Chapter Two
Turning a Profit
Even with Medieval Harvesting Techniques
Hemp, in its infancy as a modern industry, is already profitable in three distinct markets. In Canada it’s seed oil, in China it’s textiles, and in Europe it’s construction (and other industrial markets). Massive demand is allowing a fledgling industry that has barely started identifying the kinks, let alone getting them out, to grow that 20 percent per year. I’ll describe one “kink” right at the start to illustrate that hemp, despite its growing pains, nonetheless finds itself extremely lucrative at every stage from farm to supermarket shelf.
Our kink starts right in the field: The supposed weed isn’t so easy to harvest. A seasoned, churchgoing Canadian farmer in coveralls named Grant Dyck, who grows hemp for what I can attest is his wife Colleen’s delicious GORP energy bar company, told me as we crunched through his frozen back two hundred acres in the winter of 2013, “This is one of the more difficult crops I’ve ever worked with.”
Hemp Pioneers
Grant Dyck, Hemp Farmer
This is the guy actually doing it—has been for seven years. Today it might not impress a journalist to interview another GMO corn farmer about the latest developments in monoculture. But Dyck is one of only a few thousand North American hemp farmers at the moment. Certainly one of the few who wear Carhartts. So I think it’s safe to say that the thirty-six-year-old lifelong Manitoban farmer was among the most valuable sources I interviewed for this project.
In the United States, everything related to hemp cultivation is weighted down with “What if?” It’s the crystal-ball scenario in which pundits make their fortune. But Dyck partly makes his living from the crop, and so I listened up in his two-hundred-acre frozen hemp field as he stomped through months of white crust and handed me an armful of the previous season’s harvest.
“Due diligence would be my first piece of advice,” he said when I asked him what might save American farmers from some sleepless nights (or bankruptcy). “Do your research. Read all you can. Logistically, you’ve got timing issues. Adequate irrigation before planting is essential, for example.”
He was just getting started. He’s a very tall, clean-cut guy, and he was rubbing his forehead as he conjured up what looked like slightly stressful memories. “If you plant too early, you harvest when it’s hot and wet—that’s its own drying process. If you harvest too late, the plant’s dry and you’ll lose the seed as soon as the combine hits it. It requires good management to crop hemp.” At least pesticides are a non-issue. What Dyck is trying to leave us with is the awareness that hemp might grow like a weed, but harvesting is a whole other ball game, like putting versus the long game in golf.
I wouldn’t say that Dyck’s in-the-field wisdom should bring every putative farmer down to earth. Excuse my generalization, but I think a third-generation North Dakotan is going to be able to handle any nuances required by a plant that has, after all, survived three-quarters of a century of taxpayer-funded eradication efforts along Nebraskan ditches. It’s the eager-beaver newcomer who would be wise to do his or her due diligence. Professional farming is like professional anything. The marketplace (and, in this case, Mother Nature) will separate the wheat from the chaff. Oh, and in case farmers are wondering, Dick said you’ll need between twenty- five and sixty pounds of seed per acre, depending on variety.
When I asked him why that is, he said, “After multiple harvests I’m still learning. My combine caught fire twice last year when the stalk got coiled around the blades.”
Indeed, the overall cannabis-reaping process hasn’t been much improved in the eight thousand years that humans have been working with the plant, though a lot of people, including a smart dude in Australia named Adrian Francis K. Clark, are working on it.
Hemp Pioneers
Adrian Francis K. Clark, Inventor of a Hemp Decorticator
Sixty-six-year-old Clark is a citizen inventor in the tradition of John Harrison, the fellow who figured out how to measure longitude. What Clark is developing, though, doesn’t have to do with geography and navigation. It has to do with that confounding post-hemp-harvest issue of retting—the removal of the plant’s outer hurd, or bark, to get at the valuable bast fiber within. On the ground today, this is ol’-fashioned crop processing we’re talking about—something out of the Little House books I read to my kids.
Here’s how the province of Ontario explains the process to its cultivators: “Retting is the process of beginning to separate the bast fibres from the hurds or other plant tissues. It is done in the field, taking advantage of the natural elements of dew, rain and sun, or under controlled conditions using water, enzymes or chemicals. The method chosen depends on the end use to which the fibre will be put. Suitable industrial processes for water and chemical retting have not been developed.”
Even though decorticators were being used as early as 1917, they either weren’t ready for prime time or disappeared with the last iteration of the industry. In the digital age, farmers are often out there in the dew for weeks rotating the bundles of harvested hemp so they don’t get too wet or too dry, and adjusting based on what Mother Nature has to say about it. Clark sniffs at this as a risky, potentially wasteful, and just downright passé mode. “Instead of letting the harvested hemp risk the elements, with the decorticator attachment on your combine, you can harvest the crop and remove the hurd on the same day. While the plant is still green.”
Like the commoner Harrison’s difficulty in getting Royal Society attention paid to his potentially world-changing invention, the Australian Clark has had some trouble making the case to the established hemp-fiber-harvesting authorities, particularly in China, which dominates the fiber market today at forty-five thousand tons of annual production.
“We’ve tried to keep the cost down even at the start, to $115,000 for a hand-fed model and $300,000 for a model you clip to the front of a combine,” he told me via Skype (this compared with up to $10 million for commercial production models out of Europe, so Clark’s real innovation might be relative affordability). “But in China cost isn’t the problem. Officials told me I’d putting tens of thousands of people out of work—they sit in the field and peel the retted hemp [bark off] by hand. We are getting a lot of inquiries from Europe and Canada.”
Out of the prototype stage and ready to manufacture and ship (Clark’s Textile and Composites Industries YouTube videos are pretty amazing—you can sense farmers like Grant Dyck salivating as bast fiber shoots out the side of a combine during harvesting), what Clark and a few others are tackling is the first significant advancement in hemp processing since everyone in the Middle East got along.
“This is the key to the hemp industry taking off on a worldwide mass industrial scale,” he told me. In a decade Colorado and Kentucky farmers might be thanking him, as well as making him wealthy, which is not a fate Harrison enjoyed: He died before collecting the Royal Society’s twenty-thousand-pound prize for his longitude machine, the marine chronometer.
Clark’s innovation is called a decorticator, and it solves the following problem: Today, if you want to exploit the plant’s industrial fiber (and not just its edible seeds) when the crop is harvested six months after sowing, you first have to let it lie in the field for a few weeks. This is to allow the vital fungal soup we’ve discussed to soften up the tough outer husks. I can tell you from visiting hemp fields that these husks are better described as bark—they can be hard to snap at the base. And yet off they must come.
Too much moisture after harvest wrecks the crop, as does too little. There’s not much you can do but turn the stalks like barbecuing drumsticks and hope the microorganisms do their job before the next front moves in. Learning this, I suddenly felt I better understood the plight of Russian serfs. One of those moments that makes you imagine life before Costco backup supply.
And yet for all its soon-to-be-upgraded legacy harvesttime kinks, hemp is economically viable enough that the Canadian industry is exploding. Those hundred thousand acres by 2015 still represent a small industry as a share of total Canuck agricultural acreage, but 20 percent is impressive annual sector growth by any standard.
A farmer who planted a thousand acres in 2012 netted $250,000. That’s profit. And most of the half billion dollars that Canadian hemp generates in the United States comes from value-added final products like salad dressing and breakfast cereal. There’s already hemp cereal at the International Space Station.
On top of that, the founder and president of Canada’s biggest hemp seed oil processor, Shaun Crew, told me that a 20 percent annual growth figure is actually on the low end of what he expects at his Hemp Oil Canada into the foreseeable future. In fact, when we met in chilly Ste. Agathe, Manitoba, in February 2013, Crew was running around madly planning his latest factory expansion.
In the company conference room there was a photo of which Crew told me he’s proud, as Hemp Oil Canada celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. It features him, hair less gray, posing with a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) while clutching a product called My Stash. It illustrates the law enforcement cooperation that Canada has enjoyed since the moment its industry revved back up in 1998.
Crew was there. After a few ups and downs that included a seed buyer bankruptcy in 2000 that hurt hundreds of farmers, he said the industry is now “taking on a life of its own.”
“We just got approached by [food giant] Hain Celestial, and we’re at capacity,” he told me, waving toward the company’s several dozen industrial presses in an adjoining building. Each of these squeezes out 350 green, lignan-thick gallons of nutritive hemp oil every day, working 24/7. “And we’ve already got a six-week delivery lag time now. You guys consume everything we’ve got.”
By you guys he meant “you Americans,” and he meant it indirectly: The company processes for wholesalers and does private- label packaging.
Hemp is harvested the way it was at the dawn of agriculture, and yet it’s already creating millionaires. Crew related his stats and projections with a Thanks for buying me the good seats at Winnipeg Jets games smirk, Canada being a nation where the hemp oil flows like wine, and Americans will soon be buying a billion dollars’ worth of it a year.17
Which is better than if we ate a billion in Canadian McNuggets, of course, since hemp is healthy for both our bodies and farmland soil. I checked out the Province of Ontario’s official agricultural guide to hemp farmers. Right in table 1 under “Weed Control” it reads, “None needed. No herbicides registered.”