Learning that Panda Biotech has opened a hemp processing facility that’s the biggest in the U.S. and among the largest in the world is one thing. Beholding the 500,000-square-foot gin, running nearly autonomously, is another thing entirely.
When I visited the Wichita Falls plant, just twenty miles from the Oklahoma border, advanced machines called decorticators were chewing through raw fiber and spitting out fine dust that gets swept up and recirculated into other nontextile products. Bales of finished fibers in varying brownish grays were stacked in neat lines, some almost as tall as the 45-foot roof. All of them were tagged with QR codes, which pinpoint where the seed sprouted, giving textile buyers and brands rare insight into their supply chain. From the moment the raw hemp stalks are loaded onto the conveyor belt, no human hand is required to turn them into finished fibers. Right now, these fibers are destined to create denim and canvas. If all goes according to plan, they’ll soon be spun into more refined, softer textiles, eventually replacing or offsetting water-intensive cotton, pricey linen, or plastic-based synthetics.
“This isn’t your mom-and-pop pitchforking stuff. Nobody else can refine or cottonize hemp at this scale,” Mike Delcambre, Panda’s facility manager, said.
By scale, he means the ability to not only build industrial-scale infrastructure but to also maintain a supply chain to source, fashion, and distribute the fibers. Since it was legalized in 2018, hemp acreage has undoubtedly increased, but no matter how prodigious the new fields in Texas—and throughout the country—have become, without fiber processors, the harvests go to other uses, such as cannabinoids or hempcrete for buildings. Panda, a family-run, Texas-grown outfit with a storied history in building renewable energy power plants, wants to rewrite this story and rebuild an American textile industry—bridging the gaps between farming, processing, and production.
The Panda team took over the lease at an old General Motors factory in 2021 and spent more than a year securing advanced machinery before opening the facility this past June. The gin is seven football fields long and includes four industrial lines of decorticators. These rare and hard-to-manufacture machines are the lifeblood of making hemp textiles, as they separate the tough outer bark, or bast, of the hemp plant, which is used to make fibers, from the inner woody core, or hurd, which is used for feed, building materials, paper, and more.
Panda’s infrastructure attracted Wrangler; the brand has opted to wait for American-made hemp instead of sourcing from China, which processes most of the world’s hemp. Wrangler’s parent company, Kontoor, set global design standards last year that require lower-impact materials for the 141 million products its brands, which also include Lee and Rock & Republic, produce annually. Eighty-six percent of the company’s raw materials come from cotton, an environmentally intensive crop, but Druhv Agarwal, vice president at Kontoor, told me he is keenly interested in adding hemp to the mix for performance and environmental reasons and is working directly with Panda to refine a fiber that will work for their designs. “We want U.S.-grown hemp to be a viable part of the fashion industry. The main thing for us now is: How quickly can we get it?”
The answer to Agarwal’s question is more than forty years in the making. Founder Bob Carter, who The Wall Street Journal called the “Kilowatt Cowboy” in 1993, started the original Panda Energy in 1982. He built 25 natural gas power plants, five of which were in Texas, and two of the largest natural gas plants in the U.S. In the mid-2000s, when the market moved away from privatized power and Panda was forced to close its plants, Carter set his sights elsewhere.
“How many men in their seventies go, ‘What’s my next venture?’ ” said Dixie Carter, his daughter and current president of Panda. She uprooted her career in music and professional wrestling, along with her husband, Serg Salinas, who runs the gin and farming program.
When his eye landed on hemp, Bob Carter called up the largest cotton gin owner, who told him it was the next multimillion-dollar idea. The facility was originally slated to open in 2022, but Panda’s team had to wade through early obstacles such as COVID supply chain disruptions, a steel shortage that hamstrung its ability to access processing equipment, and the worst bond markets in decades.
“We knew processing was the missing link to create a hemp textile, so we had to succeed,” said Dixie Carter. The family sold their ranch in nearby Seymour and sought out private investors. They gained an equity partner in the Southern Ute Indian Tribe out of Colorado, which supplies about 1 percent of the nation’s natural gas through its methane reserves and takes on sizable clean energy and carbon capture projects. With these funds and private investors’ money, Panda secured a nine-figure investment in total, which it funneled directly into infrastructure.
To understand why processing matters so much, we have to turn to the global history of hemp cultivation. U.S. hemp has undergone two major regulatory setbacks: the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which made growing the crop moot because it was taxed and regulated so heavily; and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified all forms of cannabis, including hemp, as a Schedule I drug. Aside from wartime efforts, these two legislative acts effectively made commercial hemp production nonexistent in the U.S. until the 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp nationally. But legalization didn’t bring the same protections that cash crops like cotton and corn receive via insurance, loans, and subsidies. Without this support, farmers and producers have worked to rebuild the hemp crop and the textile industry that surrounds it—from the soil up.
In contrast, China had dynasties to develop its hemp cultivation practices. From 5,000 BCE to today, hemp was never regulated or controlled in China other than some limits around THC concentration. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s the world’s largest and most refined producer of hemp textiles today. With multinational brands like Patagonia and Levi’s sourcing hemp from China, it drives continued demand and exports that, in turn, fuel more innovation in decortication and textile refinement.
As the U.S. hemp market has reemerged, growers have primarily focused on CBD because it doesn’t require sophisticated processing. Panda saw this as an opportunity. Rather than let China continue to corner the market on clothes, the company set its sights on creating the next great American textile.
Knowing that successful processing also depended on consistent and quality input, Panda started working with farmers in 2019, well before the Wichita Falls facility opened. Its team sourced seeds from China, believing that the crops would perform well because the southern regions of China (where the country’s hemp is grown) have similar latitudes to those of Central and North Texas. But North Texas receives far less rain, especially these days. In trials, some varieties of seeds underperformed and the plant proved to not be as drought-resistant as initially touted. There’s also the regulatory risk to consider. Hemp is largely untested in the U.S. and particularly sensitive to stress, which can force THC levels above the legal limit and leave farmers in the lurch if their entire crop tests “hot” (above 0.3 percent THC). Without crop insurance to protect them, farmers could face a complete loss on their crop and startup costs if this happens.
To mitigate this risk to farmers, Panda did two things that set it up for longevity. First, it started annual seed trials with Calvin Throstle, a hemp extension agronomist at Texas A&M, to help engineer an American seed. It also created a privatized security blanket for farmers: the Pay-to-Grow program, a sort of cowboy code between processor and farmer. Panda provides farmers with seed and pays out three times: once for planting, once for harvesting and baling, and again by the pound of harvested product.
The program is in action at Waggoner Ranch, one of the largest and oldest working private ranches in the United States, in North Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border. There, a one-hour shot west of the hemp gin, Panda found a friendly farmer named Jerrod Streit. Streit’s main hustle is supporting cattle at Waggoner, so he grows what they eat: wheat and grass. But when his land is fallow between harvests, he sees hemp as an opportunity to capitalize on the time and replenish, rather than deplete, his soil.
Streit grew 2,762 acres for Panda last season and plans to double his output next year. With Pay-to-Grow, he paid nothing for his operation and received agronomy support.
“Before new hemp farmers put a seed in the ground, they should have a place to sell it,” Texas agriculture commissioner and novice hemp grower Sid Miller said. Panda’s Pay-to-Grow program gives farmers this assurance and sets the company up for long-term success with inputs fine-tuned to textile production. It also helps mitigate against a big market rush, like what we saw with CBD after the Farm Bill, by ensuring supply doesn’t outpace demand. Nineteen farmers are contributing 11,000 acres to the program, and Panda plans to bring on more by its first fully operational year in 2025.
“You can’t just do that same thing that’s always been done because your grandaddy did it. You have to stay on top of alternatives and roll with them when they have a better outlook,” Streit said.
While being for progress is usually the winning strategy, it doesn’t come without a test of will. Rebuilding an American textile industry is, after all, a massively ambitious undertaking. According to USDA reports, U.S. farmers planted approximately 28,000 acres of hemp in 2023. In the same year, cotton farmers grew around 11.3 million acres of cotton nationwide; 6.2 million were in Texas. For Panda to run at full capacity, it needs about 25,000 acres of hemp by next year. If that goes according to plan, this will be the largest hemp crop ever grown for textiles in the U.S.
Right now your jeans, tees, and plush towels can be Made in America. In a not too distant future, they could be Grown in Texas.
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