by Doug Fine
“It’s important that we win this, and we’re nearly there,” she told me buoyantly (or perhaps just shiveringly) back in the powder-swirling cryogenics lab of her farm. Billows of steam followed the words out of her scarf and around her swine-muddy coveralls.
Sometimes when she was animated, which appeared to be roughly the hours between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., I noticed that Hermann accelerated from an erudite, deliberate, Canadianer-than-thou pace to the more rapid-fire Ozarks syntax of her upbringing. At one point I had to count the number of negatives in a sentence to see how she really felt about a particular Kentucky hemp legalization bill.
This is a Get ’Er Done kind of woman, one whose frankly barely habitable winter ecosystem kept making me think, You have the skill set of the successful Fortune 500 CEO; you must really care about the hemp plant’s reemergence.
She does. Her terrifyingly drafty house is quite literally a hemp museum. There are hemp bales outside, 120-year-old hemp newspaper ads on her living room table, and hemp soaps in the bathroom. This is a woman who got into hemp as an undergraduate because her adviser asked her, “What needs to be changed so badly it makes you angry?”
A decade and a half and two degrees after throwing up her hands at the U.S. drug war, she’s still at it, having never wavered, changed careers, or abandoned the Far North. And now she’s consciously about to experience victory in her life’s biggest battle. The end of the war on hemp, for Hermann, is like De Niro’s LaMotta finally claiming the middleweight title in Raging Bull.
On the day of my visit, she chopped and chucked firewood into her woodstove with the body language of a slugger swatting batting practice, and then cooked her lunch on it, including those scientifically proven super-healthy hemp-fed chicken eggs that I’m rather craving three of at the moment. She did all this, as we’ve seen, while answering calls from her Canadian, African, and European hemp consulting clients about whether certain harvest techniques risked unwanted hemp seed sprouting prior to processor delivery.41
Not long after the pig feeding, as I wriggled like an outsmarted Houdini out of the coveralls Hermann had loaned me for the attempted truck extraction, she was on the horn with a college administrator in Corvallis, Oregon. They were discussing the landmark industrial hemp course that Hermann was co-leading at Oregon State University in the spring term of 2013.
This was a twenty-three-hour, 400-level class in the college of forestry at an American state-funded university. The course description was: “Introduction to the botany, biology and agronomy of the hemp plant, and the origins, historical contexts and implications of contemporary legal and social issues surrounding its use for food, fiber, and building products.”
The first iteration of the course had thirty-six students. “The class was really engaged,” Hermann told me a few months after my first visit. “And they were excited about creating their own bit of hemp history. Some students knew a lot about the cannabis plant, some none at all. But each brought his or her own expertise into what the course is offering.”
Hermann said it was particularly gratifying to have total support from the university. “For fall term we’re increasing the student number to one hundred,” she said.
And so the hemp knowledge base is being rebuilt—OSU is like that Irish monastery that saved all the Greek and Latin classics. It actually makes sense that Oregon State has relaunched hemp into mainstream academic legitimacy, incidentally, as it was Beaver researchers who did some of the last pre-drug-war domestic hemp cultivar research in the 1930s.42
I personally didn’t see how Hermann had time to prep for the course, since she’s one of the people the Canadian government hires to sample hemp crops to make sure the THC levels are sufficiently negligible. Hermann sampled twenty-one thousand acres over the 2012 season, running from farms all over the province to a lab near her home, all while fielding that stream of hemp client calls.
The Hemp Industries Association’s Steve Levine calls the Oregon State course “a big deal,” since the plant is as kosher as basil locally but, obviously, not yet in DC. It certainly says a lot about American academic hearts and minds. Plus I have little doubt, after how much I learned from Hermann, that it was a valuable educational experience.
Levine sees the OSU course, Bowman’s farmer activism, and national lobbying efforts as all part of the same final push to a domestic hemp industry launch. “If Colorado farmers get some seeds in the ground and are successful, that’ll also really help the legislative situation in the heartland,” he said. “This is going to be fun to watch.”
But Hermann, even when worked up by prohibition’s insanity into what struck me as her quite intentional and effective hillbilly mode, is at core a sensible, sanguine midwesterner. When I asked for her advice to American farmers, the first thing she said was, “After legalization, take it slow. Don’t expect to reap a bonanza from your first crop.”
From there she went straight into heartland schoolmarm mode. “Make sure your harvesters are sharp—know how to operate the combine so it works well with hemp . . . Dry your seed immediately to 8 or 9 percent [moisture] after harvest to protect the essential fatty acid profile during storage.”
Useful intelligence, I’m sure, but not exactly the cheerleading you’d expect from someone the Canadian government considered a “Unique Skilled Worker” (essentially bestowing permanent residency on her) before finally making her a dual citizen. And there’s a reason for the business-like posture.
“I want to see hemp just be another ingredient in a farm economy . . . providing healthy food structure and industrial material for people,” she said. No politics, in other words.
Hemp Pioneers
Mark Reinders, HempFlax Deputy Director, Oude Pekela, The Netherlands
The meadows of northern Holland were still frosted when I set off on an autumn morning to visit the nearby HempFlax headquarters in Groningen province. Perhaps the coolest part of my research for this book—and that’s like choosing between favorite ice cream flavors—came very near the end, on the HempFlax factory floor. That’s because I found myself watching (and in turn touching) the actual hemp fibers that go into Mercedes and BMW door panels. These emerged in clumps from a mechanized separator that sent the remaining hurd down a different chute (for use as cat litter).
Operating like a page out of the 1938 Popular Mechanics article that hailed hemp’s twenty-five thousand uses, HempFlax also sells parts of the European industrial cannabis plant harvest for textiles, paper, and building insulation. The vast, noisy factory I was touring this chilly morning churns out more than 1,400 pounds of hemp fiber every hour.
Even though the company does four million euros business every year, its boss, 32-year-old Mark Reinders, told me that finding markets for the locally harvested hemp is “like juggling—we sell the bast fiber and then have to find markets for twice as much of the shiv.”
On the agricultural side, the business requires constant innovation, too. Reinders pointed to a giant harvester parked next to the factory and said that his mechanics still have to jerry-rig equipment to fit a particular field’s dual-cropping needs.
“See here?” he said, hopping up about eight feet to the harvester’s hood. “We welded a forklift mast up top here so we can harvest the leaves and flowers higher up on the plant,” he said. “That gives us a market for juice and shakes before the main blade cuts the stalks down at sixty centimeters to begin the fiber-retting process.” Hey, presto, another kind of dual cropping invented. I was blown away that there’s still no standard hemp-harvesting modus operandi, even in the relatively mature markets of Europe.
I loved that all of the hemp for the HempFlax factory has to date come from surrounding farms on the Dutch countryside, but Reinders said that price competition from GMO corn has forced the company to buy farmland in Romania as hemp fiber demand increases worldwide. This really gets his goat. “It’s being grown for inefficient energy, not food,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
He hopes the
high corn price problem is temporary, because Europe’s soil needs hemp. “I came to hemp because my father’s a farmer and he cultivated it in 1996 as a cash-providing bridge crop that was a soil restorative,” Reinders told me back on the factory floor as I snatched an armful of the most combed, highest-end bast fiber from the end of a factory conveyor belt (it was so soft to the touch that I felt like I was squeezing silky air). “I liked how fast it grew and that it was pesticide free. So I interned here as an industrial engineering student, and after I graduated from business school, (company founder) Ben (Dronkers) brought me on.”
The privately owned HempFlax, which Reinders described as “on its feet, stable” and on a twenty-year, uneven climb to consistent profitability, was already supplying European automakers by the time he came on in 2007. “The way that happened is the template was already in place for natural fibers like flax in automotive components,” Reinders said. “And a combination of its fiber qualities and market forces made hemp’s position progressively stronger. We should thank the auto parts contractors as much as the auto companies. It was the parts suppliers who were looking for affordable quality to keep their own costs low.”
When I mentioned that North American hemp farmers have no modern experience taking care of a fiber harvest, Reinders nodded gravely and agreed with Canadian hemp researcher Simon Potter that we were talking about a vital body of knowledge that requires expertise. “We actually go to the fields to do the harvesting rather than letting farmers bring in the harvest,” he said. “With fiber, the motto is ‘quality in, quality out.’ A farmer might be worried about rain and want to end the retting when the fiber is still gray. He has his own priorities. We come in and say, ‘Wait three more days.’ You want the fiber to be a dark yellow for the high-quality applications like textiles and industrial components.” And so the North American hemp fiber learning curve begins.
Chapter Eleven
Teach Your Regulators Well
For hemp to once again take off in the United States, history tells us that two more elements have to fall into place. First, the industry pioneers must work with regulators to craft domestic standards. I learned this from the saga of American biodiesel pioneers Kelly and Bob King. They were in biofuels so early, their Pacific Biodiesel website is biodiesel.com.
According to Business World Magazine, Pacific Biodiesel shared its pre-launch study results with regulators and even competitors because the world frankly didn’t know how to make an industry of waste restaurant oil. Today their oil fuels a good deal of Hawaii, and they consult the world over. You can fill up at gas pumps on two Aloha State islands, and municipalities use the fuel for backup generators.
Similarly, the initial Canadian hemp players, several of whom are still in the industry, worked with regulators on everything from field-testing hemp varieties to THC analysis, right from the beginning. As we’ve discussed, this actually started several years before Canada’s official 1998 reboot.
As Hermann put it, “Even if President Obama and Congress legalize hemp tomorrow, there’s still a lot of work ahead for the U.S. market and anyone who wants to be a player.”
The initial U.S. state hemp legislation generally nods toward the Canadian model: Colorado, in addition to unlimited commercial cultivation for registered farmers who grow hemp with that inert 0.3 percent THC limit, is making a vocal statement of top-level support by allowing those ten-acre developmental test plots wherein THC levels won’t be tested until a cultivar is ready for the commercial market. Similarly, Hawaii’s step one looks to be a hundred-acre state-sponsored research project. Pacific Biodiesel’s Kelly and Bob King are big supporters of that project, because, in the end, the french fries that today drive their business are finite.
“Hawaii is close to legislation allowing for a test hemp plot that we hope will remediate a few centuries of sugarcane monoculture soil and provide energy feedstock,” Kelly King told me.
Now, patiently developing a regulatory framework and official cultivars would seem to be essential. But there is another fairly loud opinion out there, and I’d be remiss not to mention it. It goes like this: The original American hemp farmers planted what they had on hand in their wagons after crossing wild rivers and unnamed mountain passes. And they managed, before interstates, let alone NAFTA, to build a world-leading industry.
In other words, some hemp activists make the case for starting now with that ditch weed (or, if you prefer, the “heirloom cultivars”) easily found out by the railroad tracks in the heartland. This Let Darwin choose what we plant philosophy is running up against the We live in a lab-coat-and-hairnet era because of uniformity and product safety demands line of thinking.
Hermann’s view on this comes with too much in-the-field experience to ignore, and it’s basically this: Once she’s expanded beyond selling carrots at the farmer’s market, any farmer has to be savvy about her choice of variety.
“Every Walmart already carries hemp oil, Nature’s Path hemp cereal, and hemp twine,” she said. “A mature industry has to be ready for the professionalism that level of reach demands.”
She’s talking about standards, testing processes, and certification paperwork. Humanity’s oldest plant is about to grow up. “We have food and health inspectors certifying our industry in Canada,” she reminded me. Burritos in front of the Phish show this is not. Still, this first to-do item is standard business stuff. It can be easily checked off.
The second crucial hemp industry to-do item sounds a little woo-woo at first, but it comes down to the very bottom-line concept of “preserving the brand.” I firmly believe that if industrial cannabis is to emerge in a big way Stateside, its initial large purveyors must stick to the root values that, over the difficult decades of prohibition, have guided the industry: an industry that without question has also been an activist movement.
What are these core values? You only need to look at how the hemp industry standard-bearer, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, operates as a business.
Hemp Pioneers
David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap
Who knew? You can be president of a fast-growing, multimillion-dollar, family-owned company while sporting a ponytail, mentioning Bob Marley’s birthday on your company’s official website, and stating openly that you like “all forms of the cannabis plant.”
The successful can generally live how they like. Yet in an era that’s demoted “prominent businessman” to a social rank just below “used car salesman” and just above “congressman,” thirty-eight-year-old Bronner wears the mantle of a solidly old-school hero. That is, to the type of patriot who believes prosperity is best engendered by running a sustainable business that shares the wealth with its employees. Though he deservedly gained attention by risking his own freedom to ensure that his company’s sustainability ethic remains undiluted (this when he locked himself in a cage in front of the White House in 2012 with only a potted hemp plant for company), Bronner’s greatest accomplishment to date might have come while working within the law in 2004.
That was when he coordinated and helped fund a coalition of hempsters who pulled off a Lake Placid–level miracle: Helmed by Hemp Industries Association lead attorney Joe Sandler, they defeated the DEA in federal court (that was what happened on Bob Marley’s birthday, by the way). This after a protracted legal effort to prevent the federal banning of hemp food products from import into the United States. It’s one of the great unheralded victories of the drug war.
“We were already using hemp,” Bronner told me. “When the Bush administration began seizing hemp shipments at the Canadian border, we sued to be able to keep using it.”
The 2013 U.S. House passage (and very likely 2014 full congressional passage) of the first federal hemp cultivation law in half a century is a direct result of that underdog victory nine years earlier: One of the most compelling arguments hemp supporters like Representative Jared Polis (D-Colorado), Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) were able to make to
colleagues is the absurdity of importing a crop that the U.S. farmer could be profitably growing if not for Big Government regulation.
In Wyden’s words, “The outlandish restriction on free enterprise hurts rural job development and increases our trade deficit.” If Bronner and the rest of the parties to the DEA lawsuit hadn’t drawn a line in the sand in 2004, we might not be on the cusp of a new, billion-dollar domestic agricultural and manufacturing industry today. To be able to import and use but not grow a crop is, as farmer Bowman put it at his Fourth of July hemp planting, exactly the kind of absurd trade restriction that fomented the original American Revolution.
So how did Harvard alum Bronner come to hemp activism? “In Amsterdam some years back I had some frankly intense revelatory experiences while using psychoactive cannabis. Those experiences convinced me, after years of dismissing it, that my grandfather [company founder Emanuel Bronner] was right when he spoke of a spiritual unity and a quest for world peace.”
First off, this Ivory Soap of the American organic food co-op is a third-generation family company—older than that, really, since the Heilbronner family was making soap in the old country before emigrating to the United States and dropping the Heil. But today’s CEO David Bronner is the grandson of the famously gifted if verbose modern founder (as many of us first discovered in a friend’s bathroom late at a party, the company’s bottles are covered with spiritual, prophetic, poetic, and philosophical citations). The important part is that even with fifty-three million dollars in sales in 2012, the Escondido, California–based company is still run by a spiritually minded and progressive family, and this is reflected in its policies.
