Hemp Agronomy

It all begins with the farmer. Civilization itself began with the act of farming. The fathers of our country, the framers of our Constitution, were in the main, farmers. The vision that they had for America was an agrarian utopia.

At some point, maybe in the post-Civil War period, manufacturing emerged as the dominant American enterprise. Industrial muscle, corporate power kicked farming to the curb as we looked to science and manufacturing to solve society's woes. Hunger, disease, poverty; these were all to be banished to the past by good ole Yankee ingenuity.

Well, it would have been a great idea had it worked, but there exists a thing in life called "The Theory of Unintended Consequences." Our forefathers didn't foresee the pollution, the loss of our natural heritage, the dehumanizing forces of the corporate mentality or the loss of agrarian diversity as farming became a profit-driven monoculture.

For our health and sanity, not to mention the environmental health of our planet, I believe we must revitalize farming in America. Oh, I'm somewhat of a realist, I know we will never make it back to those bucolic days of our country's youth, and whatever changes that are made are done so with a great deal of corporate involvement. But to secure a better future, and I'm talking about future generations, not "the next quarter," then it is essential - at least in my mind - that we take the farms away from the multi national chemical companies and give them back to the farmers.

The chemical cures for all of our woes have not lived up to the promises that were hyped upon us. We would be better served by joining in an alliance with Mother Nature rather than trying to force our will upon her with chemical foods and pest controlling poisons. We can learn to create not deplete topsoil while at the same time husband our water resources more effectively.

Nature has provided us with a powerful tool if we will only recognize it as such: the hemp plant. In this essay I will explain how it can be used to remediate the land, reclaim watersheds, build topsoil, quell erosion, and energize the American farm, farms all over the world for that matter.

The hemp plant is a dioecious. That means it has a male version as well as a female version. This is important, but I'll wait until later to explain why. The plant is from the Cannabinaceae family, the genus is cannabis and species are many: Sativa being the most famous, but there is also Indica and Ruderallis to name two.

It takes a male and a female to procreate and crosses can occur either by the whim of nature or the will of man. When crosses occur naturally they are called "varieties" and when it happens through the involvement of man they are known as "cultivars." Breeding strains that provide what the farmer is after is at the core of successful farming and in this hemp can be a very willing and able participant. Cultivars have been developed containing very little THC (The most notorious psycho-active agent [less than 0.3% is considered industrial quality,]) and be either superior producers of fibers or of seed.

To say that it's a shame that hemp has been shrouded in mystery and vilified for the last seven decades is an understatement of colossal proportions. In the last seventy years there have been so many discoveries in the world of science, agriculture, textiles and nearly every other walk of life that it boggles the mind. And to think of what we would know now in terms of what the hemp plant could be used for, the best methods to grow it, the medicines that would have been yielded, saddens me greatly.

Think of the state of our forests if hemp could have carried some of the load in terms of paper production, home building and the production of forest products in general. How our streams and watersheds would have fared if hemp had been used to slow erosion and shade spawning grounds. But the fact is, that time was lost and we have to start from scratch. Techniques, protocols, equipment all have to go through the process of research and development, trial and error, excessive optimism and unfounded skepticism. We will know what can be done only after it has been accomplished but to play the game of what-might-have-been or ifa-coulda-shoulda is only self-defeating.

Hemp is a woody dicot with a stem that can grow to nearly twenty feet in height and put a tap root down seven or eight feet in a good growing medium. The hemp fiber, legendary in strength, grows the length of the plant so it wouldn't be beyond reason to develop a process for delivering fibers ten feet long, but for ease of production, three or four feet is probably more practical.

Still, compare that to the 3/4 inch or so that is about the max for a fiber from cotton or tree wood and you begin to understand where the hemp fiber develops some of its strength. It's claimed that the hemp fiber is the strongest naturally occurring fiber on the planet, and the roots are no joke either.

The root system consists of a single tap root that can go down three meters, and a matrix of feeder roots that go out in all directions from the plant and go down maybe a couple of feet. My experience has been in growing plants for green-bud and even though I planted them several feet apart, the roots intermingled. I can only imagine the gnarly root systems of hemp grown for fiber or seeds when thousands upon thousands of root systems intertwined over acres. It's easy to see that this plant could help slow erosion along creeks and streams.

I mean, it is a weed at heart and once it got going it would do its work year in and year out. But it is dioecious as I mentioned before, and this is one of the reasons that that's important: it's not going to take over where you don't want it like kudzu or German Ivy. Just chop it down before it goes to seed and that's pretty much the end of the story.

Another cool thing about the root system of the hemp plant is that its long tap root besides loosening the soil, brings trace minerals up from the depths and deposits them in the topsoil during the retting, a term derived from "rotting." As the plant lays cut in the field, the leaves fall off of the stalk and about half of the nitrogen that the plant used to grow is deposited back into the soil as well. This is one reason why hemp flourishes on the same plot of ground for years on end. Hemp leaves the field in which it was grown virtually weed-free, so I'm sure farmers will value it more as a rotational crop.

The stalk consists of a woody outer layer, the "bast," and a pulpy inner core known as the "hurds." The outer layer is home for the famous hemp fibers that run up and down the length of the plant. The stalk can grow to be nearly twenty feet tall, but for the purposes of agriculture, ten foot plants make the most sense when harvesting dynamics are considered. A denser, mostly branchless crop will be grown if fiber is the goal.

If the crop is intended for seeds then the plants will be spaced a little wider and some branching will occur. The time from planting to harvest will be about four months if fiber is what is desired, while plants for seeds will need to stay in the ground for another month or so. The outer layer of the stalk, and especially on the female flowers and to some degree upon the leaves is where you find the valuable resin that the plant produces. The flowers of the female, known as "buds," are where you find the seeds.

The potential of hemp as a cash crop is nearly limitless. The fiber can be used as a textile, the seed yields oil that can be used for cooking or refined into diesel fuel, and even after the oil is pressed out of the seeds a protein cake remains that can feed animals and man alike. The stalks can be made into building products or paper products that can be as strong as the best cardboard or as gentle as tissue. The tons of biomass can also be converted into alcohol for energy.

Depending on the needs of the farmer and the product desired by the end user, hemp can be grown for thousands of different purposes and because of that, the plant has the ability to energize farming on many different levels. It is critically important that the farmers of America understand what the stakes are. Until they do, the plant remains illegal. End of story.