Hemp Bound (14 page)

This is a company model America can get behind. Not just because it's righteous and so much less evil than, say, some satellite dish companies or banks I could name, but because it reflects values that are good for America's economic and spiritual future.

Consumers today associate hemp with concepts like admirable ideals, healthy cooking, and the world's strongest rope. Ask Arm & Hammer if it's important that we associate baking soda with nontoxic freshness at an affordable price. Good reputation is bankable in a cynical age. So you might say Bronner and Co. are enjoying karmic payback for fighting to institutionalize industrial hemp in the United States.

The bottom-line benefits of this “Don't Just Not Be Evil, Be Actively Good” brand are not just my opinion. The 2002 paper out of Purdue University that called hemp a “camp follower” plant also concludes that hemp is “pre-adapted to organic agriculture, and accordingly to the growing market for products associated with environmentally-friendly, sustainable production. Hemp products are an advertiser's dream.”
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Speaking as a consumer, I can say without hesitation that if farmers organize vertically in such a way that I have a farmer-direct option for my hemp oil, ideally a local one, I will gratefully take it.

Will Big Ag move into hemp? Almost certainly. That's why Canada has its hemp GMO ban in place before there is GMO hemp. For its own good, U.S. industry players would do well to do the same. Franken-hemp? The public would go elsewhere. I mention this because North Dakota's argument for immediate legalization has included the bullet point that University of North Dakota researchers are developing a sort of glow-in-the-dark gene that can serve as proof that a hemp plant isn't a psychoactive variety. Very Bad Idea. Bye-bye featured shelf at Whole Foods. GMO tainting erases hemp's strongest selling point. Plus even the inevitable McHemp sandwich needn't be genetically modified. The plant grows like a weed.

The fact is, venture capital is already flowing into cannabis because corporate bean counters see a market. The “sums” add up. That's what winning the drug war looks like, I'm afraid. Wall Street does what Wall Street does. But you'll soon be able to support your local hemp farmer and buy her oil at the farmer's market and food co-op, as well as at Walmart.

Conclusion

Support Your Local Heartland Hemp Homesteaders

A
merica's small farmers are becoming increasingly aware of the new old cash crop awaiting them. A year ago, third-generation Colorado wheat farmer Jillane Hixson never imagined she'd be talking about hemp. She in fact wasn't sure about the difference between hemp and psychoactive cannabis.

Hemp Pioneers

Jillane Hixson, Eastern Colorado Wheat Farmer

I met Hixson in 2012 when I gave a talk about cannabis in Lamar, Colorado, a place where local Democrats call 30 percent election showings “moral victories for our message.” Her family's been in the area for generations, but after the talk, she showed me her farm and said, “Something's different now.”

Right on the driveway as soon as I stepped out of my truck, a handful of beach sand (formerly known as topsoil) blew across our ankles. “This isn't what the soil is supposed to look like,” she said. “They've even tried dumping municipal waste for New York City on it. It just washed away.”

Desperation was opening Hixson's mind about hemp. “We planted this wheat in the fall,” she said, pointing to a stretch of cinematic desert that was supposed to be amber waves of grain. “It should be a foot tall by now. We just haven't had any precipitation at all. Again. The wind tears up the entire field.”

This was original Dust Bowl country in the 1930s, and what Hixson was saying is that it's back for a sequel. Hixson and husband Dave were stranded in their home for half a day during a May 24, 2013, Depression-evoking three-story dust storm. So much dirt was flying into the house during the overnight disaster that, Hixson told the
Denver Post
, she and Dave had to cover their faces with handkerchiefs and “sleep with their heads under blankets.”

I remembered this when, a year after I'd visited her farm, a federally written Dust Bowl exhibit at nearby Comanche National Grassland ascribed a good deal of the blame for the first Dust Bowl to “disastrous land management practices.”

I dunno. Sounds a lot like modern monoculture. That's why Hixson's opened her mind and calls hemp “compelling.” “We have to plant a crop that will take root and hold this highly erodible soil,” she told me.

Now, thanks to Colorado's cannabis legalization and despite her own conservative county's proclamation that it doesn't really like the new cannabis constitutional amendment that 55 percent of the state's voters passed in 2012, Hixson told me with a point to her drought-crippled fields on the morning I visited, “Hemp certainly is intriguing to me. We have to try something different.”

She was referring to the fact that hemp's wide climatic adaptation and fast-growing foot-long roots allow it to thrive in drought-damaged soil. Indeed, cannabis worldwide traditionally has been used for erosion control.

“My daddy planted it along the ditch, so it wouldn't flood,” a Nebraskan farmer named Tammy told me. “Then in the fall we'd graze the cattle out there: They sure loved it.”

These are the eastern Colorado plains, a place where, in topography, demography, and percentage of linebackers produced per capita, you
are
in Kansas anymore. It's not Boulder, is what I'm getting at. Hixson is no flower child. The thing is, you could shoot a French Foreign Legion movie here, so Sahara-esque is the parched countryside.

In fact, just as I was letting a handful of Hixson's beach volleyball sand strain through my fingers like an egg timer, husband Dave materialized and chimed in somewhat emphatically, “Look at this wheat crop. It's a dust bowl out here . . . Sure we'd grow hemp if it paid. If there was an outlet to sell it.”

That's what farmers always do: They adapt; they look for a new crop that will make them money. Since, as we've seen, so many of those outlets Dave was talking about will be industrial, we'll leave the farm and give the final word to the Composite Innovation Centre's Simon Potter. I do this not because his point of view concurs with both this book's thesis and my dreams, but because he is, in an Aristotelian sense, a reliable source.

That is to say, Potter's genuinely not a political hempster. He gets paid no matter what the best fibers turn out to be in the lab. And they're turning out, in areas ranging from roofing to insulation to aircraft bodies, to be industrial cannabis fibers.

“We've been cultivating this plant for eight thousand years,” he told me next to the hemp tractor. “[Now] we're rediscovering its manifold benefits.”

You had me at
eight thousand years
, pardner. Will the mainstream American marketplace really embrace all the hemp housing, food, power, and tractor parts we've been discussing? We're going to find out soon enough. I think yes.

If the Canadians are right about their seed oil sector's growth rate, and the Europeans are correct about hempcrete's market readiness, Jack Noel, who co-authored a 2012 industrial hemp task force report for the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, says we're talking about an industry that will be the fastest in U.S. history to reach the fifty-billion-dollar-per-year mark.

After what's turning into eight months of in-the-field investigation, I can report that I, too, believe that in a decade and a half, industrial cannabis will outearn even its lucrative psychoactive cousin in the United States. Here's why: Coors is big. But ExxonMobil is bigger. How much bigger? The
Denver Post
proffered on January 14, 2013,
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that industrial cannabis could be an industry as much as ten times larger than that of psychoactive cannabis, itself already America's number one earning crop.

Perhaps more important, the simple, ancient cannabis plant provides, after industrial harvest, a residual feedstock for regional-based sustainable energy production that cuts out at once Monsanto, BP, and Middle East oil dictators. And it gets out Ring Around the Collar.

So I hope you'll join me in wishing America's hemp farmers well. Or better yet, become one, or a partner in a processing plant or a member of an energy cooperative. These are the people who are going to be reducing GMOs in the industrial food system and in so doing helping heal our farmland from monoculture. They're heroes, in my book. I hope they will be numerous and prosperous. This is the health of my offspring we're talking about.

Said replicants currently napping, I'm off to bind a batch of tax receipts with Romanian-made hemp twine. Funny: The cannabis plant (care of the publishing and journalism games) has earned me the bulk of my income this year. I wonder how many years it'll be before this twine, which I got at Walmart and which lasts years even out in the Land of Enchantment sun where it also secures my grapevines, will be available as an American-grown product? I guarantee you it'll make quarterly tax time a little sweeter that year. It might happen sooner than anyone thought. Like this year.

You know what? Forget taxes. With the bright thought that we humans still have both truly sustainable and lucrative options in our climate stabilization arsenal, I'm going to heed the summons of the hummingbird hovering outside my office window and head out for a run up my canyon, powered by the King of Seeds.