Industrial Hemp Ventures
Evgeny Skigin has invested in industrial hemp worldwide since 2009 — from Australia's early hemp industry to DunAgro Hemp Group in the Netherlands, home to the world's only prefabricated hempcrete line and to some of the most advanced harvesting technology in the sector.
Pioneering Industrial Hemp Partnerships
Evgeny's first investment in industrial hemp was Ecofibre, an Australian hemp company, in 2009. He spent the following years helping to grow the business and was bought out in 2016. The experience gave him a working knowledge of the sector from the ground up — cultivation, processing, and the long, patient economics of building an agricultural supply chain from scratch — and it set the pattern for everything since: invest early in the parts of the industry that have to exist before hemp can compete at scale.
One of his longest-standing connections in the sector is DunAgro Hemp Group, a Netherlands-based pioneer he has been involved with since 2010. DunAgro grows its own hemp and processes it end-to-end, operating what is currently the world's only prefabricated hempcrete building production line. Rather than the slow, labour-intensive method of pouring hemp into wooden frames on site, DunAgro mixes hemp hurd with lime and water, presses and cures the panels in a factory, and delivers them ready to assemble — making hemp construction scalable for the first time.
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DunAgro's pioneering work is not confined to construction; arguably its bigger contribution is in machinery. The company designs and builds its own harvesting and processing equipment, including the Hemp Bull leaf harvester and a processing line with no direct equivalent in the industry. Several Hemp Bulls have been sold to clients in Canada, and DunAgro's specialised hemp harvesting equipment is now in use worldwide. That patience has been rewarded elsewhere too: DunAgro was selected to supply materials for a new museum of modern art in Eindhoven, has hosted a visit from the King of the Netherlands, and works closely with the Dutch government on the grants, subsidies and carbon credits needed to reach true cost-competitiveness with traditional materials.
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What Is Industrial Hemp?
Industrial hemp is a fast-growing variety of the cannabis plant cultivated for its fiber, seed, and woody core rather than for any psychoactive use — its THC content sits well below regulated thresholds and EU-registered varieties can be grown legally across the region. It is one of the oldest crops in human history, farmed for thousands of years and once grown at enormous scale; the Soviet Union alone cultivated close to a million hectares before hemp fell out of favor.
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For Evgeny, hemp was the obvious answer to a simple question he asked as a young entrepreneur in 2008: what does a truly sustainable industry look like? Agriculture was the only genuinely renewable source of raw material, and hemp was the one crop that ticked every box. It grows almost anywhere — from Finland to Thailand — needs little water and virtually no pesticides or herbicides, and yields three distinct materials from a single harvest: fiber for textiles, hurd for construction, and seed for nutrition. That combination of textiles, housing, and food from one weed-like, resilient plant is what convinced him to build a company around it.
Benefits of Industrial Hemp
Hemp's appeal is that almost nothing is wasted. A single crop produces fiber for clothing and industrial textiles, a wood-like inner hurd for construction and furniture, and a seed with an excellent protein and fat profile that makes a genuinely healthy food. At DunAgro's operations, even the dust created when separating fiber from hurd is pelletized and burned to generate roughly 80% of the facility's own heat and electricity — meaning close to 100% of every harvested plant is put to use, with nothing left behind in the field.
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Environmentally, few crops compete. Hemp regrows season after season, thrives without heavy chemical inputs, and its deep root system needs relatively little water while improving the soil it grows in. It also earns its place in the field for what it does for the crop that follows. Because hemp is sown densely, every plant competes for height and discards its lower leaves as it grows — and those leaves hold the plant's highest concentration of nutrition. Roughly 60% of the fertiliser applied to a hemp crop is returned to the soil as a result, cutting the fertiliser needed next season, while the root system improves soil structure at the same time. Together those effects can lift yields in the following crop by up to 30%, which is why hemp performs best not as a monoculture but as one link in a rotation. As a building material, hempcrete offers a low-carbon alternative to conventional options — the reason it attracts carbon credits and government support. Evgeny's bet is that these advantages compound at scale: once production reaches the volume where hemp is cost-competitive with legacy materials, its sustainability stops being a premium and simply becomes the smarter choice — for farmers, industry, and the climate alike.