Grant Moorcraft can only hope, with cautious optimism, that he is farming the crop of the future.

The area farmer grows 30 acres of hemp, a hard-to-harvest crop with numerous applications for which he is helping develop a technology that separates the hurd from the fibre. He recently received a regional Premier's agricultural innovation award worth $5,000.

"(Hemp) is really tough stuff," he said.

 

 Grant Moorcroft with the machine he and another
 hemp grower are designing and constructing
 between them

 

 

Currently, the possibilities of hemp are greater than the technology and marketing available for it. It can be used to make everything from milk to clothing. Moorcraft's crop is used exclusively for a new environmental wave; the tightly-packed bales are stacked and covered in mortar to form the walls of straw bale houses.

Moorcraft knows he's sitting on possibilities. Hemp can be used to reinforce recycled plastic and cardboard, but no one has paved the way in Ontario yet. Its hurd can be used as an eco-friendly dietary supplement.
Its tough fibre can make rope and carpets. But researchers and hemp growers themselves are still figuring out exactly how to do that.

Moorcraft had a dairy farm on his uncle's property north of Madoc on Moorcraft Road until 1998. He wanted to get out of dairy, but found the rocky land poor for cash crops, and animal damage from local wildlife wreaked havoc every time he tried. Hemp, which was newly legalized to grow by Health Canada, was getting a lot of hype.

"I thought 'this is something new,'" Moorcraft said.

The crop proved easy to grow, but when he attempted to harvest it, he hit a roadblock. The fibre was so tough that the usual blades couldn't cut it, and it simply wrapped around the equipment.

"The first time I did it with the old combine, and it took four days to combine four acres," he said. "It's the toughest plant in the world."

Moorcraft modified his equipment - part of the reason why he won the innovation award. He and a western Ontario hemp grower are also building a machine that will automatically separate the hurd from the fibre by running the straw through a decorrelator.

Such innovations are welcome for a crop still finding its way in Ontario, said Gordon Scheifele, research scientist and past president of the Ontario Hemp Alliance. Ontario has about 55 hemp growers and about 700 acres of the crop. Manitoba, by comparison, has 30,000 acres of hemp.

"At the moment, we're almost out of the picture," he said. "It's my conviction that regardless of where we are today, in the near future, it's going to expand on a commercial scale."

With an increasing environmental movement, hemp has some "incredible applications," Scheifele said. It can replace fibreglass when building plastics. It can also replace fibreglass as building insulation. It can restore the integrity of recycled paper. It can be used as livestock feed. It can be used in non-dairy frozen yogurt and ice creams, and hemp milk is now entering the market.

"It's one of God's greatest gifts that he gave to mankind," he said. "It's an incredible plant in that regard."

The food market is expanding by about 30 per cent per year, Scheifele said. There is currently "no readily available market" for the straw. Hemp experts are encouraging Health Canada to relax the regulations it puts on growers, because a lack of growers is producing a "chicken and egg" dynamic, he said. Which comes first: the market or the crop?

Moorcraft, who has the crop and a new agricultural award, hopes the rest of the world catches on.

"It's a new crop and it's not on the stock market in Chicago," he said. "If we can play it right, and if we can grow it right so they can afford to buy it, we'll be set."

 

 http://www.intelligencer.ca/

 

Do you believe in the growing of hemp for industrial purposes?  Yeah me too!  Why not join the Canna Zine message board and have your say on the subject?  If you don't, who's going to show support for the hemp farmers? 

TrackBack URI for this entry