Just the other day, we were speculating about NAT’s growth rates, and left it up to how the company’s bulk commercial hemp trials worked out. Well, some of the results are already in, and it’s looking pretty good for both Naturally Advance Technologies and the hemp industry writ large.

You see, part of hemp’s biggest potential is also one of its largest obstacle: as a fabric. Now, while cotton needs an immense amount of water (i.e. heavy irrigation), hemp can often subsist on rain water. Furthermore, while cotton is a destructive crop that quickly depletes the soil, hemp makes a great rotation crop while the soil is being left to recover.

The problem with hemp as an alternative to cotton, however, is twofold: (1) it does not make as soft of a fabric as cotton does, and as a result (2) it cannot be as easily spun by machines as cotton can. All this seriously drives up the cost of using hemp as a fabric, which in turn reduces demand for hemp fibres, which in turn discourages the kind of investment required to find a solution to all. It’s all a vicious cycle.

Well, NAT may have solved this problem with its Crailar organic fiber. Crailar is a traditionally spun yarn, but using bast fibers (like those found in plants like hemp), as is consequently a replacement for cotton. Incidentally, Crailar was part of the aforementioned bulk commercial hemp trials. These trials, moreover, were conducted in conjunction with Hanesbrands Inc. (the maker of Hanes t-shirts), and they have not only yielded a way to mass process hemp into a viable cotton substitute, but NAT has already secured a distribution deal with Costco. As Ecotextile reports:

PORTLAND – [17.11.08] An industrial hemp blended yarn has been successfully spun on conventional cotton ring-spinning equipment without modification and then knitted into jersey fabrics in trials sponsored by Hanesbrands Inc.

The hemp yarns were spun at North Carolina State University using fibres made with the ‘Crailar’ enzyme process from Naturally Advanced Technology, which uses enzyme technology to produce soft, comfortable textiles made from hemp and bast fibres that can better compete with cotton.

Tim Pleasants, Spun Yarn Lab Manager, NC State University, said, “[...] This is the first time in my 23-year yarn spinning career that I have seen hemp processed on conventional cotton spinning equipment.”

Earlier this summer, British Colombia-based Naturally Advanced Technologies (NAT) raised nearly US$2 million through a private placement of its shares and more recently signed a new promotional deal with Costco’s US stores.

Overall, NAT’s achievement with their Crailar fiber is a business accomplishment par excellence. Not only have they found a way to replace one of the most destructive textile crops with one of the most sustainable ones, but they’ve secured distribution deal for their go-to-market strategy. This kind of innovation and entrepreneurship is just the kind of proactive approach that the hemp industry needs to overcome the economies-of-scale that its less eco-friendly alternatives have held over it for so long.

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.

Researchers in the Netherlands have developed a new variety of hemp that they hope will challenge cotton’s stronghold over textiles. What’s interesting about this strain is that is supposedly contains absolutely no THC (the psycho-active compound in marijuana). Generally, industrial hemp contains less than 0.3% THC — not nearly enough to produce the psycho-active effects experiencde with marijuana, which contains about 5-15% THC or more.

These researchers, moreover, aren’t financially motivated. Rather, they’re out to help the environment. As Radio Netherlands reports:

[...] investigators from Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR) are extremely pleased with [their new] crop, as this new hemp variety may be able to break cotton’s monopoly position as the textile crop of choice.
[...]
The plant is doesn’t contain a single milligram of THC, the main psychoactive substance found in hashish and marijuana.

According to the WUR researchers, the disadvantages of cotton production should mean that farmers the world over will be more than eager to seize on the hemp variety they have created. Dr Den Nijs explains:

“It takes an enormous amount of water to produce a cotton crop. Farmers have to use vast amounts of pesticides and herbicides to grow it. Basically, huge amounts of chemicals are necessary in order to produce a decent cotton crop. Hemp is entirely different; it can be grown in more marginal areas and needs very little in the way of pesticides or herbicides in order to produce a decent crop. Furthermore, it needs far, far less water than cotton”.

Dr Den Nijs’s comment is a prime example of scientific understatement: an acre of cotton needs 25 times more water than an acre of hemp.

These developments underscore the environmental potential of cultivating industrial hemp: it’s easier on the soil, and requires less water and not toxic chemicals. Hopefully a completely THC-free strain will help erode one more rhetorical point of contention that big industry has with switching crop.

In fact, in terms of some other practical advantages that hemp has over cotton, HempFarm.org claims:

• 1 acre of hemp will produce as much as 2-3 acres of cotton.
• Hemp is 4 times warmer than cotton, 4 times more water absorbent, has 3 times the tensile strength of cotton. It is also many times more durable and is flame retardant.
• Hemp breathes well and wicks moisture away from the body better than cotton.