Hemp Bound (16 page)

I took a photo as the first handful of seed arced over some desperately thirsty corn. The motion conveyed a horseshoe pitch.

“First shot fired,” Bowman said. It seemed right. We stood in respectful silence for a few seconds, a breeze making one nearby cornstalk appear to salute.

“How's it feel to be an official hemp farmer?” I asked.

“It's the most patriotic thing I've ever done.”

“God bless America and everything,” I said. “But let's face the facts. Technically that's a federal crime you just committed and I, as Peter Tosh puts it, am going to advertise it.”

Bowman's beaming, guileless farm boy mouth sort of melted from its default grin for a moment. Then he sprinkled another handful of seed. “I guess it is a federal crime,” he said. “The DEA has jurisdiction right now over a crop that should be under the Department of Agriculture, and they're worried about job protection in their agency. But that's one of our easier challenges. This justly rebellious spirit is how our country gained independence. We're going to create a new industry to transform agriculture. America's going to be stronger with hemp in her fields.”

He looked down at the bag. “A few left—let's go back inside and throw it into a protein shake.”

Still, I wondered aloud, “Why do this so publicly? Why flaunt federal law with a couple hundred seeds that probably won't be harvested, very shortly before, but still before, the federal government is ready?”

“This is about freedom, about gaining independence from federal farm programs that might have had their purpose, but which keep us ranchers chained to a very specific set of crops. We're talking about opening markets, and all kinds of legitimate commerce that'll result. It's long past time that American farmers be allowed to do this.”

Bowman is polished enough in his soundbites, but I saw where his greatest strength lay this day after we headed back inside the event building: making the case to folks who listen to a lot of Lee Greenwood. Over the course of the next two songs, he worked the room, dance-walking. I watched as, one by one, he pressed palms, very much the hemp politician, winning over good ol' Americans to hemp.

“Five hundred grams of viable hemp seed, that's what we planted today,” I overheard him telling a young woman pushing a stroller. “It's from France, that's all I can tell you. It came from a farmer friend over there. It's a little cooler there, but this cultivar should be fine here.”

He'd made the same point to the Denver television crew, trying to open farmer minds, media minds, all minds. Since Bowman kept making the economic case for hemp, it occurred to me that, on top of all the practical reasons, Byers is also a homonymically apt name for the location of a patriotic planting. That's because as soon as you harvest this crop, there are indeed buyers. Have I hammered home the point that there is not nearly enough supply to meet hemp seed demand in North America? Right now.

“You like hemp preachin', don't you?” I asked during a quiet moment at May Farms (I think the song playing was “God Bless the USA”).

“It's effective because it's all true,” he said. “I've found that anytime someone gives me five minutes, and I get to discuss the facts, hemp's role in the founding of our country and where we're going next as a nation, that person is a convert. I think I'm batting a thousand on that. When I talk about Henry Ford growing a car from this American fiber that's stronger than steel, and fueling it with ethanol from the same crop, this speaks to people.”

To say that Bowman's a busy guy these days is a severe understatement. Ever since he had that grand success as an activist ushering in Colorado's landmark renewable energy mandates in 2004, he's been a full-time sustainability lobbyist at the state and national levels—U.S. senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) calls him The Human Hand Grenade. And it was while working on hemp's U.S. House passage late last spring that he had the inspiration for the hemp flag. After the Denver TV crew left Byers and as we prepared to do the same, Bowman reminded me that the hemp Stars and Stripes was at the moment flying over the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.

“Seemed to me one of those irreversible gestures,” he said of putting the bug in Congressman Jared Polis's ear to make the flag hoisting happen—congressmen are always shooting up flags for constituents to honor someone or some event. “I was in the House gallery when the hemp amendment passed. I thought that once a hemp flag flew, it couldn't be un-flown.”

In the last moments before we'd pulled out of May Farms just ahead of the nearby fireworks that remarkable Independence Day, I recall watching Bowman, as is his wont, maybe even his unique specialty, shift comfortably from Beltway lobbyist to local rancher.

“The DEA doesn't need to lose jobs on hemp,” he told Gary May and me over one last bowl of Mo's spicy work of art. “They can help us enforce the industry's regulations from a supportive standpoint—crop inspections and testing, farmer registration. Just like Canada did with its Mounties. I consider my job to be convincing Congress to change the DEA's prism to one of being part of the hemp industry. I'm an optimist. Even their position will evolve.”

Then, not ten minutes later, I heard Bowman call out his parting words to May's teenage son, Grant, as we hopped back in the car. “Those hemp seeds'll sprout in about three days,” he said, leaning out the window. “Keep an eye on 'em if you can.”

Epilogue, Part Two

A Dust Bowl Antidote— It's About a Cash Crop in Today's Soil

F
ast-forward a month. Across the state of Colorado from Byers, 256 miles to the southeast, an agriculturally significant 2013 hemp planting was well under way. Nothing symbolic about this one. We're talking sixty acres, intended to help build a domestic seed stock for both oil-producing and fiber-producing varieties of industrial cannabis.

As I, traveling with my family after some days spent unplugged in and around (mostly in) wilderness rivers, bumped across Comanche National Grassland on August 11, 2013, I reflected on how hard it is to get lost in Colorado, even for me, who can get lost in my kitchen. That's because the mountains are to your west. Pike's Peak. The Rockies. The spine of North America.

Heading east, as we learned during our visit to Jillane Hixson's nearby ranch, is a journey into a world so geographically and culturally different from Denver's mile-high one that by the time I crossed into Bent County I felt I knew what interstellar travel will be like.

And that's explicitly why forty-year-old Ryan Loflin was planting hemp so far east. So far east, in fact, that during one of those plains country semi-naps one takes after setting the cruise control, I think I briefly crossed into Kansas. He wanted to show his childhood neighbors that hemp was an answer to the long drought that has savaged farm economies from Nebraska to New Mexico. A Dust Bowl antidote.
47

We were meeting in Springfield (population 1,454, incorporated 1887), seat of Baca County, which in addition to Kansas also brushes Oklahoma and my own state of New Mexico, with Texas in shooting if not shouting distance. They should call this region the Five Corners. Denver is five very long hours away. I got stopped by two flash-flood-related road closures just trying to navigate between these distinct biomes.

“Everyone here is desperate for a viable cash crop,” Loflin told me when I met him downtown. “They're hurting from this half decade of drought and looking to diversify.”

Springfield is a town that keeps itself spruced up—the small grassy downtown park has a tasteful trickling fountain and rocking metal benches, and there's a well-maintained town Olympic swimming pool. Looking out the passenger window at the small, neat homes as we circled the original eighty-acre town site, my Sweetheart said it looks like a place that peaked in 1955. Or earlier: Named after their own Springfield by the Missourians who settled it in 1885, some of the buildings look like something out of
Blazing Saddles
.

To listen to him talk, you'd know Loflin was from here. He spoke with the almost southern twang of the eastern Colorado plains. To look at him, tall and thin and wearing a T-shirt featuring an in-over-his-head skier above the words
jesus shreds
, you'd also guess, correctly, that he'd gone west. That he'd flown the coop to the alpine side of Colorado's intercultural divide for a time. That was not a Baca County–made T-shirt.

Because Loflin knows both worlds, he was in a position to inform me, in our first minutes of conversation, that I'd found myself in yet another place where the prevailing opinion about where President Obama was born has no bearing on the opinion on hemp. In other words, the need for a cash crop is erasing traditional cultural war boundaries. Or, according to Loflin, has already erased.

As I and my family loaded up to follow him the couple of windy miles to the twelve-hundred-acre ranch his family has operated since the 1930s, Loflin told me, “Oh, we've got some real conservative folks around here, and everyone's asking me when they can get some dang seed. So that's what I'm doing this year—trying to build a seed bank.”

In pursuit of that locavore goal, prodigal son Loflin, who had until this year been running a reclaimed lumber business
48
and raising a family in the ski town of Crested Butte, was putting his sixty-six-year-old father's lucrative alfalfa operation, federally funded like the Bowman family farm, at risk.

“I'm invested in this community” was his explanation as I and my tribe piled into his farm truck for the short but bumpy ride from the Loflin farmhouse to its sixty-acre felony. “I have three cousins who farm here. I have my own kids' future to think about—my oldest is starting kindergarten. I knew I was coming back, and I want to create an economy. And I'm leasing the land to protect my dad.”

Before we start throwing out the Gandhi comparisons, know that this is all part of an ambitious win–win scenario Loflin freely outlined for me as the truck rumbled up to the eastern side of the hemp field. His master plan, as the Rocky Mountain Hemp company, is to become nothing short of “the hemp seed oil expeller for Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. I'm within eighty miles of all these states. Big picture, I want to be processing the region's [hemp seed] oil.”

Hearing these words, I marveled that it was only five months earlier that I'd first heard people like Shaun Crew and Norm Roulet describe such a locally controlled vertical model. While the priority mission was to build seed stock this first season (which, remember, hemp authority David West told us at the very beginning of this story is so vital: without fail the absolute Objective One in the business plan), Loflin said he hoped that, on a very small scale, oil processing would start in 2013 as well.

“This is no pipe dream,” he said, parking the truck in a sea of man-high, already densely flowering plants midway through their five-month growing cycle. It was about an hour before sunset. I hopped out, offered my Sweetheart a hand, and extracted my kids. The crop's hand-like leaves were doing Egyptian dance moves in the very slight breeze. The whole field was very quiet, except for the prairie dog squeaks.

“If I haven't found an oil press by harvesttime, David Bronner [CEO of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap], who's contracting for ten of our acres this year, said he'd let me use one of the company's presses. It's important to get a seed-expelling process going now. That way as soon as the federal law is all dialed in and everyone has seeds, it's on.”

Make no mistake, this was a professional farmer from a longtime professional farming family talking big-time professional farming. This was not a hobby garden plot. It was an agricultural operation.

“Our planting rig alone costs six hundred thousand dollars, between tractor and the air seeder,” Loflin told me. The latter device features a turbo fan that precisely delivers hundreds of thousands of seeds at whatever density you set, replacing Bowman's horseshoe toss.

Big investment, big payoff, is the model in these parts, for any crop. If Loflin showed his father, let alone the rest of Baca County and Colorado, that the hemp crop is viable and has buyers of a value-added finished product, well, the senior Loflin might want to open up the rest of the twelve-hundred-acre homestead. Then we're up into the acreage Hemp Oil Canada's Shaun Crew believes is viable.

I did the math. At current prices, seems more like a jackpot than merely viable. Twelve hundred acres at $250-per-acre profit? Um. Three hundred grand. “Clear,” as the farmers like to say. “Wheat clears thirty an acre,” Loflin told me. You might add a zero to that three hundred thousand if the town processes and sells its own seed oil and protein cake. As with any new industry, it's all about getting the initial fixed costs handled, and the eventual per-unit price down.

Within the Loflin family, Ryan knew he was engaged in a bit of a
Show me the money
situation with the older generation—similar to Gary May's willingness to plant test crops and assess. Farming, to these folks, is pure business. Has been for generations.

Though Loflin said his dad was already totally supportive. “I've been working on his mind about hemp for ten years—he sees what Canadian farmers are making.”

Listening once again to farmers speak casually of tracts of land that to this goat herder seem vast, I tried to imagine the economy of a U.S. county filled with twelve-hundred-acre industrial cannabis fields. It was overwhelming to contemplate. Want to know what my first impression was, as I, my Sweetheart, and my kids waded (well above head-high for the little ones) into America's first digital age commercial hemp field? Sixty acres is a lot.

With the three hundred gallons of biofuel that a 1975 University of Illinois–Urbana study concluded an acre of hemp can provide,
49
this one small test crop could keep eighteen thousand gallons of energy domestically produced every year. Devoted to protein, it will give forty-eight thousand pounds of seed.

It took about ten minutes to traverse the field of two principal cultivars Loflin was growing on the family land in 2013. One was a seed oil variety and the other a taller fiber cultivar. Our discussion about where the seeds came from was a tricky one, since too many specifics might get a provider in trouble. Importing viable hemp seed into the United States without DEA approval was currently illegal, though hopefully not once you're reading these words.

“The seeds came in on the down low” was how Loflin put it. The fifteen hundred pounds that made it through customs came via UPS. Two shipments were seized at borders. So we left it at this: The seed oil (often referred to as grain) cultivar came from Canada (it looked a lot like the Finola variety you see all over Manitoba), and the fiber cultivar from Europe. Back at the farmhouse near the family's watermelon and beans, Loflin was also experimenting with much smaller numbers of seeds he'd received from China and other parts of Europe.

“With both varieties this year, if we get a lot of seed production I'll be happy,” he said. “That's unusual—in the fiber varieties it won't always be the case. I also wouldn't mind if there's some cross-breeding, and we end up with a variety that can provide seed oil and fiber.”

He was talking about dual cropping, which you'll remember all the hemp experts consider essential. I couldn't believe how real everything was getting. I thought I was writing an optimistic book about the future; turns out I'm writing a practical one for today.

I thought of Anndrea Hermann's wish, that we come to find hemp simply a quiet if lucrative part of a healthy farm economy. I realized that her wish was already coming true. Seen at field level, hemp
is
just another viable crop for America's farmers. That's why when the federal ranger at my campground the next morning asked me what kind of work I'd been doing in Springfield, I said, “Writing about the farm economy.”

Loflin and I stood during what photographers call the magic hour, the sun just barely a full molten circle, at the spot where the two hemp varieties met in a line leading to the horizon. The flowers forming along the top of the fiber crop were a lighter, almost kelly green compared with its emerald leaves and stalks. Some of the blossoms were two feet long.

A fairly long silence ensued (not counting the cries of “I'm a prairie dog!” from my five-year-old, invisible but very audible around my ankles). Given that he is pretty much the only farmer U.S. growers can look to for actual in-the-field hemp-cultivation advice,
50
I asked Loflin how the debut season was going.

He laughed. “Well, hemp's about as hard or as easy to plant as any other crop,” he said. “I'm really learning each part of the process as I go.”

I asked for a for instance. Loflin laughed again, scanned the ground for about half a second, and snapped off a bushy piece of grass, about three feet tall. “Hemp may grow like a weed, but when you water a field, plenty of weeds grow like weeds,” he said. “This is foxtail grass.”

There was rather a lot of it. In places it was hard to tell where the blossoming hemp rows were, so gracefully were they sharing the space with other flora.

“Next year we'll plant thirty-inch rows instead of eight-inch, so we can run a cultivator between rows, do some manual weeding. Herbicides are out of the question—I don't want to and we can't for the Dr. Bronner's acreage—it has to be organic from the start. And I think the crop is looking good, for our main purpose.”

Which was that seed stockpiling—one acre of hemp, remember, today yields about 800 pounds of seed (the world average is actually 875 pounds, according to the USDA). Each successful harvest thus means an exponential growth in the available seed stock. This kind of field was the genetics lab before Monsanto.

I agreed with Loflin that the crop looked and smelled very green and healthy. The terpenes (or resinous hydrocarbons) in hemp provide the distinctive, almost minty smell, and it bespoke fecundity. “The flowers are so seed-heavy,” I noticed. “Some of them are losing battles with gravity. They're everywhere.”

“Look at this one,” Loflin said. It was a plant that, situated at the edge of a vast row, had been pelted into horizontality by recent hail—I myself had gotten pelted in the same front. “Look how it's still green and growing along the ground,” he said of the bamboo-like stalk. “It's amazingly hardy.”