Long-lived (ant) colonies in the desert regulate their behavior not to maximize or optimize food intake, but instead to keep going without wasting resources … (this) allows the colony to deal with high operating costs.… The ants have evolved ways of working together that we haven’t yet dreamed of.
—DEBORAH M. GORDON1
Packaging materials are an impactful starting point for regenerative enterprises, especially from the entrepreneur’s standpoint. As a production-level buyer, you can, as Margaret does, make good decisions in your product line’s containers. But how do 20-acre farm-based enterprises make millions of tons of hemp fiber? The answer is, collectively. Our rugged individualists must collaborate.
Easier said than done. An agricultural truism holds that getting farmers to cooperate is like herding cats. It’s actually worse than that. Cat herders, commiserating over a cannabinoid beverage at the end of a rough day, describe their shift as “like herding farmers.” Rather than attempting to link up when it comes to their proprietary apps on the flower or seed side, it is much more likely to be in a region’s farmers’ best interest to join together on the fiber side. Precisely because the cats don’t need to be herded. For the most part, they can stay on their own turf.
Your hemp fiber is like a mountain: It’s there, no matter what your primary hemp application is. And it ain’t worth much until you make something from it. One of my consulting clients was offered $250 per ton for what they call mixed fiber bales—straight out of the field. That felt low to me. A Louisville, Kentucky–based fiber-processing company, Sunstrand LLC, offered contract farmers $600 per acre for harvested fiber in 2018.2 Although in and of itself, raw fiber doesn’t provide a bonanza, even $400 an acre net isn’t bad if you’re also deriving a living from the seed or flower sides of the crop (or both).
Better still, when farmers follow Dolly and Wendell’s directives, their enterprises’ fiber value increases immediately once they make their initially low-value fiber into any finished product. If bagging clean hurd is all you do, as Marty at Old Dominion demonstrates, you quadruple your fiber’s value.
If all you have to do is open your gates for your regional fiber co-op’s dump truck once per season, and the next you hear about it is when you receive a check for your share of the retail value of a final horse bedding product, fiber might prove a real benefit to independent farmer-entrepreneurs. But even though fiber might be the component of hemp’s (and other plants’) architecture that will play the largest role in extending human tenure here on terra firma, successful development of biomaterials as a mainstream industrial feedstock is far from guaranteed.
In any promising industry, it’s the people already trying to survive in it who will deliver the cheerleader a reality check. There are three common themes in all my interviews with bio-based material engineers: Fiber processing requires pretty large entry costs, massive amounts of material, and, depending on the application, a fair amount of expertise.
For instance, when you ask plant-based materials engineer Patrick Flaherty, founder of Kentucky’s PF Design Lab, what an independent farming cooperative might want to know about industrial fiber like plastics or boxes, he pulls out three different composite strips (called coupons), flicks them like diving boards, and replies, “Are you interested in strength or stiffness? What’s the aspect ratio in your product? What vibration damping properties are you looking for to dissipate energy?”3
There’s a science to fiber, in other words. Aspect ratio, for example, is the length of the fiber pieces within your plastic composite or cardboard divided by its diameter. It will be different in, say, a skateboard versus a compostable shipping box. Fiber pros like Shane Ball, who for two years was farmer relations manager for Sunstrand, said, “Basically we could refine fiber into whatever the app is—we could process to the micron.” These guys have engineers and chemists on staff.
For independents, there is a low-hanging fruit on the fiber side, and it’s that hurd: Our inner core of the hemp stalk once it is separated from the long strands of outer bast. Hurd is relatively easy to produce, once you have the equipment and sufficient supply. Separate the hurd from the bast, clean and chop it to the right dimensions, and bag it.
Hurd markets are both existing and growing. The most rapidly developing ones are hemp building feedstock and animal bedding. As we discussed, Marty Phipps still had to import hurd to meet demand for his high-end horse bedding as of 2018. Hurd was the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian market in 2016. Which isn’t really saying much, since seed-based apps still dominate in Canada and hemp flower wasn’t even legal back then. The point is that relatively easy hurd apps like hemp-based building are coming into their own.
But hurd is still a crop. Farming practices affect fiber properties, which then contribute to the properties of the market-ready fiber. Still, the technical challenges for a simple hurd operation aren’t a deal breaker for a coalition of independent hemp farmers.
“Hurd is hurd, pretty much,” Flaherty said. “But when it comes to [bast] fiber, input quality is critical. And time. It can take three seasons before you dial in your fiber yield and quality protocol. And before you fully learn your decortication equipment.”
So our putative fiber cooperative might be wise to invest in a facility and equipment that can handle all sides of the stalk, but start with hurd. Become pros at that part of the plant. At the same time, this shrewd co-op has members working to build mutually beneficial relationships on the retail side (obvious choices are hardware, livestock, and home-supply outlets) while developing a reputation for providing something that is new, interesting, regional, and of good quality. “Nebraska Hemp Fiber Co-op,” for instance, is a terrific building material brand.
If the co-op’s members also find they can market the lower-quality bast for the local university’s battery research, a paper-pulping endeavor, or as spill-cleanup material, that’s just more revenue for the co-op. Sunstrand even has customers who use the residual hemp-fiber dust that the company’s filters catch for compost.
PureHemp Technology, a Fort Lupton, Colorado, fiber-processing company, works on multiple streams for its fiber output. Its factory floor reminds one of the golden age of analog industry—loud machinery turning biomass into everything from paper towels to lignin-derived sugars.
The next obvious question is the cost of a professional-grade processing facility that can handle both bast and hurd. In the fiber world, said fiber entrepreneur Ryan Doherty, president of Virginia-based Hemp Ventures, this includes decortication equipment for separating hurd from bast, but also a range of other processing machinery should the facility aim to be “turnkey,” meaning it’s able to process both market-ready hurd and bast products.
When I surveyed materials engineers in the hemp sphere, the price of a high-end, medium-scale processing facility, made by established European agricultural processing companies Van Dommele or La Roche, ranged from $8 to $10 million. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a quick-and-dirty way to get at the hurd only if you don’t care too much about uniformity on the hurd side or the bast for anything but pulp or batteries, is a hammer mill. Professional models start in the $10,000 range, and really hard-core bad boys that can handle hemp’s strength run about $40,000, not counting facilities and other costs such as baling equipment, storage, and bagging machinery.
But for a moderately priced professional facility that can process a farming community’s fiber production pretty much 24-7, Flaherty reps a more modular decortication system from a British company called Tatham. It starts at about $1.5 million, but for true industrial-scale processing of both bast and hurd, he said, it can run several million more, when you figure in equipment, facilities, and consulting expertise.
This facility, which can process up to two tons of fiber per hour, would be in reach of an independent farmer cooperative, especially if a member knows how to write grant applications to cover initial fixed costs. But even then, Flaherty told me, there is a knowledge base required in the field, especially right after harvest (when you’re already rushing your seed to be cleaned and dried).
“On the farm, you’d better understand retting,” he said.
Retting, as was discussed a bit in Hemp Bound, is the ancient art of nurturing a field-side fungal process in the weeks following the fiber harvest. Retting seasons the fiber and loosens the lignin glue that fuses the bast and hurd components of the hemp stalk. That makes decortication much easier. Retting is not super complicated (you have to turn the fiber windrows at appropriate intervals) or very different from the mode you see in medieval French sketches of hemp harvesting. But you have to get it right.
“When it comes to fiber processing,” Flaherty said. “Junk in is junk out.”
That means knowing when the fiber is just the right golden gray color, but not too yellow-gold. Not too wet, not too dry. And ready for the decorticator.
“You learn to feel when the fiber is ready to leave the field,” Flaherty said.
“You can pinch it and feel the fiber and the inner core when it’s ready,” Ball told me. “We want the moisture at fourteen percent or less before baling. I tell ya, I learn something about fiber every time I head into the field.” You and me both, brother.
On the cultivation side, if you’re growing for fiber, plant tight—20 or 30 pounds of seed per acre. This is for strong mental health upon harvest and retting: Thinner stalks are easier to harvest. If you want to give a fiber guy like Shane Ball heart trouble, show him a picture of the 15-foot monsters the University of Hawaii project grew in 2018. Beautiful plants, and I loved taking pictures looking like a hobbit next to them. But difficult to bring down with anything short of artillery. Shane, 48, took a physical step back as if punched in the stomach when I proudly shoved my phone in front of his face and said, “Look! A project I’m working on is growing a fiber cultivar!”
Consistency is a factor as well. Let’s say your regional farmer co-op plans on investing in a hammer mill, and your product is hempcrete building feedstock that you’ll supply to your region’s hardware stores. Some hempcrete builders want hurd that sports consistent dimensions and is up to industry standards for cleanliness.
Colorado-based hemp builder John Patterson of Tiny Hemp Houses says that though each structure’s needs are distinct, he likes to work with hurd “not exceeding one inch in length (for structures, smaller for plaster).” The diameter is also important, he told me. “It should be ‘split’ like firewood down to one-eighth inch or smaller.” Not nuclear physics, but there’s more to it than simply baling your fiber at harvest, hauling it to your facility, and shredding it in your hammer mill. Some builders tell me that they actually want some bast fiber left in with the hurd for strengthening the building feedstock. Others tell me they like to use hurd churned up to very fine dimensions—almost a powder. So even with simple hurd apps, your processing enterprise is going to need to gain professional expertise quickly.
Which is to say, I see the cautionary point made by the pros in the early fiber world who understand about industrial specs and commodities markets. It can seem a little naïve to the guys with materials engineering degrees to envision a bunch of New Mexico or Minnesota farmers in overalls competing in the big-time fiber market. I suggest we independent entrepreneurs take that as a challenge.
And now for the million-acre question: Let’s say you get a bunch of your region’s farmers together, form a fiber cooperative, and wrangle the initial costs for your facility. Just how many farmed hemp acres does it take to feed a fiber facility? Depends on its capacity. Flaherty and I did some napkin math together in his booth at a Texas conference in 2019. We were surrounded by hemp surfboards, hemp plate-ware, and some spherical, thermoplastic compounds he’s designing for the DIY community. He even had a line of hemp composite guitar amplifier dials. Icing on the cake? Our “napkin” math was done on the back of my hemp business card, made by Colorado’s Tree Free Hemp company.
Here’s what we came up with. Let’s say the Tatham decorticator facility can process a ton of mixed hemp fiber an hour (this is conservative, Flaherty said), or 24 tons per day, or 6,264 tons per 261-day working year. If a hemp field produces two tons of dry mixed fiber per acre (also conservative), that means one facility would require 3,132 acres to run 24-7 during every workday.
That’s not a small number. But it’s doable. Montana farmers planted 22,000 acres in 2018, according to Vote Hemp. See how we’re inching toward those 234.7 million target acres?
One economic reality we have to our advantage is that fiber has a limited range from farm to facility. Conventional wisdom (meaning pretty much everyone you talk to, the world over, who processes fiber) says that the sheer amount of biomass involved in a commercial-level operation generally necessitates cultivation within 50 to 200 miles of a facility. I think that might change when demand for value-added biomaterials products matures, and when a cooperative is able to handle its own harvest deliveries. But for now it means that if you and your hemp colleagues launch a fiber enterprise in your region, you will probably be the first ones.