If domestic hemp use and cultivation were practiced and encouraged, we might just be able to change the world…
The cultivation of the plant would be a boon for small farmers, especially organic farmers. We’re talking about industrial hemp this time, not medical cannabis/marijuana, which continues to prove its merits and gain acceptance.
The worldly benefits of using hemp are in plain view and clear to see. But it’s a complex concoction of legal and bureaucratic nonsense even without THC – the psychoactive element found in cannabis – that holds the industrial revolution of hemp back.
Commercial hemp cultivation is legal in Canada but the US government pushed the industry to the side when industry monopolies were threatened when it appeared that a hemp boom may compete for the very products of their monopolist concerns.
Around 1937 the hemp industry was boosted by the introduction of the decoricator machine. It replaced hand shredding of hemp to glean its fibers, fibers that could be used for textiles, clothing, paper, and plastic.
With this new invention, hemp would have been able to take over most competing industries in areas such as paper, textiles, fuel, and plastics. Growing hemp in abundance was easy, and it’s plant to harvest time was no more than six months.
According to Popular Mechanics during that time:
“10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land.”
This was followed by a small number of large businesses with competition concerns used high level government connections to push through the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
The inevitable marijuana scare mongering ensued and was hyped by movies such as “Reefer Madness” brought about more legislation that would prohibit all hemp cultivation, even hemp without THC.
George Washington – “Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.”
Thomas Jefferson – “Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country.”
Hemp for Nutrition
Hulled hemp seeds and their cold pressed oils provide incredible health benefits and contain all the essential amino acids for easily digested high protein. Hemp is not only high in omega-3, but it provides an almost perfect ratio of omega-3 to omega-6.
It is truly a super food that you can buy in health food stores or online. The seeds will almost always come from Canada, where industrial hemp is still legal.
Hemp is so nutritional that one could survive on hemp seeds alone during extreme food shortages. If hemp were legal, you could easily grow your own.
Hemp Improves Farming
No pesticides or synthetic fertilizers are required to successfully grow hemp.
It’s thick roots ward off weeds, and the growing process even improves the soil’s nitrogen, making that soil better for other crops in the future. They would be useful and lucrative rotation crops for organic farmers.
The growth cycle of hemp is only four months. In mild climates, harvesting hemp two times in one year would create an annual cash cow for farmers. The marijuana taboo is eliminated by allowing the male plants to continually pollinate the female plants. This reduces psychotropic THC to legal levels.
Eliminating Toxic Petrochemical Plastics
Many types of plastics are produced with hemp, from plastic clear wrapping for food to automobile and motor parts. Hemp plastics are heat resistant and durable and importantly they are bio-degradable. The French auto industry has recently started to use hemp to manufacture some of its automobile parts. Henry Ford pioneered this in 1941 when he built his “vegetable car” with hemp and flax. It was stronger and lighter than steel cars.
Ford’s hemp-mobile also used hemp bio-diesel fuel, which creates very little pollution. The petroleum industry didn’t want to see or hear that. Hemp seeds were even used to make paints and lacquers in the mid-1930s.
Petrochemical plastics for all purposes could be replaced with hemp plastics that are non-toxic and bio-degradable. Bye-bye BPA!
Housing Construction Materials
Amazingly, housing construction materials made from hemp fibers have been discovered to be superior to most cheap materials used in housing construction these days. Ever see a house under construction after its initial framing?
What you’ll usually see before whatever exterior coating is used are sheets of wood substitutes, either pasteboard or particle board or pressboards, some of which are processed and bound with toxic chemicals that can off-gas into interior quarters. It’s cheaper than other materials and used abundantly.
Inexpensive hemp can be made into various different building materials, hempcrete, fiberboard, carpet, stucco, cement blocks, insulation, and plastic. Those materials are stronger and much longer lasting than what’s being used currently. They are also mold and rot free and more fire resistant. And they are environmentally and ecologically friendly and non-toxic.
All The Paper And Textile You Could Ever Need
Anything wood pulp can do, hemp fibers can do better!
It’s thought that the original Constitution and Bill of Rights were scribed on hemp paper.
Paper made from tree and wood material can be recycled about three times. Hemp paper can be recycled eight times.
Since hemp was effectively banned in the USA since 1937, 70% of the USA’s forests have been eliminated. It takes years for trees to grow. Hemp can be gown and harvested within six months.
Researchers suggest that one acre of hemp produces more oxygen from CO2 and methane than 25 acres of forest! A novel idea presented by a group of hemp advocates is to have inner city hemp plots that can filter and improve urban air quality… There goes the bogus carbon tax legislation.
“Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?” — Henry Ford
It just goes to show how an amazing, easily cultivated plant with so many beneficial applications has been so remarkably suppressed by the powers at the top (via Organic&Healthy).
If you like this idea, be sure to share it with your friends and inspire someone you know. Anything becomes possible with just a little inspiration…
