by Doug Fine
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.”
“Ditch weed teaches us that,” I agreed. “Seventy-seven years of eradication and it’s still here.”
For his next demo, Loflin reached a few rows deep into the fiber cultivar crop and gave a five-foot-tall male a vigorous shake. “Check this out,” he said as a pollen cloud emerged that obscured the light for several seconds.
After I spent a few more minutes marveling and playing hide-and-seek with my prairie dog kids, Loflin directed my attention to a seed he was trying to pinch from the ice cream cone of a female flower on the oil side of the two crops we were straddling.
“This one’s ripe,” he said, hunched like a jeweler examining a gemstone. From a cluster of what appeared to be at least a hundred seeds in that one flower, he extracted the coconut-colored individual, a quarter of the size of an orange pip, and squeezed its already opening calyx. A lacy white seed cake emerged like a prize, floating in an oily emerald pool.
“That’s where the omegas are,” I observed, drooling,
“That’s where the money is right now,” Loflin observed, drooling. “The billion-dollar protein that’s driving the market.”
As the sun set, I shot video of row upon row of industrial cannabis plants that seemed to be maturing almost visibly. Mosquitoes were devouring humans and prairie dogs alike, but I for one didn’t mind or indeed even notice my own bites until the coyotes were going off that night outside my family’s campsite, a hundred miles away. I was that Revolutionary War–era Vermonter again: I was reading the news sheet in shocked bliss. I felt like I was seeing a bright economic future for my country, family, and planet for the first time in a long time.
On the planetary side of things, Loflin told me he was trying to prove via year-by-year nutrient comparisons whether industrial cannabis really helps heal drought-damaged soil. He was already demonstrating that it will grow in it.
“I’m sending off one of this year’s soil samples next week,” he said. “I can’t wait to see how these compare to future years.”
And so we were back, as all conversations in the western plains eventually return, to the encroaching Sahara issue. I broached the topic delicately, since Bowman had reminded me that folks in these parts consider themselves the caretakers of the land. But no one is denying that the Dust Bowl is getting real again here, in the same place it struck seventy years ago, right about when hemp got stifled. That Dust Bowl is in the collective memory here. It’s also in the official memory. In fact I saw a photo from a 1935 dust storm in my previous night’s campground, and it looked exactly like the one Jillane Hixson sent me tha
t trapped her and husband Dave in their home for fifteen hours.
“How much do you think climate change plays into this ag crisis?” I asked Loflin.
“The land is not producing as it was ten years ago and prior to that,” he said. “Because of the lack of rain. Nutrients are not being delivered. They’re gone. But this is cyclical. This topsoil can come back, and I have no doubt hemp will help the process.”
I and my Sweetheart had started gathering up children and hats and the group moved slowly back toward Loflin’s truck, each of us shredding first trails through the cannabis farm. When we reached a spot beyond the hemp field’s boundaries, Loflin pointed to a patch of altogether more desert-like dirt than what we’d been mucking through in the field. “This year’s crop is already clearly stabilizing the soil, which is another thing I’m trying to show my neighbors. That and the good news about the water.”
“What’s the good news about the water?”
“The hemp’s wanting about a third to half the water of corn, which is the dominant crop here now,” he said. “Twelve to fourteen inches for hemp, versus twenty-four to thirty-six for corn.” This was big news for farmers watering from the declining Ogallala Aquifer underneath us. “Everyone knows how much their well can produce—folks could dryland-crop hemp.”
Dusk was coming on fast. “Any other advice for farmers moving to hemp next season and in coming years?” I asked.
Loflin stopped at his truck door. “Farming is farming,” he said, sounding exactly like Grant Dyck, the Manitoban hemp farmer. “Every new crop is definitely a learning curve. Realize that, do your research, and you might have a little fun along the way.”
Yes, this makes about half a dozen sources in this book who have included “have fun” in their entry-level business advice. Still, driving back from the field, I remembered Dyck’s combine fires. “Are you ready for harvest?” I asked.
Loflin rolled his eyes and fidgeted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. “I’m consulting with Anndrea Hermann,” he muttered. “I know with the oil crop we have to consider moisture contact at harvest, plus aeration during storage. Just more parts of the process to learn. Anyway, Anndrea’s coming down here at harvesttime.”
“Smart move,” I said, speaking as a hemp journalist.
“We were just talking today about whether to turn off his irrigation now or later,” Hermann told me when I called her to ask for an assessment of Loflin’s effort. “I told him I thought he could keep watering for a bit. And I saw samples of the seeds—they look like they’re forming well. I think he’ll do fine.”
One detail that Hermann found interesting, from observing one of Colorado’s first-ever hemp fields: “The crop’s growing like we see on the high plains of Alberta.” That might help farmers choose cultivars to use or hybridize in future years.
Add Loflin to the list of Americans grateful for Canada’s hemp know-how. After all, how could he know what to do? Forget about being Colorado’s first hemp field. Almost no one has cultivated the plant south of the forty-fifth parallel in more than half a century. Billion-dollar industries have to start somewhere.
And Loflin did believe he was in on the ground floor of such an industry. In fact, he was happy to get off the topic of harvest, which appeared like it might be causing him to lose a little sleep. “Two years from now we’ll already be talking about the development of a major commercial industry that’s well under way, from these seeds,” Loflin predicted. “Between the construction industry, seed oil, and building America’s seed bank, Colorado is going to be leading the hemp revolution.”
While my sleepy kids were wiggling into their own car seats back at the Loflin farmhouse, Ryan disclosed that he was “a little apprehensive” about the lingering federal law quagmire. “I don’t think they’ll bother us. Not with drug cartels coming up from Mexico. If they do they’ll look pretty foolish.”
If the DEA’s evolving public statements were any indication, he was probably right. Notice the considerably less bellicose tone in the second of these two quotes from the same agency, in major media six months apart.
It really doesn’t matter whether it looks different or it looks the same. If it’s the cannabis plant, it’s in the Controlled Substances Act and, therefore, enforceable under federal drug law. —DEA special agent Paul Roach, threatening Michael Bowman on NPR’s Morning Edition, January 28, 2013
Hemp farmers are not on our radar. —Denver DEA spokesman, in a New York Times article about Loflin, August 5, 2013
This essentially reflects America’s widespread and growing support for hemp. Pulling a leaf from his own field off the skier on his shirt, the last thing this technical federal felon told me was, “I want to build an industry for America—something my kids and their kids can rely on.” Then he gave me a gallon jug of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap (peppermint) as a parting gift. As I loaded it into my rig, I thought, Next bottle: American-grown.
Periodic bolts of violet lightning on the southern horizon reminded me that this year at least promised to be a wet one—an auspicious rainy season for the inaugural modern hemp crop, from which it’s possible much of the early American commercial seed market will descend.
Just as I was starting my engine, Loflin waved to a neighbor driving by in front of the property. He knew everyone in Springfield. This of course matters in a small town, and reminded me to investigate whether Springfield, Colorado shared Byers, Colorado’s readiness to grow hemp en masse. Which is to say, in large enough quantities to support a local processor.
So instead of pulling out of Springfield, I backtracked and stopped in at Pappy’s BBQ (get the fried okra) in the part of town that still had its original 1886 edifices. There, on a Tuesday evening, I was able to confirm Loflin’s sense that the town was on board the hemp train.
“I don’t got a problem with it,” said lifelong resident Jack Carson, sixty-one, from a booth he shared with his wife, Debra. Along the wall above them was a shelf filled with photos of Baca County veterans who had served in long-ago and current conflicts. “It’s a cash crop for farmers, and Lord knows we need it.”
“I know the Loflins,” Debra chimed in. “Ryan went to school with my daughter. They’re good people.”
Another family expressed the same view while I waited for my own clan’s order. It stuck me viscerally that hemp fit right in in Baca County, Colorado. It fits right in in the heartland. God bless America, I thought, aiming the rig southwest and home.
Acknowledgments
As I wistfully finish this project, I’m sending out heartfelt thanks to all the hemp experts and consultants who gave freely of their time and info during its research: Anndrea Hermann, Bill Althouse, and Michael Bowman, in particular, went beyond the call. Also incredibly helpful were Ian Pritchett, Adam Eidinger, Michael Carus, John Hobson, Tim Callahan, Greg Flavall, Kelly and Bob King, David Bronner, Grant and Colleen Dyck, Agua Das, Simon Potter, Farhoud Delijani, Ryan Loflin, Don Wirtshafter, Steve Levine, Jillane Hixson, Dave Tzilkoski, Adrian Clark, Norm Roulet, Ellen Komp, Shaun Crew, Danielle Schumacher, and, well, everyone you just met in this book.
My biggest thanks, as always, goes to my superlatively supportive family, who milked the goats while I was jamming on deadline (endless hug payback already on its way). Gracias also to Mike Behar for seeing the potential of this project after discovering his own toddler reading a review of my previous book on the potty, and to Markus Hoffmann, for his usual kindness and professionalism. And thanks to Leigh Huffine and the Chelsea Green team for help with the live events. My editor, Brianne Goodspeed, was terrific to work with. Also, I’m beaming intercontinental appreciation to Michel Degens and Derrick Bergman, who set up several of my European site visits.
And, finally, thanks to the initial fellow or lady who, probably after watching the local animals munch it, first snapped off a branch of Cannabis sativa and thought, Ya know, this’d make a great roof/sandal/basket/food/rope/medicine/party gift—and then two weeks later had a follow-up thought: T
his is, like, the King of Plants, in terms of usefulness. Hey, pass the mastodon burgers.
Notes
1. This after Colorado voters amended their constitution to allow all forms of cannabis on November 6, 2012. Hemp was explicitly specified in that Amendment 64.
2. For fans of obscure government regulation, there’s some indication that this might have already happened for non-edible (fiber, rather than seed) versions of hemp, back in 2003. According to Kentucky attorney Luke Morgan (a white-shoe Bluegrass State lawyer, he used to work in the state attorney general’s office), quoted in the Kentucky publication The Lane Report on August 6, 2013, Drug Enforcement Agency Final Rule (FR Doc 03-6805) “Exemption From Control of Certain Industrial Products and Materials Derived From the Cannabis Plant” frees cannabis-plant-derived industrial products and feeds not intended for human consumption from federal control under the Controlled Substances Act.
3. “Hemp: A Confusing, Historical, and Fascinating Plant,” Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance, accessed October 18, 2013, www.hemptrade.ca/index.php.
4. West told me he learned this tale from James F. Hopkins’s A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky, a 1951 book reissued by the University of Kentucky Press in 1998.
5. In fact, as I send this book to my publisher, a source close to the FARRM Bill negotiations has emailed me to say I will come off like a prophet if I predict that the final hemp amendment wording therein will wind up allowing even stronger cultivation allowances than the “university research” wording that passed the House in 2013. Key Republicans and Democrats have agreed to present it as a states-rights issue, my source told me. “We’re talking about full legalization,” he said. Well, prediction is free, so, OK, I hereby predict that.