Pubdate: Thu, 15 May 2014
Source: Boulder Weekly (CO)
Copyright: 2014 Boulder Weekly
Contact:  http://www.boulderweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/57
Author: Leland Rucker
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hemp.htm (Hemp)

ARE WE FINALLY 'HEMP BOUND' HERE IN THE UNITED STATES?

There has been encouraging news on the hemp front. Rep. Jared Polis
and a few bipartisan representatives got a provision passed into the
FARM bill last year that allows colleges, universities and state
departments of agriculture to grow test plots of hemp for industrial
uses. Twelve states - California, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine,
Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and West
Virginia - now have laws to provide for hemp production without
federal approval. These are positive first steps in returning a
multi-billion-dollar industrial agriculture industry to the United
States after 70 years in the grip of THC insanity among American
politicians and policy makers. No matter that hemp hasn't, nor ever
will, get anyone high, it is still officially classified as a Schedule
1 drug, more dangerous even than methamphetamine and cocaine.

The enthusiasm to end this bullshit forever and bring hemp into the
21st century is growing locally, too. A University of Colorado team
under the leadership of professor Nolan Kane of the ecology and
evolutionary biology department is working to develop a genetic map of
the cannabis genus.

There were so many people at a public meeting I attended in January
that included presentations from industry consultants and a state
agriculture specialist at the George Reynolds Library in Boulder that
officials had to close it down. Industrial hemp, with literally
thousands of uses and now available only by import by those
manufacturers who use it today, could provide needed boosts to
American and Colorado agriculture, and local farmers know it.

This year they are putting plants in the ground to find out what works
and what doesn't, building seed banks and connecting with other
farmers around the globe with similar climates, day lengths and
growing seasons. This kind of information sharing and the CU genome
project will help lay the groundwork for all research into the
manufacture of industrial hemp, which might even supplant THC cannabis
as the country's most-grown crop. And Colorado is in the forefront of
all of this.

I urge anyone interested in hemp, either as a business idea or just
interest in a fascinating, misunderstood plant, to pick up a copy of
Doug Fine's Hemp Bound: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Next
Agricultural Revolution (Chelsea Green Press). Fine covers all your
questions about hemp in a short, entertaining book that Willie Nelson
calls "a blueprint for the America of the future."

To call Fine merely a hemp advocate would do a disservice to his
advocacy. He is a believer, an apostle, a John the Baptist crying in
the wilderness, heralding a great truth to the world at large. "Hemp
hands us a ninth-inning comeback opportunity," he writes. "The
worldwide cannabis industry can play a major role in our species'
longshot sustainable resource search and climate stabilization project."

But here's the deal. Fine is a realist, and a journalist, too, both of
which make Hemp Bound a great addition to the literature surrounding a
once-mainstay U.S. agricultural product.

Though he is hot for hemp, Fine isn't just endlessly praising it,
though he does plenty of that.

He's out on the road talking with people involved in all sides of the
industry - farmers, economists, capitalists - asking the tough
questions of everyone he meets about hemp's curious path to acceptance
again after 70 years with the lights out.

Along the way he confronts hemp's massive potential and the forces
still in play that have kept its possibilities hidden since the 1930s
in America, and put the country a few decades behind the rest of the
world in hemp production. It's a plant that works well as a rotational
crop, something farmers are always looking for, and it has deep roots
and doesn't require pesticides.

He discusses "dual cropping," the concept of creating a seed harvest
and a fiber harvest. He visits a Canadian non-profit that has
developed a hood for a tractor made of a hemp composite, and he talks
with builders who are using hempcrete, a mixture of hemp pulp and lime
that is being used in construction and as an alternative insulation
material in homes and buildings.

It won't be easy, but things are looking up. Out on the plains east of
Denver, Fine comes across a scene that shows why hemp and cannabis
legalization will ultimately succeed. On July 4 last year, a day he
chose carefully, fifth-generation conservative and farmer Michael
Bowman, of Byers, Colorado, held a ceremonial planting of European
hemp. Bowman's family has grown corn for decades in an area that has
been decimated by recent droughts, an area where many actively seek to
secede from the state. Bowman cast his actions in strict, patriotic
terms.

"Our own Independence Day two and a quarter centuries ago started with
a shot," Bowman said. "We are the leaders in Colorado on this issue.
We know we need to make a transition to a new farming mind-set, in
order to make a real difference for our grandchildren. That's our ammo
- - planting hemp in a GMO cornfield."
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MAP posted-by: Matt