Hemp Bound

by Doug Fine

  “It’s time to learn how to be a real businessperson,” she said with a touch of the scalded tone that I recognized from my grandfather’s admonitions about the business world. A competitive landscape is going to “eat” the naive, she added. But she also offered assistance. “I’ve been around the block many times. I can help those who want government approval in other hemp niches, including construction.”

  So all of today’s hemp industrialists tell me to tell you to start with seed applications. Find the cultivar that works in your latitude per Hermann’s and the Canadian government’s advice (hug a publicly funded cannabis cultivar researcher, people). And if you and your friends have a spare couple of million clams, start a cooperative processing operation. It’s not that complicated to make the oil and the cake once you’ve harvested your eight hundred pounds of seed per acre.23

  There’s a reason they call it an oil press. As Hermann explained it (and in fact demonstrated to me in Winnipeg), you just smoosh the seed and the oil oozes out. It’s a refreshingly mechanical technology, unless you count the newfangled fringes Hemp Oil Canada is now offering, like automated bottle labeling and expiration dating. This dang nontoxic bioproduct goes rancid after a year or so. Almost makes me wistful for the time society thought long shelf life was a good thing.

  Now, plenty of “in” superfoods have enjoyed their fifteen minutes and have then disappeared from shelves (seen much açaí lately?). But—and don’t take this as investment advice, I’m just typing here, albeit after a lot of research—I don’t see hemp going away. Ever.

  As we sipped hemp coffee in his hemp-stalk-enshrouded executive office, I asked the seed-processing mogul-in-the-making Shaun Crew what he will do when American cannabis prohibition ends.

  He leaned back in his chair, inhaled deeply, and proved quite ready with an answer. “The moment your guys’ drug policy changes, we’ll parachute a facility exactly like this, turnkey, into Grand Forks, North Dakota. Or maybe Fargo. There’s a lot of inexpensive acreage to grow on down your way. And massively growing demand. It’d be an easy move for us.”

  He said this in a very relaxed tone of voice. Kind of made me believe his characterization of this factory replication project as a manageable, low-multimillion-dollar investment.

  Hemp Pioneers

  Shaun Crew, Founder and President, Hemp Oil Canada

  I don’t know if he’d consider himself the J. P. Morgan of hemp seed oil, but the fifty-four-year-old has been in the modern industry since day one, in 1998. Actually, since a month before Canadian hemp re-legalized hemp that year. His company, along with nearby Manitoba Harvest, is a major player in Canadian seed oil processing, he can hardly keep up with its growth, and he openly cannot wait to be able to contract with North Dakotan farmers a few miles to the south—he needs the acreage planted to meet seed oil demand. When we met at company headquarters in Ste. Agathe, Manitoba, Crew had come straight from the airport after keynoting a European hemp conference. And yet, as with several other hempreneurs I met, what struck me the most about the guy is the fun-loving attitude he brings to his work.

  For one thing, he sits at an executive desk framed by a version of Grant Wood’s American Gothic portrait where the somber farmers have a hemp leaf stuck on their pitchfork. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Crew freely disclosed to me that, back when hemp was far from a sure bet, he channeled his entrepreneurial drive by taking a risk on the plant at least partly because of his “familiarity with and friendliness to” all forms of the cannabis plant.

  This stayed with me, as some hempsters try to separate the non-psychoactive uses of the plant from the social/medicinal side. Yet one of the most successful ones didn’t seem to think that appreciating all uses was something to hide from an author interviewing him on the record. Crew also wanted to talk hockey, but that was just a Canadian thing, not a cannabis thing.

  Simply liking the plant and what it obviously offers humanity’s economy and spirit is what’s behind the We win! smirk he’s wearing in his picture alongside a red-jacketed RCMP officer while holding a bag of his first approved hemp seed product, My Stash.

  None of this means that Crew doesn’t take his work seriously. He’s a workaholic who doesn’t notice the hours he puts in—he told me that even with yet another Hemp Oil Canada factory expansion under way, he usually calls it a day at least in time to hit his family’s Winnipeg Jets seats by the start of the second period. And he’s another hemp pioneer who’s happy to offer advice to putative American hemp entrepreneurs.

  “Adopt a Walk before you run attitude,” he advised. “Develop a market for your products and the processes by which you’re going to operate. The pot of gold at the end of rainbow comes after a lot of work and, in the U.S. this will especially be true, market development.”

  In addition to letting me know how ready the American market is, Crew gave me another vital (and to me surprising) piece of advice. When I asked him about a hypothetical “hundred-acre” American dual-cropping hemp farmer’s prospects, his arm shot up in the universal Talk to the hand gesture.

  “Stop right there,” he said emphatically. “You’ll want to start with one thousand to three thousand acres to make it viable. Otherwise it’s a hobby farm.”

  Yeesh, I thought. I raise a few goats on forty-one acres and I feel like Ted Turner. But the guy does work with forty farmers and have twenty-one employees, so I did the math: Cultivating two thousand acres at $250-per-acre profit, you are, to quote Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places, buying your kid “the GI Joe with the kung fu grip” for his birthday. Scale, in hemp farming, helps a lot.

  Crew offered his last tip of that informative morning almost as an afterthought as I was leaving his office, insufficiently bundled for Manitoba in February. It involved value-added marketing. “Your oil’s value triples once you put it in, say, a skin care bottle,” he said. Be a farmer, in other words, but be more than a farmer. Like the Dycks with their GORP energy bar. Turned out to be a piece of advice to which Colorado farmers and hempreneurs in particular are paying a lot of attention.

  So I think we’ve established that exploiting the high-lignan hemp seed oil is an obvious and relatively safe place for American hemp pioneers to start. When it comes to the likely growth curve of the seed market, it seems like there’s no end in rapacious sight. Not for me, that’s for sure. Right now I’m sipping my usual morning shake full of blueberries, bee pollen, and hemp seed oil. This last ingredient is produced by the Nutiva company to which we’ve been introduced from Canadian-grown (dang it!) hemp seed. Chances are I walked past the press that processed it in 2013 while researching this book.

  So if you want to make me and millions of other eager-to-be-locavore consumers happy and at the same time develop a business that’ll put you in the good hockey seats, you can emulate the Hemp Oil Canada model: Work toward vertical control of your regional industry by teaming up with half a dozen (or many more) other farmers and investors on a “turnkey” seed-oil-processing facility yourselves. Market it as a hemp microbrew.

  It’s not like the oil press machinery is hard to find. Nor consultant advice even for farmers in the field. The whole time I interviewed consultant Hermann in Canada, her phone kept ringing. I heard her tell clients in places like Quebec and South Africa things like, “Well, sure, I’d recommend straight-cut combining at reduced speeds—you can lose yield with swathing.”

  Though you better start drafting your business plan now: Crew already has a Hemp Oil USA logo. This is not a fellow who, after fifteen years building his company as a trailblazing entrepreneur, chases wild goose markets. The Canadian economic imperialist knows as well as anyone in the world that the American hemp appetite is insatiable, and that North Dakota, Colorado, Kentucky, and much of the heartland is ready the minute U.S. federal policy finally surrenders to inevitable market forces. “Hemp hemp hooray!” were Crew’s final words to me.

  Chapter Four

  Grow Your Next House

&n
bsp; (or Factory or Office or High-Rise or School)

  My fingers were numb from tapping notes into my phone in the subzero Canadian heartland provinces late in the morning of February 22, 2013. The primary thought I was trying to record midway into this, my third hemp building site visit in as many days, was, Okay, you’re an American hemp businesswoman paying the mortgage with hemp seed oil toothpaste grown and processed nearby. What can you do with the fiber to maybe open yourself a savings account?

  I see now that through the frost-induced typos and misguided autocorrects I also managed to record the secondary thought, Wow. Manitoba. What a difference an inch makes. I was thinking of nearby North Dakota.

  Specifically, I was trying to map the conversation I had just enjoyed with the Province of Manitoba deputy minister for housing and community development Joy Cramer onto her American counterpart sixty-five miles south. That’d probably be North Dakota agriculture commissioner Doug Goehring, since the Roughrider State doesn’t have a housing secretary.

  The twenty-below morning would be familiar to both politicians, as would the rate of neighborhood vehicles gliding gracefully into snowbanks per hour (it would soon happen to me), and probably also the truly inspiring organic cinnamon buns. Closely observing local winter survival techniques, I lived on those warm, caramel-dripping sponges during my Canadian research.

  What would be different those sixty-five miles to the south was the likely federal drug enforcement authorities’ reaction to Cramer the Canadian’s casual statement to me that she “just wants to help our local hemp farmers.” At least as of 2013.

  See, the materials used to insulate the half-completed house inside of which we were then standing were cannabis plants grown a few miles away in the Manitoba countryside. Here in downtown Winnipeg’s upscale “granola belt” neighborhood where she herself has lived, Deputy Minister Cramer had been telling me about the provincially funded hemp house project, after we’d clumped up the icy porch stairs to the homesite.

  “We’re particularly interested in this project because the insulation and wall materials are being built of hemp and lime, and if it performs, it’s another market for our farmers and our construction industry,” said Cramer, as polished a politician as I’ve ever met. “We know it’s a big crop for Canada and we’re proud that our Manitoba hemp farmers are some of the biggest exporters in the country. We have high hopes for our hemp industry here.”

  Brian Pollack, the project’s contractor, demonstrated the tamping of the “hempcrete” insulation on which the house is relying. He told me hempcrete is essentially a self-curing and breathable mixture of dried cannabis hurd and lime, absent concrete’s toxic ickiness and high heat needs. “It comes out of the mixer light and airy,” he said, and though there’s something of a science to getting the material ratios right, once you do, “It’s easy to use and fast to build with.”

  When she said that provincial deciders are watching how the hemp house “performs,” Cramer told me she meant in three categories: (1) cost competitiveness versus standard methods in the box-store era, (2) ease of replication in remote areas of the province, and, (3) (obviously a vital one at twenty below in February) how it performs thermally through a Canadian year.

  This last category includes not just energy costs in a place that endures drastic annual temperature and humidity swings, but also how comfortable the not-yet-selected family that will move in by the end of 2013 will be. Cramer—a senior enough official to have a driver and pull off a beaver cap in a casual interview with a shaggy American author and filmmaker—told me her office will be closely studying the reports that come in surrounding “air quality, mold control, and, of course, warmth.”

  Yes, this house is going to be Home Sweet Home for real tenants, probably by the time you’re reading these words. Hearing this, I gave Goehring, North Dakota’s agriculture commish, a buzz to see how it feels for North Dakota farmers not to receive Cramer’s kind of support (let alone $250-per-acre profit).

  “It makes you some days want to shake somebody,” the Republican said. But he said it in a very polite prairie way, as though he was going to follow up with, Did you hear Jennifer Svenson is running for deacon?” He reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s more deliberate cousin.

  “We have producers who would like to grow industrial hemp,” he continued. “They know that state law allows them to be licensed, but they also know that they then have to apply to the DEA to be allowed to raise hemp. We in North Dakota asked the DEA to waive that registration. They denied us that.24 It’s a bit disingenuous for the federal government to . . . completely ignore the great attributes of industrial hemp. It should be utilized as a commodity for the public good.”

  I asked Goehring if he knew that Canadian farmers were banking 250 C-notes an acre within shouting distance of the border. He did. “And that’s the other thing about it,” he said, still politely soft-spoken, but getting what no doubt passes in the northern heartland for worked up. “Agronomically, hemp works in our soils. It can be another in our healthy crop rotation system.”

  At last Goehring really exploded into what a New Yorker would call a soft speaking voice. “It’s amazing. We have farmers who live near the border, and six miles away cultivators are growing this very viable product. For those who have expressed interest, it’s a lost opportunity for a fine product that’s utilized all over the United States.”

  I hung up the phone wondering, What does it mean that I seem to be agreeing with a lot of Republicans on drug policy lately? Then I remembered my mission—the thought that I had used most of my five seconds of exposed Manitoba finger blood flow to tap into my phone: Where might the first hemp fiber killer app reside? I was about to find out I had been looking at it while interviewing Deputy Minister Cramer and dreaming of cinnamon buns.

  If you’re like me (and Deputy Minister Cramer), you’re wondering if we know how hemp/lime insulation performs in an actual finished house, or even what this hempcrete insulation is. Starting with the second question, I looked for a scientific description of what makes fluffy hempcrete the effective insulator that the Manitoba builders were telling me it is.

  The explanation came care of Farhoud Delijani, PhD student in biosystems engineering at the University of Manitoba’s frankly awesome Alternative Village. You’ll remember him as the fellow who ate all the King of Seeds as a kid in Iran. He showed me several underway hempcrete experiments, including one surrounding energy efficiency. I got to touch the stuff, and it is, as advertised, “light and airy.” You can see the hemp hurd in it even after it’s cured into rock-solid blocks. It looks like the shredded stuff people toss into guinea pig cages.

  Turns out that when it comes to insulation, you want to trap air (like a wet suit traps water), so “light and airy” material is not just easier to work with than fiberglass, it’s an essential part of the formula. Delijani told me that hempcrete in twelve-inch-thick sections has an R-value (this is how insulation is rated) of twenty. That’s extremely competitive, even without factoring in the absence of material toxicity and the centuries-long durability that home designers insist you’ll get in your hemp house.

  What’s the bottom line performance of hemp as an insulator? “The study is still under way,” Delijani said. “But it clearly takes less energy than the control group to keep a house heated to twenty-one degrees Celsius [about seventy degrees Fahrenheit] throughout the [Canadian] winter.” That was music to the ears of a solar-powered goat herder rooting for his two young kids to have a livable planet.

  And hempcrete is very easy to apply on-site, Delijani and others told me. Mechanically, what the builder is doing during hempcrete construction is described by the website HempBuilding.com this way: “The hempcrete is cast around a timber framework. This is achieved by tamping down between shuttering, or it can be sprayed against a formwork . . . The hempcrete [is then] finished with a natural paint.” Some companies even sell complete construction blocks with the hempcrete already inside.

  N
ow that we can visualize what hempcrete is, we can move on to our other question, that of finished hemp structure performance. To do that, we leave the lab and head into the real world.

  We’ve all seen promising wonder technologies that flop in the marketplace for one reason or another (cough cough Bill Gates/the Chinese/Walmart offer a watered-down version cheaper). In fact, when I wrote for a computer magazine just out of college, I learned that there’s a name for such technologies: vaporware. An actual working product that lives only in the hopes of the company’s founding team and perhaps a harried publicist.

  So I set my Anti-Vaporware Detection Meter to “sensitive” and reached out in an effort to learn how hempcrete performs in a house that’s faced the elements. I found the answer in Dixie by way of New Zealand. Greg Flavall is co-founder of a company called Hemp Technologies, which built a hemp house in Asheville, North Carolina.

  I watched a comprehensive video about the house. It furthers Delijani’s description of what hempcrete is, even showing the schedule-one-narcotic hurd before it goes into the mixture. The result performs better than pink fiberglass insulation, even in sections that were left exposed to the elements for a winter. The Twenty-First Century Construction Revolution is hereby televised. Google “hemp technologies asheville north carolina house.” It could be a turning point in the human pursuit of shelter since the questionable decision to emerge from the cave.

  When that Asheville project was finished in 2010, Flavall moved the heck back to his native North Island of New Zealand largely because, being such a believer in hemp building technology, he wanted to be closer to the one key factor keeping it from being cost-competitive Stateside today: legal local sources of hemp.