MILAN (AP) — No miracle needed. The United States is on top of the hockey world for the first time in nearly a half-century.

Jack Hughes scored 1:41 into overtime and the U.S. defeated Canada 2-1 in the gold medal final at the Milan Cortina Olympics on Sunday, claiming the nation’s third men’s title at the Games and its first since the “Miracle on Ice” on 1980.

Unlike that ragtag group of college kids that pulled off one of the biggest upsets in sports history 46 years ago by knocking off the heavily favored Soviet Union, the Americans in Milan were a machine that rode goaltender Connor Hellebuyck and a stacked roster full of NHL players through the tournament unbeaten.

Hellebuyck was by far the best player on the ice, stopping 41 of the 42 shots he faced as Canada tilted the ice toward him. He made the save of the tournament by getting his stick on the puck on a shot from Devon Toews in the third period, then minutes later denied Macklin Celebrini on a breakaway — something he also did to Connor McDavid earlier.

It was only fitting they needed to go through Canada, their northern neighbor that beat them at the 4 Nations Face-Off a year ago and has claimed hockey supremacy for quite some time, winning every international competition over the past 16 years that featured the world’s best players.

Not anymore.

Jack Hughes (86) of Team United States scores the game winning goal against Connor McDavid (97) and Jordan Binnington of Team Canada in overtime during the Men’s Gold Medal match between Canada and the United States on the final day of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena on February 22, 2026 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

Winning a fast-paced, riveting game that was full of big hits and plenty of post-whistle altercations, the U.S. got a goal from Matt Boldy 6 minutes in and led until Cale Makar tied it late in the second period. Hellebuyck and the penalty kill was a perfect 18 for 18 at the Olympics.

The U.S. finally came through after generations of churning out talent from the grassroots level like a production line. All but two of the 25 players on the team went through USA Hockey’s National Team Development Program.

That group of 23 includes captain Auston Matthews, the top line of Brady and Matthew Tkachuk and Jack Eichel, and the second set of brothers, Jack and Quinn Hughes. Much of the team played together either at the program, under-18s, the world junior championship or some combination of them.

The U.S. winning silenced criticism of general manager Bill Guerin and his management group choosing a roster full of experienced veteran players to fill specific roles and leaving four of the top 10 American goal-scorers in the NHL this season at home. Some decisions were no-doubters, like coach Mike Sullivan giving the net to Hellebuyck, who was the best goalie in the tournament.

Canada, back-to-back Olympic champions in 2010 and ’14 and winners of three of the first five, fell short while playing without injured captain Sidney Crosby. The 38-year-old two-time gold medalist and three-time Stanley Cup champion left the quarterfinal game against Czechia and sat out the semifinal game against Finland.

McDavid, the widely considered best player in the world who wore the “C” in Crosby’s absence, suffered another devastating defeat on the doorstep of a title. He and the Edmonton Oilers have lost to Matthew Tkachuk and the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup Final each of the past two years.

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Anela Malik worked as a diplomat before becoming a storyteller about Black food history — and much more. She hosts the web series, “Our Block,” about Black businesses and local heroes, organizes global travel and is the writer and content creator behind the website formerly called Feed the Malik.

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She’s also the author of “American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States” (National Geographic, $40), which traces the history of Black foodways in the U.S. from the first documented arrival of African peoples to a North American settlement in 1619 to today. The book, which came out in September, emphasizes just how deeply Black food history is American food history.

During slavery, Africans’ agricultural and culinary work formed the backbone of the colonial economy, and food and water access were used as tools of control, she explains. African foods like millet, rice, yams, black-eyed peas, avocados, eggplant, peanuts and many more were brought across the Atlantic with enslaved people.

The slave trade also transformed sugar from a rare luxury good to an affordable commodity, and enabled the immense wealth that shaped American cuisine, allowing rich enslavers to try out agricultural and culinary experiments, train chefs and staff, and import expensive ingredients.

For example, George Washington’s enslaved workers maintained an ice house that enabled him to serve cold treats even during the summer, and his enslaved chef, Hercules Posey, was one of the country’s first celebrity chefs.

And James Hemings, an enslaved chef at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Monticello, trained as a pastry chef in France while Jefferson was there and was probably one of the best-trained chefs in America at the time. He helped to popularize macaroni and cheese, then a well-known dish in Paris.

In the North, many great early American caterers were Black tastemakers and culinary trendsetters. For example, Thomas Downing, the freeborn son of enslaved parents, started the Thomas Downing Oyster House, a fine-dining oyster restaurant that was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.

After the Civil War, many jobs available to Black peoples involved work in agriculture, food service or domestic work — roles with deep ties to food systems. In the West, Black peoples had a major impact in shaping the livestock industry: It’s estimated that Black peoples made up about a quarter of the cowboys working on cattle drives and ranches, Malik writes.

“American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States” by Anela Malik and Renae Wilson (National Geographic, $40) is available in bookstores and online now. (Courtesy Andrea Pippins)

In the 1920s, the Harlem Renaissance made Harlem a hub for Black food and culture. Black chefs were also a core part of the Civil Rights Movement: In the 1950s, Georgia Gilmore and other Black women created the Club From Nowhere, a group that sold food during the Montgomery bus boycotts to help fund the boycott, supporting the carpool system needed to keep the boycott going and feeding people whose extended commutes left them less time to cook.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the Black Panther Party provided free breakfast to schoolchildren in Oakland, helping address community food insecurity.

But Malik’s book doesn’t end in the past. She identifies many contemporary leaders and influencers in the culinary world who continue to shape Black foodways: people like Bryant Terry, former chef in residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, whose work focuses on food justice; and Pierre Thiam, a renowned Senegalese chef based in Oakland, who leads efforts to popularize fonio, a drought-resistant West African grain, among many other leaders today.

In “American Soul,” Anela Malik identifies Bryant Terry, former chef in residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, as an important Black culinary leader. In the photo, Bryant poses with his book, “Black Food,” at his studio in Oakland on Oct. 8, 2021. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

Malik took a break from Arabic classes in Oman to chat with The Mercury News. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into this work, exploring the Black history of food in America.

A: I was a U.S. diplomat in another life, and my focus was primarily on the Middle East and Arabic. That’s what I studied. That’s why I got a master’s degree in. Then I got the job and did the things. And then I quit.

I had been exploring food in the Middle East primarily as a way to connect with people and get out of the expat bubble. I’d spent tens of thousands of dollars learning Arabic and wanted to actually use it instead of just going to French and Italian restaurants. I had been telling stories about food in that way.

After I left the Foreign Service, I was exploring and documenting food in D.C. and food in America. I thought I would try storytelling on social media and see what happened. If that didn’t work, I planned to get a job in a restaurant, because through high school, undergrad and grad school, I had always worked in restaurants.

And so I started telling stories about food and culture, food and history, food as something more than just food, on social media. Eventually, this book project came about, and then I spent three years in rooms talking to people and reading about and researching Black foodways. Ultimately, where I’ve landed is that food is a universal language in the same way that music is.

Even now, I’m in Oman, and there are a few elements that anyone can relate to, even if they don’t quite understand the ingredients, or maybe the words. That’s my approach now: food as this living memory, a living history as both a cultural and historical item at the same time.

Q: You cover so many different parts of Black American history in your book. How did you go about trying to capture all of that in one space?

A: There’s absolutely no way to capture everything, but I tried to set up the book as a starting point. There are going to be people who are left out, and there are going to be historical moments that are left out. That’s just the nature of a history that’s so long. Black people have been in North America for a very long time. My approach was to take a semi-historical approach, to walk people through major moments and movements.

Of course, we cover enslavement and the deep entwinement of Black peoples in the agricultural space during that period. But then there’s a section in the book on early American and colonial economies, because these imported ingredients and food trends at that time were really Frenchified. We wouldn’t have that if there weren’t immense wealth generated by enslavers to import ingredients and to send their enslaved chefs for training in France.

And then we talk about things like the Great Migration and the movement of peoples. My approach was to give people historical references that they might have heard in other contexts, and then complicate them — because it is a complicated story.

Q: What were some surprising or interesting parts of your research?

A: Some of the best moments for me and the most resonant were the interviews I conducted with chefs, people working in the food space today, or with people working in food media today, because so many of them have parallels to the stories that are told in the historical parts of the book. It’s one thing to research the Great Migration, and then it’s another thing to ask how did most of my favorite Black chefs in New York land with their families in New York?

Take someone like Cheryl Day, who is such a force in Southern baking. She moved back to Savannah after her family had migrated to the West Coast. Today, L.A.’s barbecue scene is so very Black. But why is that? Because of the Great Migration.

Q: Where does the Bay Area fit into this history? You mention the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program.

A: The book definitely talks about food as an integral part of these social justice movements in many ways. The Breakfast Program is one. Another is Georgia Gilmore and the Club From Nowhere and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and how integral food was to support that boycott.

There are historical movements that are not really food-focused: They’re focused on changing the underlying structure of our society. But over and over again, we see food either used as a tool, or food folks — so chefs, bakers, home cooks, etc. — stepping up to support those movements, which is what we still see today.

In every city, when there’s a crisis, the first people who are either feeding people or raising money, they’re usually people who work in the local professional food space. Hospitality people are hospitable. I think that’s often part of their core being.

Q: You talk in the book about how Black history is so much bigger than just Black History Month. But we’re putting this story together for Black History Month. Is there a particular historical moment you share in the book that you wish more people were aware of?

A: National holidays and Black History Month, I think, are nudges to us as consumers and citizens to pay attention. Black history in the United States right now is so contentious. And not just Black history, but so many marginalized histories are being battled over, in school boards and online and in book clubs.

Instead of pointing readers to a particular historical moment or even a particular story in the book, I would urge them to consider that all of this history in this book continues today, and the exploitation and marginalization and violence committed against Black and Indigenous and all these other peoples continue today.

We’re in a historical moment where it’s very out in the open, and it’s up to us to have the hard conversations to combat that. So rather than point them to like a particular historical moment, I would say that maybe the moment is at the dinner table with your cousin, and maybe the right moment would be not just Black History Month, but forever.

Q: Anything else you’d like to highlight or share?

A: There’s so much of our history that we are not taught or are not aware of for a myriad of reasons. But Black history is American history, undeniably.  At times, it can be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is what we learn from.

I think there is an urge to just look at the Martin Luther Kings of the world, through the framing of his nicest, most polite quotes, when in fact, it’s much more complicated and much broader. “American Soul” is an attempt to look at a sampling of that.

There are so many people throughout the country who are doing this work. Many of them are in the book, which is why I deliberately wanted to include a more forward-looking section. I think it’s very important for people to consciously diversify what they’re consuming, and sometimes to be challenged by what they see or listen to or hear or watch. And so this book stands in a long line of people who have done this work, but they’re not all historical figures. Many of them are alive and doing it today, and many of them are in the book.

Details: “American Soul: The Black History of Food in the United States,” by Anela Malik and Renae Wilson (National Geographic, $40) was published Sept. 9, 2025. Learn more at anelamalik.com or follow her on Instagram at @theanelamalik.

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

The millions of immigrants who have crossed the border with Mexico since 2020 could change the balance of political power in Congress — but in a way likely to boost Republican states that emphasize border security, at the expense of more welcoming Democratic states.

That’s because many of the new immigrants joined state-to-state movers gravitating to the fast-growing conservative strongholds of Florida and Texas, boosting those states’ populations. California and New York also had large influxes from the border but ended up losing population anyway.

The vastly different population changes threaten to scramble the Electoral College map.

California and other Democratic states lost immigration-related population gains when residents moved away during the COVID-19 pandemic or while seeking jobs and housing. Where did those state-to-state movers go? Florida and Texas, in large measure.

Republicans have long accused Democrats of encouraging immigration for their electoral benefit.

But the shift is likely to help Republican-leaning states in the next decade: The Constitution allocates congressional representation by population — including noncitizens. Every 10 years, the country counts its people and then shuffles the number of U.S. House seats given to each state.

In presidential elections, each state has the same number of electoral votes as it does congressional representatives.

Several experts contacted by Stateline agreed that after the next decennial census in 2030, California is likely to lose four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas is likely to gain four.

Adam Kincaid, president and executive director of the GOP-founded American Redistricting Project, said the changes could dramatically alter the Electoral College map, with the Midwest no longer a “blue wall” against Republican presidential victories if the region loses three seats, by his calculation.

On the plus side for Democrats, he said, immigration helped stem population losses in many blue states.

But it’s hard to predict the next five years, Kincaid said. Housing is expensive and hard to get in states such as California and New York, he noted, while also blaming Democratic “policies that drive where people want to live.”

“I don’t think anybody rationally expects Florida and Texas to grow as rapidly through the decade as they did during COVID,” Kincaid said. “We’ll all be wrong. These are only forecasts and things will change.”

House seats

Three forecasts for 2030 — one provided to Stateline by Jonathan Cervas, an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University; one from Kincaid’s American Redistricting Project; and one from William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution — all show Democratic states in the Northeast and West losing House seats while fast-growing, mostly Republican states in the South and West gain seats.

In addition to the representation changes in California and Texas, Florida would gain either three or four seats in the U.S. House, depending on the forecast, while Illinois and New York each would lose either one or two seats.

Other possible gains would go to Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Utah, depending on the forecast. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin might lose seats.

The forecasts were developed from new census population estimates that attempt to show where millions of border migrants went since 2020, based on court records showing ZIP codes of residence.

Florida, Texas and California each got around a million immigrants, many from the border surge of 2022-2024. But California’s gain was offset by 1.7 million people moving away to other states, including Texas, while Florida and Texas gained from both immigration and state-to-state movers.

Similarly, New York gained 750,000 people from immigration but lost 1.1 million as New Yorkers moved out of state.

Party leaders are paying close attention to the details.

Republican states could gain more seats in the U.S. House after decennial redistricting in 2030, assuming heavily Republican states like Florida and Texas remain that way. More people are moving to those states, including immigrants and state-to-state movers from Democratic states.

The new census estimates show the lion’s share of new immigration since 2020 going to Florida, Texas, California, New York and New Jersey. Hundreds of thousands of migrants also went to other states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Georgia, North Carolina and Washington.

It’s likely that many of the migrants who landed in California and New York ended up moving to Texas and Florida, where there were more jobs and affordable housing available.

The largest single state-to-state migration flow between 2022 and 2024 — about 171,000 people — was from California to Texas, according to a Stateline analysis of a separate Census Bureau release. There was another large flow, of about 122,000 people, from New York to Florida.

The February state population estimates, delayed from their usual release in December by the government shutdown in October, also used court records to adjust immigration numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau located millions of asylum-seekers, parolees and other “humanitarian migrants” who entered the country between 2022 and 2024 based on the ZIP codes they provided to immigration courts.

That’s a change from 2024 estimates, when the Census Bureau added humanitarian migrants to the total but assumed they had gone to places with historically high immigration.

“That assumption was convenient but implausible,” said Jed Kolko, an economist and undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Biden administration.

But as it turned out, Kolko added, “The humanitarian migrants were more likely to come over the border and then settle in places anecdotally known for providing services, like New York City and Denver.”

The result of sharpening the picture with court records: Some states got more immigration added for 2020-24 (130,000 for New York, 32,000 for Colorado, 30,000 for Texas), and some had it subtracted (104,000 fewer for Florida, 70,000 for California, 39,000 for Michigan) in comparison with older estimates.

Five years and beyond

With border crossings from Mexico at their lowest level in 50 years in fiscal 2025, it’s hard to chart the next five years and predict 2030 population, which will ultimately decide House representation.

Adding to the uncertainty is the unprecedented nature of the stress on population since 2020: pandemic restrictions and dislocations, followed by large-scale immigration during a labor shortage, a clamping down at the border late in the Biden administration, and then President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan that was just ramping up in mid-2025.

Frey, the Brookings Institution demographer, agreed that “the second half of the decade could be wildly different from the first half,” noting that state-to-state moves and immigration both dropped off between 2024 and 2025. That diminishes both of the drivers of Southern state population growth.

“My guess is, if this continues, Texas and Florida would benefit less in Electoral College gains,” Frey said. If immigration remains sharply curtailed, Texas could gain only three seats and California could lose only three, he said.

The overall trend would still see fast-growing, mostly Republican states getting more congressional representation, Frey said. But with lower immigration, “the contrast in red-blue state reallocation is still there but not as sharp as before.”

State demographers in Florida and Texas say they’re uncertain about what kind of growth the states might see in the next five years.

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Florida estimates its own population using electricity usage to gauge the number of new residents, which shows more recent growth in the past couple of years than the Census Bureau does, said Richard Doty, a research demographer with the state Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

In the coming years, Florida growth could stall for various reasons, including higher housing prices and high insurance costs from recent storms.

“Florida is no longer the bargain it once was,” Doty said. “The cost of housing in particular is driving young people and retirees to other states.”

In Texas, the large drop in immigration between 2024 and 2025 — down almost 50% from about 355,000 to 167,000 — will curb future growth, said Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter.

“If we look at next year, I think we’re going to see immigration to the United States take a very significant decline, and then that’s obviously going to affect Texas because immigration is such a big part of our population change,” Potter said.

That will likely extend to legal immigrants, such as the tech workers on high-skill visas who have moved to Texas cities and suburbs, he said.

“There’s a tendency for potential immigrants, legal immigrants, to perhaps be a little more reticent now, given what seems to be happening in terms of immigration enforcement in the United States,” Potter said.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

©2026 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By MATT HUDSON, Montana Free Press

In 2020, a northcentral Montana hemp crop was harvested, beginning a trial run by two Montana companies to produce clothing without the material ever leaving the United States.

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When the shirt finally went to market last year, it was proof of a concept that had long since moved overseas.

Hemp is often held up as a versatile crop with all sorts of applications: fabrics, home insulation, even edible seed oils, to name a few. But it was illegal to grow or distribute hemp in the U.S. for nearly a century until 2018 when Congress lifted federal restrictions on the marijuana-adjacent plant. So, when a Fort Benton hemp processor and a Great Falls-based apparel company sought to make a line of U.S.-made hemp shirts, they had to scrap together a supply chain to make it happen.

“Honestly, it was just: Can we do it? Because it hadn’t happened in, arguably, 100 years,” Morgan Tweet, co-founder and CEO of IND Hemp, told Montana Free Press. “No one had grown (hemp) fiber and been able to process it to a quality that they were able to spin with in the U.S.”

IND Hemp was formed in 2018 and started producing hemp seed oils from regionally grown crops for various food applications. But hemp-based textiles, known for their sturdiness, were on the company’s radar, and after two years of planning, IND started up its fiber production line in 2022.

It was around that time that Great Falls-based apparel company Smith and Rogue approached IND with a proposal. The brand is an offshoot of the North 40 Outfitters chain of farm and outdoors supply stores, which is also based in Great Falls and has 12 stores across the northwestern United States.

Smith and Rogue already had hemp-based clothing lines, but those were produced internationally. Brandon Kishpaugh, apparel merchandiser at Smith and Rogue, was interested in the possibility of a clothing line that didn’t leave American borders.

“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.?”

It was a stroke of luck that a hemp fiber processor opened up less than an hour away in Fort Benton. But that was just one early step in a long manufacturing chain.

FROM PROHIBITION TO PRODUCTION

Despite being illegal for much of the 20th century, hemp is intertwined with American history. Grown by founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, it was seen not only as a reliable crop but also a source of domestic pride amid boycotts of British goods during the American Revolution.

Hemp fiber ready to be shipped to the Carolinas where it will be made into fabric is seen in the at the warehouse Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Fort Benton, Mont. (Lauren Miller/Montana Free Press via AP)

Hemp is a sibling of marijuana, although modern hemp has tiny levels of the psychoactive chemical that’s sought in the recreational drug. But the two were the same in the eyes of Congress, which passed a prohibitive tax in 1937 that outlawed both plants. Aside from a brief U.S. government push for hemp-based rope, parachutes and water hoses during World War II, industrial hemp production shuttered in America for the rest of the century.

The Montana Legislature legalized the cultivation of industrial hemp in 2001, but it didn’t spark a green rush. It wasn’t until 2009 that the state issued its first industrial hemp license to a Bozeman medical marijuana business.

Like medical marijuana, hemp remained federally prohibited and languished in jurisdictional purgatory. Montana’s hemp licenses included language that warned about the plant being federally illegal, and the DEA declined at first to recognize Montana’s industrial hemp law. Another licensed hemp farmer near Helena saw her crops die in 2017 because she couldn’t get access to federally controlled water.

Congress relaxed its stance in 2018 and lifted the restrictions on industrial hemp through that year’s farm bill, and Montana farmers harvested 2,400 acres of hemp in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That makes Montana a middling state for hemp production, beaten out by larger producers such as South Dakota, Texas and California.

The prohibition is gone ( at least for now ), but over the preceding decades, the institutional knowledge around hemp production largely disappeared in the United States. In addition, American textile manufacturing of all kinds witnessed precipitous declines around the turn of the century.

Sofi Thanhauser, author of the book “Worn: A People’s History of Clothing,” told MTFP that prolonged prohibition made it difficult for hemp to return to American clothing manufacturing. What was left of the industry centered mostly on cotton. Hemp was more like a niche material, sometimes more difficult to process, and U.S. companies weren’t equipped to handle it.

“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.”

IND’s main fiber-processing equipment was manufactured in France, where a stable European hemp industry has existed. The Fort Benton plant is dedicated to a process called decortication, which separates the outer fiber material, called bast, from the hemp straw’s woody core, called hurd. The machines are massive and can process five tons per hour.

After hemp cultivation became federally legal in 2018, Tweet said lots of people started growing the plant. Few were getting into fiber processing.

“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.’”

THE SHIRT

Smith and Rogue’s test run for an American-manufactured line of clothing was limited — initially, 239 men’s work shirts. Kishpaugh said he focused on a shirt for this experimental run because it was something his New York sewing contractors could work with.

“I wanted to go with something very heritage, very workwear,” he said. “I knew our factory could execute.”

The result was the Benton work shirt, a $150 piece of clothing made from a blend of IND’s Montana-grown hemp fibers and cotton grown in Arizona. The raw fibers traveled from Fort Benton and Arizona to North Carolina to be refined and blended. The material was then sent to another North Carolina company for spinning before heading to South Carolina for weaving. The fabric was finished in Georgia before being trucked to New York City for cutting and sewing.

The difficult part wasn’t finding the companies to work with, because there are few players in American textiles. The challenge was convincing some of the companies to fit a small run of hemp-based material into their 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.”

More than 97% of clothing sold in the United States is made overseas. The efficiencies of overseas production lie in scale, labor costs and experience in making modern clothing. But there are many examples of exploitative or dangerous conditions for the workers who meet the demands of a quick-turn, affordable fashion industry.

While smaller operations are coming online in the United States, some parts of the process require highly specialized equipment that startups may not be able to afford.

“It’s things like the spinning mill that turns the fiber into thread that is hugely capital-intensive and involves huge, complicated machines,” author Thanhauser said. “And also the weaving, the spinning mills. You can’t, as a small business, just buy a couple of those.”

For the Benton shirt, nearly every step required a different company. That affected the cost of the final product, but it also cost time. When Kishpaugh received a prototype in the fall of 2024 that didn’t fit right, fixing the issue meant going back through multiple hands to refine the shirt.

The Benton shirt may have debuted early in 2025, but a shipment of finished fabric went missing en route to New York City. The roll of textiles — one of the first domestic hemp fabric runs since prohibition that was painstakingly coordinated across multiple states — vanished and hasn’t been found.

“So there’s 600 yards of this historic fabric that’s warehoused somewhere,” Tweet said.

The process was once again delayed, but thankfully, there was enough additional fabric to resume production.

Smith and Rogue debuted the shirt in December, both online and in its affiliated retail stores, along with a marketing plan to showcase the effort put into it.

“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.”

The $150 price reflects the costs of the USA manufacturing chain, Kishpaugh said, adding that Smith and Rogue’s margin isn’t as strong on this shirt as some of the company’s other clothing made overseas. He said there is a segment of consumers who respond to marketing about a USA-made shirt, even at that price.

“That is hard for some people to come to grips with,” he said. “This is $150, and this is why. We have to pay for all those other touch points.”

LINKS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN

Stacks of hemp age in the IND Hemp warehouse Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Fort Benton, Mont. (Lauren Miller/Montana Free Press via AP)

The hemp for the Benton shirt run was grown in 2020 at a Meissner family farm north of Fort Benton. The fiber material was part of a crop primarily meant for other products IND was producing at the time.

“What we probably didn’t appreciate then that we most certainly do now is how much agronomic impacts and the variables that happen in the field affect the finished quality,” Tweet said.

Those factors are numerous. The variety of hemp chosen, planting density, harvest timing, soil microbes and annual precipitation all influence the crop’s suitability for textile production. There are some quality factors that Tweet can control at the Fort Benton processing plant. But if a bad crop comes in, that’s what they have to work with.

It took years to refine that process to routinely receive higher-quality hemp fibers, Tweet said. The ability to use those early 2020 crops for a shirt that was released in late 2025 was a proof of concept. Today, IND has more consistent quality fibers for use in textiles.

“No one has at scale been able to decorticate and get fibers to a point that they can be spun,” Tweet said. “Maybe it’s a reach to make that claim, but I am hard pressed to find something else.”

Plans for the second-generation Benton shirt are underway, Kishpaugh said. He hopes to scale up the process to produce larger quantities and a wider range of clothing, including outerwear and pants. He said the experience gained from producing the Benton shirt could help bring costs down a bit, but Kishpaugh and Tweet said a hybrid model is also a good avenue for Montana hemp.

“We have good factories overseas that we work with,” Kishpaugh said. “And if we can get the hemp to them, they’re set up to do the bibs, jackets. Now we’re just using American-sourced hemp versus overseas hemp.”

The constraints of cost and scale still limit growth in domestic manufacturing.

“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.”

This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.