Exhibitors High on Many Uses for Hemp : The sturdy plant is wearable and edible and can be used to make thousands of products.
This year’s Eco Expo turned out to be even more of an “industrial strength” sort of thing than I suggested in last week’s column.
The emphasis was very much on commodities--such as textiles, paper and packaging, compressed chip-board building materials and furniture, cosmetics, paints and sealants, lubricants and fuels, food and animal feed--and that was just in the corner devoted to products made from a single agricultural crop: hemp.
Each vendor’s display featured copies of a new book published by an Ojai company, HEMPTECH, titled “Industrial Hemp.”
Yes, we’re talking about that cousin of the mulberry, or Cannabis sativa , known by its street name, marijuana. Hemp used to be a primary industrial raw material for most of the world but was made illegal to grow in the 1930s.
Today, however, legal hemp production--the industrial kind, not the recreational--is flourishing in Europe and Asia.
If the products displayed at Eco Expo and catalogued in this new book are any indication, the plant may once again become an important agricultural crop.
Since Earthwatch is an environmental column, you may wonder how hemp fits in. Better buckle your seat belts:
You know how I obsess in this column about paper recycling as a way to save the forests. Well, I’m a piker compared to the Orange County Register, which has asserted editorially, “Since 1937, about half the forests in the world have been cut down to make paper. If hemp had not been outlawed, most would still be standing, oxygenating the planet.”
Then there’s the current edition of “Abundance,” the official newsletter of the California Vegetarian Assn. A copy was given to me at the Expo after I had lunched on hemp cheese, Sharon’s Finest Hemp-Rella. This newsletter makes good on its name by reporting that hemp crops, maturing as they do in a mere 100 days or less, produce a seed volume amounting to 50% by weight of the harvest. Hemp seed is “second only to the soybean in protein content (and) provides one of humankind’s most complete and available-to-the-body vegetable proteins.”
John W. Roulac, Ojai-based editor and publisher of “Industrial Hemp,” cites an astounding 25,000 products that can be made from this weed-like plant.
The crop has some interesting environmental characteristics. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, hemp itself acts as an herbicide and insecticide, so it doesn’t need petrochemical sprays to keep other weeds from gumming up the fields or bugs from eating up the harvest. It also replenishes the soil, as soybeans do.
Envisioning a new era for local agribusiness if this country ever approves the use of this low-water-using crop, the newsletter speculated that maybe “someday you’ll wake up in the morning (and) smell the odor of hemp wafting in your window from the hemp fields of Ventura County.”
Then there’s clothing. This section of The Times carried a story at Christmas about an Ojai-based designer of high-fashion clothes made of hemp fiber. It noted that this fabric, which used to be the main thing everybody everywhere used for clothing, is stronger than linen, more durable than silk and softer than cotton.
At Eco Expo, I heard the chairman of the Hemp Industries Assn., Don Wirtschafter, turn a neat phrase: “Cotton wears out, hemp wears in.” He also quipped that if you try to get high smoking commercially grown hemp, “You’ll need a truckload.”
That’s why, incidentally, there isn’t a pilferage problem with hemp crops currently growing in France, Spain, Russia, China, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. “It would be like eating corn in an attempt to get the effect of corn whiskey,” Wirtschafter said.
Details
* FYI: For a copy of “Industrial Hemp” ($4.95) or to make inquiries about the availability of hemp products, call HEMPTECH in Ojai at 646-HEMP.
* ALSO: For a free catalogue of mail-order hemp products, call Cannabest in San Luis Obisbo at 543-4213.
