On March 11, 2025 our friends Patricia Bishop and Josh Oulton drove with their daughter Lily from Nova Scotia to the Borderview Research Farm in Alburgh, Vermont to hand deliver a new hemp fiber hackler to the UVM extension NWCS team. They somehow managed to fit it into the back of a sprinter van, and our farmhand, Travis Driver, also somehow managed to lift it out in one piece.

Nova Scotia to Alburgh!
The hackler represents the third step in a three-part scutching line that Bishop and Oulton have developed over the years to process long fibers like hemp and flax at a cottage industry scale. The role of the hackler is to take the long fibers, which have already been broken or decorticated, and comb them rigorously to open up the fiber and separate the fiber bundles which are ostensibly glued together by naturally occurring lignin and pectin.
The machine is the first of its kind in the United States. Prior to our purchase, there was only one hackler like it in all of the western hemisphere; that being the one belonging to Bishop and Oulton at their processing facility in the Maritime Provinces known as Taproot Fiberlab.

It is a dream to see our hemp processing capabilities expand as we add mechanized elements to the intensive ongoing hand-processing that is necessary to extract fiber from biomass. We hope that this historical moment will mark just the beginning of our bast fiber processing capabilities in Northeast. Much more infrastructure will be necessary in order to see the industry grow here, but we are in it for the long haul. Many thanks to the USDA Sungrant cycle for sponsoring this project, and you can follow along with this ongoing project by searching award number AWD00001779.
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