Hemp, America's New Cash Crop

Tobacco is out, hemp is in. In recent years, farmers across the country have chosen hemp as their new money-making crop. The benefits of farming hemp outweigh the benefits of farming tobacco and many popular crops that have been farmed for years. Research has shown that farming hemp helps the environment in countless ways.

When most people think of hemp, their minds automatically picture marijuana. Although, hemp is the non-psychoactive relative of marijuana, meaning you cannot get high by smoking hemp. Hemp includes up to only 0.3 percent of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is what gets you high in marijuana and is the reason why marijuana is classified as a drug.

“So what?”, you might ask? Hemp is used in over 25,000 products around the world. For years, hemp has been researched and looked upon as a way to make thousands of products and help the environment, but it has not always been legal to grow in all 50 states. Until recently when President Trump passed the 2018 Farm Bill making hemp legal everywhere in the United States. This will help farmers nationwide, provide health benefits, and it will be a tremendous help to one of our world’s biggest problems: climate change.

For farmers in Tennessee, climate change has influenced the outcome of their crops tremendously. With recent periods of drought this year, farmers have had a difficult time getting enough water into their crops. Although, for Russell Leonard, founder of MERJ, a 20 acre hemp farm in Bristol, Tennessee, his farm has been able to handle unexpected weather conditions well.

Russell he said his company, MERJ, was created last year but their first plant was not until May of this year. Even though his farm is brand new, they have still dealt with drought while attempting to grow hemp for the first time.

“When we planted in May, we went twenty days without rain. Luckily, we have a water source on our property so we could still get enough water to the hemp”, Russell said.

Even though MERJ went through a short period of drought, MERJ ended up having a successful end of the summer with plenty of rain.

“We were lucky to have a really good late July and August with a fair amount of rain which helped us a lot”.

MERJ not only has handled recent drought efficiently but has also taken zero hemp damage from rain showers and thunderstorms which is an issue for all farmers. When asked if frost from the cold weather has started to affect his hemp, Russell said,

“Yes, we have dealt with one mild frost, but we aren’t sure how the plants were affected. We grow three different varieties of hemp and the third variety was the one that experienced the frost and we have not processed that variety, so we won’t know the effect until we see the CBD content”.

“CBD” as in Cannabidiol, the main ingredient of hemp that is extracted to sell to people to help with an incredible amount of health issues including, anxiety, pain, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), etc. MERJ has a leg up on their competitors because they have half a million dollars-worth of extraction equipment on their farm so they can immediately start extracting CBD from their hemp after they are done drying and fully grown. Russell says that the “main bottleneck” of the industry is the ability to get CBD extracted from the hemp. Many farmers have a license to grow the crop but do not have the equipment to extract the CBD.

According to Russell, MERJ plans to begin selling CBD products in 2020. Research has shown that there are numerous health benefits to taking CBD and many people in Tennessee along with the entire country are already taking it. CBD comes in oils, creams, lotions, pills, gummies, and vaping oil.

According to healthline.com, CBD helps treat people with addiction, Schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. One study from the New England Journal of Medicine shows that CBD has also been proven to help with childhood epilepsy.

According to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, there is no truth to the idea that CBD can cure cancer, however, it can be used with “chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting”. There is a lot more to research and study when it comes to CBD and its affects, but the current benefits help many people.

Hemp not only provides these health benefits, but also helps tremendously with our world’s serious issue of climate change. Research has shown that hemp absorbs more carbon dioxide per hectare than any other crop making it the perfect “carbon sink”, according to buzzflash.com. Planting miles of hemp would greatly benefit our world due to the absorption of carbon dioxide. The cheapest way to combat global warming is to plant a tree, so why not plant hemp?

Plastic from hemp can also be used to replace the toxic plastic that is “being dumped into the ocean at the rate of one garbage truck per minute”, according to buzzflash.com. Over one million seabirds die every year after ingesting plastic and around 90% of them have plastic in their guts. These plastics absorb toxins in the ocean and eventually end up in humans. To prevent all of this, we can use plastic from hemp because it is non-toxic and biodegradable.

Hemp can also be used to make pretty much anything you can think of. Important products that hemp can be used to make include food, clothes, sports cars, gasoline, paper, and even concrete (referred to as “hempcrete”), according to 420intel.com. Making paper from hemp makes more sense because it is quicker to grow hemp than it is to grow trees making it better for the environment.

“You must take into account that hemp has a shorter growth period, one hundred percent yield, and is very beneficial. Looking at a global scale, such as the Amazon being cut down, if you replace that kind of damage with hemp, jobs would be created, revenue, and so forth”, says Agriculture Researcher, Joshua Leonard, of the University of Tennessee.

Joshua says, “Hemp is going to be nature’s band aid”.