Introduction

After-School Snacks Before Doritos

Turns out your Deadhead roommate was right. Sort of. It isn’t so much that hemp, useful as we’re about to see it is, will automatically save humanity. It’s that the worldwide industrial cannabis industry can play a major role in our species’ long-shot sustainable resource search and climate stabilization project. For that to happen, the plant must be exploited domestically in ways upon which the marketplace smiles. No pressure: We fail? We just go extinct. The Earth’ll be fine.

Hemp hands us a ninth-inning comeback opportunity. At the same time that it stimulates community-based economic growth on the producer side (and not a little bit, if a farm community is serious about implementing some of the ideas we’re about to discuss), large scale re-adaptation of one of humanity’s longest-utilized plants will provide sustainable energy, regionally produced food, and digital age industrial materials on the consumer end.

The planet’s struggling soil wins, too: All those farmers put back to work growing a viable cash crop? They’re remediating soil toxified or desertified after a century of monoculture (or in Kentucky’s case, coal mining).

“Since hemp is so good for soil structure,” British hemp expert John Hobson told me of European use of the plant today, “it’s utilized as a true [rotational] crop. Even when growing cereals is more profitable, hemp keeps those yields from going down and blots out weed invasion.” Hobson should know: He advises farmers on which hemp cultivars his Lime Technology company wants grown for use as building material in the Continental construction industry.

The key to success, from humanity’s perspective and from an economic perspective, is multiple use of the plant. This starts on the farm with a concept we’ll be discussing called dual cropping, but which really should be called tri-cropping. Basically, one hemp harvest can and should be used at once for food, energy, and industrial components (like car parts, building insulation, and clothing). Hemp is already in BMW and Dodge door panels.

The fact is, after my most recent intense, several-month, in-the-field research journey that carried me in person from Hawaii to Canada, Belgium, and Colorado (and virtually from New Zealand to China), I can report that hemp is one of the most valuable crops for the USDA to encourage and subsidize with the greatest possible dispatch. As China is consciously on its way to doing, the United States should be cultivating two million acres of the stuff.

This recommendation isn’t news to our leaders. In a 1994 executive order, President Clinton included hemp among “the essential agricultural products that should be stocked for defense preparedness purposes.”13

Whoever did the research for that wise conclusion had a lot of history to examine, starting long before modern researchers began testing hemp’s stronger-than-steel fiber for use in body armor and aircraft components. Here’s a portion of the USDA’s 1895 Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture: “The hemp plant . . . has been so generally cultivated the world over as a cordage fiber that the value of all other fibers as to strength and durability is estimated by it . . . The plant is an admirable weed killer, and is sometimes employed . . . because it puts the soil in good condition . . . The value of hemp for fiber . . . and oil would seem to make its cultivation a very profitable one.”

Actually, the White House researchers might have gone back much farther still. The Persians have called hemp Shaah-daaneh, or King of Seeds, for four millennia. I discovered this (before I fully realized what a concisely true name it is) when one of the engineers who was giving me a tour of the University of Manitoba’s hemp-and-lime building insulation research projects in February 2013 mentioned offhandedly that our (quite technical) interview had brought back fond memories for him. Why? Because toasted hemp seed had “always been the go-to” after-school snack in his native Iran.

Absent Doritos and val-u-meals, Farhoud Delijani told me, hemp was a ubiquitous meal bridge for kids on the way to soccer practice. He couldn’t wax wistfully enough on the Farsi treat of his youth. “Pop ’em in by the handful, shells on. Yum, it was just really tasty,” Delijani told me, adding of the plant’s now famous benefits, “We didn’t know about the fatty acids, let alone the biofuel apps. It was just a very popular everyday treat.”

That’s a four-thousand-year-old message that should be heeded. Delijani mentioned biofuels. If you’re like me, you’re fairly desperate for a fossil energy replacement and you’ve liked what you’ve read about hemp’s potential. But you’ve also wondered, “Really? The plant whose psychoactive side Abbie Hoffman thought should be mandatory before the stock exchange’s opening bell is actually going to revitalize the economy and save the planet?” I’m excited to report that the answer is yes. Colorado biomass fuels consultant Agua Das and Colorado School of Mines chemical engineer Thomas B. Reed reported that an acre of hemp can produce power equivalent to a thousand gallons of gasoline.14

The hemp revolution is already under way, and, as with any new industry, its trajectory is market-driven. Today Canadian hemp farmers profit to the tune of $250 (U.S.15) per acre, compared with $30–100 for wheat. This on a crop that the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance says will double in acreage to one hundred thousand acres by 2015 largely because 90 percent of it goes to the United States. We are, of course, the world’s largest consumer of pretty much everything except affordable health care, and this includes hemp.

Consider these pages a playbook for the patriotic hemp farmer, entrepreneur, and investor who wants to help humanity transition smoothly from fossil fuels, tree farms, and monoculture. If you’re simply hemp-curious, you’ll hopefully finish this book a voracious consumer. That’s a win for your health and the economy’s. And if you’re not an American, here’s what Colorado rancher Bowman said is one of his motivations for establishing the plant’s planetwide worth: “Family farmers like me are committing suicide in India and all over the world because the GMO cycle of debt is meeting climate change. I think we’re going to find that hemp can help break that cycle.”

American readers are about to notice that the rest of the industrialized world has a two-decade head start on the hemp revival. Embarrassing as that is, I’ve found that the slow start actually provides a slew of helpful lessons: We know what sustainably works (or can) in the marketplace. On our journey across four continents, we’ll delve into the most promising real-world applications provided by a soil-stabilizing plant that can help replace or reverse three of my least favorite things: petroleum-based plastics, GMO monoculture, and environmental degradation.