Pubdate: Thu, 26 Jun 2014
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Doug Fine
Note: Doug Fine is the author, most recently, of "Hemp Bound: 
Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Next Agricultural Revolution."
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hemp.htm (Hemp)

GROW HEMP, MAKE MONEY

After a 77-year break, hemp plants are growing in American soil 
again. Right now, in fact. If you hear farmers from South Carolina to 
Hawaii shouting "God bless America," the reason isn't because Thomas 
Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper (he 
did). Nor is it because the canvas that put the "covered" in pioneer 
covered wagons was made of hemp, nor that the hemp webbing in his 
parachute saved George H.W. Bush's life in World War II.

Nope. It's because U.S. policy is finally acknowledging that hemp can 
help restore our agricultural economy, play a key role in dealing 
with climate change and, best of all, allow American family farmers 
to get in on a hemp market that, just north of us in Canada, is 
verging on $1 billion a year.

Hemp is a variety of cannabis - and thus a cousin of marijuana - that 
contains 0.3% or less of the psychoactive component THC. (Marijuana 
plants typically contain 5% to 20% THC.) You can't get high from 
hemp, but starting in 1937, U.S. drug laws made cultivating it off-limits.

Finally, the U.S. hemp industry is back. A provision in the 2014 farm 
bill signed by President Obama on Feb. 7 removed hemp grown for 
research purposes from the Controlled Substances Act, the main 
federal drug law.

Not a moment too soon. American farmers have been watching as 
Canadian farmers clear huge profits from hemp: $250 per acre in 2013. 
By comparison, South Dakota State University predicts that soy, a 
major crop, will net U.S. farmers $71 per acre in 2014.

Canada's windfall has been largely due to the American demand for 
omega-balanced hempseed oil. But hemp is also a go-to material for 
dozens of applications all over the world. In a Dutch factory 
recently, I held the stronger-than-steel hemp fiber that's used in 
Mercedes door panels, and Britain's Marks and Spencer department 
store chain used hemp fiber insulation in a new flagship outlet. 
"Hempcrete" outperforms fiberglass insulation.

Farmers I've interviewed from Oregon to Ohio have gotten the memo. In 
a Kansas-abutting corner of eastern Colorado, in the town of 
Springfield, 41-year-old Ryan Loflin wants to save his family farm 
with hemp. "It takes half the water that wheat does," Loflin told me, 
scooping up a handful of drought-scarred soil so parched it evoked 
the Sahara, "and provides four times the income. Hemp is going to 
revive farming families in the climate-change era."

 From an agronomic perspective, American farmers need to start by 
importing dozens of hemp varieties (known as cultivars) from seed 
stock worldwide. This is vital because our own hemp seed stock, once 
the envy of the world, was lost to prohibition. This requires 
diversity and quantity because North Dakota's soil and climate are 
different from Kentucky's, which are different from California's. 
Also, the broad variety of hemp applications requires distinct cultivars.

Legally, farmers and researchers doing pilot programs in the 15 
states that have their own hemp legislation (including California) 
now have the right to import those seeds. The point of the research 
authorization in the farm bill is explicitly to rebuild our seed 
stock. Such research is how the modern Canadian hemp industry was 
kick-started in 1998.

But one final hurdle has been placed in front of American hemp 
entrepreneurs. In Kentucky, U.S. Customs officials, at the behest of 
the Drug Enforcement Administration, in May seized a 286-pound 
shipment of Italian hemp seed bound for the state's agriculture 
department. After a weeklong standoff, a federal agency had to be 
reminded by the federal courts that the law had changed and 
Kentucky's seed imports were legal.

The problem is as much an entrenched bureaucratic mind-set as the ink 
drying on the new federal hemp policy. DEA Administrator Michele 
Leonhart told a law enforcement group last month that the hoisting of 
a hemp flag above the U.S. Capitol last July 4 was "the low point in 
my career."

It should have been a high point. Hemp's economic potential is too 
big to ignore. When he was China's president, Hu Jintao visited that 
nation's hemp fiber processors in 2009 to demand that farmers 
cultivate 2 million acres to replace pesticide-heavy cotton. Canada 
funded its cultivar research for farmers, with today's huge payoff.

Even Roger Ford, a politically conservative Kentucky utility owner, 
told me his Patriot BioEnergy's biofuels division would be planting 
hemp on coal- and tobacco-damaged soil the moment it was legal. Why? 
To use the fiber harvest for clean biomass energy. "We have a proud 
history of hemp in the South," Ford told me.

Congress knows the farm bill hemp provision is just a baby step. The 
real solution is the Industrial Hemp Farming Act, introduced by Sen. 
Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), which would allow nationwide commercial hemp 
cultivation. Colorado, already ahead of federal law on legalizing 
psychoactive cannabis, is also in front on hemp; it has a state law 
allowing commercial hemp cultivation. At least 1,600 acres were 
planted this season.

Wyden's bill should be fasttracked. In the meantime, Rep. Thomas 
Massie (R-Ky.) believes hemp is so important for the Bluegrass State 
that he's not waiting for another brouhaha over seed imports. He 
added an amendment to a bill that controls the DEA's budget to 
specifically protect imported hemp seeds from seizure. It passed in 
the House 246 to 162 on May 30.

It's a necessary move: Just last week at the Canadian border, the DEA 
seized another shipment of hemp seeds, this time bound for Colorado 
farmers. This counterproductive nonsense must stop.

American farmers and investors need our support to catch up with 
Canada's and the rest of the world's hemp head start. Now. As Loflin 
put it when I toured his family's 1,200 acre Colorado spread, "I'm 
planting hemp to show my neighbors that small farmers have a real 
option as businesspeople in the digital age."

We're down to 1% of Americans farming; it was 30% when our 
world-leading hemp industry was stymied in 1937. The crop is more 
valuable today than it was then. We should be waving flags and 
holding parades for the farmers ready to plant the crop that Thomas 
Jefferson called "vastly desirable." I know I'm ready. To cheer, and to plant.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom