Hemp Bound (4 page)

Chapter One

Hemp Gets Out Ring Around the Collar

B
efore getting to the industrial cannabis apps that have me so energized about my kids' kids' atmospheric prospects, I feel I have to address the Giggle Factor. Even though my family already sends Canada about three thousand dollars each year for products that start out life as Saskatchewanian hemp plants, after conducting all this research I'm myself still a little surprised at the extent of the plant's potential.

Sure, there's hemp in everything from my hand soap to the only diapers that hold up to brutal New Mexican line drying. These simply win in my home economy. But from there to “industrial cannabis can put the Coloradan and Kentuckian (and Ghanaian) small farmer back to work while forcing emergency board meetings at both ExxonMobil and Monsanto”?

When the folks who have been shouting about hemp's uses for decades might have come to their conclusions by what we can gently describe as anecdotal evidence, we somehow expect them to be wrong, or at least exaggerating. I think it might have to do with departmental tenure.

With apologies to the cynical, I can't help but report that I witnessed all of the cannabis uses we'll be examining. I saw half a dozen hemp-insulated houses. I studied multiple plans to power entire communities with plant fiber. I sent my holiday cards on hemp card stock. I even drove in a hemp-powered limo.

Bringing my belly into the research, I interviewed the authors of a new study showing that hemp-fed laying hens manage to pass on the plant's impressive essential fatty acid profile from their breakfasts into yours:
16
the eggs that you then eat. I even tried some. Fried.

The eggs were scrumptious. My fellow foodies will know that the deep apricot color in the yolks I enjoyed brings good news to the taste buds and life span. The two essential fatty acids we eat, omega-3 and omega-6, are aptly named, nutritively. They are essential. A balanced ratio of them is the modern Immortality Elixir. It's what Ponce de León would've brought home to the queen if he'd beached himself next to an Alaskan cod run. Sure, someday we may find it's all carcinogenic or a bunch of hooey, but here we are. I gulp the stuff.

Even though the facts on (or in) the ground convinced me that this one plant, properly utilized, can help form the backbone of a climate stabilization regimen while revitalizing the U.S. (and worldwide) small-farm economy and creating a community-based distributed energy marketplace, I still feel some hesitation alongside my excitement in relating them. That's because after twenty years as an investigative journalist who's covered some fairly incontrovertibly serious topics from Rwanda to Tajikistan, I can see the cynical media interviews on the horizon already: I frankly open myself up to Pollyanna accusations. Or Snoop Lion ones.

Even the most prominent hemp industrial player, David Bronner, CEO of the legendary Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap company and a fellow who was arrested in 2012 for tending a live hemp plant while both he and the plant were locked in a cage in front of the White House, told me he's careful in his interviews not to “overstate it.”

A seasoned journalist, especially, doesn't want to come across as one of those
Hemp can do anything including get out Ring Around the Collar
people. But I have no choice: You're about to see that hemp's applications are as real as, well, Tide detergent. You actually can use Dr. Bronner's 18-in-1 Hemp Pure-Castile Soap to nontoxically and hypoallergenically clean your laundry. The gray water is so inert that you can water your garden with it while, yes, expunging that nasty Ring Around the Collar.

The 1970s commercial would at this point have the skeptical mom at the Laundromat ask, “Yes, but does it really work?” Two of Dr. Bronner's flavors (peppermint and baby mild) placed among the A-rated detergents in a 2012 field test conducted by the Environmental Working Group. Hemp's spectrum of industrial uses, I'm forced to report, are actual.
Broadly compelling
is the phrase that comes to mind.

With the exception of high-volume energy production (which is still largely in the drawing-board stage at the industrial level, although Czech hemp farmer Hanka Gabrielová is generating bioenergy from her harvest), all of the cannabis applications we'll be discussing have already been implemented in the real world. Which is to say that to accurately report on hemp, we don't have to rely on cheerleading hempsters.

Biologist Simon Potter can safely be described as cannabis agnostic. He works with hemp every day, at a Canadian government/industry joint venture called the Composites Innovation Centre (CIC) in Winnipeg. Short hair, buttondown style, British accent: The guy's not an activist. Yet he, too, is bullish on the future of the industrial cannabis industry.

During a tour of the center's projects that included soundproof hemp walls, bash-proof hemp roofing, and cold-proof hemp insulation blankets (and, oh yeah, an entire tractor body made from hemp), Potter told me in the understatement of the day, “There's considerable interest in [industrial cannabis] materials.” Shuffling through his desk, he added, “I have reports right here just on European, Australian, and Canadian textile applications . . . The economics of hemp have a very bright future.”

Hemp Pioneers

Simon Potter, Biologist, Sector Manager for Product Innovation, CIC

The forty-five-year-old Potter is excited to come to work every day, and this, of course, is a blessing for anyone. When Potter was giving me the tour of half a dozen hemp research projects at the Composites Innovation Centre (a government/industry joint venture in Winnipeg, Manitoba), his role was that of a generalist—he enthusiastically explained hemp insulation, hemp tractors, and hemp energy.

But as a biologist by degree and calling, Potter got particularly jazzed—perhaps a little pleasantly surprised—when I asked him about the microbiology of the plant. Especially the tiny battle going on during the part of the hemp-harvesting process known as retting.

Which is to say I never saw him so excited as when he smacked the poster-sized blowup of a microscopic green image like a headmaster and told me about the “fungal attack” he's trying to understand during this vital and risky part of the harvest process.

Retting is that fungal attack. And this is a good thing, because it softens the plant's outer hurd, or bark, which can then be removed for access to the gold within: the strong hemp cordage that already makes some, and in the near future is going to make so many more, of our industrial products. The retting process can take three weeks, leaving a valuable crop that's just survived a four-month growing season dangerously exposed to the elements.

Since he works for an organization that can afford what Monty Python called the “machine that goes ping,” Potter can get 3-D views of what is essentially an in-the-field post-harvest microbiological battle that farmers have been intentionally harnessing for eight thousand years. “Once we understand retting, we hope we can make the process easier and more uniform,” he told me optimistically as I stared at his chart. I'd never seen fungus so close up. It looked like a string of Tic Tacs.

In short, nature allows hemp's interior treasure box to open only at her own slow pace. It would be like drilling for natural gas, then having to simmer it outdoors for three weeks at a specific temperature before it could be used in a power plant or stove.

“We're also going to look at the internal chemistry and structure of the bast part of the hemp plant,” he said of his next months' work. “This X-ray diffraction pattern here tells us a lot about where the strength of the fiber is going to be.”

Which is all well and good for researcher Potter—I like to see a fellow who's living his dream. But what kept crossing my mind during my tour of the center's projects was this: As hemp is fully reintegrated into the world economy, which country has the advantage—the one putting its best biologists to work maximizing the plant's potential, or the one whose federal law enforcement bureaucrats are fighting tooth and nail to keep domestic farmers from even cultivating it?

Smart people are working on hemp, is the point I'm endeavoring to convey, and very few of them, as yet, are Americans. Potter seems quite willing to share the knowledge, though.

Chapter Two

Turning a Profit

Even with Medieval Harvesting Techniques

H
emp, in its infancy as a modern industry, is already profitable in three distinct markets. In Canada it's seed oil, in China it's textiles, and in Europe it's construction (and other industrial markets). Massive demand is allowing a fledgling industry that has barely started identifying the kinks, let alone getting them out, to grow that 20 percent per year. I'll describe one “kink” right at the start to illustrate that hemp, despite its growing pains, nonetheless finds itself extremely lucrative at every stage from farm to supermarket shelf.

Our kink starts right in the field: The supposed weed isn't so easy to harvest. A seasoned, churchgoing Canadian farmer in coveralls named Grant Dyck, who grows hemp for what I can attest is his wife Colleen's delicious GORP energy bar company, told me as we crunched through his frozen back two hundred acres in the winter of 2013, “This is one of the more difficult crops I've ever worked with.”

Hemp Pioneers

Grant Dyck, Hemp Farmer

This is the guy actually doing it—has been for seven years. Today it might not impress a journalist to interview another GMO corn farmer about the latest developments in monoculture. But Dyck is one of only a few thousand North American hemp farmers at the moment. Certainly one of the few who wear Carhartts. So I think it's safe to say that the thirty-six-year-old lifelong Manitoban farmer was among the most valuable sources I interviewed for this project.

In the United States, everything related to hemp cultivation is weighted down with “What if?” It's the crystal-ball scenario in which pundits make their fortune. But Dyck partly makes his living from the crop, and so I listened up in his two-hundred-acre frozen hemp field as he stomped through months of white crust and handed me an armful of the previous season's harvest.

“Due diligence would be my first piece of advice,” he said when I asked him what might save American farmers from some sleepless nights (or bankruptcy). “Do your research. Read all you can. Logistically, you've got timing issues. Adequate irrigation before planting is essential, for example.”

He was just getting started. He's a very tall, clean-cut guy, and he was rubbing his forehead as he conjured up what looked like slightly stressful memories. “If you plant too early, you harvest when it's hot and wet—that's its own drying process. If you harvest too late, the plant's dry and you'll lose the seed as soon as the combine hits it. It requires good management to crop hemp.” At least pesticides are a non-issue. What Dyck is trying to leave us with is the awareness that hemp might grow like a weed, but harvesting is a whole other ball game, like putting versus the long game in golf.

I wouldn't say that Dyck's in-the-field wisdom should bring every putative farmer down to earth. Excuse my generalization, but I think a third-generation North Dakotan is going to be able to handle any nuances required by a plant that has, after all, survived three-quarters of a century of taxpayer-funded eradication efforts along Nebraskan ditches. It's the eager-beaver newcomer who would be wise to do his or her due diligence. Professional farming is like professional anything. The marketplace (and, in this case, Mother Nature) will separate the wheat from the chaff. Oh, and in case farmers are wondering, Dick said you'll need between twenty- five and sixty pounds of seed per acre, depending on variety.

When I asked him why that is, he said, “After multiple harvests I'm still learning. My combine caught fire twice last year when the stalk got coiled around the blades.”

Indeed, the overall cannabis-reaping process hasn't been much improved in the eight thousand years that humans have been working with the plant, though a lot of people, including a smart dude in Australia named Adrian Francis K. Clark, are working on it.

Hemp Pioneers

Adrian Francis K. Clark, Inventor of a Hemp Decorticator

Sixty-six-year-old Clark is a citizen inventor in the tradition of John Harrison, the fellow who figured out how to measure longitude. What Clark is developing, though, doesn't have to do with geography and navigation. It has to do with that confounding post-hemp-harvest issue of retting—the removal of the plant's outer hurd, or bark, to get at the valuable bast fiber within. On the ground today, this is ol'-fashioned crop processing we're talking about—something out of the
Little House
books I read to my kids.

Here's how the province of Ontario explains the process to its cultivators: “Retting is the process of beginning to separate the bast fibres from the hurds or other plant tissues. It is done in the field, taking advantage of the natural elements of dew, rain and sun, or under controlled conditions using water, enzymes or chemicals. The method chosen depends on the end use to which the fibre will be put. Suitable industrial processes for water and chemical retting have not been developed.”

Even though decorticators were being used as early as 1917, they either weren't ready for prime time or disappeared with the last iteration of the industry. In the digital age, farmers are often out there in the dew for weeks rotating the bundles of harvested hemp so they don't get too wet or too dry, and adjusting based on what Mother Nature has to say about it. Clark sniffs at this as a risky, potentially wasteful, and just downright passé mode. “Instead of letting the harvested hemp risk the elements, with the decorticator attachment on your combine, you can harvest the crop and remove the hurd on the same day. While the plant is still green.”

Like the commoner Harrison's difficulty in getting Royal Society attention paid to his potentially world-changing invention, the Australian Clark has had some trouble making the case to the established hemp-fiber-harvesting authorities, particularly in China, which dominates the fiber market today at forty-five thousand tons of annual production.

“We've tried to keep the cost down even at the start, to $115,000 for a hand-fed model and $300,000 for a model you clip to the front of a combine,” he told me via Skype (this compared with up to $10 million for commercial production models out of Europe, so Clark's real innovation might be relative affordability). “But in China cost isn't the problem. Officials told me I'd putting tens of thousands of people out of work—they sit in the field and peel the retted hemp [bark off] by hand. We are getting a lot of inquiries from Europe and Canada.”

Out of the prototype stage and ready to manufacture and ship (Clark's Textile and Composites Industries YouTube videos are pretty amazing—you can sense farmers like Grant Dyck salivating as bast fiber shoots out the side of a combine during harvesting), what Clark and a few others are tackling is the first significant advancement in hemp processing since everyone in the Middle East got along.

“This is the key to the hemp industry taking off on a worldwide mass industrial scale,” he told me. In a decade Colorado and Kentucky farmers might be thanking him, as well as making him wealthy, which is not a fate Harrison enjoyed: He died before collecting the Royal Society's twenty-thousand-pound prize for his longitude machine, the marine chronometer.