Aussie Hemp Farmer

Global commodity prices rise are on the rise, driving up the price of all staples, from food to coffee to cotton. These increases have been severe enough that they even have some G20 leaders worried about food security.

On the cotton front, hemp fibers could help consumers save on their clothing purchases. But if hemp farming was legal in the US, the crop could also preempt further environmental devastation as farmers rush to cash-in on the cotton rush.

Short Supply, Growing Demand

The main causes behind poor cotton yields has been severe weather caused by global warming. Indeed, crops in Pakistan, India, China, and Australia all fell short of expectations in 2010.

As CTV reports, this shortage and increasing demands in India and China may push the price of cotton up as much as 80%. And because of rising price, farmers are rushing to plant more cotton. Both Australia and Brazil have increased their production, and some US states are expected to even double theirs. As Business Week reports:

[...] California farmers are expected to plant 400,000 acres of cotton this year. That’s up from a low of 200,000 acres planted two years ago.

In the short-term, increased cotton production and export will help the US manage its trade deficit. In the medium- to long-term, however, increasing cotton production is bound to only exacerbate one of the causes behind the world’s cotton shortage.

Hemp vs Cotton: Crops & The Climate

The problem with ramping up cotton production, though, is that will only contribute to climate change further. Hemp, on the other hand, represent a much more sustainable, less resource intensive alternative.

First, cotton is thirsty crop, requiring considerable irrigation, which disturbs both marine and terrestrial habitats. Indeed, it can take up to 100 gallons of water to produce one pound of cotton. Hemp can subsist off of rainfall in most climates.

Second, cotton is notorious for depleting soil — leading to soil erosion and desertification. Hemp, by contrast, has a deep root system that helps to prevent soil erosion and aerates the soil — to the benefit of other, future crops.

Third, because cotton depletes soil so extensively, it requires considerable fertilization, leading to eutrophication — poisoning the water table and destroying marine ecosystems. Hemp, however, rarely require fertilization.

Finally, while cotton crops constitute on 3% of cultivated land globally, it account for 25% of the world’s insecticides and 10% of the world’s pesticides. Hemp does require the use of such toxic chemicals.

Holding Hemp Back

So while cotton farming not only requires a lot of water, but also uses a lot fertilizer and pesticides (furthering our dependency on petroleum), hemp represents an alternative that is (1) cheaper to produce and (2) much more sustainable as a crop. So what’s holding hemp back as a cash-crop? Well, a number of things.

For starters, there are legal hurdles in many countries. While Canada, Australia, China, and many European countries grow and export industrial hemp, it remains illegal in the US and India because legislation doesn’t distinguish between hemp and its psychoactive counterpart – marijuana. Both the US and India, however, are major cotton producers, so legislative change could bring about considerable agricultural (and ecological) reform.

Hanes Logo

Then, there is the facts that hemp is not as easily spun into a soft fabric as cotton is. Of course, companies such as Hanes and NAT are working on a solution to this, but the technology to spin hemp into a complete substitute for cotton is still a couple years off.

Finally, there are market issues. Simply put, hemp is still not a mainstream fiber, meaning that farmers just do not have the incentive to grow hemp as they do cotton — i.e. they can’t sell it as easily. This, of course, will change as technology makes hemp fabrics more suitable for consumer needs.

As hemp fiber technology gets better, market demand will go up, farmers will have more of an incentive to cultivate it, and markets forces will apply more pressure on governments to accommodate the crop. Perhaps recent change in commodity prices will lend force to such market forces.

Chances are, though, that cotton lobbyists will work against the crop for at least 5-10 years to come. But let’s hope not.

Credit: Granville Online

Came across this interesting article on Hemp vs Cotton. It’s just another reminder of how the plant is not only extrememly versatile, but can how, once again, it’s an extremely eco-friendlier alternative to a very environmentally damaging crop. Here were some key points:

• It takes about 1,400 gallons of water to produce just 1 pound of cotton
• Cotton require only half that
• One acre of land can produce 250% more hemp fiber than cotton fiber
• A field of hemp can also yield two crops a year
• Cotton consumes 25% of the world’s insecticides and 10% of the world’s pesticides
• Most hemp is grown without pesticides/insecticides
• Hemp doesn’t require herbicide because it over-shades weeds
• Hemp is a tremendous carbon trap

The environmental advantage of hemp, I think, are strikingly clear. But the article also goes on to explore how hemp and cotton compare in terms of industrial applications and market potential, and hemp still comes out on top.

It makes you wonder how hemp every got outlawed as a fiber crop. Oh yeah, I remember: William Randolf Hearst printed his news on cotton paper and owned a bunch of interests in cotton farming, so he used marijuana to launch a smear campaign again the cotton’s biggest (non-psychoactive) rival, hemp.

It’s outright tragic and injust that 70 years later, us and the planet are still bearing the burden of Hearst’s corrupt corporate interests.

Dr. Keithe Bolton

We’ve previously covered how hemp can be used to treat sewage, and how an Australian researcher, Dr. Keith Bolton, was testing it’s full potential as a mop-up crop. Well, it appears that the good Dr. Bolton is at it again. As the Northern Rivers Echo reports, Dr. Bolton has recently used his research to help an Australian aboriginal community whose sewage treatment facilities have fallen into disrepair:

With a love of travel and a secondary business behind him of importing hemp products such as hemp seed oil, it was natural that Dr Bolton’s next project should involve research into growing and irrigating hemp with effluent.
[...]
“Half a million litres of poorly treated effluent were being released into the local creek at Bangalow causing ecological damage,” Dr Bolton said. “I suggested that the alternative was a land application of effluent where we grow and irrigate crops with it.”

Dr Bolton then trialled crops of hemp, bamboo and kenaf on the land. While hemp produced the most in terms of biomass production, today bamboo is grown there as the main ‘mop crop’ because it grows all year round.
[...]
It was the combination of hemp and waste water which brought the people from the Aboriginal community of Malabugilmah near Tenterfield to Dr Bolton’s door about four years ago. They had heard about his successful hemp growing trials and they hoped he could help them with their own sewage problems.

The community of Malabugilmah now has complete sewage treatment facilities, and unlike other such projects in Australian Aborginal communities, the community itself was heavily involved in both the planning and upkeep of the facilities. In fact, 14 community members received proper training and are now employed to maintain the infrastructure and services required by the community.

As a mop-up crop, hemp has considerable potential to pull toxins from the soil. When irrigated with sewage, hemp will pull 90% of the nitrogen from the effluent and soil. In fact, during Dr. Bolton’s first trials, someone even tried adding ammonium to the irrigation system, and the hemp absorbed 95% of it. Hemp can also be used to pull lead from contaminated land.

A mop-up crop, simply put, is a crop that pulls contaminants out of the soil. Well, hemp has been shown to pull heavy metals out of the soil, but apparently it can also help used in sewage treatment.

You see, raw sewage is a problem for water because it causes eutrophication, which is when so many nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients seep into the water that most life cannot survive. Basically, these nutrients cause so much algae to grow that fish life suffocates. Next thing you know, there’s nothing but algae living in your water — and that’s not much of a diverse ecosystem.

Eutropihication is most common when manure fertilizer and other farm animal waste runs off into the water table. But imagine if you were dumping that manure directly into streams or river. Well, that’s pretty much what we do with sewage.

Well Keith Bolton, Chief Scientist and Director of Ecoteam, recently conducted some trials using a variety of fiber crops to as a mop-up crop in sewage treatment, and hemp greatly out-performed all the other crops. Collaborating with a water treatment company, Bolton irrigated a hemp crop with sewage, and teh hemp absorbed 90% of the nitrogen. Also of interest was that at one point, someone dumped ammonium into the sewage, and the hemp absorbed 95% of that.

Sydney Indymedia has an interview with Bolton where he discusses both using hemp for water treatment and his experience with hemps as a building material. An mp3 version of the interview can be downloaded here.

Just last week, we posted about an article in the University of Maryland’s student newspaper, The Retriever Weekly about hemp in American history. Well, it seems that the editor at that student paper have are sympathetic toward the cannabis plant, and have just run another piece. This one looks at the environmental potential of hemp biofuel. The article is called Government should look toward hemp as a viable alternative fuel, and in addition to discussing how hemp can be used to actually produce biofuel, the author also provides an overview of all the other environmental benefits of cultivating the hemp plant en masse:

Hemp Global Solutions researches the use of hemp as a biofuel. They advocate hemp as a “potential solution to some of the major social and environmental challenges of the 21st century.”
[...]
Perhaps one of hemp’s best characteristics is its environmental friendliness. It grows faster than other crops like corn or rice and it comes with the added benefit of improving soil quality where it’s grown. Similarly, it does not need cleared land to grow and is naturally pest resistant, meaning that pesticides are not necessary which would help to ultimately reduce CFCs and nutrient leeching. Furthermore, hemp even kills pests in the soil, further reducing the need for pesticides. Unlike fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide and sulfur into the air, hemp actually converts carbon dioxide back into biomass at an astounding rate. The crop itself is extremely diverse and able to grow in conditions that other biofuel crops cannot. Its drought resistance makes it an ideal crop for farmers in the Midwest and other areas that are so-called “dust bowls.”

Although researchers have been looking at corn as a possible biofuel, hemp is much more productive and cost-effective. One acre of hemp can produce ten times as much methanol as an acre of corn, with an exponentially faster rate of growth. Capable of producing ten tons of biomass per acre in less than four months, hemp would only take six percent of the American land mass to grow enough hemp to completely eliminate our need for fossil fuels. The infrastructure change would not be a problem either, as traditional farming equipment could be used to harvest hemp.

Written by the same author as the article that The Retriever ran last week, this piece also touches on the role that hemp has played throughout US history — from Henry Ford’s famous hemp car to how Congress lifted marijuana prohibition during WW II. This writer just might be someone for the hemp industry to keep an eye. Of course, he might also just be another starry-eyed student who’s bound to grow disenchanted and apathetic once he actually has to start paying taxes and bills. Let’s hope that the former wins out over the latter.

Today has been a slow day in terms of hemp related news, so I thought I’d post this video on one man’s effort to replace cotton farms in Whales with industrial hemp farms. Hemp has a number of advantages over cotton:

• it can produce 250% the amount of fibre
• it requires little to no pesticides
• and it requires much less water to grow

Overall, hemp is a much more sustainable crop than cotton. The only thing really holding back the hemp fiber industry is the technology required to spin it into fiber — which could easily catch up if enough interest was stirred up in the marketplace. The need to incite such interest, moreover, couldn’t be more pressing because cotton is one of the most destructive crops there is. Consider the following:

• half the pesticides used in the US go to cotton alone
• cotton takes up 3% of the world’s most arable land, but is responsible for about 25% of the pesticides used
• one pound of cotton require 100 gallons of water, and hemp can subsist off of rainfall in most climates

Add these environmental tidbits to the reality that hemp makes for a more durable, insulating, and absorbent fiber than cotton, and the choice seems obvious. The only drawback is that hemp can’t be used to make fibers as light, fluffy, and soft as cotton can.

An opinion piece on OpEd News points to an interesting paper by Lynn Osburn. Appearing to have been written in 1990, Toward a Green Economy outlines some of major environmental dilemmas caused by our economy, and then explores how industrial hemp might be able to solve them. Here’s an excerpt on how using industrial hemp for paper production can save forests:

About seventy-five years ago two dedicated USDA scientists projected that at the rate the U.S. was using paper we would deplete the forests in our lifetimes. [...] So USDA scientists Dewey and Merrill looked for an alternate agricultural resource for paper products to prevent the disaster we now face.

They found the ideal candidate to be the waste material left in the fields after the hemp harvest. The left over pulp, called hemp hurds, was traditionally burned in the fields when the hemp fiber had been removed after the time consuming retting (partially rotting the hemp stalk to separate the fiber from the hurds) process was completed.

Hemp hurds are richer in cellulose and contain less lignin than wood pulp. Dewey and Merrill found after much experimentation that harsh sulfur acids used to break down the lignin in wood pulp were not necessary when making paper from hemp hurds. Sulfur acid wastes from paper mills are known to be a major source of waterway pollution. The coarse paper they made from hemp hurds was stronger and had greater folding durability than course wood pulp paper. Hemp hurd paper would make better cardboard and paper bag products than wood paper. They found the fine print quality hemp hurd paper to be equal to writing quality wood pulp paper. [ Dewey and Merrill, Bulletin #404, Hemp Hurds As Paper-Making Material, U.S.D.A., Washington, D.C., October 14, 1916.]

The only problem to implementing the paper industry resource change from wood to hemp hurds was machinery to separate hemp fiber from the hurds needed to be developed. Separation was still done by hand after the machine breaks had softened the hemp stalks.

The paper seems focused on how forests need to be protected because emissions aren’t going to go away. Of course, hemp has quite a few uses that can help us cut down on emissions, such as biofuel and replacing a slew of other synthetic products that cause emission when manufactured. Mind you, Toward a Green Economy was written nearly two decades ago, so many of the advances in hemp processing that we have today had not yet been made.

Built in New Zealand and valued at $3 million, Earthrace is the world’s fastest eco-boat. In fact, it broke the world record for circumnavigating the globe by almost 14 days when it completed the journey in 60 days, 23 hours, and 49 minutes. Cooler still: it’s hull is made of hemp. As BVI Platinum reports:

Earthrace, which runs on 100% biodiesel, is the first boat in the world to use hemp composite. This is visible on the floor of the helm. Hemp is renewable, unlike carbon and Kevlar, and is strong and versatile enough for medium impact protection.

The hull shape is extremely efficient, reducing fuel consumption compared with conventional craft.

During construction, Earthrace used a number of recycled products (such as ice cream containers) collected from local Schools. In exchange, the team provided the schools with discarded MDF and pine to use in their woodworking departments.

Now if only Earthrace was powered by hemp and used hemp biofuel instead of regular biodiesel, we’d really have a reason to get excited. But you can find out more about the Earthrace at www.earthrace.net.