Table of Contents

• Why We Need Alternatives To Fossil Fuel-Based Plastic
• Hemp Cellulose Fibers A Good Source For Plastic
• The Pros & Limitations of Bioplastic
• The Biggest Barrier To Hemp Plastic
• Where to Buy Hemp Plastic

You may have heard that agricultural hemp, the non-mind-altering cousin of cannabis (commonly known as marijuana), has dozens of potential uses from clothing to paper.

Since virtually all climate scientists agree that we must replace our dependence on fossil fuels, and given that hemp can even make the soil cleaner, it’s surprising that this miracle crop isn’t in wider use.

When we looked into the topic, we found that hemp is already appearing in some commonplace objects, including cars, and could soon find its way into more. But there are also remaining barriers that keep hemp plastics more expensive and less versatile, for now.

Keep reading to learn more about the future of hemp plastic, or scroll to the bottom to find companies making hemp plastic today.

Alternatives Needed As Plastic Pollutes Water & Land

Researchers found 38 million pieces of plastic waste on one uninhabited island in the South Pacific. That’s just one island.

Not only are the harmful effects of global warming increasingly clear, conventional plastics linger in the environment and can even enter the food chain to detrimental effect on human and animal health.

In one especially shocking recent example, researchers from the University of Tasmania and the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds found 38 million pieces of plastic waste on Henderson Island, an uninhabited coral island in the South Pacific.

Jennifer Lavers, a marine scientist from the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian that evidence of human activity litters the beaches of some of the most far-flung islands in the world, regardless of the year, location, or area of the ocean.Topic

As much as 1.9 million of these tiny particles per square mile, according to a 2014 report from National Geographic, compose the infamous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.””

Hemp Cellulose Fibers A Good Source For Many Plastics

Some of the earliest plastics were made from cellulose fibers obtained from organic, non-petroleum-based sources.

Seshata, a writer at Sensi Seeds in 2014, reported that hemp cellulose, which contains around 65-70% cellulose, can extract and use to make cellophane, rayon, celluloid, and a range of related plastics. Hemp is a good source of cellulose with particular promise due to its relative sustainability and low environmental impact when compared to wood (which contains around 40%), flax (which contains 65-75%), and cotton (which contains up to 90%).

While 100% hemp-based plastic is still a rarity, some “composite bioplastics” — plastics made from a combination of hemp and other plant sources — are already in use. Thanks to their high strength and rigidity, these plastics are currently used in the construction of cars, boats, and even musical instruments.

Bioplastic Is Promising, But Can’t Solve All Our Pollution Problems

Many plastic products are made from polymer resins, including polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, found in everyday products like plastic bottles. While advocates hope to someday see 100% hemp-based plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, the technology just isn’t ready for prime time.

Coca-Cola and other companies have experimented with 100% plant-based bottles, but they currently produce commercially available products using no more than 30% plant-based materials, while using traditional fossil fuel sources for the remaining portion.

The good news is that many corporations are investing heavily in researching replacements to traditional PET. It’s likely the first company to produce a viable commercial product could stand to earn millions.

Unfortunately, even plastic that’s deliberately designed to be biodegradable can still be a source of pollution. Almost nothing biodegrades in a landfill, and hemp microplastics could still cause problems when introduced to the oceans. Biodegradable plastics need to be sent to commercial composting facilities for efficient disposal, and these facilities aren’t available to everyone. In addition to creating better alternatives to plastic, we’ll still need to create more responsible attitudes toward disposable products.

Cost And The War On Drugs Are Biggest Barrier To Hemp Plastic

While fossil fuel costs are kept low with subsidies, hemp products for the most part remain costly luxury items. The U.S. legalized hemp in 2018, after a few years of research into hemp growing. However, decades of drug prohibition mean we’re still lacking much of the infrastructure needed to grow and process hemp into plastic.

Though hemp requires fewer pesticides and has a smaller environmental footprint than many other crops, growing and harvesting it remains labor intensive. Another drawback is that hemp requires “significant fertiliser in some soils, and also has relatively high water requirements,” as noted by Seshata.

However, hemp prices will undoubtedly come down, and technology improve as hemp growing spreads from coast to coast.

Currently, farmers in the United States are growing hemp mostly for CBD, but they are starting to experiment with other varieties that are easier to harvest for their fiber content.

Will we someday use hemp LEGOs? (It’s probably just hype)

One of the most provocative examples of hemp’s potential plastic future could come from LEGOs, the ubiquitous building block toy. which is promising to phase out fossil-fuel based resin by 2030.

“Hemp might just be the cost effective, environmentally sustainable alternative material that LEGO is looking for,” speculated Emily Gray Brosious in a February 2016 investigation from the Sun Times. However, there’s no proof that LEGO is currently seriously considering hemp.

Whether or not we’re ever able to build a spaceship from hemp bricks, the full promise of hemp plastic remains tantalizingly close, but just out of reach.

Where to buy hemp plastic?

We recommend the following brands:

• Green Spring Technologies

Green Spring Technologies creates hemp plastics used in several projects, including hemp plastic pens that several politicians have used to sign hemp legalization bills.

• SANA Packaging

SANA Packaging focuses on creating sustainable packaging for the legal cannabis and hemp industries. They’ve created “doob tubes” and other containers made from both hemp and reclaimed ocean plastic.

• PF DesignLab

PF DesignLab are cutting edge researchers creating plastic and other composite materials from hemp and other plants. Their 3D-printed hemp bicycle frame, an experimental creation showcased at the NoCo Hemp Expo in 2019, amazed us.

• ExHemplary Life (Hemp pastic drinking straws)

Plastic straws made from hemp and two other plant-based materials. These hemp drinking straws feel identical to regular straws, but they start to biodegrade in 120 days. A great example of a hemp solution to an everyday need. These straws are safer than many other replacements to common straws.

The post Hemp Makes Great Plastic, So Why Isn’t Hemp Plastic Everywhere? appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

While every plant absorbs nutrients from the soil, hemp is a powerful “bioaccumulator.” That means it’s especially good at absorbing toxins, including heavy metals, from the ground. That’s great news if you want to clean the soil with hemp. It also means CBD consumers need to be careful. We don’t want to take unwanted chemicals or toxins into our bodies with our CBD supplements. 

With over 1500 different manufacturers, the CBD industry is oversaturated with cheap, low-quality, and sometimes unsafe products. There are countless brands with dishonest labels, improper health claims, contaminated hemp extracts, and artificial ingredients. So how do you know where to start? To avoid these scary realities, take the first step with CBD made from certified organic hemp. Not only is it a better product, but it’s better for your body and the planet.

Unfortunately, it’s still hard to get full organic certification for hemp. So a lot of companies use terms like “organically-grown” or “grown using organic methods.” In this article, we’ll talk more about what the difference is between organic methods and actual certified organic hemp.

The destructive aspects of conventional farming

Many CBD manufacturers source their hemp through conventional farming which has many destructive aspects. 

One of these aspects is synthetic fertilizers. Synthetic fertilizers are water-soluble and need to be reapplied after every rain. With this constant reapplication, they’re wrecking the soil composition for future crops. Any excess fertilizer then runs off into waterways causing an accumulation of cadmium and other heavy metals. 

A powerful example of this is “dead zones”, areas where few to no organisms can survive in their oxygen-depleted, also known as hypoxic, waters. These conditions are a reaction to excessive nutrient pollution, and one of the contributing factors are man-made synthetic fertilizers. 

While it’s true that hemp, in general, requires fewer pesticides than some other crops, it still depends on rich, well-fertilized soil to grow to optimal health.

The benefits of organic farming

Did you know that organic farming can actually increase the amount of soil each year? 

Healthy soil better binds together, preventing runoff and erosion. This involves improving soil fertility by maintaining and building a fertile living soil through the application of frequent organic matter, such as compost and manures. 

Our planet’s soil is an ecosystem, because not only does it hold roots, but it serves as a life source for bacteria, fungi, insects, and animals. Organic farming’s lack of pesticides and insecticides is healthier for bugs and plant diversity. In return, organic plants add more nutrient density to the soil, because they don’t have any artificial help in their defense against nature. 

Additionally, the higher quality soil does a better job of maintaining water. Organic farmers often spread organic mulch and plant cover crops, which further encourages water retention. With water scarcity becoming an increasingly prominent issue, it’s hard not to feel that it’s our obligation to do what we can to conserve water.

Not all CBD products are created equal

There have been many cases of contaminated and tainted CBD products. Sometimes these are byproducts of conventional farming. Other times, it’s simple carelessness on a brand’s part.

Heavy metals, molds, pesticides, and chemical residues have all been found in finished products. That’s because hemp is a phytoremediator. It pulls up toxins and heavy metals in the soil when present and grows very fast.

When grown on soil that is not tested for toxins, we run the risk of our hemp plants (and as a result, our CBD) containing those toxins. When grown on a certified organic farm, we can be sure the soil is clean and free of harmful chemicals.

‘USDA Organic Hemp’ vs. ‘Organically Grown’: What’s in a CBD label?

Terms like “organically-grown” are touted on packaging and marketing materials to entice buyers who are looking for authentic CBD and hemp products. 

While there are alternative state-level and private certifications available to fill the organic and organically grown gap, the USDA will only provide organic certification for qualified industrial hemp. This is a lengthy and somewhat complex process.

For hemp to be USDA Organic certified there are rigorous tests, trials, and fees. First, the farm must adopt organic practices if they haven’t already. They must transition from conventional farming methods to organic and allow their soil composition to change, which takes 3 years.  

Next, they must choose an authorized “certifying agent” to grant them the USDA certification. To achieve this grant, the farm must create an Organic System Plan, or OSP, which is the foundational document which the certifying agent will use. The OSP outlines the operation, clearly delineating how the operation is in compliance with organic standards and what precautions are in place to prevent contamination and commingling. 

Once the OSP is completed, an inspection occurs. It’s at this point that the inspector will compare the operation to the OSP to validate that it is being strictly followed. Upon approval, the certifying agent issues an organic certificate. This certificate not only determines the organic quality of the product’s sourcing but the quality of the hemp’s industrial processes as well. 

You can see that actual USDA organic certification is a very rigorous process. Ultimately, this creates hemp that should be cleaner and safer for consumers. 

Organic CBD & third-party lab tests

The quality and potency of your CBD depend on the entire process—from seed to self. 

Among the last stages of quality control is a test done by an independent laboratory. To certify the product’s authenticity, transparency, and quality, this series of testing is crucial. Third-party lab testing is when a private party, not affiliated with the manufacturer or distributor performs a scientific analysis of a product. These tests verify that CBD is clean. Most tests will show the potency (strength) of the product, but make sure the brand is testing for toxins too.

With a lack of federal regulation, there is no standardized process for testing CBD. That’s why, at Hemp Luxe, we craft our products using only USDA Certified Organic Hemp. We also perform third party testing for harmful toxins by an industry-leading lab. 

If a CBD brand doesn’t make it easy to access these third-party lab tests, also known as a “Certificate of Analysis” or COA, then you should move on to another brand that does. 

Organic hemp means a cleaner CBD experience

By choosing certified organic hemp, we can feel proud to avoid pesticides. The products we consume will be better for the planet. By buying CBD made from organic hemp, we know that our purchase encourages soil growth. We can feel confident that our products are clean.

We get it, buying CBD can be confusing. It gets easier if you do a little research into the company you’re buying from. For many of us, looking for USDA-certified organic hemp is the first step.

The post Organic Hemp: Not All Organic CBD Is Created Equal & Why That Matters appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In episode 63 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, our host Matt Baum talks about biodegradable hemp plastic with Carolyn Virostek, a distributor for Exhemplarylife.com.

Carolyn talks about the benefits of biodegradable hemp plastic vs other plastics. Some plastics that creators claim are more environmentally friendly actually break down into microplastics. The conversation covers single-use plastics like the hemp straws and how hemp and other plants like flax can be used for much more than making smoothies. Matt also mentions this Stanford University report on plastic straws at the beginning of the episode.

About Exhemplary Life

Exhemplary Life was created out of a desire to advocate for hemp and products made from this indigenous plant. The hemp flowers, seeds, and stalks can make many products such as clothing, shoes, accessories made with Hemp fibers for more natural and eco-friendly products. The oils of the plant can be used for food and extracts as a huge health benefit of our bodies Endocannabinoid System.

Part of the advocacy is in educating people about the needs and health benefits of hemp products as well as its eco-friendly sustainability. While educating people about the benefits of hemp people would ask us where they could get quality hemp products. Their plan is to provide more products made from hemp as the industry develops new items. Since the U.S. has finally made hemp legal to grow and cultivate we will see more and more hemp goods being made available. At first, they’ve focused on providing high-quality clothing, salves, lotions, extracts, oils and foods with more products added over time.

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

Subscribe to our show!

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Hemp Straws And The Sustainability Of Hemp: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 63 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “Hemp Straws And The Sustainability Of Hemp”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp podcast, brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education. Welcome back to the Ministry of Hemp podcast. And I know we’ve been talking about hemp plastic a lot on the show, but there’s been a lot coming out about hemp plastic, and bio-plastics, that’s really exciting, today on the show we’re going to talk about some new completely biodegradable hemp plastics that are out there that hopefully are going to take the place of a lot of single use plastics on the market right now. But before we get to that, let’s talk about straws for a second.

Matt Baum:
Did you know that almost 500 million straws are used a day in the United States, and of those 500 million I’m going to say close to a 100% only get used once and then thrown away. Now this plastic finds its way into the ocean, into our landfills all over the place. And it’s not good for you. It’s not good for animals. It’s not good for the planet. It’s not good for anyone.

Matt Baum:
And while 500 million straws can sound like a crazy, huge number. And it is, that makes up for less than 1% of plastic pollution, which is sheer insanity. This information is coming from an article from stanford.edu, and I’ll have a link to it in the show notes, but it blows my mind. Now the good news is, there are States like Washington that have banned plastic straws. McDonald’s is moving away from plastic straws, Starbucks also did the same thing this year, and look, I don’t think paper straws are the answer either because they’re awful.

Matt Baum:
They just melt, and cutting down trees to make paper straws is not an answer. Now, there are people out there making a completely biodegradable hemp plastic. And today we start off talking about straws. My conversation today is with, Carolyn Virostek. She’s the distributor for exhemplarylife.com, who deals in all cool hemp products, including hemp straws.

Matt Baum:
And we just happen to give some away on our Instagram and at the end of the show, stay tuned because I get to reveal the winners on the end of the show. Super fun. Right? And I’m going to have a coupon code for you guys for 25% off your purchase at exhemplarylife.com. So, stay tuned for the end of the show for all of that, but first here’s my conversation with Carolyn about hemp plastic, hemp straws, and how we can make a more responsible and biodegradable plant-based plastic.

Hemp straws and the problem of plastic pollution

Matt Baum:
Carolyn, before we get into it, we’re going to talk about, I don’t even know what to call it quite honestly. You sent me these straws, and I looked at them and I said, “These look like plastic. They feel like plastic, when I drink out of them it feels like plastic in my mouth, but it’s not plastic. What am I holding here? What did I drink through the other day?”

Carolyn Virostek:
They absolutely do look like plastic. They feel like it, they don’t hold up as long as plastic, which is what the purpose of them is, because we don’t want them to last a 100-1000 years, our environment and our animals don’t need that. They are hemp-based product made out of hemp biomass. And then, we have two other products that we don’t actually divulge it’s proprietary, but none of it is PLA, which is something that a lot of plastics end up using if they’re trying to be compostable or biodegradable.

Carolyn Virostek:
Especially in the hemp industry, or really in a lot of the plastic industry where they’re trying to come up with alternative to fossil fuel plastics. They will use PLAs, sometimes a PHA, but the PLAs are the biggest ones, which, I don’t want to sound like I’m negative against PLAs, they’re great because they are a plant base, but they still have their issues with how they break down, how they need to be composted and broken down in the right environment.

Matt Baum:
Sure. So, real quick, can I ask you, what is a PLA? I have no idea, or a PLH? No clue.

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s an organic based polylactic acid, that is used as a binder within plastics as we call them. And plastic really is a term really basically, of anything that has the malleability that we can use in different products where it’s going to hold up under different circumstances. We have hard plastic, soft plastic, et cetera, but PLA is going to be an organic compound that is used as a binding agent.

Matt Baum:
Same with PLH?

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. A lot of times it’s made out of corn starch, sugar cane, and now they’re even starting to make it out of other products too, even coconut shells. So PLAs can be made from many different products.

Matt Baum:
But in these PLA products, they still have plastic in them. They’re still petroleum-based plastics that these are incorporated into?

Carolyn Virostek:
No. That’s the difference, PLAs won’t have the petroleum base. It is an advantage to use the PLAs, because we’re not using the petroleum-base, because that’s a completely different animal. And that’s what we’re trying to get away from, because petroleum-based takes so much more energy to produce, actually just to extract from the earth, to refine it and then produce it.

Carolyn Virostek:
That in itself is toxic to the environment as well as the actual product. And then what do you do with that product when you’re done with it? After drinking that water bottle that you just had for maybe an hour, what are you going to do with it? And what’s going to happen to it? Or you throw it in the garbage and it’s there for 1000 years.

Matt Baum:
Right. Aliens, discover it after human society has been wiped from the earth and go, “Well, I wonder what they did with this trash.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. Why did they make these? What’s this purposed for? It really does make you think about, “Well, do we really need all these plastics all the time? And how long is it going to be in our environment?” And we’re finding that it’s not good, that we are finding huge portions of it on islands where humans have not even inhabited, but here these plastics are washing up on shores.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. And like rafts of plastic that gather in the middle of the ocean and stuff, it’s insane, it’s absolutely insane.

Carolyn Virostek:
It is. And we just keep making more and more plastic, because the oil industry puts a lot of money into it and they want to keep it going.

Matt Baum:
It’s cheap too. So why not?

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s very cheap according to them. Now that brings into another conversation I have, we can say, “Yeah, it’s cheap, plastics are cheap.” And that’s the comparison between our straws, is that, our straws are more expensive than plastic. And that’s one of the issues that people have with it. And my comment as well, “You can either pay for it now, or you can pay for it later.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Because when you use plastics that are oil-based, first of all, you do pay for it. In that you’re extracting a finite material from the earth. We can’t make more of that. Whereas hemp, we can grow it every couple of months, every few months we’ve got a whole new crop.

Matt Baum:
Exactly.

Carolyn Virostek:
And it also is great for the environment. We’re not causing more toxicity by growing hemp, whereas oil, how it’s even processed and refined that takes toxicity, puts toxic waste into the environment. So right then and there, we do want to look at the cost to the environment, just in bringing it to the market. And then when we have a product just like in plastics, in our bottles or our hemp straws, one, we find it out in the rivers or out in the creeks or wherever we are.

Matt Baum:
Or in the bellies of dead animals even.

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly, in the ocean, and then we’re losing animals because they’re eating it. It goes back to where we find the material, we have to go and get it. You’ve got to bring it in from the trash that it is, the pollution that it is. Then we have to find a way to process it. Process it into a new material to make something new.

Carolyn Virostek:
If we do that, a lot of times, many countries still burn all their plastics. So we’re increasing the toxic waste into the environment by burning it. But for them, it’s a lot easier to be able to just burn it than to actually process it into something new.

Matt Baum:
It’s cheap, right?

Carolyn Virostek:
That’s what they say, it’s cheap.

Matt Baum:
You can put those blinders on and just say, “Well, yeah, but it’s less expensive, and it does the job. And I don’t have to think about it when it gets thrown away.” But that’s not the case. Just like you said, we are pulling oil out of the earth. We are then doing something toxic to the environment to create this plastic straw that you use one time, you literally use one time and then you throw it away. And then the earth pays for it for 1000 damn years.

The problem with PLAs

Matt Baum:
We know we’re trying to get away from that, and PLH is a step better, but it’s not as good as what’s being used in these hemp straws. Now, what is the difference? You said PLH, doesn’t quite break down the same basically. It’s less durable, or it’s more durable, before we get into what’s in the hemp straws, What is the problem with PLAs?

Carolyn Virostek:
The problem with that is, and even some chemists are still debating on what it is, as far as, are PLAs biodegradable, or are they just degradable?

Matt Baum:
So we don’t even know?

Carolyn:
There’s debate, you can get one scientist. “Well, no, it’s absolutely biodegradable.” And another one will go, “It breaks down, but it’s not really biodegradable.” If we even look at that, if I can just come up with a biodegradable versus compostable, that’s the other thing, if something is deemed certified compostable, it’s also biodegradable, but something that’s biodegradable is not compostable.

Matt Baum:
Yes. Not all things that are biodegradable are compostable, but all things that are compostable are biodegradable?

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. And with the PLAs, they do debate on that. And we can say it does degrade, but it just takes longer. So PLAs can biodegrade in, as I’ve seen it as short as four years, but the average is about 80 years. So again, it will break down and it doesn’t have the toxic residue that an oil-based plastic will, if it were to break down, but it still has a cost to the environment, because these PLAs as a plastic, quote-unquote, “Break down into smaller finer materials, which then become microplastics.”

Carolyn Virostek:
And those microplastics are what we’re finding in the billions in the oceans and our creeks, and even in the glaciers, and even at the top of the mountains where it’s actually raining and snowing down in those particles, they’re such fine particles. We do find plastic bottles, plastic bags, in the stomachs of the sea life.

Carolyn Virostek:
But we’re also finding these microplastics in the smaller forms. They can’t eat a big bottle, but they’re still eating these microplastics thinking that they’re food, and they’re either dying from it or they’re carrying it on to us. So even our urine, they’re finding huge amounts of microplastics in our system.

Matt Baum:
So does it break down? Yes. But it breaks down just into really small plastic. It doesn’t break down into something that is combustible even, or compostable. It’s just really, really little pieces. And that’s not an answer either. We don’t want that.

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. With compostable, something that’s compostable, that’s going to break down and may compost. Then we can use that, that’s something usable, but when it just breaks down into microplastics, into smaller parts of it, it’s not usable and it’s not ideal.

Matt Baum:
And still dangerous.

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s still dangerous. I don’t want to make it out to be this horrible thing, because it’s a lot better than using the fossil fuels, but we still have to move a little further along to make it the right product.

Hemp straws & how they’re made

Matt Baum:
So tell me about the hemp straws then. What are these made of, and how does something that feels so completely plastic, both in your mouth and in your hand and does the job, how is it completely compostable?

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, the biggest thing is the plant, hemp. You and I both are advocates of the hemp plant.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely, it’s why we are here.

Carolyn Virostek:
Because, it can do so much for us. How many plants do we know that you could use the seeds, the fiber and the pulp, and make so many products? One of the big taglines is that, hemp can make 25,000 products. Well, that’s actually a disservice. I think it can make a lot more than 25,000 products.

Matt Baum:
Oh yeah. Totally agree.

Carolyn Virostek:
Hemp is a cellulose based product as a plant, it has cellulose just like sugar, just like the sugar cane would, even has cellulose. These are products that are used in quote-unquote “Plastics to make material.” Because, cellulose is the binding agent. It helps to support that. And as you look at hemp, the stalks and the biomass, it’s very fibrous, it’s much more fibers than wood, and that’s what gives us its strength too.

Carolyn Virostek:
If we can make hemp into say, a fine powder, and compress it under heat with some other elements that are plant-based too, is what we use. Those can actually form a very strong material in a very simple way. It can be complicated, but then it can also be very simplified. You can watch YouTube videos, where people make this in their kitchen, where they take cornstarch and water, heat it up and they make a little plastic out of it. So, hemp that’s what we’re doing also, is we’re taking hemp and making it very fine powder, like a starch and adding other materials to help bind it. And then it gets heated up and formed into straws.

Matt Baum:
So, it literally melts basically, and the cellulose works with the other binders and holds it together. And at that point you can form it just like plastic? You put it around a dowel and it becomes a straw?

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly. Exactly. They do make them into little pellets, just like they do with the plastic, so that they can put it into the extruder machines, so they don’t have to adapt the machines for the product, but the product gets adapted for the machines. With that, then the pellets are made very small, just so they can be added to the machine. And then they get melted within that process, going through the extruder and that’s what helps to make them, now there are many products that can be made out of it too. And that’s in the futures bags, cups, you name it.

Matt Baum:
Sure. Sure. Now let me ask you, is clear a problem. Because I’ve heard in hemp plastics clear is very difficult, because of the nature of the plant green and brown, super easy?

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly, super easy.

Matt Baum:
But clear seems to be a problem still?

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. Yeah. You can’t really do a clear straw, but you can do an opaque straw or we do add colors and the colors that we add are standard colors that we are able to use in the industry that are, I’m not gonna say completely plant-based natural, but they are more natural. They are able to use them to color it into any color that you need. But people do like the natural color as a hemp straw though.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It makes sense that it’s green. It comes from hemp. I like it. It differentiates it, if nothing else. Let me ask, I take my hemp straw, I drink my drink, I throw my hemp straw away or I compost it. I actually have a compost pile in my backyard. Take it out, throw in the compost pile. How long before it’s gone?

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, it depends on your compost really, because anytime you… I would love to say that every single one’s going to compost in a certain time, but it’s going to be different. In fact, industrial composting is going to be the fastest and the best because they’re going to control the oxygen in there. They’re going to control the heat and even the microbes and all the little critters that are going to go in there and eat it up to make it into compost. How that’s going to be in your compost, is going to vary. How’s it going to change from day to day, let alone month to month, with all the different seasons.

Matt Baum:
Sure. So, let’s say industrial compost, a best case scenario?

Carolyn Virostek:
We’ve seen them biodegrade completely in 120 days.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing. That’s like paper.

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. When we look at the compost, there’s really nothing that’s in there. There’s no residue. That’s the other great thing, is that a lot of times you will find some residue from that because of some of the materials that they use gunks up the systems, and facilities that are compostable facilities are very picky about what they allow in, because it will mess up their whole system.

Carolyn Virostek:
And so, you have to be certified through the BPI world compostable and biodegradable. They will give you certifications on your product, which we do have. In fact, here in Pittsburgh, we have a company that does do the compost, and they actually go around to the restaurants and bring in all their compostable material, and they found our straws and they contacted us because they said, “Are you guys really compostable? Can you share that with me?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And gave him the information.

Carolyn Virostek:
Because he said, “Otherwise we have to pull it out.” Because it’ll just gunk up the system. I said, “No, you really will not have an issue with it.” And that’s something that you can’t say about every product that is a PLA, and even PLAs if you send them in the landfill, people think, “Oh, we’re in the landfill, if it’s biodegradable it will breakdown.” Actually it won’t, because landfills seal them up and you have no oxygen, without oxygen it’s not going to break down, and it can actually create more methane gas. It’s same as a plastic, if it’s trying to break down in that environment, because it’s not the appropriate environment.

Matt Baum:
So, I say it’s like for a month and we say no more food garbage, your food garbage goes over here. And we’ll compost that because it’s so much methane builds up when you seal it and put it away in an airtight coffin. You’ve basically created a bomb, a methane bomb at that point. Is this different than other hemp plastics? Because, I’ve spoken to some people recently on the show and brought up that like, “Oh yeah, I just did an interview with some people about hemp plastic and stuff.”

Is hemp plastic really sustainable?

Matt Baum:
And a couple of them are like, “Oh, hemp plastic? Huh. You know about that?” And I was like, “Well, I don’t follow. What do you mean?” And they’re like, “It’s a lot of hemp filler, and it’s still a lot of plastic.” Is this different than that? Have you encountered that elsewhere? And are they lying to me? Because, I’ve bought some hemp plastic products and felt really good. Like, “It’s made of hemp plastic.” Does that mean that there are different levels of this, and you’ve got to watch out for it basically?

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. If you look at say the 3d printers, which is a lot of hemp plastic, which again, I think it’s great that they’re using hemp and they’re wanting to make things compostable and biodegradable. But a lot of them are going to be with a PLA or PHA, which is another one too, which is actually really good. I think it would be better if we did start using PHAs more than the PLAs, but they’re still not using that.

Carolyn Virostek:
But a lot of the 3d plastic filament, I’ve not been able to find one that does not have PLAs in there. Now, they do have different components even, or I should say substance, or where it might be 25% hemp, 40%, 60%. There’s very few companies that do anything to 90, to a 100%. Now there is a company that is in France and even in Canada, where they have really a much higher percentage of hemp in their plastic.

Carolyn Virostek:
Again, we use that term. But in their filaments, they do have a much better process that they’re using and they’re trying to break into the industry and they’re doing well with it, but there’s still very few companies that are doing that.

Matt Baum:
What can you look for? I’m just curious. Is there a question that you can ask? Is there something you can look for, when you see someone that is working with hemp plastic or some way? What do I ask them to make sure… I understand it’s good that they’re using any hemp as a filler, because less plastic better, but if it’s just a filler and there’s still plastic in it, or there’s these PLAs in it and whatnot, what is the question we should be asking to make sure that we’re getting responsibly made hemp plastic, that’s going to break down and it is compostable? Is it just as simple as saying, “Hey, is this compostable?”

Carolyn Virostek:
That’s one of the questions, yeah. “Is it compostable?” And how long does it take? And also, is it a PLA? If it’s a PLA, then we know that it’s going to break down into microplastics and it’s going to take longer for it to break down, and it’s not going to be compostable it’s biodegradable, but not compostable.

Matt Baum:
And they’re going to know, if I say the word, “Hey are their PLAs in this?” They’re going to go, “Oh, this guy knows what he’s talking about.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, they’re going to say, “Yeah, there are PLAs, but it’s compostable.” And that’s okay. Yeah, it is. I would much rather have a 25% hemp than a no hemp, and 25% with PLA than an oil based fossil fuel that they’re using.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Carolyn Virostek:
That would be one thing, “Are you using any fossil fuels?” Because some will still even use PLA with some fossil fuels to bind it up, to make a little bit stronger, but then we changed the compostable ability as well as the bio-degradability.

Matt Baum:
That’s exactly the subject that was brought up with the person I was speaking with, who I’m not going to name because they asked me not to, because they’re like, “I don’t want to mess up anyone else’s good thing.” And he’s like, “But a lot of these people that are working in hemp plastic now are literally just incorporating it into old fashion oil-based plastics and using it as a filler.” Which again, better but not the answer, not what we want.

Matt Baum:
The idea is to move to something closer to these hemp straws that like you said, “Reduce in to powder, you’re adding some…” And I’m not sure, I’m not even me to look for the scientific terms, what you add to make a bind, but you heat it up and boom, we have plastic. What is the future of this? Where does this go? Is this something that you… The straws I think are so important, because if you look at single waste plastic, that is the biggest form of plastic waste out there.

The future of hemp straws

Matt Baum:
It’s not children’s toys, or even industrial plastics, it’s single use plastic. So, obviously like you said, these are a little more expensive, but the idea behind it, is it’s more responsible. Are people responding to that? Are people excited about this? Are people willing to spend a little more? And do you think this is something that is going to catch on and start to get major plastic producers to pay attention?

Carolyn Virostek:
Absolutely. There’s an excitement about it, because of the property of hemp, as well as not having the PLAs. And it is more expensive. So it is something that we have to try to get them to understand, that you either pay for it now or pay for it later. You can either pay for the straws as a cheap component and then pay for it later in the processing of having to get it off the beaches and out of the waters, et cetera, or you pay a little bit more now and then that worry is less.

Carolyn Virostek:
We still have to be responsible in how we dispose them and how we compost them. But it’s something that, if it does end up in the ocean or in the waters, it’s going to break down and we don’t have to be so concerned about the toxic residue that it might leave behind.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It’s perfect.

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s very exciting. We have a lot of people excited about it. I will say the environment right now with the pandemic, everything’s shut down. It’s cooled things off, but what it has done also is made people more excited about realizing we need to do something now, this is not something that we need to put off for five years or try to work it into the budget because again, we either pay for them now, or we pay for that cost later. And I think right now people are really excited about having something that they know is going to break down and is not going to linger in our environment for years and years.

Matt Baum:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but sounds it like, I would guess anyway, that the price is only high because there aren’t a lot of people making this stuff yet. And as more people get into the business of making hemp plastic, that price is going to come down. Is it just a matter of producers? Because it seems like every aspect of the hemp business at present, and not just at present, but in the last we’ll say four years, their biggest issue has been finding producers to do the work.

Matt Baum:
Basically, we’ve got farmers, that’ll grow it and that’s great. But what happens next? Whether it’s going to a place that’s going to extract CBD, or take out the fiber or grind the seeds, is this just another case of, “We just need more people doing this?”

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. And knowing how to do it. Absolutely, because even though we are farming a lot more hemp than we were even a year ago. And a lot of companies say we’ve got so much biomass that we don’t even have the buyers for it. What it is, is that they actually don’t have the equipment or the know-how, to process it the way that they want it to, and that machinery is millions and millions of dollars.

Carolyn Virostek:
They’re bringing it out, but we’re in the growing pains, of learning how to use this product and how to use it in the best way that we can environmentally and being able to process it without any waste too. Because, we really can’t use the entire plant. We just need to know how and have the proper equipment. So, we’re in a big learning curve right now, growing pains with that.

Matt Baum:
How far off do you think we are? And just call your shot. No, one’s going to hold you to this. No, one’s going to look at the podcast in five years and be like, “Nice call.” But how far off do you think we are before, I go to Starbucks and I get a hemp straw?

Carolyn Virostek:
I’m hoping a year to two years.

Matt Baum:
Wow. Really?

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. That’s absolutely my hope.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Carolyn Virostek:
I will say that we had really big clients on the list, until the pandemic shut everything down. Really big companies similar to Starbucks. So it’s on the cusp there. People are wanting and ready. It’s just now we’ve we need the economy to just support it too.

Matt Baum:
So we’ve got the machines, we know how to do it. We’ve got people growing it, now it’s just a matter of showing people. Not only is this the responsible thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. And it’s a cost-effective thing to do, if we put a little know-how into it and that’s basically it, that’s our biggest issue. Just getting them to try it more or less.

Growing hemp for sustainability

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. Yeah. And then it will come down to a point where we do need more farmers for that biomass, because one farm is not going to be able to supply the biomass for Starbucks.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Carolyn Virostek:
That’s our hope, is that we have so much demand for it that we need more farmers to be able to supply that biomass.

Matt Baum:
It also seems like there’s a lot of farmers that went into this, with the CBD gold rush idea where like, “I’m going to grow hemp and sell to CBD weirdos, and they’re going to turn it into all kinds of fake drugs for hippies and I’m going to make money.” And then they went, “Oh, that market’s not quite there.”

Matt Baum:
And in the meantime, the fiber farmers weren’t as plentiful. Because again, it seems like they’re won as many, I want to say, industrial companies that were working in hemp fiber, is that part of the issue too? Just convincing people that like, “Hey, it’s not all CBD. We can grow this for fiber and seed as well?”

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s that as well as the machinery. In order to break the hemp down into the product that you need it for, whether it’s for clothing or for, quote-unquote “plastics.” It’s having the correct machinery to break it down. And that I think is what has slowed a lot of companies down into processing it. The hemp is the passion of mine. I really do think that we should be using it more. I feel I know maybe a half a percent of what we could know about the plant, but I think we’re still learning.

Matt Baum:
That’s the most exciting part though, right?

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
It’s like, how many other plants out there that farmers in the United States, in Iowa, in Nebraska, in Kentucky, in Colorado are growing right now where we’re like, “Oh my God, there’s so much more we could do with this.” What can we learn about this? It’s like, if we found out, like, “Look at that corn, we can build skyscrapers out of it.” Who knew?

Carolyn Virostek:
Who knew we could refill a car out of the corn oil?

Matt Baum:
Right. It’s crazy.

Carolyn:
We can do it, but are we doing it? That’s the same thing with hemp. We can make all these products. Why aren’t we?

Matt Baum:
Exactly.

Carolyn Virostek:
One, it is the infrastructure is not there. Also, we still have regulations that limit what can be done, in some States they’re not allowed to use the biomass or the fibers or anything for animal bedding, even just simple as that, or animal feed.

Matt Baum:
Let alone animal feed. They won’t even let them lay around in it for a fair. Like, is the cow going to get stoned? Come on, it’s ridiculous.

Carolyn Virostek:
Those things just make you question like, “Really, why aren’t we using it more?” Just like flax, that’s a plant too that can be used, and my great, great grandfather brought it over from Ireland in the 1850s to Canada. And I didn’t realize this until a few years ago when I started looking at the hemp and then I realized that he actually wrote a book in Canada about flax and the importance of flax for the fiber, for clothing, for so many different things, for food. He had a big part in bringing flax over to North America, but we’re still not using flax even to the point where we could be. Hemp is the same thing.

Matt Baum:
We put it in smoothies, and that’s about it, because it helps in digestion. Right? You can do so much more with it. It’s crazy.

Carolyn Virostek:
With hemp, even making clothing and building materials, if you’ve seen hemp wood, there’s a company, Hemp Wood.

Matt Baum:
I just interviewed them. I just interviewed them on the show. They were fantastic.

Carolyn Virostek:
I love their wood. With Hempcrete, what I think we should be doing is, especially in California, Colorado, Oregon, with all these forest fires, we need to rebuild with hemp, because if you can put a blow torch on hempcrete, why aren’t we building-

Matt Baum:
Same with hemp wood. Hemp wood barely burns, it’s crazy.

Carolyn Virostek:
And they’re antibacterial, antimicrobial. Why aren’t we using this down in South when they’ve got all these floods and hurricanes, because if it gets wet, all you got to do is bring in a dehumidifier and let it dry out.

Matt Baum:
Right. And you are good to go.

Carolyn Virostek:
Whereas now you got to tear down the whole structure because it turns to mold and mildew within three days.

Matt Baum:
Oh, but there’s a whole cottage industry for that too. So they might not be happy about losing their jobs.

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly. And that’s why the fossil fuel industry pays $125 million a year to lobby, to keep their oils in the plastic industry. It’s just the same thing with everything else. I think we’re going to be moving towards that more and more, building materials, clothing, containers, furniture, I really hope that we can.

Matt Baum:
It’s unavoidable, because oil is going to get more and more expensive and more and more bizarre. And the ways we have to find it, we’re filtering it out of sand and stuff now, it’s going to get more and more expensive, and hemp like you said, they can grow it in a month.

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. And it doesn’t have toxic byproducts. If you fracking all that toxic byproducts that comes from the waters and it contaminates that, where is how it actually can heal the land. And creates more carbon dioxide for us. And it really can help in healing the planet. So yeah. Why aren’t we using more of it? And it’s all political, but we’re getting there.

Matt Baum:
Of course. It’s going to happen. I feel good about it. You feel good about it, we feel good about it. Right?

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, the other thing is that if you look at Europe, they’re way ahead of the game, they’ve been making clothes for decades. Now, they’re even making their cars out of hemp, the internal components, the dashboards and things are made out of hemp because it’s stronger, it’s lighter weight. So it makes the gas mileage even better.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. I interviewed a company that works with Maserati, Mercedes. It’s not like they’re making junk here. They’re making hemp plastic for very expensive high-end cars. And I asked him, “Why don’t we do this in the US?” And he goes, “Well, we don’t really want to mess with all your BS right now, as soon as you guys figure it out, we’ll be there.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. It’s got to make you question. Why is it that Europe is already making them, but we don’t have the American car manufacturer?

Matt Baum:
It’s shamefully stupid, is what it is.

Carolyn Virostek:
We also know that cars don’t have to rely on fossil fuels. Right? We can be using corn oil, hemp oil to run our cars.

Matt Baum:
Or electricity.

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. They want to tax people if they use solar energy. And it’s government regulations that are backed by these big corporations that are feeling threatened. And that’s why we lost cannabis to begin with in the 1930s, was because of political and corporate concern about getting into their space. And we’re just dealing with that in 2020.

Matt Baum:
That’s why they’re hesitating to bring it back too. I don’t want to take up any more of your time. This has been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for the straws. They’re great.

Carolyn Virostek:
Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you, Matt. I really appreciate you having me on, and making me feel at ease.

Matt Baum:
Totally. I took a box of the straws up to my local coffee shop and I was like, “Check it out. These are hemp straws.” And they were like, “Oh my God, these are amazing.” It’s like super or liberal, where you go to see dudes having Marxist conversations and stuff in Omaha, in our little blue pocket of Nebraska here in Omaha, but they loved them. So I’ll put them in touch. I’ll definitely put them in touch so they can order some.

Carolyn Virostek:
Great. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it.

Hemp straws contest winners & Exhemplary Life coupon

Matt Baum:
Carolyn was wonderful to talk to, and she’s the type of person that is very passionate about hemp. And I love speaking to people like that. Funny story, when she initially started and I told her I wasn’t going to mention this on the show, but I thought it was funny enough that you guys should know.

Matt Baum:
When we first started talking, she was really worried that we may not be able to use the interview, because she doesn’t normally talk about this stuff. And she’s not from a science background, but as you can see, she is very well-versed in hemp plastics and bio-plastics, and it was so nice to talk to her. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Carolyn, I will have links to exhemplarylife.com in the show notes. And, like I promised you, if you use the coupon code 25 off that’s 25OFF, you will get 25% off your first purchase at exhemplarylife.com. That’s 25OFF, 25 off use that code.

Matt Baum:
Let them know that you heard about their site here on the Ministry of Hemp podcast and let them know that you appreciate what they are doing on their site. And as always, because we believe that the world is a better place for all when it’s more accessible, we have a full written transcript of this show in the show notes as well.

Matt Baum:
And now it’s contest time as promised. I get to announce the three winners of our exemplary life and Ministry of Hemp, Instagram giveaway, congratulations to @ritualsofthekitchen, @xtra_salt_xtra_lime, and @Kateanne27. You are all big winners of hemp straws and Ministry of Hemp stickers. So go tell every money you win big, when you listen to the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Oh, follow us on Instagram too, more about that in just a moment.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
And that brings us to the end of another exciting episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. If you dig what we do here on this show, and you think that hemp can change the world, the best way you can support us is to go to Patreon.com/ministryofhemp and become a Ministry of Hemp insider. It is an awesome way to help us spread the word. And you could access to podcast extras, early articles, all kinds of other stuff, not to mention you can feel better knowing you’re helping us spread the good word of hemp education.

Matt Baum:
And if you need more hemp education in your life, get over to ministryofhemp.com. Check out all our awesome articles there. Follow us on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook, we are either at Ministry of Hemp or /Ministry of Hemp, maybe you got hemp questions. Maybe you’ve got some subjects you’d like to hear me talk about on the show.

Matt Baum:
Call me, leave me a message. And tell me about it. 402-819-6417. Leave me a message on our Ministry of Hemp voice line. And I might answer your question on the show with little help and Drew and Kate and maybe even Deseret who you’re going to hear from soon. She’s great. She’s our videographer. We love her. Again, that number is 402-819-6417. Call us, ask your questions and you might hear us answer them right here on the show.

Matt Baum:
Now, I hope you all have a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Remember to wash your hands. I hope you’re not traveling. And if you are out there and be extra careful, please wear a mask the time for me to get out of here. And I like to sign off the same way every time by saying, “Remember to take care of yourself, remember to take care of others and make good decisions, will you?” This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp.
Signing off.

The post Hemp Straws And The Sustainability Of Hemp With Exhemplary Life appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Getting back to nature is not just a catchy phrase but our absolute mindset. The inconvenient truth is our planet is drowning in plastic with no signs of slowing down. It is estimated that more than 8 BILLION METRIC TONS of plastic has been created since the early 1950’s. Nearly half of this number was made after the year 2000, according to Roland Geyer at the University of California at Santa Barbara. There is a growing problem with plastic packaging that we can no longer overlook. 

Getting back to nature needs to be more than a catchphrase.

The Absolute Nature team took a hard look in the mirror and decided to act to make more sustainable CBD. Even if what we come up with is small, changes must be made, and any change is better than doing nothing at all.

How were we to even begin? What should we do? Our meetings became less about customer acquisition and marketing strategies and more about how we can clean our own house. We became passionate about doing our best to limit and eventually remove all plastic packaging and non-biodegradable materials, in house.

Our hope in this article is to put aside selfish gains of capitalizing on a new customer base but to do our part in waking up the community. Our goal is to set up a viable path that will educate and inspire others to help cut down plastic waste within our own industry and within their own lives. We believe a sustainable CBD industry is a real possibility, if we act collectively.

Plastic pollution: A reason for action

Plastics have played a dominating role in the packaging of goods. Everything from what we eat to what we use to entertain ourselves with is built from and or coated in plastics. Plastics offer an easily sourced and low-cost solution to packaging needs that most businesses see as their only option. Plastic can be molded and colored to fit any companies branding. Low cost, easy to store, and safe to use for the most part. 

Unfortunately, plastics also have a side to them that is not as flattering. One-time use plastic packaging adds up in time with just the amount made for one person. Now multiple that on a scale of billions over 50 years and it won’t be hard to imagine the problems our grandchildren will inherit.

This is a fast-moving train that shows no signs of slowing down. 8 Billion Metric tons is hard to even comprehend, much less know where to even begin in tackling this issue. We asked Ministry of Hemp to help raise awareness of this issue and do what we can to help get this message out. 

Where to start? 

It starts with just a single step in the right direction and staying committed and disciplined to see it through. There are so many places to start and work on.

Don’t stress yourself out hitting all the points at once. Creating sustainable CBD is a process that will eat a lot of resources to achieve. Start where you can and build upon that. It took us almost a year to get here and we are still not finished! 

Sustainable CBD starts with the technology 

Our first change was not even reducing plastics!

We made our first move by cutting down our carbon footprint with the servers we use. Believe it or not, data centers account for 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, which is as much as the airline industry! Experts expect data center pollution to grow to 14% of total emissions by 2040.

With this in mind, we hired GreenGeeks for our data center needs. GreenGeeks began in 2008 and, built on a commitment to be the most eco-friendly web hosting company in the world. By 2009, GreenGeeks was recognized by the United States Environmental Agency as a Green Power Partner. GreenGeeks works with environmental foundations to purchase wind energy credits to put back into the grid three times the amount of energy Absolute Nature consumes.

This was just the first step we took in reducing our carbon footprint. 

Making CBD packing & shipping more sustainable

Our next goal was to tackle our packing/shipping procedures. We started with removing bubble wrap and Styrofoam peanuts from our shipping packages. We had to rework and set in place new policies and procedures for our warehouse employees to streamline this new way of packing and shipping product. Though this may seem like a small thing, it’s a lot harder to break old habits and start brand new ones at the drop of a hat.

We really want to praise our hard-working employees to take this change in stride! We replaced the bubble wrap with thick brown packing paper that is neatly rolled and secured shut. Then, we replaced styrofoam peanuts with now bio-degradable pellets. There is an extra cost in doing this that we have to absorb, but we believe it’s worth doing. 

Using glass instead of plastic

The next item we looked at tackling was the plastic bottles we used for our products. Our hemp flower was sold in plastic pop top bottles. We sourced glass jars to replace the plastic pop tops. This was nearly a 70% increase in packaging cost right from the start. But for us, ethics over profits.

We then removed the plastic bottles for our Fruit Chew line to also use glass jars. For pre-rolls, we use glass tubes with cork tops. Our next move is to move our softgels to glass tinted jars next.

Again, starting anywhere is better than not starting at all. We refuse to sit back and do nothing! 

We can work together to make the CBD industry more sustainable

Absolute Nature is committed to not only offer the best CBD products on the market but do it in a responsible and respectful way to the environment.

We look forward to a time in the future where our tiny ripple in the market changes to a tidal wave of change. If the hemp community works together, we can tackle sustainability head-on. We believe if we can put aside our difference and work together towards a common goal, we can achieve anything.

Try Absolute Nature CBD: Whether you’re part of a CBD brand or just an everyday hemp consumer, we hope you’ll give Absolute Nature a try! Use coupon code Ministry to get 40% off your order!

The post Sustainable CBD Packaging: Getting Back To Nature appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

First, our host Matt begins the Ministry of Hemp podcast with a word about our new Best CBD Pre-Rolls 2020 article. It’s full of great info pertaining to pre-rolled CBD cigarettes and hemp joints, which a lot of you have been asking about lately.

In the main conversation, Matt talks with Jordan Hinshaw, CEO of GreenTek Packaging. GreenTek’s misson is to replace everyday plastics with eco-friendly hemp plastic. The two talk about the benefits of not just hemp plastics but pairing them with other bioplastics too. They compare hemp and regular plastic in both strength, applications, and sustainability. Plus they discuss Greentek’s latest venture, Hemptensils which they hope to become a responsible replacement for single-use plastic silverware.

About Jordan Hinshaw & GreenTek Packaging

The Son of Major Leaguer George Hinshaw and a bilingual Los Angeles teacher/principal, Jordan developed a unique perspective on American Exceptionalism in the diverse city of Long Beach, CA. Having spent the early part of his twenties living and working in 20 states, Mexico, Canada, and briefly in Japan, he grew a clear understanding of the impact of climate change and plastic waste on the environment.

Idolizing the work of William H. Deming, Jordan’s belief in the future strength of the American economy being based on domestic manufacturing and renewable resources has guided his work towards innovations in industrial hemp. Following stints with both manufacturing and fulfillment companies whose supply chains were entrenched overseas, Jordan, along with a team of industry resources engineers andadvisors, established GreenTek in 2019. Now, they work to grow its offerings of eco-friendly packaging and housewares using domestic hemp and other plant feedstocks.

Brought to you by Canvas 1839

This episode is brought to you with help from our partners at Canvas 1839. This Austin, TX brand creates high quality CBD oil and CBD topicals using Colorado-grown, full-spectrum hemp extract. They develop their great products with the help of their chief science officer, Dr. Kyle Hammerick, a Stanford graduate.

We’re big fans of Canvas 1839 products and think you should try them too. And right now you can get 15% off your order just for being a listener to this show. Head to canvasrelief.com and use the code friend15 and you get 15% off your purchase. Thanks again, Canvas, for making this episode possible.

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

Subscribe to our show!

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Bioplastics and hemp utensils: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 55 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “CBD Testing & Stopping Bad CBD Oil”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast brought to you by Ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.

Matt Baum:
(singing)

Matt Baum:
Today on the show, we’re going to talk about hemp plastics. What are we really talking about, when we talk about hemp plastic? Let’s be honest, we’re talking about garbage, because plastic makes up not only the bulk of our garbage that we throw away, but it also sticks around longer than just about anything we throw away. Today on the show, I’m going to talk to a guy named Jordan Hinshaw. He’s the CEO of GreenTek Plastics. He is working on incorporating hemp plastic, into some very simple every day things that we use, single use plastics like containers and utensils. It’s an awesome conversation. This is the kind of guy that’s really going to change things, and I’m so excited for you to hear from him.

Matt Baum:
But before we get into that, I want to let you know that, we are once again partnered with Canvas 1839. They’re centered out of Austin, Texas they’re buddies of ours, and they are a fantastic CBD brand. You guys are constantly hitting us up and asking us, “Who can I trust? Who should I buy from?” Canvas is one of those companies that is doing it right, and we are super proud to partner with them. Later on the show, I’m going to tell you how you can get 15% off your first order from Canvasrelief.com. Huge thanks to canvas for partnering with us.

Ministry of Hemp picks the best CBD pre-rolls

Matt Baum:
Before we get into the interview real quick, a lot of people have been contacting both the site and me, asking about pre-rolls, about smokable hemp. We’ve got a fantastic article up at Ministryofhemp.com right now. It’s all about the companies that are doing it right, from growing their hemp, to drying it, to putting it into their pre-roll, so you know exactly what you’re getting, and exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. Now, we’re not going to tell you that smoking is healthier. There’s dangers to smoking. Yes. If you’re inhaling smoke, you’re doing something that is not great for your lungs. But, if you’re doing it in limited amounts, to help with pain, appetite, anxiety, things that CBD really can help, there are very quick benefits to smoking hemp.

Matt Baum:
But, if you are going to smoke him, of course, we want you to do it with caution and in moderation. I’ve linked this article in the show notes for this episode. I’ve tried a few myself and I have to say, I really like smokable hemp, but again, only in moderation.

Meet Jordan Hinshaw

Matt Baum:
My conversation today is with Jordan Hinshaw. He’s the CEO of GreenTek Packaging, and Jordan is awesome. [inaudible 00:02:48] here he came up in the cannabis industry, and saw a real chance for hemp to become a plastic substitute, that could literally change the world. GreenTek is a manufacturing company out of the South Bay in Long Beach. They emphasize community improvement and sustainable economics. You’re going to hear him talk about responsibility before profit. I cannot stress how important and cool their mission is. This is my conversation with Jordan Hinshaw of GreenTek Packaging.

Matt Baum:
Jordan, before we get into it, why don’t you tell me what makes a guy like you decide, “Hey, I want to open a company that not only is dealing with hemp in a time where it’s still pretty wild west and scary, but I want to take on the plastics company, and show people that we can make the same stuff out of hemp.” Where did this come from? How does this start?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah, no. It was kind of organic, no pun intended. The idea was floating around in Long Beach and in the cannabis space for some time, that you have all this raw material that’s not being used, and new advances in technology. So, I just wanted to be part of the forefront of that push, and saw it as purpose over profits. Coming out of my previous career, where I was well-paid for what I was doing and enjoyed it, but just didn’t feel like I was making an impact in a larger industrial way.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Luckily, I had the background of in engineering. I was at Cal Poly alumni, where I studied mechanical engineering, and Cal State, East Bay alumni, where I was doing industrial engineering studies in the off seasons on their quarter system, before that evaporated. So, I just felt like it was a next point for my skillsets and my interests.

Matt Baum:
So, what drew you specifically to the cannabis? Were you working in that? Cannabis obviously has been legal in California for quite a while, or did you just notice like, “Hey, there’s a real business here and a real opportunity that people aren’t seizing on.” Was it just that simple?

Jordan Hinshaw:
A bit of both. So, I’ve been a well integrated. Like you said, California has been legal for some time in the cannabis space. I myself, I’m a member of the Long Beach Collective Association, as is our company, and I had done some work with… I’ve worked through the supply chain of cannabis a bit, more on the logistics side, fulfillment, even down to being able to go to the fields and see how they operate, and do that side of the business since I was… I’m 30 now, so it’s about a decade ago when that started.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Jordan Hinshaw:
It was just kind of the tinglings of someone who’s interested in that space, and understands and respects that it’s more than just psychoactives and good times. There’s actual industry and innovation going on.

Introducing GreenTek Packaging

Matt Baum:
Tell me about GreenTek. How did it start? Right now, you’re moving into the utensils, which is how I found you. I saw a press release and I was like, “This is freaking amazing and exactly the kind of stuff we need to be doing with hemp.” How did GreenTek get started? What was the first products?

Jordan Hinshaw:
The first products were all based on packaging for the cannabis industry. We were prototyping a ton of containers that had a balance of like rigid aspects with the base, and some elastomers that we were going to make them airtight, and try to offer something that was industrially compostable and made from plant based matter. We were courting some rather large pre-roll companies, like flower companies that were doing units at 50,000 or 100,000 per month, where we would justify some custom materials that were a bit over in the luxury range of pricing, but were environmentally much more beneficial.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, you’re making a statement, definitely. If you’re going to grow this stuff right, and you’re going to talk about how important it is to farm it, and do it the right way, you may as well package it the right way too, right?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Exactly. That’s all feedback from the consumer base. That’s all based on how people in general are moving in that direction. The companies don’t want to be too far behind it, so they’re trying to match solutions with revenue.

The challenges of developing hemp bioplastics

Matt Baum:
So, what was the most difficult part? Like when you guys started this and you decided, “Okay, we want to move into hemp plastics and whatnot,” we call it hemp plastics, but there’s no petroleum in it. What was the hardest part in developing that kind of stuff, and also getting it to the consumer, who’s going to buy it and package their stuff? When I say the consumer, the companies. Was it difficult to sell them on the idea that like, “Hey, this is going to be a little more expensive, but look, it does the same job. Not just that, you can throw this away and not feel guilty about it.” Was that all it took to sell them on it?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Right. So yeah, if you were able to make it as concise and well put as you did, absolutely. It’s a massive undertaking.

Matt Baum:
If you guys are hiring, let me know. This sounds cool.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Very well done, right? It was a massive undertaking, and a supply chain management challenge where, you got new infrastructures, new machinery that’s being placed around the nation, farmers that are just getting into their swing of things in terms of production and specifics of how it comes out. So, it’s working with those groups collectively, understanding our own capabilities, to be able to offer pricing that is measurable to the value add in their operations.

Matt Baum:
Right, right.

Jordan Hinshaw:
We’ve had some swings and misses for sure. We’ve had some really big players that came to us and asked us to work with them, and then kind of got an idea where the pricing was, and was like, “Well, we’re going to hold off a little bit longer.” But, we’ve also had a lot of smaller businesses that are much closer to their consumer, that are much more quick to say, “We understand the intrinsic value of what you’re doing here,” because the externalities of us continuing to make plastics are outweighing the small pennies that we’re saving by using them.

Why bioplastics are more expensive

Matt Baum:
Absolutely. Let me ask you, when you said you had like some bigger companies that came in, and they looked at the pricing, and obviously they’re going off bottom line in a case like that, is it just a matter of catching up technology-wise to bring that price down? Or, is it a matter of more people growing hemp? Is it a matter of more processing, better processing? What do you think pushes that price point down to a point where you can say something like, “Hey McDonald’s or Hey, Walmart…” Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of health food stores and the whole foods and whatnot, but they’re not going to change the world at the price point they’re selling food at. We’re going to change the world by getting this stuff in frigging Walmart, you know?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Right.

Matt Baum:
What do you see as the biggest hurdle to getting that price down? What do you think?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Right. I think it’s mainly the second by comparison of those aspects. Scale really is a huge thing, and you have to walk that up. It’s speculative to guess that everything is going to go perfectly well when you go from selling 100,000 units to 100 million units.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Jordan Hinshaw:
So, there’s a brick by brick aspect of building the industry, where you want traction to grow in an organic manner, to a point where you can be confident to say, “Hey, look McDonald’s, we have this proven process here. Delivering at this scale would allow us to be price competitive within 10 or 20%,” and have them say, “Yeah, yeah, we see the work you’ve done. We believe in that enough to invest, and make that switch over, without having to deal with all of kinks and issues that any expanding business would deal with.”

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Jordan Hinshaw:
On the other side, yes, supplies. There’s actually a glut of a material right now. I think last year, industrial hemp acreage increased to about 125,000 acres in the nation, up from the tens of thousands a few years back. 60% plus of that didn’t have scheduled offtake. So, you’ve got a lot of material out there, that’s going to actually push down the price the more of it you use. But, you just need to be organized supply chain wise, where your processing is within range of where you’re doing it, and you’re able to coordinate all the pricing, so that you can guarantee that, “Hey McDonald’s, you will have it, as we say it will be,” for example.

Creating Hemptensils hemp utensils

Matt Baum:
Let me ask you, as far as… I was reading the press cue you guys have coming out, and it sounds like this utensil thing, people are pretty excited about this. I thought it was cool as hell. But, take me through it. We don’t have to do the hardcore science or anything, but take me through the process, like, the hemp comes in and it ends up as plastic. How does that work? That just sounds nuts.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah, pretty cool stuff. Essentially, anytime you work with the stalks of the plant, the lignocellulose, you have an opportunity to extract the sugars from it, which build the starches. In that process, you’re creating the same polymers that are used in petroleum plastic. It’s when they make it from oil or in a large amount of cases, natural gas.

Matt Baum:
Literally the same polymers? Like no difference? That’s-

Jordan Hinshaw:
Similar. There are differences, depending on the formulation that you use. There’s mixes of sugarcane, of cornstarch, of different materials that have different properties, and they tend to… You tend to trade off between sturdiness or toughness versus flexibility, which has been a pretty big challenge for a lot of a lot of our products. Where, the more hemp fiber you have in it, the stronger and lighter weight it is by density, but oftentimes it doesn’t have that type of like pop-pop capability that people are often used to.

Matt Baum:
Basically, you’re not using the leaves, you’re using the stems, and you’re de-coordinating them, if you will.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Decorticating. Yes, that’s-

Matt Baum:
Decorticating, got it.

Jordan Hinshaw:
… That’s a word if you type into Word, it will always have a little red squiggly underneath it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, yeah. I even practiced saying it, and I still got it wrong. That’s great. But from that point, it comes in as like little pellets basically, that you’re turning it into? Then those pellets, are you literally melting them into forms from there?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Right. That’s the process, whether by injection or extrusion, in some cases some compression molding and thermoforming, to heat it to 190 degrees, 210, 240, and press it into an extremely heavy tooling. In some cases, 1400 pound steel item that is water cooled around it, so that once it goes in, it’s able to pop out as the perfect shape of what you made it, designed to be.

Matt Baum:
Just like you would with plastic basically, but no petroleum.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah, yeah, a very similar process. Absolutely. The only difference obviously is in processing temperatures, and cycle times, and aspects that have to do with how the material wears on the tooling. So, it’s not as transferable, where in a lot of cases, the material dictates how you actually build the tooling. Ours are unique to these types of materials.

Comparing hemp bioplastic and petro-plastic

Matt Baum:
Let me ask you differences between this hemp plastic and petroleum plastic. Is it a matter of like strength or transparency? What are the major differences? Are there pros, cons? Let’s just take the ecology side out of it for a minute, and just discuss raw pros and cons of stability, what it looks like, stuff like that.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Right. So, the material we’ve been working with has a really natural color to it, that natural hemp brown. So, transparent items have not been… We’ve not been able to achieve that aspect. But, you can always add color additives that are nontoxic, if you so choose, to make it black or brown or blue, whatever other colors that are optional.

Matt Baum:
Sure. So, clear is not really an option yet.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Not in hemp, no. Obviously, the biomass itself has that natural tinge, and so you’d be hard pressed to try to make that-

Matt Baum:
It’s green, right? What are you going to do?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah, exactly. But luckily, it’s a nice hazelnut color, hazelnut hemp.

Matt Baum:
Cool.

Jordan Hinshaw:
So, it’s kind of got a nice visual aesthetic to it. So, we’re not too ashamed of that.

A message from Canvas 1839

Matt Baum:
Let’s take a quick break, to talk about our partner this week, Canvas 1839, centered out of Austin, Texas, which also happens to be the de facto home of Ministry of Hemp, because Kit lives there. Canvas strives to make products with the highest efficacy based on proprietary science, with the help of their Chief Science Officer and Stanford grad. Dr. Kyle Hammerick’s pioneering work in nanoscale biology. Canvas currently offers a relief oil that is crafted with Colorado grown, full spectrum hemp extract, grown under organic practices to support your wellbeing in mind and body.

Matt Baum:
Each one ounce bottle contains 300 milligrams of CBD, which is 10 milligrams per dropper. Now, they sent me a bottle and I have to say, normally, 10 milligrams of CBD isn’t enough for me, but I’ve really been enjoying it. I’ve been taking the relief oil in the mornings with my coffee, and I feel like it brings me in for a soft landing, as I get to work. I’m focused and I’m awake, but the Canvas relief oil keeps me from my usual ADD morning coffee rush. It’s actually helped with some of the aches and pains that I’ve been dealing with, since I started boxing training again.

Matt Baum:
They also offer a luxurious relief cream that is specifically formulated for optimal transdermal penetration and absorption, which means, when you rub it on your skin, it actually goes into your skin. It leaves a very clean skin field with no residue whatsoever. There’s 500 milligrams of CBD in each two jar. My wife, who’s an aerobics instructor and owns a gym has been using it, and she loves it. It’s become a part of her post-workout shower regime. Canvas is a company that is just doing it right. That’s why we’re proud to partner with them. They know their farmers, they have third party lab results readily available. Right now, you can get 15% off your order, just for being a listener to this show. Head to Canvasrelief.com and use the code Friend15, and you get 15% off your purchase.

Matt Baum:
I would recommend their starter pack. That features the two products they sent me, the relief oil and the relief cream, and both are fantastic. That’s Friend15, all one word. Of course, I will have a link to Canvasrelief.com in the show notes, for this episode. Now, back to the show.

Bioplastics vs. fossil fuels

Jordan Hinshaw:
Besides that, obviously the heat implications, depending on product thickness, it’s designed to allow heat and bacteria to eat away at it.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Jordan Hinshaw:
So, while it holds up on a shelf just fine for years, if you do apply it to higher pressure, a higher heat environment, it’s going to start to soften in a way that actually no other plastic really does. We did some testing on some basic corn plastics, and they tend to break at a certain temperature change.

Matt Baum:
They get real brittle, right?

Jordan Hinshaw:
[crosstalk 00:19:16] shaped. Yeah, brittle. Whereas the hemp plastic, actually, it doesn’t get brittle, it gets really elastic. It’s really flexible.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah. So, we were testing it out, we dumped it in boiling waters for a period of time. All we had to do was dip it back in cold water and it solidified right back into it’s shape, and we were able to bang it against the table.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool.

Jordan Hinshaw:
It was really interesting.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool. Do you think that’s a difference in sugar content of the corn versus the hemp basically?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah. The content of the hemp itself, the nature of fibers, just their resilience lends towards that more flexibility under pressure, rather than just snapping overall.

Matt Baum:
Sure. So, what about raw strength of the product itself? How does that compare to like plastic? Is it stronger, the same, not quite as strong? What are we talking?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Rank well, as it’s stronger. There’s evidence there since the ’40s, where they were doing a Ford, if you’ve ever heard of that experiment, he was putting it in his-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, his car and stuff, right?

Jordan Hinshaw:
In the walls of his car, and taking hammers to it. That’s actually still been going on. I believe Mercedes, if not BMW, has a line of doors, their lining that’s more than carbon fiber, it’s hemp fiber.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. I just interviewed those guys actually a couple of weeks ago.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Very nice. Essentially, strength is never a trade off. You’re actually increasing your density. So, compared to most of the exact same weight, you’re going to have a stronger product for certain. The main differences are more chemical based where, there’s a lot of compatiblizers, additives and such that they add, that often have these toxins and stuff. Without getting too much into it, that can affect temperature and barrier properties, where they’re able to resist more caustic environments.

Matt Baum:
Right, right.

Jordan Hinshaw:
These are for your lunch at the break room.

Matt Baum:
Right. This is stuff that you want to disappear when you throw it away. You don’t want it to stick around forever.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
Speaking of temperature, obviously plastic burns at a certain temperature, and it gives off all kinds of caustic fumes and stuff. What about hemp plastic? Does it burn the same? What happens when you apply fire to it?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Like you said, with little petroleum plastics, and it’s a great question, they do emit a lot of greenhouse gases as they burn up or break down. Carbon dioxide is released as a process of breaking down most… That’s when they say it’s carcinogenic, whatever. But, the hemp itself is more of a plant based matter. So, it has less of a negative impact in that way. But that being said, I have not actually set these on fire on purpose. So, I’ll have to add that to the list.

Matt Baum:
Would you be willing to burn something right now?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Right. You know what? That’s a great point.

The biodegradability of hemp plastic

Matt Baum:
I’m just curious. You start thinking about the ecology side, which I want to talk about next. Obviously, this stuff isn’t meant to be permanent. The idea is, this is temporary packaging for a cupcake, or your lunch, or something like that. What’s the difference if I take, let’s say a hemp packaging that is like a bag, for example, and I bury it next to a plastic bag in my backyard, or maybe I don’t even bury it, I sit them outside in my backyard. That plastic bag is going to be different thousands of years. How long… What happens to this hemp bag? How long does it take to break down?

Jordan Hinshaw:
In an aerobic environment like that, where it’s just sitting on top of the ground-

Matt Baum:
Right. Aerobic meaning air can get to it, right?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Sorry, say it again?

Matt Baum:
Aerobic meaning air can get to it more or less.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Right, right, right. You’re still going to be facing dozens of years, where the hemp plastic will hang around, because it’s actually more about the bacteria and the soil, like the environment itself, that’s allowing it to become a food source for, well I wouldn’t say fauna, but for the environment around it. So, what you’re really looking for is for it to be able to get back into the food chain, or the environment of soil or dirt or, and obviously ideally a compost. But, if it does get in those environments with ability to break down, then it could be as short as six months.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Jordan Hinshaw:
How I see it evaporate.

Matt Baum:
That’s crazy.

Jordan Hinshaw:
The trade off there… Yeah, it’s pretty big. That’s why we’re really concentrated on pushing this element because, we understand that there’s a ton of politicians, a ton of legislation that is looking to solve all these problems of getting away from plastics, but that requires development of these composting centers, circular economies, and production of plant based materials.

Matt Baum:
So, I can compost. I compost on my backyard right now. I can compost this. If you send me something in hemp plastic, I can take it out, eat it, have a nice little meal and then throw the scraps, the vegetable scraps and the bag into my compost, and it’ll break down.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah. About half of all the industrial composting centers, they do that on a pretty regular basis. I think it’s important that we try to move away from recycling.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Not move away from it necessarily, but look to materials that are going to provide some alternatives, just for the obvious reason that for one, a lot of recycling doesn’t get done. And then two, these plant based materials actually are not ideal for recycling. These are designed to be that type of degradable material. So, we’ve got some different experiments going on right now, we’ve got the B5511, which is an [inaudible 00:25:29] one, where they’re doing it in a backyard compost center. Then, there’s a few different methods that we’re testing out, so that we can really get a hard number on exactly how long they’ll take. But, that’s the idea. We really want to see higher quality compost going on, and we want to give them the feed stock that makes that possible.

The demand for hemp plastic utensils

Matt Baum:
And making a temporary product, like you said, that we don’t have to worry about. When you’re done with it, you don’t have to feel guilty. Speaking of which, let’s talk about the utensils. You guys have a big thing coming out right now. You just partnered with British Columbia. Can you name who it is yet, or is it still let’s keep it under wraps?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Well, we’ve already been under a distribution agreement with them, so it’s not necessarily a secret. It’s a company called Follow The Leader Distribution Company. They were really adamant about offering new eco-friendly solutions for packaging in that legal cannabis market there, and have since expanded. So, we were wanting to make sure that we sent them what they needed to that market there. Obviously, without overshooting, I’d say that the Canadians are in the advanced awareness state or acceptance state of the challenges of climate change, and are constantly looking to invest and find ways to bring those to fruition.

Jordan Hinshaw:
We’ve got a number of distributors that are spread out, and it just happens at two of them are in Canada, one there in BC, and a new one that we’re working on in Toronto. So, it’s no secret or anything, but it was encouraging to know that companies from all around the globe have been reaching out to us to see, “Hey, what can we do?” Which is just ironic in the sense that, we’re here in one of the top economies in the world, and these other countries are saying, “Hey, let’s-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, we like to make fun of Canada, like they’re our little brother, but they typically make us look pretty bad when it comes to stuff like climate science.

Jordan Hinshaw:
You got it.

Matt Baum:
It’s sad, unfortunately. Now, tell me about the utensils. How did you develop this? It’s like a fork, and a spork and a spoon, but they’re made of hemp plastic. It almost looks like they’re made out of wood, because of the color you said, that they have, and straws as well, hemp straws. Tell me they’re better than paper straws, because paper straws, they’re the worst.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Absolutely, yeah. The hemp straws are the big winner. We’re trying to get that prepared for a much larger scale launch because, we understand there’s just so many bars, restaurants, places of business, that are looking for an-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, absolutely, coffee shops.

Jordan Hinshaw:
… Alternative. In my mom’s generation, they were using paper straws, so it’s not a revolutionary thing to have them, and nobody liked them then either.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, they were garbage.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah. The ideas, bamboo… I go to the store and cost-plus goods, and they’ve got bamboo straws that they’re selling for $1 a unit. We just knew that there’s got to be a middle ground there between the paper straws, which are doing a good thing and, and trying to reduce that. But using hemp as a feedstock, a material not neither a crop, a food crop nor forestry, rather than that paper. So, we’ve been experimenting with that for the last six weeks, and trying to get everything on point to break that the hemp straw out.

Matt Baum:
That’s so cool.

Jordan Hinshaw:
As far as the utensils, I’ve got a partner who helps with the CAD design, and try to engineer it based on material specs. Then, you get a large EDM machine out and start cutting steel. There’s steps and stages, but it’s been a fun process for sure.

Matt Baum:
My wife and I, we have those metal straws you can buy, and that’s great, you’re not throwing away plastic. But, you are introducing more metal straws, that are also made with gnarly chemicals, and they’re to be around forever. Whereas like the bamboo straw, like you said, great idea, too expensive. It’s just too expensive. Bamboo is an amazing plant, but it doesn’t grow as fast as hemp. It’s not as cheap and easy to grow. The same thing with reusable bags, and water bottles and stuff like that, it’s great, and we should be doing that stuff. But, we’re also creating an army of bags and water bottles, that will be around for the next 100,000 years, you know?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah.

The future of GreenTek Packaging

Matt Baum:
So, what do you think the future is for you guys? Where do you go from here? What’s next?

Jordan Hinshaw:
It’s really interesting that you say that. I think with the reusable bags, there’s some stat. You’ve got to use them at least 28 times for them to even justify, because of the additional industrial waste or impact from making them. A lot of steel, the metals are no different in that way. That’s the idea is that, we believe that hemp itself is that carbon neutral solution. So, obviously as it grows, especially purpose grown for fiber, it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than any other crop.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Jordan Hinshaw:
So, what you’re finding is that, by growing it and then using it in manufacturing processes, which often in bioplastics already have lower emissions, you’re striking basically a sustainable supply chain. So, that’s kind of what we’re focused on. We’re trying to say, “Listen, it’s not just about the actual bioplastic result, and the fact that it’s better at the end of life. It’s about the entire chain, and how we’re using our domestic economy to its fullest, our own agricultural resources to develop products, innovate in those products, and become more independent as a nation, creating jobs, all that.” So, that’s our focus. We’ve got some different pilot programs for some technology to be developed, that’s going to make it as cost competitive as possible. But, we just understand that it’s an invigorating leg up for America.

Matt Baum:
Definitely, definitely.

Jordan Hinshaw:
So, that’s kind of where we see ourselves going.

Matt Baum:
How far away am I from hemp plastic bags in my grocery store? What am I talking 5 years, 15 years? What do you think?

Jordan Hinshaw:
Certainly within five years, I think you could see that. I know there are some groups that are already trying to develop some blown film options with that. Again, I think it’s going to be a matter of which companies buy-in, to lock in those kinds of purchase orders, and justify those supply chains first. But, I think within the next five years, you’re going to see some options that are those lines. If it took 10, then it was a policy problem. It was something to do with-

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Jordan Hinshaw:
… Our nation not invigorating and pushing for these types of things. But, there’s some cool stuff coming down the wire.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool to hear you say that though, because just to hear someone that’s in the industry say like, “Yeah, we can do this, and it is going to take a few years, but it’s not going to take 10 years. We’re learning, we’re kicking ass here, and it’s more a matter of don’t hold us back, than it is, we need to come up with brand new technology and the future we’re talking about.” I’m really happy to hear you say that. Let me ask you, what is the one plastic product that you are most excited about replacing with hemp plastics, that you think makes the biggest difference in the world?

Bioplastics and a more sustainable world

Jordan Hinshaw:
The biggest difference in the world? Well, let’s start from top down. If you look at 50% of all plastics that are made, those are usually single use. So, you’re really talking about these subscription food boxes, these take to go boxes and take out.

Matt Baum:
Yes.

Jordan Hinshaw:
You’re looking at things that are consumed in the pounds per day, per person, that really would impact the waste that’s gathering up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now. Some of the most common ones are our medical containers, pharmaceuticals and such, that really could be made from bioplastic materials, and are shipping out again all around the world. Being here in Long Beach, when I go to the beach, which I love my city, but it’s not one of the cleanest beaches by far.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I’ve been there. I know what you mean.

Jordan Hinshaw:
That’s what you find.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. You find hypodermic needles and pill boxes and stuff, yeah, unfortunately.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Unfortunately. It doesn’t make me happy. But, those are some of the things that I think, if those were integrated from renewable resources, you’d have a real acknowledgeable impact in plastic waste.

Matt Baum:
Making a real change. You’re absolutely right. It’s that crap that we don’t think about, that we use every day, the container for your pills, the container your lunch came in, and stuff like that. How far off do you think we are from developing a clear plastic? Is that out of the question or is it just a matter of like, “Hey, we’ll figure it out. It’s coming.”

Jordan Hinshaw:
Again, it’s just material sources. When you’re talking about bioplastics in general, there’s a lot of options, from the material for tapioca all the way to sugarcane.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Now they’ve got some mycelium with mushrooms, and different options.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, that’s really cool too. They’re doing a lot of stuff there.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Yeah. We’ve been wanting to work with them for some time. They’re so overwhelmed with demand themselves, that you’ve got to go down there and knock on their door in-person.

Matt Baum:
I’m sure. That’s a good problem to have though. That means they’re busy. That means they’re kicking ass, hopefully.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s a product that people want, and it’s a classy product. It’s a really nice looking final product. But no, my point just being that, is that technology coming? Yes. Is it something in the immediate future? I don’t think so. If you choose to do it with some of the older materials, obviously bioplastics have been around for much longer than you’d imagine, when you don’t involve the hemp itself, you can find some clearer plastics. I think World Centric makes some clear bioplastics, although I’m not sure exactly what their formulation is, in terms of petrol, corn, whatever the balance may be.

Matt Baum:
But, you’re saying there’s no reason why there couldn’t be a combination of two things. You have your hemp plastic thing on the bottom, and then on top, maybe you have a mycelium plastic or some other type of bioplastic.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Exactly, yeah. Again, it’s just going from, right now, I think 1% of all plastics are made from bio renewable resources. So, it’s going from that to an increase in margin, increase in part of the market, where you’re going to find those type of combinations and solutions are more prevalent.

Matt Baum:
I ask because I was a chef for a long time, and working in kitchens, clear plastics, we literally go through tons of that stuff. You’ve got to be able to see what’s in it. So, when you’re in a hurry, you open it up and there’s a bag of label that and you can see it’s perfectly good, we’ll just grab it and go. When that bag is empty, you can’t reuse it because the health code won’t even let you. That’s against the law. You have to throw that crap away. Every time I did it, it just felt gross. Every time you wrap something in cling wrap, every time you threw something in a freezer bag, and you thought it out and then you just throw it away, it’s perfectly good, it’s going to be around for the next 50,000 years, but you can’t use it again. That’s the kind of stuff that’s another single use plastics, if we can start to replace that.

Jordan Hinshaw:
That’s what the overarching… GreenTek Packaging, obviously we focus on the division, and manufacturing these products, developing them, and providing them to the market, but in reality, GreenTek Planet is like, “Well, let’s combine those different resources.” Like for example, with the cellophanes, you’ve got some seaweed aspects there, that are moving towards making these thinner, more clear or see-through materials. Those are going to be the type of advances that cover a lot of the more unseen or low weight solutions for the bags and the options that you’re talking about. I think that that’s really where the pendulum is going to need to swing, to see those turtle suffocating items, not end up in the cycle. Again, I’m not sure to what level or what advancement specifically is going to turn that tide, but I know that we are a part of the group that’s pushing for that.

Jordan Hinshaw:
So, obviously it’s been a great opportunity to chat with you, and I’m thankful that we did connect. We’ve been doing a lot in terms of outreach, and understanding that while some of the larger companies are going to be challenges to knock the door of, it’s a grassroots movement. It’s the people behind this that really make this a viable objective. So, as far as plugging us, I’d say, come reach out if you guys are interested. If anybody has any custom projects or ideas that they want to see come to fruition, we’re available, Greentekplanet.com, and shop utensils, if people wanted to buy some of the products.

Jordan Hinshaw:
Our big push and our big reason for doing businesses is to impact disadvantaged communities. I came from one, the north side of Long Beach, and I understand that the waste ends up in these places, I understand that the jobs don’t go to these places, and that the community needs help. So, working with that, there’s a lot of community events, a lot of cleanups, a lot of food giveaways. We were doing some last week that… I just really want to be able to connect with the city on, and my team on. So, if there’s any questions, I’d definitely be open.

Matt Baum:
Cool. It sounds like you guys are doing it right. You’re buying American, you’re using American hemp, you’re repurposing waste hemp to do this stuff, you’re putting jobs in the community, this is the dream, right? This is what it’s all about. Let’s get-

Jordan Hinshaw:
Living the dream brother.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
Yeah, let’s get behind this people, come on. I want to send huge, thanks to Jordan for coming on the show. I will have links to GreenTek Packaging in the show notes for this episode, so you can check out all the cool things they’re doing over there. Like he said, if you have custom needs and you want to work with hemp plastic, they are the company to contact. Now, not to get too political here, but listen to what he was saying about American jobs, and working in the community, and using American hemp, and keeping it all here without any need for petroleum, and other gnarly chemicals that are not only bad for the environment, but we even outsource from other countries. I can’t think of anything more American than what is going on in the hemp movement right now, with companies like GreenTek Packaging. I’m just happy they’re out there.

Matt Baum:
(Singing)

Matt Baum:
That’s about it for this episode. But again, I want to thank Canvas CBD for partnering with us. Don’t forget, go to Canvasrelief.com, use the code Friend15, for 15% off your purchase, and let them know that you want to help them, and you think it’s awesome that they are supporting ministryofhemp.com. Speaking of supporting ministryofhemp.com, if you like what we’re doing here, and you think that hemp can probably change the world, head overdue Patreon\ministryofhemp, and become a Ministry of Hemp insider. Any amount you give makes you an insider, and it gives you access to early articles, podcast extras, and all kinds of other stuff. But more than that, it helps us get the good word of hemp out to other people.

Matt Baum:
Also, leave us a star rating, or a written review on wherever you’re listening to the podcast. This show is available anywhere you can download podcasts, and your reviews and star ratings and thumbs up or whatever they have, it really helps put us in front of other listeners. But, we don’t just do it for listeners either. Here at the Ministry of Hemp, we believe that an accessible world is a better world for everyone. So, we have a full written transcript for this episode in the show notes, over at ministryofhemp.com. Speaking of ministryofhemp.com, don’t forget to check out our latest article on the best CBD pre-rolls of 2020 that I mentioned in the beginning of the show.

Matt Baum:
If that’s not enough, you can always find us on all our social medias, at Ministryofhemp\ministryofhemp. We’re always kicking out great links to quality companies, quality news stories, and good old hemp education. All right. It’s time for me to get out of here, and I like to end the show the same way every week. I like to say, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others and make good decisions will you? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp, signing off.

The post Bioplastics And Hemp Utensils With GreenTek Packaging appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In theory, farming hemp should not be considered damaging to the earth at all. In fact, hemp can be regenerative to the soil on which it’s farmed.

Yet due to the dramatic consumer demand that companies are rushing to meet, many companies (and thus farmers) are now focused on making as much hemp as possible leaving little to no attention on its quality or the soil on which it was grown on. Our legislation is to blame as well: the law which legalized hemp can lead to the forced excessive destruction of perfectly healthy hemp plants. 

Many of us know the hemp industry through its various CBD products, ointments, salves & oils. What many of us don’t know is that those very same products are the result of a complex system of moving parts, spanning across the country, involving thousands of people. What many of us cannot see are the highly specific intricacies at every step, and how they might affect the environment and community around them. Currently, the hemp industry is at an impasse with the environmentalist ideals that it is usually associated with, as there are many problems in the farming and production of hemp that is putting the environment at risk.

For an industry that prides itself on holistic and sustainable practices, it is vital to constantly challenge these practices, and to analyze what hemp can do better.

Sustainability and burning hemp plants

Today, we would like to focus precisely on how regulations can force farmers to burn entire harvests, and how that affects the immediate area around them.

Current regulations often force farmers to destroy their entire hemp harvests.

This article focuses on the start of the hemp supply chain to look at how legislative and market forces shape the hemp industry at the farming level. And how the industry can take steps forward to make themselves truly sustainable, and even reach beyond sustainability to regenerative agriculture. 

We asked two industry experts to weigh in on such this important subject. Joy Beckerman, former president of the Hemp Industries Association; principal consultant for Hemp Ace international as well as the regulatory officer and industry liaison for the CBD brand Elixinol; and John Roulac, founder of RE Botanicals & Nutiva. Their input was instrumental in creating this article.

A 5000′ view of the hemp industry and sustainability

Before we can properly draw a picture of the current state of hemp farming, we must first look at the entire industry and the context exists in.

Let’s remember we’ve pretty much gone from almost zero hemp production to a full on CBD “Gold Rush.” That’s thrown the entire industry for a loop. While it’s great that there is such a high demand for hemp-derived products, and the influx of money will ultimately be the reason why the industry will prosper, it that also means is that there are numerous organizations that are inexperienced and lack the proper infrastructure to meet consumer demand. More importantly, they can’t meet the high standards required for quality products.

In times of such extraordinary demand for hemp products, standards get ignored and corners get cut. This corner-cutting can sometimes go unnoticed, as the draw of profit can take up most people’s attention. 

Now with the proper context set up, we can effectively explore the farming of hemp. 

Burn it, Burn it All!

Under the guidelines set under the 2018 Farm Bill, hemp is only federally legal if it has less than 0.3% THC. By comparison, recreational or medicinal cannabis products found in legal dispensaries can have 15-25% THC or more.

These extremely low levels of THC need to be maintained at every step of the supply chain. For farmers, subtle factors like genetics or weather may lead to their plants exceeding this threshold. Under the law, this “hot” hemp must be destroyed.

Burning ‘hot’ hemp costs farmers and calls into question the ethics of a “sustainable” industry.

This policy is just one of many that have made the industrial farming of hemp much harder than it should be. Because of the relatively new market, many inexperienced farmers end up burning their entire season’s harvest, mainly due to these policies.

For the communities around these hemp farms, this means immediate and widespread air pollution with the added visual of having massive piles of freshly grown hemp being burned in open fields. Not only is it a pollutant and an eyesore, but it calls into question the ethics of a supposedly sustainable industry. The genesis of this article was a reader who wrote to us last year complaining about the smoke from nearby hemp farms.

For the hemp farmer, it’s extremely demoralizing, not to mention expensive. Hemp advocates suggest hemp can rebuild American agriculture. But a hot hemp field means watching that promise go up in smoke along with a farmer’s crops.

THC limit is arbitrary

But most of this can be prevented, as many of the policies around farming are arbitrary and still rooted in the stigma of the war on drugs. The biggest policy change that needs to be changed is, of course, the 0.3% rule.

As Joy Beckerman pointed out, “the current 0.3% THC threshold that industrial hemp is held to is a purely arbitrary number.”

“There is no strong scientific and tested backing to such percentage in hemp,” Beckerman continued.

She also maintains that there shouldn’t be a static/single-numbered cut-off point for industrial hemp, she pushes for a “margin-of-error” method that better fits the varying nature of growing plants — as well as the diverse uses or hemp. Which makes sense, since there are so many variables in growing industrial hemp, it is hard to always perfectly maintain a level below the arbitrary 0.3% mark.

She also commented on the inconsistencies amongst state-level legislature (states having varying THC cut-off points for industrial hemp), as that further dilutes the guidelines for the industry as a whole.

A problem of legal semantics

Joy Beckerman further attributes this problem in the sustainability of hemp farming to not just the regulations but the semantics of the hemp guidelines themselves.

When it comes to hot hemp, legislators are using words like “destroy” instead of “dispose.”

“Right now, legislators are using the words ‘destruction and destroy’ rather than words such as ‘dispose and disposal,'” she explained. “And while these simple words may seem insignificant to the naked eye, in the legal landscape, they are extremely meaningful.”

Changing such words could mean an end to the draconian tactic of burning masses of “hot hemp” and change the industry to not only be more efficient in growing hemp that fit the THC requirements, but when they do make a mistake and have a ‘bad batch’ of hemp, they can still find ways to utilize that wasted batch. 

For example, “hot hemp” could still be used in the creation of hemp fabric, or perhaps hempcrete building materials. It might even be used to generate power, instead of simply burning it in a field. This single change could open up new, sustainable avenues for using hemp and let farmers potentially recoup some of their lost profits.

From sustainable hemp to regenerative farming 

You know the old adage: when you use someone else’s stuff, leave it in better condition than when you found it.

For farmers, this is the ideal, as it means that they essentially make the soil they farm richer than before. This concept is known as regenerative agriculture, which is formally defined as “a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystem services.”

In the agricultural world, regenerative agriculture are becoming the standard that everyone aims for.

In theory, it should be easy to achieve regenerative farming with hemp. Hemp requires fewer resources than many other crops. Let’s take corn for example, which approximately takes up to two times more water to grow than hemp.

Hemp is also extremely robust. It has relatively few natural enemies, it’s extremely low maintenance and often grows in dense clusters that prevent weed growth. It requires few herbicides and little to no pesticides.

When grown at a large scale, the hemp fields can quickly become havens for pollinators, birds and various small animals, which promotes a better overall eco-system for the surrounding area. Then, when harvested, hemp leaves the fields it was grown on with plenty of left-over biomass, making the soil extremely nutrient-rich. 

Why hemp can be more sustainable

At least that’s the theory.

When talking to John Roulac of Nutiva and RE Botanicals, our conversation focused to the current mindset of the hemp industry itself.

“Most of the industry is not focused currently on soil health and whatever the fastest way it is to grow the plant, what they’re really focused on is the hemp seed itself.”

He suggested the focus is on the biggest, rather than most harvest. Roulac pointed out that the vast majority of the farmers are focused on this volume mindset, which he called a “gold rush mentality.”

Less than 1% of hemp farmers are certified organic, and most of the rest simply use synthetic fertilizer as its the cheapest option. He thinks the real problem behind the industry’s inconsistencies are the people themselves: they see themselves as business owners rather than cultivators working in unison with our planet.

Roulac previously appeared on the Ministry of Hemp podcast, where he expressed his passion for regenerative farming. That passion has been evident throughout his entire career and in his companies. To Roulac, the success of Nutiva and RE Botanicals are proof you don’t need to compromise between sustainability and economic viability.

A brighter, more sustainable future for hemp

While we must admit the overall tone of this article is focused on the bad parts of farming hemp, we believe that this is merely a roadblock on the way to a more sustainable future for hemp.

It’s easy to get focused on the bad, but with people like Joy Beckerman and John Roulac championing for a better, more sustainable industry, it is only a matter of time before we reach regenerative and zero-waste farming. 

Meanwhile, there’s also hope for sustainability at the other end of the supply chain. Companies such as 9Fiber, which we’ve written about before, seek to recycle hemp waste. With a focus on true sustainability growing throughout the hemp industry, we’re feeling more idealistic future about the future.

The post Sustainable Hemp Farming: Promoting Regenerative Agriculture In Hemp appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode, our host Matt talks with Doug, an NPR correspondent and activist author, about his upcoming book, “American Hemp Farmer: Adventures & Misadventures in the Cannabis Trade.” Doug tells us about growing hemp in New Mexico and also explains why a good sense of humor is important when trying to save the world.

We got our hands on a digital pre-release copy of “American Hemp Farmer” and just fell in love with it. The book is due out April 23 but can be pre-ordered today. We hope you do!

If you’d like to learn more about regenerative agriculture, check out our interview with John Roulac from a previous podcast episode.

Send us your feedback

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

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Growing Hemp with Doug Fine: Complete episode transcript

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum and this is the Ministry of Hemp podcast, brought to you by ministryofhemp.com. America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.

Matt Baum:
It’s the Ministry of Hemp podcast. My name is Matt and I’m your host. Today on the show I’m going to be talking to Doug Fine. He’s an author of the book, American Hemp Farmer, and I can’t wait for you guys to read this. But before any of that, I want to send a huge thanks to everybody that has checked out our Patreon page. You can find it at patreon.com/ministryofhemp. Of course, there’ll be a link to that in our show notes. And huge thank you to everybody that has decided to help support us in spreading hemp education and taking a stand for legal hemp in the United States. Seriously, thank you so much. It is so cool to have this kind of support.

Matt Baum:
Be sure to get over there and check out all the extras we have. We’ve got a newsletter that’ll keep you in touch with everything we’re doing in the Ministry of Hemp. I do podcast extras over there. We just threw up an article on Ministry of Hemp’s Time at South by Southwest. All kinds of cool stuff with several different levels. Please check it out and if you already have, again, thank you so much.

Matt Baum:
Doug Fine is a self-described solar powered goat herder, comedic investigative journalist, bestselling author, and pioneer voice in regenerative farming including cannabis and hemp. He has cultivated hemp for food and seed building in four U.S. states and teaches a Sterling College hemp class in Vermont. In addition, he’s an award winning culture and climate correspondent from five continents: NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among others. His books include American Hemp Farmer, Hemp Bound, Too High to Fail, Farewell, My Subaru, which was a Boston Globe bestseller, Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man and First Legal Harvest, a monograph that was printed on hemp paper.

Matt Baum:
Willie Nelson calls Doug’s work, “A blueprint for the America of the future.” The Washington Post says, “Fine is a storyteller in the mold of Douglas Adams.”

Matt Baum:
When I interviewed Doug for this show, I had read about half of his new book, American Hemp Farmer. And since I finished it. It is wonderful. Like I said, I can’t wait for you guys to read it.

Meet Doug Fine

Matt Baum:
Here’s my conversation with author, solar powered goat herder, and comedic investigative journalist, Doug Fine.

Matt Baum:
So Doug, you’ve got a new book coming out and this is your second book on hemp.

Doug Fine:
Yes. Well, it depends on how you count it. I’ll tell you this. It was, first, I wrote a book on psychoactive cannabis, regenerative psychoactive cannabis called Too High to Fail. And then wrote Hemp Bound. And then in between Hemp Bound and this new one, American Hemp Farmer, I put out a hemp printed monograph called First Legal Harvest, collaborated with the good folks at Colorado Hemp Company on that one. So you could argue this is my fourth.

Matt Baum:
Okay, fair enough. No, I’ll count it. That’s awesome by the way. So tell me how this got started, this journey. You’ve been a reporter for a long time and you’ve been an author sort of writing these long form reports on what you’re doing. How did you get started in this?

Doug Fine:
I’m an extreme left brain person. So I’m a real sort of verbal communicator. That’s where my skill set is. And it’s also, I do enjoy it, especially, when there’s humor involved in any kind of presentation. Whether it’s written or performance or anything, I love doing it. I feel very lucky that that’s who I am and what I’ve always been. The journey, though, to be covering cannabis hemp plant, I could talk to you about the origins and there are some cool origins to it. But what’s been sticking, Matt, with my mind lately is where we are now. And what I’ve learned about my own relationship with plants and all of our relationships with plants, there are people, of course, farmers, people who were born into farming, who understand their relationship with plants and how it’s as complicated and as interesting, at least, as relationships with animals and all that kind of thing.

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Doug Fine:
But totemically, I’ve always been more of an animal guy, really good with animals. It’s through journalism that I’ve learned about the cannabis plant and expanded my sort of, I guess, love and appreciation for plant’s intelligence.

Matt Baum:
Okay. So you were never a farmer. You never came from a farm background, right?

Doug Fine:
I came from the opposite. I came from… The way I kind of sum it up is the New York suburbs when Madonna was like a virgin.

Matt Baum:
Okay. That’s good. That’s really good. And you decided, “Oh, I’ve had all these outdoor adventures. I fell in love with goat herding. Why not grow hemp.” And just threw yourself into it.

Doug Fine:
Yeah. I lived in Alaska for a number of years and I subsistence fish there. I really learned about being a member of the animal kingdom in an ecosystem and loved it and wrote a book called Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man. And then wanting to see about being self-sufficient, energy wise, I moved to New Mexico where you can kind of point the solar panel down towards the ground, still get enough power for your day. And lived and continue to live that lifestyle. Wrote a book about that called Farewell My Subaru. And then was interested in the end of cannabis prohibition and the revival of hemp. But what was the catalyst to make it my next sort of mission was my next door neighbor in New Mexico. When I say that, I mean, very far away out at shouting distance when we were both in our home.

Doug Fine:
He’s a retired guy from Kodak. Minding his own business and self-medicating with cannabis for PTSD for military service. Not only gets raided but for a few plants and to which for amount that today is totally legal.

Matt Baum:
Right. Thank God they took him out though. We can’t have anything like that going on. How dangerous. I mean, a guy with a few plants taking care of himself. Good Lord.

Doug Fine:
Oh man. And putting all of us in danger actually. It was crazy. I don’t know if you’ve been around full-bore raids, but it was like living in apocalypse now. There was planes, helicopters, uniforms of every description. I had to wade through some machine guns to get past his ranch to my ranch and it was not okay.

Matt Baum:
If you’re going to put a raid on you may as well put on a show too, right? I mean, come on. Good Lord. So from there-

Doug Fine:
That’s what made me decide I was going to write about the end of the drug war. So I’ve been kind of off and on on that topic for the last 10 or so years. That’s what I’m doing. I’m putting my comedic investigated energy into cannabis. This time where I’m at, it’s about hemp industry has started. It’s for real.

Growing hemp in America

Doug Fine:
I’ve been part of it because I just don’t… I’m sick of pundits who talk about stuff and don’t actually do it themselves. So I’m going to try myself. I don’t consider myself an expert, but I’m five years into my own hemp planting, two or three years to my own product. And this new book is really about suggesting what mode…No, I’m sorry, just my own modes, but all the people I’ve met for being a successful entrepreneur as a farmer entrepreneur. In other words, regeneratively producing hemp in such a way that you’re doing good for your community, your family, your bottom line, but also for humanity’s climate change mitigation efforts.

Matt Baum:
Okay. One of the things that I loved from whatever… And I haven’t read the whole book, I read about half of it and I love the way you write. I love the humor you inject in it because otherwise this could be really dry and just come off as, “Oh great. Another hippie has decided he’s going to tell me a good way to do this stuff.” But I love that you made the choice not only am I going to discuss, basically, a 20 acre farm, I’m going to try to make a living on it too. What was that decision like? How did you… I mean, I would guess you’re a single, but you write about your wife and kids and stuff. How do you turn to the family and say, “Okay, not only am I going to write this book, I am going to write a book about how we try to live on this.” How did that decision play out in the family?

Doug Fine:
Definitely having a supportive family is vital and central and entire. If you’re going to be any kind of farmer or just any kind of entrepreneur, let alone both, everybody has to be on board. So for that, I’m extremely thankful. Very, very thankful.

Doug Fine:
In truth though, while I am on what I like to think of as a five year game plan for the product that I put out, I am lucky compared to many of the other people who are covered in the book in that my income is not dependent upon immediately selling large numbers of that product.

Matt Baum:
Right. It’s not that you didn’t start from zero and go, “Okay. Yeah, this is it. I’m not taking any money from book sales or anything.” No. I mean, I get that, which is good. I mean, you’ve got to live. I understand that.

Doug Fine:
But I am trying to be successful. I’ve got some great new partners for the product that I do… So I am trying to walk the walk. I appreciate the question, but in truth when we’re… So we’re dealing with some real code red issues in hemp. But I bet you’ve talked about here on Ministry of Hemp before in terms of the necessity of getting the THC level, at least, up to one to start. And changes that have to happen in the recent to the late last year’s draft regulations, USDA regulations.

Doug Fine:
So we have some code red stuff going on. For people who are depending on who have put all their nest egg and their livelihood and an investment into their hemp enterprise, these decisions getting fixed for farmer… This is not a joke for them. It’s not a joke for me either, but it’s just not as mission critical. I guess I can take a more relaxed approach to it than some people can.

Matt Baum:
But it is terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying. If you’re a farmer, you decide you’re going to grow this stuff and you’re going to do the research like you did. You had partners in Oregon, right, that you were working with to get your hemp plants?

Doug Fine:
Oregon and Vermont, both.

Growing hemp and making mistakess

Matt Baum:
Okay. What was that like when you decided, “All right, I know I need to go find a plant that is below 0.03% THC.” So you don’t get rated like your old neighbor. Or just told to destroy your field. I mean, are you initially calling your shot, taking your best guess at who to work with and planting in and just hoping for the best? Was there terror there?

Doug Fine:
I don’t think there was terror, but that is a really good question. Because, I think, and the book points this out, really, I think, the hardest part for me, what I’ve found and now three, four, five years at this is choosing the right partners. Many of us, probably most of us, learn the hard way. There’s a section in the book what says, “Plan for plan B.” You are not going to make all your right decisions right at the beginning.

Doug Fine:
So the partners, the folks that I work with now, my colleagues in Oregon and my colleagues in Vermont, are both people that are in it for the long-term like I am that have similar dispositions. Because we all kind of… If you ask someone like, “Okay, if you were going to pair up entrepreneurially with someone, what would you want in a farmer type enterprise?” You say, “Well, similar values on organics, farming skills, honesty.” Those are all important skills but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a good business match. So I would urge people to really, really look carefully before they leap in with someone on the entrepreneurial side.

Matt Baum:
Did they think you were insane when you came to them and you were like, “Look, I’m not a farmer. I’m a journalist. I have this idea for a book and I want to do this.” Did they think you were crazy or were they like, “Great, let’s do it.”

Doug Fine:
Well, the partners that I have now are more experienced than I. My partner in Oregon, has written about a lot in the book, Edgar Winters, he started cultivating up in 1957. He might be the longest cultivating American hemp farmer at this point. He’s got a really fantastic backstory and an organic mindset. He’s been an absolutely a great mentor. He didn’t think I was crazy at all.

Doug Fine:
One of the sentiments that we all share, all the people that I really work with, I mean, there’s so many people that I have mutually support. We support one another and want each other to succeed. But in terms of people that I’m really partnered with, we share something, which is all along, we’ve not been interested in just following the CBD gold rush that we love cannabinoids. Who wouldn’t love cannabinoids? They are great.

Doug Fine:
It’s really about food and next generation industrial components. Hemp is a superfood from the seed as we’ve known. This stuff is less of an immediate gold rush and more of a long-term play and that’s something that we all had in common going in.

From raising goats to growing hemp

Matt Baum:
Let me ask you. When we first started talking, I don’t think I haven’t recorded it, you mentioned about how you started with animals and the connection that you felt to animals. And from there you felt this connection to this plant. Tell me about that a little bit. How did that develop? How did it go from your goats to hemp?

Doug Fine:
I think we all have sort of totemic energy, synchronicities with that sound too woo.

Matt Baum:
No, I love it. I love it. I am smiling. When you started there I was like, “Here we go.”

Doug Fine:
And to admit it, we could say this, I could say, “I think I’m decent at goat ranching.” I think I’ve taken to it that the goats like me. They know I love them. They know I’m not rushing. I’m not resenting my whatever it is, 20 minutes, twice a day spent milking and the other care you have to give. I enjoy it. I enjoy it the way you talked about it earlier before we went on the air for about your hobbies.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Doug Fine:
But with plants, it wasn’t that I didn’t respect plants. It’s just that my connections tended to be more with animals and it’s through now many years of journalism about the hemp plant and then finally leaping in to planting it that I’ve come to recognize and feel comfortable speaking about plant intelligence. It continues. I was just talking to my Vermont partners the other day. The reality of the situation right now is that some of our seed in Vermont, which is organically certified, something I’m really proud of because when you have a plant that five years ago was some kind of ridiculous felony. And now you’ve got federally certified unifiers coming and it’s a good feeling saying USDA organic on your crop.

Doug Fine:
Well, my colleagues, great colleagues, in Vermont that I work with also written about in the book, some of our harvest from last year we think we want to now use for experimenting with food product as opposed to selling it for its genetics because it’s good genetics. And or using it immediately in our other products. But just use a portion of it to see about it as a straight up food product. Just do our own research on that. And that is 100% the plant telling us what it wants to do. Just the logistics of where our seeds are, where our seed cleaners are, what our winters were shaping up before next year, the plant was done just like your goats or your fish will tell you what they want. The plant was telling us what we want, and I’ve started to really accept plant intelligence.

Doug Fine:
Some people out there who can say, “Oh, that’s a heartwarming story.” Or “Oh, I’m going have my eyes open for plants to talk.” But most people who are listening to this who are already hemp farmers are going, “Duh.” Because they probably already had recognized that their totemic connection was to various plants. For me, it’s new and it’s beautiful to learn something when you’re several decades in the life, you know?

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Support the Ministry of Hemp on Patreon

Matt Baum:
We’ll be right back to my interview with Doug. But first, a short word from Ministry of Hemp, Editor-in-Chief, Kit O’Connell about our Patreon page. I know. I can’t stop talking about it.

Kit O’Connell:
Hi, this is Kit O’Connell. I’m the editor-in-chief at Ministry of Hemp. I hope you’re enjoying the Ministry of Hemp podcast and the articles we’ve been publishing recently. But today I want to talk to you about the newest way that you can support what we do.

Kit O’Connell:
So we’re launching a Patreon at patreon.com/ministryofhemp. And this Patreon will help our readers and fans contribute to what we do. With your help, we’ll be able to make our podcast and produce even more great articles about science and information about hemp and CBD.

Kit O’Connell:
We’ll publish more recipes and more guides. We’ll be able to work with more journalists, chefs, and authors of all kinds. Not only that, but by joining our Patreon, you’ll become a hemp insider. We’re launching a special newsletter just for our patrons. Each month we’ll work with experts and advocates and other industry professionals to give you an inside look at hemp and offer you ways to help the return of our favorite plant nationwide.

Kit O’Connell:
To get access to this new newsletter, you can donate any amount on our Patreon, even as low as $3 a month. For a few dollars more, we’ll send you some Ministry of Hemp stickers and even samples of our favorite CBD products. If you joined before February 15th at $25 or more, we’ll give you a Ministry of Hemp t-shirt as well.

Kit O’Connell:
So if you love hemp and the work that we’re doing at the Ministry of Hemp, I hope you’ll support us. You can join at patreon.com/ministryofhemp. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/ministry ofhemp, which is all one word. Thanks.

Doug Fine on hemp seed oil and hemp foods

Matt Baum:
What kind of food products are you guys thinking about doing with yours?

Doug Fine:
So the product that I already doing… Please don’t folks, don’t take this as a commercial. Shop locally, 12 batch and… The product that I already do is called Hemp and Hemp. It already has hemp seed oil. It’s department stable product with hemp flower and hemp seed oil. That’s it. That’s the only ingredient. That’s why it’s called, Hemp and Hemp. It’s potentially be a superfood, but because I’m really walking very carefully to becoming officially a food product with all FDA now leaping in hemp. Thus far, I’ve always marketed it as a massage oil and a bath oil because it’s got an entourage effect of cannabinoids that I think almost has a chemical relationship with the lipids from its own plant. The seed from its own flower.

Doug Fine:
It relaxes me. I’ve been told that this is the one you have to be careful about claims. It’s about the entourage effect of the cannabinoids, right? I should say very low levels, all of them, not what today people we consider maximum milligram dose of any of the cannabinoids. And yet I like it. It works. I enjoy the product. So that product is already dialed into be officially a food product. That’s going to be a superfood that’s also a cannabinoid.

Doug Fine:
But what we’re talking about doing now is taste profilings on pressing the seed for just straight up seed oil. Just straight up as a nutritive seed. Things like hemp hearts. We were even talking about doing chocolate. Cacao covered whole seeds and then the one of the element that’s really exciting on the horizon is that hemp protein powder. That’s the byproduct when you press the seed oil. It’s a great human food, but it’s going to be a great animal feed. And there’s a lot of people, as I’m sure you know, you’ve probably had them on your Ministry of Hemp. There are a lot of people working to make sure that animal feed is… That hemp is approved as an animal feed. We’re getting that.

Matt Baum:
I know they’re definitely pushing for it right now and a lot of people want that. Had your goats eat hemp? Or you feed them hemp?

Doug Fine:
They love it. They love it. Yes, absolutely.

A sustainable future for hemp in all forms

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome. That’s so cool. So tell me when you were getting started. I liked how, in the book, you wrote about how Michael Pollan, who’s an author that I adore, talked about how this plant has been around for millennia. We’ve been growing this and it has been giving us things. Whether it’s, like you said, cannabinoids or sandals or the rope or whatever. What was it that drew you to that idea of it? Because you went… A lot of people get to the CBD bubble, like you said, and go for the gold there and just stop. But you’re talking about growing hemp for food for industrial. That’s really the hard part. What’s the attraction there? Is it just because that’s what the plant is telling you that it wants?

Doug Fine:
Matt, I feel righteous when I feel like my career is part of an effort to save humanity and give a good life to my kids. So that’s a big part of it is feeling good about going to work each day. When we have an industrial pipeline where the stuff, our stuff, all of our stuff are rocket door panels. Our car door panels, is made from biomaterials, not just hemp fiber, but all kinds of renewable biomass or regenerative biomass. And we’re not burning as much dinosaur juice. That’s a good sign.

Doug Fine:
And then superfood. I mean, it really, it truly is a superfood and has long been recognized as… Because humans have bred it for it to be a superfood with great proteins, and amino acids, and anti-inflammatory properties.

Doug Fine:
I remember when I was researching my earlier book about Hemp Bound, that I was ostensibly on an interview about hempcrete. One of the graduate students at the Manitoba College where I was looking at a hempcrete project, said that where he grew up in Iran, that they didn’t have Doritos and pretzels for soccer practice snacks that everybody just went to this vendor on the street who roasted hemp seeds and the word [shadi naan 00:00:22:41] in Persian, hemp seed.

Matt Baum:
That is so cool. I didn’t even know that was going on. That’s like…

Doug Fine:
Yeah, I mean it’s prohibition that’s been the aberration. It’s amazing how much can be remembered and forgotten in 77 years.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely. One of the things that I think is amazing about hemp as a crop in the United States right now is the fact that prohibition was bad and it set us way back. But it also allowed us to have a very true version of this plant that hasn’t been modified a whole lot. We’re returning to it almost. Can I ask you, what was your first harvest like? I mean, was it just an instant success? I mean, did you plant this and it just, you follow the instructions and it worked?

Doug Fine:
The first harvest was really beautiful. But you hit on something there really important in that question about that there can be upsides to this three generation enforced break with this plant. From being one of humanity’s favorite plants to be in one of its most vilified plants and back is a really interesting thing. Because you could draw a lot of conclusions about exactly what hemp cannabis prohibition parallel. But things like all the horrors of the 20th century that we could list, we weren’t feeding the endocannabinoid system. But also that we live in a society where, although, there is now a Renaissance of healthy living, and regenerative living, and regenerative farming, and eating and everything, the majority of the people on the earth are not eating healthy diets. So that hemp can come back and provide this healthy, tasty solution is a great thing.

Doug Fine:
But also on the business end is what I find really interesting is that as someone who is developing genetics with hemp, right? Needless to say, I’d come across folks who are interested in working on the genetic model of what you might call the 20th century way of distributing seeds, which is, to put it bluntly, farmers have to buy it from you every year if you’re a seed provider. And you don’t own your food. You don’t own your genetics.

Matt Baum:
You’re growing somebody else’s seeds basically.

Doug Fine:
Yeah. And that’s not how I want to farm. So I and others are looking at a different model. It seems so weird to folks who are like… They think that what’s been going on for the last 75 years in the way farmers have been treated is normal. And they’re trying to recreate it now. I was thinking when Charles Ingalls and the Ingalls family was going out a little house on the Prairie and with their wheat seed and starting their wheat crop, they were not serves to company that they brought their wheat from. And for-

Matt Baum:
No, they were just farmers, basically.

Doug Fine:
Yeah. So the business model that we’re able to recreate and when someone says, “Hey, that’s never how agriculture has been done. It’s tough.” You banned our plant for so many years, we’re doing it our way now. And if you want to try and rip off farmers or… Let me be fair. Let me be fair. There was an argument to be made, a legitimate argument to be made that as long as supply is consistent, the people that are selling, let’s say, seeds that a farmer might want to grow for a food product on large acreage, they probably are offering it at much, much lower prices than someone like me and others who would be offering right of replication and the ability of own genetics.

Matt Baum:
I mean, Nebraska corn is a perfect example.

Doug Fine:
Yeah. You’re right.

Matt Baum:
It’s sad. But that’s why there’s so much of it too.

Doug Fine:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
So what-

Doug Fine:
Fair enough, right? Different business model, but just to answer your question about the first harvest, I got to tell you. My son was with me on the first harvest that I was really fully part of. I’d been covering hemp for years and cannabis and hemp both for years. But the first crop that was really, I was part of. My son spent his sixth birthday harvesting and loved it. It’s a great memory for everyone and I have a great picture of a bundle of his hemp covering his whole body. It did go well. We were partnered with a great, terrific farmer that first year and I learned a lot from him. I’m very grateful to the first partners that I had when I first started out. So I would say that it was a combination of good fortune, good weather, good genetics, good partners.

Doug Fine:
But yeah, the first crop was… It was a high benchmark that I still judge every year’s crop bite. How does it look compared to 2016 in Vermont.

Making money from growing hemp

Matt Baum:
Sure. So let’s say you’re not an author, you don’t have any other money coming in. Can you live on this? Could this be the one thing that you do?

Doug Fine:
No, not yet. I’m excited about a new partnership that I have. So I have these great friends that I’ve known for seven years. These great women, Kim and Dana, who run this health center in Tucson, that it’s just trusted in the community of helping people, especially, with cannabis. And they’re not a dispensary, but they do have put sales of various things including hemp products. So there are people that I trust. There are people who trust me and there are people who have an existing body of customers in a major city who trust them. And they are talking numbers that if we decided to switch… We’re still deciding how much acreage to plan for this year, 2020. If we really go for it, let’s say, 2020 even just isn’t yet another kind of… I don’t want to say a practice year, but a growth year and it’s 2021 before there would be a significant amount of income for my family.

Doug Fine:
Again, you’re asking such good questions. I’m glad you asked that because it’s easy to advise people to have a five year plan and say, “Oh, you better be ready.” Best laid plans. You’re not going to make money for the first couple of years. Especially, if you’re doing it right. Especially if you have soil to clean up.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Doug Fine:
But if you’re a farmer that’s struggling and has a mortgage, you need to make it work. So it’s a tough decision. But you got to have that long-term game plan.

Matt Baum:
It’s a matter of what do you have to lose, basically, in that case.

Doug Fine:
Yeah. Right.

Matt Baum:
This wasn’t a gotcha question. Like, “Oh well, he’s an author. Of course, he can stop and do this. He’s got that fat NPR money. I’m sure.”

What’s next for Doug Fine?

Matt Baum:
So what’s the next book about?

Doug Fine:
Good question. Well, so American Hemp Farmers, what we’ve been talking about now, comes out year 2020. The world’s kind of open on the next one. I have a collection of comedic essays that are related to hemp that I’ve been working on. I’m also developing a TV show of the same name, American Hemp Farmer that is related to that.

Matt Baum:
Oh, awesome.

Doug Fine:
It’s not picked up yet, but I’m optimistic about it. [crosstalk 00:29:23]

Matt Baum:
That’s very cool.

Doug Fine:
Eyes and ears open.

Matt Baum:
Okay. If you’re going forward, do you continue? Is hemp a part of your life now? Are you a hemp farmer now? This is the life?

Doug Fine:
I’m about to apply for my New Mexico permit. So my commercial work is not at home in New Mexico. New Mexico permits are pretty expensive. They start hover around 700, 800 bucks. So it’s just for personal use. We’re using our fiber from last year’s harvest to do a hempcrete patch on our porch. There’s like a little door jamb home.

Matt Baum:
You make your own hempcrete?

Doug Fine:
Yeah. Isn’t that cool?

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome.

Doug Fine:
But I mean, very micro amounts, man. Not a huge amount.

Matt Baum:
Oh, sure. Yeah.

Doug Fine:
But what I’m getting at is, yes, I’m going from my own family’s food and fiber needs. One of these years we’ll grow enough at home. Because my sweetheart makes a lot of them. Our family’s clothes in general and including hemp clothes, but not yet from hemp that we’ve grown. So that would be cool.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. I mean, the next step, that’s one of the things I’m really excited for is hemp material and hemp processing of fabrics and whatnot. It seems like we are so far behind right now. There’s no reason. There’s no reason whatsoever.

Matt Baum:
Doug, I love the book. I don’t want to keep you any longer. You’ve got kids and goats and whatnot. Is there anything that you want to touch on that I didn’t touch on that we need to mention? I’m going to edit this too, so this part will go out. We’re just going to sound super slick. Don’t worry about that. But is there anything-

Doug Fine:
You did a fantastic job of covering the basics. I guess, I would say to leave folks with, first off, thank you so much for your support of American Hemp Farmer. And thanks for reading it because-

Matt Baum:
Oh, love it.

Doug Fine:
Thank you. The goal is to help farmers as you know, Matt, for reading it. That’s really why I wrote the book. And folks who want to follow me at Organic Cowboy on Twitter and Instagram. And my website’s dougfine.com where folks can sign up for my periodic dispatches from the Funky Butte Ranch. Everything about regenerative living and hemp and beyond. Thanks for keeping an eye out for future projects.

Support from the hemp community

Matt Baum:
Hey, last question, and I just thought of it. Did you feel any pushback from other people that are farmers and whatnot that thought this guy’s faking it? This guy’s getting in it just because as a fashion statement or something. Was there anybody that pushed back against you?

Doug Fine:
I felt almost complete support since getting into hemp. I think one of the reasons was, I mean, the first year that I planted, myself was 2016. And there were not, I forgot, like 700 something permanent farmers that year.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, maybe.

Doug Fine:
Being back that early, again, I do not consider… I consider myself learning every single time I put a seed in the ground and I do not consider myself an expert. But at least I’ve been added enough to wear a badge of legitimate… Somewhat of a badge of legitimacy. And that’s something I’m going to always try to do is to walk the walk. Because nobody’s perfect and it’s not just about growing hemp organically, regeneratively and all that. My product, I spend 50 cents per label on compostable label with non-toxic stickum. It’s really expensive to be righteous.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it’s hard. It’s very hard.

Doug Fine:
You have to be a role model here because you don’t want people calling you out and going, “Why is there plastic in your packaging.” And stuff like that. We’re trying to save humanity here.

Matt Baum:
You’ve got to be really careful every step of the way. And it’s not just gatekeeping and whatnot. I mean, if we’re going to do this, it’s important to do it the right way. But yeah, it’s not easy.

Matt Baum:
Doug, you’re doing it the right way. I love the book. I’m excited for other people to read it. I hope you get this TV show because you’re a riot and this would be fantastic. We need more of this. We need more people that not only can tell the story and spread the word, but they can do it with a little bit of humor and make it relatable and that’s what I really liked about your book. That is not to say that all the other scientists and farmers I’ve interviewed were super boring. You were just great. Okay? That’s all I’m saying.

Doug Fine:
Well, bless you for that and thank you to you and the Ministry of Hemp. It’s a great resource and I’m sure you got a ton of followers, but I hope everybody’s paying attention and I’m watching.

Matt Baum:
Hey, we’ll keep spreading the word if you do man. Thank you so much for what you’ve done.

Doug Fine:
You’re welcome. Thank you brother.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
You can follow the further adventures of Doug over at dougfine.com. You can find him anywhere on social media with his handle at Organic Cowboy. I’ll have information in the show notes about how to preorder American Hemp Farmer. It would be really cool to help Doug get on the bestseller list, so if you get a chance, get over there and preorder American Hemp Farmer. I know I’ve gushed about it the whole episode, but I loved this book.

Matt Baum:
And that about brings us to the end of another episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. My name is Matt. I have been your host and I want to thank everybody that is supporting us with your downloads, our Patreon or just asking questions. You can call me at 402-819-6417 and ask your hemp related question. We will play it later on one of our Hemp Q and A shows where Kit, the editor-in-chief of ministryofhemp.com and myself, play your questions on the air and answer them. So please shoot us your questions. You’ll be able to find that phone number in the show notes along with information about how to preorder Doug Fine’s book and all kinds of other cool stuff including the full written transcript for this episode. Because at Ministry of Hemp, we believe a more accessible world is a better world for everybody.

Matt Baum:
Be sure to get over to ministryofhemp.com and check out all the latest stuff that we’re throwing up there, article wise, and let us know what you think about everything we’re doing at all of our social media. You can find us under the handle at Ministry of Hemp or /ministryofhemp.

Matt Baum:
Until next time, this is Matt reminding you to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will ya? This is the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Signing off.

The post Growing Hemp With Doug Fine, Solar-Powered Goat Herder & American Farmer appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

First on episode 23 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, our host Matt answers some unanswered questions from last week’s hemp questions podcast. Our discussion of hemp plastic left some issues unaddressed. Matt mentions our friends at Sana Packaging again in this episode. They create sustainable plastic packaging from hemp and reclaimed ocean plastic:

Then, Matt sits down with the cofounder of We Are For Better Alternatives (WAFBA), Morris Beegle to discuss how hemp can replace many industrial materials and pollutants. Beegle is an expert on hemp sustainability, and a pioneer in the industry: from hemp guitars and clothing to organizing important events like NoCo Hemp Expo, he seems to show up everywhere. Even our hemp paper business cards are printed by Tree Free Hemp, another of Beegle’s efforts. We’re excited to share his knowledge with you in this episode.

Sponsored by LifePatent

Thanks to our friends at LifePatent, one of our Top CBD Brands, for sponsoring this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. Check out their site now to try free samples of their great sleep capsules.

We’re also big fans of their CBD-A tincture, which we reviewed last year. Our editor Kit still frequently reaches for this product for help with his chronic pain.

Send us your feedback!

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com.

An interview with Morris Beegle: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete written transcript for this episode:

Matt Baum: 00:00 The Ministry of Hemp Podcast is brought to you by LifePatent, purveyors of high quality CBD products that just happened to be one of our favorite brands too. They care very deeply about their customers because when it comes down to it, LifePatent understands their customers are people, seeking relief. You can learn more about the entire line of CBD related products at lifepatent.com.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. My name is Matt Baum, and I am your host. Today on the show, we are going to talk about some industrial uses for hemp with a guy named Morris Beegle. Morris is an amazing guy. He’s the co-founder and president of We Need A Better Alternative, and what they do is just that, look for alternatives to plastics, petroleums and other wasteful construction and industrial materials that could be a lot more renewable. It just so happens that hemp is not only a great alternative, it is a highly versatile one too, but before we get into that, I wanted to touch on something from last week’s show.

Unanswered questions about hemp plastic and hemp farming

Matt Baum: Last week, if you were listening, Kit and I did a Q and A. Several of you called in and left messages, which you can always do at 402-819-6417, and we answer them on the show. One of which came from a man named Rico. Rico wrote us back after we answered his question, and he had a couple more questions that he wanted to follow up on. I’m going to go ahead and read from the email he sent me, and see if I can give him some answers here, but he says, “First, the point about hemp plastics not being fully biodegradable. I’m glad you covered that because based on the research I’ve been doing or found rather, the impression I got about it was that hemp plastics are indeed fully biodegradable, which happened to be a major point on which my decision hinged because, like you said, what’s the point of just swapping one earth damaging material for another in our landfills and oceans? Doesn’t make sense. That meant a lot to me and was a huge talking point. Do you know where I can find 100% biodegradable hemp plastic manufacturers?”

They are out there, and we’re going to talk about a couple today with Morris. One of the bigger ones is Sana Packaging. It’s S-A-N-A-packaging.com, and I’ll be sure to have a link to that in the show notes, but they’re amazing. I actually just finished another interview for a show coming up with a guy that’s running a pre-roll hemp joint company that packages all their pre-roll stuff in hemp packaging as well.

Like you said, yes, it is 100% biodegradable, but there’s certain rules that go into that. You can’t just bury it and leave it there. Otherwise, just like other plastics, it’s just going to stay buried. Biodegradable, plant-based plastics need sun, they need air, they need to be left, literally left out for them to biodegrade. So, therein lies a challenge as well. So, maybe it’s not so much worrying about throwing this stuff away but repurposing what we can, sort of like bringing your hemp grocery bag to the grocery store or buying an aluminum straw or even a reusable, recycled plastic water bottle. In a nutshell, is it better for the environment? Without a doubt. Is it more biodegradable than petroleum-based plastics? Yes, but we still have to think about it before we throw this stuff away.

Rico’s second question, he says, “I’ve read that while our farmers sat near poverty because of redundant crop rotations, other nations such as China and Canada have been growing, processing, and utilizing the incredible hemp plant for decades, even centuries in the case of China. What do you know about their technologies and the possibility of sourcing and manufacturing from them? Why are these technologies not yet available for American businesses and entrepreneur startups?”

You’re absolutely right. China, Canada, and most of Europe is way ahead of us because they didn’t have the same prohibition that we had for hemp here in the United States. Now, we are starting to see more industrial hemp producers pop up, but there needs to be more demand, and the more demand, the more we will see. So, just like we sort of talked about in that Q and A, when people start asking for this stuff, looking for packaging that’s made with plant-based plastics, and I’m not just talking hemp, flax, all kinds of other things too, when major companies start to see people making those buying decisions, that is when they will be willing to invest more in it. More investment means more hemp industry.

Now, as the beginning of the question, yes, you can import this stuff, and people have been importing it for years now. In the interview that I’m about to have with Morris, he is sitting in front of two guitar cabinets that are made entirely of pressed hemp wood, and they have speaker cones in them made of hemp paper. This company that’s making the speaker cones has been making them for years now using Chinese hemp.

So, it kind of goes back to the ridiculousness of the idea of the prohibition of hemp. We were saying, no, you can’t grow it, but you can import it and use it for industrial things like paper or textiles and whatnot. Now, that is blowing up, and as hemp prohibition begins to go to the wayside, you are going to see more industry getting involved in this, and hopefully, we will see more hempcrete producers, more hemp wood producers, more hemp textile producers, but like I said, it’s going to be up to people like you and me, Rico, to convince businesses that we not only want this, we’re willing to spend money on it because we as consumers believe that it’s a more responsible and renewable way to do business.

Thanks a lot for listening to the show, Rico, and for getting back to me, and I hope that answered some of your questions. You have one more question, and I’ll shoot you an email about that, and we’ll talk. Now, let’s get to my interview with Morris Beegle from We Need a Better Alternative. Word of warning, Morris has got a little bit of a mouth on him. He came out of the rock and roll industry, and he’s not afraid to throw some cuss words around. So, if you’ve got little ones in the room, might be a good idea to listen to the rest of this episode on headphones. So, tell me about We Are For Better Alternatives. How did this get started and like what’s the mission?

Introducing Morris Beegle and We Are For Better Alternatives

Morris Beegle: 06:50 So, in 2012, I’ve been in the music business for 25 plus years and kind of looking to find another industry as the industry that I was in was really based around manufacturing, physical product, distribution and-

Matt Baum: 07:12 Are you talking about records or like actual-

Morris Beegle: 07:14 Like CDs and DVDs.

Matt Baum: 07:16 Okay.

Morris Beegle: 07:16 So, I had a production company, and we did lots of CD and DVD manufacturing and packaging, which got decimated by the internet after-

Matt Baum: 07:24 Go figure.

Morris Beegle: 07:26 … Napster and Mp3 and then here comes iTunes and Amazon and a variety of other digital music platforms that basically killed the physical media business other than vinyl, which has made a resurgence, which actually, this year, has got more sales revenue wise than CDs for the first time.

Matt Baum: 07:45 Yeah. I’m a vinyl collector myself, so …

Morris Beegle: 07:48 Yeah. So, vinyl is actually outselling CDs now.

Matt Baum: 07:51 Yeah. Go figure. I don’t remember the last time I bought a CD. I never stopped buying vinyl.

Morris Beegle: 07:58 Well, I still manufacturer CDs for some bands if I-

Matt Baum: 08:01 Really?

Morris Beegle: 08:01 If somebody wants to run a hundred or a couple hundred CDs, I’ve still got my manufacturing connections and I still do-

Matt Baum: 08:07 You’ll take those suckers’ money, huh?

Morris Beegle: 08:10 Yeah. I mean, if you want to run a couple hundred CDs, you want to spend 500 bucks and having to sell at gigs or give away or use for promo, then we’ll still do it.

Matt Baum: 08:19 So, how do you go from music production, from physical music production to hemp in the marketplace? I mean, like hemp paper, hemp wood. How does this happen?

Morris Beegle: 08:29 So, I mean doing CD and DVD production and printing and also merchandise and distribution and licensing and also events and concerts and festivals, promotion, artist management, this whole skillset, kind of this Jack of all trades, I brought over to the hemp side. We started doing T-shirts and hats and product distribution, trying to get some of this stuff placed including hemp shoes back in 2012. So, when we started Colorado Hemp Company in 2012, it was at the same time that the initiative Amendment 64 got launched in Colorado to legalize marijuana and tax and regulate it like alcohol.

Matt Baum: 09:14 Right.

Morris Beegle: 09:14 So, within that, I mean we’d already been doing medical since like 2001. 2009, it became more mainstreamed in Colorado. Dispensary started popping up everywhere. Everybody started getting their medical cards. It became a lot more available, and then, here comes the push for recreational and at the same time, within that legislation, there was an opportunity to start growing industrial hemp under that measure. It’s like, well, I’m familiar with hemp, and with my music company, we actually did some hemp shirts and hemp pads back in the ’90s, and I was familiar with the apparel side of things and basically learned about these other uses of the cannabis plant, that soap and rope and sails and kind of the history of it from the Jack Here book. Really didn’t do anything with it other than I just found out some history about the plant.

Then, when I was looking to try to go into something different besides the music industry, which I couldn’t make any money in physical media anymore … I mean by 2009, 2010, that industry basically-

Matt Baum: 10:19 Yeah. It was [inaudible 00:10:20] … I was a musician. I remember all of it so-

Morris Beegle: 10:19 Now, what am I going to do now? As an independent music promoter and producer, all of a sudden, here comes this hemp opportunity that popped up in 2012, and nobody was really talking about it that much compared to the medical and recreational side of cannabis. It’s like, well, shit. Let’s start a little T-shirt company. We can start making hemp T-shirts, and we found a couple of companies making hemp shoes, making hemp footwear. Hempy’s was making hemp wallets and beanies and doing cordage and stuff like that.

Matt Baum: 10:52 Yeah. I remember Hempy’s back in the day. Yeah.

Morris Beegle: 10:54 They’re still around. Another company called Hempmania who’s also still around was doing backpacks and duffle bags and fanny packs and wallets and had a bunch of cordage and various other little hemp fiber items. So, we started wrapping their merchandise and selling it over our website, trying to get placed in stores, and then I found a hemp paper company, Green Field Paper out of San Diego was making a hemp paper, and it’s like, “Well, hey. I’ve been in the printing business for 25 years doing commercial printing, doing CD packaging and posters and all this. It’s like, hey, we can start making hemp posters for bands and festivals and CD release parties and stuff like that.”

So, we did that, and then we started making business cards and flyers and brochures and other marketing collateral, and then from there, we launched NoCo Hemp Expo in 2014 and started doing the event thing, and then just it kind of continued on from there, doing events, trade shows, conferences, shirts, hats, printing and then all-

Matt Baum: 11:56 It’s just like licensing bands basically.

Morris Beegle: 11:57 It is.

Matt Baum: 11:58 More or less, it’s the same thing.

Morris Beegle: 12:00 It’s taking that same exact skillset and just translating it into the hemp industry and carving out our own niche because nobody’s been doing it. So, it’s like it’s wide open, and here we are, seven years later, and we’ve got a pretty successful event company, and we’ve got a paper company that’s doing pretty good considering the amount of paper that’s actually in the marketplace, which I know we’re going to talk a little bit more about here. It’s kind of the initial premise of our conversation.

Matt Baum: 12:28 Yeah.

Morris Beegle: 12:29 We’re still in the infancy of this industry domestically, and this fiber side of things, which really attracted me to the industry, is lagging way behind compared to the CBD cannabinoid side of the industry, which is what’s blown it up and made it… Everybody knows about CBD, CBD this and this, and this and that.

Matt Baum: 12:48 Right. Everybody sees that. That’s where the money is at as far as they’re concerned.

Morris Beegle: 12:51 That’s where the money’s at, and this fiber side of things is yet to really take hold here, but it will. We’ve got a brand new industry. We need processing. We need smart people, innovative people to jump into the marketplace and help develop these materials that can get them plugged into the commercial industrial side of industries and start doing replacement ingredients for some of these petrol chemical ingredients or corn or cotton or whatever it is that are not environmentally friendly type ingredients that hemp can really replace.

Hemp and the climate crisis

Morris Beegle: 13:27 So, let’s talk about that for a minute. I mean, and honestly, I don’t even know this stuff. The majority of people that I’ve talked to have either been farmers or CBD people, and that’s one of the reasons I reached out to you because I’m really curious about this. Now, I know hemp can be made into paper. It can be made into textiles. It can be compressed into wood, but give me some kind of comparison like what an acre of trees makes in wood compared to say like an acre in hemp and the processing speed. Is it better? Is it cheaper? Is it …

Morris Beegle: 13:57 Well, it’s certainly not cheaper at this point in time.

Matt Baum: 13:59 Right.

Morris Beegle: 14:01 Is it better? I think that it could be better with technology and modern day innovation, and I think that we’re seeing some of that stuff that’s happened over in Europe where they’d been building houses and commercial structures, and so you’ve got like building materials over there. You’ve also got these hemp biocomposites or bio-plastics that are being used in Audi and BMW and Jaguar for like their inner car paneling that they’ve replaced like Petro plastics with now these composite natural fiber plastics that includes hemp. It also can include flax. It can have some of these other fibrous crops out there, and it’s definitely less impactful negatively on our environment by using the stuff that we can grow from the ground pretty organically rather than sucking stuff out of the ground and making these synthetic, fairly toxic materials and plastics.

Matt Baum: 15:06 We’re cutting down a forest.

Morris Beegle: 15:10 Cutting down a forest and then-

Matt Baum: 15:10 It takes 50 years to grow back as opposed to an acre of hemp that’s going to grow back in a hundred days.

Morris Beegle: 15:16 Right, exactly. So, when they’ve done that and they’ve cleared out all this old forest, and then they go back and they replant with, let’s say GMO type pine trees to just grow it for manufacturing, nothing lives in that area after you chop it down and you burn that stuff.

Matt Baum: 15:16 Of course.

Morris Beegle: 15:37 I mean, the ecosystem is disrupted, and it’s basically dead, and from harvesting-

Matt Baum: 15:43 It’ll return but probably not for 1,500 years or something, you know?

Morris Beegle: 15:43 It’ll return, yeah.

Matt Baum: 15:44 It’s got to reestablish.

Morris Beegle: 15:48 Right, but we have to start thinking about things differently because we’ve been doing this stuff for over a hundred years now, whether that’s sucking all this stuff out of the ground, whether that’s starting to clear all these forest out and chop down all this old growth, and all that stuff has been subsidized, whether it’s on the petroleum side or the timber forestry side. We look back over a hundred years now, and we’ve done some significant devastation to our environment.

Matt Baum: 16:17 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Morris Beegle: 16:18 The world. People thinking that this stuff does not affect climate change, man does not affect climate change is absolutely freaking ridiculous. We are disrupting the natural ecosystems everywhere whether that’s in forest or whether that’s in streams and lakes or the oceans. I mean, we’re fucking things up.

Matt Baum: 16:36 Totally. Yeah, no question, and I think that’s the best way to put it. We have to stop arguing about whether or not there’s science involved here and just say, “Look, we know it’s happening, and we are definitely fucking it up.”

Morris Beegle: 16:46 We are, and if we don’t try to do something and at least acknowledge the fact that we … Hey, yeah, we really have done something, and these scientists aren’t all on the government dole trying to get a paycheck and just to make shit up.

Matt Baum: 16:59 Yeah. How many billionaire scientists can you name off top of your head? How many? Oh, wait.

Morris Beegle: 17:03 No one.

Matt Baum: 17:03 Exactly.

Morris Beegle: 17:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty popular, but he’s certainly not a billionaire.

Matt Baum: 17:09 No. No.

Morris Beegle: 17:10 I think he’s in cahoots with anybody to just make money off of putting out false information.

Thanks to our sponsors at LifePatent

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Hemp as a more sustainable alternative

Matt Baum: So, where do you see hemp coming in here? How do you picture it? Two questions here. How do you picture it in the future, and why are Europeans so far ahead of us on this?

Morris Beegle: 19:16 Well, they’re so far ahead of us because they started doing this back in the ’90s. It was really HempFlax back in 1993, ’94, and Ben Dronkers who was a compadre of Jack Herer and those guys coming through the whole cannabis scene of the ’70s and the ’80s, they started the Hemp Cannabis Museum over there. Dronkers also had Sensi Seeds and gathered this huge collection of cannabis seeds and did very well by selling these seeds and made a lot of money. That money initially funded the whole HempFlax thing because they found out all this information of hemp really played this important role in our history from thousands of years ago to hundreds of years ago, and all this stuff had been done. They did all this research and found it all out. It’s like, well, how can we bring this crop back to make it part of our economy and part of our agriculture?

So, I credit really the Dronkers and those guys for getting things going in Europe. There’s another company Dyna-Gro over there who’s another big company, does a lot of the similar type things with the fiber side, and they also have done the food side with the grain and the protein powder and the hemp seeds and hemp seed oil and all that stuff. Those guys have just been at it for 25 years now, and they had to create markets over there and who’s going to use this product. They’ve just spent a bunch of time and money and created markets, whether that’s with the car manufacturers or whether that’s with the building industry over there and replacing a lot of this kind of toxic craps that you put into buildings with something that’s natural. It’s breathable. It absorbs CO2 from the air, and it’s just a better alternative, and we are for better alternatives here.

Matt Baum: 21:10 Fair enough, but nice plug. That was good. So, it’s just a matter of the fact that they’re ahead of us because they’ve been doing it longer, and this stuff is coming up in the States. Producers are starting to see there’s money to be made here. Sooner or later, the CBD boom is going to settle down, and farmers are going to realize, “Look, we can do a lot more with this plant.” What do you think is the next step here? People just start taking risks as far as putting together a hemp textile-like production or putting together hemp composite wood production?

Morris Beegle: 21:42 Yeah. I think that there’s opportunities for this fiber side of the market and the grain side of the market. There’s all these industries out there that create products that have a variety of ingredients in their products, and most likely, hemp can be an ingredient in a lot of these products. Whether these are food products or whether these are industrial products like building walls or, again, the plastic side of things or the paper side of things, the packaging industries, there’s all these different industries that create products. Let’s say the paint industry and stains and all of that, you can make that stuff from hemp seed oil. The energy industry, there’s a variety of different uses that hemp can go into that from cleaning up spills by … There’s these things called lost-circulation materials that you can shoot down into fracking that absorb the toxic shit that we’re putting into our ground as we do fracking and-

Matt Baum: 22:43 Oh, but I’ve heard it’s no harm at all. It doesn’t do any harm at all, right?

Morris Beegle: 22:47 Of course.

Matt Baum: 22:48 It’s just poison. How bad can it be?

Morris Beegle: 22:51 Yeah, getting into the water streams. Now, there’s-

Matt Baum: 22:57 Come on.

Morris Beegle: 22:59 If you turn on your faucet and flames come out, don’t worry.

Hemp as a replacement for wood and paper

Matt Baum: 23:02 No. No doubt. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. Now, am I correct in assuming that hemp fiber, hemp wood, hemp plastic, stuff like that, am I correct when I assume that hemp takes less processing than a lot of other components like lumber, for example? It seems like you have to do a lot more to just plain old tree lumber than you do to make compressed hemp lumber.

Morris Beegle: 23:27 Well, I wouldn’t say that that is necessarily true. There’s significant processing depending on what you’re actually manufacturing and if it has to be the spec. A, you have to separate out the fiber from the wood, the hurd, and so, to get that completely separated, and then there’s various stages of processing for that fiber depending on if it would go into textiles and be a high-grade fiber that could actually go into making your shirts and different apparel type items or if it’s a short fiber that’s going to go into non-wovens, let’s say like paper and composites and plastics, then there’s just various processing that needs to be done. So, there is processing that definitely needs to be done to make sure that it’s the spec that gets to the market.

With like the hemp wood company that we’ve been seeing in the news here the last couple of months, they’re based out of Kentucky, and I’ve seen some of their board, their process is not quite as significant. They’re making their board similar to what they do with bamboo for flooring. It’s basically, you just chop everything into the exact … Let’s say it’s 10-inch or 12-inch parts of the stalk, and then they compress it, and they’ve got a binder that goes, and it basically just binds the entire stalk. So, the processing is pretty simple compared to a lot of the stuff. The processing that goes into the guitars is different.

What goes into making the board product for the guitar cabinets, it’s really, it’s all the fiber and hurd, and you grind that up, and then it gets compressed just like it would particleboard. The processing with that is not as significant. All you have to do is like shred that stuff into finely X size of particles, and then you just put it together, and you laminate it or bind it with a ECO-binder. So, I know that Larry Serbin from Hemp Traders, he’s the guy that’s developed this board, somebody else you should have on your podcast because he can talk about textiles as good as anybody can …

Matt Baum: 25:35 Yeah, I would love to.

Morris Beegle: 25:37 He’s been working on this type of board product for 20 years, and now, it’s coming to fruition, and he’s done a great job. We’re happy to use this board. I see all kinds of different potential applications for this board that he’s creating and to be a replacement for particle board out there. We can get the price down once we grow enough material out in the marketplace, and we can process it because processing the fiber, it is expensive, but once we’ve got all these huge facilities and you can feed it with enough biomass, then it becomes economical.

Building hemp fiber infrastructure

Matt Baum: 26:12 It seems like this is a theme that I keep hearing repeated with every aspect of the hemp business. It’s like, look, we just need to grow more of it, and if we grow more of it, then processors are going to see that, yes, there is a market for this, and they’re going to buy it, and they will process it. In the case of the wood, from what you were saying, it’s not that there’s more or less processing. It’s still, at the end of the day, it’s better than chopping down trees, and it uses less toxic crap to put it together into what it needs to be in the end. Right now, it’s expensive because we don’t have enough of it. We don’t have enough people doing it.

Morris Beegle: 26:43 Correct. It’s a brand new thing, and five, 10 years down the road, once we build out the infrastructure for processing this and actually dialed in the processes to do it, it will become economical, and it’ll be very cost competitive with wood or whatever the other competing ingredient could be. Let’s say it’s a corn ingredient or a soy ingredient or a cotton ingredient or a wood ingredient or a petroleum ingredient. Once we get the processing in place and the process is down and the amount and availability of the biomass, then it will be competitive, and I think that companies really will make transitions into using more eco-friendly materials because consumers are demanding it more now.

Matt Baum: 27:39 Yeah, absolutely, and that’s the best way we get them to do it, is keep screaming about it.

Morris Beegle: 27:40 Absolutely.

Matt Baum: 27:41 Definitely.

Morris Beegle: 27:41 Vote with our wallet, and they need to make the Coca-Colas and the Walmarts and the Best Buys of the world, all of these companies, hey, we want more environmentally friendly products.

Matt Baum: 27:53 Right. Stuff that’s-

Morris Beegle: 27:53 Know that climate change is real. We want to spend money on companies that are making products that are going to be less harmful for the environment.

Matt Baum: 28:02 Yeah, responsible products that, when we’re done with them, will break down faster and go back to where they came from to make more plants basically.

Morris Beegle: 28:11 Exactly. Exactly.

Matt Baum: 28:13 So, what do you see for the future? How soon do you think it is before we’re handing out hemp business cards, and I’m reading a newspaper or comic books are printed on hemp or I’m wearing hemp denim or something? How soon before this takes off?

Morris Beegle: 28:27 Well, you can do some of the hemp business cards. We print them all day long.

Matt Baum: 28:32 I know. You printed some for us actually, Ministry of Hemp.

Morris Beegle: 28:34 [crosstalk 00:28:34] Yeah. I’ve been printing cards for Kit for a couple years now.

Matt Baum: 28:39 So, what about mainstream, I guess is what I’m saying?

Morris Beegle: 28:43 Well, the same thing with kind of shirts. I mean, there’s been hemp T-shirts and hemp apparel for a long time, and well, this is … This hat is hemp.

Morris Beegle: 28:51 Yeah, I’ve got an old hemp hat. I can’t remember the name of the company I got it from, Colorado and … God, what’s the name? I’m drawing a complete blank. They’ve got like the crossed axis is their symbol. Super nice guys. He was like a surfer skater.

Morris Beegle: 29:04 Oh, Hemp Hoodlamb?

Matt Baum: 29:05 Yeah, totally great guys.

Morris Beegle: 29:07 There you go.

Matt Baum: 29:08 I had talked to the guy at NoCo. I actually was there, and they still had plastic bills in their hats, and he was super bummed out about it. I was like, “It’s still a kick ass hat, and it’s all hemp. I mean, that’s great.” I guess they just got someone who’s doing the hemp plastic for their bills now, so they’re full on 100% plastic hats.

Morris Beegle: 29:08 Nice.

Matt Baum: 29:28 I got to order a new one of those. I mean, this stuff is out there. It is a little expensive, and it’s just really a matter of infrastructure from what it sounds like.

Morris Beegle: 29:37 It is.

Matt Baum: 29:38 We build that out, and people are going to see this is a better way to do this. It’s going to get cheaper because you can grow more of it faster. Logically, it just seems to make sense.

After the CBD bubble bursts

Morris Beegle: 29:48 Exactly. It’s going to take a little bit of time to get there. The next three to five to 10 years, we’re going to continue to make significant progress. Attrition will happen. People that are in the game now will throw in the towel. The CBD market’s going to pop. It’s going to get in the commoditized here where there’s going to be so much supply. The price is going to go down. That’s going to come sooner than later

Matt Baum: 30:13 Oh, that bubble is going to burst big time. I’d say in the next five years. No question.

Morris Beegle: 30:17 Oh, yeah. It’ll be probably before then. Farmers have to diversify. With this crop, you need to look at all the components from not just the flower but the grain and the stalk fiber side of it and all … You can make money from all those. You might not be making the 10, 20, $30,000 an acre you are today, but when it all flushes out and becomes a regular crop, you should be able to still do pretty well in comparison to a lot of these other crops. The great thing is, is hopefully you don’t have to have the input cost that you do if you’re growing these GMO crops and spraying them with a bunch of fertilizers and pesticides.

Matt Baum: 30:58 Right, yeah.

Morris Beegle: 31:00 If we can really figure out how to grow this crop more across the board organically and regeneratively, that hopefully inspires some of these other crop industries, corn and soy and wheat and cotton, to grow more organically because just spraying stuff on all of our soil and all of our food and all this stuff that we wear, that stuff just runs off into the water, runs off into the rivers, into the lakes and into the oceans, and it’s acidifying, and it’s doing stuff that’s wreaking havoc on our environment.

Matt Baum: 31:35 Absolutely.

Morris Beegle: 31:37 We have to get away from that. If we don’t get away from it, we’re just going to poison the planet, and a whole bunch of us are going to die off [crosstalk 00:31:46]-

Matt Baum: 31:45 We can cover our eyes and then plug our ears and act like it’s not happening. That’s not going to stop you from getting killed.

Morris Beegle: 31:50 Exactly. It’s still all happening. Weather’s-

Matt Baum: 31:53 Do you think that educating the farmers, do you think that is the biggest hurdle right now?

Morris Beegle: 31:59 I don’t think that’s really the biggest hurdle. I think farmers are smart, and so many of the farmers that have got into this industry or who are now interested in farming again, they really care about the land, and they really care about their families and their communities.

Matt Baum: 32:16 Right. They live on it. I mean, they literally live on it, and if they ruin their land, they fundamentally understand, I’m out of a job. I’m totally broke so …

Morris Beegle: 32:26 Yeah. I don’t think it’s really the … The farmers understand the importance of the land. I think what’s happened more than anything is you’ve got these huge corporations and the global entities that own all this big ag, and it’s really all corporate that all this policy and practices, it just trickles down to the farmers. The farmers have sold out most of their land any … A lot of these guys, because it’s like, “Fuck it.” There’s this huge monster out there that’s buying everything up on this big industrial ag thing.

Matt Baum: 33:04 Yeah. Why fight it?

Morris Beegle: 33:05 Why fight it? All these small family farmers that everybody used to be, fewer and fewer exists today. The ones that do actually really care still, but it’s a struggle. I’ve seen this struggle since I got into … I mean, I grew up on a farm. We didn’t grow anything. We had 17 acres. We had some cows and some horses and some chickens, but we didn’t like grow any crops or anything. It was cool to grow up on a farm, but I see these farmers now, they grow stuff or they’ve got dairy farms, and it’s a fucking tough thing to do, and it’s hard to make money, and you’ve got these subsidies.

Matt Baum: 33:46 Yeah. We’ve convinced more than half of the farming population to grow soy and corn. Now, they’re screwed on it. I mean, we’ve turned farmland into deserts. We have piles of stuff going bad. We’re trying to make ethanol that doesn’t even put out as much energy as it takes to make it. I mean, at some point, there has to be a change. There has to be a breaking point. Otherwise, I mean, not only are we going to poison our soil, we’re not going to have any farmers to grow anything because they’re all going to be broke.

Morris Beegle: 34:14 Right. All we’re going to have are these big corporations that manage whatever is being grown out there, and whatever practices are being done aren’t being done by people that care. It’s all being done based on yield and profitability and shareholders, and it’s not about human health at all.

Matt Baum: 34:33 No. You said it yourself. We need a better alternative. There it is.

Morris Beegle: 34:36 We do need a better alternative, and that’s why we need millions of people that are on the front lines to join together as an army, an army of leaders that we’re all out there generally on this same mission to make a difference for future generations. I’ve got kids that are 12 and 16 years old, and where are things going to be 30, 40 years down the road? If you listen to some predictions by scientists, the one side will say, “Oh, it’s all alarmist. They said that 30 years ago.” The signs are all around us. We see the natural disasters year after year, things getting worse, things getting more extreme, hotter temperatures, colder temperatures, global warming-

Matt Baum: 35:25 We just had tornado-

Morris Beegle: 35:27 It’s extreme.

Matt Baum: 35:28 We just had a tornado in Texas last night that killed four people. They were talking about it on a Monday night football in October. I mean, like come on. How much more evidence do we need? Morris, I don’t want to take up any more of your time, man. This has been great.

Morris Beegle: 35:42 [inaudible 00:35:42].

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum: 35:41 You guys are doing an amazing … You can find out more about Morris Beegle and everything he is doing in the hemp world over at morrisbeegle.com, and of course, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes for this episode. That is about it for this episode of Ministry of Hemp Podcast, but before we get out of here, I want to thank everyone that has been downloading and supporting this show through your tweets, your Facebook mentions and going to iTunes and reviewing the show. That is the single biggest way you can help get this information to people who are looking for it. So, if you’ve got a minute, give us a star rating, maybe write us a review. I really appreciate it.

I mentioned it earlier, but you can always call me at 402-819-6417 with your hemp related questions, and we love to play them on the show and answer them. Kit, the editor-in-chief of ministryofhemp.com comes on and helps me answer your questions. We’ve done a couple of them, and so far, they’ve been a couple of my favorite shows. Speaking of ministryofhemp.com, get over there and check out our holiday gift buying guide because nothing says happy holidays like hemp for Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah or whatever you choose to celebrate.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter @MinistryofHemp. Check us out on Facebook/ministryofhemp. Since I am the producer, editor and the host of this show, you can email me, matt@ministryofhemp.com with your questions, with your comments, suggestions, things you’d like to hear on the show, just about anything, and I would love to hear from you. As always, you will find a complete written transcript of this episode in the show notes because we like to make the Ministry of Hemp Podcast accessible for everyone. Thanks again for listening, but for now, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is the Ministry of Hemp, wishing you happy holidays and signing off.

The post Morris Beegle: Hemp Can Be A Sustainable Industrial Alternative appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this week’s episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast it’s time for another Q&A session with Matt and Ministry of Hemp’s Editor in Chief Kit O’Connell. This round of questions touches on everything from where to buy quality CBD, vaping CBD safely, and industrial uses for hemp like plastic and fabric.

Sponsored by LifePatent

Thanks to our friends at LifePatent, one of our Top CBD Brands, for sponsoring this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. Check out their site now to try free samples of their great sleep capsules.

We’re also big fans of their CBD-A tincture, which we reviewed last year. Our editor Kit still frequently reaches for this product for help with his chronic pain.

Send us your feedback!

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com.

Thanks again for listening! Contact sales@ministryofhemp.com if you’re interested in sponsoring our podcast or other content on our website.

Answering common hemp & CBD questions

Below you’ll find answers to some common CBD and hemp questions like we address in this episode of our podcast.

• Full spectrum vs. broad spectrum vs. CBD isolate — which should you buy?
• For hemp fabric, we recommend Nature’s Fabrics and Hemp Fabric Lab.
• Using hemp as a sustainable packaging alternative
• Why isn’t hemp plastic everywhere if it’s more sustainable?

Oh, and one of our callers had a doctor concerned about the calcium content in hemp milk. It turns out hemp milk has the highest calcium content of any alternative milk.

Hemp questions answered with Matt & Kit: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete written transcript for this episode:

Speaker 1: 00:00 The Ministry of Hemp podcast was brought to you by LifePatent, purveyors of high-quality CBD products that just happen to be one of our favorite brands too. They care very deeply about their customers because when it comes down to it, LifePatent understands their customers are people seeking relief. You can learn more about the entire line of CBD-related products at lifepatent.com.

Matt Baum: 00:31 Welcome to another episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Today on the show, I am joined once again by ministryofhemp.com’s editor-in-chief and all around brilliant guy, Kit O’Connell. We are going to be answering your hemp-related questions on our second Ministry of Hemp Q&A show. I am super excited, so let’s get to it, shall we? Kit, welcome back for another Ministry of Hemp Q&A. It is always good to have you, sir.

Kit O’Connell: 01:11 It’s good to be here. I enjoy dropping in for these.

Matt Baum: 01:14 This is where I bring you on to do my job for me and I appreciate that. Thank you. We got a few voicemails today and, again, the questions are kind of all over the place, which is great. If you guys want to call, like I said at the beginning of the show, you can always do so. Just call us at 402-819-6417 and leave your message with your hemp-related question. Kit, should we get into the first one? You ready?

Kit O’Connell: 01:37 Let’s jump in.

Matt Baum: 01:38 All right. Here we go.

We don’t sell CBD, just review it

Speaker 4: 01:40 Hi, I’m trying to get ahold of the company that makes first-class, full-spectrum CBD, [inaudible 00:01:50] hemp oil. Please give me a call.

Matt Baum: 01:54 We do get a lot of calls like this. I wanted to play one, rather than responding to everybody and saying, “Hey, we don’t actually sell it.” Kit, maybe you can explain for people that are listening to the show where can they go to find quality hemp oil that they can trust?

Kit O’Connell: 02:09 Sure. Yeah. We don’t sell products. That is a common misconception that we get a lot of emails to about that. We’re trying to provide useful information and really clear, honest, transparent basics about what’s happening in the CBD and hemp industries. The good thing is we do have a lot of information. We’ve tried out a lot of different products and we list a lot of our favorites on our website. You can go right up to the top and search right where it says, “CBD Reviews.” We have a best CBD oil review, which is our favorite, overall brands in the industry. Under that, you’ll see breakdowns. If you’re looking for tinctures or a topical to apply to your sore muscles or gummies and so on, we’ve got all of that in there. We’ve recommended some of our favorite brands beyond that. We’ll put a link to this in the show notes.

Kit O’Connell: 03:04 We’ve written a couple articles about how you can pick a really good brand of CBD. Check the show notes for this or if you want to just go directly on our site, you can even just go search for the word. A good word to punch in is actually the word quality and that’ll bring up a couple articles about why quality matters in CBD and some guides and tips for picking the best products. In general, you want a brand, of course, that’s transparent, that’s offering third-party lab results. For a lot of people who are going to prefer that full-spectrum hemp extract, which has CBD plus traces, at least, of all the other compounds that are naturally occurring in the hemp plant. That’s a good choice for a lot of people.

Matt Baum: 03:51 It looks like some of our latest reviews, she was looking for hemp oil. Right now, we’ve got some of our top brands up there that include like Populum, Lazarus, Ananda, Everyday Optimal D-Stress, CBDfx and Joy Organics. Again, right under the CBD reviews, it’s the first link you’ll see, best CBD oil reviews. If you want to start there, can’t go wrong. Let’s go for our next question here.

Kit O’Connell: 04:17 Yup. Yup.

Questions about buying hemp fabric

Speaker 5: 04:18 Good morning. It is 2:39, eastern standard time in Columbus, Ohio. I’m calling. I’m an artist. I do turn tree limbs into Moses or as we say in Arabic, Musa’s staff, for my artwork, bags, wall hangings, what I call urban survival clothing, my own design and I wanted to know where I can buy hemp fabric. I’m retired. From Michigan, Detroit, but I live in Columbus, Ohio, right now, and I wanted to buy some hemp fabric. Probably will have to save up for it, but I would like to know how I can do that. Just happen to be up in the middle of the night like most artist’s are. A farmer who had done some clothing for some fashion show to the awareness of hemp farming, so African-American farmers, so I thought I would just research it on Facebook and I found you all. I was trying to find out … I’m 70 tomorrow on the 18th, September, so I’m trying to figure out how to use all this technology to find your podcast and listen to you. I hope you have it archived. Blessed to have found you. Much success.

Speaker 5: 05:29 Once in a blue moon at Trader Joe’s, we can find hemp milk, which is really neat. I have to look up the calcium content though. My doctor frowned when I mentioned it, but I’m like, “Whatever.” I like to try different milks. I used to farm and I get tired of that. I will look that up also. Any place I can find or buy hemp fabric in America. I saw one place in UK, but I don’t know if that’s legit or dependable or not. I would appreciate it. I will email you to send you my telephone number.

Speaker 5: 06:04 All right. Thank you. You guys have a blessed week, month and keep it going. I miss farming. I used to raise cows, sheep, goats, chickens and selling animals, slaughter them, sell them and then process the hide for artwork. I brought a few back with me to the city once I left the country down south. All right. Again, take care. Have a blessed, successful podcast. You’re growing. Take care. Bye-bye.

Matt Baum: 06:30 She sounds like the coolest. I really like her.

Kit O’Connell: 06:33 I want to hang out with her.

Matt Baum: 06:35 Totally.

Kit O’Connell: 06:35 Pop open a beer and talk about crafting. I’m a writer, so I’m up at 2:00 a.m., scribbling away-

Matt Baum: 06:43 Oh, yeah.

Kit O’Connell: 06:43 … sometimes getting my best ideas, so I totally get that. I think our caller is a great example too of how the stigma around hemp is disappearing because we are hearing from people from the older generations that are really interested in hemp. Some of them might not have been in the past. I don’t know about this caller, but a lot of them might have turned away from it because of the associations of it with the war on drugs and all that.

Matt Baum: 07:08 Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kit O’Connell: 07:10 I love to see this kind of thing. This is great. In terms of the specific topic with hemp fabric, that is an area … Unfortunately, it’s hard to buy domestic, US-produced fully hemp fabric. That is one place that our video producer, Jessica, recommended to me because we had this question come in at least once before via email. What she recommended was this site called Nature’s Fabrics. Again, we’ll put this in the show notes, but it’s just Nature’s, with an S, Fabrics, again with an S, dot com. They do have a small collection of hemp fabric. That’s one of the only US sources that we’ve personally worked with.

Kit O’Connell: 07:54 We’ve also engaged with a company in India called Hemp Fabric Lab. Now you are obviously going to be paying a little more because of the international shipping, but one of the nice things about Hemp Fabric Lab is that they don’t have any minimum orders. They have several different hemp fabrics that they’ve made, as well as some blends of hemp with other fabrics. You can pick up just one yard of it to play with if you want or obviously make a big bulk order too. They’re really cool people. They’re working with some really interesting fashion designers. But, overall, some of their stuff is affordable, especially with that no minimum, so Hemp Fabric Lab. We’ll drop a link to them.

Kit O’Connell: 08:34 This is an area that we really hope is going to expand a lot-

Matt Baum: 08:38 Definitely.

Kit O’Connell: 08:38 … in the coming years.

Matt Baum: 08:39 Definitely. This is one of those areas where it is a little more expensive right now I’m sure, but the only reason that is, is because we don’t have as many producers yet.

Kit O’Connell: 08:47 Exactly.

Matt Baum: 08:47 As you see more producers getting in the game, we will see the price of hemp fabric come down.

Kit O’Connell: 08:54 We don’t have exact figures on this year, but we probably in the US grew, give or take, about 150,000 acres of hemp, let’s say as a generous figure. It’s probably a little less than that. Out of that 150 or so, from the experts I’ve spoken with, we only had about 10,000 acres of hemp that was grown for anything other than CBD. That means for fiber, to making the fabric, to making the building material, to making the food. Almost all of those uses of hemp are still bringing it in from Canada, from China, from India, eastern Europe, places like that. This is going to come down. Prices are going to come down. The availability is going to go up. It’s all going to happen over the next couple years is our prediction.

Matt Baum: 09:37 One of the things we’ve been talking about on the show with guests is that there is a very big CBD bubble right now. Like you said, everyone is growing hemp for CBD, literally everyone, because that is where the money is at the moment. But, again, that is going to change too. Unfortunately, you might have to dig around to find hemp fabrics right now, but they are out there. Like we said, we’ll put this in the show notes. You can check it out. As far as hemp milk goes, you had mentioned you had talked to your doctor and he kind of aargh because he wasn’t sure about the calcium. I took a couple years of nutrition when I was going through culinary school and it is an absolute fact that you get more calcium from plant-based milks like soy milk or almond milk or oat milk than you are from cow milk and that’s just because there’s lactose in it. If you’re not a baby, you are lactose intolerant to some degree. You’re going to get more calcium, as long as it’s in there. I haven’t seen the Trader Joe’s hemp milk, but I would think it’s pretty weird if there’s no calcium in there. Be one worth looking into though.

Kit O’Connell: 10:42 Of course, also with hemp milk, the hemp seed has a ton of great benefits apart from the calcium you gain all kinds of amino acids, Omega-3’s and 6’s and all these other beneficial nutritional substances that are in the hemp seed. It’s a real nutritional powerhouse. Even if it’s not your main source of calcium, it’s definitely … can be really good to make hemp milk. We’ve even got a video and some instructions on our site to make your own hemp milk with seeds, so check that out.

Matt Baum: 11:11 Again, all things are you’re not going to get from lactose-based animal milk.

Kit O’Connell: 11:17 Hey, if you do get this, drop us a note and tell us more about the artwork you are doing. That sounds really cool.

Matt Baum: 11:21 Yeah.

Kit O’Connell: 11:21 We’d love to learn more about what you’re doing.

Matt Baum: 11:22 Yeah, email that to us, we’d love to us. You can send that to-

Kit O’Connell: 11:25 Please.

Matt Baum: 11:25 Matt@ministryofhemp.com or info@ministryofhemp.com. All right. Let’s move to our next question here.

Understanding the dosage of CBD oil

Speaker 6: 11:32 Hey, so I was looking at some stuff online and I have some questions. I’m confused about CBD dosage on products. Some of the bottles say that they’re 1,000 milligrams or 500 milligrams or 250 milligrams. Is that the total amount in the bottle? Then it kind of goes hand-in-hand like why are some of them 25 milligrams? Is that just like a really low dose amount or is that the amount in the dropper? Appreciate some answers on this. Thank you very much for taking my call.

Matt Baum: 12:12 This is an excellent question. I’ll be honest, I get a little confused sometimes looking at these labels. Can you shed any light on this one, Kit?

Kit O’Connell: 12:20 It is confusing and it even throws us off a little bit. There’s one thing I want to say at the beginning here as sort of a preamble is that it’s just a good reminder and something that has come up recently to say that CBD is not currently regulated by the FDA. The FDA and the FTC will come down on the worst of the worst actors in the field. Those are the people that are claiming that CBD is going to cure cancer.

Matt Baum: 12:44 Right.

Kit O’Connell: 12:45 But as far as the other side of things, they’re not setting any standards. There’s no one looking at CBD and saying, “Every CBD bottle should be labeled like this.”

Matt Baum: 12:54 Right. Like you-

Kit O’Connell: 12:54 In the same way that there’s standards around buying vitamin C, we just don’t have that.

Matt Baum: 12:58 Yeah. It’ll say, “250 milligrams per pill” or whatever and you know exactly what you’re taking. Unfortunately-

Kit O’Connell: 13:03 And that’s just not the case for CBD, right now. Exactly. Yeah. When we look at products, because we review products here, the gold standard to us is that your label should say how much total is in the bottle. Some brands that are still very reputable brands have made the choice to instead list, like you said, the total amount in a dropper. If a full dropper is 25 milligrams, they’re going to put 25 milligrams on the bottle or if it’s a capsule, they’re listing how much is per capsule, which obviously makes a lot of sense to do it with capsules. The short answer is it varies from product to product and you need to read the label a little more carefully with CBD than you would with other products. For a tincture it should be the total amount on the bottle. Obviously, for things like a gummy or a capsule, it makes more sense to put a per dose list on there too. That’s what we think it should look like, but you are seeing stuff that’s all over the map. You see people that are just putting the per dropper. Occasionally, you’re seeing people that are listing a number that’s based on say the full amount of hemp oil in the bottle. It’s kind of an inflated number that doesn’t accurately reflect on what’s actually in the bottle.

Matt Baum: 14:25 Is that where we start seeing labels that say 5,000 milligrams and stuff like that?

Kit O’Connell: 14:31 We do see some of that. Yeah. We’re going to see some of those. Unfortunately, there are some people that, as far as we can tell, are just straight up scammers. If you search for CBD on Amazon, we’ve talked about this before, you’re going to see those ridiculous ones where they claim that there’s 25,000 milligrams in the bottle. On a more reasonable level, we did encounter a product recently. I won’t name names, but they had … theirs listed 3,000 on the bottle. When we took a closer look, we found that the actual amount of CBD was closer to about 2,250 say, 2,250 milligrams. The rest of it, they had made up by saying that there was hemp seed oil in there, so you’re still getting the hemp nutrition. We decided because they did provide a real honest breakdown on their website that they were a brand that we wanted to work with. Even with some of these good brands, it does require a little more research on your part. You need to go look at the brand information on the website, see what kind of breakdowns they’re offering. Even if a brand says that they have 500 in the bottle, unfortunately you still have to go look at their lab tests to find if they’re telling the truth about that. It’s really important to check those third-party lab tests.

Matt Baum: 15:46 Definitely.

Kit O’Connell: 15:47 A good product is going to be within 10% of what they say they are on their bottle or more exact, obviously, but you don’t want to go with anybody that’s any further off than that.

Matt Baum: 15:56 The TLDR version here and correct me if I’m wrong, but if we see a bottle with something that says 25 milligrams, typically that means it’s 25 milligrams per dropper. Anything above 100 is technically saying there is that much CBD in the bottle. If you get something that says 250 milligrams, that’s 250 milligrams per bottle.

Kit O’Connell: 16:21 That’s a good rule to follow in general at least as a starting point as you’re looking into a product [crosstalk 00:16:28].

Matt Baum: 16:27 Okay. All right. Yeah, because honestly I had a friend of mine who has been having some knee and hip trouble. I gave him CBD that someone had sent me and he really liked it. Then, I gave him another one that somebody else had sent me and he’s like, “Well, this one only says 25.” I said, “Well, I think means it’s per, you know, dropper, but I don’t really know.” I knew they were very reputable and he ended up really liking it, so good to know I wasn’t lying to him.

Kit O’Connell: 16:58 Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Thanks to LifePatent

Matt Baum: 16:59 Before we move along, I am super excited to introduce you to our first sponsor for the Ministry of Hemp podcast, LifePatent. With a full line of high-quality and responsibly-sourced CBD products, LifePatent offers relief from pain, anxiety and even some help getting to sleep. It even offers CBD tincture for dogs and personally I have a pug with a nerve issue that was causing pain and she was shaking like crazy. I found giving her a CBD tincture with her meals has helped her stop shaking and reduced her pain quite a bit. The LifePatent site is currently offering free samples of their new LPX Technology, which harnesses a natural delivery system. The most effective delivery method available for the ingestion of cannabinoids on the market. You get to try two, 15 milligram sleep capsules on LifePatent and enjoy the power and efficacy of nature’s delivery system at lifepatent.com.

Matt Baum: 18:00 Also, check out a glowing review of LifePatent’s CBD/A oil over at ministryofhealth.com and you’ll learn more about the antiinflammatory and nausea-reducing properties of CBD/A. LifePatent cares deeply about their customers, because when it comes down to it, they understand their customers are people seeking relief. Like I said, you can learn more about their entire line of CBD products at lifepatent.com and, of course, we will have links to their site in the show notes. Huge thanks to lifepatent.com for sponsoring the Ministry of Hemp podcast.

Vitamin E & CBD vaping safety

Matt Baum: 18:41 Okay. Next question, here we go.

Speaker 7: 18:43 Hey, yeah, I had a question for you. It’s kind of been bouncing around my head a little bit. I’ve been hearing a lot about flavored vape pens that can cause serious injuries and sometimes death with people that have been using them. With all this CBD stuff going around out there now, I was wondering has there been any similar reports with CBD and stuff like that? Yeah, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you.

Matt Baum: 19:06 This is a really good one and I think this has been on a lot of people’s minds. We talked about it briefly on the show a little while back when they were still investigating what the ingredient was that was causing problems. As I understand it, all of the deaths were related to cannabis, like full-on, marijuana-related products, is that correct?

Kit O’Connell: 19:30 Yeah. Specifically, it seems like it was an issue with an additive that … It was vitamin E acetate.

Matt Baum: 19:39 Right.

Kit O’Connell: 19:39 Vitamin E is something that gets added as a preservative and I don’t want people like … Because you will see the edible products like the tinctures with vitamin E in them and you shouldn’t panic. That’s a very safe ingredient in something that goes on your skin or that you eat. But as far as inhaling, it seems like vitamin E is really bad news. That seems to be, again, as we often say, “We’re not doctors and we’re definitely not medical researchers.” It seems like the current consensus is that all of the issues seem to have been this additive called vitamin E acetate. I remember reading some research that also maybe pointed at this terpene-based additive that some of the black market brands were also adding to make their stuff go further. That’s also kind of with the vitamin E acetate is these black market cannabis or marijuana vape brand makers found out that they could keep having a thick looking extract inside of that capsule, inside of that cartridge, but have to put less of the actual THC extract in it by spacing it out with these terpenes or with the vitamin E.

Kit O’Connell: 20:59 Bottom line, don’t buy illegal vape cartridges. That’s unfortunate because I know that there’s a lot of people out there that are still stuck in black market states and it looks real tempting, but just don’t do it. It’s just not worth it unfortunately. Stick to the legal stuff, especially when it comes to vapes. It does seem like you’re relatively safe if you’re going to a legal dispensary and buying a vape there or buying these CBD vapes. As far as it looks like, there were not any issues with CBD. We’re still waiting to see if there’s any more research to come out before we’re personally picking up on the vape reviews again at Ministry of Hemp. I think we’re heading in that direction. It does look like it really … almost all or all was this vitamin E.

Matt Baum: 21:48 I did a, not a deep dive on this one, but I couldn’t find any reports about CBD vaping being involved even in the sicknesses, let alone the deaths. Again, not doctors here, but you’re probably okay as long as you’re buying your vape product from a reputable company.

Kit O’Connell: 22:10 Just like with CBD, I think, especially with if you’re going to be vaping it, you should make sure you know every ingredient that’s in that cartridge that you’re buying from a reputable company-

Matt Baum: 22:20 Absolutely.

Kit O’Connell: 22:20 … and that they’re a company that has really comprehensive third-party lab tests. There have been issues in the cannabis field where even outside of vaping where people got sick from inhaling moldy marijuana flower. As far as I know, that hasn’t happened in hemp yet, but it is potentially a risk because mold is mold and it’s bad for you no matter where it pops up, so it doesn’t-

Matt Baum: 22:43 Right. Whether you’re eating it or inhaling it.

Kit O’Connell: 22:46 Exactly. Especially with vapes, look for the brands that are offering these comprehensive third-party tests where they show not just the CBD content, but also that they’ve been checked for mold and pesticide residues.

Getting involved in hemp plastics

Matt Baum: 23:00 Okay. Last question here. It’s a longer one.

Speaker 8: 23:06 Hi, this is Rico, from Southern California. I recently discovered the possible impacts that hemp may have on our society and culture as a whole. Obviously, it’s come a long way in the size as far as external use products, topical products and obviously oral products. I am interested in getting into the field as soon as possible. I’m apparently making plans to get myself involved. I wasn’t thinking so much on the food or dietary supplement side of things, what I was thinking was more like in the industrial product or production of industrial use products made from hemp. What was I thinking, to be more specific, was plastics. My question is where do you see the process or how soon do you see something on the horizon in terms of processing plastics for the industry because as far as I’ve read up on this topic, decortication is heavily outdated. Because of all the years of being outlawed, so to speak, there’s been real no new manufacturing techniques or methods developed over the last 70 years or so, ever since the Marihuana Tax Act.

Speaker 8: 24:47 My question is, like I said, how soon do we see some major processing revolutions taking place for industrial goods, like plastics in particular. Thank you. My name is Rico. I’m from Southern California. I’ll be listening. Bye-bye.

Matt Baum: 25:04 Thanks for your call, Rico. That is a fantastic question. The short answer is the sooner guys like you get involved, the sooner we will see more, but I think there’s a longer answer here too.

Kit O’Connell: 25:18 Yeah. It’s really good, Rico, that you pointed out the effect of the prohibition, because we lost decades of development in every aspect of the cannabis plant.

Matt Baum: 25:28 Absolutely.

Kit O’Connell: 25:29 There’s so much more we could be doing with it right now if we hadn’t had this huge gap. That affects everything from the farmer planting the seeds in this field, all the way up to the guy trying to make the hemp plastic and everybody in between. The people processing and decorticating and drying and all the other processes, all those steps would be much advanced and more convenient and more efficient if we had the years of research. As far as the state of plastic right now, there is some hemp plastic out there in use. Now, of course, car manufacturers are pretty cagey about exactly what they do and how they make their cars, but we do understand that if there is some composite use of hemp in things like doorframes and some other very durable parts of vehicles are actually, in certain cases, using hemp. It’s usually mixed with other materials, but it is basically a hemp plastic. Beyond that, what we’re seeing is there’s these … They’re kind of crude, these hemp composite plastics and you can look at that them and tell that it was something made from a plant. It’s got little bits of plant in it. It’s not a clear plastic bottle. We just can’t do that yet.

Matt Baum: 26:35 Right. I remember seeing like a-

Kit O’Connell: 26:36 Not just the hemp-

Matt Baum: 26:36 … surfboard and stuff that we saw at NOCO that was completely-

Kit O’Connell: 26:39 Yeah, exactly.

Matt Baum: 26:41 … made of hemp. It was kind of fibrous if you looked really close.

Kit O’Connell: 26:46 You saw too, of course, there’s those people, PF Design Labs and they’re printing these very advanced composites. They had a bicycle frame that was made from hemp and it just looked like any other bike frame.

Matt Baum: 26:58 Yeah, it was amazing.

Kit O’Connell: 26:58 It was real light. It was real light.

Matt Baum: 27:00 Like virtually weightless, it was incredible.

Kit O’Connell: 27:02 Yeah, it was amazing. But that’s obviously super experimental. We’re seeing these great advanced, really cool experimental stuff. As far as practical use, there is this great company that we love called Sana Packaging, S-A-N-A, and they’re taking hemp plastic and they’re making products for the marijuana, for the cannabis industry where they’re taking … If you’re buying a doob tube or whatever, you can have it made out of a recycled hemp plastic. Even in some experimentation with taking the hemp waste from CBD production and turning that into plastic or paper, which is really cool.

Matt Baum: 27:37 See, that’s very cool. That is amazing.

Kit O’Connell: 27:39 I love that idea.

Matt Baum: 27:40 Yeah.

Kit O’Connell: 27:41 Yeah. That’s like where the future is to us is closing the circle so that the waste products of the hemp industry get made back into the packaging for the hemp industry-

Matt Baum: 27:51 Absolutely.

Kit O’Connell: 27:51 That’s super cool to us. Beyond that, someone’s just going to have to see the potential, get people involved who can throw money at it and do the research because that’s what we need to get to having really good, modern plastics made from hemp.

Matt Baum: 28:06 Absolutely.

Kit O’Connell: 28:07 Now, of course, we do have to say too that just as us being lovers of the planet here that there’s a lot of potential in hemp plastic. It is more biodegradable than conventional plastic depending on how you make it. Not all hemp plastic is automatically biodegradable, that’s a myth. It really depends on the type. Beyond that, we still, as a whole, have to be more responsible as a species about plastic-

Matt Baum: 28:31 Absolutely.

Kit O’Connell: 28:32 … no matter what we make it out of.

Matt Baum: 28:32 Absolutely.

Kit O’Connell: 28:33 We’ve got to be better about it. But, with what said, Rico, I hope you get involved with this because there’s so much potential for hemp plastic. It’s kind of a catch-22 in that we need the money to put in it and we don’t have anything to show for that yet, so how do we get the money? We just got to have some people that are willing to see that potential there and invest in it and put their time and their blood, sweat and tears into really making a progress in this. We have people out there doing it, but there’s a lot of room for growth, so I hope you’ll get involved in some way.

Matt Baum: 29:03 This is one of those things where I don’t shop at Walmart and I don’t agree with all their politics, but they were one of the first companies to start massively buying plastics that had been recycled for their vegetables and whatnot like that. It’s going to take someone like that, a giant, that is willing to put their foot in the market and say, “Okay, we want to look at hemp plastic because it’s not going to use petroleum like regular plastics. It will degrade faster. But just like with CBD where we keep saying, “This needs to be done organically, it needs to be done the right way” plastic has to be done the same way. It has to be able to biodegrade. We can’t just come up with another product that we’re throwing in landfills. Otherwise, what is the point?

Kit O’Connell: 29:48 Exactly.

Matt Baum: 29:48 It is going to take some titan of industry out there to say, “Let’s go for it and give it a try” and throw a bunch of money at it, unfortunately.

Kit O’Connell: 29:56 There’s an article that unfortunately it goes viral every few months. It’s this headline saying that LEGO is switching to hemp plastic and they’re not unfortunately. The article has this headline that’s very definitive that LEGO is doing this, but if you actually open the article, it just says that LEGO is considering switching to a vegetable plastic. The article makes the argument that hemp would be a good choice, which it would be. They’re not doing it yet, but that is another great example. If someone like LEGO said, “We’re going ahead and doing … and putting the money into learning what it would take to make the switch to hemp plastic.” If someone like them did that or-

Matt Baum: 30:34 Oh, yeah.

Kit O’Connell: 30:34 … a Hasbro or somebody huge like that, that would make a huge-

Matt Baum: 30:37 Or a DuPont [crosstalk 00:30:39] or somebody. I mean, like-

Kit O’Connell: 30:40 Oh, yeah. Somebody like that. Yeah.

Matt Baum: 30:41 That would be massive, but for right now-

Kit O’Connell: 30:44 And it is this weird place because I’m not a big fan of Walmart either. These big corporations are problematic, but at the same time some of them are starting to see the way the wind is blowing. Even fossil fuel companies are investing in renewable energy. Hopefully, we’ll see one of these big plastic manufacturers realize, hey, not only are we destroying earth, but we’re going to go out of business if we don’t change.

Matt Baum: 31:05 Right.

Kit O’Connell: 31:05 We need to start looking into this now. Hopefully, we’ll start to see them realize that and to make the choice to investigate hemp.

Matt Baum: 31:11 The thing we can do on our end is start demanding stuff like this. That’s one thing you can do as a consumer. Start demanding it and when you do see it, buy it, throw your money at it and let them know I’m interested in this, I like what you’re doing and the more we do that, the more these larger companies will see there’s money here. I’m not fooling myself that they’re going to wake up and go, “What we have done to this planet?” That’s not going to happen anytime soon. But, if we can show them we as a consumer are genuinely interested in this, then we can make a change and we can interest them in making a responsible change, even if it is just to make a bunch more cash.

Kit O’Connell: 31:49 I think one other thing to add too is that it’s important with these sorts of topics to look at transitional steps. We see this with hemp fabric too where it’s really expensive right now to make a 100% hemp shirt.

Matt Baum: 31:59 Right.

Kit O’Connell: 32:00 But you can still make a shirt that’s 50% hemp and 50% cotton and you still have a healthier shirt that’s more sustainable for the earth. You’re taking that step. I think we probably are going to see some intermediate steps where we see, for example, plastic bottles that are 40% hemp and 60% fossil fuel. Let’s not turn up our nose at those intermediate steps because they will hopefully get us where we need to be.

Matt Baum: 32:22 Yeah. That’s a really good point. We have to be cheerleaders right now and if we start screaming everything down because they are not doing it the sacred way, then we’re not going to make any headway unfortunately. We got to keep our eyes on the prize. You know what I mean?

Kit O’Connell: 32:36 Definitely.

Hemp questions: Final thoughts with Matt and Kit

Matt Baum: 32:36 Kit, thank you so much for joining me and answering these questions. This was a great group of questions we got this time.

Kit O’Connell: 32:43 Great variety. Yeah. Thanks for calling everybody.

Matt Baum: 32:46 Yeah, definitely. I can’t wait to do this again. We will definitely, maybe in the next month or so, we’ll get together, answer some more of your questions. Sound good?

Kit O’Connell: 32:54 Sounds great. Anytime.

Matt Baum: 32:55 Awesome. Kit, thanks again for joining us. Huge thank you to everybody that called in today and if you have hemp-related questions, just like I said at the beginning of the show, you can always call us at 402-819-6417 and you can leave a message with your hemp-related question. Now, do me a favor, don’t leave your personal information because we don’t want to broadcast that to the whole world, but feel free to followup with an email to me, Matt@ministryofhemp.com, if you’d like me to follow up on your question or let you know when it’s going to be played.

Matt Baum: 33:46 Once again, I want to thank Kit for coming on the show and helping me out. He does an amazing job over at ministryofhemp.com where you can find all the latest hemp and CBD news stories and reviews and a fantastic list of quality companies that you should be buying CBD from, including LifePatent, our first sponsor. Thank you much guys. It’s great to have you on board.

Matt Baum: 34:11 Recently we’ve been talking a lot about hemp in the industrial world on the show and next episode we’re going to do just that, so tune in to hear more about the future as hemp as an industrial commodity. As always, you can find a full written transcript of this show in the show notes to make it a little more accessible for everybody. If you like what you hear in this show, then please do us a huge favor, go to iTunes and leave us a star rating. It really, really helps to put this information in front of people better looking for it. Hey, if you hate the show, let me know that too. Shoot me an email to Matt@ministryofhemp.com and tell me what you would like to hear, what you think we’re doing wrong and what you think we could do better. I would love to hear your thoughts. That is it for today’s show and for now this is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp telling you to take care of yourself and take care of others and make good decisions, will you? This is the Ministry of Hemp podcast, signing off.

The post Even More Hemp Questions Answered With Matt & Kit appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Fuel is everything. America would not be the hyper-efficient economy it is today without something to power our cars, computers, and our Roomba vacuum cleaners. We would be nothing but Neolithic farmers without our electricity and gasoline.

But, anything that is truly valuable always comes at a price. Traditional fuel sources hurt the environment, and they’re running out. Air pollution from processing fossil fuels harms the troposphere, and indirectly depletes ozone from our atmosphere. The price for hyper efficiency is evident, which is why alternative fuel sources are becoming so important. Today we focus on a fuel source that hits close to home. That alternative is hemp biofuel.

The cannabis plant is the gift that keeps on givin’. This magic plant gives us CBD oil, THC, hemp fibers and even fuel! Researchers have made hemp into two types of biofuel: biodiesel and ethanol.

Hemp biodiesel

Biodiesel is produced by the pressing of hemp seeds to extract their oils & fats.

After the extraction, the product is then put through more steps to make it into a usable hemp biofuel for your car. If you’re curious to learn about the specifics of biodiesel production, the process is thoroughly explained by hemp.com.

The argument for hemp-derived biodiesel comes down to convenience. If processed correctly, biodiesel can be put into any diesel-powered automobiles. It can be stored and transported like diesel, so there isn’t a need to create a new system for transportation. It even replaces the smell of traditional diesel with the smell of hemp.

Using hemp to make ethanol

Ethanol is traditionally made from wheat-based crops such as corn and barley. It’s traditionally used as an additive to gasoline, which gave way to our “flex-fuel” vehicles of today.

Hemp can be made into ethanol by various forms of fermentation. Using hemp as the main source of ethanol, instead of food crops like wheat & corn has clear advantages. Not using food crops as a fuel source allows more efficiency in food production, and hemp can be grown in lower quality conditions unlike corn or wheat. Hemp-derived ethanol also shares the advantages of transportation and usability as biodiesel.

Hemp biofuel: A more sustainable alternative?

Fuel alternatives like this can seem like a no-brainer to replace our traditional fossil-fuel sources, but there are drawbacks to these alternative techniques.

To set up a large-scale industrial hemp farm, you will experience the same ethical dilemmas that the farming industry faces. Deforestation and pesticide use will increase, and we’ll inevitably replace some of our food-crop land with more hemp-crop land. Farmers can grow hemp biofuel on land that is not fit for other crops. This “marginal land” is essentially land that isn’t tilled and cleared out for farming.

Despite the versatility, hemp produces a much bigger harvest in ideal farming settings. Additionally, marginal land is actually home to important plants, trees, and living creatures that are vital to the ecosystem. Read “Is Hemp The Best Biofuel?” from sensiseeds.com for a more in-depth look into the argument for hemp biofuel.

Clearly, hemp biofuel alone won’t solve our environmental crisis, but we believe it could be part of a transition to a cleaner way of living.

The auto industry already uses hemp

While hemp biofuel may not be a popular alternative just yet, the automotive industry already uses hemp.

Automakers weave hemp plastic into a bendable material similar to fiberglass. Almost all European car makers use hemp fibers as interior door panels and trim pieces. And companies like FlexForm technologies operate as a dedicated producer of hemp-fiberglass that they sell to automotive companies to be made into car doors and exterior panels.

Cars that feature hemp-based materials include the BMW i8 supercar and the Lotus Evora. The advantages that come with hemp-made materials is that they are lighter, bio-degradable, and comes from a much easier renewable resource. Hemp grows in roughly 3 months while metals take thousands of years to form.

The future of hemp fuel

Now that hemp is legal in the U.S., we’re witnessing the beginning of  hemp revolution. We hope that means more hemp material available for experimental uses like fuel, in the not too distant future.

While hemp biofuel can’t solve the entire energy crisis (we believe the answer to that problem will require multiple solutions), it can provide us with a great renewable fuel source in addition to its already useful applications.

While we spent our time here discussing hemp biofuel, let’s not forget the other ways people have been using hemp. There’s hemp beer, hemp paper, and, this reporter’s personal favorite, hemp food! The future is indeed green.

Article updated October 2019.

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