Hemp and Sustainable Agriculture

If you anything about the farming system in the U.S. most of it is corporate owned, mostly corn and soybeans, and uses tons of fertilizers and pesticides to keep it going. Now some of you might not think this is a problem but in reality it is a problem. Since we keep growing corn over and over again in the same fields the quality of the soil diminishes every year. To counteract that they inject nitrogen and phosphate into the soil. Ironically, this contributes to global warming because of the nitrous oxide that escapes into the atmosphere. Now I'll admit, they are trying to reduce the amount of nitrogen they use for fertilizing but the fact of the matter is, we shouldn't have to continually use fertilizers to replenish the soil if there are more sustainable ways to do the same thing. Along with corn, cotton has a significant impact on the environment. Because of the boll weevil, cotton needs massive amounts of pesticides to counteract the disastrous effects of this pest. Globally, cotton production uses about 25% of all the pesticides.

Now how does hemp fit into the picture? Well the first thing is that hemp is a great crop for crop rotations. It replenishes the soil and uses very little nutrients. Historically, the Gauls (aka the French today) used hemp during their crop rotation because of how it replenished the soil. Also, hemp thrives in soils that corn thrives in as well, but it doesn't take out the same nutrients as corn but replenishes those nutrients. Kentucky farmers would grow hemp every year in the same field and would get the same crop yields every year. Instead of trying to replenish the soil every year with fertilizers why don't we use a technique that had been used for thousands of years instead, crop rotation with hemp. While it replenishes the soil it can still be used for industrial purposes. Another good thing about hemp is that it needs little to virtually no pesticides. This is something we can cheer about because of issues that are with pesticide use. (mostly cancer) Some of you may be wondering what kind of yields hemp has so let's talk about that next.

Hemp can produce 4 times as much paper per acre as trees and twice as much as cotton. So is there really a need to cut down trees if we can use hemp to produce paper? What about cotton? The only reason cotton was king is because it was easier to refine and produce cotton thanks to the cotton gin. The process of retting hemp was so time consuming and back breaking that it was starting to fade until someone engineered a retting machine to make it more cost effective. Ironically, around the same time hemp became illegal. (which I'll discuss in a later blog) Now I don't have data on how much hemp we could possibly produce in the U.S. through the use of crop rotations. The concept is something that we should really think about and in the opinion of this blogger, it's something we should start researching. The first step in doing so is to make access to growing hemp easy. AKA Legalize Hemp!

If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to post! I like any criticism that's constructive.