by Doug Fine
“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.
Clark’s innovation is called a decorticator, and it solves the following problem: Today, if you want to exploit the plant’s industrial fiber (and not just its edible seeds) when the crop is harvested six months after sowing, you first have to let it lie in the field for a few weeks. This is to allow the vital fungal soup we’ve discussed to soften up the tough outer husks. I can tell you from visiting hemp fields that these husks are better described as bark—they can be hard to snap at the base. And yet off they must come.
Too much moisture after harvest wrecks the crop, as does too little. There’s not much you can do but turn the stalks like barbecuing drumsticks and hope the microorganisms do their job before the next front moves in. Learning this, I suddenly felt I better understood the plight of Russian serfs. One of those moments that makes you imagine life before Costco backup supply.
And yet for all its soon-to-be-upgraded legacy harvesttime kinks, hemp is economically viable enough that the Canadian industry is exploding. Those hundred thousand acres by 2015 still represent a small industry as a share of total Canuck agricultural acreage, but 20 percent is impressive annual sector growth by any standard.
A farmer who planted a thousand acres in 2012 netted $250,000. That’s profit. And most of the half billion dollars that Canadian hemp generates in the United States comes from value-added final products like salad dressing and breakfast cereal. There’s already hemp cereal at the International Space Station.
On top of that, the founder and president of Canada’s biggest hemp seed oil processor, Shaun Crew, told me that a 20 percent annual growth figure is actually on the low end of what he expects at his Hemp Oil Canada into the foreseeable future. In fact, when we met in chilly Ste. Agathe, Manitoba, in February 2013, Crew was running around madly planning his latest factory expansion.
In the company conference room there was a photo of which Crew told me he’s proud, as Hemp Oil Canada celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. It features him, hair less gray, posing with a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) while clutching a product called My Stash. It illustrates the law enforcement cooperation that Canada has enjoyed since the moment its industry revved back up in 1998.
Crew was there. After a few ups and downs that included a seed buyer bankruptcy in 2000 that hurt hundreds of farmers, he said the industry is now “taking on a life of its own.”
“We just got approached by [food giant] Hain Celestial, and we’re at capacity,” he told me, waving toward the company’s several dozen industrial presses in an adjoining building. Each of these squeezes out 350 green, lignan-thick gallons of nutritive hemp oil every day, working 24/7. “And we’ve already got a six-week delivery lag time now. You guys consume everything we’ve got.”
By you guys he meant “you Americans,” and he meant it indirectly: The company processes for wholesalers and does private- label packaging.
Hemp is harvested the way it was at the dawn of agriculture, and yet it’s already creating millionaires. Crew related his stats and projections with a Thanks for buying me the good seats at Winnipeg Jets games smirk, Canada being a nation where the hemp oil flows like wine, and Americans will soon be buying a billion dollars’ worth of it a year.17
Which is better than if we ate a billion in Canadian McNuggets, of course, since hemp is healthy for both our bodies and farmland soil. I checked out the Province of Ontario’s official agricultural guide to hemp farmers. Right in table 1 under “Weed Control” it reads, “None needed. No herbicides registered.”
Chapter Three
Want to Make It in the Hemp Game?
Two Words: Dual Cropping
I asked experts from four continents what advice they would give to nascent American hemp entrepreneurs, and while their tips were diverse and sometimes contradictory (they were, after all, advising future competitors), the phrase dual cropping invariably came up.
What it means is this: Hemp might be a miracle crop in its diversity of utility, but, particularly before economies of scale are reestablished in the United States, it is not necessarily a slam dunk in the marketplace in any one sector. So the digital age farmer/investor/industrialist needs to focus on two markets with one planting. At least.
To understand the three distinct product lines you’re potentially utilizing with every hemp harvest, you have to know a little bit about the architecture of this remarkable plant. The triumvirate of usable parts (some of which we’ve already mentioned) are (1) the seed, (2) the bast (or high-quality long fiber), and (3) the shiv or hurd (often referred to as the woody core).
How dual cropping looks in the real world is something like this: Pick a hybrid cultivar (seed variety) that will provide both a seed harvest and a fiber harvest. Pretty simple.
How do you know which cultivar is right for your hilly section of Oregon, recent sugarcane plantation in Hawaii, or dusty former GMO cornfield in Wisconsin? When I asked Canadian/American hemp consultant Anndrea Hermann that question, the MA in hemp fiber agronomy spun a nearby globe and basically said, “Find a variety from your latitude, with your day length and your humidity.” Day length, or photoperiod, is particularly important because the cannabis plant begins to flower as day length decreases. Certain cultivars will handle this more gracefully in certain latitudes. Premature flowering will reduce both a seed and a fiber crop’s quality. Rainfall is another factor: During my research in Ireland, I learned that moist weather during harvest season has to be factored in—this might prove of use to farmers in a similarly wet place like Western Oregon.
In the Czech Republic, similarly, farmer and entrepreneur Gabrielová told me she’s been growing the traditional European Carmagnola fiber cultivar, but is in contact with Finnish and Canadian seed providers as she searches for a dual-cropping variety that will provide both fiber and flowers for the health and beauty-care products she sells at her retail shop. “It’s been fun finding out the long history of this plant in Czech culture,” the 35-year-old told me via Skype. “It’s in our folklore. We have towns and even birds who like to eat the seeds named after hemp.”
Even if you’re not lucky enough to live in places like Nebraska, where as we’ve discussed natural selection has chosen the variety (it’s that one you find in your irrigation ditch), it’s still a matter of easy if methodical research to find cultivars well matched to your ecosystem. Unless, of course, you live in unusually chilly places like Antarctica or Congress.
A good starting point is the online cultivar list that Canadian federal government provides its hemp farmers.18 Or the farmer guide that the Brits who make hemp-and-lime building materials distribute gratis.19 From there, delve deeper into a prospective cultivar’s climate of origin, then call some farmers there to see if the climate, soil, and overall agricultural s
eason sound similar to yours. Do your advance work, in other words, as you would when starting any business.
One cultivar Hermann suggested for dual cropping in the northern United States is called Alyssa (it was the subject of her graduate work). Come harvesttime, the farmer can sell her seed to the oil processor (or better yet, unite with her neighbors to own their own processor), and then sell the fiber to, say, a construction materials entity like the already established American Lime Technology, for use in building carbon-negative homes (more about those in a little while).
That isn’t even the most exciting part. This is the most exciting part, which I’m going to suggest even though one hemp expert called it a “current dream but a possible future if the numbers add up”: Imagine squeezing in a third harvest from the tough remaining hurd of the plant, to use for something fairly important: putting Chevron out of business—or at least forcing it to radically change its business model, thus ending a lot of U.S. and local teenager deaths in the Middle East.
The fact is, I found that planet-friendly “biomass energy production” is already happening. There are, for example, Austrian farmers generating their own (and some of their local grid) power from farm-side, cell-phone-monitored personal power plants. The power comes from stuffing waste farm fiber into a truck-sized device’s specialized double furnace chamber, creating energy via a relatively clean, anaerobic process called gasification. We’ll be talking more about this later, but for now know that those thousand gallons of gasoline power that Das and Reed tell us an acre of hemp can produce comes via gasification.20
Gasification (or more generally “biomass combustion”) has not been implemented on a large scale with hemp to date, and one European hemp consultant cautioned me that cannabis hurd doesn’t provide as efficient a per-acre energy yield in a biomass combustion application as some other crop waste. But, heck, if you have it lying around by the ton? I mean, for a decade and a half the Canadians have just been burning it in the field.21
Props to the Canadians for jump-starting the industry, but one day, single-market hemp farming will be considered laughably wasteful. Indeed, with the amount of research, brainpower, and private and government support industrial cannabis is generating everywhere in the industrialized world except the United States, no doubt new applications will emerge for all parts of the King of Seeds plant in coming months and years.
Which is to say I’m nearly certain that when I update this book in five years I’ll have to slap my forehead and apologize for missing hemp’s explosion into, I don’t know, water purification, malaria antidote making, cold fusion, computer chip multitasking, or Roger Ailes humanizing. I know of one fellow who’s developing a hemp plastic bottle to replace our landfill-clogging petroleum-derived bottles. He’s raised seventeen thousand dollars via Kickstarter. Another hemp entrepreneur, Wisconsin’s Ken Anderson, is delving into the federal approval process for hemp-based highway soundproofing material. “It absorbs twice the sound that concrete does,” he told me.
But I can only report on what I’ve seen today, and in the coming chapters we’ll look at some major hemp sectors to get us started dual cropping a plant from which China today nets close to two hundred million dollars, according to Shangnan Shui, a commodity specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Instead of restricting and threatening its farmers, China sends its president to tour hemp research facilities.22 That’s a multibillion- dollar policy difference.
Now, you’ve got to start somewhere. If you’re an American farmer (or processor) who wants her work to pay the mortgage, you’re asking, “In which industrial cannabis market should I begin when Congress finally gets around to passing the FARRM Bill?” The answer to that question is unequivocally “the seed.”
This is actually two markets: seed oil and the accompanying high-protein “cake” that’s left in the press after extraction, the world supply of which is currently snapped up for high-value food and body care products.
The reason to start with the seed is that the template is already in place: If you grow it, there’s a buyer for it. In fact, it’s pretty much the only existing North American market on the production side as the young industry reaches its fifteenth season since Maple Leaf re-legalization of the crop. Nearly all of Canada’s considerable government support of its lucrative young industry has gone into developing hemp varieties that create goopy, omega-rich food oil.
Many farmers I spoke with grow a cultivar called Finola, which is so short-stalked and seed-dense you couldn’t use it for fiber even if you wanted to. This is how they’ve liked it up there up until now.
So if it’s your dream to make a hemp-seed-based energy bar, a healthy juice (I’d personally love to see a mango/hemp/chia blend), or a Hemperific Hydration skin cream, you’re well positioned.
Hemp Pioneers
Colleen Dyck, Founder and President, GORP Clean Energy Bars
Thirty-six-year-old Dyck is one of those pint-sized wonder women who seem to have plenty of time to pick the mint for the tea she’s brewing for you despite (a) training for a triathlon, (b) chauffeuring four young children to hockey practice and church groups, and, oh yeah, (c) launching a literally homegrown energy bar company in her basement, which is where I visited and snacked with her.
As I sampled a cocoa/hemp/almond flavor (she’s proud that the packaging is resealable, since the bar, nutritionally, is “more than a small snack”), Dyck told me that “educating people about where their food comes from” is part of her calling. “If this venture helps people get in touch with the story of their daily food and how it relates to their life, I feel like it’s a good thing. That’s one reason our farm’s hemp and sunflowers are in our products.” Watch out, Power Bar.
The world probably wouldn’t be blessed with GORP Clean Energy Bar company had the diminutive, raven-haired Dyck not won “fifteen thousand dollars I did not have” in a competition called The Great Manitoba Food Fight in 2009. “It takes so much money for R&D, shelf-life testing and mold testing, and everything else you have to do to bring something to market.”
When I asked her whether it’s a bigger accomplishment to launch a business or raise four kids, she laughed but didn’t hesitate. “Raise four kids.”
A hemp wedding gown? Not so much, unless you’re fluent in Mandarin and prepared to commit some serious industrial espionage by getting a job as janitor at Beijing’s Hemp Research Centre. Chinese industry is a decade ahead in the “cottonization” of the plant’s long outer bast fibers. In the industry the softness of the finished textile is referred to as its “hand.” This can be read as “its readiness for the shelves at the Gap.”
Attractive as replacing cotton with hemp sounds when you know about the former’s monster water needs and obscene pesticide footprint (cotton uses 25 percent of the world’s pesticides, according to the Pesticide Action Network), several industry players cautioned that re-adding chemical processes to natural fibers kind of defeats the purpose.
As someone who’s written a book about living petroleum-free and who has yet to feed his children (or clothe them in) much that is non-organic, I of course powerfully agree. As a cannabis journalist who’s just talked to two dozen experts who work with the plant every day, I’m convinced that the additives and binding agents that digital age applications demand—be they for a bathrobe or an aircraft’s door panel—can themselves be best derived from nontoxic (often plant-based) sources. Accordingly, a Portland Oregon-based company called Naturally Advanced Technologies offers a sustainable enzymatic fiber softening process called Crailar that the company website says “drastically reduces” chemical and water usage.
If hemp bathrobes are your dream application, you’re truly going to have to be a modern hemp pioneer, growing (or if you’re a manufacturer, contracting with farmers to grow) known textile varieties of the plant that put the dual in your dual cropping. Then you’ll have to borrow or innovate technologies for fiber softening. Good luck with that: I’ll buy the plush America
n-grown bathrobe. I’d like mine deep-piled, please. Like sheepskin, or polar bear fur. It gets cold under the stars on my ranch at fifty-seven hundred feet.
Hemp Pioneers
Barbara Filippone, President of EnviroTextiles
Based in Glenwood, Colorado, EnviroTextiles is a woman-owned industrial hemp and natural fiber manufacturing company that has offices in three countries, supplied President Obama with a hemp reelection scarf, and is the largest importer of hemp textiles in the United States. But what Filippone told me breathlessly was the reason she was contacting me is that her company, which is worth fifteen million dollars, had just earned approval from the USDA BioPreferred program, which promotes the purchase and use of biobased products. “Hemp’s already creating jobs while still a schedule one narcotic,” she glowed.
The victory was a long time coming. “I worked in China for nineteen years and for thirty-seven in plant fiber, as well as three years qualifying to be a government supplier,” she said. But with a deep belief that natural fibers are the only future option with petroleum-based synthetics on the endangered list, she was confident hemp would win out in the end.
“The federal government knows hemp is an alternative to cotton that’s drought-resistant. The military knows it—I’ve been speaking with them. Cotton’s done. China knows it, too.”
Filippone gave a very bottom-line reason China is moving away from cotton. “It uses too much water and pesticides,” she said. “They have no choice.”
Since she is so seasoned in the real-world economy, Filippone is not shy about offering advice to the tide of newcomers who are already becoming both her colleagues and her competitors.
