Would anyone plant industrial hemp?

Hemp is a major crop in India and China. It is very resistant to nearly all pests so requires nearly no pesticides.

We eat a lot of hemp seeds. Delicious nutty taste and high in protein. We buy it in the grocery store and it is always sold out!. It is way too expensive for chicken feed but would be great for them I am sure.

We have a Hemp store in town. Hemp cloth is wonderfully comfortable to wear and extremely strong.

Virtually all sail cloth up until the last fifty years or so was made of hemp. Henry Ford once built a car, the body of which was made largely of hemp plastic, which was as strong as steel.

Cheech and Chong tried that too:

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ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

There is so much confusion about hemp and marijuana.

Smoking marijuana will make the user high, and smoking hemp will not. Hemp contains less than 1 percent of the active ingredient THC, the substance that gives pot smokers a high. Marijuana plants, on the other hand, can contain 10 to 20 percent THC.

Marijuana plants and hemp plants have different appearances and are harvested differently. Marijuana plants tend to be short and bushy, while hemp plants can have stalks that are 25 feet high! Unlike marijuana, hemp has many uses. Over 25,000 products can be manufactured from hemp, including hair conditioner, diapers, insulation, carpets, paper, and perfume. Things like rope made out of hemp never rot like traditional rope. Hemp as a food is one of the most easily absorbed by the body, very high in protein.

It is all rather like the poppy plant discussion. It is a beautiful ornamental flower and poppy seeds and oil are delicious and used in many cuisines. But you also make opium from the same plant, Papaver somniferum.

The good old days

I'll stick to my recreational hemp crop thanks.

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www.salmonslayer-simplelife.blogspot.com

A lot of the debate about medical marijuana and even hemp will eventually be moot. The Israelis have developed a strain of medical marijuana that gives you the benefits without any high at all.

I wish we had an unlike button!

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If it becomes legal, I'd probably plant a half acre or so....just so that every time I found some plants missing, I could giggle at the local kids walking around with massive headaches that even ibuprofin won't touch.

Once the local kids had learned their lesson, I would bale it, before it got too fibrous, as livestock hay. Hemp is high protein and high trace minerals, and goats love the stuff.

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Peace,
Caliann

"First, Show me in the Bible where it says you can save someone's soul by annoying the hell out of them." -- Chuck

ok i know there is a difference between the medical MJ and hemp..but is there any good use for the by products of the medical MJ plants other than compost..can the stems and leaves be used in some beneficial way..forage..chickens?? (happy chickens)..etc..maybe we need a thread on beneficial uses of the byproduct of medical MJ for those who are growinig it and throwing away the rest of the plant

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Brenda Groth
http://restfultrailsfoodforestgarden.blogspot.com/

I have read up on hemp in the past and I WOULD plant it if it were easier to do and I had acreage to do it on. The permits and process takes years and a lot of money since the Feds consider it the same as pot, though. I think a lot of people who support over estimate some of the benefits but you get that with any "different" product that mainstream doesn't support. If only half of the yields are true I still see it as being a beneficial plant for anything made of fibers, biofuel, food/feed and any of the other thousands of uses

Ummmm.... the benefit IS the high!

As to the OP's original question... No, I wouldnt not want to grow hemp, nor have any of my neighbors grow it, too much danger of cross pollination with.... Ummm errmmmm.... carry on.

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

Whether or not it is a marketable crop really isn't the issue: to me anyway. The reasons for hemp being quasi-illegal are because of a fear of competition and not because there is something wrong or immoral about the plant itself.

The current political climate gives farmers and industry a chance to take another look at hemp and its uses. MJ will be legal soon enough, why not allow hemp to be grown and let the market sort it out?

Trading subsidies for the potential of hemp seems like a good compromise that could work for everyone. Just thoughts.

Hemp plants. I remembered the first time I saw that ingred. in my tanning lotion, I was in shock. Back in the 70's , friends and I grew fields and fields of pot plants, had to stand guard all night with guns. Sold baggies for 5 bucks. In the 80's , planted pot plants in fields next to a big hospital for cancer patients. 2 yrs. ago my ex got a job in a medical m. store. Again in shock, after all that we been though growing and hiding it. Its just funny. I notice when he died last yr. they never put where he worked, only 25 yrs. before. Again Funny. Now Hemp. I wished I knew back then I could have sold both. Cheech and Chong are my hero's , still are. Sorry , just thinking about my life, and how things have changed so much.

The stems can be used for fiber, just like non-happy hemp. The large leaves that do not have trichomes on them can be used as livestock feed.

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Peace,
Caliann

"First, Show me in the Bible where it says you can save someone's soul by annoying the hell out of them." -- Chuck

Hemp was used to make ropes during WW2. It was grown locally and we had it in our corn fields in the 1950s. Silage corn would be 10' tall and the hemp would be 5' above that. It would sound like a tree going through the silo filler.

Martin

I wonder how 20 years of hemp fiber production compares with 20 years of wood fiber production. My bet is that hemp would outproduce wood on a per acre per year basis.

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"Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?" Hobbs
"I'm not sure that man needs the help." Calvin

Yea my ship had hemp ropes (6" hawser). If we would have used synthetic rope it would have melted under the tension. Pro tip: When the hemp rope is smoking, slack up!

I think it is 3:1.

I believe it is more efficient than corn for biofuel as well but I dont know the numbers for that.

The problem with hemp production is getting the infrastructure up to process it into an end-product. I would SOOOOO love to see it replace wood in paper production, and I have some lovely clothes and a purse made from hemp. I also use hemp oil as a nutrient supplement and in soap making.

It can be done if the powers that be would move in that direction. After all, soy is a relatively "new" agricultural commodity. My grandfather farmed into the 1970s and never grew it. That's about when my dad started....

I would defintely support hemp as a renewable resource.
We need to up our renewable resources.
It would be awesome to become the world leaders in something once again and there are openings.

Hempcrete is amazing stuff.
Hemp for biofuels is vastly superior to burning the food.
There are even hemp plastics now that make better solar panels etc..

Yep.. hemp could be, and should be, the wave of the future.
Being trapped by big corporations is a bummer.
But it wouild be nice if they realized that they could grow it alongside their wells etc.. to improve the health of the soil and make a buck or two..

heavy, heavy sigh...

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Does hemp have much sugar or starch in it?

Several have mentioned it would be more efficient that corn for fuel, how does it work?

--->Paul