Hemp A Cash Crop Again?
Fike: When we were harvesting these plants, some of this stuff got knocked down. It’s just been laying on the ground. It’s retting. It’s going through what’s called a retting process. You see how it breaks up more easily?
We’re in Virginia in a field of industrial grade hemp also known as cannibis. It’s very low in THC, the psychotropic agent found in marijuana, but for centuries, rope and canvas have been made from hemp fiber. Now farmers are looking to see if industrial hemp could again take its place as a cash crop. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Fike: You’ll lay this and you’ll turn it every few days. Just the process of natural degradation, these interior herd fibers will be easily separated from these external fibers.
John Fike is an associate professor in the Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences Department at Virginia Tech.
Fike: I think we have traditional hay equipment that probably will work in many cases to harvest hemp fibers, although there may be better systems of doing it. We just simply don’t have much infrastructure available to take these stalks and to separate them out into the fiber components that we want.
In addition to the fiber, hemp grain can be used to manufacture a host of food and pharmaceutical products.
Fike: We already have infrastructure to harvest grain. We have the combine that we can use to harvest it. We have grain bins where we can store it. We know how to process grain and turn it into other things. The question then will be, what’s the market demand for those products, and do they in fact outperform products that we have right now, whether economically or from a nutrition standpoint? Hemp could be the feed stock for something like 25,000 different products.
I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.