What happens to the crop after it leaves the field: decortication into bast fibre and hurd, retting, seed cleaning and cold pressing, protein and oil, and the building materials, textiles and paper that come out of the stalk fraction.
Processing is where hemp becomes a business or fails to. The bulk density of raw stalk makes transport expensive, which is why decortication tends to sit close to the field, and why most hemp ventures stall on the gap between an agronomic plan and a route to a buyer who wants a specific fibre grade in a specific tonnage.
Two things are worth understanding before planning a line. Fibre grade is set by the retting, not by the variety alone, and under-retted or over-retted straw cannot be corrected downstream. And the food side is a different regulatory world from the fibre side: seed oil and protein are food products with food processing requirements, and mixing them into a single facility plan is how approval timelines get lost.
There are no reference articles in this sub-board yet; processing questions and equipment discussion are what it needs first.
Related elsewhere on the forum: Hemp vs Marijuana: The Chemical and Legal Divide in Safety and Regulation.