What if I told you there was a miracle plant? One that has over 25,000 uses from rope to
clothes, to concrete, to medicine. A plant that grew quick and tall, that dug its roots
deep into the dirt and sequestered tons of carbon back into the soil while sucking polluting
metals back out of it. Could you guess what it is? I’ll give you a hint, it’s been
demonized for its association with its cousin, weed. That’s right, this miracle plant is
hemp. But in the U.S. it’s barely grown. So why, if hemp can do such good, has it been
so villainized in the eyes of Americans. This is the shocking story of how the United States
almost had a sustainable, hemp-based society, and then threw it all away.
The Many Wonders of Hemp: Hemp, a non psychoactive strain of the cannabis
plant, seems like it can do everything. It’s one of the fastest growing plants on the planet,
is able to sequester 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the soil per hectare, and crowds out
weeds to such an extent that very little herbicide is needed to grow it successfully. When implemented
in a crop rotation, hemp can be a boon to farmers. Indeed, the Rodale Institute found
in their hemp cover crop trials that yields of soybean and wheat increased in the next
year while weed pressure dwindled. This might be in part due to the plant’s ability to
pull heavy metals like cadmium and lead out of the soil while aerating the soiling with
its root system, ultimately leaving a healthier soil for the next plant. In short, hemp’s
impact on soil is minimal while also sequestering a massive amount of carbon in a very short
period of time. But hemp’s benefits don’t end on the farm. As I mentioned earlier, according
to the USDA it has over 25,000 uses. Its seeds are nutrient dense and can be eaten raw or
made into milk or oils. Its stalks can be used to make fiber that’s stronger, more
absorbent, more durable, and better insulating than cotton, and if clothing isn’t what
you need then you can make hemp paper, or even hemp concrete. That’s right, concrete.
When you mix the wooden refuse from the fiber-making process with a lime-based binder and water
you get a hardened substance similar to traditional concrete. Except this concrete filters CO2
out of the air as it dries. As a result, a meter squared area of hempcrete can sequester
up to 16 kg of CO2e over its lifecycle. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg, there
are many more applications like insulation that can be made from hemp. So, if hemp can
fulfill so many needs, then why isn’t it all over the place now?
The Deep Roots of Hemp: Back in 8,000 B.C.E Mesopotamian were weaving
hemp cord into pottery. That’s right, hemp was getting used as far back as 10,000 years
ago. In fact, the plant is one of the first cultivated crops. In China, hemp has been
continuously cultivated for over 6,000 years, with farmers first converting the crop into
textiles and then later in 150 B.C. into some of the first paper. And from the paper of
the Magna Carta to the very sails that brought the violence of colonialism to the shores
of North America, hemp has been a part of history. In fact, the early days of the United
States were marked by an intensive hemp economy. In 1535, King Henry VIII of England required
farmers to sow at least ¼ acre of their land with hemp, because, at the time, 80% of clothing
was made from hemp. As a result the American colonial project partly developed on the back
of hemp. The first American colony in Jamestown, Virginia mandated farmers grow hemp in 1619,
and soon after Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Chesapeake Bay Colonies all enacted
similar laws. Hemp was even used as a form of currency in colonies. George Washington
farmed hemp, and so did Thomas Jefferson. In short, hemp was a cash crop in the American
colonies. But there was a problem: hemp required a significant amount of labor to harvest and
process. This was solved at first by the violent use of forced labor of enslaved people, but
as the cotton industry soon took off and the cotton gin made cotton that much quicker to
process, hemp products slid into a decline. But the story doesn’t end there. Hemp farms
in Missouri and Kentucky continued to pump out fibers for sails and textiles throughout
the 19th century and into the early 20th century. But it’s here, in the early years of the
20th century, that we begin to see the last threads of the American hemp industry wither
away.
How The U.S. Stopped Hemp: The American hemp industry was struggling
in 1919. Steam engines were replacing hemp sails, cotton was overshadowing hemp clothes,
and there was not yet an industrialized mechanism to keep up with the advances of the logging
and alternative textile industries. But that year, a promising development appeared on
the horizon. G.W. Schlichten took out a patent for a machine that would reduce the labor
required to produce hemp by a factor of 100. Essentially it was the hemp version of the
cotton gin. Everything was ready for an American hemp boom. The tools were there, the crops
were sown, and then, because of stoked up racist anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese fears
of weed, states like California and Texas outlawed recreational use of the drug, and
as a result hemp’s association with the its psychoactive cousin gave investors cold
feet, so Schlichten wasn’t able to take his plans to market. Soon after hemp farming
declined rapidly from 41,200 acres in 1917 to just 600 acres in 1929. America’s Hemp
Industry was at death’s door, and the final nail in the coffin was reefer madness propaganda
campaign of the 1930s. The campaign was rumored to have been partially driven by newspaper
tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s fear of hemp overtaking traditional tree paper-making
operations, as well as the fossil fuel chemical company DuPont’s desire to crush any resurgence
of hemp that would threaten to compete with their new plastic fiber invention, nylon.
“Reefer madness” ruthlessly villainized weed, and through association, hemp. Steeped
in racism and fear mongering, the campaign was largely a success in the eyes of its conservative
creators and by 1937, the Marihuana Tax Act was implemented, which placed a heavy tax
on the sale of any cannabis product, including hemp products. The tax and the plant’s stiff
competition left hemp farmers withering, except for a brief period during WW2 where the U.S.
government spurred the growth of hemp to create military goods and uniforms. By 1958, however,
industrial hemp had gone extinct in the United States. But now, in 2021, a new hope is growing
for the American hemp industry, one that could possibly point us towards a sustainable, plant-based
future with a much smaller impact.
A New Hemp Revolution? After almost 70 years of lying dormant, the
seeds of hemp are sprouting through American soils once again. As of October 2019, 46 states
in the U.S. are allowed to grow hemp for commercial purposes. Hemp was removed from its classification
as a schedule 1 drug and now is considered a commodity crop in the eyes of the federal
government. Driven by a boom in CBD and hemp-based foods, 148,780 acres of hemp were farmed in
2019. IMarc research group predicts that the hemp market will expand by 18% by 2026. This
is promising, but in order to truly live up to its potential, the hemp industry not only
needs to develop quickly but also its uses need to expand outside the realm of CBD. Hemp
concrete, hemp fuel, hemp clothing, hemp insulation, and hemp paper could all potentially replace
their current counterparts. But the question is, if hemp production is scaled up, will
it actually be better than current practices or will it just be another commodity crop
like corn?
How We Need to Treat Hemp: “I feel that that plant can help us undo
the mess that we've made but we have to approach it right you know because we will get nowhere
if we continue with the same aggressive industrial behavior we'll get nowhere.” That’s Winona
LaDuke, co-founder of Honor the Earth, Hemp Activist, and member of the Ojibwe Nation.
She drills to down the heart of the matter when it comes to hemp cultivation. While hemp
is certainly more sustainable than the fossil-fuel-derived plastics or carbon hungry concrete we currently
use, an industrialized hemp system could very well throw us back into the same hole we’ve
been trying to dig ourselves out of. If we carry over our same capitalist, industrial
agricultural systems into hemp farming, we’re going to get a whole lot of CBD and tired
soil. A transition into a hemp economy could, however, offer a pivot point. A point that
moves from extractive monocultural farming, to regenerative polycultural stewardship.
This means using appropriate technologies, no till methods, compost, and crop rotations
among many other systems to not only sequester carbon, but heal the soil as well. And these
sustainable methods are already being developed by people like Winona LaDuke, who helped establish
the tribal hemp initiative through the Anishinabe Agriculture Institute. Up in Northern Minnesota,
LaDuke and many others are working to bring traditional hemp farming techniques in parallel
with modern practices to create a thriving Indigenous-led hemp industry. An industry
the runs counter to a fossil fuel thirsty industrial agricultural industry by demonstrating
that a more ethical world is already possible. LaDuke is showing us just the tip of the iceberg,
because if cultivated appropriately, hemp could change the world; we just have to pay
attention to the soil between our toes, the land all around us, and have the courage to
transition to a new agricultural system
If you’re interested in learning more about the specifics of hemp concrete or want to
know a little bit more about how it’s currently being implemented into the world of construction,
then you’re in luck. I wrote a little bonus section all about hempcrete, but I didn’t
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