|
southern MN | Hemp sucks. It’s a terrible model.
Getting the oil out of it is tough.
Harvesting it is tough.
Storing it is tough.
Once you get the oil out of it, you end up with a pile of fiber that no one actually wants, despite romantic stories of how valuable it was in the war years of the 1940s before we had synthetic fibers that now preform much better then hemp.
There are also romantic stories how hemp grows on waste land, and it doesn’t use an ounce of fertilizer. Which is currently true, as hemp is a weed that grows on bad land - which you couldn’t harvest. And because it is a weed that isn’t harvested, it recycles itself and doesn’t need fertilizer. Once you start harvesting it, then it will be removing nutrients, and you will need to use fertilizer on it.
These romantic stories of the wonders of hemp are propagated by the folks that want to smoke it. They are the big proponents of getting hemp all out and about. They come up with the romantic stories of the wonders of hemp while enjoying the smoking kind..... it’s not well thought out....
There is a very small market for actual hemp products, and that market will be quickly swamped with product.
The romantic stories of hemp are just urban myth.
Perhaps we can get the oil from hemp, and burn the biomass for energy, but that leaves you hauling and storing huge volumes of product from good farm land, and you are not returning the nutrients to the land that you hauled off, as with soybean meal (no manure produced).
It’s not really a good model.
I’m all for it if it works, I’d love another crop to put in the rotation. But look at it closely, and it seems far-fetched. The romantic notions fall apart.
Some years ago when the state wanted more green energy, a power company here theorized a plan to plant many acres of alfalfa, haul the alfalfa to a processing plant, strip the stems from the leaves, haul the leaves back to dairy farms for protein, burn the stems for power.
Several farmers actually invested in the idea. The power company then said oh no, that was just a silly study for the state, we have no intention of trying to make that work, the logistics are awful, go away.....
Paul | |
|
Could we blow through our soybean supply by replacing petroleum with soy oil?
