Northern Germany's mild winters and cool summers are better for cultivating hemp than flax. Hemp fits well into existing crop rotations. Achieving appropriate and reproducible fiber quality requires an exact understanding of hemp varieties, harvesting and crop collection techniques, and the dependence of the retting process upon the weather. Hemp growers currently lack a simple and easily handled set of instruments for determining hemp quality characteristics, such as degree of retting, and fiber fineness, content, and strength. Intensive shredders for mobile conditioning in the field, rotary swathers for turning and swathing, and balers with cutting devices should not be used in hemp cultivation. Tests showed that retting influences the fiber separation of hemp. Unretted hemp yielded greater fiber losses and larger hurd contents by mass after mechanical coarse separation. Coarse hemp fiber bundles extracted through low cost processes can be used in such engineering applications as soil and hydraulic engineering or automobile munufacturing.