by HempingtonPost | Jan 16, 2020
As marijuana becomes legal across the country, a select few companies have come to dominate the market with some bad business practices. But Willie Nelson is trying to stop them.
Thirty-five years ago, as Willie was playing his music at Live Aid, a benefit concert for those affected by the famine in Ethiopia, he had the idea for a benefit concert that supports local farmers.
But Bob Geldof, the organizer of Live Aid at the time, thought that his proposal was a “crass, stupid, and nationalistic” conflation of the two issues. As Willie listened to him downplay the importance of farmers affected by a drought, bankruptcy, and a corporate takeover of the industry, it only solidified his desire to start his own concert, thus Farm Aid was born.
In their first year, Farm Aid included artists such as Johnny Cash and B.B. King and raised over $9 million for down-and-out American farmers.
“We were losing like 300 farmers a week” to suicide, Nelson recalls. “[But] things are a little better now. People have started thinking about buying and growing sustainably.”
Since Farm Aid began, a paradigm shift has occurred. People are now talking about sustainable agriculture, permaculture, and organic food, and the likes of Big Tobacco, Big Agriculture, and Big Biotech have become stains on American identity.
Willie Nelson was as much a player in this cultural shift as anybody, but he knows that the battle isn’t over yet. In recent years, Willie has set his sights on something very near and dear to him, marijuana.
As a life-long marijuana smoker, Willie Nelson has a deep concern about the way that cannabis is grown and distributed. Out of this passion for weed came the start-up company Willies Reserve, a company started by Willie and investor Andrew Davison that seeks to bring social responsibility into the pot market.
“I really believe in the environmental aspect of this. It’s a great way to revitalize small farms, and I want to make sure that any product we grow is as clean as we can make it and that, wherever possible, we’re trying to lower the environmental impact of our operations.’” – Andrew Davidson on Willie Nelson’s response to his proposal.
The legalization movement was founded on the values of justice, liberty, and health. Many people, often disproportionately black, have been thrown in jail for victimless crimes relating to cannabis. Although marijuana is now legal to smoke in many places, it is not always legal to grow or sell. In order to do so, you must get a medical permit, or a cannabis business license respectively, in which the government is handing out very few.
“It looks a lot like the concentration of capital that we have seen with Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco. I think that’s problematic for cannabis-law reformers, because it plays into our opposition’s strongest argument.” – Alison Holcomb, drafter of the original cannabis legalization law in Washington State
Big Pot has also begun using harmful pesticides, none of which cannabis activists and consumers ever desired to smoke. Prior to legalization, black market growers typically would not use any pesticides because the quantity of plants tended to be low.
“But when you’re investing millions of dollars in a large cultivation center, you can bet they are not going to take the risk of their crop getting wiped out by mold or mildew or insects.” – Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
Oddly enough, there are no chemicals approved for use on the cannabis plant. This tends to mean however, that companies are using whichever chemicals they want without much oversight. These chemicals include Avid, Floramite, myclobutanil, and imidacloprid, which professor of entomology at Colorado State University Whitney Cranshaw claims actually develops more mites on the plants.
To make matters worse, labels such as “clean” and “natural” have a striking resemblance to the Big Food term “all natural,” in that there are few regulatory requirements resulting in meaningless labeling used solely to market products as less dangerous than they actually are.
Although Willie Nelson has recently announced his retirement as a weed smoker, he is still in charge of his company and is rumored to take edibles frequently. However, he has stated before that he “[doesn’t] like edibles that much.”
“I had a bad experience the first time I did it. This was 50 years ago. I ate a bunch of cookies, and I lay there all night thinking the flesh was falling off my bones.” – Willie Nelson
Willie’s Reserve empowers local farmers by allowing them the Willie Nelson branding in exchange for particular rules they must follow, such as restrictions on pesticide use and that they must be small companies. This ensures quality weed and empowers small businesses seeking to compete with the big names like Privateer Holdings and Diego Pellicer.
“They [consumers] want to know where the product comes from, they want to know it’s clean and cared for, they want to know it was local grown and that it has a connection to their community.” – Andrew Davidson
Willie has another enemy in the pot industry, GMO Marijuana. In one of the biggest moves to consolidate power in the cannabis industry to date, Bayer and Monsanto are maneuvering to take over the cannabis industry with genetically modified strains, which you can only grow if you have a license from the company.
“These problems could have been fixed on the first day, but you have a lot of bureaucracy and bullshit, a lot of big corporations. So that’s what we’re up against. They’re trying to monopolize it all. That’s horseshit. That ain’t right, and we’ll do everything we can to keep that from happening.” – Willie Nelson
Phillip Schneider is a student as well as a staff writer and assistant editor for Waking Times. If you would like to see more of his work, you can visit his website, or follow him on the free speech social network Minds.
by HempingtonPost | Nov 25, 2019
A Vancouver Island home built using cutting-edge green technology is now move-in ready.
It’s called the Harmless Home, and the exterior walls are constructed out of Lego-like building blocks, made essentially of compressed hemp, lime and water.
Now, it’s being hailed as the most sustainable, safest and most energy-efficient house possible.
Homeowner Arno Keinonen recently settled in.
“We are very happy with the end result,” he said.
The product itself is being manufactured in Calgary. It doesn’t mould and is virtually fire-resistant.
“We heat it up to over 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and it barely has an impact,” said Just Bio Fiber builder Mark Faber. “Very unlikely for this house to catch fire.”
The blocks also absorb carbon, making them grow even stronger over time. As for the cost, it’s in line with other alternatives.
“With those aspects and the condition the world is in now, this just has to go — it just has to,” said Just Bio Fiber director Michael DeChamplain.
The Harmless Home was the first project of its kind, and two more are now in the works.
The hope is to make this a standard in the building industry, Faber explained.
“So far, we’ve seen that it is easy to use and put together — once we develop and really dial in the system, I think we’ll be able to be competitive with all other building systems out there.”
The home, located just outside Victoria, will continue to be monitored to make sure it’s operating as efficiently as possible.© 2018 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
This story first appeared at Global News.ca
by HempingtonPost | Nov 12, 2019
Henry Ford’s Model T was famously made partly from hemp bioplastic and powered by hemp biofuel. Now, with battery-powered vehicles starting to replace those that use combustion engines, it has been found that hemp batteries perform eight times better than lithium-ion. Is there anything that this criminally-underused plant can’t do?
The comparison has only been proven on a very small scale. (You weren’t expecting a Silicon Valley conglomerate to do something genuinely groundbreaking were you? They mainly just commercialise stuff that’s been invented or at least funded by the state.) But the results are extremely promising.
The experiment was conducted by Robert Murray Smith – who has built up quite a following on his YouTube channel– of FWG Ltd in Kent. He observed a Volts by Amps curve of both the hemp and lithium batteries and found that the power underneath the hemp cell was a value of 31 while that of the lithium cell had a value of just 4. Although he does not claim to have proven anything, he said that the results of his experiment showed that the performance of the hemp cell is “significantly better” than the lithium cell.
It comes as no real surprise, which is presumably why he conducted the experiment. In 2014, scientists in the USfound that waste fibres – ‘shiv’ – from hemp crops can be transformed into “ultrafast” supercapacitors that are “better than graphene”. Graphene is a synthetic carbon material lighter than foil yet bulletproof, but it is prohibitively expensive to make. The hemp version isn’t just better, it costs one-thousandth of the price.
The scientists “cooked” leftover bast fibre – the inner bark of the plant that usually ends up in landfill – into carbon nanosheets in a process called hydrothermal synthesis. “People ask me: why hemp? I say, why not?” said Dr David Mitlin of Clarkson University, New York, in an interview with the BBC. “We’re making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price – and we’re doing it with waste.”
Dr Mitlin’s team recycled the fibres into supercapacitors, energy storage devices which are transforming the way electronics are powered. While conventional batteries store large reservoirs of energy and drip-feed it slowly, supercapacitors can rapidly discharge their entire load.
This makes them ideal in machines that require sharp bursts of power. In electric cars, for example, supercapacitors are used for regenerative braking. Releasing this torrent requires electrodes with high surface area, one of graphene’s many phenomenal properties.
Mitlin says that “you can do really interesting things with bio-waste”. With banana peels, for example, “you can turn them into a dense block of carbon – we call it pseudo-graphite – and that’s great for sodium-ion batteries. But if you look at hemp fibre its structure is the opposite – it makes sheets with high surface area – and that’s very conducive to supercapacitors.”
Once the bark has been cooked, “you dissolve the lignin and the semicellulose, and it leaves these carbon nanosheets – a pseudo-graphene structure”. By fabricating these sheets into electrodes and adding an ionic liquid as the electrolyte, his team made supercapacitors which operate at a broad range of temperatures and a high energy density.
Mitlin’s peer-reviewed journal paper ranks the device “on par with or better than commercial graphene-based devices”.
“They work down to 0C and display some of the best power-energy combinations reported in the literature for any carbon,” he adds. “For example, at a very high power density of 20 kW/kg (kilowatt per kilo) and temperatures of 20, 60, and 100C, the energy densities are 19, 34, and 40 Wh/kg (watt-hours per kilo) respectively.” Fully assembled, their energy density is 12 Wh/kg – which can be achieved at a charge time less than six seconds.
At the end of 2018, Texas-based electric motorcycle company Alternet announced that it was working with Mitlin to power motorbikes for its ReVolt Electric Motorbikes subsidiary.
So there you have it. If we already knew that there is no need to use the fossil fuels that are destroying the planet’s climate, because hemp biofuel provides a better alternative, we now know that there is no need to destroy the environment by mining for lithium and the materials that are used in batteries. We can literally grow technology. Hemp can save and power the world.
This article was first published in The Quarter Leaf issue 1.
by HempingtonPost | Jul 11, 2019
It’s easy to get swept away in the magic of a hemp farm where dragonflies float and goats bleat on verdant hills. Franny’s Farm is a place where practical magic and science meet.
Owned and operated by Franny Tacy and her husband and CEO Jeff Tacy, Franny’s is an active hemp farm in Leicester, and one of the grower sites for North Carolina State University’s Industrial Hemp Pilot Research Program. The program’s aim is to shoulder the burden of trial and error for farmers who want to dig into a swiftly growing industry.
Franny Tacy was a pharmaceutical industry executive
for a decade, and also holds a forestry degree from Northern Arizona
University in Flagstaff and a master’s in education from Tennessee State
University.
She’s also the first female industrial
hemp grower in Western North Carolina and, as a woman, part of the
fastest-growing farmer demographic in the U.S. The future of hemp, she
said, is female.
“The hemp revolution, if you will, in Western North Carolina is being led by female researchers, and female growers and female business owners,” she said.
Meagan Coneybeer-Roberts, a Ph.D. researcher and part
of the Alternative Crops and Organic Research group at NC State, and
Gwen Casebeer, a master’s student at NC State, are two of the women
leading hemp research in the region.
Their work
focuses exclusively on industrial hemp, with field trials taking place
on seven regional grower farms: four in Buncombe County and three in
Caldwell County, all averaging 1,000 plants per acre, with the largest
site a biodynamic grower in Caldwell with 6 acres.
“We take the burden of risk and we take the burden of experimentation, and we allow the growers to take what we find that works,” Coneybeer-Roberts said. “Then they can use that to make money and grow hemp successfully.”
On the day research clones were planted in Tacy’s
field, shortly after Mother’s Day, shamans came to tap drums and bless
the plants. While inviting a shaman to a hemp planting might sound as
Asheville as you can get, Coneybeer-Roberts said ritual can easily
co-exist with science.
“There are indications that plants respond to music, to sound, to vibration,” she said, standing on the edge of the field where volunteers planted buffer plants around her research rows. “It certainly couldn’t hurt.”
Before the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act swept hemp away in
prohibition, American farmers long grew the plant for fiber, feed and
more, with George Washington one of hemp’s more famous cultivators.
“The government even encouraged them to do so,” said Dr. Jeanine Davis, adviser to Casebeer and Coneybeer-Roberts. Davis is an associate professor and extension specialist with the Department of Horticultural Science at NC State.
It wasn’t until the 2014 Farm Bill, under
then-president Barack Obama, that growers were allowed to plant pilot
industrial hemp plots, and only under the umbrella of universities and
state departments of agriculture for research.
Ever since President Donald Trump signed into law the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018,
hemp containing less than 0.3% THC is now regulated by the Food and
Drug Administration, moving it out from under Drug Enforcement
Administration regulation, Davis said.
The 2018
Farm Bill removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act, which means
that it is no longer a controlled substance under federal law, allowing
for the possibility of crop insurance and opening doors to bank funding,
Davis explained. “People should be able to grow more freely.”
At
the same time, according to an FDA statement, Congress preserved the
FDA’s authority to regulate products containing cannabis or
cannabis-derived compounds under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic
Act and section 351 of the Public Health Service Act.
“The
FDA will now help, and some will say hinder, us decide whether CBD will
be regulated as a botanical, a pharmaceutical, or some of both,” Davis
said. “I’m looking forward to rules and regulations on production so we,
as consumers, know we’re getting a safe, clean product.”
Now,
it’s a brave new world, and hemp agriculture is booming in the state,
with 3,000 permits issued for hemp growers this year, a 900% increase in
less than a year.
The national appetite for hemp
and hemp-derived products is huge, with Scientific American reporting
the U.S. imported more than $67 million worth of hemp seed and fiber
products in 2017.
Some of hemp’s growth is likely influenced by the booming demand for CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid proponents say is useful for everything from arthritic pain to anxiety in humans and in pets.
The CBD market was worth nearly $200 million in 2017, triple that by the end of last year. Rapid growth is predicted to continue.
That’s just one tool in hemp’s toolbox, with the plant’s uses counting among the tens of thousands, some largely unexplored, and many nowhere near as sexy as CBD. They include everything from fiber to cooking products to a building material called “hempcrete.”
One size does not fit all when it comes to the plant, and plants grown for fiber might not be useful for oil. Figuring which plants are best for which use, and how those plants prefer to grow, is no easy task.
That’s where the trials come in.
Proponents of hemp agriculture, like Tacy, hope the results could help North Carolina emerge as a leader in the industry. “You have Florida oranges, Idaho potatoes, and hopefully North Carolina hemp,” she said.
Hemp’s long history buried
Decades-long prohibition has left huge gaps in grower knowledge, and programs like NC State’s and other hemp trials aim to fill in the spaces.
“There are multiple generations that haven’t come into contact with hemp as a crop so, for production and harvest information, a lot of the resources I’ve used personally date back to the 19th century and in other countries,” Coneybeer-Roberts said.
Working to push the notion of knowledge as power is the nonprofit Women in Hemp.
Co-founded by Tacy, LilyHemp boutique’s Susan Cromer, Florida hemp attorney Carrie McKnight and Coeus Research founder Debbie Custer, Women in Hemp has worked to help back hemp research, providing, for one, at least a quarter of the funding for Coneybeer-Roberts’ and Casebeers’ project.
Tacy, who once started a junior high science club to get microscopes in her school, says she feels the same sort of childlike wonder in throwing her energy behind Women in Hemp.
It’s the right mix of magic, science and activism that fuels her work on the farm. “Mixing science and magic is exactly what we were doing in the field this morning,” she said in July, the field hemp not yet flowered.
She and a new hire had worked together under the hot summer sun, mixing organic fertilizer and rigorously testing and balancing the pH — getting the science right first, Tacy said.
Then, the magic: As part of biodynamic principles, they swirled the water clockwise 50 times, then counterclockwise 50 times to create a vortex over which Tacy read poetry.
“We have love written on our barn over our hemp field, and we go into the field with our best intentions,” she said. “We’re putting science out there, but our intentions are what are helping create a crop tens of thousands of people have access to in our product line.”
Tacy grows enough hemp to create a vertically integrated supply chain for Franny’s Farm products, sold online and in the company’s four Franny’s Farmacy dispensaries. Within weeks, the company will offer a public stock option, with franchise options also coming to the table.
Tacy hopes hemp will become North Carolina’s new agricultural legacy, and her company is proof there’s a strong market for it. “I think right now, we’re in the gold rush era, if you will, and we found a nugget with CBD — no pun intended.”
A reason to be optimistic
Of the 22 rows of hemp on Franny’s Farm, NC State’s trial plants occupy the center of five, each covered in different colors of plastic.
The red plastic, Coneybeer-Roberts said in May, might encourage flower set. The silver might have some utility in reducing insects. Black warms the soil, while white doesn’t trap the heat as much. The green? “We don’t know yet,” she said, but it’s something they’ve observed in marijuana cultivation in places where it’s legal.
They won’t know the impacts until later this year. The trials are double blind, and not even the growers know the identities of the hemp plant varietals, many provided by Triangle Hemp in Durham.
The results of what will be a three-year trial will eventually be compared with 20 universities across the world, including in Dubai, Barcelona and Texas. The trials will have studied hemp for fiber and food for three years at the end of this season, which will also mark the second year of CBD research.
Davis said she’s not sure yet how the information will be compiled and disseminated. “But I think we’re going to answer a lot of questions.”
For a researcher, it’s an exciting prospect to be on the forefront of the cultivation of a crop that’s been illegal to grow for generations simply because of its association with a psychoactive cousin.
There’s no real reason not to be optimistic. The question isn’t whether or not hemp will grow here, but what kind is perfect for each region, and how to build the infrastructure to process it into an end product — which itself is a long and complicated story.
A replacement for tobacco?
Hemp is often held up as a viable replacement for tobacco, once a booming industry and cultural influence in the state, now all but faded.
Part of the hemp narrative is the notion that the planting, growing and processing methods for tobacco can be easily transferred to hemp. But there are still so many questions left unanswered and, as Tacy will tell you, a lot of misinformation out there.
“The important thing to remember is we are still in a pilot program and still doing a lot of research, so everyone growing hemp in North Carolina has the exact length of time of experience,” Coneybeer-Roberts said. “We are all equally experienced and inexperienced.”
Tacy has a farmer’s directness and a passion for her crop. “There is never going to be another tobacco,” she said. “Tobacco has one use. Hemp is the only crop that will feed, clothe, shelter and provide medicine.”
In five years, Tacy predicted, hemp prohibition will seem like nothing but a blip. “It will seem ridiculous that we ever didn’t grow hemp. It will be in our food system, in our clothing system, in our building materials, our bio-fuels. Every aspect.”
North Carolina has one of the strongest agricultural economies in the country, she said.
“We are farming people. We have a farm economy here, and our farmers have struggled with the loss of tobacco; they’ve struggled to get a foothold into something new.”
Whether or not hemp will become North Carolina’s agricultural calling card remains to be seen, though researchers will be one step closer to finding out after this growing season.
But on the sunny May day the clones went into the ground, Jeff Tacy addressed the volunteers gathered for the occasion, his focus on the day-to-day magic he said surrounds the plant.
“I’m in the dispensaries every day, and it’s been mind-blowing the feedback we’ve gotten from people using CBD products,” he said. “It’s many miracles every day in these stores as we interact with people who are getting off opioids, and getting back to a normal lifestyle and finding relief from their inflammation.”
“This is where it starts,” he said, gesturing to the fields. “It’s been an amazing journey.”
This story first appeared on Citizen Times
