{"id":90105,"date":"2014-06-27T21:20:07","date_gmt":"2014-06-28T04:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/?p=885"},"modified":"2014-06-27T21:20:07","modified_gmt":"2014-06-28T04:20:07","slug":"grow-hemp-make-money-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/27\/grow-hemp-make-money-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Grow Hemp, Make Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

A tip for American farmers: Grow hemp, make money<\/a><\/p>\n

This was a great Op-ed in the LA Times by author Doug Fine about our favorite plant (hemp):<\/p>\n

\n

Farmers I\u2019ve interviewed from Oregon to Ohio have gotten the memo. In a Kansas-abutting corner of eastern Colorado, in the town of Springfield, 41-year-old Ryan Loflin wants to save his family farm with hemp. \u201cIt takes half the water that wheat does,\u201d Loflin told me, scooping up a handful of drought-scarred soil so parched it evoked the Sahara, \u201cand provides four times the income. Hemp is going to revive farming families in the climate-change era.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After decades of government suppression, hemp is once again growing on American farms and we are beginning to once again reap the benefits of real\u00a0hemp crops grown by real American farmers FOR PROFIT. We are finally moving out of the theoretical debate about what hemp \u201ccould possibly do\u201d and seeing the rebirth of the\u00a0American hemp industry.<\/p>\n

In a world\u00a0devided by the \u201cHaves and Have Nots\u201d\u00a0where we\u00a0fight each other over the crumbs of crony capitalism,\u00a0we are finally seeing \u201cThe Left and The Right\u201d come together in the fields of America, where money speaks louder than bloviating pundits and politicians:<\/p>\n

\n

Even Roger Ford, a politically conservative Kentucky utility owner, told me his Patriot BioEnergy\u2019s biofuels division would be planting hemp on coal- and tobacco-damaged soil the moment it was legal. Why? To use the fiber harvest for clean biomass energy. \u201cWe have a proud history of hemp in the South,\u201d Ford told me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Across\u00a0the heartland of\u00a0America, political parties are becoming irrelevant when all that really matters is once again getting\u00a0an honest day\u2019s pay for an honest day\u2019s work, and more farmers are turning back\u00a0to the\u00a0sustainable agriculture of hemp where they can once again grow the food, fiber, and fuel that will\u00a0feed a rebirth of local industries and manufacturing around the green economy of the future.<\/p>\n

Or we could just keep keep fighting Oil Wars\u00a0like\u00a0we\u2019ve been doing for the last\u00a0100 years<\/a> and hope for the best.<\/p>\n

[cough]<\/p>\n

A better path forward is clear. The only question is how long\u00a0we will continue to protect the fossil fuel paradigm that is killing\u00a0us like a cancer:<\/p>\n

\n

American farmers and investors need our support to catch up with Canada\u2019s and the rest of the world\u2019s hemp head start. Now. As Loflin put it when I toured his family\u2019s 1,200-acre Colorado spread, \u201cI\u2019m planting hemp to show my neighbors that small farmers have a real option as businesspeople in the digital age.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ll let the Op-Ed author Doug Fine finish in his own words:<\/p>\n

\n

We\u2019re down to 1% of Americans farming; it was 30% when our world-leading hemp industry was stymied in 1937. The crop is more valuable today than it was then. We should be waving flags and holding parades for the farmers ready to plant the crop that Thomas Jefferson called \u201cvastly desirable.\u201d I know I\u2019m ready. To cheer, and to plant.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His book \u201cHemp Bound<\/a>\u201d is available wherever paperbacks used to be sold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A tip for American farmers: Grow hemp, make money This was a great Op-ed in the LA Times by author Doug Fine about our favorite plant (hemp): Farmers I\u2019ve interviewed from Oregon to Ohio have gotten the memo. In a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hempfarm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}