Chapter Five

Heck, Grow Your Whole Tractor Out of Hemp

You know James Bond’s gadget guy, Q? Best job in the world, as far as I and about ten million other fourteen-year-olds-at-heart are concerned. That’s pretty much Simon Potter’s gig at the Winnipeg-based Composites Innovation Centre (CIC) we’ve been visiting. His title is sector manager for product innovation. Oh, how I crave such a title. “Hold my calls, Ms. Moneypenny, I’m working on the Invisibility Suit this morning.”

As we toured the warehouse-sized CIC labs (hidden in a nondescript outskirt like British Intelligence headquarters would be), I kept expecting to see wristwatches shooting poison darts at targets and men in beekeeper suits absorbing small rocket attacks without harm. There was even a Moneypenny-type character at the sleek, overlarge, semicircular front desk, who offered me a kind of futuristically labeled water bottle.

Only Potter doesn’t work for MI5. He works for the future of the atmosphere. Funded, of course (since this is anywhere on the planet but today’s United States), as a nonprofit by the federal and provincial Canadian governments in partnership with various private foundations and industry players.

Hemp is prominent here at this facility whose formidable engineering and biological minds are dedicated to designing not the cheapest, not the most appealing-to-young-demographics, but rather the best of tomorrow’s industrial materials.

And the multi-team work at the center is showing that biocomposites—naturally sourced plastics and replacements for toxic or petroleum-dependent materials like fiberglass, particleboard, and plywood—are performing best in an incredibly broad array of industrial applications.

“I don’t know why we forgot, institutionally, about this plant’s uses,” Potter said of cannabis at one point on our tour. This is a well-funded scientist who can, and does, work with any material he chooses.

Why is the remembering currently under way so vital? Composites are the fastest-growing segment of the wood products and plastics industries.27 An eighty-billion-dollar market, Potter told me, rapping his knuckles on what looked like a huge, shiny vehicle hood. “And we can replace 30 percent of it immediately with biocomposites like this hemp tractor hood.”

I stopped in my tracks. Yes, what really blew the mind at the CIC was much closer to home than an Invisibility Suit for this solar-powered goat herder. I realized immediately that I’m a fellow who’s in the market for a sustainable tractor. I just hadn’t realized it was an option. I’ve been using a machete for my squash.

The tractor hood was shiny, curved in an appealingly contemporary design arc, and undentable by my hardest palm-heel hammer punch. It was beautiful. And it was grown from the local hemp harvest.

Plants, I had previously thought, go in the garden. They don’t go into the manufacture of heavy machinery. To me, what I was looking at was as strange as a space shuttle or a senator being made out of industrial cannabis.

“It’ll make a lighter, stronger, and considerably more fuel-efficient vehicle than the usual composites that go into heavy industrial structural components today,” Potter told me. “And it’s grown by the farmers from the material it’s going to harvest.”

That’s not just a cute locavore gesture. “Natural fibers are cheaper than synthetic fibers, to start,” Potter explained. “And this tractor’s body embodies a lot less energy in production than synthetic fiberglass body components.” Meaning, he said, “It off-gases far less carbon in production. Fiberglass is an energy-intensive process to make.”

“Why do you think The Hemp Reaper or whatever you’re calling it will result in greater fuel efficiency?” I asked.

Potter pointed at a nearby hunk of “traditional” plastic. “Because it’s 30 percent lighter than that synthetic composite. That will translate to greatly increased fuel efficiency in the vehicle.” (Also, as we’ll see, it can one day be fueled by hemp.)

Then he laid the zinger on me when I asked as skeptically as I could, “Are we really going to see hemp semi trucks? Hemp airplanes? Hemp as a major industrial component competing with or even replacing the major materials of today like steel, fiberglass, and petroleum-based plastics?”

“I think it’s absolutely inevitable,” Potter said confidently and without pause. “It’s the only way we’re going to have structural materials in the future. We can’t rely on fossil sources anymore.”

The smart men and women at the vanguard of biocomposite research are on the case. “We’ve moved beyond the experimental with this project,” Potter said, clomping the clear-finished hemp fiber tractor hood again. “We’re into the implementation of these things. This is going to be a commercial product.”

Potter explained that, although the CIC is a nonprofit and government-funded, the center’s teams are allowed to be entrepreneurial. So when the tractor body’s field-testing is done, they’ll likely partner with a commercial vehicle-production company on the engine, transmission, electronics, and drive train—the moving parts, in other words. “Or,” he said, “you can buy the hemp body from us and design your own vehicle.”

Holey Gazoley, I can’t wait to see that in the John Deere or Caterpillar showroom. A documentary called Government Grown mentions that International Harvester once made a combine that worked “with the tallest hemp stalks.” Surely that blueprint is somewhere.

My hope is that the CIC and its partners will work the necessary features into the final product and release it on a commercial scale. That’d certainly be useful to our hemp pioneer Grant Dyck, whose harvesting equipment burst into flames (twice) in 2012. I hereby offer my online handle of Organic Cowboy as the tractor’s model name in exchange for a reasonable franchising fee. Though The Hemp Reaper is pretty good, too.

I’m kind of expecting a call on one of these, based on Potter’s industrial intelligence report. “We have automotive industry designers coming by almost on a weekly basis asking, ‘When are these materials going to be ready?’” he told me.

To address industry interest in all of its work, Potter said the CIC is developing a project called FibreCITY, which is a replicable franchising system for anyone who wants to open a fiber-processing facility “appropriate to their regional cellulosic needs in Kentucky, Australia, or China.” Could be you.

That morning’s tour made me further optimistic that my descendants will have a breathable atmosphere without humanity returning to the Stone Age. The CIC is demonstrating a real-world mechanism by which a sustainable industrial cannabis infrastructure can reestablish itself.

There is a wrinkle to work out with the industrial and high-tech sides of hemp, though. Though each bend in the CIC facility revealed another hemp marvel (I especially loved the load-bearing hemp wall used for its sound-insulating qualities by CIC engineers to keep their own loud compressor machinery from distracting them), some applications require what Potter calls “greater fiber consistency.”

My tour guide that sunny subzero day was broaching a technical issue that, though hardly insurmountable, the North American hemp industry has hardly begun to address.

It goes like this: Yes, Potter says, hemp’s most passionate advocates are correct that the plant’s tensile strength is (or can be) greater than steel’s. But farmers, especially in the young, seed-oil-centric North American fields, are not yet growing for fiber that displays this quality. It’s possible that the perfect industrial cultivars don’t yet exist.

Thus, Potter told me, “We’re starting to work with farmers to breed the kind of consistent, strong bast fibers that are absolutely essentially for sophisticated technological and industrial applications.” The whole conversation left me wondering, Any grad students out there looking for a dissertation project?

“We even have to examine the soil nutritive regime, which can damage the fibers,” Potter said. He laughed, then added in a conspiratorial tone, “Today farmers beat the crap out of the fiber during harvest. And once we do come up with ideal cultivars for our applications, we have to be able to replicate the breeding processes.”

Okay then, I thought. Let’s get to work. I felt safe thinking that because those blessed Canadians have a hemp GMO ban prophylactically in place. Seriously, it’s a cool country. Even though the rumors that Fox News is banned there aren’t true. I didn’t see it on anywhere, though.