Chapter Four

Grow Your Next House

(or Factory or Office or High-Rise or School)

My fingers were numb from tapping notes into my phone in the subzero Canadian heartland provinces late in the morning of February 22, 2013. The primary thought I was trying to record midway into this, my third hemp building site visit in as many days, was, Okay, you’re an American hemp businesswoman paying the mortgage with hemp seed oil toothpaste grown and processed nearby. What can you do with the fiber to maybe open yourself a savings account?

I see now that through the frost-induced typos and misguided autocorrects I also managed to record the secondary thought, Wow. Manitoba. What a difference an inch makes. I was thinking of nearby North Dakota.

Specifically, I was trying to map the conversation I had just enjoyed with the Province of Manitoba deputy minister for housing and community development Joy Cramer onto her American counterpart sixty-five miles south. That’d probably be North Dakota agriculture commissioner Doug Goehring, since the Roughrider State doesn’t have a housing secretary.

The twenty-below morning would be familiar to both politicians, as would the rate of neighborhood vehicles gliding gracefully into snowbanks per hour (it would soon happen to me), and probably also the truly inspiring organic cinnamon buns. Closely observing local winter survival techniques, I lived on those warm, caramel-dripping sponges during my Canadian research.

What would be different those sixty-five miles to the south was the likely federal drug enforcement authorities’ reaction to Cramer the Canadian’s casual statement to me that she “just wants to help our local hemp farmers.” At least as of 2013.

See, the materials used to insulate the half-completed house inside of which we were then standing were cannabis plants grown a few miles away in the Manitoba countryside. Here in downtown Winnipeg’s upscale “granola belt” neighborhood where she herself has lived, Deputy Minister Cramer had been telling me about the provincially funded hemp house project, after we’d clumped up the icy porch stairs to the homesite.

“We’re particularly interested in this project because the insulation and wall materials are being built of hemp and lime, and if it performs, it’s another market for our farmers and our construction industry,” said Cramer, as polished a politician as I’ve ever met. “We know it’s a big crop for Canada and we’re proud that our Manitoba hemp farmers are some of the biggest exporters in the country. We have high hopes for our hemp industry here.”

Brian Pollack, the project’s contractor, demonstrated the tamping of the “hempcrete” insulation on which the house is relying. He told me hempcrete is essentially a self-curing and breathable mixture of dried cannabis hurd and lime, absent concrete’s toxic ickiness and high heat needs. “It comes out of the mixer light and airy,” he said, and though there’s something of a science to getting the material ratios right, once you do, “It’s easy to use and fast to build with.”

When she said that provincial deciders are watching how the hemp house “performs,” Cramer told me she meant in three categories: (1) cost competitiveness versus standard methods in the box-store era, (2) ease of replication in remote areas of the province, and, (3) (obviously a vital one at twenty below in February) how it performs thermally through a Canadian year.

This last category includes not just energy costs in a place that endures drastic annual temperature and humidity swings, but also how comfortable the not-yet-selected family that will move in by the end of 2013 will be. Cramer—a senior enough official to have a driver and pull off a beaver cap in a casual interview with a shaggy American author and filmmaker—told me her office will be closely studying the reports that come in surrounding “air quality, mold control, and, of course, warmth.”

Yes, this house is going to be Home Sweet Home for real tenants, probably by the time you’re reading these words. Hearing this, I gave Goehring, North Dakota’s agriculture commish, a buzz to see how it feels for North Dakota farmers not to receive Cramer’s kind of support (let alone $250-per-acre profit).

“It makes you some days want to shake somebody,” the Republican said. But he said it in a very polite prairie way, as though he was going to follow up with, Did you hear Jennifer Svenson is running for deacon?” He reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s more deliberate cousin.

“We have producers who would like to grow industrial hemp,” he continued. “They know that state law allows them to be licensed, but they also know that they then have to apply to the DEA to be allowed to raise hemp. We in North Dakota asked the DEA to waive that registration. They denied us that.24 It’s a bit disingenuous for the federal government to . . . completely ignore the great attributes of industrial hemp. It should be utilized as a commodity for the public good.”

I asked Goehring if he knew that Canadian farmers were banking 250 C-notes an acre within shouting distance of the border. He did. “And that’s the other thing about it,” he said, still politely soft-spoken, but getting what no doubt passes in the northern heartland for worked up. “Agronomically, hemp works in our soils. It can be another in our healthy crop rotation system.”

At last Goehring really exploded into what a New Yorker would call a soft speaking voice. “It’s amazing. We have farmers who live near the border, and six miles away cultivators are growing this very viable product. For those who have expressed interest, it’s a lost opportunity for a fine product that’s utilized all over the United States.”

I hung up the phone wondering, What does it mean that I seem to be agreeing with a lot of Republicans on drug policy lately? Then I remembered my mission—the thought that I had used most of my five seconds of exposed Manitoba finger blood flow to tap into my phone: Where might the first hemp fiber killer app reside? I was about to find out I had been looking at it while interviewing Deputy Minister Cramer and dreaming of cinnamon buns.

If you’re like me (and Deputy Minister Cramer), you’re wondering if we know how hemp/lime insulation performs in an actual finished house, or even what this hempcrete insulation is. Starting with the second question, I looked for a scientific description of what makes fluffy hempcrete the effective insulator that the Manitoba builders were telling me it is.

The explanation came care of Farhoud Delijani, PhD student in biosystems engineering at the University of Manitoba’s frankly awesome Alternative Village. You’ll remember him as the fellow who ate all the King of Seeds as a kid in Iran. He showed me several underway hempcrete experiments, including one surrounding energy efficiency. I got to touch the stuff, and it is, as advertised, “light and airy.” You can see the hemp hurd in it even after it’s cured into rock-solid blocks. It looks like the shredded stuff people toss into guinea pig cages.

Turns out that when it comes to insulation, you want to trap air (like a wet suit traps water), so “light and airy” material is not just easier to work with than fiberglass, it’s an essential part of the formula. Delijani told me that hempcrete in twelve-inch-thick sections has an R-value (this is how insulation is rated) of twenty. That’s extremely competitive, even without factoring in the absence of material toxicity and the centuries-long durability that home designers insist you’ll get in your hemp house.

What’s the bottom line performance of hemp as an insulator? “The study is still under way,” Delijani said. “But it clearly takes less energy than the control group to keep a house heated to twenty-one degrees Celsius [about seventy degrees Fahrenheit] throughout the [Canadian] winter.” That was music to the ears of a solar-powered goat herder rooting for his two young kids to have a livable planet.

And hempcrete is very easy to apply on-site, Delijani and others told me. Mechanically, what the builder is doing during hempcrete construction is described by the website HempBuilding.com this way: “The hempcrete is cast around a timber framework. This is achieved by tamping down between shuttering, or it can be sprayed against a formwork . . . The hempcrete [is then] finished with a natural paint.” Some companies even sell complete construction blocks with the hempcrete already inside.

Now that we can visualize what hempcrete is, we can move on to our other question, that of finished hemp structure performance. To do that, we leave the lab and head into the real world.

We’ve all seen promising wonder technologies that flop in the marketplace for one reason or another (cough cough Bill Gates/the Chinese/Walmart offer a watered-down version cheaper). In fact, when I wrote for a computer magazine just out of college, I learned that there’s a name for such technologies: vaporware. An actual working product that lives only in the hopes of the company’s founding team and perhaps a harried publicist.

So I set my Anti-Vaporware Detection Meter to “sensitive” and reached out in an effort to learn how hempcrete performs in a house that’s faced the elements. I found the answer in Dixie by way of New Zealand. Greg Flavall is co-founder of a company called Hemp Technologies, which built a hemp house in Asheville, North Carolina.

I watched a comprehensive video about the house. It furthers Delijani’s description of what hempcrete is, even showing the schedule-one-narcotic hurd before it goes into the mixture. The result performs better than pink fiberglass insulation, even in sections that were left exposed to the elements for a winter. The Twenty-First Century Construction Revolution is hereby televised. Google “hemp technologies asheville north carolina house.” It could be a turning point in the human pursuit of shelter since the questionable decision to emerge from the cave.

When that Asheville project was finished in 2010, Flavall moved the heck back to his native North Island of New Zealand largely because, being such a believer in hemp building technology, he wanted to be closer to the one key factor keeping it from being cost-competitive Stateside today: legal local sources of hemp.

I’m no architect, but Flavall’s North Carolina house project just looks to me like a nice big American house. I found the “carbon-negative” and low lifetime energy use claims in the Hemp Technologies video compelling enough, though, to Skype with Flavall in New Plymouth, New Zealand, at some unusual hour. I think we were in fact on different days.

First off, Flavall stopped me right away when I asked him when he thought hemp construction would be cost-competitive. I posited that one first because I knew that, even if hempcrete cures cancer, a certain type of reader is only going to want to know what it costs per square foot to build.

“It already is cost-competitive,” the fifty-four-year-old said in his Kiwi accent. “That house in Asheville was the first one we built, it was in a high-wind zone, which meant we needed to bring in additional structural engineers, and we still finished it at 150 dollars a square foot not counting grounds work and landscaping. That compares favorably with regular construction.”

Okay, that emboldened me to ask about these carbon-negative claims. “The house eats carbon?” I asked. “Just cleans the atmosphere when you’re sitting in the living room doing a jigsaw puzzle with the fam?”

“It does,” Flavall said in a tone I’d describe as calm confidence. “First off, it’s 80 percent more energy-efficient than a regular building—it costs twenty-five cents a square foot per month to heat and cool—which is a testament to the quality of hemp as a thermodynamic insulator. But in addition, the lime feeds on carbon dioxide as it [the lime] hardens over the course of years. It wants to go back to rock so it absorbs carbon from the air while making the house stronger. That house is going to last hundreds of years.”

“What about the houseplants?”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t the houseplants need carbon dioxide?” I asked. “Does the lime steal it from them? People want to have houseplants.”

“The houseplants are fine,” Flavall assured me. “They just provide another carbon sink.”

Flavall also said the house was getting about the same 2.4-per-inch R-value from hemp walls that the Alternative Village studies were showing at the University of Manitoba. “That more than meets building codes in America,” he told me from a distance of seventy-seven hundred miles from the drug war.

Tim Callahan, who designed another North Carolina hemp house, also said that significantly lower labor costs associated with hemp building are a major factor. “It’s doable with not that large of an investment, especially once we have repeatability.”

Sounded terrific, but Flavall and Callahan don’t have to live in their creations. Amazingly, it seems there’s yet another house in Asheville (talk about the New South!) whose occupants seem quite satisfied with the cost and comfort level in their hemp home.

“This is the . . . future,” owner Karon Korp told CNN, while her husband, former Asheville mayor Russ Martin, raved about the low utility bills he pays in the upscale, thirty-three-hundred-square-foot pad. A clean interior environment was the big selling point for the family. “The house itself is an air filter,” said its designer, Anthony Brenner.

Flavall’s Hemp Technologies website even has a page of prototype hemp structures they’ll build for you, ranging from a single-family loft to an apartment complex to, for gosh sakes, a mixed-use commercial site.

Still think it’s a pipe dream? Hempcrete is featured in a new, 195,000-square-foot British Marks & Spencer department store. That project delivered me a memo: Check out what’s happening with hemp across the Pond.

I guess that North Carolina’s mini hemp housing boom answers the livability question. I mean, I didn’t have the budget to time-travel ahead three hundred years to see if all of today’s hemp houses are still standing and happily occupied as promised. But the revolution well under way in European construction—which was the biggest stunner in my research for this project—is kind of like time travel. Two decades’ worth.

Which is to say that all this North American V8 head slapping about hemp’s proving a serious contender for “Go-To Building Material of the Sustainability Era” is old hat on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, hemp mixtures are being used not just for insulation, but for load-bearing-construction applications as well.

No-brainer was Lime Technology vice president and director of technology Ian Pritchett’s choice of phrase about hempcrete25 building when we Skyped and I asked, “Why the heck aren’t you Europeans telling us about all this hemp construction?” Like most of the hemp executives with whom I met, Pritchett was not wearing a tie when we interviewed, even though his construction company is already classified, thanks to its ten million euros in sales in 2012, as a British SME (small to medium enterprise). They’re past the start-up phase, is what I’m saying. This is not a fellow hawking granola at a crunchy trade show.

Even with two hundred houses and fifty commercial buildings under his belt, including an attractive little English housing complex known as The Triangle, the British hemp builder did attach a condition to his no-brainer assessment.

“The target market for us is people who are building a structure they’ll run themselves,” Pritchett told me. “So that the construction costs and the energy costs are coming from the same person. Then it’s a no-brainer. Even when it’s a little more expensive to build, it’s much cheaper to run. But if the builder only cares about the immediate costs, then that’s for now a tougher sell.”

The longer view Pritchett’s speaking about starts with climate change mitigation at the very building site: You have to heat concrete as high as three thousand degrees. Not so hemp/lime. This is why many of the conclusions you’ll find in the European Industrial Hemp Association trade group’s “Assessment of Life Cycle Studies on Hemp Fibre Applications” paper26 show hemp pulling ahead—or farther ahead—of a diverse array of synthetic and fossil-based industrial applications once length of use is factored in.

Seeming to anticipate hemp building similarly proving a no-brainer for northern Canada back at the brisk Winnipeg hemp house site, Deputy Housing Minister Cramer called hempcrete’s likely performance the “easy part” of the project. On durability alone, she echoed (albeit in a sub-Arctic version) what hemp-friendly Hawaiian legislators told me about the plant’s impressive resistance to the tropical plague of termites. “Here the problem is mold, and it’s doing great in tests at the university [of Manitoba] so far,” Cramer said.

The actual trickiest hurdle that future builders and entrepreneurs will face, Cramer surprised me by revealing, is “each municipality’s unique building codes. We’re documenting how we maneuver through that whole process, and our construction industry players are watching. City bylaws are always a pain for builders.”

Cramer might be ironing out the mundane wrinkles in construction bureaucracy, which I’m sure is an essential part of any building equation when a new material enters the marketplace. But it struck me by the time I started skidding back out into Winnipeg traffic that day that what we’re talking about with hemp-based construction is more than a revolution in the building industry. It’s a revolution in society.

Why do I say something so dramatic? Because cement plants alone contribute 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the construction industry was responsible for more than 8 percent of the U.S. GDP in 2007. Make that huge industry not just sustainable but domestically produced and you’re at once betting on America’s economic and atmospheric future.

North Carolina hemp house designer Callahan told me that the only thing keeping hemp building technology from domestic cost-effectiveness today is having to import the actual hemp.

“That would be a huge boon to us,” he told me of being able to get ready-to-go building material from Cleveland or Lexington, Kentucky, instead of the UK or Canada. “And it would almost certainly be the turning point for the domestic hemp construction industry.”

Construction, in other words, is going to be the first domestic hemp fiber breakout market. Steve Levine, CFO of the Hemp Industries Association trade group and a fellow who’s been selling hemp products in the United States since 1997, said he has little doubt that hempcrete will be the first dual-cropping sector to explode.

“If I were a venture capitalist with ten million in play, I’d invest in building materials,” he said. “Once there are processing plants Stateside, once Kentucky and Southern California are growing industrial cannabis, the battle is mostly won and we’ll see exponential growth.”