The American-made hemp shirt experiment
A Fort Benton hemp processor and a Great Falls apparel company have assembled a limited, U.S.-based test of what it takes to make hemp shirts with domestic cultivation and processing, a proposition that the companies say had not been demonstrated in the United States for roughly a century. When the shirts reached customers after years of coordination, the result was positioned as a proof of concept that industrial hemp clothing could be produced without the material leaving American borders for the key steps involved.
The experiment started after two companies looked for a way to keep hemp textiles from becoming another category that relies on overseas manufacturing infrastructure. The push combined IND Hemp’s fiber-processing work in Fort Benton with Smith and Rogue’s apparel development, an effort linked to the North 40 Outfitters retail chain based in Great Falls.
IND Hemp formed in 2018 and began by producing hemp seed oils from regionally grown crops for food uses. Morgan Tweet, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said the next phase turned to textiles, and that when the trial began the question was whether the partners could do the underlying work of growing, processing and spinning hemp fiber to the quality needed for clothing in the United States. “Honestly, it was just: Can we do it? Because it hadn’t happened in, arguably, 100 years,” Tweet told Montana Free Press.
Smith and Rogue, an apparel company based in Great Falls, approached IND Hemp after it had already developed hemp-based clothing lines manufactured internationally. Brandon Kishpaugh, the apparel merchandiser at Smith and Rogue, said the company saw demand for a more durable and more sustainable product and wanted to answer a practical sourcing question: “We saw there was a demand for a more durable, more sustainable, higher quality fiber,” Kishpaugh said. “And now it’s how do we get it sourced in the U.S.?”
The companies traced their opportunity to a Fort Benton hemp processor located less than an hour away, but they also described the project as only one early link in a longer manufacturing chain. Building the shirt meant not just getting hemp fiber processed locally, but fitting smaller U.S. textile runs into the schedules of multiple manufacturers that each handled a different step.
From federal limits to a domestic test
The companies’ approach depends on industrial hemp being lawful to cultivate and process in the United States. Hemp’s modern status changed when federal restrictions were lifted in 2018 through that year’s farm bill, ending nearly a century in which hemp had been illegal under federal policy. Congress had previously treated hemp as marijuana-adjacent by passing a prohibitive tax in 1937 that outlawed both plants.
Long before the 2018 change, Montana had legalized industrial hemp cultivation in 2001, but early growth remained limited. The state issued its first industrial hemp license in 2009 to a Bozeman medical marijuana business, and hemp stayed in a regulatory “languor” at the federal level for years, including warning language in Montana’s hemp licenses and delays in federal recognition. The U.S. Department of Agriculture later reported that Montana harvested 2,400 acres of hemp in 2024, placing it behind larger producers including South Dakota, Texas and California.
Sofi Thanhauser, the author of the book “Worn: A People’s History of Clothing,” told Montana Free Press that decades of prohibition made it difficult for hemp to return to American clothing manufacturing and that any remaining textile capacity centered mostly on cotton. “Over time, that infrastructure has disappeared,” Thanhauser said. “And so it’s really hard for companies who want to do supply chains in the U.S., because a lot of the time the equipment and expertise is not here.”
Tweet said IND Hemp’s key processing equipment illustrates why reconstruction is hard: much of the equipment was manufactured in France, where a European hemp industry has been stable. In Fort Benton, the processor runs a decortication process that separates bast—outer fiber material—from the hemp straw’s hurd, and Tweet said the machines can process five tons per hour.
How the shirts were made—and why it took years
Smith and Rogue limited the initial test run for its U.S.-made hemp line to 239 men’s work shirts. Kishpaugh said he selected the work-shirt format for the first run because it was something the brand’s sewing contractors could handle and because he wanted a piece that reflected traditional workwear. “I wanted to go with something very heritage, very workwear,” he said. “I knew our factory could execute.”
The companies marketed the shirt as the Benton work shirt, a $150 garment made from a blend of IND’s Montana-grown hemp fibers and cotton grown in Arizona. The raw fibers moved from Fort Benton and Arizona to North Carolina for refinement and blending, then to another North Carolina company for spinning, before weaving in South Carolina. Georgia finished the fabric, and the textiles were later trucked to New York City for cutting and sewing.
Tweet said the challenge was less about finding companies in the abstract than about persuading them to fit a small experimental hemp-based run into their operating schedules. “We were able to piece this thing together, which made it very costly,” Tweet said. “The fiber moved probably 10 more times than it had to, and freight is your biggest enemy in all these things.”
The companies also described operational setbacks typical of small-batch domestic production. When Kishpaugh received a prototype in the fall of 2024 that did not fit correctly, he said correcting the issue required work going back through multiple hands. Later, a shipment of finished fabric from the multi-state effort went missing en route to New York City; Tweet said the fabric involved was 600 yards and had been “warehoused somewhere.” He said the process was delayed again but that additional fabric allowed production to resume.
Smith and Rogue debuted the shirts in December through online channels and in its affiliated retail stores. Kishpaugh said the brand’s marketing approach reflected a concern that a hemp prototype could otherwise be indistinguishable on a rack and therefore fail to convey what made it distinct, and he said the $150 price reflected the added costs of running the domestic supply chain. “You can’t just put it on the rack,” Kishpaugh said. “If you don’t know what it is, it’s just going to look like another button-up shirt. And then you look at the price tag.”
Scaling beyond a proof of concept
The fiber for the Benton shirt run came from a crop grown in 2020 at the Meissner family farm north of Fort Benton. Tweet said the team did not fully appreciate early how field conditions would affect textile quality, and he cited factors such as variety selection, planting density, harvest timing, soil microbes and annual precipitation as influences on suitability for fiber production.
Tweet said it took years to refine the processing approach so IND could more routinely receive higher-quality hemp fibers suitable for textiles. He also described the lack of a domestic “playbook,” saying new customers could not simply pick up the steps and replicate them quickly without expertise and specialized capital. “We are still always optimizing our line,” Tweet said. “But there’s not a playbook. You can’t really call up a company and say, ‘We want to make hemp fiber for T-shirts’ and they say, ‘I’ve got you covered.’”
Plans for a second-generation Benton shirt are underway, Kishpaugh said, with an emphasis on scaling up quantities and expanding beyond work shirts into outerwear and pants. Kishpaugh and Tweet said they also see a hybrid route as a way to broaden options—using U.S.-sourced hemp with factories overseas that already handle steps such as bibs and jackets—rather than trying to move every part of the system onshore at once.
Tweet said cost and scale constraints still limit how much domestic manufacturing can expand through the same approach. “Will there always be these opportunities to promote a full domestic supply chain? Absolutely,” Tweet said. “But they’re never going to be able to serve the larger demand to get it into everyone’s closet.”