Episode Nine - Revisiting Hemp in the 21st Century
Episode Description:
Hemp seeds were first introduced to North America by European colonists and were grown to produce everything from rope and canvas, to paper, paints and varnishes. This versatile crop was so important to the foundation of early settlements, that in 1619 it was actually illegal not to grow hemp in some of the newly formed states, like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and parts of Virginia.
Although hemp was never a common crop in Ohio, during the 1800’s it was produced extensively around Marietta where there was a flourishing shipbuilding industry, and to a lesser extent along the bottoms of the Scioto and Miami Rivers.
But, hemp is a very labor intensive crop to grow and process, and as competition from cotton and synthetic fibers like nylon became available, by 1918 hemp production in Ohio had ceased.
Now, one hundred years later, researchers in the state are looking for ways to bring hemp crops back into Ohio’s agricultural future.
Dr. Craig Schluttenhofer measuring hemp plants at the Central State University research plots
Photo Credit: Renee Wilde
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO: In this episode of Grounded Hope we’ll talk with leading researchers about the future of the hemp industry and what role this ancient crop could play in Ohio’s agricultural future.
I’m Renee Wilde. From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you grounded hope.
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RENEE WILDE: Hemp seeds were first introduced to North America by European colonists and were grown to produce everything from rope and canvas, to paper, paints and varnishes. This versatile crop was so important to the foundation of early settlements, that in 1619 it was actually illegal not to grow hemp in some of the newly formed states, like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and parts of Virginia.
Although hemp was never a common crop in Ohio, during the 1800’s it was produced extensively around Marietta where there was a flourishing shipbuilding industry, and to a lesser extent along the bottoms of the Scioto and Miami Rivers.
But, hemp is a very labor intensive crop to grow and process, and as competition from cotton and synthetic fibers like nylon became available, by 1918 hemp production in Ohio had ceased.
Now, one hundred years later, researchers in the state are looking for ways to bring hemp crops back into Ohio’s agricultural future.
LEE BEERS: And, we are starting from the ground up in trying to fit a crop from the 1900’s, early 1900’s, into a modern production system.
There’s a learning curve.
WILDE:That’s Lee Beers.
BEERS: I’m the Ag and Natural Resources Extension Educator for Trumbull County.
So, nobody is really growing hemp for rope anymore. We don’t have these big sailing ships that need a lot of rope, but it's the fiber that can be used in a variety of other things. So, using the fiber in concrete.
WILDE: Lee is part of a group that includes Penn State University, OSU Extension, and local growers who are partnering with a non-profit organization in New Castle, Pennsylvania called DON: Disabilities Opportunities Network.
The organization just finished construction on the very first hemp house in the state of Pennsylvania. It’s made out of hempcrete, a mixture of lime, industrial hemp and water, which has been used as an alternative building material in Europe and Australia since the 1960’s.
BEERS: There’s actually a company that will take the whole plant and press it into flooring, like you might have seen pressed bamboo flooring, but instead of bamboo it’s hemp.
In Europe they use the oil and seed for a lot of things. Just think how we use soybean for everything in the car, they use hemp.
So, it’s again, an industry that if allowed to continue when it was made illegal, it would be a whole different state of things right now. Instead of a reliance on soybeans and a couple other things that work very well, there’d be another alternative for hemp.
WILDE: On the table in front of us are hemp fiber samples from some of the research plots Lee grew last year.
BEERS: Here, we can take this, this one’s already broken. So you can see we have the center portion here, which is called the herd, and then the fibers on the outside are what you’re after.
So, when you harvest this you actually mow it, and it has to sit in the field for 4 - 6 weeks and go through a controlled rotting process, called retting, r. e. t. t. i. n. g, until it reaches a certain color, and that natural process will allow the fibers to be separated from the rest of the plant much easier.
WILDE: Growing industrial hemp for fiber could be a good fit for farmers because it can be done with some of the same conventional machinery that they use to make hay.
BEERS: The problem is, if you don’t get it to grow just right, the weeds are going to be astronomical.
And you can see here, these are all weeds that came in last year's crop, that’s going to be barnyard grass and some hemp, and we actually had to mow off one of our research plots this year because the weeds came in so bad.
And there’s no labeled herbicides that you can actually go in and spray overtop of the hemp to control the weeds, and hand weeding or any mechanical weeding is not practical.
WILDE: On the drive out to look at one of the hemp research plots located on a nearby farm, we pass a soybean field surrounded by a brand new, 15 foot tall, black chain link fence.
That fence is a remnant from one farmer’s attempt last year to get in on the CBD market frenzy when hemp finally became legalized to grow in Ohio.
BEERS: When hemp became legal at the federal level, our door was knocked on daily with people who were like, hey I want to grow hemp.
They saw the crazy prices that people were getting for CBD before it was made legal.
WILDE: But, for most of the 197 growers who applied for a license to cultivate hemp in 2020, they quickly found out that not only was hemp a very labor intensive crop to grow, but the market for domestic CBD had already crashed as more states passed legislation to legalize hemp crops.
In 2016, less than 10,000 acres of hemp were licensed to grow in the U.S., but when federal legislation passed in 2018 that number jumped to 78,000 acres, and by 2019 over half a million acres were licensed to grow hemp domestically.
Farmers in states that were among the first to legalize hemp had been making around $40 a pound but with the influx of new growers from other states, prices had plunged below the break-even point by the time hemp became legal for Ohio growers.
BEERS: We were producing an astronomical amount of CBD that we couldn’t even consume as a nation and that caused a flood of product, a lack of processors, and a lot of very disappointed farmers trying to sell their product at pennies on the dollar.
I think long term sustainability, long term establishment of hemp as a normal crop, is going to be in either the grain or the fiber.
That’s my personal opinion.
(TRUCK DOOR OPENS)
BEERS: You want to take a look at it here?
WILDE: Yes.
Oh, the smell hits you right away! Is that because it’s humid today?
BEERS: It’s humid and these are still flowering a little bit.
So B- Lab is monoecious, it means that there are male and female on one plant. Some of these other varieties have male plants or female plants, and that has another set of challenges because they may flower at different times.
But, from the road if you didn’t know what you were looking at.
WILDE: So what is the difference between hemp and marijuana?
DR. BRANDY PHIPPS: These are legal definitions established by the federal government when we talk about what they call marijuana and what they call hemp.
WILDE: That’s Dr. Brandy Phipps. She’s the Research Assistant Professor of Food, Nutrition and Health at Central State University.
DR. PHIPPS: And so in the law, hemp is cannabis that has less than 0.3% tetrahydrocannabinol, which is THC. What's typically referred to as marijuana is anything that when it's tested is higher than that 0.3% THC.
Sometimes you'll see hemp further referred to as industrial hemp, to suggest that it's used for industrial purposes versus recreational or medicinal purposes.
WILDE: The majority of hemp being grown in the U.S. right now is for the CBD industry. So they are growing hemp for the flowers to extract the CBD oil from, which is then used in a wide variety of health and alternative medicine related products.
DR. PHIPPS: When we talk about THC and CBD - and again, TCH is tetrahydrocannabinol, it’s just a chemical compound, and CBD is referring to cannabidiol - both of them are part of a huge family of chemical compounds known as cannabinoids.
So they’re all similar in structure, but as we all know, tiny changes in chemical structure can cause them to bind to different receptors or act differently in the human body than their family counterparts.
And so the main difference between THC and the majority of the other cannabinoids is that THC provides an intoxicating effect, versus the other cannabinoids, that, for the most part, are what we call non-intoxicating.
Now, sometimes there's some confusion, because people confuse "intoxicating" with "psychoactive," and that's not the same thing.
Many of the cannabinoids are psychoactive, meaning that they do bind to receptors that are in different parts of the nervous system. If they didn't, then people wouldn't be trying to use them for anxiety, for insomnia, for PTSD, right, for other things related to the nervous system.
And so we know that they can be psychoactive, but they're not what we refer to as intoxicating, giving that high that people think of and refer to when they think of THC.
WILDE: With all the attention right now on hemp being grown for cannabinoids, Dr. Phipps says that one of the most nutritious parts of the hemp plant is often overlooked.
DR. PHIPPS: Grain get’s sort of left in the background, when really, hemp grain is this amazing, nutrient-dense plant product, and we have very little of it grown in the United States right now.
The majority of hemp grain on the market is coming out of Canada, and is coming out of Europe.
And, so I always say that I would like people to consider if they want to grow hemp, not just thinking about fiber, which can be very expensive to get into because of the equipment required, or metabolite hemp, which the market’s saturated right now with that, but thinking about grain as a possible field to look into.
And, so when I say that it’s this amazing plant product, when we talk about any kind of food product, if you can have a great balance of carbohydrates and fats and proteins, we say that’s a great thing to have. You don’t want to lean too heavily in your meals on any one side.
Well, It just so happens that hemp grain has a wonderful balance of carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and then if we move beyond that, we talk about things like complete proteins and incomplete proteins.
A complete protein — and most people think of meat products, dairy, eggs — has all of the essential amino acids. An incomplete protein, so this is going to be most grains, beans etcetera, means they’re missing one or more of those essential amino acids.
Most plant proteins are incomplete, that’s why we do complementary eating, you have beans and rice, or beans and tortillas. So almost every culture in the world has their version of combining foods in order to get a complete protein in their meal, which I think is pretty cool if we look through the history of cultural foods.
But very few plant products have complete protein on their own. Soy is one of the ones that does, but most people aren’t eating soy in its most natural form. They’re eating highly processed forms of soy and so there starts to be pros and cons of using that as your primary protein source.
Hemp happens to have all the essential amino acids, and that's when it can be eaten just dehulled and in its grain form. You can also, by very simple processing that doesn't remove a lot of nutrients, it can be pressed into oil, and into hemp seed cake, which can be used for protein powders, or ground more finely as a flour.
So again, minimal processing for these really highly nutrient dense products.
And then finally, my very favorite, we talk about omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. And, so you hear that a lot in the news, that’s why people are encouraged to eat fish oil, to get those omega 3 heart healthy fats.
It's not that omega-6’s are bad, and omega-3’s are good, it's that you want the right ratio of them in your foods or in your diet, and ideally that’s going to be a one-to-one omega-6 to omega-3, up to a three-to-one omega-6 to omega-3.
The typical American diet is twenty-to-one or higher, and a lot of that is because of the corn oil and the different food products that are much higher because of the omega-6’s.
So whenever we can find a product that has this really nice balance of three-to-one, we'll even settle for six-to-one if we need to, but just try to get lower than that twenty-to-one, you're going to have more of those heart-healthy, anti-inflammatory amino acids to balance the omega-6’s, which are a little more, I wouldn’t say pro-inflammatory, but they are less anti-inflammatory than the omega-3.
We know that fish oil is not a sustainable resource, at least not the way that fish oil is done right now, and so any time that we can find, in my opinion, nutrient dense foods that are going to provide the things that we need in a way that is environmentally sustainable and economically viable, I’m all for it.
And so hemp grain has approximately a three to one, omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid. So it's that perfect balance that we talked about.
WILDE: Hemp is also being researched for it’s regenerative use as a phytoremediator, a term that refers to using green plants to ‘vacuum’ contaminants out of soils and waterways through its root system.
But, the hemp plant's ability to absorb the messes left behind by poor farming practices, industrial contaminants and waste dumping, is also the reason why it’s really important to make sure that any hemp products that are made for human or animal consumption are grown under strict organic guidelines.
DR. CRAIG SCHLUTTENHOFER: I’m Dr. Craig Schluttenhofer. I work at Central State University. I’m a Research Assistant Professor of Natural Products, and my specialty is with hemp.
In this case a lot of the work that I’m doing is more with understanding how different regulatory parameters impact the crop, because there’s a lot of regulatory components to maintain a compliant crop, and understanding how those come into play so we could reduce the risk for growers of producing the crop.
Because if you produce a non-compliant crop then there’s going to be financial losses because of the need for crop destruction and things like that.
WILDE: Ok, here’s the tricky part for Ohio hemp growers - whether they are growing for CBD, fiber or grain, if the THC content goes above .03% at any point in the growing process it’s considered “hot hemp” and the entire crop will be destroyed by the state.
That can be devastating for growers who have invested tens of thousands of dollars up front for the licensing fees, seeds, equipment and labor costs, only to have their crops burned before they can get to market.
DR. SCHLUTTENHOFER: That’s the big, multi-million dollar question really, is how you control that THC level.
The plants controlling it through genetics primarily, so selection for proper genetics can help, but if you talk to growers, anecdotally it seems that there is some stress factors that probably impact the THC level as well and cause it to go up, and so a lot of them try to mitigate as much stress on the crop as possible to keep it lower.
But, ultimately, the only way to control for it is, it's not even really control, you monitor by having samples taken and sent off to an analytical lab for testing periodically so you could keep track of what that level is.
A lot of growers don’t realize how much testing needs to be done, how frequently.
Usually it needs to be done, I would recommend, at least weekly once the plants are flowering until you see a level that you’re comfortable with getting the Department of Ag to come out and collect their official samples, which sometimes takes time.
They’re expensive tests to run but they're essential to maintaining the compliance of the crop.
It’s most important if you’re growing the crop for the metabolites, particularly like CBD, which is the cannabidiol. Other crops have been genetically selected over time for less THC levels, especially with the genetics from other countries.
And, so the grain crops and the fiber crops typically have less concern. Fiber also because you’re usually harvesting before those female flowers really even get going, it’s when the male plants are flowering, so they’re not going to have a lot of cannabinoids anyways.
When you have grain, you’re allowing that flower to fully mature to get grain, so you can have cannabinoids there, but those genetics have been much more heavily selected for compliance, and in some cases for an even lower level of THC in other countries than we have in the U.S.
(PAPER BAG RATTLING)
So here’s some, this is some dried material. It's actually from last year that I haven't got processed because we’ve been developing all the testing protocols for looking at the whole cannabinoid profile and everything.
I’ve got some material out in the field that we’re looking at for variety trials, just seeing how different varieties perform for our region. This is important because most of the grain and fiber varieties that I’m looking at are coming from other countries, and so they’re not the best suited for the U.S.
So some of the work I’m doing with that is identifying what varieties have positive traits and then being able to take other material that I have and actually breed for better genetics that are better adapted for our region.
WILDE: What do you see as the future for this plant?
DR. SCHLUTTENHOFER: There’s a lot of different opinions on what people see for hemp out there, and it runs all the way from the gamut of, people think it could be used for anything and everything, all the way to the people that think its just a route into the recreational cannabis and don’t see any actual utility for it.
I see people on both sides of those opinions and everybody in between. Realistically, I see it somewhere in the middle.
It has a lot of potentially beneficial applications, but everything it’s going to be good for, it's going to have to compete with other crops that may have similar properties that are beneficial.
WILDE: Give an example.
DR. SCHLUTTENHOFER: A lot of people are interested in trying to get hemp into feeds, animal feeds, because of the omega content, and that could be healthy for animals. It's going to have to compete with corn and soybeans that are other components of feed.
Particularly soybeans, which even though they have different ratios of these nutritional components, they can be obtained from that crop. And obviously, we in the U.S. mass produce soybeans on a such larger scale that that’s a fairly low cost feed ingredient.
And so we’re going to have to find ways that - ok, is hemp truly better than this product? And then maybe it will get wide scale adopted. Or is there a niche in there that we could exploit that makes it useful.
And the same with fiber.
There are other natural fibers, we import a lot of those, and a lot of them are coming from places that can produce them really cheaply vs having to do a domestic production of hemp fiber.
So to incorporate those realistically into a product we’re going to have to find those products that this is ideally suited for that can capture that value that it actually brings of that strength, versus some of these other natural fibers that are available.
But, it’s a fascinating area to work in because all of this is going on.
From a plant perspective it's a very old plant, people have been dealing with it for millennia, but even the actual underlying biology, and what’s going on in the plant, we’re still figuring all that out.
And there’s decades of research ahead of us to begin to get a good grasp on that, at least to the point where we are at the same kind of knowledge as corn and soybeans and these other major crops that we have.
So there's always something new and exciting to look at, which makes it really fun.
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HOST OUTRO:
Visit our website at Groundedhope.org and click on the educational resources tab to see ways that hemp is being used for regenerative purposes.
This podcast is brought to you by the people at Agraria, Ohio’s first center for regenerative practices, and funded in part by a grant from the Ohio Humanities.
Sign up for Agraria’s Pathways to Regeneration: Honoring Water conference being held on November 5th and 6th, at www.communitysolution.org, to hear stories directly from Indigenous peoples, artists, activists, and researchers working to protect water.
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson.
Our scholars are Beth Bridgeman, who teaches a series of reskilling and resilience courses at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Rick Livingston, the Assistant Director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
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