Chapter Eight

Don’t Just Legalize It—Subsidize It

By the time I clued in to communities like Feldheim, I was pretty excited. The whole picture was in place: seed oil, construction material, energy. Hemp hemp hooray.

I remember gleefully perusing my gasification file at the tail end of my Canadian hemp research, just after informing the U.S. Customs man that I carried no hemp home with me “other than my breakfast, lunch, pants,34 shirt, hat, and soap.” Game on for this industry, I thought.

Then, back in comparatively toasty New Mexico, I spoke to some European consultants who kind of brought me back to Earth. “See,” they explained, “there’s this thing called the real-world economy.”

Even with all of hemp’s exciting species saving and climate change mitigation, a German hemp expert named Michael Carus told me I shouldn’t expect a profitable American market to leap magically into existence the moment domestic cultivation ramps up.

In fact, it might need help to ramp up, he said. Income from domestic hemp cultivation for fiber, especially, wouldn’t be competitive enough on the free market to incentivize American farmers to grow the millions of acres we need for our dual-cropping, humanity-saving plan. He said China, to give one example, grows textile fiber cheaper than America would.35

What a downer (sorry, realist) that Carus was! Of all the hemp experts I interviewed, he was the one who seemed patently uninspired by the American hemp sector coming online. I got the impression that most of our hour-long conversation was, for him, an exercise in reticence and caution, no doubt well learned. Indeed, the European market, though steady and robust at a hundred million dollars annually, wasn’t projected to show Canadian-level growth in 2013, and there was even talk of a seed shortage.

Still, I sometimes think these Europeans willingly fail to figure American exuberance into their economic formulae. That’s our real fuel. That, hemp oil, and love are pretty much all I run on. They and indeed all economists can call it ∑ or ® or something and consider it a constant that makes any venture ten times more likely to work. Some folks might think I’m kidding. Actually, persistence and optimism, basically America’s two required traits, are always listed among the most vital qualities cited by today’s successful entrepreneurs in your finer airline magazines.

Whatever the reason, I just couldn’t get Carus psyched about American hemp prospects. That is, until the very end of the interview. It was only when I asked him, “What if official U.S. policy incorporated the true economic value of the cannabis plant, including soil remediation from hemp’s, ya know, famously deep taproots?” that Carus finally burst into an almost New World exuberance.

“If you can convince Obama to implement European-style subsidies, the U.S. market’ll be okay,” he blurted, albeit with a sort of deep chuckle. Then he added, quite seriously, “Like Europe, American agriculture is guided by government incentives. If your government decides it wants to encourage hemp, well . . .” At this Carus’s face melted back into mirth, and he emitted a sort of “ho ho ho!” from beneath what was actually something of a Santa Claus beard. For some reason a lot of the folks, worldwide, who work in hemp look like Dori or Nori.

The chuckling no doubt had to do with the four hundred dollars per acre with which the European Union subsidizes its hemp farmers. He was wishing us luck.

The British hemp expert John Hobson we earlier met, who advises European hemp farmers on agricultural nuance, emphatically concurred with Carus’s assessment. Especially when I told him that our president has vowed to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020.

“It’s rare enough that hemp’s a soil builder,” he explained, “but it requires no spraying of pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. If those qualities are worked into an agricultural subsidy formula, it suddenly looks much stronger.”

And that’s before you get into carbon sequestration. Hobson’s company website says its version of hempcrete “locks-up approximately 110 kilograms of carbon dioxide per cubic meter of wall.”36 Greg Flavall said that’s comparable to how his North Carolina house performs in its role of mitigating climate change.

So how do we make the numbers add up to profit for farmers on the home front? There’s always a hemp subsidy we could drop, hardly noticed, into the next FARRM Bill. At least to start, to help the industry get on its feet across the United States, until those two million acres begin to literally seed our food, construction, and energy revolutions.

There’s another way to encourage domestic hemp farming, too. One that consciously aims to return America to her family-farming roots. We are, incredibly, down to an embarrassing 1 percent of Americans farming now. It was 30 percent the last time hemp was legal.

Just as the famous Homesteading Act wound up feeding the nation, I’ve heard a new plan described in the form of a Digital Age Homesteading Act. This would provide industrial cannabis farmers in places like North Dakota, Vermont, and Kentucky with micro grants for land purchase and cultivar research. Funding can come from the two billion dollars President Obama committed to alternative fuel research in March 2013.

And on that encouraging note, we return to our hemp entrepreneurial journey. We’ll stick for the moment with construction materials like hempcrete, since that’s our first fiber killer app. Without question, Carus is correct that the expensive hassle of the drug war has things in something of a holding pattern. Unprocessed hemp doesn’t travel or store particularly well or inexpensively. Which is to say imports of anything are rarely cheap.

But domestic hemp will win in a worldwide fiber marketplace that has a level playing field for raw materials, the Hemp Industries Association’s Steve Levine believes. That’s simply because it is “too amazing a construction [material] not to, not just for insulation, but for load-bearing block components, roofing, paneling, fiberboard, and flooring.” And when high international shipping costs are eliminated, he said, that is a big step toward a level playing field.

Furthermore, said Vote Hemp’s Eric Steenstra, domestic hemp will be profitable even during the high-end fiber processing learning curve the CIC’s Simon Potter believes is necessary, because “fiber for industrial composites and construction can be successfully shipped in a more raw form than textiles.”

That, in the end, is why builders like Flavall and Tim Callahan are having a go at it even as the drug war’s final fires are being extinguished. They’re confident that they’ll find affordable hempcrete in tomorrow’s Hemp Home Depot. They want to be the established industry leaders.

In addition to exuberance, the United States already has one huge practical advantage over much of the world: the factory infrastructure necessary to launch our fiber apps from season one. Want proof? Simon Potter thrust a sort of thin, strong, fibrous blanket at me during my CIC visit and then told me that the Canadian team that developed the “extremely promising hemp insulating mat material” had to (get this) send it to Pennsylvania for the actual fiber weaving. They just don’t have the processing facilities in Manitoba.

For this reason, hemp advocate Norm Roulet, who is trying to organize the legalization and maturation of hemp in Ohio, believes that the Buckeye State’s unparalleled farm-to-rail-to-factory network is ideal for the industry’s rebirth. So ideal, he said, that Ohio should be the seat of a hemp commodities market. Seeming to confirm this is a 2006 USDA ethanol feasibility study that asserted, “The optimal location of a . . . processing facility is largely dependent on being in close proximity to its feedstock supply, regardless of which feedstock is being utilized.”37

This is terrific news for a place like Ohio if its economic planners want vertical integration and local job creation to allow the state to again emerge as the major hemp player it was in the nineteenth century.

“We have more factory space in Cleveland than we know what to do with,” Roulet told me. “Rail lines deliver right to it from nearby farms. With demand for industrial cannabis products so great, a historical hemp trade, and a perfect cultivation climate, let’s put people back to work. The best part is that small farm communities and city neighborhoods—both in need of economic development—will be helping one another.”

Hemp Pioneers

Don Wirtshafter, Founder and Owner, the Ohio Hempery

When Wirtshafter opened his legendary Hempery shop, (oil) press, and (publishing) press in 1991 in his third-floor Athens, Ohio, law office, most people thought he was a pioneer—an early adopter. But that’s not exactly how he sees it, even if he did supply much of America’s hemp oil through most of the 1990s.

First, there was local history, which he’d researched heavily. “The first cash crop of any kind in my area was Joshua Wyatt, in 1727,” he told me. “He took twenty-seven bales of hemp up the Ohio River without a boat. He made rafts of it and sold it to the river boating industry for rope.”

Industrial cannabis was so important to the Buckeye State by the nineteenth century, the sixty-two-year-old Wirtshafter said, that “Ohio State University’s trustees allowed tuition be paid in hemp.” In my own research, I found references to “broad expanses of well-shaped fields of hemp”38 from the 1820s and 1830s that were inspected and praised by U.S. hemp agents and sent to local processors.

The second reason Wirtshafter doesn’t totally grab at the pioneer mantle is because of the reason he came to hemp.

“I went to law school for environmental reasons, but my friends kept getting busted for pot,” he told me. “When I returned home, I was doing some environmental work, but dealing with a lot of pot cases at a terrible time. You had Nancy Reagan, mandatory minimum sentencing—people going away for ten years for two joints—and the good-faith exception [which allows illegally obtained evidence to be admitted in court in some cases]—all the defenses that were taken away that made criminal law so gruesome in the 1980s. I saw my whole peer group getting taken down or at least getting very secretive about this plant. Finally the era started winding down, and I saw a way to unite the environmental and the criminal justice issues I faced in my small-town law office. I thought if we could wake the world up about hemp, if we could untie the knot around this plant, it would help both.”

The Ohio Hempery sold your hemp oil (one of two U.S. sources in the 1990s), your hemp hats, and your hemp yarn, and “reminded heartland of its agricultural heritage,” according to Wirtshafter, who still has an active law practice. “But,” he said, “the real product was the cookbook.” This was The Hemp Seed Cookbook, which Wirtshafter co-wrote with Carol Miller in November 1990. It sold ten thousand copies and is for now, sadly, out of print. “I’ll get it online now that you’ve reminded me,” Wirtshafter told me.

Wirtshafter said the cookbook “had the first description of how to shell the seed to make delicious hemp milk at home, with a colander and blender. The stuff that’s five bucks a quart in your grocery store today. There were recipes for toasted hemp seed tamari salads, and there were all kinds of sprouted seed recipes.” Wirtshafter did not pause when I asked for his favorite recipe in the book: “Hemp chocolate chip cookie,” he said. “I realize now I ate differently then.”

The Hemp Seed Cookbook, with a pound of hemp seed stapled to the cover, cost seven dollars in the Hempery, plus postage for shipped books that Wirtshafter said the Hempery “advertised heavily. You could call 1-800-BUY-HEMP. The plan was to spread the hemp message worldwide. The business grew quickly.”

This went on from 1991 to 1998, when the DEA shut down the New Jersey mill the Hempery was using to sterilize the seeds—they actually had a schedule one permit to import the seeds.

“That was the year Canada’s market opened up,” he said. “So I wound up touring the north giving advice to our competitors.” Fortunately, he said, the American market’s launch is now “inevitable”—though he warned against measuring everything in terms of a coming billion-dollar industry. “It should be cultivated in everyone’s backyard. We don’t have to turn hemp over to big business.”

Wirtshafter’s other hemp-related exploits include driving in a hemp car that “did laps around the U.S.” in the 1990s, including a California leg with longtime hemp activist Woody Harrelson. “The Hempery was making money,” he said. “And we supported projects like that,” as well as an abortive 1994 plan to plant a test crop at a USDA-recognized research facility in Imperial County, California (state authorities chopped the half acre down).

Looking at the coming hemp era, the pioneer (he is one) said, “Twenty years from now we’ll be building our houses from hemp.” Wirtshafter paused for a moment, before adding, “Again. Did you know that the [1883] Chicago World Exposition’s buildings were finished with a hemp plaster called ‘staff’?”

One Pennsylvania weaving plant is terrific. But does the United States really have sufficient infrastructure to support hemp? As with oil processor Shaun Crew’s intent to parachute into the North Dakota seed oil market the moment it’s legal to grow hemp Stateside, I think it’s worth noting where the already successful hemp building companies are putting their money.

Our British friend Ian Pritchett, Lime Technology’s VP, struck me as a savvy, unsentimental businessperson. His company wouldn’t devote resources to a market if its “sums,” as he put it so Britishly, didn’t make the accountants smile. He went so far as to tell me, “Every new market is a battle.” And Lime Technology is evidently so jazzed about the United States coming online that it’s already started the Chicago-based subsidiary called American Lime Technology we earlier discussed.

This is a company from which you can today order hempcrete for your next building project. It’ll be imported hemp, for now, of course, but what’re you gonna do, beyond calling your congressperson and senators to bend their ears about the Digital Age Homesteading Act?39