Tobacco out, hemp in for Tennessee farmers | Hacker News Reader

Tobacco out, hemp in for Tennessee farmers

sfgate.com

77 pointsjelliclesfarm29 comments

> So those folks are used to managing a high-value crop, a high-labor crop, managing a lot of labor...

> You use the same resources if you do tobacco as you do hemp. You have the same tractors, the same planting equipment. You have the same regimen to get the plant ready for the year. Popping your seeds are the same and doing all that

Clearly, the biggest driver of this shift is CBD oil. Here in KY, there are tons of shops opening up, but also production facilities. Millions of dollars have poured in (lots from CA) to process hemp into CBD products.

It makes me wonder what would happen to our economy were farming marijuana to be legalized. All these areas have years of history growing high labor cash crops, and even though a lot of that infrastructure is gone or shrunk (tobacco warehouses, etc), the skill is still there.

Just wait until they find out you can make paper from hemp, at a much higher yield than with trees - and a much quicker regrow rate.

it is not just CBD that can come from hemp

And fabric/clothing.

https://ecosciences.com/blogs/news/hemp-vs-cotton

Or construction materials.

http://www.globalhemp.com/2014/04/hemp-building-materials.ht...

Yeah, I'm way more interested in hemp fabric than I am in CBD products. Nylon fishing nets are a massive source of marine debris... what the heck did fishermen use before plastic was invented? Hemp, of course. Until it was made illegal. I would very much like to see a return to hemp nets wherever possible.

I would also like to see hemp mulch products for Ag. And edge out petroleum based plastics.

OK, you're on tarring and repair detail for the next month.

Alright, so often when hemp comes up I hear about the textile uses. Personally, I sew a bit and love textiles, but I've never quite understood the allure of hemp fabric or, at least, the best use for it in textiles. For making button shirts, long stable cotton such as sea island cotton is amazing. It's soft and has this amazing crispness that other plant fiber textiles such as hemp and linen do not have. In terms of suiting cloth, it seems like largely wool is king. There are tropical wools for the summer and thick tweeds for the winter; it's an amazing material. This brings us back to hemp. To me, hemp feels similar to linen, which has its uses, but it's more of a niche fabric. Now, there multiple ways to produce a fabric and I don't contend to know all of them, but what is the killer application for hemp fabric?

As a related aside, there's been a lot of evolution of textile technology over the last several thousand years. In the American southwest, cotton supplanted native fibers over a thousand years ago. We can make cloth from yucca, agave, jute, etc., but we largely don't because cotton is generally better. That's partly why I'm curious about hemp. Other than a fad, it seems like cotton and wool won the textile game. For those curious, here are some older papers discussing textiles in the Americas:

https://arizona.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10150/32...

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Wool is animal product. Terrestrial land mass shrinking due to higher human population.

Hemp is a good rotational crop between corn and alfafa. It restores marginal and tired soils. It will fit in beautifully in American Ag.

Candidly, I don't know much about the sustainability of hemp versus the many varieties of cotton, so I will defer. That said, it's not clear to me that sustainability will be the ultimate decider for what textile people use. People need to want to wear a garment because it provides the qualities they desire, which is largely look and feel. To me, hemp looks and feels like linen, which has largely lost out to cotton as a material of choice. As such, it's not clear to me that hemp will be more desirable than cotton. Now, again, maybe hemp really is the best material for some application like upholstery or bags, but I've never heard a good argument for that, which is why I'm asking.

As far as wool, it has very different characteristics from plant fibers. It felts; it can be warm or cool; it insulates when wet. People in cold climates use wool and other animal textiles for a reason and I don't see how they will be easily supplanted.

Anyway, my point is not to argue that hemp is bad. Really, outside of the environmental factors, where would I want to use hemp apart from linen, cotton, or wool?

Bioplastics too..when used with a polymer. And Hempcrete for buildings(termite, mold and fire resistant) when used with lime.

Food, fiber and medicine.

Check out Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer

Hasn't industrial hemp production been legal in most of the world the whole time? And hasn't importation of hemp products (e.g. rope, or tshirts, or whatever) been legal even in America the whole time?

Surely if hemp was going to outcompete popular modern fibers, it would have done so by now. What am I missing here?

What changes now is that people will be growing hemp in mass for CBD and be left with all of the pulp as byproduct to be sold on the cheap. Which in turn may spur more hemp products. Whereas before your help business model was considerably different and likely not as profitable.

Okay that makes more sense. How far does that stretch though? Will the CBD industry really get so large that their waste product truly competes against cotton or synthetics? I can't help but feel hemp is destined to be a niche material for nearly all applications.

Finding something to do with agricultural waste is useful. There's so much of it already. Doing it profitably is hard. People have been trying hard for a century. Henry Ford was into this.

It's possible to make something like particle board from bagasse, the waste from sugar cane. But it's never become big. Corncobs and corn silk are available in huge quantities, but other than animal feed, not much is done with them. The energy input, processing cost, and transportation cost usually defeats this, because what you get out is usually a low-value product.

But in that same regard its part of why many foods have cellulose in them. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/10/329767647/fr...

They get government assistance in the name of reducing waste. Hemp could see the same relief.

Mostly in Canada and Australia.

Cotton is a commodity crop and Big Ag. GMO cotton is powerful and Monsanto had its fingers deep in that pie. Cotton market is pretty gnarly and ruthless. Different market. Very aggressive.

Having said that..smaller countries need to focus on local food production than fiber. USA dominates because we have large acreages for commodity crops and can import cheap food from other countries.

That hemp isn't that good a bast fiber. Kenaf, sisal, jute, and manila are more useful. Manila is sometimes called "manila hemp", but it's really abacá, a species of banana. It makes good rope. Jute is used to make heavy cloth, for carpets and such. Sisal is used for twine and light rope. Kenaf has been used to make paper, but that never caught on. "Peak paper" was a while back, and the paper industry is shrinking.

All of these are low-value field crops, cheap to farm and harvest. They're mostly farmed in the more backward third-world countries now.

Automation necessary. Prices will come crashing down tho’ now that everyone is growing it.

Even the Amish are happy. It will save a lot of farm business bottomlines. Dairy farms are especially watching carefully.

It's not just CBD. Hemp seeds are an amazingly nutrient rich food. Sibling comments mentioned it can be used in fabrics and paper. It's an amazingly versatile product that's been unfortunately supressed in the war on drugs.

I wonder if there is anything similar going on in western Massachusetts, e.g. the Pioneer Valley area including such towns as Hadley and the surrounding areas, where tobacco barns are not an uncommon sight.

Perhaps a change has already started but I am currently personally unsure; for better or worse I moved away a good number of years ago due to college and work and have yet to move back [should that be in my future or desires].

Hemp growing has a long tradition in the USA: https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/facts/george-w...

"At one point in the 1760’s Washington considered whether hemp would be a more lucrative cash crop than tobacco but determined wheat was a better alternative."

Interesting. I live at ground zero in this article, but I haven’t noticed much hemp. I’ll have to go out and look a bit closer at the fields this weekend.

Why do Americans always call it hemp or, more frequently, marijuana? It's cannabis.

I think hemp and cannabis come from the same Old English root word. However hemp is normally used to refer to the industrial plants, as opposed to the higher THC ones with more recreational potential. Supposedly the term marijuana became popular back in the "reefer madness" days because it had more of a racial connotation, but I don't know how accurate that is.

https://medium.com/cbd-origin/hemp-vs-marijuana-the-differen...

One is cannibis indica and the other sativa. Marijuana has THC and CBD. Only one kind of hemp is grown for CBD..no THC. The rest is called industrial hemp for paper/fiber etc.

It is still the same plant. „Marijuana“ is made from both, India and Sativa, or from a hybrid of both. You can even buy hybrids that are made from indica, sativa and ruderalis. Also, in the EU, farmers have to buy their cannabis seed every year. It is not legal to use the seeds produced from the harvest of last year. Because over a few generations the THC content in the „hemp“ rises and to stay under 0.3% new seeds are required.

I wonder how legislating such low thc content affects the viability of (industrial) hemp because I seem to recall reading that for example higher thc may help protect the plant against pests and possibly affect other qualities of the product as well as having synergistic or other medical qualities when combined with cbd and other cannabinoids in oil or other forms.

Are we gimping the potential of hemp by clinging to the war on drugs reefer madness mentality?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com