Hemp Bound (3 page)

While I've got you thinking big picture, and before we launch into the plant's most lucrative digital age killer apps, I thought it might be helpful to include a quick, explicit definition of hemp. That's because it's finally sunk in, after several years spent researching an industry that's indeed growing 20 percent a year (and that's just the hemp seed oil market), that such growth means a lot of new people are coming to the topic all the time. These folks will want to know what exactly this plant is we're discussing.

Even some of 2014's U.S. farmers will be fresh to the species, given that Canada's cultivators can't keep up with demand, meaning a much-needed cash crop is ready to roll Stateside. Now. The North American industry is growing like feral hemp in a Nebraska ditch.

Hemp
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includes all varieties of the
Cannabis
genus that contain negligible amounts of THC (a component of the cannabis plant that can be intoxicating when heated). It is synonymous, as we've said, with industrial cannabis and in fact has been used in industry for so long that linguists can trace when and where key language changes occurred based on a culture's word for the plant.

Cannabis is a dioecious plant (there are males and females), and branches are covered with hand-like leaf fans. Originating in Central Asia, hemp has a four- to six-month growing cycle and has been successfully cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. Mature plants range from two to twelve feet tall, depending on variety.

There are two main reasons the plant is important to humanity: It feeds us and it protects us. The seed oil, as we'll see in a Canadian study I visited in the lab, is an incredibly nutritious protein- and mineral-rich source of essential fatty acids. And the fiber is freakishly strong. When you slice a hemp stalk in half, you'll see, nestled in a snug hollow tube, a long, string-like band running the length inside. This is hemp's famous bast fiber. Cultivated correctly, it's stronger than steel. So when I say hemp protects us, I mean it has done so from the time of our earliest and still most durable clothing and shelter right up to our next-generation body armor.
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Okay. So now as I rattle off all the hempsters' favorite historical uses for hemp (which, really, is a way of showing how patriotic and conservative their view is, how history is on hemp's side), you'll know the reasons why.

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote his Declaration of Independence draft on hemp paper, and Betsy Ross's first flag was made from the plant. Early Virginia colonists were ordered to cultivate industrial cannabis and could even pay their taxes with harvest shares. More recently, a 1938
Popular Mechanics
article that's become legendary among hemp boosters presciently called hemp “the billion dollar crop,” and extolled its bafflingly strong fibers' twenty-five thousand industrial uses, half a dozen of which we'll be looking at in this book.

Really all of this is most elegantly expressed in that Shinto coronation ceremony. The message is, “Bring the hemp with you.” It's what anthropologists call a camp follower—it was toted nearly everywhere as humans traipsed around the globe.
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Which is actually good for the U.S. industry, according to hemp agronomist Anndrea Hermann. Rather than relying on feral Nebraskan ditch weed, “Farmers in Kentucky and Colorado can look for varieties that have worked in climates similar to theirs.” An Uzbek cultivar, for example, might be perfect for Illinois, where as a state senator Barack Obama voted twice for hemp cultivation.

West told me that a century before
Hemp for Victory
, the U.S. Navy was so desperate for hemp rope that the federal government began contests, in the 1840s, for the production of high-quality fiber strains that could compete with the then-standard-bearing Italian and Russian varieties that taxpayers were being forced to expensively procure.

“Missionaries sent back Chinese hemp, farmers blended it with the more coarse European strains we already had, and the result was the finest hemp in the world,” he said. “It's generally called Kentucky hemp, but there were many named varieties with specific properties that were well known and widely marketed for more than half a century. Government-run breeding programs continued until the 1930s.” USDA-researched strains had names like Kymington, Keijo, and Yarrow.

And so was birthed an industry that employed thousands, earned millions, and spanned a dozen states by the turn of the twentieth century. Kentucky's first millionaire, Lexington's John Wesley Hunt, made his pile in the 1840s weaving his hemp crop into rope, according to the
Lexington Herald-Leader
.
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For a solar-powered goat herder like me, it's worth noting that, according to the Canadian government, hemp can be cultivated with almost no pesticides (though as we'll see, there's a bit more to that story than that).

I think that covers everything a newcomer should know before diving into this book. Oh, except for a special note to those very new to the topic—especially those who were raised, as I was, on “Just Say No” era rhetoric: You can't possibly confuse industrial cannabis with psychoactive cannabis, for a number of reasons.

For one, hemp grows in vast, dense fields of thin, stick-like plants (as opposed to the flower-heavy, manicured prima donna social/medicinal cannabis plants). Even more crucially, hemp's pollen will immediately ruin a psychoactive cannabis crop, by diluting the psychoactivity that, as President Obama so eloquently pointed out in describing his own affection for the plant, is “the point.”

In fact, this is why when California passed a terrific bit of industrial cannabis legislation in 2011 with bipartisan and local law enforcement support (inexplicably vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown
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), it called for cultivation only in counties (incidentally, very politically conservative counties) that are far from the Emerald Triangle region in the northern redwoods that's known worldwide for its top-shelf psychoactive cannabis.

Also, eating, drinking, wearing, or sleeping in a house made of hemp will never cause intoxication, nor THC to show up in a urine test. Young children can safely eat and drink hemp oil and other hemp food products. All are as healthy and inert as flaxseed and cod liver oils.

In the real world, would you care to know how many cases of hidden or accidentally psychoactive cannabis plants have turned up in the course of Canada's decade-and-a-half-old and burgeoning hemp industry, according to Hermann, who does the testing and inspecting in the province of Manitoba? Zero. “There's no confusion,” she told me. “We've been at this for fifteen years now. Everyone recognizes hemp's great value to farmers and the country.”

—
Doug Fine
Funky Butte Ranch, New Mexico August 22, 2013

Introduction

After-School Snacks Before Doritos

T
urns out your Deadhead roommate was right. Sort of. It isn't so much that hemp, useful as we're about to see it is, will automatically save humanity. It's that the worldwide industrial cannabis industry can play a major role in our species' long-shot sustainable resource search and climate stabilization project. For that to happen, the plant must be exploited domestically in ways upon which the marketplace smiles. No pressure: We fail? We just go extinct. The Earth'll be fine.

Hemp hands us a ninth-inning comeback opportunity. At the same time that it stimulates community-based economic growth on the producer side (and not a little bit, if a farm community is serious about implementing some of the ideas we're about to discuss), large scale re-adaptation of one of humanity's longest-utilized plants will provide sustainable energy, regionally produced food, and digital age industrial materials on the consumer end.

The planet's struggling soil wins, too: All those farmers put back to work growing a viable cash crop? They're remediating soil toxified or desertified after a century of monoculture (or in Kentucky's case, coal mining).

“Since hemp is so good for soil structure,” British hemp expert John Hobson told me of European use of the plant today, “it's utilized as a true [rotational] crop. Even when growing cereals is more profitable, hemp keeps those yields from going down and blots out weed invasion.” Hobson should know: He advises farmers on which hemp cultivars his Lime Technology company wants grown for use as building material in the Continental construction industry.

The key to success, from humanity's perspective and from an economic perspective, is multiple use of the plant. This starts on the farm with a concept we'll be discussing called dual cropping, but which really should be called tri-cropping. Basically, one hemp harvest can and should be used at once for food, energy, and industrial components (like car parts, building insulation, and clothing). Hemp is already in BMW and Dodge door panels.

The fact is, after my most recent intense, several-month, in-the-field research journey that carried me in person from Hawaii to Canada, Belgium, and Colorado (and virtually from New Zealand to China), I can report that hemp is one of the most valuable crops for the USDA to encourage and subsidize with the greatest possible dispatch. As China is consciously on its way to doing, the United States should be cultivating two million acres of the stuff.

This recommendation isn't news to our leaders. In a 1994 executive order, President Clinton included hemp among “the essential agricultural products that should be stocked for defense preparedness purposes.”
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Whoever did the research for that wise conclusion had a lot of history to examine, starting long before modern researchers began testing hemp's stronger-than-steel fiber for use in body armor and aircraft components. Here's a portion of the USDA's 1895
Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture
: “The hemp plant . . . has been so generally cultivated the world over as a cordage fiber that the value of all other fibers as to strength and durability is estimated by it . . . The plant is an admirable weed killer, and is sometimes employed . . . because it puts the soil in good condition . . . The value of hemp for fiber . . . and oil would seem to make its cultivation a very profitable one.”

Actually, the White House researchers might have gone back much farther still. The Persians have called hemp
Shaah-daaneh
, or King of Seeds, for four millennia. I discovered this (before I fully realized what a concisely true name it is) when one of the engineers who was giving me a tour of the University of Manitoba's hemp-and-lime building insulation research projects in February 2013 mentioned offhandedly that our (quite technical) interview had brought back fond memories for him. Why? Because toasted hemp seed had “always been the go-to” after-school snack in his native Iran.

Absent Doritos and val-u-meals, Farhoud Delijani told me, hemp was a ubiquitous meal bridge for kids on the way to soccer practice. He couldn't wax wistfully enough on the Farsi treat of his youth. “Pop 'em in by the handful, shells on. Yum, it was just really tasty,” Delijani told me, adding of the plant's now famous benefits, “We didn't know about the fatty acids, let alone the biofuel apps. It was just a very popular everyday treat.”

That's a four-thousand-year-old message that should be heeded. Delijani mentioned biofuels. If you're like me, you're fairly desperate for a fossil energy replacement and you've liked what you've read about hemp's potential. But you've also wondered, “Really? The plant whose psychoactive side Abbie Hoffman thought should be mandatory before the stock exchange's opening bell is actually going to revitalize the economy and save the planet?” I'm excited to report that the answer is yes. Colorado biomass fuels consultant Agua Das and Colorado School of Mines chemical engineer Thomas B. Reed reported that an acre of hemp can produce power equivalent to a thousand gallons of gasoline.
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The hemp revolution is already under way, and, as with any new industry, its trajectory is market-driven. Today Canadian hemp farmers profit to the tune of $250 (U.S.
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) per acre, compared with $30–100 for wheat. This on a crop that the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance says will double in acreage to one hundred thousand acres by 2015 largely because 90 percent of it goes to the United States. We are, of course, the world's largest consumer of pretty much everything except affordable health care, and this includes hemp.

Consider these pages a playbook for the patriotic hemp farmer, entrepreneur, and investor who wants to help humanity transition smoothly from fossil fuels, tree farms, and monoculture. If you're simply hemp-curious, you'll hopefully finish this book a voracious consumer. That's a win for your health and the economy's. And if you're not an American, here's what Colorado rancher Bowman said is one of his motivations for establishing the plant's planetwide worth: “Family farmers like me are committing suicide in India and all over the world because the GMO cycle of debt is meeting climate change. I think we're going to find that hemp can help break that cycle.”

American readers are about to notice that the rest of the industrialized world has a two-decade head start on the hemp revival. Embarrassing as that is, I've found that the slow start actually provides a slew of helpful lessons: We know what sustainably works (or can) in the marketplace. On our journey across four continents, we'll delve into the most promising real-world applications provided by a soil-stabilizing plant that can help replace or reverse three of my least favorite things: petroleum-based plastics, GMO monoculture, and environmental degradation.