Hemp Bound

by Doug Fine

  One Pennsylvania weaving plant is terrific. But does the United States really have sufficient infrastructure to support hemp? As with oil processor Shaun Crew’s intent to parachute into the North Dakota seed oil market the moment it’s legal to grow hemp Stateside, I think it’s worth noting where the already successful hemp building companies are putting their money.

  Our British friend Ian Pritchett, Lime Technology’s VP, struck me as a savvy, unsentimental businessperson. His company wouldn’t devote resources to a market if its “sums,” as he put it so Britishly, didn’t make the accountants smile. He went so far as to tell me, “Every new market is a battle.” And Lime Technology is evidently so jazzed about the United States coming online that it’s already started the Chicago-based subsidiary called American Lime Technology we earlier discussed.

  This is a company from which you can today order hempcrete for your next building project. It’ll be imported hemp, for now, of course, but what’re you gonna do, beyond calling your congressperson and senators to bend their ears about the Digital Age Homesteading Act?39

  Chapter Nine

  Patriots Ponder Planting

  Back in the waiting American fields—the millions of ready-for-hemp acres in North Dakota, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, Oregon, California, and Colorado, to name a few states with either significant historic harvests or modern hemp-friendly laws—the inability to capitalize domestically on these market forces is intolerably stifling.

  With the tide turning their way, some farmers aren’t waiting. Coloradans explicitly legalized industrial cannabis farming in the same 2012 election that permitted adult social use of psychoactive cannabis. As many as two dozen farmers in the Rocky Mountain State planted hemp in the spring of 2013. One of them, fifth-generation Colorado rancher Michael Bowman, told me he’s quite willing to be a test case, on the agricultural side and the legal side.

  “We can eat it, wear it, and slather it on our bodies, but we can’t grow it?” posited Bowman, whose Aw shucks, I don’t know better than anyone else, I’m just tryin’ to do what’s right humility belies both his political savvy and his ranching know-how. “That’s inexcusable. It’s shameful. Do our federal drug squads really want to raid a longtime family rancher for growing the fiber the Declaration of Independence was drafted on?”

  Hemp Pioneers

  Michael Bowman, National Hemp and Sustainability Lobbyist

  “Check your email—I just shot you a photo of me with [U.S. agriculture secretary] Tom Vilsack,” Colorado’s Bowman told me when, in April 2013, I had asked, “C’mon, really? Hemp is going to be federally re-legalized in this session of Congress? It never gets more than a snicker in committee.”

  “At least in the House,” he said.

  He was right (and I still have that and other Beltway action photos he sent during what turned out to be the partly victorious whirlwind hemp effort in 2013). The tide had turned. Common sense had prevailed. Or maybe the money the Canadians were making had finally talked.

  It’s safe to say that Bowman (along with years of effort by other hemp activists) was a key figure in the lobbying effort that saw Colorado representative Jared Polis’s groundbreaking hemp research bill sneak into the FARRM Bill, thus (if Congress finishes the job in 2014) ending one of the most counterproductive agricultural bans in human history.

  A towering fifty-four-year-old farm boy intellectual who emerges from weeks of communication darkness to call me at weird hours from weird time zones after tracking down cabinet officials and key congressional “maybes” on hemp, Bowman laughs like a good ol’ boy, never has a negative word for anyone, and gets things done by operating according to a sort of Zen-inspired seven-year patience plan.

  “It started with a community center I worked on [he’s from a small, conservative farming town of 2,354 called Wray] back in 1983,” Bowman told me over doughnuts in Denver. “I saw that a project that takes six months to accomplish the goal isn’t even enough of a challenge for me. Renewable energy was years in the wilderness. Hemp was years.”

  Bowman’s graying around the fringes and not wearing a peace sign t-shirt, “always a plus on the Hill,” he said. After he was instrumental in his home state’s passage of the first substantive renewable energy requirements in the nation in 2004 (for which, as a resident of downwind New Mexico, I am very grateful), Bowman realized what a difference an individual can make in state politics.

  So he thought he’d see if that was true on the federal level. He paid his own way to DC in 2013 and crashed with friends while pounding the legislative and executive branch hallways every day for two months to speak the truth about hemp. And what did President Obama say when he bent the POTUS’s ear about hemp as a biofuel source during a 2012 Oval Office visit that he’d earned as a White House Champion of Change for his renewable energy work? “He listened respectfully,” Bowman said.

  “This is not a new crop,” he told me, draining his coffee mug. “We’re just late to the game in recognizing its value in the digital age.” Indeed, at least thirty countries cultivate industrial cannabis today.

  One of Bowman’s key political skills is that he can speak eastern Colorado rancher-ese. No one accuses him of being a hippie. Raiding his family farm would end the federal war on hemp in about a week, just from right-wing outrage.

  Could happen. He was explicitly threatened by a DEA agent on NPR on January 28, 2013.40 Even longtime hemp activist Adam Eidinger, a man who’s been handcuffed for planting hemp seeds at the Pentagon, said that farmers like Bowman, if they plant before the drug peace officially breaks out, are “literally betting the farm.”

  As with all bets, there’s a payoff for the winner. Like the North Carolina hemp builders, what Bowman is trying to get a slice of is the drug peace dividend: the billions that transfer back to the economy when the drug war budget is redirected. Besides saving taxpayers tons of money during a federal debt crisis, the coming era allows hemp to take off as a profitable commodity. Bowman’s no fool.

  Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron sees $46.7 billion just in annual tax benefits when the drug war ends. He’s talking about the legalization of all forms of the cannabis plant, but we already know the industrial side will be a significant part of the new cannabis economy. As Bowman frequently reminded me, the rest of the industrialized world has a considerable head start over the United States. Luckily, American academia is starting to educate a new generation of hemp farmers and entrepreneurs.

  Hemp Pioneers

  Lynda Parker, Hemp Advocate, Grandmother

  I met the gray-haired, dignified Parker (and these qualities are important, as we’ll see) at the August 1, 2013, official hemp flag hoisting above the Colorado statehouse in Denver. The matriarch of hemp in the Rocky Mountain State was beaming here in the city in which she lives and had worked for decades as a yellow page directory sales rep. “Farmers are planting, I consider this achieving the goal,” she told me.

  What I discovered from the love Parker was being shown by the comparatively latter-day hemp activists that day at the statehouse was that Colorado’s farmers and entrepreneurs are leading the United States into the billion-dollar world cannabis industry in large part because of the preparatory work done by this single human being.

  It all happened because when Parker retired from the phone book sales job in 2005, she took a year off to decide what she wanted to do with her life. She only knew that “environmental values” comprised her criteria.

  “I remember where I was when it came to me clear as day,” Parker told me as state police unfolded and raised the flag made from the same material that Betsy Ross used for the first American flag. “It was hemp in neon letters. Hemp was the biggest difference I could make for the planet as an individual.”

  The now sixty-three-year-old grandmother had no previous lobbying experience of any kind. And yet if this industry takes off as predicted (remember, Canada can’t plant new hemp acreage fast enough to keep up with demand), there will be buildings named after her
one day. That’s because unlike Kentucky and Ohio, Colorado doesn’t have a traditional hemp industry. “This is about rescuing wheat and corn farmers who are losing their soil due to monoculture and climate change,” she told me. “About a modern cash crop in an expanding area for our agriculture industry.”

  Parker’s backstory—and Colorado’s hemp head start over the rest of the United States—reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. If a series of crucial happy accidents hadn’t happened, hemp cultivation probably wouldn’t be taking off in the state full-bore in 2014. To name one, ten years before her post-retirement hemp catharsis, in 1996, Parker had taken a political science course at the University of Colorado at Denver. As part of a “follow a bill’s life cycle” project, she happened to be assigned to cover the nation’s first modern hemp legalization bill (sponsored by Colorado state senator Lloyd Casey, it passed the state house but failed in the senate when the DEA complained about it).

  “Had I not taken that course, I would not be talking to you today, and this hemp flag might not be flying above the capital,” she said. In other words, hemp would probably not be legal in Colorado.

  From the class she learned how the legislative branch of government works. She used that knowledge a decade later, in 2006, when she spearheaded her first hemp initiative. “The first thing I did was call my friend [Colorado state representative] Suzanne Williams [D–South Aurora]. I gave her my poli sci class final paper and asked, ‘Can we revisit this issue?’ She said, ‘I think we should.’ Suzanne became my champion, introduced me around, put me in touch with not just elected officials but the amazing and effective sustainability activist Mike Bowman. We pounded the hallways seemingly in vain for years. It was a lonely time.”

  Mark these works carefully, ye who hath given up on representative democracy: After those few years of blank stares and giggles, Parker changed the hemp laws in a big state, in a time of supposed corporate control of government, nearly alone. She had no political experience. Her secrets? “I love what I do, I dress conservatively, and I don’t give up.”

  Not that she didn’t consider throwing in the towel—more than once. “Oh, I told friends several times, ‘This is hopeless, and nothing’s ever going to move through the legislature on hemp.’ But Suzanne, Mike, and I kept prodding and poking around to see where we could get an opening.”

  An early opening came from north of the border. “The Canadian consulate’s agriculture people in Denver were very supportive,” Parker told me. “By allowing us to use their conference room for meetings, they legitimized us. And they provided us with a huge amount of information about the hemp industry, which was really taking off for them. The RCMP conferenced with Colorado law enforcement, telling them they had no problems with their industry. Zero. That got our law enforcement on board very early, which has proven very helpful.”

  Still, Parker spent most of her time during those first years answering Can I smoke my drapes? jokes from legislators and Rotarians.

  “It was frustrating,” she said. “But we’d get little bursts of momentum, and by 2010 we were having serious conversations. I realized we were seeing a shift in the consciousness.”

  That year Colorado passed a resolution in support of hemp legalization that went out to the White House and Attorney General Eric Holder. “It was toothless, of course,” she said of that first victory. “But it stated the real issues farmers are facing—water shortages, debt, and the truth about hemp as a soil restorer and cash crop.”

  Was Parker’s age and buttoned-down sales experience an asset? “I don’t think there’s any question,” she said, her hair prim and her sweater buttoned even this day. “I am a mainstream face for hemp. It doesn’t get any more mainstream than a gray-haired lady who sells yellow pages advertising. No one was threatened by me.”

  Hemp’s first actual legislative victory in Colorado came in 2012. Another Colorado hemp advocate, Jason Lauve, with amazing alacrity, helped write a hemp phytoremediation (soil restoration) bill, HB12-1099. “Representative Wes McKinley called me into his office,” Lauve remembered. McKinley is a cowboy poet from a rural district. “He was there with two attorneys, and he said, ‘We’re gonna write a hemp bill today.’ In forty-five minutes we had it drafted.”

  Lauve reached out to Parker to help the bill gain traction, knowing she had good contacts and unwavering intensity. The forty-two-year-old Lauve, who runs a hemp industry building clearinghouse called Team Hemp (one of its projects is a hemp house), along with advocate Dr. Erik Hunter and Parker, testified in support of the phytoremediation bill.

  “It moved so fast with so much support—that’s what was so rewarding,” Lauve said. The phytoremediation bill became law when Governor John Hickenlooper signed it on June 4, 2012. Parker looked at it from the perspective of years of work. “We had educated the legislature. They were ready.”

  Then came another huge unexpected boost, a chapter in the Colorado Hemp Choose Your Own Adventure.

  “Years ago,” Parker explained. “I had told Brian Vicente [one of the leaders of the successful Amendment 64 voter initiative that legalized all forms of cannabis in Colorado in November 2012] that I didn’t want to be active in the psychoactive side, since legislators were just starting to understand hemp. And yet he still included hemp in that initiative. I bow down to him in thanks for that whenever I see him.”

  To codify the will of the people on that count, the legislature, again with near unanimity (one senator thought the bill too restrictive), passed a bill (Senate Bill 13-241, signed into law on May 28, 2013) that will allow commercial cultivation of hemp in Colorado regardless of federal law. Farmers will have to pay for a state permit, provide their field’s GPS coordinates, and verify the crop’s low THC levels, according to Bowman.

  That law created a hemp advisory committee whose members plan to have hemp cultivation guideline recommendations for the state agriculture commissioner in place in time for the 2014 cultivation season, said Bowman, who’s a committee member. Given that those roughly two dozen farmers planted in 2013, before the state regulations were even implemented, it’s anyone’s guess how many Colorado farmers will give hemp a try in 2014 when it’s fully kosher on the state level in any amount. Thousands, hopefully.

  In addition to unlimited commercial cultivation for plants under 0.3 percent THC, Senate Bill 13-241 also allows research crops of up to ten acres for plants that for now might have higher THC, in order to develop seed stock with different traits. “We had thirty-eight sponsors for that bill,” Lauve recalled. “It passed through every committee unanimously. That was it. Colorado is totally behind hemp.”

  “Another big part of why the state moved so fast is Colorado farmers said we’re doing it,” Parker told me. “They don’t need DEA approval and they’re not waiting for it.” As for federal legalization of hemp, she added, “The momentum is utterly unstoppable.”

  So what’s the message for activists in any cause? Parker had so many suggestions to tick off, it was as though she had waited her whole life for the question. “There has to be that level of maturity,” she began. “Include the people you think will resist. Most of the time your supposed enemies just don’t understand. Always take the high road, no matter how weird it gets—and it gets weird in politics. And most of all, try to have fun along the way. Looking back on it, I can truly say it’s been totally fun.”

  Ya know, nearly single-handedly laying the groundwork for what looks to be a billion-dollar industry for your state’s farmers. Not a bad thing to check off one’s bucket list.

  Chapter Ten

  Hempucation Immersion Course

  Anndrea Hermann, strawberry-blond hair flayed across the back of her coveralls, was trying to help me dig my full-sized four-wheel-drive rental truck out of another snowbank, this one behind her former Mennonite farmhouse. Based on the fact that I could see only a frozen pancake in all directions, it seemed to me that I was in the dictionary definition of the middle of nowhere—somewhere on the Canadia
n Prairie. In her directions, Hermann had described the location as a suburb of Winnipeg.

  The minus-seventeen cold at the moment—calculated before healthy breeze—was a physical presence on Hermann’s 120 acres. An entity to which I could and did speak. And we were out in it for longer than humans are rated for.

  I’m relating what any Canadian will tell you is just another Far North Thursday to get to the reason I was stuck: Both one of the world’s most prominent hemp industry authorities and I had wanted to get ten feet closer to the former’s barn to unload the truck. The surrounding snowdrifts, if not Himalayan, had seemed imposing to navigate on foot in such conditions. It was a lazy move, and we were paying for it. Good thing I had about a month’s supply of Colleen Dyck’s GORP bars in the cab.

  In our defense, Hermann had tossed perhaps thirty white feedbags, at fifty pounds each, into the Ford’s truck bed when we’d visited the Hemp Oil Canada facility. I’m pretty sure no previous Payless renter had done that. Not with this cargo: The bags contained pure hemp seed cake, the protein-rich by-product of hemp oil pressing. Upward of three-quarters of a ton of it. It was feed for Hermann’s pigs.

  “This and compost is all I feed ’em in winter,” she told me just before I drove into the crystalline snowdrifts (where I remained for several hours) on February 21, 2013. “In the summertime sometimes they graze the hemp stalks in the field.”

  I watched the morning feeding: These were healthy-looking pink-and-brown pigs, energetically charging me either for pets or for more hemp. One of them was pregnant.

  Hermann, in other words, doesn’t just work to promote hemp. She lives it. Thus these are heady times for the thirty-six-year-old, not just because her consulting business line is ringing off the hook, but because she’s still, after fifteen years in the hemp business, ticked off that hemp isn’t legal to help the economy in her native Missouri.