by Chris Conrad
RESTORATIVE AGRICULTURE
Farms always need a profitable crop, and hemp is an ideal one. Hemp is a hardy, pest resistant, soil-building plant that is excellent in crop rotation. Hemp patches have played important roles in erosion control, reforestation, weed eradication, supporting wildlife habitat, and reducing air and water pollution. The plant’s strong roots anchor and aerate the soil to control erosion and mud slides. This is especially beneficial in recently deforested areas. It grows best in warm tropical zones or moderately cool, temperate climates. Hemp seedlings endure cold or light frost as well as oat seedlings or other spring crops. Certain strains of this traditional cash crop do quite well in mild droughts, thanks to the plant’s deep tap root.8 Hemp plants shed their leaves throughout the growing season, adding rich organic matter to the topsoil. Hemp crops never need chemical herbicides and rarely need any pesticides.9 In fact, the plant has so few serious insect enemies that it is said to have been used to make organic pest repellents.10 It is often possible to grow two crops in the same year. The best fertilizer for hemp is manure applied to the preceding crop. Hemp is sown as “green fertilizer” to prepare the ground for the next crop. It can be grown on muck lands for purposes other than fiber.11 Hemp squeezes out weeds, and leaves the soil in excellent condition for any succeeding crop, especially when weeds may otherwise be troublesome.12
Farmers reported excellent hemp growth for nearly one hundred years on land that was steadily cultivated. Yields can easily come in at three to five tons of stalk per acre, including about a ton of nature’s finest natural fiber for textiles and high density composites, plus more than a ton of cellulose for paper and construction material, plus plenty of leftovers for compost, fuel, or plastics. Factor in the seed’s economic potential, and it’s clear that a farm can turn a decent profit.
The agricultural community has begun to recognize this fact. The first industrial hemp bill was introduced into the New York legislature by Senator Joe Galiber. Delegates to the 1996 national convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation voted overwhelmingly in favor of research into reviving domestic industrial hemp development. The Kentucky Bourbon County Farm Bureau passed a follow-up Industrial Hemp Resolution on October 10, 1996, stating, “We support the development of industrial hemp (by definition less than 1 percent THC) and urge the Farm Bureau to put its full resources into getting the laws changed to allow this.” Legislation authorizing research into restoring industrial hemp was adopted in two states at opposite ends of the country in 1996, Vermont and Hawaii, and attempted in two others, Colorado and Missouri. As the traditional southern and midwestern hemp belt takes renewed interest in hemp, pressure for legislative reform is likely to mount. So far the federal government has not allowed any field tests to proceed. Obviously, the key to the whole process of agriculture is to get the seed into the soil, and let commerce grow from there.
Hemp farming in the Netherlands
Source: The Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum
HEALING THE EARTH
It’s called earth, but we treat it like dirt. Soil is a precious but unappreciated resource. Loss of topsoil has been a plague throughout the ages, and has caused many great civilizations to fall. The fields of Europe and Asia have been tilled for millennia. The world has supported agriculture for over ten thousand years.
The New World was legendary in Europe for its fertile soil. Thomas Morton attributed the fact that hemp in New England grew twice as high as that in England to the richness of the soil.13 Thomas Paine felt that America was ripe for revolution because the hemp harvest was flourishing and abundant enough to outfit a Continental army and navy.14 Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris urged farmers in 1791 to stop growing tobacco and return to hemp, which is easier on the soil, because “a material for manufactures of various sorts, becomes afterwards the means of support to numbers of people, hence it is to be preferred in a populous country.” Hemp covered the wagons and powered the sailing ships that expanded the nation and brought great wealth and trade.
But times changed. Severe restrictions were placed on growing hemp early this century in the U.S. Soon major droughts hit, and the midwestern farm states were dubbed “the dust bowl.” The wind which had hung heavy with hemp pollen and the water which had run clear were thick and brown with the topsoil they carried away. The region’s farm economy was destroyed and the environment has still never fully recovered. Over two-thirds of our original topsoil was lost between the beginning of European colonization and the late 1980s.15 Current loss of agricultural land here continues at over five billion tons per year.16 Some of this is caused by logging forests, but 85 percent results from croplands, pastures, range land, and forest land directly used for raising cattle and other livestock.17 Something is dreadfully wrong when centuries of topsoil are consumed in a few generations.
SAVING THE TREES
They are the lungs of the planet, and they’re being eaten away every day. Over 97 percent of our American forests have been destroyed under the relentless onslaught of economic expansion. In 1988 alone, 226 million tons of trees were pulped for paper. Today 93 percent of the world’s paper is made from trees. If forestry practices were truly sustainable, we would not have needed to log any virgin forests for decades now, yet the devastation goes on. The battle to save the world’s last remaining virgin redwood forests in California from logging interests highlights the falsehood of the claim that forests are a renewable resource. Even as logging companies claim that their monoculture tree farms can meet the demand, they also say they need to “harvest” most of the remaining natural mixed-growth forests. Someone is lying, and nature is dying.
Forests protect and nurture the diversity of life on the planet. When we lose the forests, we lose a lot more than precious trees. We lose entire ecosystems that are built around them. We kill off entire species with impunity. As many as one-fourth of all mammal species are now described as “endangered,” meaning that they are at imminent risk of extinction. That includes one-half of all monkeys and apes, according to the World Conservation Union, which has conducted an annual study for more than thirty-five years. The project evaluated the chances of survival for all 4,025 known species of mammals, and it does not look good. “If anything, we’ve been too optimistic” in previous assessments of the health of biodiversity, noted primate specialist Russell Mittermeier.18
This situation is due in part to pollution and in part to the introduction of non-native species into established ecological systems. The bigger part of the problem is the destruction and fragmentation of wildlife habitat, which causes the other two problems. This is a consequence of the expansive nature of our economic development. Rainforests are often logged or burned down simply to clear more land for grazing and farming. The topsoil soon washes away, and the land becomes barren, so the slash and burn process moves to devour its next morsel of land. What the world needs is an emergency dose of hemp in all agricultural regions. Since traditional hemp agriculture does not wear out soil, the land retains its fertility, and there is no need to clear more forest.
Each ton of paper made from hemp saves twelve mature trees. Hemp and trees are both made of wood, but because cannabis is an annual plant, it constructs a less durable organic structure than a tree requires to stand for decades and longer. Paper made from hemp requires substantially less of the acids and other toxic chemicals used to break trees down into pulp. Because the bast fiber of hemp is so much longer than the wood fiber of trees, paper made with hemp can be recycled more than twice as many times as tree-pulp paper before losing its strength. Hemp can also be made into fiberboard, particle board, or variable density composite boards for all types of mold making, construction, and commercial fabrication. In other words, anything now made with trees can be made with hemp. We can continue to have paper, build homes and other structures, expand our productivity, and still let our forests grow and breathe.
Unfortunately, the trees keep falling, and as the forest goes, so goes much of its inherent mois
ture. Certain strains of hemp grow well in dryer conditions, such as those that follow the loss of forest canopy.19 Tight rows of hemp, planted in a wide belt hugging the tree line, form a wind block to help maintain the natural humidity within the standing groves and hold weeds at bay while the damaged forest recovers. Theoretically, a systematic planting of hemp along the edges of man-made deserts in the course of coming decades could eventually return them to marginal land, then crop land, and finally, back to forest.
WATER, AIR, AND ENERGY
Water is nature’s way of flushing and refreshing Earth’s lifeforms. Chemical water pollution has a catastrophic effect on the environment, but also directly on people’s health, and has been linked to numerous cancers and birth defects.20 In the U.S. alone, agricultural pollution, including soil, fertilizer, and pesticide runoff, accounts for more pollution than all municipal and industrial sources combined.21 We can reduce this problem at its source. Cotton, corn, sugar cane, and tobacco are among the hardest crops on the soil, in terms of chemical applications and nutrient depletion. They all require heavy fertilization. While it is possible to grow quality organic cotton, in general cotton is the most chemical-intensive crop ever grown. It uses a lot of water and about seventeen separate applications of fungicides, herbicides, pesticides, and defoliants in the course of its growing cycle. About half of all agriculture chemicals are used on cotton.22 Yet, an acre of land will produce two or three times as much hemp fiber as cotton and serve all the same industrial uses, plus certain high-tech applications for which cotton is unsuited.
Livestock in the U.S. produces 230,000 pounds of excrement each and every second, much of which ends up as runoff water pollution. Fortunately, this is actually the best possible natural fertilizer for hemp, which digests the manure and simultaneously controls both erosion and chemical runoff. By switching from crops that require massive doses of chemical fertilizers to crops like hemp that prefer to consume the manure oversupply, we can solve several problems at once and have an overall increase of productivity.
Rivers might be characterized as the bloodstream of the planet; the beverage from which most land species drink their life. These rivers feed our lakes and reservoirs, and serve as the direct water supply for communities everywhere. Pulp mills kill rivers with foul-smelling and poisonous effluence. As raw material for pulp and paper, hemp can greatly reduce the mills’ use of sulfur-based acids that are used to break down tree cellulose, a major source of river contamination. This means less water pollution from the timber pulping process. Tree-free hemp paper can be made without dioxin-producing chlorine bleach, another toxin in both our water and our air. The federal EPA estimates that 99 percent of airborne dioxin emissions come from incineration of medical and municipal waste that contains chlorine.23 Much of this comes from papers and fabrics that have been bleached to create an impression of cleanliness and purity. The consequences of all this whiteness have been dire, indeed, for the planet and its inhabitants. Atmospheric ozone acts as a shield against ultraviolet radiation—a shield that chlorine is rapidly disintegrating. The hole in the ozone layer is now over 8.5 million square miles, twice the area of Europe’s landmass. The increased radiation is already causing skin carcinomas among sunbathers and cataract blindness in wildlife, particularly in the Southern hemisphere. An update report to the 1996 United Nations conference on ozone depletion estimated that the ozone layer could be depleted by 40 percent by the year 2075, causing an additional 154 million cases of skin cancer and 3.4 million more deaths in the U.S. alone.24
The earth not only has a hole in its halo, it has a bad case of gas, too. There has been an alarming increase in the amount of “greenhouse gas” in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas that the atmosphere holds in place like the windows of a greenhouse, capturing heat that is normally reflected back into space. This pollution buildup is a direct result of burning, mostly of fossil fuels like petroleum and coal. Many experts consider this chemical imbalance to be a key factor in regional weather changes and global warming, possibly leading to desertification. Other effluents from burning fossil fuels include carbon monoxide, a carcinogen, as well as sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide, two components of acid rain. Both individually and in combination, these pollutants cause lung disorders and significant ecological harm. The situation is eerily reminiscent of a warning given by Mohammed in the Koran, “The heaven shall produce a visible smoke, which shall cover mankind; this will be a tormenting plague.” This degradation is often characterized as an unavoidable consequence of the economy-versus-ecology tradeoff. Contrary to opinion, however, the condition is treatable.
Nature has devised an effective system to clean the air. Rainfall pulls down dust and particulate matter. Plant photosynthesis converts CO2 back into oxygen. Growing plants take the CO2, remove the carbon atom and use it to build carbohydrate vegetable matter, then release the leftover oxygen into the air. Biofuel technology can convert plant matter into a wide range of fuels and energy. Hemp produces a larger amount of dry vegetable matter than almost any other rotational farm crop suited for temperate climates.25 Each crop produces as much oxygen while growing as it produces CO2 if burned as fuel, creating a balanced cycle. Furthermore, hemp deposits 10 percent of its mass in the soil as roots and up to 30 percent as leaves that drop throughout the growing season. This means that some 20 to 40 percent more oxygen can typically be produced each season than will be polluted—a net gain in clean air, for a “reverse greenhouse effect.”
When the sky cries, it must really be hurting. Acid rain hits when certain contaminants have a chemical reaction as they wash out of the air. Fossil fuels contain sulfur, and when burned they form air pollution containing sulfur dioxide (SO2). When SO2 combines with rain water (H2O), they form sulfurous acid (H2SO3). This common form of acid rain eats away at our fields, forests, cars, buildings, and monuments. Trees and other plants, lakes and rivers are damaged first by the liquid acid and then by the resulting soil-chemistry imbalances. The buildup of acids in our lakes and ponds is thought to be a major factor behind the precipitous reduction of amphibians globally.26
Biofuels do not contain sulfur or lead unless they are intentionally added, which is not necessary. Hemp makes an excellent biofuel source. It can be grown as an energy crop, or fuel could be produced from its waste material left over from manufacturing textile, paper, or other consumer goods. During the Second World War, the head of the U.S. War Hemp Industries Corporation explained that hemp waste was burned to power its own mills, potentially generating a huge energy surplus.27 “Fiber is obtained from the stems of the plant, Cannabis sativa. All of the factories use the hurd to fire the huge boilers which provide heat for drying and power to operate the machines. Fuel costs are eliminated through this ingenious procedure.” This power can be profitably sold back to the utility companies to feed the overall energy grid.
Perhaps use of hemp as a combustible fuel will turn out to be a transition into even cleaner technologies, like photovoltaic cells and hydrogen fuel. Until that day, we still need cleaner fuel. The most hazardous toxic wastes arise from two industries, petrochemicals and nuclear power. Hemp and other biofuels can safely, cleanly, and significantly reduce the use of these destructive resources. We will still need to refine, transport, and store finished fuel for use, creating some level of accident risk, but many important advantages remain. Less reliance on petroleum means fewer oil wells, fewer oil well fires, and fewer oil spills to destroy marine life, birds, and beaches. A hemp spill is relatively harmless and easy to clean up. Similarly, without nuclear reactors there will be no nuclear utility accidents, no radioactive waste, leaks, or spills, and no danger of terrorist attacks. In terms of national security, nuclear reactors and oil fields are tempting military targets; bombing hemp fields would be rather ineffective. The economic arguments for nuclear power and fossil fuels fall apart in light of the massive subsidies needed, such as military costs of protecting oil fields, cleanup costs, and the health costs borne by society. Depart
ment of Energy estimates suggest that renewable energy plus conservation could produce a return on investment of almost $100 for every dollar spent, through avoided oil imports and environmental damage.28
OTHER ECO-CONSIDERATIONS
The way that we eat can change the world, and the American diet has changed radically in recent decades. By 1985 Americans ate only half as much grains and potatoes as in 1909. Consumption of beef soared by almost half. Poultry consumption nearly tripled. This had an important effect on seemingly unrelated areas of the economy and environment. Livestock consume grain and other food items, and require additional equipment and health care. The cumulative energy value used to produce one calorie of beef protein is 78 calories of fuel, while one calorie of soybean protein takes only two calories of fuel.29 If Americans reduced their intake of meat by just 10 percent, an estimated 100 million people could be adequately nourished using the land, water, and energy freed from growing livestock feed.30 Nutritious hempseed serves as food, as vegetable oil and, if necessary, as fuel oil. Properly processed, even the hemp stalk offers a plentiful source of dietary fiber.