GREAT HEMP HOPE

Is Barrie Farmer's Hemp Oil The Key To The Future Of Ontario Agriculture?

"Rope, not dope" was my slogan some years back, when I was involved
in a successful campaign (yes, we do win some battles) to legalize
industrial hemp in Canada.

My eye was on the 25,000 industrial products hemp was thought to
offer, a farm-friendly, pesticide-free, green source for everything
from clothing to rope to paper to plastic.

It never occurred to me that food would be first out of the gate once
the plant was legalized.

But it did occur to Greg Herriott, who was then running a design shop
that had just won acclaim for producing a reusable takeout coffee cup.

Herriott understood that paper, clothing and plastic are volume
businesses. Manufacturers won't switch inputs until they can be
guaranteed a continuous and reliable supply. So the place to start
ramping up the volume of the hemp supply was food, he figured.

Food products are small-scale, niche-friendly and offer a base for
independent entrepreneurs who can substitute sweat and chutzpah for
equity a gateway industry, so to speak.

As soon as he tasted some hemp oil in 1993, Herriott was hooked. "It
was a no-brainer, since it could work itself into gourmet and health
circles," he said, referring to the rich store of essential fatty
acids and antioxidants that make hemp oil an alternative to flax and
fish oils, the latter not an option for vegans or those concerned
about mercury contamination.

But back in the 1990s, nobody, including Herriott, knew that oil and
flour could be produced from hemp seeds while leaving the long stem
of the plant available for animal bedding and paper.

Herriott first isolated what he calls hemp flour in 1998, holding the
premiere for it at a health food show in Baltimore. He has just
patented the cold press machine that can produce both oil and flour.

I dropped in to see him earlier this fall at Hempola, his combo
oilseed farm, processing operation, farm store and summertime
farmers' market just north of Barrie.

He was riding an old tractor, looking like a little boy who'd just
got a big play truck. "Smell those delicious fumes," he said, before
jumping down to show me around his farm.

Herriott isn't dismayed by the slow marketing of hemp salad oil.
"Canola was branded 40 years ago and is essentially rapeseed," he
says. "That's a really interesting parallel for the hemp industry to
learn from."

Herriott's operation uses pressure to squeeze most of the oil out of
the seeds and down a tap. He tries to use as much of the oil as
possible in the product that fetches the highest price and makes best
use of hemp's nutrients: salad oil. But if he can't sell enough salad
oil, he'll convert as much as possible of what's left into wood
finish. And whatever can't be used that way gets turned into diesel
oil, which fetches the lowest price.

The part of the seed left after the first tapping is called seedcake.
Lab tests required by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency show that
the flour milled from seedcake is made up of eight percent oils, 40
per cent protein, 20 per cent fibre and carbs.

Herriott sells it through his own brand of pancake and brownie flour,
and markets his leftover flour to one T.O. baker and a leading U.S.
one. His latest dream is to find a breadmaker who's interested in a
package deal of flour for bread plus diesel oil for the bread delivery trucks.

While that deal is being worked out, whatever flour can't be sold for
human consumption can, as soon as government regulations catch up
with the possibility, be used as feed for livestock and fish farms.
Unlike most farm crops, hemp is all about co-products, not single
ones, a reality that stretches the time and skills of any lean
cottage industry.

Then there are the political challenges: hemp's possibilities for a
quadruple bottom line position it as a front-running alternative to
corn-based ethanol fuels.

Financially and legislatively supported by many North American
governments, corn ethanol requires heavy inputs of fossil-fuel
fertilizers and further dependence on the giant oil companies that
are key ethanol partners at the distribution end.

As well, corn is the opposite of a nutritional wunderkind. The
production of ethanol takes almost everything the plant has to offer,
which is mainly carbs. All that's left is mash that can be fed to
cattle. And corn is difficult to grow, usually requiring harsh
pesticides and genetically engineered seeds, and its wide rows
commonly lead to severe soil erosion.

If all the subsidies that now go to corn ethanol went instead to hemp
foods and bio-fuel, the green farm economy could start to rock. And
that's what Herriott wants to oil the skids for to kick-start farm
hemp volume to the point where it's an alternative to chopping down
forests for toilet paper and scratch pads, or to growing
pesticide-intensive cotton.

As farm entrepreneurs like Herriott succeed, the harvests of the
future will start to look very different. It's hard to get a sense of
the scale of possibilities, because agriculture over the past 40
years has not been very innovative, concentrating almost exclusively
on new ways of doing old chores.

What Herriott offers are old ways an ancient crop and adaptations to
relatively traditional cold-pressing technologies to do new things,
multiplying the efficiency of agriculture and in the process
inventing ways to localize economies.

When neighbourhood farms can produce transportation fuel, wood
finish, paper and animal feed as well as premium human foods, we are
enroute to agro-ecology, the next revolution in agriculture.