Gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) is … known to affect vital metabolic roles in humans, ranging from control of inflammation and vascular tone to initiation of contractions during childbirth. GLA has been found to alleviate psoriasis, atopic eczema, and mastalgia, and may also benefit cardiovascular, psychiatric, and immunological disorders … As much as 15 percent of the human population may benefit from addition of GLA to their diet … It is important to note that hemp is the only current natural food source of GLA, i.e. not requiring the consumption of extracted dietary supplements. Because of the extremely desirable fatty acid constitution of hemp (seed) oil, it is now being marketed as a dietary supplement.
—ERNEST SMALL and DAVID MARCUS, Hemp: A New Crop with New Uses for North America1
Snacks? What kind of snacks? Are they good snacks?
—HOBBES, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Even when I’m on the road, not a day goes by when hempseed is not in and on my body. I pack the liquid Hemp in Hemp in checked luggage for air travel, and I keep hemp hearts and cacao nibs on-call in my carry-on. At home, I eat probably a solid cupful of hempseed in some form most days, and it’s in my human and goat kids’ bellies by 8:00 a.m.
But my diet is not yet typical. Many of us who are part of the early, self-reinforcing hemp-family bubble tend to think everybody on the planet is a day away from kicking Wheat Thins and switching to hempseed. The reality, as we’ve discussed, is that 99 percent of North American homes have never popped open a hempseed oil bottle or filled a bulk produce bag with hemp hearts.
A Deserving Diet Craze
So how do we spark the diet craze that will expand our acreage to where our climate needs it? In order to do its part in preventing humanity from tumbling over the climate precipice, hemp has to become a staple crop. That doesn’t happen in energy-demanding sinsemilla “grow facilities.” It happens on huge numbers of outdoor farms cultivating for food. According to the Environmental Protection Association (EPA), hemp sequesters 14 metric tons of carbon per acre.2
How many acres represent a staple crop? Let’s start with those 234.7 million acres American farmers currently devote to soy, corn, cotton, and wheat. If organic dioecious hemp acreage reaches that level, we’ll be sequestering 3.29 billion metric tons of carbon.
Not to overshoot or anything. We are speaking about a crop currently at 150,000 acres. Our goal might seem to run a bit beyond the 20-acre farms on which we’ve been focusing. Without a doubt, we are talking about quantity if we’re trying to launch a healthy food renaissance. But 14 million farmers each cultivating 20 acres gets us there. That still only gets 4.6 percent of Americans farming. And those numbers come down when you reflect that in states like North Dakota, the average farm size is 1,238 acres. Roger Gussiaas’s smallest contract farmer for his seed presses in the Peace Garden State grows 50 acres (a 50,000-pound seed contract, by dry weight), but most are in the hundreds of acres.
Make no mistake: Farmers have the number one job in the regenerative economy. That’s because agriculture, which today releases more carbon than all modes of transportation combined, will sequester the most carbon when regenerative modes become the norm.3 I envision one day flying in a solar-powered, hemp-bodied plane, over section upon section of hemp planted in a checkerboard pattern in rotation with other large-scale food and soil-building crops. All grown organically, all sequestering carbon, unbroken horizon to horizon.
About five years after we hit that target, while you’re enjoying the cleaner air and water and stronger rural economy, don’t forget to take some pleasure in watching all the pundits currently predicting CBD will be the largest long-term hemp sector quickly change their stories. That’s good. That means climate change is being addressed.
To literally seed the supply side, if I held the USDA purse strings (or its equivalent in any nation), I would direct tons of energy, human power, and funding toward a Digital Age Homesteading Act that incentivizes a surge in independent hemp production and other soil-building crops that provide healthy food. The idea fits seamlessly with all this talk of a Green New Deal. It also rebuilds rural communities while all the climate mitigating is under way.
Incentivizing is a start. But the fact is, as I mentioned when relating the impact of my own family’s wildfire jolt, we all probably require the single-minded refocusing of economic purpose that last occurred in the United States after Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941 in order to achieve our goal of immediately transforming our agricultural economy into a regenerative one. Of course, pretty much everyone I meet across the planet who does not hold a public office or work for Monsanto or Syngenta seems to realize this is imperative. But no one wants to experience a collective, climate-based shock. In this case it would probably mean a major city sinking into the ocean.
Even with incentives boosting supply, there must be consistent, enduring markets for all these putative millions of acres of fantastic hemp and companion crops. Billions of people must crunch hemp food every day, instead of today’s mere millions.
A couple of years back I had an idea. As an author, I recognize that there are few better ways to guarantee a spot on a best-seller list than to capitalize on a diet fad. The list is always clogged with some secret to weight loss that is linked with a healthy, sexy future. Celery Juice: The Most Powerful Medicine of Our Time Healing Millions Worldwide is dancing with the top 20 on Amazon right now.
This kind of title used to cause me dismay, but I can’t deny the genre moves units. As a survivor of the Atkins craze, I have memories of having to fight for my slices of bread at restaurants against significant moral opposition. Remembering the force of that diet fad, I think, a decade later, that it would be cool if we early industry influencers rallied to establish hempseed as the next diet craze, the next acai, the new Paleo. I’m happy to write the diet book.
It helps that hemp will make a legitimate health craze for a lot of reasons, from its ideal omega 9-6-3 ratios to magnesium levels difficult to find in vegan foods. But a lot of foods are healthy. Healthy alone isn’t enough for the best-seller lists. The question I’ve been mulling is: For someone who has never eaten hempseed or hempseed oil, what one beneficial component of its impressive nutritive profile sets hemp apart from the field? What will make millions of people take their first bite? Once they do, I’m confident they will continue biting.4
Our friend Chad Rosen, over at Victory Hemp Foods, is an ideal fellow to talk to about this kind of thing. The 40-year-old Kentucky native started pressing hempseed for a 100-acre contract with a farmer in 2015, and today says, “I think I remember when a ton a day felt like a lot.” Victory now presses three tons of oil per day.
I called Chad early during my inquiries into this topic of launching hemp food into the big leagues. If his take didn’t bring me down to earth slightly, it did educate me to ask the right questions. That’s because Chad is not a cheerleader. Rather he is one of the few US folks, alongside Roger Gussiaas and a couple of others, who can speak as a real-world seed-market veteran.
“I burst a lot of people’s bubbles when I say that hemp has a big learning curve before it totally remakes the human diet,” he admitted to me. “Because we don’t really know how folks eat it yet. A spoonful of hemp hearts in yogurt is not a major industry.”
“I hear that,” I said, spooning a tablespoon of hemp hearts into my yogurt.
He added, “Will there be a dominant taste profile, or many profiles? At the commodity level there are advantages to consistency, although hemp’s diversity can of course be an asset at the craft level.”
I understood his point: People don’t even know what they mean or what they want when they speak about the taste of hempseed. Most don’t even know it’s technically a nut.
“And here’s another difference between hempseed oil and other popular oils. You eat hemp oil raw, you don’t cook with it. That’s a learning curve for some customers.”
3T3-L1 and Your Lipid Neighborhood
Chad’s broader message is that hemp needs its “hook.” We have truth on our side, sure. We’ve already got our fellow label readers, our fellow co-op shoppers. You can always find hemp hearts, hemp cereal, and hemp energy bars at Whole Foods. But if we’re talking about significantly displacing corn and soy with organic hemp as a human and nonhuman food staple, how do we get there? How does hemp come to mean something as pervasive as (and let us pray, even longer-lasting than) Atkins? What, I still wondered, would be that best-seller’s title?
I discovered the answer in January 2018, on a volcanic rock 3,700 miles west of the Funky Butte Ranch. It happened at one of the tea ceremonies Professor Qing X. Li, PhD (Qing to his friends) was always holding in his offices in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Really good white tea, too; it came loose in beautifully painted tin containers with calligraphic labels.
Qing, biochemist, Renaissance man, and one of true nice guys of this world, liked to shoot the breeze in this kind of Pacific Rim salon setting. When I was on-island for field visits during the research collaboration with the university, I would join project coordinator Heidel on Honolulu supply runs. As with Colville in 2017, the Hawaii project genetics lived in a DEA-supported locker. In this case, a locked fridge down the hallway from Qing’s office.
“3T3-L1,” my favorite academic said at one of these teas, setting down his enamel cup and writing the sequence on the dry-erase board beside the break room table piled high with back issues of light reading like the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry and Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.5 “This is a typical lipid cell used in an obesity study. We looked at the impact of a hemp diet on it.”
He returned to the table and casually refilled our glasses, as though he weren’t about to drop a piece of potentially humanity-altering research he had been quietly conducting in paradise. I mean, if this work comes to fruition, it might alter the very shape of the human form.
“You are skinnier than me,” Qing continued, elbowing me impishly. (We’re equally thin.) “Not necessarily because your fat cells are fewer. It’s because you have less lipid in each of your cells. I have a few more cell blocks in my lipid neighborhood.”
You might want to be sitting down for this next part. Qing, stressing that his research is “at a very early stage,” said that when hemp is part of a diet, it looks like the 3T3-L1 cells are inhibited. “They appear to stay smaller.”
Qing’s preliminary research indicates that a hemp diet plays a role in combatting obesity. I realized in a flash that the diet-craze book title is, of course, The 3T3-L1 Diet: Hemp Keeps You Thin.
“That research made me interested enough in industrial hemp to want to grow it in the field,” Qing went on, breaking out the chocolate wafers that would soon be fighting with my hempseed breakfast over the girth of my lipid cells. “Because the promise is there, I’m willing to spend extra effort to do more studies.”
Hemp Keeps You Thin. Ya know, in conjunction with exercise, a comprehensively healthy diet, and genetic good fortune. We now possess, in fat cell blocking, the ultimate diet hook. And the best part is, when the craze hits, it may do some real good, for farmers and customers. I now frequently envision hundreds of millions of people getting visibly thinner over six months or however long by adding a delicious superfood to their waffles.
I see how to get there. Heck, diet books were the rage even before the current obesity and diabetes epidemics, back when folks only thought they were overweight, because TV and diet books told them they were. Now they really are, and “food”-related health issues are among the most serious and pervasive problems facing the species.
“3T3-L1,” Qing said again as we cleaned up the table several wafers later. Melody and I were picking up some clippers, then heading an hour south to the field while volcanoes rumbled one island over. “Remember that.”
“I will,” I replied with vim. And I have. Qing explained a game-changing concept magnificently and, equally important for mass media exposure, succinctly. He had me at “fat cells stay smaller.”
An Inflamed Species
Even as more research is conducted on the anti-obesity front (obviously no one’s really writing a diet book until we see years of double-blind studies, peer-reviewed and all that), we already have the requisite sequel in the Hemp Keeps You Thin series lined up. It comes from existing knowledge about another one of hemp’s nutritive components: anti-inflammatory properties.
It was hemp food giant Nutiva’s 60-year-old founder John Roulac, citing the 2002 paper by David Marcus and the impactful Ernest Small that serves as the first epigraph for this chapter, who first clued me in to gamma-linolenic acid (GLA).
“Many folks don’t realize how important GLA is, and how hard it is to obtain from food sources,” Roulac told me not long after we met a half decade ago. “It’s an omega-6 associated with anti-inflammatory properties.”
That is likely because of the eicosanoid metabolites (which are building blocks of fatty acids) in GLA, according to Dr. Dylan MacKay, a nutritional biochemist at the University of Manitoba, although he added that more research is needed before there is consensus on this point. And it is under way, including multiple studies showing anti-inflammatory effects of hemp diets in pigs, mice, and guinea pigs.6
The anti-inflammatory discussion is a hot one these days because, well, so many folks find their digestive, immune, ocular, and other regulatory systems in a state of cell inflammation. Diet, air and water quality, and pharmaceutical side effects all probably play a role in this disastrous mishmash.
Let’s look at digestion. According to the nutritional philosophy espoused by people like physician Andrew Weil and Stanford microbiology and immunology professor Justin Sonnenburg, what’s happening in your gut is very similar to what’s happening in soil: Your endogenous chemicals and (ideally beneficial) microflora are speaking to the nutrients and (ideally beneficial) microorganisms in your food. Collectively this internal ecosystem is called your microbiome.
To encourage microbial balance in the ol’ belly, I eat a lot of fermented foods and home-raised goat yogurt. My anti-inflammatory regimen also includes avoiding unnecessary food additives. I read every label before I crunch something, looking out for sketchy ingredients including corn syrup, natural flavors, or autolyzed yeast.
But what about those who are in a perpetual crisis mode with one of their body’s regulatory systems, especially when inflammation might be the culprit (or at least one of the suspects)? GLA’s documented properties in this area make it a de rigueur part of a daily human diet. So our sequel best-seller title, hopefully while the original obesity-themed selection is still topping the lists, is Hemp Keeps You in Balance.
Hemp Animal Feed
There’s one more dietary area that itself might well demand a few hundred million hemp acres. Its manifestation in book form can be called, Hemp: It’s Not Just for Humans Anymore. I can attest that hemp feed results in maximum performance for my goat herd. But I feel obligated to add that it does not mean hemp makes your goats behave. Still, we need this livestock side of the dietary revolution—it is coming, and it will be big. Millions-of-acres big.
Factory farming of 65 billion critters in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) contributes 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse emissions, including 37 percent of methane, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. This is why you roll up your windows when you drive past one of those “ranches.”
I was thinking about this after the 2018 Oregon harvest as Edgar, Margaret, and I fed the koi a dash of the hempseed they so love. I filmed the ensuing vegan fish feeding frenzy with a submerged GoPro, and was so impressed that I looked up some stats. Animal feed is a $297 billion industry in the United States, according to the Institute for Feed Education and Research, with 75 percent of that GMO corn- and soy-based (for the moment).
Hemp as livestock feed has a long legacy in the United States. At a book signing following the first talk I gave when Hemp Bound came out in 2014 (this was in Denver and televised on C-SPAN), a sturdy octogenarian rancher from Nebraska named Nan approached me and filled me in on a bit of American agricultural history.
“Growing up, I knew it was spring when my daddy had us plant hemp along the irrigation ditch,” she said. “The roots helped the ditch walls hold fast whether we faced drought or flood. And I knew it was fall when we set the cattle on that hemp to finish ’em. They loved it.”
I can relate—my goats do this sort of joyful sideways hind leg kick when I bust out the hemp-protein meal. We humans should kick, too, as we benefit from healthier, hemp-fed animals: In Hemp Bound, we visited with Canadian researchers who had just completed a study showing that hemp-fed hens produced more nutritious eggs than corn-fed hens.
Yet in the United States, hemp as livestock feed is still, astoundingly, fighting for the necessary federal designation known as GRAS (generally recognized as safe).7 But don’t worry: Iowa farmer Ethan Vorhes and the Hemp Feed Coalition team are fighting a disciplined fight on the livestock front. Ethan just wants the competitive advantage he believes hemp will provide his cattle. Today you can feed hemp to your own animals, of course, and to commercial livestock that humans don’t eat, like horses and dogs. But not yet to commercial cattle, chickens, and the rest.
When we inevitably win that battle, the numbers we add to the 944,000 jobs that the Institute for Feed Education and Research says the animal feed industry already provides might help raise our percentage of Americans farming close to our target of 30 percent.
One other note on the protein-rich meal that is hempseed oil’s by-product: It might provide a competitive edge to nonhuman athletes. It was my colleague Marty Phipps of Old Dominion Hemp in Virginia who convinced me to do the original Samurai protein test that came out at 31 percent, because the Olympic-level dressage horse owners to whom he already provided hemp hurd for bedding were interested in the known nutritional benefits of high-protein feed supplements—from any source.
These are high-performance animals, of the “this filly is worth more than your ranch and mine put together” class. Their owners are looking for the same kind of hundredths-of-a-second performance advantages that human Olympic sprinters seek. So now Marty and I are going to work together to expand this market. Others have started looking livestock-ward as well. Hemp dog treats are already big. Look for hemp-based high-performance livestock supplements to become another deserved craze in the near future.
We need that craze. Both Chad Rosen and Roger Gussiaas tell me that protein meal is the more difficult seed-based product to move in their current inventory. The oil flies off the shelves. My prediction is that protein meal will catch up when hemp livestock feed comes online.
To hold up my end on the human consumption side, I’ll make sure Hemp Keeps You Thin contains plenty of recipes for hemp protein in bread, cakes, cookies, healthy shakes, and, of course, waffles. All I ask of you is that you grow some of those 234.7 million acres of it every year. Or help ensure that those who do make very fine livings. Which is really the key remaining piece of this puzzle. The hemp diet craze only works if farmers prosper. I mean lucrative, dentist-level livings for millions of farming families.
Farmers in the American heartland and similar breadbaskets around the world know how to cultivate grain. And they do it on a vast scale. It’s not uncommon for one farm family to plant five or more sections. Which leads to a legitimate question some macroeconomist might ask about mass hemp acreage: “If we really grow millions of acres of hemp, won’t the market crash?” In other words, in our “go big with hempseed” thesis, aren’t we violating Wendell Berry’s prime directive?
The answer, in my view, is a firm no. That is, if we’re smart about developing long-term markets. The surplus value of organic certification plays an important role.
“We offer two and a half times the price for organic on our seed contracts,” Roger Gussiaas told me of his Healthy Oilseeds business, where every acre is grown outdoors and the presses never stop.
The 58-year-old Roger, a generous member of Team Hemp who even invites potential competitors to facility tours in the name of expanding the food side of the industry, has a farmer-friendly “act of God” clause with his farmers. This assures farmers some payment even if a crop doesn’t pan out. Needless to say, such protections should be a component of any Digital Age Homesteading Act.
If organic hempseed at this scale brings in a conservative $1 per pound wholesale to a farmer who has low overhead on 3,000 acres and who harvests 1,000 pounds per acre, that means a $3 million crop for that farming family. Plus the family’s work is done when the seed is delivered to the grain bin. No barn ice-skating, for better or for worse. Although nothing’s stopping that family from also marketing an artisan secondary-market product.
It’s Raining Organic Hemp Energy Bars
Along those lines, I wanted to check out if value-added hempseed product lines are an option. This investigation gained some urgency when I got an email from a Pennsylvania farmer in 2018 who was having trouble moving her wholesale seed. As markets stand now, if you start working on it with the same vigor we’re been discussing on the flower side, you’ve got a shot. But it’s no fait accompli, even according to one of the most successful value-added seed purveyors in the business.
When I first met Evo Hemp cofounder Ari Sherman at the company’s Boulder, Colorado, facility in 2016, he and cofounder Jourdan Samel (biz school buddies, both then under 30) were already moving close to a million units a year. These were all-organic, US-sourced hemp energy bars. Varieties at the time included cashew cacao and mango macadamia.
A million hemp bars! That sounded mighty impressive to me, a fellow who had not yet expanded to a thousand units. In fact, you could see the Boulder Whole Foods Market location that Evo Hemp supplied right from the company’s front door.
“That’s actually the store where I got the original ingredients when we were toying around with our first bars,” Ari told me as we toured a warehouse full of ready-to-ship cases of hemp bars. “I bought their bulk hempseed and fruit. Now we sell them the products.”
Foolish, naïve me. I thought selling a million products meant you’d cleared a million dollars. I thought these guys had made it. They had been written up in Forbes. Then, as we tasted samples of the new mocha chip bars, Ari spilled the beans about how the big-league retail food business works, from the independent entrepreneur point of view. Even at a million units sold, he and Jourdan hadn’t been paid yet.
“The way it works is, you get the honor of being given shelf space at a big store,” he explained. “But it’d better sell. If it doesn’t sell well, you don’t necessarily get paid right from the start. The chains set the rules, until you’re making them a lot of money.”
“Isn’t that theft?” I asked.
Ari looked at me for a moment, then tilted his head in a sort of, I guess I never looked at it that way kind of way.
Fast-forward three years, when Ari and I spoke again in 2019. I asked first off if he felt Evo Hemp was over the hump, from a bootstrapping entrepreneurial standpoint.
“As most entrepreneurs learn quickly,” he said. “There are many different plateaus that an enterprise reaches. I don’t think we’re ever over every hump. People like us have a hungry nature. But the short answer is that yes, we’re over the hump that we discussed in 2016. As things grow, you start to see other hurdles in front of you, the next plateau. Each of which brings its own set of challenges and opportunities.”
I asked the obvious: “What’s the next plateau?”
“Jourdan and I have had to wear every hat up until now,” Ari said. “We’re the packing guys, salesmen, we’re physically making products, doing product development.”
“I’ve even seen you as chief spokesmodel at trade show booths,” I said.
He laughed. “Exactly. The next steps are building out teams. We’ve hired a graphic designer, for instance, which will free us on the marketing side.”
“How many Evo Hemp Bars get eaten every year now?” I asked.
“We’ll sell more than five million bars in 2019,” Ari said. “Besides Whole Foods, now we’re in Costco, Kroger, Barnes and Noble, Fresh Market, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Ross.”
“As a result, on the manufacturing side,” he continued, “our demand has exceeded our supply capabilities here in Boulder. That’s a good problem, but we need two extra production facilities for the bars. And now we’re moving into other categories, like our topical CBD line.”
“With how many farmers does Evo Hemp contract?” I asked.
“Six farmers on fourteen hundred acres paid two dollars per pound for organic in 2018,” Ari said.
No point dancing around the bottom line. “Are you and Jourdan getting paid yet?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ari said with a chuckle. “Not any crazy executive salaries. But we are able to live a sustainable lifestyle in Boulder. Which is not a super affordable area.”
We spent the last bit of our chat commiserating on the “Oh well, we entrepreneurs will sleep when we’re dead” theme.
“The work is never-ending, and taxing on Jourdan and me as individuals,” Ari said. “We have a sort of positive feedback loop with supportive colleagues and family, which helps.”
“I love seeing a hemp entrepreneur’s social media post from a forest or a beach when I know he’s been working hard for a long time,” I said. “I think, ‘Good for you. A little vaycay.’”
“I don’t know what that is,” Ari said.
Yeah, I thought. And you don’t have kids yet.