More hemp is not what we need. What we need is legal cannabis, with subsidies given to farmers that produce stocks that can be used in the fiber industry(which is all of them, after the buds are harvested.)
Hemp was a good vehicle to get the uses of cannabis out there into the public consciousness. But now that it’s there, why should we fill square miles with hemp, when we could be filling those same square miles with medicine, that would produce almost if not just as much biomass for the various industries that use it?
can you elaborate on what your saying/suggesting here in terms of medicine?
Flower from high THC plants produce stalks as well. Under the current situation, though it’s become a number 1 cash crop in a couple of states, it’s being grown with making medicine in mind. So the stalks go largely unused.
I’ve worked on giant outdoor operations in California where they had a tradition of turning the stalks and leaves and whatnot into a giant bonfire(though I suspect this is less common now that they know they can still get CBD from those parts.
Basically, long story short, the only difference between a “cannabis plant” and a “hemp plant” is that cannabis is psychoactive and hemp is not.
Have you ever seen “Kansas ditch weed?” The stuff that grows wild in the US Midwest because of attempts to grow it for use during WWII? I have. It looks exactly like the real thing. The fibers are exactly the same.
What I’m saying is that instead of taking up all of that space, growing cannabis for medical cannabis patients, and giving tax credits/subsidies to farms that provide their leftovers for use as either fiber for the paper and textile industries, or biomass for the renewable energy industry.
Furthermore, stalks can be smashed and have their CBD extracted without harming the fibers. The vast majority of flower anymore winds up being turned into extracts, and after they run solvents through it, you can’t use it as medicine anymore, but that biomass is still there.
My point is that anything you can do with the hemp plant, you can do with the cannabis plant. The cannabis plant just also happens to provide life changing medicine for millions of people.
I say we replace “hemp” with “cannabis.” Obviously this needs to start in states where it’s already legal, and in legal states, we all know these things about hemp and don’t want it around because we don’t want it cross pollinating our cannabis plants and ruining them. A field of hemp can cross pollinate a field of cannabis many many miles away.