The Sunday Telegraph, July 23, 1995 (London)p.12

Opening the stable door to grass that is greener

This is probably the most discreet world exclusive in the history of
newspapers. The company involved would like to keep it very low key
indeed. Nevertheless, I can now reveal that for the last two weeks, as a
trial only, horses in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace have been going
to sleep every night on bedding made entirely of cannabis.

If you visit the Mews as a member of the public, the sight of the
royal carriage horses nuzzling happily down into their ganja duvets is not
what will greet you. In the show stable, chandeliers down the central
alleyway, spit and polish, wall to wall brasses, the horses are stabled
entirely in rich, golden straw. This is what the public expects.

In the efficient part, behind the scenes, straw is unheard of. It's
too old-fashioned, with little absorbency. It needs constant mucking out
and creates a vast dung heap that in central London has to be carted away
in skips at a disproportionate cost. For several years now, the Royal
Mews' horses have been stabled on shredded newsprint. It is highly
absorbent, less bulky and weighty, easily managed and, when finally
transported to some London allotments rots down quickly to make good
compost.

The price of newsprint at the moment is going through the roof. The
fashion for recycled paper is beginning to make its use as horse-bedding
uneconomic. This is where the cannabis comes in.

It is, of course, illegal to grow cannabis if you mean to smoke it.
Until three years ago, it was at best a window box crop in the United
Kingdom. That has now changed. At the moment, across about 3,000 acres of
East Anglia and the south-east Cannabis sativa is growing with its
accustomed virulence and vitality. It is now, with its beautiful,
half-minty, half-acrid smell blowing across the fields, about six or seven
feet tall, a forest of dense, nettly green, virtually unaffected by the
drought that has stunted cereal crops in eastern England.

If you happen to spot a cannabis field as you drive along, it has at
the moment a rather exotic, glossy, Jamaican look to it. If you didn't
know it you'd never guess what it was. If things go the way its promoters
hope, it may well within a decade or so become as familiar a roadside sight
as the fields of oilseed rape.

What is going on? In the autumn of 1991 an entrepreneurial Essex
farmer, Robert Lukies, spotted some bales of horse bedding manufactured in
France that on inspection turned out to be made from the pithy core of
cannabis, or to give it its English agricultural name, hemp. He then found
that the EC was offering a subsidy on the growing of hemp that was more
than for any other crop. Currently it stands at 607 per hectare, or
about 245 an acre. Luckies thought, "If they can do it, why can't we?"

Applications were made to the Home Office and after a deal of
cajoling, persuading them out of their reluctance to license the growing of
a banned substance, Luckies won through. In the summer of 1992, trial beds
of a variety of different hemp seeds, from France and eastern Europe, were
grown on Lukies's farm. The officials from the Home Office tested the
plants for their narcotic content when they had matured. The stuff from
eastern Europe was superbly intoxicating and had to go. It was burnt on
the field. The French seeds had less than 0.3 per cent of the
psychoactive element THC and these were the ones that the Home Office
approved.

Skunk, the street cannabis of the moment, can have a THC content of up
to 30 per cent. You'd have to stand downwind of a burning acre of the
approved plants to get any sensation at all. Last year about 90 kilos were
stolen one night from a field near Stevenage, which were probably passed
off as the real thing. Perhaps there might be a market in the cannabis
equivalent of alcohol-free lager or decaffeinated coffee.

Given the go-ahead, Lukies teamed up with Ian Low of the seed
merchants HAM to form a company called Hemcore and started to persuade
farmers to try it. It didn't need much work. The subsidy did the talking.
Marijuana is a simple crop to grow. First, the Home Office men come
and interview the farmer to see he is the right sort and that the cannabis
field is well away from a public road. Once that is established, and no
one has yet been refused a licence (although some have been "dissuaded"
largely because they have no suitable ground), the field can be prepared
and the seed can be drilled.

The huge growth of the plant, up to 15 feet in a year, means that it
needs a heavy application of fertiliser to start with. The seed bed itself
needs to be fine and well drained. Once it is well drilled, it can be
ignored until harvesting in late summer.

"It's a farmer's dream," says Scott Findlay, who has been growing it
for three years on a few of his 2,000 acres near Harlow in Essex. "It's a
wonderful crop. Anyone could grow it. It's almost addictive to watch it
grow, three inches a day. It's like a 'Triffid'. And that's what's so
good about it. It grows so fast that it chokes all the rubbish out. We
never have to spray it: no herbicide, fungicide or insecticide."

Apart from the fertiliser application, it is one of the greenest crops
you could think of. Even on the heavily chemical arable farms in Essex
that are participating in the Hemcore scheme, there were masses of
butterflies around the cannabis fields, flourishing in the poison-free
environment.

It's something that the farmers themselves like the crop for. To get
the higher payments for clean, high-quality grain out of their cereal
fields, they feel they have little choice but to spray as much as is
necessary to get rid of wild oats, fat hen, black grass or whatever their
particular problem might be. To find a break-crop that is self-cleaning
like hemp not only saves time and money but allows farmers the pleasure of
not relying on yet another chemical. Cannabis might well provide a soft
entry point into non-chemical farming for many farmers to whom organic
farming has a rather wet, non-macho image. The net margins on an acre of
hemp, at around 250, are about the same as those on a conventionally
farmed acre of wheat or barley.

But can there really be much of a market for this stuff? There are not
too many Royal Mews. John Hobson, general manager of Hemcore, is of course
highly bullish about it. Apart from the horse bedding, which is made from
the core of the plant known as shiv, cannabis can be turned to an amazing
variety of uses. Hemp, which has very long fibres, makes strong paper.
The fibre from Hemcore's Essex plants are sold to European cigarette paper
manufacturers, including Rizla.

To grow the plant is still illegal in the United States and Germany and
so there is a foreign demand there which the Essex men can fill. Because
the fibres are so long and strong compared with those in wood pulp, hemp is
ideal for the perforated paper of tea bags, for bank notes (most of which
are now made with cotton) and for beefing up the short, broken fibres in
recycled paper. As John Hobson says, hempen paper is a far greener product
than recycled, because it has no need of bleaching, which is
environmentally destructive.

The problem with the paper market is that the wood pulp business is
already so massively dominant that mills cannot afford to accommodate a
small hemp supply. No one will invest in a serious hemp paper mill until
the supply is larger and the supply will not grow larger until the mill is
there to process it.

Where Hemcore sees its major opportunities is in the textile market.
The first Californian jeans were made with hemp not cotton and Levis are
now said to be interested in using the material again. Both BMW and
Daimler-Benz are looking into using hemp in their cars. High fashion
always likes to think of itself as green and there are
various--particularly Californian--designers specialising in hemp clothes.
John Hobson claims there are 800 shops around the world selling nothing but
hemp products. So the Royal Mews, rather bravely risking the "Queen's
Horses on Dope" headlines, are doing no more than getting in early to what
looks like becoming a familiar part of everyday life.

Adam Nicolson

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