Farmers rushed into hemp, but now face a glut
wsj.com
wsj.com
1) they weren't growing on contract and didn't have buyers lined up 2) didn't grow for smokable flower 3) had their plants herm due to bad seed stock or environmental stress 4) their hemp ran 'hot' with THC over the allowable levels and they live in a state where the AG commissioner cares. Was up in Oregon and the farmers were telling me as long as it's under 2.0% THC they get a pass. In more strict states it's 0.3%.
Source: am a shareholder in a large CBD cultivation/manufacturing business.
Just to clarify: <=0.3% is the federal cut-off. it’s protected by the agricultural whatever act of 2018 - the plant itself is legal to cultivate, and its CBD oil derivatives are likewise loosely regulated. Above that it’s considered to be illegal cannabis, and -its- CBD oil derivatives are regulated accordingly.
And then asking for handouts when they don't make their money back.
They grow millions upon millions of tons of it each year and have an entire infrastructure of university and government research organizations built up around hemp cultivation.
The industrial products are never coming. Access by US domestic engineers and scientists to hemp on the order of days instead of weeks won’t change that.
There are billions of people on earth for which hemp cultivation has never been illegal, where they have grown it for centuries if not millennia.
To think that domestic production will spin up the release of industrial products can only lead to one of two conclusions:
1. There are no industrial uses of hemp to the degree that advocates claim. (The ludicrous ones) or,
2. Most of rest of the world, around 3 billion people, are all stupid and/or incompetent and only the smart and industrious US domestic engineers and scientists can figure out how to use hemp for things other than hippy bags.
I’ve been around the world. I’m going to go with 1.
I’m not saying hemp doesn’t have industrial uses.
I’m saying that the claims by some of its more fervent activists, on the order of “hemp fuel will power hemp steel-manufactured flying cars adorned in hemp faux “Rich Corinthian“ leather, that land of runways made of hempcrete and it’s all going to be carbon neural and organic because hemp violates the laws of thermodynamics and doesn’t require fertilizer or pesticide” are wrong.
As far as I know, most followed US hegemony, and for example in germany it was legal, but very hard to get permission to grow hemp. So only small uses like for making rope and birdfood.
So I also believe demand and supply for various things will grow. I really like for example, that nowdays you can get organic hemp seeds in the supermarket. It gets more in fashion, because it is nice and quite healthy. But no, hemp will probably not disrupt big industries. It might disrupt the alcohol industrie a bit though, when it is widespread legal.
"There are no industrial uses of hemp to the degree that advocates claim."
That's a leap too far, especially considering the current chaotic state of the laws governing its use. There are surely advocates that also make leaps too far but the truth about the potential resides in the known uses, which are many, and those yet to come, which are also likely to be many.
Since China has a head start working on this we can assume it's likely they will be leaders in both hemp production and manufacturing hemp based products, and we can only blame ourselves if they are. But that still doesn't mean that the U.S won't invest in processing hemp grown here into useful and profitable products and when it does the cost and profits of production will stabilize.
As the parent poster said, in most of the rest of the world, there are no such laws governing its use, and for some reason, nobody in it really has much of a need for this 'miracle' plant.
How do you explain that?
I don't know what those sell for but it's probably pretty hard to beat the price of what could be grown here legally.
Levi corporation announced just this year a line of the jeans and other clothes to be made with hemp. I think they're being made offshore but the point that it will take time for industries to ramp up for using hemp is made by that single case alone.
The market for it will surely grow from this point and likely peak and stabilize pretty quickly and, no, it won't be a "get rich bonanza" for farmers because it will grow almost anywhere here but it will be another crop they can grow and sell and that's good thing.
The real action now seems to be in bagasse, the leftover strands after extracting sugar from sugar cane. It's a waste product from sugar mills, so it's really cheap, sometimes free. It's made into biodegradable containers for fast food, replacing styrofoam. Many of those little white clamshell boxes used for food delivery are now made from bagasse. It's also possible to make oriented strand board from bagasse, although that hasn't really caught on.
There's huge amounts of agricultural waste available very cheaply, if you have a use for it. Ethanol fuel from cellulose was a hot idea once, as a way to do something useful with corn cobs and stalks, but it's just not cost-effective.
There are some questions around whether the “entourage effect” is beneficial with CBD. In other words, does the presence of THC and various other compounds make CBD oil more effective for x or y (vs pure isolates of just CBD).
But “industrial hemp” really just means cannabis with a THC content below a federally determined guideline. And that’s why it needs to be tested for being “hot”. Many people lose their crops because they test hot and find themselves with smokable weed.
Honestly the science on this isn't in because the funding has never been available.
(it's also totally orthogonal to my claim.)
Business 101
As for the fiber, it's a relatively unremarkable cellulosic fiber. It is rather coarse and contains about 8% lignin, which means hemp fabric is relatively stiff and rough, limiting its application to clothing beyond its branding power (and shoes, where it works well). However, it is useful in composites. Hemp is apparently being used to make composite panels for several cars in the present day, although the actual volume in this market is not so high. The asterisk is that there are lots of other similar fibers (jute, linen, lyocell) that work well in composites, and it's the resins (polyester) which tend to be both more expensive and environmentally problematic. If some kind of more eco-friendly resin technology appears (don't hold your breath) it could become more widespread.
Other claims, e.g. hemp as a building material, are just wrong (hempcrete is not structural). Hemp rope was replaced by manila which has better moisture resistance. Hemp as a biodiesel precursor is unremarkable.
I'm not familiar with any fermentation process that operates on nuts, or any high-fat food source besides soybeans.
http://www.bccdc.ca/resource-gallery/Documents/Educational%2...
I'm not sure if this process has been attempted with hempseeds. It's a fast bacterial process, in contrast with the slow fungal fermentation of dairy cheeses. I wouldn't really say it's a commercial-ready process at this point; I'd like to see something done with proper cheese cultures!
But besides that, it was one of the worst business plans I'd ever seen. I couldn't tell if they were just inept, or were scam artists looking for gullible investors.
A decade later and the debate still rages whether ethanol and E85 was even it worth it now with electric vehicles and hybrids are way more common and many stations who had E85 pumps are all but gone now.
The new USDA guidelines would make almost all of the current strains of CBD-dominant flower unavailable to grow due to the change in testing to count total THC rather than just delta-9 THC. Some farmers will switch to CBG which is another cannabinoid, but it's not one that is going to have as wide of an appeal.
My small friends and family grows in Southern Oregon and we did ok this year despite the challenges, but there is a lot of uncertainty around what will happen next year due to the potential regulation changes.
Reminds me of the scene in the "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" where oil was booming and production was hardly centralized which led to big fluctuations in the price and an overestimation of the demand, and therefore of the necessary supply.
You grow a ton of hemp. It captures X tons of carbon.
People use it for rope or whatever. Eventually throw it away. It decays or is burned. X tons of carb are released back into the atmosphere.
How did that capture any carbon?
- the products last longer than a rotting plant. This is incremental.
- burned for energy. This reduces coal, NG etc uses and is roughly carbon neutral
Right now the only realistic way to use photosynthesis to capture CO2 in a long term way is to plant a forest. There's some amount of this going on, though not enough to even cover deforestation elsewhere.
As a material, if you're using it in place of plastics again it forms a more sustainable cycle over a reasonably long time frame.
Yes we do need to sequester some atmospheric carbon long term, but establishing a more sustainable carbon materials cycle has an important role to play.
If those goods are discarded in a manner where the carbon isn't immediately re-released, so they're buried or introduced into a bio-system that can consume it and turn the carbon into some other non-gas form, then you can get further gains.
Are they really growing that much more efficient? Cannabis hemp was also intensively optimised for grow since generations.