Chapter Ten

Hempucation Immersion Course

Anndrea Hermann, strawberry-blond hair flayed across the back of her coveralls, was trying to help me dig my full-sized four-wheel-drive rental truck out of another snowbank, this one behind her former Mennonite farmhouse. Based on the fact that I could see only a frozen pancake in all directions, it seemed to me that I was in the dictionary definition of the middle of nowhere—somewhere on the Canadian Prairie. In her directions, Hermann had described the location as a suburb of Winnipeg.

The minus-seventeen cold at the moment—calculated before healthy breeze—was a physical presence on Hermann’s 120 acres. An entity to which I could and did speak. And we were out in it for longer than humans are rated for.

I’m relating what any Canadian will tell you is just another Far North Thursday to get to the reason I was stuck: Both one of the world’s most prominent hemp industry authorities and I had wanted to get ten feet closer to the former’s barn to unload the truck. The surrounding snowdrifts, if not Himalayan, had seemed imposing to navigate on foot in such conditions. It was a lazy move, and we were paying for it. Good thing I had about a month’s supply of Colleen Dyck’s GORP bars in the cab.

In our defense, Hermann had tossed perhaps thirty white feedbags, at fifty pounds each, into the Ford’s truck bed when we’d visited the Hemp Oil Canada facility. I’m pretty sure no previous Payless renter had done that. Not with this cargo: The bags contained pure hemp seed cake, the protein-rich by-product of hemp oil pressing. Upward of three-quarters of a ton of it. It was feed for Hermann’s pigs.

“This and compost is all I feed ’em in winter,” she told me just before I drove into the crystalline snowdrifts (where I remained for several hours) on February 21, 2013. “In the summertime sometimes they graze the hemp stalks in the field.”

I watched the morning feeding: These were healthy-looking pink-and-brown pigs, energetically charging me either for pets or for more hemp. One of them was pregnant.

Hermann, in other words, doesn’t just work to promote hemp. She lives it. Thus these are heady times for the thirty-six-year-old, not just because her consulting business line is ringing off the hook, but because she’s still, after fifteen years in the hemp business, ticked off that hemp isn’t legal to help the economy in her native Missouri.

“It’s important that we win this, and we’re nearly there,” she told me buoyantly (or perhaps just shiveringly) back in the powder-swirling cryogenics lab of her farm. Billows of steam followed the words out of her scarf and around her swine-muddy coveralls.

Sometimes when she was animated, which appeared to be roughly the hours between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., I noticed that Hermann accelerated from an erudite, deliberate, Canadianer-than-thou pace to the more rapid-fire Ozarks syntax of her upbringing. At one point I had to count the number of negatives in a sentence to see how she really felt about a particular Kentucky hemp legalization bill.

This is a Get ’Er Done kind of woman, one whose frankly barely habitable winter ecosystem kept making me think, You have the skill set of the successful Fortune 500 CEO; you must really care about the hemp plant’s reemergence.

She does. Her terrifyingly drafty house is quite literally a hemp museum. There are hemp bales outside, 120-year-old hemp newspaper ads on her living room table, and hemp soaps in the bathroom. This is a woman who got into hemp as an undergraduate because her adviser asked her, “What needs to be changed so badly it makes you angry?”

A decade and a half and two degrees after throwing up her hands at the U.S. drug war, she’s still at it, having never wavered, changed careers, or abandoned the Far North. And now she’s consciously about to experience victory in her life’s biggest battle. The end of the war on hemp, for Hermann, is like De Niro’s LaMotta finally claiming the middleweight title in Raging Bull.

On the day of my visit, she chopped and chucked firewood into her woodstove with the body language of a slugger swatting batting practice, and then cooked her lunch on it, including those scientifically proven super-healthy hemp-fed chicken eggs that I’m rather craving three of at the moment. She did all this, as we’ve seen, while answering calls from her Canadian, African, and European hemp consulting clients about whether certain harvest techniques risked unwanted hemp seed sprouting prior to processor delivery.41

Not long after the pig feeding, as I wriggled like an outsmarted Houdini out of the coveralls Hermann had loaned me for the attempted truck extraction, she was on the horn with a college administrator in Corvallis, Oregon. They were discussing the landmark industrial hemp course that Hermann was co-leading at Oregon State University in the spring term of 2013.

This was a twenty-three-hour, 400-level class in the college of forestry at an American state-funded university. The course description was: “Introduction to the botany, biology and agronomy of the hemp plant, and the origins, historical contexts and implications of contemporary legal and social issues surrounding its use for food, fiber, and building products.”

The first iteration of the course had thirty-six students. “The class was really engaged,” Hermann told me a few months after my first visit. “And they were excited about creating their own bit of hemp history. Some students knew a lot about the cannabis plant, some none at all. But each brought his or her own expertise into what the course is offering.”

Hermann said it was particularly gratifying to have total support from the university. “For fall term we’re increasing the student number to one hundred,” she said.

And so the hemp knowledge base is being rebuilt—OSU is like that Irish monastery that saved all the Greek and Latin classics. It actually makes sense that Oregon State has relaunched hemp into mainstream academic legitimacy, incidentally, as it was Beaver researchers who did some of the last pre-drug-war domestic hemp cultivar research in the 1930s.42

I personally didn’t see how Hermann had time to prep for the course, since she’s one of the people the Canadian government hires to sample hemp crops to make sure the THC levels are sufficiently negligible. Hermann sampled twenty-one thousand acres over the 2012 season, running from farms all over the province to a lab near her home, all while fielding that stream of hemp client calls.

The Hemp Industries Association’s Steve Levine calls the Oregon State course “a big deal,” since the plant is as kosher as basil locally but, obviously, not yet in DC. It certainly says a lot about American academic hearts and minds. Plus I have little doubt, after how much I learned from Hermann, that it was a valuable educational experience.

Levine sees the OSU course, Bowman’s farmer activism, and national lobbying efforts as all part of the same final push to a domestic hemp industry launch. “If Colorado farmers get some seeds in the ground and are successful, that’ll also really help the legislative situation in the heartland,” he said. “This is going to be fun to watch.”

But Hermann, even when worked up by prohibition’s insanity into what struck me as her quite intentional and effective hillbilly mode, is at core a sensible, sanguine midwesterner. When I asked for her advice to American farmers, the first thing she said was, “After legalization, take it slow. Don’t expect to reap a bonanza from your first crop.”

From there she went straight into heartland schoolmarm mode. “Make sure your harvesters are sharp—know how to operate the combine so it works well with hemp . . . Dry your seed immediately to 8 or 9 percent [moisture] after harvest to protect the essential fatty acid profile during storage.”

Useful intelligence, I’m sure, but not exactly the cheerleading you’d expect from someone the Canadian government considered a “Unique Skilled Worker” (essentially bestowing permanent residency on her) before finally making her a dual citizen. And there’s a reason for the business-like posture.

“I want to see hemp just be another ingredient in a farm economy . . . providing healthy food structure and industrial material for people,” she said. No politics, in other words.

Hemp Pioneers

Mark Reinders, HempFlax Deputy Director, Oude Pekela, The Netherlands

The meadows of northern Holland were still frosted when I set off on an autumn morning to visit the nearby HempFlax headquarters in Groningen province. Perhaps the coolest part of my research for this book—and that’s like choosing between favorite ice cream flavors—came very near the end, on the HempFlax factory floor. That’s because I found myself watching (and in turn touching) the actual hemp fibers that go into Mercedes and BMW door panels. These emerged in clumps from a mechanized separator that sent the remaining hurd down a different chute (for use as cat litter).

Operating like a page out of the 1938 Popular Mechanics article that hailed hemp’s twenty-five thousand uses, HempFlax also sells parts of the European industrial cannabis plant harvest for textiles, paper, and building insulation. The vast, noisy factory I was touring this chilly morning churns out more than 1,400 pounds of hemp fiber every hour.

Even though the company does four million euros business every year, its boss, 32-year-old Mark Reinders, told me that finding markets for the locally harvested hemp is “like juggling—we sell the bast fiber and then have to find markets for twice as much of the shiv.”

On the agricultural side, the business requires constant innovation, too. Reinders pointed to a giant harvester parked next to the factory and said that his mechanics still have to jerry-rig equipment to fit a particular field’s dual-cropping needs.

“See here?” he said, hopping up about eight feet to the harvester’s hood. “We welded a forklift mast up top here so we can harvest the leaves and flowers higher up on the plant,” he said. “That gives us a market for juice and shakes before the main blade cuts the stalks down at sixty centimeters to begin the fiber-retting process.” Hey, presto, another kind of dual cropping invented. I was blown away that there’s still no standard hemp-harvesting modus operandi, even in the relatively mature markets of Europe.

I loved that all of the hemp for the HempFlax factory has to date come from surrounding farms on the Dutch countryside, but Reinders said that price competition from GMO corn has forced the company to buy farmland in Romania as hemp fiber demand increases worldwide. This really gets his goat. “It’s being grown for inefficient energy, not food,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”

He hopes the high corn price problem is temporary, because Europe’s soil needs hemp. “I came to hemp because my father’s a farmer and he cultivated it in 1996 as a cash-providing bridge crop that was a soil restorative,” Reinders told me back on the factory floor as I snatched an armful of the most combed, highest-end bast fiber from the end of a factory conveyor belt (it was so soft to the touch that I felt like I was squeezing silky air). “I liked how fast it grew and that it was pesticide free. So I interned here as an industrial engineering student, and after I graduated from business school, (company founder) Ben (Dronkers) brought me on.”

The privately owned HempFlax, which Reinders described as “on its feet, stable” and on a twenty-year, uneven climb to consistent profitability, was already supplying European automakers by the time he came on in 2007. “The way that happened is the template was already in place for natural fibers like flax in automotive components,” Reinders said. “And a combination of its fiber qualities and market forces made hemp’s position progressively stronger. We should thank the auto parts contractors as much as the auto companies. It was the parts suppliers who were looking for affordable quality to keep their own costs low.”

When I mentioned that North American hemp farmers have no modern experience taking care of a fiber harvest, Reinders nodded gravely and agreed with Canadian hemp researcher Simon Potter that we were talking about a vital body of knowledge that requires expertise. “We actually go to the fields to do the harvesting rather than letting farmers bring in the harvest,” he said. “With fiber, the motto is ‘quality in, quality out.’ A farmer might be worried about rain and want to end the retting when the fiber is still gray. He has his own priorities. We come in and say, ‘Wait three more days.’ You want the fiber to be a dark yellow for the high-quality applications like textiles and industrial components.” And so the North American hemp fiber learning curve begins.