THE MIRACLE CROP

Farmers prepare to plant first legal hemp fields to produce tough fibre for
dozens of wearable and edible products

As farmers prepare to grow hemp legally for the first time in six decades,
its advocates are high on its seemingly limitless potential:

* The plant is so environmentally friendly it leaves the soil in better
condition when harvested than when planted. It needs no chemicals for
weeds, bugs or fertilization.

* It provides some of nature's most durable fibres - rot-free raw material
for clothes, wallboard, paper, even car parts. To say nothing of its
nutritious seeds, which produce high-quality oil. About the only thing this
distant cousin of marijuana can't do is get you high.

``It's a reawakening of a sleeping giant,'' says University of Guelph field
crop scientist Gordon Scheifele, who has been growing hemp on an
experimental basis for several years in preparation for its legalization.

``The real challenge now with hemp is that it has so many different uses we
have to identify the right uses for the right places.''

Those uses are derived from the plant's sturdy fibres and nutritious seeds,
which can be used in a wide variety of fashion and industrial fabrics,
paper, salad oils, cereals, construction materials, medicines, cosmetics.
And yes, even beer brewing.

In continuous cultivation for thousands of years in parts of Europe and
Asia, hemp was outlawed in North America during the 1930s (1938 in Canada)
because of its association with its ``reefer madness'' cousin, marijuana.

But regulations were put in place in March by Health Canada for hemp's
commercial cultivation, after Ottawa passed the new Controlled Substance
and Abuse Act in 1996 okaying the plant's production.

Within weeks, as soon as federal permits are issued, it will go into the
ground in about 1,200 hectares of Ontario soil, to seed what many hope will
be a new and vibrant agricultural industry.

So what is hemp? To say it's a close cousin of marijuana is not quite correct.

``Hemp is the same species as marijuana, but it comes in varieties that
have been deliberately bred and collected for low THC and cannabinoids -
the psychoactive drugs - and for high-fibre yields and grain yields,''
Scheifele says.

You can't get high off hemp, Scheifele says, because the plants legally
must contain less than 0.3 per cent THC by dry weight, while marijuana will
normally have between 10 and 20 per cent of the hallucinogen.

``Not a hope of getting high,'' says Toronto hemp entrepreneur Ruth Shamai,
whose company The Natural Order, grew hemp on a research permit last year.

``We grew it for grain and at the end of the season we didn't want the
stalks so we burned them. We burned an acre of hemp and my partner stood in
the middle of it - an acre of burning hemp, and he said he needed a beer to
get a buzz.''

But Scheifele says hemp is an economic ``golden apple.''

It requires a minimum of chemical fertilizers and almost no pesticides to
grow. It provides some of the most sturdy and durable fibres in nature -
fibre that can create anything from clothes and paper to wallboard and car
parts.

And virtually all of it can be used, from the roots up, for a plethora of
industrial and agricultural purposes.

``Agriculturally, hemp is a golden apple in our hands with regards to
fitting in to our existing crop rotation,'' says Scheifele.

``It's a soil builder. It's one of the crops that actually contributes to
the soil structure. It leaves the soil in better condition than when it
started there.''

It also can be grown without the use of a chemical weed control, Scheifele says.

It simply grows so fast it ``out-competes the weeds and creates almost
total shade at the ground level,'' he says. There are also few insects that
have taken a shine to the crop, leaving no need to spray it with a chemical
insecticides, he adds.

These chemical-free growing requirements give hemp one of its most
important economic attractions, says Bob L'Ecuyer, general manager of Kenex
Ltd., a Chatham-area hemp-processing company.

``We do see a healthy market for several reasons and Number 1 is it's
environmentally friendly,'' says L'Ecuyer, whose company is now buying the
equipment that will put it on the ground floor of Ontario's hemp-processing
industry.

But hemp's main economic attributes come from the sturdy and versatile
fibres it can provide to numerous industries.

``The main market attraction to hemp is the stalk because the stalk yields
several different types of fibres,'' Scheifele explains.

``These fibres have a reputation of having very unique, exceptional
qualities for strength and longevity.''

Hemp plants are planted at close quarters to force their stems to grow fast
and long in an upward race for the sun.

The outer bark of these stalks yield two types of ``bast'' fibres (one
longer, the other shorter), which provide two distinct uses.

The longer ones, Scheifele says, are generally used for textile
manufacturing while the shorter ones provide fodder for high-quality paper
products.

``And one of the characteristics of hemp's longer fibre is that it has an
extremely long wearability,'' Scheifele says.

Add to this strength a multiplicity of uses and the potential for hemp
textiles becomes enormous, says Owen Sercus, a textile professor at New
York City's Fashion Institute of Technology.

It has pretty much everything that you make fabric from, says Sercus, who
studied hemp fabrics for six years at the institute.

``I would say that it has everything that cotton has and everything that
linen has plus a good deal of what nylon and polyester and other man-made
fibres have.''

Sercus says hemp is the only natural fibre that approaches man-made
materials like polyester in strength, but that its main characteristics put
it in the linen-like category of fabrics.

``It's also impervious to ultraviolet rays and it is not, like cotton or
the other plant fibres, susceptible to mildew, so it doesn't rot.''

This made hemp a mainstay for centuries in shipping circles, where its
non-rotting ropes and canvas sails were standard. And the importance of
these materials for transportation also made it a mandatory crop on many
farms.

Hemp's shorter fibres can be used as an environmentally friendly
alternative to trees for paper-making applications, Scheifele says.

Experts say that about 20 hectares of hemp could produce the same quantity
and quality of paper as one hectare of trees, leaving those trees to stand
for future generations.

Hemp's shorter fibres can also be crushed into building board material as
well as auto accessories like dashboard padding and roof insulation.

The plant seeds, on the other hand, offer another range of manufacturing
possibilities.

``The seeds have the most nutritionally balanced oil of any vegetable
oil,'' Scheifele says.

With their packaging of fatty acids and proteins, hemp seeds offer a wide
range of product possibilities, says Shamai, who received a $60,000
provincial grant to study the plant.

The seeds could be used to make such products as salad oils, sunflower
seed-like snack foods, flour and skin-friendly soaps, creams and cosmetics.

A mash of hemp seeds can also be added to barley to make beer, as
Vancouver's Bowen Island Brewing Co. Ltd. has been doing with
``astonishing'' success since last year. ``It definitely adds a fruity nose
to the beer, almost like peaches and it imparts a real smoothness to it and
a nutty aftertaste,'' says Bowen sales manager Les Patterson.

With all it might have going for it, however, hemp in Canada faces some
serious problems, not least of which is a lack of infrastructure to process
large amounts of it.

``You know, working in the hemp industry right now is how I imagine it was
in the Yukon gold rush. People are just jumping in, thinking everything is
there and a number of them will lose their shirts.''

Whatever final processing and manufacturing infrastructures appears, it
will likely be spread out in pockets around the country, Scheifele says.

That's because the product is so bulky - one bale weighs some 360 kilograms
- - that processing plants would have to be located within about 70
kilometres of the farms.

Those farms, which Scheifele sees as predominantly small, family-owned
ones, could also include some of southwestern Ontario's tobacco operations
now searching for alternative crops. ``There's been four years of
developmental research in Southern Ontario funded by ministry money called
the Tobacco Diversification Program to look at hemp in the tobacco-growing
regions as an alternative crop,'' he says.

Scheifele says, however, that the crop could realistically be grown in any
area of the province where the soil is rich enough to sustain it.

Photo Caption:

MICHAEL STUPARYK/TORONTO STAR

Ruth Shamai, holding raw hemp fibres, received a $60,000 provincial grant
to study hemp and its utility.

Checked-by: jwjohnson@netmagic.net (Joel W. Johnson)