Hemp Bound

by Doug Fine

  In other words, watch for big policy change when MoveOn and Tea Partiers and everyone in between agrees on an issue. For his part, the sixty-five-year-old May was what everyone told me was characteristically garrulous about his ol’ liberal buddy’s ceremonial planting that day. He spoke as an agronomist.

  “I am an eastern Colorado farmer,” he said, joining Bowman and me for jambalaya after parking the golf cart he used to oversee the day’s festivities. “I need to take two looks at my crops: the economic and the agronomic view. The agronomic view is the approach of another rotation crop that might help me become more productive in an area of the world that gives me no promises of water. When I look at my thousands of acres of dryland wheat, my thousand acres of corn, I need to consider all opportunities. This might be an opportunity to make something work economically, especially if we can get some processing going nearby.”

  In the midst of a very Toby Keith–heavy set, I asked if May cared at all about drug war rhetoric. “I try to stick to the agronomic,” he said. “I’m trying to produce food for the people of this country. If hemp moves into the rotation for me, I’m more than willing to plant it. So we’ll see what happens in Colorado in this next year. If there’s really a market.”46

  I sat back in my chair to listen to what was probably the nine thousandth lifetime policy discussion between Bowman and May, both people who can get along with anyone. It wasn’t long, though, before the political talk turned to the goings-on in the actual dirt—because that’s where the facts reside. Rainfall levels don’t lie. In fact, one of the coolest parts of the day for me was listening, as a suburban-raised recent convert to Southwest ranching, to these two fellows, who had local farming in their blood for a combined total of ten generations, talk shop.

  “This cultivar’ll take a twenty-seven-degree freeze, which is nice,” Bowman observed of his seed.

  “I like that it doesn’t have to go in in March, like canola does,” came back May. “I mean, June first, you’re almost in there with millet.”

  “He’s trying to keep a struggling community alive,” Bowman told me after May sped off to put out a fire surrounding the classic car contest judging. “This was Colorado’s first county. If Gary decides to plant a full hemp crop himself in future years, and I think he will, a lot of people will see it. He’s got a corn maze, and pumpkin picking in the fall, and as you can see we’re right on the freeway—a tall crop would probably be visible to drivers.”

  So that’s why Bowman chose this planting site. “Gary thought, Hmm, I wish there was a crop that could provide income while helping us deal with drought,” I said, chewing contemplatively.

  “And he came to hemp,” Bowman said. “At least he’s considering it. Which is why it’s so astonishing that what we’re doing here today is so political. It shouldn’t be.”

  I picked up the bag of seed. “Doesn’t look like a felony,” I admitted.

  Bloated with southern cuisine, Bowman and I shuffled out to May’s back forty after lunch and a brief tour of the crises-ridden classic car show (calm appeared restored). We came to the site of the hemp ceremony—near the middle of a rectangular field at the moment home to ten acres of somewhat sad-looking corn. I scooped up a handful of grainy dirt. “I keep thinking Sahara when I see the heartland topsoil these days,” I said.

  “Welcome to the Central Great Plains of the United States of America in a time of climate change,” Bowman said. “We’re in the middle of historic drought. All the crops are drought-stressed around here. Our aquifers are drying out, too, so we can’t pump the water the current crops need.”

  “Drought-stressed sounds a little euphemistic,” I murmured, dropping the hot handful of GMO-worked dirt. “This corn looks sick. Like stay home from school sick.”

  Bowman shrugged. “This is the new normal. It’s a serious challenge before us, and we’re here today to find solutions.

  “This,” he added, peeling open the seed bag, “is a rescue operation. A recovery crop. Replacing, as you say, corn with hemp.”

  It’s a recovery operation in the field and in the history books, I thought. Because we’re talking about reclaiming the mantle of the early independent agricultural principles on which the United States was founded—in the name of sustainability. Bowman was saying that a locavore, GMO-free, and yet lucrative economy is the most patriotic model for the future.

  He made his way to the heart of the field, looking comfortable among corn rows, which I observed aloud.

  “I’ve grown a lot of corn in my life,” Bowman confirmed. “Including a lot of GMO corn. I was cornfed.” As most of us are these days.

  “No planting machinery?” I asked.

  “We’re doing it the way our forefathers did before automatic seeding,” he said, digging his paw in the seed bag for a handful of what could, in a decade or two, be among America’s most profitable crops. “We’re scattering it, and then tamping it down for good seed–soil contact. I’m well-versed in the technique from my family’s own ranch.”

  And so the time had come. “This is a crop to be rediscovered and used to create a new twenty-first-century economy for America” were Bowman’s preparatory words.

  “I’m going to let that classic car exhaust fill the role of the John Philip Sousa march that ought to be playing right now,” I commented, then added, of his seed-scattering pose, “That’ll be the statue, right there, hold it!”

  I took a photo as the first handful of seed arced over some desperately thirsty corn. The motion conveyed a horseshoe pitch.

  “First shot fired,” Bowman said. It seemed right. We stood in respectful silence for a few seconds, a breeze making one nearby cornstalk appear to salute.

  “How’s it feel to be an official hemp farmer?” I asked.

  “It’s the most patriotic thing I’ve ever done.”

  “God bless America and everything,” I said. “But let’s face the facts. Technically that’s a federal crime you just committed and I, as Peter Tosh puts it, am going to advertise it.”

  Bowman’s beaming, guileless farm boy mouth sort of melted from its default grin for a moment. Then he sprinkled another handful of seed. “I guess it is a federal crime,” he said. “The DEA has jurisdiction right now over a crop that should be under the Department of Agriculture, and they’re worried about job protection in their agency. But that’s one of our easier challenges. This justly rebellious spirit is how our country gained independence. We’re going to create a new industry to transform agriculture. America’s going to be stronger with hemp in her fields.”

  He looked down at the bag. “A few left—let’s go back inside and throw it into a protein shake.”

  Still, I wondered aloud, “Why do this so publicly? Why flaunt federal law with a couple hundred seeds that probably won’t be harvested, very shortly before, but still before, the federal government is ready?”

  “This is about freedom, about gaining independence from federal farm programs that might have had their purpose, but which keep us ranchers chained to a very specific set of crops. We’re talking about opening markets, and all kinds of legitimate commerce that’ll result. It’s long past time that American farmers be allowed to do this.”

  Bowman is polished enough in his soundbites, but I saw where his greatest strength lay this day after we headed back inside the event building: making the case to folks who listen to a lot of Lee Greenwood. Over the course of the next two songs, he worked the room, dance-walking. I watched as, one by one, he pressed palms, very much the hemp politician, winning over good ol’ Americans to hemp.

  “Five hundred grams of viable hemp seed, that’s what we planted today,” I overheard him telling a young woman pushing a stroller. “It’s from France, that’s all I can tell you. It came from a farmer friend over there. It’s a little cooler there, but this cultivar should be fine here.”

  He’d made the same point to the Denver television crew, trying to open farmer minds, media minds, all minds. Since Bowman kept making the
economic case for hemp, it occurred to me that, on top of all the practical reasons, Byers is also a homonymically apt name for the location of a patriotic planting. That’s because as soon as you harvest this crop, there are indeed buyers. Have I hammered home the point that there is not nearly enough supply to meet hemp seed demand in North America? Right now.

  “You like hemp preachin’, don’t you?” I asked during a quiet moment at May Farms (I think the song playing was “God Bless the USA”).

  “It’s effective because it’s all true,” he said. “I’ve found that anytime someone gives me five minutes, and I get to discuss the facts, hemp’s role in the founding of our country and where we’re going next as a nation, that person is a convert. I think I’m batting a thousand on that. When I talk about Henry Ford growing a car from this American fiber that’s stronger than steel, and fueling it with ethanol from the same crop, this speaks to people.”

  To say that Bowman’s a busy guy these days is a severe understatement. Ever since he had that grand success as an activist ushering in Colorado’s landmark renewable energy mandates in 2004, he’s been a full-time sustainability lobbyist at the state and national levels—U.S. senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) calls him The Human Hand Grenade. And it was while working on hemp’s U.S. House passage late last spring that he had the inspiration for the hemp flag. After the Denver TV crew left Byers and as we prepared to do the same, Bowman reminded me that the hemp Stars and Stripes was at the moment flying over the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.

  “Seemed to me one of those irreversible gestures,” he said of putting the bug in Congressman Jared Polis’s ear to make the flag hoisting happen—congressmen are always shooting up flags for constituents to honor someone or some event. “I was in the House gallery when the hemp amendment passed. I thought that once a hemp flag flew, it couldn’t be un-flown.”

  In the last moments before we’d pulled out of May Farms just ahead of the nearby fireworks that remarkable Independence Day, I recall watching Bowman, as is his wont, maybe even his unique specialty, shift comfortably from Beltway lobbyist to local rancher.

  “The DEA doesn’t need to lose jobs on hemp,” he told Gary May and me over one last bowl of Mo’s spicy work of art. “They can help us enforce the industry’s regulations from a supportive standpoint—crop inspections and testing, farmer registration. Just like Canada did with its Mounties. I consider my job to be convincing Congress to change the DEA’s prism to one of being part of the hemp industry. I’m an optimist. Even their position will evolve.”

  Then, not ten minutes later, I heard Bowman call out his parting words to May’s teenage son, Grant, as we hopped back in the car. “Those hemp seeds’ll sprout in about three days,” he said, leaning out the window. “Keep an eye on ’em if you can.”

  Epilogue, Part Two

  A Dust Bowl Antidote— It’s About a Cash Crop in Today’s Soil

  Fast-forward a month. Across the state of Colorado from Byers, 256 miles to the southeast, an agriculturally significant 2013 hemp planting was well under way. Nothing symbolic about this one. We’re talking sixty acres, intended to help build a domestic seed stock for both oil-producing and fiber-producing varieties of industrial cannabis.

  As I, traveling with my family after some days spent unplugged in and around (mostly in) wilderness rivers, bumped across Comanche National Grassland on August 11, 2013, I reflected on how hard it is to get lost in Colorado, even for me, who can get lost in my kitchen. That’s because the mountains are to your west. Pike’s Peak. The Rockies. The spine of North America.

  Heading east, as we learned during our visit to Jillane Hixson’s nearby ranch, is a journey into a world so geographically and culturally different from Denver’s mile-high one that by the time I crossed into Bent County I felt I knew what interstellar travel will be like.

  And that’s explicitly why forty-year-old Ryan Loflin was planting hemp so far east. So far east, in fact, that during one of those plains country semi-naps one takes after setting the cruise control, I think I briefly crossed into Kansas. He wanted to show his childhood neighbors that hemp was an answer to the long drought that has savaged farm economies from Nebraska to New Mexico. A Dust Bowl antidote.47

  We were meeting in Springfield (population 1,454, incorporated 1887), seat of Baca County, which in addition to Kansas also brushes Oklahoma and my own state of New Mexico, with Texas in shooting if not shouting distance. They should call this region the Five Corners. Denver is five very long hours away. I got stopped by two flash-flood-related road closures just trying to navigate between these distinct biomes.

  “Everyone here is desperate for a viable cash crop,” Loflin told me when I met him downtown. “They’re hurting from this half decade of drought and looking to diversify.”

  Springfield is a town that keeps itself spruced up—the small grassy downtown park has a tasteful trickling fountain and rocking metal benches, and there’s a well-maintained town Olympic swimming pool. Looking out the passenger window at the small, neat homes as we circled the original eighty-acre town site, my Sweetheart said it looks like a place that peaked in 1955. Or earlier: Named after their own Springfield by the Missourians who settled it in 1885, some of the buildings look like something out of Blazing Saddles.

  To listen to him talk, you’d know Loflin was from here. He spoke with the almost southern twang of the eastern Colorado plains. To look at him, tall and thin and wearing a T-shirt featuring an in-over-his-head skier above the words jesus shreds, you’d also guess, correctly, that he’d gone west. That he’d flown the coop to the alpine side of Colorado’s intercultural divide for a time. That was not a Baca County–made T-shirt.

  Because Loflin knows both worlds, he was in a position to inform me, in our first minutes of conversation, that I’d found myself in yet another place where the prevailing opinion about where President Obama was born has no bearing on the opinion on hemp. In other words, the need for a cash crop is erasing traditional cultural war boundaries. Or, according to Loflin, has already erased.

  As I and my family loaded up to follow him the couple of windy miles to the twelve-hundred-acre ranch his family has operated since the 1930s, Loflin told me, “Oh, we’ve got some real conservative folks around here, and everyone’s asking me when they can get some dang seed. So that’s what I’m doing this year—trying to build a seed bank.”

  In pursuit of that locavore goal, prodigal son Loflin, who had until this year been running a reclaimed lumber business48 and raising a family in the ski town of Crested Butte, was putting his sixty-six-year-old father’s lucrative alfalfa operation, federally funded like the Bowman family farm, at risk.

  “I’m invested in this community” was his explanation as I and my tribe piled into his farm truck for the short but bumpy ride from the Loflin farmhouse to its sixty-acre felony. “I have three cousins who farm here. I have my own kids’ future to think about—my oldest is starting kindergarten. I knew I was coming back, and I want to create an economy. And I’m leasing the land to protect my dad.”

  Before we start throwing out the Gandhi comparisons, know that this is all part of an ambitious win–win scenario Loflin freely outlined for me as the truck rumbled up to the eastern side of the hemp field. His master plan, as the Rocky Mountain Hemp company, is to become nothing short of “the hemp seed oil expeller for Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. I’m within eighty miles of all these states. Big picture, I want to be processing the region’s [hemp seed] oil.”

  Hearing these words, I marveled that it was only five months earlier that I’d first heard people like Shaun Crew and Norm Roulet describe such a locally controlled vertical model. While the priority mission was to build seed stock this first season (which, remember, hemp authority David West told us at the very beginning of this story is so vital: without fail the absolute Objective One in the business plan), Loflin said he hoped that, on a very small scale, oil processing would start in 2013 as well.

  “This
is no pipe dream,” he said, parking the truck in a sea of man-high, already densely flowering plants midway through their five-month growing cycle. It was about an hour before sunset. I hopped out, offered my Sweetheart a hand, and extracted my kids. The crop’s hand-like leaves were doing Egyptian dance moves in the very slight breeze. The whole field was very quiet, except for the prairie dog squeaks.

  “If I haven’t found an oil press by harvesttime, David Bronner [CEO of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap], who’s contracting for ten of our acres this year, said he’d let me use one of the company’s presses. It’s important to get a seed-expelling process going now. That way as soon as the federal law is all dialed in and everyone has seeds, it’s on.”

  Make no mistake, this was a professional farmer from a longtime professional farming family talking big-time professional farming. This was not a hobby garden plot. It was an agricultural operation.

  “Our planting rig alone costs six hundred thousand dollars, between tractor and the air seeder,” Loflin told me. The latter device features a turbo fan that precisely delivers hundreds of thousands of seeds at whatever density you set, replacing Bowman’s horseshoe toss.

  Big investment, big payoff, is the model in these parts, for any crop. If Loflin showed his father, let alone the rest of Baca County and Colorado, that the hemp crop is viable and has buyers of a value-added finished product, well, the senior Loflin might want to open up the rest of the twelve-hundred-acre homestead. Then we’re up into the acreage Hemp Oil Canada’s Shaun Crew believes is viable.

  I did the math. At current prices, seems more like a jackpot than merely viable. Twelve hundred acres at $250-per-acre profit? Um. Three hundred grand. “Clear,” as the farmers like to say. “Wheat clears thirty an acre,” Loflin told me. You might add a zero to that three hundred thousand if the town processes and sells its own seed oil and protein cake. As with any new industry, it’s all about getting the initial fixed costs handled, and the eventual per-unit price down.