Hemp Bound
Authors: Doug Fine
Praise for
Hemp Bound
“The issue is simple: farmers need hemp, the soil needs hemp, forests need hemp, and humanity needs the plant that the good Lord gave us for our own survivalâhemp. The benefits are too many to name, but if hemp was a crop that could be monopolized by industrial Ag corporations it would already be legal.
Hemp Bound
tells us with detail and humor how to get to the environmental Promised Land. Doug has created a blueprint for the America of the future.”
â
Willie Nelson
, songwriter, president of Farm Aid
“If ever anyone needed proof that government meddling in markets is injurious to innovation,
Hemp Bound
dispels all doubt. With science and humor, Fine paints an alternative and optimistic futureâone that makes growing hemp seem as exhilarating and necessary as clean air. Fine's style and storytelling ability make this one of the most fun books you'll ever read about the future of farming.”
â
Joel Salatin
, author of
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal
“Hemp is our ancestral ally, one that long provided us with food, shelter, clothing, and medicine.
Hemp Bound
reveals that now is the time to remember this alliance with hemp after years of prohibition, and that although it won't
save
us, it can help us. That's what earth medicine does.”
â
John Trudell
, poet, recording artist, actor, activist, and cofounder of Hempstead Project HEART
“Doug Fine's engrossing and eye-opening book reveals hemp's role as a new source of food, energy, and raw materials. This absurd war on one of the world's most useful plants is about to end, and everyone can declare victory.”
â
Mark Frauenfelder
, founder, Boing Boing
“I never dreamed industrial hemp had so much promise until I read Doug Fine's
Hemp Bound
. The book is not only fun to read, but it passes along fascinating insights about a farm crop that produces many food and fiber products and is adapted to areas where corn and soybeans are rarely profitable. As the author points out with gracious good humor, industrial hemp is not medical marijuana, and it should become a major farm crop in America as it has elsewhere.”
â
Gene Logsdon
, author of
Gene Everlasting
and
Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind
“In
Hemp Bound
, Doug Fine convincingly describes the proven value and amazing potential of the nonpsychoactive variety of the cannabis plant. You can eat it, drink it, read it, tie it, wear it, drive it, live in it, and make money growing it, all while saving the soil and protecting the climate. This is an important story, engagingly told.”
â
William Martin
, senior fellow, drug policy, Rice University's Baker Institute
Also by Doug Fine
Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man
Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living
Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution
HEMP
BOUND
DISPATCHES FROM
THE FRONT LINES
OF THE NEXT
AGRICULTURAL
REVOLUTION
Doug Fine
CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VERMONT
Copyright © 2014 by Doug Fine.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover painting,
Hemp Fields
, by Richard Fields.
To order prints of
Hemp Fields
, contact
[email protected]
Project Manager: Bill Bokermann
Project and Developmental Editor: Brianne Goodspeed
Copy Editor: Laura Jorstad
Proofreader: Helen Walden
Indexer: Margaret Holloway
Designer: Melissa Jacobson
Printed in the United States of America.
First printing March, 2014.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 15 16 17
Our Commitment to Green Publishing
Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you'll agree that it's worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (
www.greenpressinitiative.org
), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world's endangered forests and conserve natural resources.
Hemp Bound
was printed on FSC
®
-certified paper supplied by Thomson-Shore that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fine, Doug.
Hemp bound : dispatches from the front lines of the next agricultural revolution / Doug Fine.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60358-543-9 (pbk.) â ISBN 978-1-60358-544-6 (ebook)
1. Hemp. 2. Hemp industry. I. Title.
SB255.F56 2014
633.5'3âdc23
2013048926
Chelsea Green Publishing
85 North Main Street, Suite 120
White River Junction, VT 05001
(802) 295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com
F
or Nancy, Dee, and Kate, who, in one of the hot springs that increasingly seem to provide my office, made sure I asked about R-value (remember this, IRS, if any of this year's deductions seem esoteric). And for Bill Althouse, for the carbon-neutral limo ride.
Contents
Introduction:
After-School Snacks Before Doritos
O
NE
: Hemp Gets Out Ring Around the Collar
T
WO
: Turning a Profit Even with Medieval Harvesting Techniques
T
HREE
: Want to Make It in the Hemp Game? Two Words: Dual Cropping
F
OUR
: Grow Your Next House (or Factory or Office or High-Rise or School)
F
IVE
: Heck, Grow Your Whole Tractor Out of Hemp
S
EVEN
: A New Utility ParadigmâThe Distributed, Sustainable Community Energy Grid
E
IGHT
: Don't Just Legalize ItâSubsidize It
N
INE
: Patriots Ponder Planting
T
EN
: Hempucation Immersion Course
E
LEVEN
: Teach Your Regulators Well
Conclusion:
Support Your Local Heartland Hemp Homesteaders
Epilogue, Part One:
Watching Cannabis Displace Corn in the First Digital Age American Hemp Fields
Epilogue, Part Two:
A Dust Bowl Antidoteâ It's About a Cash Crop in Today's Soil
Author's Note
Hot Off the Hemp Pressesâ Just Trying to Keep Pace with America's Light-Speed Return to Its Usual Attitude About a Plant
H
emp cultivation is about to become legal (and shortly thereafter, big) again in the United States. It started to happen while I was about halfway done with this book. I'm just not used to winning big, important societal battles outright. It's an astonishing no-brainer. And it directly affects my life.
To give just one example, my plan the day hemp becomes legal is to begin cultivating ten acres of the plant so that my Sweetheart no longer has to import from China the material she already uses to make the shirts I wear in media interviews to discuss the fairly massive economic value of hemp. In a cynical age, we can use one less irony.
It's not an exaggeration to say that in humanity's eight-thousand-year relationship with the hemp plant, this past year has been the most impactful one since the first Paleolithic hunter with blistered feet noticed that hemp's fibers made a stronger sandal than the leading brand. We saw Kentucky's passage of hemp (also called industrial cannabis) legislation and the Colorado legislature's near-unanimous approval of commercial hemp cultivation in time for the 2014 planting season
1
(making ten states that have in some form allowed cultivation, including North Dakota and Vermont).
Most important, the U.S. Congress, as I send this book to my publisher, is also poised to re-legalize domestic hemp cultivation without the necessity of federal approval for the first time since 1937.
2
The federal drug war is the last impediment to U.S. farmers and entrepreneurs benefiting from what we'll see is already a half-billion-dollar hemp industry in Canada.
In the House version of the massive 2013 FARRM Bill (one of those “must pass” infrastructure bills that come along every five years), the psychoactively inert hemp plant was removed from the purview of the federal Controlled Substances Act (where it currently is classified as more dangerous than meth and cocaine). The wording of a bipartisan amendment allows industrial cannabis cultivation as part of university research in states that permit hemp farming.
To many who have battled for years to get the plant we're going to be discussing back into the economy, this seems like a baby step. But Canada followed a similar course prior to ramping up its hemp crop in 1998, conducting government-sponsored research into the best cultivars (seed varieties) for its farmers to use from Ontario to Alberta, starting in 1994. In Europe as well, new cultivar certification is a three-year process.
“We don't have the seed stock in the U.S. anymore,” plant breeder, former Big Corn scientist (he invented the plant molecular marker), and renowned hemp researcher David West told me. “I checked with the National Seed Storage Laboratory. They found me a few bags of the old Kentucky seed sitting in a hallway. They were long rotten. It's hard to express what a terrible loss that isâthis was a blending of Asian and European cultivars that comprised the best hemp germplasm in the world.”
In other words, it'll take some time and study to re-learn what hemp varieties will work in the American heartland's soil. West and many others believe that feral hempâthe “ditch weed” that's survived prohibition in places like Nebraskaâmight be a source for rebuilding the stock for a seed that's been cultivated in the New World since the earliest colonial moments (1545 in Chile, 1606 in present-day Nova Scotia
3
). Let Darwin pick the cultivar, is the argument. “I tell farmers to make clandestine collection of feral seeds in advance of legalization,” West told me with a laugh.
Hemp Pioneers
Dr. David West, Geneticist, Actual Twenty-First-Century American Hemp Researcher
From his home alone in Prescott, Wisconsin, along the St. Croix River, the sixty-five-year-old West said that what is, on the surface, his unusual journey from legendary Big Ag researcher to legendary hemp researcher actually follows what for him was an obvious course. After pioneering the use of molecular markers in plant breeding (now part of the standard commercial plant identification tool kit), he “watched the seed industry get taken over by the chemical industry” in the 1990s. At the same time, he told me, “One day I saw a helicopter land in a neighboring field [in Wisconsin] to eradicate feral hemp. Now, as a plant breeder, I'm quite aware of what hemp is. I thought,
What the hell is going on here?
”
In a 1994 paper titled
Fiber War
, West declared modern hemp's agricultural value, a radical view for someone with unimpeachable creds in what was fast becoming the GMO monoculture world (which industry he had by this time left, saying, “I don't want to grow terminator corn for Monsanto”).
His notoriety from that piece and subsequent writing on hemp (as well as the co-founding of the North American Industrial Hemp Council) led, in 1999, to him being contacted by Hawaiian representative Cynthia Thielen (R-Oahu), who is still in office and to this day battling for hemp production in the Aloha State. She's trying to find a replacement for the declining sugarcane industry, help remediate soil, and find an animal feed that can be grown on the islands.
“Cynthia basically said, âDo you want to come to Oahu to grow hemp?'” West explained. It was an
Is this a trick question?
moment. Or as West, who thought that maybe he was on
Candid Camera
, puts it, “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
The half-acre project, which got its federal permits to acquire hemp seed at what West described as “the last second,” ran from 1999 through 2003, and began with a state Hemp Day declared by the governor for the morning of the first planting on December 19, 1999.
“There were cameras, the Kahuna ceremonial blessing, the whole deal, then everyone went home, and it was me on a fenced-in, alarmed patch of dirt, dealing with every problem farmers have always had to deal with.”
One of his first discoveries, he told me with an
It's funnier now
snicker, was that “birds love hemp. Took a while to rig a netting system that kept them out. They ate the whole first planting.”
The project was funded by a hair care company interested in a publicity stunt for what West called a “dash” of hemp oil in its product. West was fine with that. “When I saw like-minded people at energy fairs speak about hemp without any real knowledgeâand how could they have knowledge?âI realized that what we really needed was some studies. But I also knew, since I worked for seed companies for years, how much that kind of research costs.”
West groaned like a hungry man when I told him I was just back from a visit to the sixty acres of hemp that Colorado farmer Ryan Loflin was able to cultivate in 2013. “My study was on a very small, academic scale, but we wound up showing that hemp could be viable in Hawaii's latitude, which is important because growing hemp is all about the photoperiod. It was a Chinese cultivar that worked best. Grew more than ten feet tall. And it was on former Dole plantation land.”
When the project wrapped, West said, George W. Bush was in the White House, 9/11 had happened, and almost no one was paying attention, not even the reps at Alterna, the hair care company. But he rigorously recorded his data and methods, because “I knew people would care about hemp again.”
West calls himself retired today, but he's still researching ditch weed in Nebraska and trying to fund a hemp genome project. I watched a YouTube video where he visited a feral Midwest hemp field, dissecting several plants' morphology. His explanation for all the activity is that it's involuntary. “When you open one door with hemp genetics and even with American hemp history, a dozen other doors open,” he said.
He then launched into perhaps a twelve-minute (and riveting) tale of one of the original “hempreneurs,” David Myerle, who went bankrupt in the 1820s after planting and contracting for hemp in Kentucky, Missouri, and elsewhere.
4
One problem? The U.S. Navy kept rejecting his multi-ton hemp deliveries, either for quality reasons or because of corrupt ties to another supplier. A bigger problem? Too many of his workers were dying of pneumonia trying to implement his special water-based hemp-processing regime. We'll be looking at less deadly and potentially faster methods in these pages.
What's astonishing, for someone who's been following “drug” policy pretty much full-time for three years now, is that it's really happening: America's worst policy since segregationâcannabis prohibitionâis ending. It lasted seventy-seven years. That's how powerful the rhetoric of the drug war has proven since alcohol prohibition's chief crusader, Harry Anslinger, took the helm at the new Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. Using the same arguments that the American people no longer bought regarding beer, cannabis prohibition began seven years later. Banning (in actuality, restricting to zero by not issuing federal permits) hemp cultivation is like banning wheat. It's a surreal policy. Absolutely, 100 percent baseless.