Hemp Bound by Doug Fine Page B

incentives. If your government decides it wants to encourage hemp, well . . .” At this Carus’s face melted back into mirth, and he emitted a sort of “ho ho ho!” from beneath what was actually something of a Santa Claus beard. For some reason a lot of the folks, worldwide, who work in hemp look like Dori or Nori.
    The chuckling no doubt had to do with the four hundred dollars per acre with which the European Union subsidizes its hemp farmers. He was wishing us luck.
    The British hemp expert John Hobson we earlier met, who advises European hemp farmers on agricultural nuance, emphatically concurred with Carus’s assessment. Especially when I told him that our president has vowed to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020.
    â€œIt’s rare enough that hemp’s a soil builder,” he explained, “but it requires no spraying of pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. If those qualities are worked into an agricultural subsidy formula, it suddenly looks much stronger.”
    And that’s before you get into carbon sequestration. Hobson’s company website says its version of hempcrete “locks-up approximately 110 kilograms of carbon dioxide per cubic meter of wall.” 36 Greg Flavall said that’s comparable to how his North Carolina house performs in its role of mitigating climate change.
    So how do we make the numbers add up to profit for farmers on the home front? There’s always a hemp subsidy we could drop, hardly noticed, into the next FARRM Bill. At least to start, to help the industry get on its feet across the United States, until those two million acres begin to literally seed our food, construction, and energy revolutions.
    There’s another way to encourage domestic hemp farming, too. One that consciously aims to return America to her family-farming roots. We are, incredibly, down to an embarrassing 1 percent of Americans farming now. It was 30 percent the last time hemp was legal.
    Just as the famous Homesteading Act wound up feeding the nation, I’ve heard a new plan described in the form of a Digital Age Homesteading Act. This would provide industrial cannabis farmers in places like North Dakota, Vermont, and Kentucky with micro grants for land purchase and cultivar research. Funding can come from the two billion dollars President Obama committed to alternative fuel research in March 2013.
    And on that encouraging note, we return to our hemp entrepreneurial journey. We’ll stick for the moment with construction materials like hempcrete, since that’s our first fiber killer app. Without question, Carus is correct that the expensive hassle of the drug war has things in something of a holding pattern. Unprocessed hemp doesn’t travel or store particularly well or inexpensively. Which is to say imports of anything are rarely cheap.
    But domestic hemp will win in a worldwide fiber marketplace that has a level playing field for raw materials, the Hemp Industries Association’s Steve Levine believes. That’s simply because it is “too amazing a construction [material] not to, not just for insulation, but for load-bearing block components, roofing, paneling, fiberboard, and flooring.” And when high international shipping costs are eliminated, he said, that is a big step toward a level playing field.
    Furthermore, said Vote Hemp’s Eric Steenstra, domestic hemp will be profitable even during the high-end fiber processing learning curve the CIC’s Simon Potter believes is necessary, because “fiber for industrial composites and construction can be successfully shipped in a more raw form than textiles.”
    That, in the end, is why builders like Flavall and Tim Callahan are having a go at it even as the drug war’s final fires are being extinguished. They’re confident that they’ll find affordable hempcrete in tomorrow’s Hemp Home Depot. They want to be the established industry