After years of growing, testing, selling, and trying to stay on the right side of a moving target, we shut the gates. The fees, the paperwork, and the product bans finally outweighed the work.
The short version
Waco Hemp Farm was a small Central Texas operation — hemp flower, lab-tested products, and the usual stack of gummies, oils, and prerolls that the 2018 Farm Bill made possible. We listed third-party lab reports because that was the deal: stay under 0.3% delta-9 THC, document it, and sell a legal agricultural product.
Texas invited farmers into this in 2019. Then the rules changed, then they were enjoined, then they came back harder. By summer 2026 a retailer registration that used to cost about $155 was $5,000 a year. A manufacturer license that used to cost about $258 was $10,000 a year per facility. Total-THC testing counted THCA as if it were already delta-9, which took smokable flower and prerolls off the table. Delta-8 and other isomers were treated as controlled substances again. A federal cap of 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container is queued up behind that.
We could have paid the new fees to sell a thinner and thinner slice of what used to be the catalog. We chose not to. August 1, 2026 is the close date.
Annual DSHS fee per location after the March 31, 2026 consumable-hemp rules. Plus Texas.gov processing.
Annual fee per facility. Late renewal adds a $1,000 delinquency charge. Fees are not prorated.
The 2025 federal funding bill rewrites hemp so most consumable products fail a milligram-per-container test, not a 0.3% test.
Texas Supreme Court restored DSHS authority to treat delta-8 and related hemp THC isomers as controlled substances.
A short history
This is the path that got a crop legal, then made a living off it nearly impossible for a small farm and shop.
The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 removes hemp from the federal Controlled Substances Act. Hemp is cannabis with not more than 0.3% delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis. States can run USDA-approved production programs.
Governor Abbott signs House Bill 1325. Statute calls hemp a viable agricultural crop. The Texas Department of Agriculture licenses growers and handlers. DSHS later runs consumable hemp products. Licenses, lot permits, background checks, and pre-harvest testing are built in from day one.
Texas farmers plant again. Permitted acreage peaks early. A gold-rush in CBD biomass follows — then a crash. Oversupply, thin buyers, drought, and “hot crop” risk (test over 0.3% and you destroy the lot) wash a lot of people out before retail ever gets weird.
Intoxicating hemp products fill the gap Texas never filled with adult-use cannabis. DSHS tries to sweep non-delta-9 isomers onto the controlled-substance schedule. Courts freeze pieces of that for years. Separately, the Texas Supreme Court upholds the statute that already banned manufacturing a consumable hemp product for smoking — even as flower still moved through a gray retail channel.
Permitted field acres and greenhouse space fall year after year. By 2024 TDA still showed hundreds of licensed producers, but far fewer active lot permits. Floral hemp harvested in Texas dropped from thousands of acres of hype to a few hundred — then less. Fiber never became the textile boom that was sold in 2019 hearings.
Senate Bill 3, a near-total ban on consumable THC hemp products, passes. Abbott vetoes it and tells agencies to regulate instead — age 21, packaging, testing. In November a federal funding bill redefines hemp and caps most products at 0.4 mg total THC per container, with a one-year fuse. Waco shops say out loud that none of their shelves would pass.
DSHS consumable-hemp amendments take effect: total delta-9 now includes THCA (the acid that becomes THC when you heat flower), manufacturer licenses jump to $10,000, retail registrations to $5,000, plus heavier testing, labeling, recordkeeping, and transport limits. Industry sues. Injunctions go on and off all spring.
After the Texas Supreme Court sides with DSHS in the long-running scheduling fight, delta-8 and related manufactured isomers are treated as controlled substances. Combined with the total-THC rule, the products that actually paid the rent are gone or felony-adjacent.
We are not a lobby. We are not a chain that can float a $5,000–$10,000 license while lawyers argue the next injunction. When the catalog and the fee schedule no longer add up, the honest thing is to close.
What farms and shops actually faced
Every lot needed an official pre-harvest sample by a licensed sampler and a TDA-registered lab. Miss the harvest window after sampling and you test again. Come back over 0.3% THC and the crop is marijuana — destroy it. Texas heat and late-season stress push THC up. That is not a paperwork inconvenience. That is a whole season in a burn pile.
TDA licensed the dirt. DSHS licensed anything people swallow, smoke, or put on skin. TABC got pulled into enforcement after the 2025 executive order. A farm that also retailed lived in all three buildings at once, with inspections, manifests, and age-gating stacked on top of farming.
Statute said delta-9, 0.3%, dry weight. Rules later counted THCA as if it had already converted. That single formula change made natural hemp flower — the thing a farm actually grows — noncompliant overnight. Retailers who had built a store around flower and prerolls lost the middle of the store.
After the 2025 veto, agencies raised retail registration roughly thirty-fold and manufacturer licenses roughly forty-fold. Industry groups called it an unauthorized tax. Whether a court eventually agrees does not help a shop that has to write the check this year or lock the door.
Temporary restraining orders, injunctions, an appeals court lifting the stay, a Supreme Court ruling on a 2021 schedule fight — shelves went legal, illegal, legal-ish, then empty. Customers stopped trusting that what they bought in March would still be legal in August. Staff could not plan inventory.
Even at the high-water mark, many banks and carriers treated hemp like cannabis. Local zoning and “is this a dispensary?” fights never fully went away in conservative counties. Add child-resistant packaging, COAs on every SKU, and $10,000-a-day penalty language, and a country farm store is suddenly staffed like a pharmacy.
The November 2025 funding bill’s hemp rewrite was written to take effect about a year later. A 0.4 mg total-THC cap per container is not a farm standard. It is a prohibition on almost every finished product that ever sat in a Texas hemp case, including a lot of CBD that is not sold to get anyone high.
Lawmakers still say “industrial hemp is legal.” Fiber and grain never paid what flower and consumables did. Processing plants are scarce. Prices cratered after the 2019–2020 rush. Telling a farm to “just grow industrial” after ripping out the only profitable end-use is not a business plan. It is an obituary with extra steps.
We wouldn’t be in the hemp business in a million years if they hadn’t passed that bill. Ann Gauger, Caprock Family Farms — on the 2025 ban fight
From Waco
If you bought flower, asked for a lab report, or shopped with us — thank you. This site stays up as a closed sign and a record, not a store.
Nothing here is legal advice. The dates above are the public timeline as it stood when we closed: HB 1325 in 2019, DSHS Chapter 300 amendments effective March 31, 2026, the restored controlled-substance schedule on July 31, 2026, and the federal hemp rewrite passed in November 2025. Lawsuits were still pending when the lights went out. That is part of why we left. A small farm cannot litigate its way through every session.
For anyone still in the trade: read the current DSHS Consumable Hemp Program page and the TDA hemp program before you write another license check. The math changed.