HEMP CROP GAINS GROUND

1,200 Hectares Being Grown For Processing At Two Area Plants

With little hype, hemp is taking root in southern Ontario as an alternate
cash crop.

It was only last summer that Canada reversed a 60-year ban on the plant,
whose kinship to drug-producing marijuana had led to its prohibition.

This summer, about 1,200 hectares of hemp are being grown in southern
Ontario to be sold to two hemp-fibre processing plants in the area.

Harvest of the fibrous stalks should start by early August -- but first,
licensed agronomists will hit hemp fields in the next two weeks, testing if
crops exceed the 0.3 per cent limit set by Health Canada for THC, the
active ingredient in hemp's cousin plant, marijuana. As well, testers from
the Canadian Food Inspection Agency will do spot checks of hemp crops.

Any crop with more than the allowed trace of THC must be destroyed.

"It's always going to be a controlled crop," says Robert L'Ecuyer, general
manager of Kentex Ltd. of Chatham, which processes hemp. "It won't always
be as stringent as it is now, but we need to get a level of comfort."

Last summer, inspectors found only a few fields where hemp THC exceeded the
government limits, set when hemp-growing became legal last year. All were
traced to a particular variety, Secuiene, which has been removed from the
varieties approved by Health Canada.

Chatham-Kent's Kenex has about 800 hectares growing this summer, mostly in
Kent County, while Delaware's Hempline has contracted for about 400
hectares from farmers in Elgin, Middlesex, Perth, Oxford and Lambeth counties.

It should be a bumper crop, says Hempline's president, Geof Kime.

"We've had lots of heat, broken with period of moisture," says Kime, who
also worked with authorized test fields of hemp grown in southern Ontario
from 1994 to 1997. "This should be the best we've had in our six years."

This year, hemp also qualified for crop insurance. "Innovative farmers are
willing to try new crops, if they can have insurance to mitigate the risk,"
Kime says. "It was a nice stamp of legitimacy for the industry, so early in
commercial production."

Kenex's focus is the auto industry, where hemp fibres are being used to
make auto parts.

Hempline separates out the long, slender outer hemp fires for use in
textiles -- primarily for carpet and upholstery fabrics. The company has
also found success with its "hemp chips" -- horse bedding made from the
stalk core. "As fast as we can produce it, it's moving out the door," he says.

Now that hemp is legal and grown more widely, it's less plagued by
"two-legged pests" -- Kime's term for people who think hemp is marijuana
and decide to steal plants from farm fields.

"In 1997, we had one field where the two-legged pests were a problem, but
no one came after that. They must have discovered hemp didn't have what
they were looking for."