Hempseed Shells in Bulk for Livestock Feed: Fibre and Drying

Last updated: October 28, 2026

The outer coat of the hemp seed is the part most feed buyers never see. It leaves the dehulling line as a dry flake, is sold to the food trade as fibre, and increasingly ends up in a ruminant ration. Nordic Hemp sells it in bulk as a feed material, and it is available now. What decides its value is not what it is called but how much of it a rumen can use, and that turns out to depend on how the seed was dried before the coat came off.

Most published work on hemp by-products looks at the meal. Hulls get a paragraph at best. This article fills that gap with what the numbers say, where the evidence is thin, and what belongs on paper before a load is booked.

Sander Kuusk

HEAD OF MARKETING, NORDIC HEMP

Sander Kuusk oversees marketing and product communication at Nordic Hemp Cooperation in Estonia. He has been with the company since 2020, working with food manufacturers and distributors worldwide. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

What are hempseed shells?

Hempseed has two parts that matter commercially: the kernel, sold as hemp hearts and pressed for oil, and the outer coat, which is thin, pale and slightly woody. To get hearts, the seed is cracked and the coat separated on a de-hulling line, and what comes off is the shell.

It is not a waste stream in the nutritional sense. The shell is built mostly of structural carbohydrate, which is why it has value where fibre is short and volume matters more than energy density. It leaves the plant as a dry, flowable flake: not milled, not pelleted, not blended with anything else. The share of the seed that leaves as coat moves with the variety, with seed size and with how the lot was dried, so no single ratio holds for all hemp and we report the figure per production run instead of quoting one industry number.

How does the shell come off the seed?

Every lot of seed arrives first at our warehouse in Mustvee, a 3,000 square metre site, and only reaches the processing plant in Vahi, 1,500 square metres, once it has been through intake quality control. Nothing goes onto the dehulling line straight off a trailer.

At intake, each incoming lot runs through a small-scale dehulling trial together with a colour check, so the behaviour of that seed is known before it is committed to the line. Seed size, seed moisture and the way the coat sits on the kernel all change how cleanly the coat lifts away.

On the line the seed is cracked and the coat separated from the kernel. An optical sorter runs at 300 to 600 kilograms per hour and ejects material on colour. It is not a sieve: it removes what a camera reads as dark, discoloured or foreign, not what differs in size. Colour is the first thing a buyer notices in a hull lot, and size grading is a separate question that belongs on the specification.

Raw seed intake runs to 3,000 tonnes a year and the dehulling side to 1,000 tonnes of seed across two shifts. The shell fraction is a direct function of that volume, so tonnage moves with how much seed is dehulled, not how much is bought.

Every tonne of seed that arrives is processed into finished food ingredients, and raw seed is not resold. Shells therefore come off a line that exists to make food, with the sampling, colour control and documentation a food ingredient line carries, rather than out of a waste bin at the back of a feed mill.

Why does drying temperature matter?

The physical quality of a hemp shell is decided in the dryer, weeks before it is bagged, and almost no feed specification captures it. Hemp seed comes off the combine wet enough to spoil, so drying starts immediately. Our dryers are indirect fired, so combustion gas never touches the seed, and the ceiling is 45 to 50 degrees Celsius.

Above 50 degrees the seed coat cracks. A cracked coat lets oxygen reach the kernel underneath, and oxidation begins there, in the store, before the lot has been processed. On the oil side that is the root cause of the rancidity blamed on the press much later. On the shell side it leaves fracture lines through the coat: a more brittle material that breaks into more fragments on the line, with a different dust and flow behaviour from an intact flake.

The dryer exits at 6 to 9 percent seed moisture, targeting 8 percent, which is the moisture the coat carries when it is separated. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are tested on incoming material, and a lot whose PAH sum exceeds 10 does not go into food use; those samples travel to a laboratory in Germany.

After drying, seed is held in closed bags on pallets, below 15 degrees Celsius and out of the light. Conveyor belts are oil resistant, so a spill does not become a film that oxidises into the next lot.

Two hull lots can show the same NDF and differ completely in brittleness, fines and dust, because one coat was dried within limits and one was not.

How do they differ from cake and from the fine fraction?

The three are not interchangeable. Cake is a protein feed, smoothie hemp a protein and fibre feed with a useful fat content, and shells a fibre feed with modest protein and a low energy density, comparable to a medium quality forage.

Smoothie hemp also explains why a brittle coat costs money: it sends more of itself into that fine fraction. Our comparison of smoothie hemp and hempseed cake covers both.

What the fibre numbers mean

Two fibre values circulate for this material and they measure different things. A fibre figure on a food label counts a different set of components from a neutral detergent fibre figure, which counts the whole plant cell wall including the lignin a rumen cannot break down. Both are correct for what they measure, and neither replaces the lot analysis.

The detail that matters more than any single number is what the fibre is made of. A neutral detergent fibre figure counts the cell wall as a whole; the acid detergent fraction counts the lignified part, and lignin is what a rumen cannot break down. Shells and soybean hulls sit at about 65% and 64% NDF, but soybean hull fibre ferments quickly with very little lignin, which is why it works as an energy-bearing fibre, while hemp shell fibre is more lignified and its published TDN is around 52%.

It is a fibre filler, not a fibre-based energy feed. Formulate it as bulk and structure and it delivers.

For the full comparison with soybean hulls, beet pulp and wheat bran, see our guide to hemp hulls against the other fibre sources.

Where our shells come from

Our hemp is grown under contract on 5,000 hectares in Estonia, on farms we have worked with for years, and processed in our own facility. The seed we dehull is Estica, our own variety. Estica is large-seeded: 95 percent of the seed runs over 3 millimetres and the oil content reaches up to 35 percent, and a larger, more uniform seed cracks more cleanly on a dehulling line.

Nothing in that field programme leans on chemistry. Hemp is grown without herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, and weed suppression comes from sowing density at 120 to 130 seeds per square metre and from the canopy closing over the row.

Certification behind the material

Because the coat arrives from a crop that has not been through a spray programme, the organic claim rests on the field record rather than on paperwork alone. Organic status is certified under EU Organic, registration EE-ÖKO-03, and the site operates to BRCGS, Brand Reputation through Compliance Global Standards. Both are auditable, so the paper trail behind a lot of shells is inspected by someone other than us. We sell business to business, ship worldwide, and our hemp ingredients reach 26 countries.

Which animals do hempseed shells suit?

Fibre is the whole point of this material, so the question is which animals want fibre and can afford the digestibility penalty.

EFSA lists properly processed hemp seed with hulls among hemp seed-derived feed materials, and no maximum inclusion rate is laid down for the material. The limit is therefore nutritional rather than regulatory, and three constraints set it: rumen fill, which arrives first in a high-producing animal; lignin, which caps how much energy is extracted per kilogram; and palatability, because a light flake can be sorted against in a ration that is not mixed thoroughly. Treat shells as a partial replacement for the forage or by-product fibre fraction rather than an addition on top of it, introduce them in the dry-cow or youngstock group first, and watch intake rather than body condition over the first two weeks. In sheep, published work fed hulls at up to roughly a fifth of the diet without depressing weight gain; for cattle no equivalent ceiling exists, which is why a first trial should be small and on your own animals.

What does the 2026 ruminant study show?

A Canadian study evaluated hemp hulls in three parts: in situ rumen degradability of hemp hulls, hemp screenings and wheat screenings using cannulated heifers; growth in feedlot lambs; and lactating ewes.

The headline finding is that dry matter intake rose with hemp hulls compared with wheat screenings, while weight gain was not affected. The animals ate more of the hull-based ration and performed the same, which is what a bulky, slowly fermented fibre diluting the diet would produce.

Two cautions. This is one study, in sheep, and sheep are not dairy cows, so the result should not be read across to a lactating dairy ration without your own trial. It was also run where feeding these fractions to ruminants was not yet a licensed route, which is why the authors framed it as an evaluation rather than a feeding recommendation. It establishes that intake held and weight gain was unaffected; it does not set a maximum inclusion level.

Bulk handling, dust and storage

Bulk density is the number to ask for before you book a silo or a trailer, because a light material fills volume long before it fills weight.

What should you specify before you buy?

Four things decide whether a lot is right for your ration.

• The fibre fractions for that lot. NDF, ADF and acid detergent lignin together, because NDF alone will not tell you how the material will perform.
• Bulk density and particle size range, so you know what it will do in your silo and your mixer.
• The drying regime. Ask at what temperature the seed was dried, because that decides whether the coat is intact or brittle.
• Organic status and certification. If the ration has to carry an organic claim, the certificate has to match the lot.

The documentation should cover all four and arrive before the first trailer does.

Frequently asked questions

Sources