About Us
About Us
Murat Kocaballı, the founder and the general manager of the company, earned his Bachelor’s degree in Economics at Bilkent University, worked in the textile and apparel industries throughout his whole career.
He’s continuing the R&D and feasibility studies by collaborating with leading Turkish universities. The research studies are mainly focused on production which include the seeds, fiber and shives. On the other hand, the yarn and fabric obtained from hemp fibres are experimented under several conditions in order to achieve the best quality. Ultimate goal is to build a modern and state of the art processing plant that covers all the stages of the production from decortication to weaving and knitting.
After the years of R&D and experiments, Ketene Co. is found in 2018 and legally registered as trademark in 2020.
Ketene is operating in its temporary facilities located in Vezirköprü / Samsun where is the most developed hemp production area in the country, holds the most of Ketene’s hemp production lands.
Turkey has recently restarted it’s -once traditional- hemp production with only 150 decares cultivated in 2018 and 860 decares in 2019. Ketene with its early interest and R&D in hemp production, became the largest grower in Turkey with 45 decares in 2018, 235 decares in 2019 and 450 decares in 2020.
Ketene harvested 800 tons of hemp in those years and started decortication of the stems with the machines that Ketene engineers developed.
Traditionally hemp is harvested by hand in Turkey, which is time consuming, expensive and has quality failures. Since hemp industry is very small in Turkey, there is no proper harvesting machine in the country. So we had to build our own machine and Ketene engineers did a great job and developed a unique, first-in-the-country and still only harvesting machine. Now we can harvest faster, better, more efficient and not to mention about the better quality.
With the harvesting and decortication machines we developed, famers are be able to cultivate larger areas without the fear of costly labor and very difficult working conditions. Hemp production in Turkey began to grow rapidly.
KETENE Agriculture and Textile Co. now aims to expand its production into a different level by integrating hemp processing with textile production. Our project is approved and granted for the government funds (13th Stage of Rural Development Supports) which covers %50 of the investment and also granted for a land in the Havza Organized Industrial Zone in Havza, Samsun, where the state-of-the-art production facilities will be constructed.
Our zero-waste hemp processing plant, which is planned to be completed in 2020, we plan to decorticate the stems into fibers and shives and sell them as semi-raw products. On the other hand we will process the fibers into yarns and produce fabrics which will be worked in to apparel products.
Shives will be used in concrete, ready-mixed concrete and isolation materials in the construction industry. We are collaborating with an isolation material producer and over the last two years we managed to develop an insulating material. The results are very promising, and we sent samples to several EU countries. In 2020, we aim to process 280 tons of shives into insulation materials and export them.
We are continuing to work via experiments and sample productions on processing fiber, yarn and fabric from hemp. We succeeded in producing very high quality fibres, which we’ve harvested from local hemp variety plantations. By mixing the hemp fibres with cotton fibres with %50-50 ratio, we can produce many yarn sizes: 15/1, 18/1, 20/1 etc. During the steps of processing the raw fibres into yarn, no chemicals are used only organic materials are used. In the end, we are able to control all the stages of the production starting with planting, harvesting, decorticating to kinitting under our own production facilities and staff. We are one of the very few companies in the world that can control every stage of the production process.
When we move to our new state of the art facilities, we target to export 300 tons of textile products annually. All of our production will be sourced from our own hemp plantations.
KETENE BİTKİSEL ÜRETİM VE TEKSTİL SANAYİ TİCARET ANONİM ŞİRKETİ.