Key Takeaways
- Germany’s hemp sector faces a decline in farms despite a proposed liberalization bill that raises the THC threshold from 0.3% to 1%.
- The bill aims to remove the misuse clause, enable indoor cultivation, and address legal uncertainties for hemp producers.
- Expert testimony indicates that bureaucratic burdens and EU subsidy rules may hinder recovery in the hemp sector, despite changes in national classifications.
- Current regulations do not alter the EU’s 0.3% THC threshold for subsidies, leaving farmers at risk if their THC levels exceed this limit.
- Increased genetic diversity could become a benefit from the bill, offering opportunities for better hemp varieties over time.
Germany’s hemp sector may be getting a legislative glow-up. On October 14th, the Bundestag’s Committee on Agriculture, Food and Home Affairs will hold a public hearing on a bill that would rewrite how the country defines and regulates industrial hemp. The proposal, BT-Drucksache 21/2116, would delete the so-called “misuse clause,” legalize indoor hemp cultivation, and lift the THC threshold for hemp products from 0.3 percent to 1 percent.
On paper, this looks like a decisive win for German hemp. In practice, the sector’s core problem isn’t just its legal definition. It’s that fewer farms are willing to grow the crop at all. Expert witness Felix Drewes, submitting testimony ahead of the hearing, points out that Germany had 889 hemp-growing farms in 2022. By 2026, that number had fallen to 438, a drop of more than half in four years.
That contradiction sits in the middle of this story. Germany is proposing a bolder, more liberal hemp definition at precisely the moment its farming base is shrinking. A bigger THC number makes for a clean headline. Whether it reverses the farm exodus is a separate question entirely.
What Does Germany’s Hemp Liberalization Bill Actually Propose?
The bill targets three specific barriers in the Consumer Cannabis Act (KCanG).
First, it would strike the misuse clause, a provision that currently makes the legality of hemp commerce depend on ruling out potential recreational abuse, even when THC content sits well under the legal limit. Courts have applied this clause inconsistently, creating what the German Farmers Association calls a direct source of legal uncertainty for anyone handling hemp tea, flower, or similar products.
Second, the bill would permit indoor hemp cultivation for the first time, opening the door to greenhouse and controlled-environment production, not just open-field farming.
Third, it would raise the THC definition for hemp from 0.3 percent to 1 percent, matching the threshold already used in the Czech Republic and Switzerland.
According to the bill’s text, this change addresses a real agronomic problem: weather, soil conditions, and harvest timing can all push a compliant crop’s THC content above 0.3 percent, triggering a total loss of the harvest even when nothing was done wrong.
The German Farmers Association (Deutscher Bauernverband) has formally endorsed all three changes, calling bureaucratic and legal uncertainty the main reasons farms hesitate to plant or expand hemp acreage, according to its submitted statement to the committee.
How Did Germany’s Hemp Farm Count Fall By Half?
The numbers tell a clear story of volatility. Germany’s hemp acreage peaked in 2024 at 7,116 hectares across 623 farms. In 2025, that fell to 5,274 hectares and 496 farms. By 2026, acreage had recovered to 5,785 hectares, but farm participation kept sliding to just 438 operations, according to Felix Drewes’s statement, which cites data from the Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE).
Notice what’s happening there. Acreage and farm count have decoupled. More land is going into hemp, but it’s being farmed by fewer and fewer operators. Drewes attributes this to fixed per-farm obligations, like reporting, THC testing, equipment costs, and administrative overhead, that hit small growers disproportionately harder than large ones.
A survey of 14 hemp-growing operations cited in his testimony found that specialized harvesting equipment only pays off above roughly 200 hectares of hemp per farm. Below that threshold, the economics get difficult fast.
Regionally, the decline concentrates in Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and Baden-Württemberg, which together dropped from 547 combined hemp farms in 2022 to 271 by 2026. Some of the acreage growth since 2023 reportedly comes from contract winter hemp grown for a single fiber processor, meaning a meaningful share of Germany’s hemp footprint now depends on a small handful of buyers.
Will the 1 Percent THC Threshold Fix Germany’s Subsidy Problem?
Here’s where the bill’s limits come into focus. Raising the THC definition to 1 percent changes how Germany classifies hemp under its own consumer cannabis law. It does not change the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) threshold, which remains fixed at 0.3 percent for farmers seeking direct payment subsidies under Regulation (EU) 2021/2115.
That detail matters enormously for working farms. A grower can comply fully with Germany’s new 1 percent definition and still lose EU subsidy eligibility if their crop’s THC content crosses 0.3 percent in two consecutive years, since that triggers a loss of funding eligibility for the variety itself under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/126. Drewes notes in his testimony that for farms relying on direct payments, which is most of them, the subsidy threshold is the more immediate economic risk, not the national legal definition.
Food-product THC maximums represent a third, separate ceiling. Under Regulation (EU) 2023/915, hemp seeds and hemp seed oil face maximum THC equivalents of 3.0 mg/kg and 7.5 mg/kg respectively, figures the bill does not touch at all. Choose to evaluate this bill by its effect on farm economics, and the honest answer is that it resolves the criminal-law risk while leaving the subsidy and food-safety ceilings exactly where they were.
Four Barriers That Still Separate Hemp Growers From a Viable Business
Reading the expert testimony together, four distinct obstacles emerge, and conflating them is where a lot of hemp coverage goes wrong:
- National cannabis classification: Governed by the KCanG, this is what the bill directly changes, removing the misuse clause and raising the definitional THC threshold to 1 percent.
- EU agricultural-support eligibility: Governed by CAP regulations, this stays locked at 0.3 percent THC regardless of what Germany does domestically.
- Food-product THC limits: Set under EU food safety regulation, these caps apply to consumable hemp products and are unaffected by the bill.
- Processing infrastructure and purchasing contracts: Not a legal threshold at all, but a market reality. Felix Drewes notes that Germany has very few facilities capable of processing hemp fiber straw, and hemp oil production relies mostly on small, specialized mills.
A farmer navigating all four of these simultaneously faces a far more complicated calculation than “what’s the THC limit now.”
What Does the Genetics Gap Reveal About German Hemp’s Competitiveness?
Professor Simone Graeff-Hönninger of the University of Hohenheim, another expert submitting testimony for the hearing, argues that the 0.3 percent threshold has done lasting damage to the genetic diversity of hemp varieties available to European farmers. Her statement cites research showing that EU-registered hemp varieties average just 2.5 percent CBD content. Compare that to Swiss varieties, grown under a sub-1-percent THC standard, which average 13.64 percent CBD, or U.S. varieties at 12.78 percent.
The sample sizes behind those numbers are telling too. Researchers identified only 31 EU varieties with meaningful CBD content, compared to 185 Swiss varieties and 1,243 U.S. varieties. Decades of breeding under a strict 0.3 percent ceiling pushed European cultivars toward “nearly THC-free” genetics, narrowing the available gene pool and, according to Graeff-Hönninger’s testimony, costing growers valuable agronomic traits like disease resistance, yield, and nutrient efficiency along the way.
Raise the threshold to 1 percent, and you open breeding room for crosses with CBD-dominant, THC-low chemotypes, without meaningfully closing the gap to psychoactive cannabis genetics. That’s a genuine, measurable upside for German hemp over the long term, even though it won’t show up in next year’s planting numbers.
Who Stands to Gain If the Bundestag Passes the Hemp Bill?
Removing the misuse clause would reduce criminal-law exposure for a wide swath of the hemp value chain: farmers, processors, tea and flower retailers, and investors who currently face uncertainty simply because courts haven’t ruled out hypothetical abuse scenarios, even at compliant THC levels. Graeff-Hönninger’s testimony notes that banks, insurers, and payment processors treat hemp businesses restrictively specifically because of this unresolved legal risk.
Indoor cultivation, meanwhile, opens a genuinely new revenue category. Chemotype III genetics, which are CBD-dominant and THC-low, create opportunities in cosmetics, extracts, and pharmaceutical input markets. That window just got timelier too: the European Food Safety Authority issued its first positive safety opinion on a CBD novel food application in September 2026, a regulatory first that could support new CBD product approvals as soon as 2027 or 2028.
For rural economies, indoor and greenhouse production could mean additional income streams using existing infrastructure, from unused greenhouses to waste heat from biogas facilities.
The hearing takes place in Berlin’s Paul-Löbe-Haus from 12:00 to 14:00 on October 14, with registration having closed today. Testimony has already been submitted by the German Farmers Association, Professor Graeff-Hönninger, and independent expert Felix Drewes, all generally supportive of the bill’s direction while flagging where it falls short of solving the sector’s deeper structural problems.
What Germany’s Hemp Sector Needs Beyond a New THC Number
The bill addresses real legal friction, and the expert testimony submitted ahead of the hearing broadly supports it. But testimony from Felix Drewes is blunt on one point: the legal fix is necessary, not sufficient. Fixed administrative burdens, scarce processing infrastructure, and a subsidy threshold that remains unchanged at the EU level will keep squeezing smaller operations regardless of how Germany defines hemp domestically.
For farmers, processors, and investors watching this space, the useful move isn’t celebrating or dismissing the 1 percent threshold in isolation. It’s tracking all four layers, national classification, EU subsidy eligibility, food-product limits, and processing capacity, together. That’s the only way to judge whether Germany’s hemp sector is actually recovering, or just getting a more liberal definition while continuing to shrink.
Frequently Asked Questions
The bill amends Germany’s Consumer Cannabis Act (KCanG) to remove the misuse clause, permit indoor hemp cultivation, and raise the THC threshold used to define industrial hemp from 0.3 percent to 1 percent. It does not change EU subsidy thresholds or food-product THC limits.
The public hearing takes place Wednesday, October 14, 2026, from 12:00 to 14:00 at the Paul-Löbe-Haus in Berlin, before the Committee on Agriculture, Food and Home Affairs.
Germany had 889 hemp-growing farms in 2022, which fell to 438 by 2026, even as total acreage recovered to 5,785 hectares. Expert testimony attributes this to fixed per-farm costs, including reporting, THC testing, equipment, and processing burdens, that disproportionately affect smaller operations.
No. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy subsidy threshold remains fixed at 0.3 percent THC regardless of Germany’s domestic definition. A farmer can meet Germany’s 1 percent standard and still lose direct payment eligibility if a hemp variety exceeds 0.3 percent THC in two consecutive years.
