Ask your friends for their hottest take on beans or barley, and you might not get much more than a blank stare.

Ask them about hemp, however, and there’s a chance you’ll get a speech about the amazing properties and game-changing economic potential of this cure-all plant — or a dire warning about how hemp is the first step toward marijuana shops on every street corner.

But as the State of Wyoming prepares to oversee hemp production for the first time, we hope that our elected officials and regulators continue to treat the plant with a more level-headed mixture of both skepticism and enthusiasm.

We’re also thankful that the Powell City Council recently cleared the way to allow the city’s own GF Harvest to become perhaps the first business in the state to grow and process hemp; the business plans to add hemp ingredients to its lineup of foods, based around gluten-free oats.

However, it was unnerving to watch the council nearly block GF Harvest’s plans, approving them on a 4-3 vote last week.

Three city councilors — Tim Sapp, Floyd Young and Lesli Spencer — voted to prohibit GF Harvest from processing hemp at its East Washington Street facility, which sits on city-owned land.

Spencer said later that she didn’t feel GF Harvest had adequately answered the council’s questions, while Young said he opposed hemp and Sapp expressed concern about the plant opening the doors to legal marijuana.

Certainly, there are reasons to be wary of hemp, given the black sheep in its family tree. The crop is a variant of cannabis — the same plant that produces marijuana — and going just off appearances, it’s hard to distinguish between the two substances.

But that’s why the State of Wyoming, the U.S Department of Agriculture and other government agencies have literally spent years writing rules to ensure that no one is sneaking marijuana into their greenhouses or fields.

For instance, part of the regulatory process involves periodic testing to ensure hemp crops contain no more than 0.3% THC — the psychoactive ingredient that makes marijuana intoxicating. In other words, by its very definition, hemp cannot get you high; as one state lawmaker put it in 2018, “the only thing you get from smoking that stuff is a burnt tongue.”

While no set of regulations is foolproof, we feel confident that the state will be able to safely regulate hemp. And while there are reasons to be wary of the crop, there are more reasons to trust GF Harvest.

The Powell company traces its roots back more than a decade-and-a-half, when the Smith family became one of the first in the country to launch a business built around gluten-free oats.

Since starting as an FFA project by Forrest Smith, the company has grown through public partnerships and its own volition. GF Harvest has done some of the very things that we talk about as being vital to Wyoming’s economic development — including producing value-added agricultural products through its Powell mill.

That’s why it was disconcerting to see the council, on what seemed to be a very abrupt vote, almost throw a wrench in GF Harvest’s plans for its next phase of growth.

It remains to be seen whether hemp will prove to be a major cash crop in Wyoming, and there’s little evidence that it will ever come close to being the same kind of economic driver as beans, barley and sugar beets. But Wyoming growers and business owners, like the Smiths, could use another commodity — and they deserve the chance to try it.