Hemp Bound (6 page)

A hemp wedding gown? Not so much, unless you're fluent in Mandarin and prepared to commit some serious industrial espionage by getting a job as janitor at Beijing's Hemp Research Centre. Chinese industry is a decade ahead in the “cottonization” of the plant's long outer bast fibers. In the industry the softness of the finished textile is referred to as its “hand.” This can be read as “its readiness for the shelves at the Gap.”

Attractive as replacing cotton with hemp sounds when you know about the former's monster water needs and obscene pesticide footprint (cotton uses 25 percent of the world's pesticides, according to the Pesticide Action Network), several industry players cautioned that re-adding chemical processes to natural fibers kind of defeats the purpose.

As someone who's written a book about living petroleum-free and who has yet to feed his children (or clothe them in) much that is non-organic, I of course powerfully agree. As a cannabis journalist who's just talked to two dozen experts who work with the plant every day, I'm convinced that the additives and binding agents that digital age applications demand—be they for a bathrobe or an aircraft's door panel—can themselves be best derived from nontoxic (often plant-based) sources. Accordingly, a Portland Oregon-based company called Naturally Advanced Technologies offers a sustainable enzymatic fiber softening process called Crailar that the company website says “drastically reduces” chemical and water usage.

If hemp bathrobes are your dream application, you're truly going to have to be a modern hemp pioneer, growing (or if you're a manufacturer, contracting with farmers to grow) known textile varieties of the plant that put the
dual
in your dual cropping. Then you'll have to borrow or innovate technologies for fiber softening. Good luck with that: I'll buy the plush American-grown bathrobe. I'd like mine deep-piled, please. Like sheepskin, or polar bear fur. It gets cold under the stars on my ranch at fifty-seven hundred feet.

Hemp Pioneers

Barbara Filippone, President of EnviroTextiles

Based in Glenwood, Colorado, EnviroTextiles is a woman-owned industrial hemp and natural fiber manufacturing company that has offices in three countries, supplied President Obama with a hemp reelection scarf, and is the largest importer of hemp textiles in the United States. But what Filippone told me breathlessly was the reason she was contacting me is that her company, which is worth fifteen million dollars, had just earned approval from the USDA BioPreferred program, which promotes the purchase and use of biobased products. “Hemp's already creating jobs while still a schedule one narcotic,” she glowed.

The victory was a long time coming. “I worked in China for nineteen years and for thirty-seven in plant fiber, as well as three years qualifying to be a government supplier,” she said. But with a deep belief that natural fibers are the only future option with petroleum-based synthetics on the endangered list, she was confident hemp would win out in the end.

“The federal government knows hemp is an alternative to cotton that's drought-resistant. The military knows it—I've been speaking with them. Cotton's done. China knows it, too.”

Filippone gave a very bottom-line reason China is moving away from cotton. “It uses too much water and pesticides,” she said. “They have no choice.”

Since she is so seasoned in the real-world economy, Filippone is not shy about offering advice to the tide of newcomers who are already becoming both her colleagues and her competitors.

“It's time to learn how to be a real businessperson,” she said with a touch of the scalded tone that I recognized from my grandfather's admonitions about the business world. A competitive landscape is going to “eat” the naive, she added. But she also offered assistance. “I've been around the block many times. I can help those who want government approval in other hemp niches, including construction.”

So all of today's hemp industrialists tell me to tell you to start with seed applications. Find the cultivar that works in your latitude per Hermann's and the Canadian government's advice (hug a publicly funded cannabis cultivar researcher, people). And if you and your friends have a spare couple of million clams, start a cooperative processing operation. It's not that complicated to make the oil and the cake once you've harvested your eight hundred pounds of seed per acre.
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There's a reason they call it an oil press. As Hermann explained it (and in fact demonstrated to me in Winnipeg), you just smoosh the seed and the oil oozes out. It's a refreshingly mechanical technology, unless you count the newfangled fringes Hemp Oil Canada is now offering, like automated bottle labeling and expiration dating. This dang nontoxic bioproduct goes rancid after a year or so. Almost makes me wistful for the time society thought long shelf life was a good thing.

Now, plenty of “in” superfoods have enjoyed their fifteen minutes and have then disappeared from shelves (seen much açaí lately?). But—and don't take this as investment advice, I'm just typing here, albeit after a lot of research—I don't see hemp going away. Ever.

As we sipped hemp coffee in his hemp-stalk-enshrouded executive office, I asked the seed-processing mogul-in-the-making Shaun Crew what he will do when American cannabis prohibition ends.

He leaned back in his chair, inhaled deeply, and proved quite ready with an answer. “The moment your guys' drug policy changes, we'll parachute a facility exactly like this, turnkey, into Grand Forks, North Dakota. Or maybe Fargo. There's a lot of inexpensive acreage to grow on down your way. And massively growing demand. It'd be an easy move for us.”

He said this in a very relaxed tone of voice. Kind of made me believe his characterization of this factory replication project as a manageable, low-multimillion-dollar investment.

Hemp Pioneers

Shaun Crew, Founder and President, Hemp Oil Canada

I don't know if he'd consider himself the J. P. Morgan of hemp seed oil, but the fifty-four-year-old has been in the modern industry since day one, in 1998. Actually, since a month before Canadian hemp re-legalized hemp that year. His company, along with nearby Manitoba Harvest, is a major player in Canadian seed oil processing, he can hardly keep up with its growth, and he openly cannot wait to be able to contract with North Dakotan farmers a few miles to the south—he needs the acreage planted to meet seed oil demand. When we met at company headquarters in Ste. Agathe, Manitoba, Crew had come straight from the airport after keynoting a European hemp conference. And yet, as with several other hempreneurs I met, what struck me the most about the guy is the fun-loving attitude he brings to his work.

For one thing, he sits at an executive desk framed by a version of Grant Wood's
American Gothic
portrait where the somber farmers have a hemp leaf stuck on their pitchfork. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Crew freely disclosed to me that, back when hemp was far from a sure bet, he channeled his entrepreneurial drive by taking a risk on the plant at least partly because of his “familiarity with and friendliness to” all forms of the cannabis plant.

This stayed with me, as some hempsters try to separate the non-psychoactive uses of the plant from the social/medicinal side. Yet one of the most successful ones didn't seem to think that appreciating all uses was something to hide from an author interviewing him on the record. Crew also wanted to talk hockey, but that was just a Canadian thing, not a cannabis thing.

Simply liking the plant and what it obviously offers humanity's economy and spirit is what's behind the
We win!
smirk he's wearing in his picture alongside a red-jacketed RCMP officer while holding a bag of his first approved hemp seed product, My Stash.

None of this means that Crew doesn't take his work seriously. He's a workaholic who doesn't notice the hours he puts in—he told me that even with yet another Hemp Oil Canada factory expansion under way, he usually calls it a day at least in time to hit his family's Winnipeg Jets seats by the start of the second period. And he's another hemp pioneer who's happy to offer advice to putative American hemp entrepreneurs.

“Adopt a
Walk before you run
attitude,” he advised. “Develop a market for your products and the processes by which you're going to operate. The pot of gold at the end of rainbow comes after a lot of work and, in the U.S. this will especially be true, market development.”