Expanding Hemp within Limits

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Expanding HempWithin Limits

von Steve Allin

It is 30 years since the famous book “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” by Herer was first published and in the intervening years there has grown a worldwide desire to make the promises of the information contained in this groundbreaking work to be made a reality.

Industrial production of many thousands of hectares is currently being realized in countries such as Canada with food production, China with textiles and in France and Holland with fibres for bio-composites for the automotive industry but elsewhere production is on a smaller scale although the aim is for large scale production and markets in the future. As many will know we can obtain many materials from this one plant and indeed it is this aspect which has helped the potential of hemp to be broadcast far and wide. With any Hemp production, industrial or not, there will be 3 or 4 products to sell if all the processing is put in place and indeed this is the only way to make the activity profitable in an economic sense. However modern farming crop systems usually only cope with one product or material and this is usually food for mankind or the animals that supply a part of our diet. Or a crop may have a single product such as logs of timber or fibres in the case of cotton or flax. The many possibilities of a hemp crop complicates the choices farmers or entrepreneurs have to make to invest in the different equipment to capitalise on the potential of the materials they produce. We, as a society, have become used to obtaining many of the materials used to produce our clothing, transportation or other domestic products from mineral sources. The extraction or manufacture of metals or plastics does not rely on good weather for growth or harvest, as long as the supply is there in the ground it is only a case of digging or

drilling the hole deeper to increase supply. If we are to replace those ultimately limited resources such as fossil fuels or ores with those produced on an annual basis from agriculture we need to alter many of our processes to accommodate this return to natural materials. This will require serious investment in both new machinery and processes and the research to develop improvements and new technology. Although many mechanical processes of manufacture will be similar, the move towards synthetic feedstocks such as fibres for yarns and other reinforcing fibres has created a situation where speed of processing has relied on exact parameters of the materials used. It is far easier to alter slightly the specifications of a machine spewing out synthetic fibres such as Carbon and Mineral wool or Nylon, Lycra or Kevlar than it is to adjust to the variations of size, texture or purity of a bale of natural fibres such as Hemp.

There are several materials that could be made from hemp that have not yet been realized in a commercial sense. Paper and Boards are two that come to mind from the pallet described by Jack Herer and others such as Chris Conrad and John Roulac. Both these products have been difficult to bring to market due to the low cost of the feedstocks used at present which include recycled materials such as paper and clothing waste in the case of paper and timber for both. It can be argued that using recycled materials is a very good idea and in fact paper has often been made from such stuff for centuries but there is still a large percentage of timber used in these mills. Particle boards such as chipboard, Orientated Strand Boards (OSB) or Medium Density Fibre boards (MDF) all use wood fibres but there are several problems with these products. The first is the glues used to bind them together, being in some cases identified as emitting formaldehyde or other VOC’s or producing dangerous dust when being cut, during use. The other problem is the scale that such factories now operate on. With little regard for natural limits they expect to devour a million tonnes of ‘pulpwood’ a year. If the future growth predicted by the management of such companies is to be achieved there will be a tremendous strain put on our already threatened forests, even those already planted for that purpose. Remember it takes at least 20 years to grow a crop of such trees and any expansion will have to take that into account. To enter the market for products such as Particle Board made with annually renewable hemp there will have to be a focus on creating the local supply for a factory within a reasonable distance for transporting the straw or, if there already exists a decortication plant, the separated hurds.At present I am working on a plan that would consume 5,000 hectares of hemp production and produce complete houses prefabricated using Hemp boards, ready for assembly on site. This would be on the scale to suit a more community orientated approach to economics where the surrounding agricultural community can be part of an industrial enterprise that provides jobs and important inward flow of money from the sales of Hemp homes outside the community indeed initially outside the country as well. Up until recently when talking about hemp we often used the term Industrial Hemp. This would suggest that the crop has only large scale industrial applications and though it does indeed have that potential there are other scales of establishing the production of this crop that have relevance today. As we can all see we live in “interesting times” and the move to protecting employment for the indigenous workers in many regions of Europe and the USA in particular makes a lot of sense when seen in comparison to the dive to the bottom of wage levels and worker’s rights as a result of globalization. Other considerations such as climate change can also be addressed with the use of hemp especially when used as a construction material.

When I first started getting involved with the production of Hemp and was already convinced of the value of using it as a building material I soon realized that if the more valuable components of the plant such as fibre or seed where to be grown there was inevitably a large quantity of the wood chips remaining and that it would be essential to expand the market for this use to enable the economically viable expansion of the other materials. So how can hemp help with climate change? Well first any expansion to the growing of hemp as a crop adds to the amount of CO2 we sequester (Hemp stores 1.8 tonnes of C02 per tonne of dry material harvested) when incorporated in the carbon footprint of hempcrete produces a carbon negative building material storing over 100 kgs CO2 per cubic meter. If this is added to the ability of Hempcrete to provide an envelope of healthy comfort in both cold or hot climates which greatly reduces the energy consumed for heating or cooling we are winning both emissions wise and monetarily. It is easily possible to build a long lasting, economic, healthy home using either Hempcrete or Hemp fibre insulation materials which could provide a very real solution to both the need to house our growing populations and reduce our demands for energy. Politicians take note! Now that word REDUCE doesn’t sit well with our friends in the Banking sector as they rely completely on the ‘growth paradigm’ but becoming far more efficient with our energy reserves we’ll have to be part of the solution to our future plans as businesses, families or nations and a local supply of hemp for building could certainly help with that. Of course lately the extraction of CBD and other Cannabinoids from hemp crops has been proposed as other products possible to create income from and there have been some examples of large scale extraction from the leaf matter harvested from Industrial crops however the parallel move to legalize ‘Medical Cannabis’ has made it more likely that intensive production from indoor or greenhouse production is more likely to be able to feed this market. These home grown Cannabinoid medicines will also have a positive effect on our communities with improved health and local production again ‘reducing’ our reliance on expensive Pharmaceutical medicines.