High Damages or Mere Refunds? Reading the Fine Print in the Hemp Fields
There is a kind of tragic comedy in agriculture, where hope is planted by hand and destroyed by clause. Jacob Mohr’s High Damages or Mere Refunds? Unconscionability and Failure of Essential Purpose in Contracts for Defective Hemp Seed reads less like a dry survey of commercial law and more like a morality play staged in the furrows of American fields. His central character, “Farmer Bob,” could be anyone — a dreamer turned litigant, who discovers that the seed of prosperity is all too often wrapped in disclaimers, buried in small print, and harvested not in the soil but in the courtroom.
Mohr reminds us that hemp is not soy or corn. It is a mercurial plant that is dioecious, fragile to climate, genetically unstable, and shackled to the razor-thin line of legality: 0.3% THC. A hot crop is not a bumper crop but a bonfire. When a season’s labor and fortune can vanish at the whim of weather or genetics, the difference between a refund and full compensation is the difference between survival and ruin.
The article walks us through the fractured landscape of U.S. courts, a nation divided not only by politics but by its interpretations of seed contracts. In Michigan, Georgia, or Arizona, Farmer Bob may find sympathy: judges strike down warranty disclaimers as unconscionable, remedies as failing their “essential purpose.” The law bends toward justice when a refund feels like mockery in the face of a half-million-dollar loss. Yet in North Dakota, California, or Texas, the same farmer is told: you bargained for the risk, you get back your dollar-a-seed and nothing more. The law here, Mohr notes, reads like a parable of rugged individualism — plant at your peril, and let the market sort it out.
It is this split that gives the review its dramatic tension. Will hemp be treated like any other crop, its seeds bound by boilerplate disclaimers? Or will the courts acknowledge that hemp, still young in its commercial rebirth, demands a jurisprudence of nuance?
Mohr offers pragmatic advice to both sides — seed dealers urged to strengthen their contracts, producers counseled to scrutinize terms before planting hope in the ground. But beneath the practicalities is something larger, almost lyrical: a portrait of risk in a new economy. Hemp, he suggests, is not only a plant but a wager — on science, on law, on the capacity of institutions to keep pace with agriculture’s experiments.
Reading Mohr, one feels that the law here is not just statute and precedent but a mirror of culture. The clash between “mere refund” and “high damages” is really a contest between two visions of commerce — one that treats seed as product, the other that treats seed as potential, as promise.
In the end, High Damages or Mere Refunds? is more than a legal note in the Drake Journal of Agricultural Law. It is a cautionary tale for anyone entering the hemp economy: that the most dangerous weeds are not those sprouting in the field, but those woven into the language of the contract.
