Hemp on our horizon

In August 1898, the Pacific Rural Press published a letter from Yuma, Ariz., inquiring about the hemp industry in Butte County.

“Does it grow wild? About what acreage is there?” The writer reeled off a half-dozen questions, then wrote: “I am very anxious to learn all I can about the hemp….”

The San Francisco-based publication reached out to John Heaney of Gridley, described as “interested in fiber production for a good many years, most of the time being actively engaged in the business.” Heaney described what it took to grow, harvest and process the plant—the latter requiring significant effort and water. He explained that “hemp does not grow wild, but has to be sown every spring,” and estimated about 600 acres of it grew in the county.

Six hundred acres may not seem like much, compared with contemporary totals of 55,000 acres for walnuts and 41,000 acres for almonds. But Rob Hill, Butte County deputy agricultural commissioner, notes that without modern mechanization, “100 acres of that stuff could be a lot of work.”

Hemp farming continued into the early 20th century, hit a peak during World War II due to demand for strong fibers, then stopped.

“It wasn’t the hemp,” Hill said. “It was the marijuana issue that was affecting the hemp.”

Hemp and marijuana are both part of the same plant genus, cannabis. Hemp has next to none of the psychoactive compound THC that makes marijuana a potent medicinal and recreational drug. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lists cannabis on its most restrictive tier; that’s kept hemp under the same federal ban.

But the times, they are a-changin’. With marijuana legal in 33 states and Washington, D.C., for medical and/or recreational use, the federal government lifted the prohibition on growing hemp as a provision in the newest version of the farm bill, which the president signed late last month.

House Resolution 2, formally titled the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, changes U.S. Department of Agriculture policy to “legalize industrial hemp and make hemp producers eligible for the federal crop insurance program.” Both the USDA and the California Department of Food and Agriculture now classify hemp as a commodity crop—akin to nuts, grains, fruits, etc.

Since legalization, Hill and Butte County Agricultural Commissioner Louie Mendoza told the CN&R they’ve had a dozen inquiries from locals interested in hemp farming. Colleen Cecil, executive director of the Butte County Farm Bureau, says she’d fielded one call.

“There’s not a lot of general knowledge about this plant,” Hill said. “There’s a lot of people [in farming who are] suspicious about it because of the nature of where it comes from, its association with marijuana. But that’s just a matter of education; over time, they’ll begin to look at some of the reasons for growing it and the value it has as a crop.”

Hemp’s value has changed since before the ban. It once was prized as source material for rope and sails—“The fiber in New York is now worth $100 per ton,” Heaney wrote in 1898. It’s become more popular for production of oil extracts and animal food.

The oils contain cannabinoids, chemicals specific to cannabis plants that trigger various physiological reactions. CBD, or cannabidiol, is one of the most common as an active ingredient for medicinal supplements (see “ABCs of CBD,” Healthlines, Oct. 25, 2018). It’s not psychoactive.

“CBD itself does have some pharmaceutical value to it—it’s being used for epilepsy; there’s some use of it for autism,” said John Yoder, professor of plant sciences at UC Davis. “Whether it works or not is not totally clear. No one in the U.S., or basically worldwide, has been allowed to study cannabis as a medicine since the early 1930s.”

Only now, with hemp removed from the Controlled Substances Act, can American scientists start researching the plant and its properties. Still, the FDA rattled its sword the day the president signed H.R. 2 with a 1,464-word statement by its commissioner asserting the agency’s “authority to regulate products containing cannabis or cannabis-derived compounds.”

UC Davis plans to study hemp, spearheaded by Charlie Brummer, a plant sciences professor and director of the university’s Center for Plant Breeding.

“There’s certainly a lot of positive attributes in hemp and hemp fibers,” Brummer said. Whether the crop takes off “is an open question,” he continued. “In the north valley, there are other crops that have very high value … it’s opportunity cost.

“An advantage of hemp, or tomatoes for that matter, over trees is it’s not a permanent crop. If you have varying water, you’re in for a year and you’re out. But it’s all about the value of the crop you can get off it, and it seems at this point, the medicinal or nutritional [yield] would be the thing that would make it a cash crop.”

Hill said he visited hemp farms in Nevada growing the crop for livestock feed. Regardless of the end product, farmers appreciate the plant’s deep tap root, which draws water and nutrients from below other plants—a benefit when rotating different crops. The root system, left behind after harvest, provides the ecological benefit of sequestering carbon.

Water need “depends on the environment and the variety of plant you have,” Mendoza said. “I think you can tailor [hemp farming] to whatever irrigation system you have to deal with it in your area.”

Added Hill: “You just don’t know until you get out there and put a crop in the ground.”