INDUSTRIAL FIBER HEMP

Interview: John Roulac & Joseph Hickey

ACRES, U.S.A....."the voice of eco-agriculture." (Feb. 1996) p. 19-23
(P.O. Box 8800 Metairie, Louisiana 70011 (504) 889-2100 e-mail
acresusa@aol.com

A kind of historical amnesia has long relegated industrial fiber
hemp to the margins of agriculture. Once the biggest cash crop in the
world, for the past five decades or so it has been swept under the rug
along with its close relative, marijuana. This can be put down to an
accident of history that worked to the advantage of the timber industry,
for one thing industrial fiber hemp cannot do -- despite its almost
identical appearance to the stuff variously known as pot, weed, grass, Bob
Hope or Mary Jane -- is produce a narcotic effect when smoked. Lacking
enough of the psychoactive ingredient in pot to matter, industrial fiber
hemp is only good for making paper, cloth, fiber-board and at least a few
hundred other useful products.

The arrival of industrial fiber hemp on the agricultural scene in
North America seems imminent now that International Paper, the Farm Bureau
and other heavy-hitters have endorsed it, and due to a happy accident of
nature, it could easily become one of the biggest cash crops in the world
produced without recourse to pesticides, herbicides, or high-octane
fertilizers. For industrial fiber hemp is an unusually hardy plant, even
for a weed. It outgrows any other weed that tries to compete with it for
soil nutrients and has few enemies from the insect realm.

In still another happy accident, Acres U.S.A. encountered two
leading hemp proponents, John Roulac and Joseph Hickey, at the Eco-Fair in
Austin, Texas last fall. Roulac is a Californian who uses the no-nonsense
rhetoric of an experienced activist, building his argument with every
sentence. He came to the hemp issue after years of fighting old-growth
logging in northern California and the Pacific Northwest and still works as
a compost consultant when he's not busy with Hemptech, an information
clearing house and advocacy unit.

Soft-spoken, but no less convincing, Joe Hickey was steered toward
hemp by a series of happenstances, beginning a few years ago when a
contracting job in Belize fell through, taking him back to Kentucky where a
stack of papers that had belonged to his late father yielded a newspaper
article from the early forties. It told of something called the Kentucky
Hemp Growers Cooperative and its role in the war effort during the big one,
WW II. Hickey ended up reviving that organization which he now serves as
executive director.

ACRES U.S.A. For most people hemp is a sort of footnote to marijuana, even
if they understand the difference. Why is it worth caring about at this
stage of the game, and why should farmers be especially interested?

ROULAC. Hemp offers farmers a profitable cash crop that's very easy to
grow, and hemp is making a resurgence because of the growing fiber crisis.
For instance, paper use is growing at approximately four percent a year
worldwide. With population increasing, forest reserves are decresing which
has led to essentially a doubling of wood pulp prices in the last 18
months.

ACRES U.S.A. For the record, what is the difference between hemp grown for
industrial fiber and its famous first cousin, marijuana?

ROULAC. Industrial hemp, whether grown in 1790 on George Washington's
farm, or in 1935 in Kentucky, or in 1995 in Canada, has never contained any
psychoactive properties. Industrial hemp contains less than 0.5% THC
whereas marijuana has anywhere from 3-15% THC, which is the chemical that
makes it psychoactive. For instance, when they planted hemp in England for
the first time, some of the teenage kids came in and cut the plants down
and smoked the leaves and instead of getting high they got a headache, and
the word got around and nobody bothered the fields after that.

ACRES U.S.A. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that the same thing
would happen here.

ROULAC. Right, the more you smoke it the more of a headache you get.
There are licensed seeds and America can follow similar guidelines as to
what' happening in Europe, Canada and Australia. Also, one other thing.
You grow hemp anywhere from 400-700 plants per square meter and the vast
majority of the plant is stalk with just a few leaves at the very top which
looks completely different from marijuana. Many people will say, well,
won't people just plant just a few marijuana plants in the middle of the
field. But industrial hemp is harvested before it goes to flower, and so
even if they did plant marijuana in the middle of the fields it would all
be cut down.

ACRES U.S.A. And of course the psychoactive chemical is contained in the
flower?

ROULAC. Right.

ACRES U.S.A. So it just wouldn't be feasible to try and cheat?

ROULAC. Yes. It' s not feasible at all, and with cross-pollenization it
would be even worse for the [illicit] grower. If you just look at England,
France or Australia, where they have very strict drug laws, they have no
problem with any hemp fields being converted into illicit drug trade.

ACRES U.S.A. How does hemp compare to a traditional textile crop such as
cotton?

ROULAC. One of the hottest topics right now in the hemp industry is the
use of hemp for textiles. Many of the textile companies are pursuing hemp
for a range of uses from carpet backing to furniture coverings to denim
jeans. Hemp is significantly stronger than cotton and can be grown without
any pesticides or herbicides with a greater yield per acre than cotton.

ACRES U.S.A. What's been keeping it off the market all of these years?

ROULAC. In many ways hemp is like a Rip van Winkle industry that's been
asleep for 60 years since the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.

ACRES U.S.A. How extensive was the hemp industry in this country before
the 1930's?

ROULAC. In 1750, hemp was the largest agricultural crop in the world and
over 30 towns in North America are named after hemp, including Hempstead,
Texas, Hempstead, New York, Hemphill, Texas.

ACRES U.S.A. Where did it come from?

ROULAC. It's native to Asia, to China.

ACRES U.S.A. And the industry was worldwide when the 19th century began?

ROULAC. Yes, for example, Sherwin-Williams Paint Company manufactured
their paints, shellacs and resins from hemp oil and testified at the
Congressional hearings against the Marijuana Tax Act. By 1900, hemp had
been displaced by cotton because of the shift from sails to steam and steam
ships and the invention of the cotton gin all made cotton a lot more
economical. Then hemp made a resurgence in the 1920's with the invention
of the decorticator, which separated the short and long fibers. Up until
that time, 75% of the hemp short fibers were burned in the field. This is
a quote from a newspaper, from the December 31, 1937 "Winona Republic"\ of
Winona, Minnesota newspaper: "The Chemco plant produces more than a
carload of hemp fiber per day and more than three carloads of the woody
material called hemp hurds. This woody material is ground into a flour
which can be made into a wide variety of compositions." The article
further said that hemp was used to produce fine writing papers as well as
hard plastics for manufacturing telephone sets. By 1940 the Minnesota
companies had ceased to exist. Their innovative decorticating technology
would have to wait for another era.

ACRES U.S.A. That technology has been dormant for the last few decades?

ROULAC. Fifty years. We have the ability to separate those two fibers.
The Germans have been working on a variety of processing technologies
including steam explosion and ultrasonic.

ACRES U.S.A. What was the impact of the decorticator?

ROULAC. Imagine if you could take an industry that was operating at 25%
efficiency and raise it up to 95% efficiency because of the ability to
separate the two fibers, how profitable you would be. At this time, hemp
was part of the chemurgy movement, and the chemurgy catchphrase was
"anything that can be made from a hydrocarbon can be made from a
carbohydrate." Chemurgy was a term coined by William Hale, which
[referred to] the bringing together of agriculture and the organic
chemical industry. Hale was a chemist with Dow Chemical, which had its
roots in agriculture. Hale joined forces with the American Farm Bureau and
Henry Ford to promote the vision of farm products replacing imported oils
for fuels, lubricants and synthetic fibers.

ACRES U.S.A. Joe, how far back does the history of hemp cultivation go in
Kentucky?

HICKEY. Hemp was one of the first crops that was grown in Kentucky -- it
goes back to the 17th century. In the mid-to lat-17th century it was grown
in Danville.

ACRES U.S.A. And was it an important part of the agriculture in that
state?

HICKEY. It was the main agricultural crop until the early 1930s. I have a
newspaper, I think it's from the early thirties, the 'Lexington Herald',
one of the headlines in it says that tobacco has replaced hemp as the
number one cash crop in Kentucky. So it was the number one cash crop until
tobacco took over.

ACRES U.S.A. Then what happened?

HICKEY. I think it was a number of things. One was that the Philippine
sisal, jute and hemp were cheaper imports and that helped in the decline
until World War II when we were cut off from the Asian products. The
beginning of the decline, I guess, was when the steamships came into
existence because there was less need for the hemp in sails for ships. I
guess that was the beginning of it and that was probably in the mid-teens.
Then we had a decline from that when the cheap imports came in it declined
further and it was revived in the forties, when we were cut off from the
Philippine source by the war. That's when we had a big explosion in
production here and it was along with a program called "Hemp for Victory."
There was also a film that was produced by the Department of Defense for
the secretary of agriculture. Every farmer in Kentucky had to sit down and
watch the movie. Farmers and their sons were exempt from the draft if
they were producing hemp for the war effort. So you know, hemp has always
played an important part. I guess after the war we again got the cheap
imports in and then we had the synthetic fibers that came on-line right
after the end of the war, and that was a further reason for the demise of
the hemp industry then, along with the regulations from the 1937 Marijuana
Tax Act.

ACRES U.S.A. They included it in the Tax Act even though hemp is not the
same thing as marijuana?

HICKEY. Back then they didn't have any way of telling which plant was hemp
and which plant was marijuana. They didn't have the technical ability to
distinguish between the two. To them it didn't make any difference. The
THC level didn't make any difference back then, it wasn't regulated
according to THC level, it was regulated by them according to commerce. If
you had a contract and a legal end-use or the stalk, the fiber or the seed
you could get a license. And again, because they had no way of telling
which was hemp and which was marijuana, they treated it all as marijuana.

ACRES U.S.A. When did the government stop granting licenses to grow hemp?

HICKEY. I guess there was probably some licensed up until -- I think
around 1958 was [the year of] the last license that I've heard of being
issued, and since then the only licenses that have been issued have not
been for hemp, they've been for marijuana.

ACRES U.S.A. To grow it for medical uses?

HICKEY. Right, to see what the medical uses are.

ACRES U.S.A. John, do you think that a resurgent hemp industry
realistically has a potential of the magnitude Ford and Hale were
trumpeting, as far as reducing the United States' reliance on foreign oil?

ROULAC. I think definitely so, and one of the major differences between
the 1930s and the 1990s is that in the 1930 s you had fiber companies that
owned vast quantities of forests with only a few factories. Today, you
have fiber companies that have lots of factories and decreasing quantities
of forest resources around their factories. That's why two of the Fortune
500 corporations, International Paper and Inland Container, are currently
researching the use of industrial hemp fibers and are preparing to begin
the process to grow industrial hemp in the United States.

ACRES U.S.A. They are actually researching growing it domestically?

ROULAC. That's correct.

ACRES U.S.A. Would it be safe to say that we can expect these companies
will sponsor some political efforts to turn around the prohibition on
growing hemp?

ROULAC. Actually, it is not illegal to grow hemp. The Marijuana Tax Act
did not ban the production of industrial hemp.

ACRES U.S.A. What did that act do?

HICKEY. Well, basically, what the act did was it regulated the hemp
industry out of business. Everyone had to register and pay a fee or get a
license to grow hemp and then in the mills -- and I guess this was one of
the biggest problems --- the mills that were taking the hemp and making
paper or rope out of it, in order for them to do anything they had to have
a federal regulator. If they moved anything, they had to have a federal
regulator there, if they were going to take stuff from one building to
another they had to have a federal regulator there, so it made it real
cumbersome. You can imagine in any business if every time you did
something you had to call up and have someone stand out there and watch you
do it, that would make it economically not feasible to do it -- and that's
basically what happened, the industry was just over-regulated. That was
not the only thing that stopped it, but it was a nail in the coffin.

ACRES U.S.A. Because it's technically not illegal, there's a de facto
prohibition nowadays since they are not issuing any licenses?

ROULAC. Yes. But what's starting to change is that larger organizations
and more farm groups, for instance the president of the Weld County
Colorado American Farm Bureau, Robert Winter, want to grow industrial hemp.
As more farmers and industry begin to get interested in this crop, the
government officials and politicians will be more open to pursuing an
industrial hemp policy for the United States. Additionally, Canada has
granted 11 farmers permits to grow hemp for research purposes only in 1995.
Hemp is mentioned in NAFTA as a feed stock.

ACRES U.S.A. Then one of your most pressing tasks is educating the
legislators who could turn around the policy.

HICKEY. What the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative has done is, we had the
University of Kentucky put questions on their 1995 spring opinion poll, and
I might add that the University of Kentucky's survey researcyh center is
one of the most well-respected research survey centers in the state. The
resulting poll showed that 77% of Kentuckians are in favor of industrial
fiber hemp and that the only people who weren't in favor of it were the
people that didn't know the difference between industrial fiber hemp and
marijuana. So the 23% that weren't in favor of it basically just needed to
be educated, and what we've done is send that poll to every legislator in
the state to show him that the support of the public is out there. That is
the reason we think it is so important for the farmers to organize now,
because this is coming.

ACRES U.S.A. What exactly has to happen legislatively in Kentucky, and I
assume in other states as well, for this industry to get a foothold?

HICKEY. Legislatively what has to happen is that first of all, we need to
separate industrial fiber hemp from marijuana. Right now in Kentucky we
have a tax that was passed, it's a thousand dollar [marijuana] stamp tax.
This tax is to be paid at $1,000 per plant and a stamp is to be attached
to that plant. We don't want to change the marijuana stamp tax. What we
want to do is to put a rider on the bill, or an amendment on the bill that
would exempt industrial fiber hemp from the statute. The next thing we've
got to do is put legislation in place that will basically follow the
English legislation or the European legislation which allows farmers to
grow hemp. In the basic form it says that the farmer would be bondable, he
would have to have a contract in hand, he would have to receive certified
seed either from a coop or a government agency, he would have an aerial
photo of his property and he would have....

ACRES U.S.A. Then he'd be liable to spot checks?

HICKEY. Right, well, the coop regulators would come out and take cuttings
from his plants and do tests for THC levels. Any farmers that were growing
anything but industrial hemp would be subject to existing laws. We
wouldn't be changing any existing laws pertaining to anything besides
industrial fiber hemp. So once that legislation is in place we don't
expect any subsidies. We think the government should do exactly the way
they are doing with the steel industries and the paper industries here and
that is to subsidize the industry and not the farmers, allowing the
industry to get a jump start where they in turn could turn around on a
shorter time basis and be able to pay the farmers the fair market value for
the fibers. So it's not complicated as far as the legislation is
concerned. At this point what we've found is the perception that most
legislators don't want people to perceive that they are in favor of
marijuana.

ROULAC. I would anticipate that within one year of when a Fortune 500
Company makes an application to the DEA/USDA to grow hemp, there will be
hemp seed in the ground.

ACRES U.S.A. We should point out that the USDA doesn't control these
permits yet. Do you expect the jurisdiction for this to move over to the
USDA?

ROULAC. It's always hard to predict the movements of large bureaucratic
organizations. But I think it will likely be a joint effort. While the
DEA is pretty entrenched right now, I think we will see hemp in the ground
in the next three to five years.

ACRES U.S.A. As of right now, though, the DEA is dead set against it?

ROULAC. Correct.

ACRES U.S.A. Let's go back to the plant itself. Now that there are plenty
of ways to separate the parts of it, how much of the plant is useful?

ROULAC. I should respond to the first part of that. The ability to
separate out the long fiber in economical ways, and the rending processors,
still need more research. Germany is the leader in that, but there is
still research needed in that area. Basically, you can use all of the
stalk, and the leaves and the tops go back in the field for mulch or
fertilizer.

ACRES U.S.A. So virtually all of it is useful?

ROULAC. Correct.
ACRES U.S.A. What kind of things can be made out of the long fibers?

ROULAC. The best applications for the long fibers are textiles, and high
quality paper such as bank notes. Markets for textiles include: carpets,
backing, furniture covering, denim jeans, shoes, backpacks, luggage.

ACRES U.S.A. Does hemp have any advantages over the traditional fibers
that are used in products like canvas shoes or luggage or carpet?

ROULAC. Yes, that's what's so exciting about hemp. For instance, I have a
pair of hemp shoes with Hungarian hemp fabric that I wore at a composting
event where I was working all day out in the rain, and my shoes were
completely soaked. At the end of the day I took them off, and my socks
were barely damp and my feet were completely dry. Now if that had been a
cotton shoe my feet would have been totally soaked. The hemp fibers
swelled up and reduced the amount of moisture penetrating past the fiber.
That was the reason why they were chosen for sails to cross the Atlantic
for all of the great sailing ships, the clipper ships. For example, an
awning made out of hemp can last 20 to 30 years completely exposed to the
elements, whereas a cotton canvas awning will break down after several
years. A petroleum awning would last a long time but when it degrades it
is not as easily recycled or disposed of as hemp, because hemp is a natural
material and can enter back into the earth. It's biodegradable.

ACRES U.S.A. What makes the long fibers good for the paper products?

ROULAC. Because the hemp fibers are so strong, they make an excellent
combination with recycled paper which has shorter fibers, so they extend
the life of recycled papers. For example, Inland Container is looking to
use a portion of hemp fibers allowing them to make a lighter weight yet
strong cardboard box. The largest paper company in Germany currently
distributes a line of 50% hemp / 50% postconsumer paper. And it's selling
well.

ACRES U.S.A. It almost goes without saying that a paper company would be
out of its mind not to embrace hemp, considering the flak they are taking
for chopping down the world's old growth forests. This sounds like a way
out of the dilemma that would reap them a publicity bonanza and actually do
some good.

ROULAC. As someone who has been very concerned about the accelerated
deforestation and has been active in California forest politics, I've been
very drawn to the use of hemp fiber. Because instead of just saying don't
cut trees which in turn eliminates jobs, we can now say let's protect our
forests and protect our job base by using hemp fiber instead of tree fiber.

ACRES U.S.A. The longer fiber is about how much of the plant?

ROULAC. Twenty-five percent of the stalk. Hemp also makes an excellent
substitute for fiberglass. Advanced Composites of Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, which manufactures a wide variety of composite products
including electric cars, has tested hemp fiber and shown that it can be an
effective replacement for fiberglass without the toxic qualities of
fiberglass. Economically it's a winner because once hemp is grown in the
United States its cost will be approximately one-third of fiberglass. Many
people say fiberglass will go the way of asbestos in the 21st century.
Hemp is also being used in hundreds of houses in France as insulation in
attic and wall insulation.

ACRES U.S.A. Similar to cellulose blow-in insulation?

ROULAC. Yes. Many of the cellulose insulation companies are using
newspaper which has gone up from $25 a ton last year, reaching $125 a ton
this past summer. That's encouraging them to look at alternative fiber
sources. In addition to using it for insulation, the French are taking the
short fibers and making a hemp cement or plaster for use in exterior walls.

ACRES U.S.A. Not unlike stucco?

ROULAC. Yes, though it's more applied, it's not shot but hand applied.

ACRES U.S.A. The short fiber is what percent of the plant?

ROULAC. The short fiber is 75% of the stalk which is the inner portion of
the stalk. It's called hurds, or shives in Europe. In 1938 Popular
Mechanics said that over 25,000 products could be manufactured from the
hurds. One of the largest markets for the hurds will be in multidensity
fiberboard manufacturing as a supplemental feed stock to companies
currently shipping trees. Washington state's preeminent wood composites
laboratory scientist, Tom Maloney, has stated that hemp makes an excellent
fiber board and actually is superior to wood because of its strength, and
it has a superior ability to hold nails.

ACRES U.S.A. Do you ever run into people who just have trouble believing
this because it sounds too good to be true? Too much benefit out of one
plant?

ROULAC. Oh, yeah. That's one of the challenges. Because hemp is so
versatile and many proponents overstate some of its uses and agronomic
qualities, some people just have a hard time believing it. Some people say
hemp can save the world, and while that clearly is not the case, I do
believe it can do a lot to make the world a better place.

(continued)

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