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.
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