Welcome to episode 60 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. In this episode, Matt has a conversation with Gregory Wilson, founder of Fibonacci LLC which manufactures HempWood. Wilson is creating beautiful wood for flooring, cabinetry, and so much more with compressed hemp fibers. Located in Murray Kentucky, Wilson and his crew of engineers are the only scaled fiber and hemp building manufacturer in the U.S.

They talk about the challenges of creating not only it but inventing the tools needed to manufacture HempWood, its benefits and comparison to other popular woods, and the challenges of launching a hemp start-up during the Covid pandemic. Wilson didn’t just move to Kentucky to be near the hemp his company needs; he’s also hiring agriculture students from nearby Murray State to work in the plant and better understand the hemp itself.

Brought to you by Blue Forest Farms Hemp

We’d like to thank our partners at Blue Forest Farms for making this episode possible.

The folks at BFF pride themselves on a fully seed-to-shelf process that is also fully organic. From selectively breeding their own high-quality varietals of hemp; growing plants locally on their sun-kissed, organic, Colorado farm; monitoring the state-of-the-art extraction process; and even engineering the best tasting formulas, Blue Forest Farms ensures quality at every step in the CBD product creation process.

The Blue Forest Farms What’s Your Number system comes from processing 6 different unique oils. Whether you’re looking for a full spectrum unrefined hemp oil, pure CBD isolate with absolutely no THC, or even an advanced sleep formula that combines CBD with a concentrated amount of CBN, BFF has six oil formulas to fit the unique needs of their customers. We also picked Blue Forest Farms Broad Spectrum Gummies as one of our top brands of CBD gummies.

Use the code “Ministry” at checkout for 20% off your purchase at bffhemp.com and help support a great CBD brand that supports the Ministry of Hemp.

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

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Hemp Wood Alternatives: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 60 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “Hemp Wood Alternatives”:

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. Recently on the show, we were talking about hemp plastics, and today we’re going to talk about making wood out of hemp. It is stronger than oak, it looks just as nice, it’s not as flammable, and it sure grows faster than trees. But before we get into that, I want to say thanks to our partner, Blue Forest Farms. We are super pumped to be partnering with them again, this week. Blue Forest Farms or BFF, as we call them, has a whole line of amazing CBD products, including a new CBN advanced formula. And I’m going to tell you all about that later on, and how you can get 20% off just for listening to this show. That’s all coming up real soon here. But first, let me introduce you to Gregory Wilson.

Meet Greg Wilson, creator of HempWood

Greg Wilson:
My name is Greg Wilson. I’m the founder of Fibonacci, LLC, which manufactures hemp wood in the United States.

Matt Baum:
Gregory spoke to me from his plant in Murray, Kentucky, he’s out there in the middle of nowhere. You’ll hear him talk about it more later. And he showed me what they’ve got going on. It’s him and team of engineers that are creating machines to create hemp wood. It’s pretty amazing. And my conversation today with Gregory is all about hemp wood, how it works, how it is creating jobs for people right here in America and its future in American carpentry. Here’s my conversation with Gregory Wilson.

Greg Wilson:
We’ve been around for a couple of years now. And we’re the only scaled fiber manufacturer of hemp in the United States, and the only hemp-building materials manufacturer in the United States.

Matt Baum:
So let’s start right there. Why? Why do you think you’re the only one? Is that strange? Is this new? Are you guys diving into a new technology? Or is hemp wood been around for a while?

Greg Wilson:
Well, maybe because we’re the only ones dumb enough to do it. I don’t know.

Matt Baum:
That’s a good answer too. I like that.

Greg Wilson:
So, the journey begins years and years ago. When I was in school, I was studying building materials, studying engineering, and got into vinyl siding, and then Oak flooring. And when I graduated from college, I moved to China because I was studying Chinese as well and figured an engineer who can speak Chinese can write his own ticket.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Greg Wilson:
Got involved in bamboo flooring and helped figure out how to make bamboo flooring acceptable for commercial use, which was a means of making it harder or densified. So you densify woods by either impregnating them with something, some sort of polymers or plastics, or different elements like that, or you compress them. So you can compress woods and then you typically have to glue them together. So we came up with impregnating it, bamboo, and then compressing it, and then baking it in an oven so it stays that same compression ratio or that same density, which gives you hardness and stability in your final product. And then it got into a whole bunch of science and math and stuff like that.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
And then we turned it into an algorithm and then PAT and the standard operating procedure and ended up spending 14 years building bamboo factories.

Finding sustainable alternatives to wood and vinyl

Matt Baum:
Wow. So you went from bamboo to hemp? That was the next step.

Greg Wilson:
No, it was not the Chinese government deemed the bamboo patents to be a monopoly in 2009, 2010.

Matt Baum:
Oh my god.

Greg Wilson:
And so my boss then said, “Come up with a new raw material and has to be domestically sourced.” So we came up with fast-growing Eucalyptus grandis, which grows in the south of China. It actually has more Eucalyptus grandis trees in China than people really.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Greg Wilson:
So the raw material was readily available. And it fit into this process. And at that point had set up a nanotech lab in Australia, because we got bought out by an Australian company, so I was working for them. The powers that be just shifted patents. But I set up a nanotech lab there that would take technologies we’ve developed in the laboratory, and then try to commercialize them in China where I was at. So I would go and work with the scientist and then bring it back and find the engineering solution in the plants in China. So then we set up a [inaudible 00:04:48] called strand woven eucalyptus, and it’s still… Every Lowe’s in the United States still buy that stuff.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Greg Wilson:
The bamboo that we set up is… Yeah, the bamboo… We do 40% of the world’s bamboo flooring.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
That company is huge.

Matt Baum:
Jeez.

Greg Wilson:
But I’m involved with it less and less because there has been change of ownership and moving this way and moving that way.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
And actually the company does a lot more vinyl flooring now, which doesn’t fit the eco-friendly perspective we’ve been trying to do [crosstalk 00:05:20].

Before hemp, recycled wood

Matt Baum:
That seems like two steps back to me if you’re going for something a little more ecologically friendly, right? So you jumped from bamboo, to Eucalyptus, and then to hemp? Is that where we ended up?

Greg Wilson:
There was another step.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
So then after that I started getting pimped out with the algorithm to recycling woods. And so I ended up in Poland and the Ukraine and Tasmania-

Matt Baum:
You’ve been like everywhere.

Greg Wilson:
… figuring out various ways… Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
And figured out various ways to take typically the offcuts from plywood mills and compress it back into wood that can be used as a solid.

Matt Baum:
I would assume it was a nice buck in that too, because you’re basically making money off scrap, stuff that would otherwise just be thrown away.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, it works. Every place is a little different. And it seems like these days, no matter where you go, some sort of catastrophe or problem or whatever… I own a piece of a company called Smart Oak in Tasmania, where we do just that, and it burned down.

Matt Baum:
Oh.

Greg Wilson:
It was wildfires [crosstalk 00:06:27].

Matt Baum:
That’s awful.

Greg Wilson:
So yeah, it was going [inaudible 00:06:31], and then it caught on fire and I was trying to get back up but [crosstalk 00:06:35]-

Matt Baum:
It literally caught on fire, the bad way, not a good on fire. God, I’m sorry, man.

Greg Wilson:
Hey, I have a house in Annapolis that I actually use to underwrite loans and stuff like that for this place. But I built that place out with smart oak. It’s the only one in the United States.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. My business partner when I got married, my wife and I… In China, if you get married without real estate already own, it’s called a naked wedding. So when we were going to get married and moved to the States, I had to buy a house. I bought an old beater to fix up because that’s what I do.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
And my business partner sent me over a couple of pallets of wood from Tasmania that we had made down there. So it turned from just getting a floor, which he thought it was funny, and instead just send me a couple hundred feet of flooring. He then sent me a couple of pallets of lumber and a couple of different specialty cuts and stuff like that. And so it turned into a hundred thousand dollar remodel with taking down walls and the new kitchen and bathrooms.

Matt Baum:
Jeez. Wow.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. Just in time to move to Kentucky to start HempWood six months later. So my wife-

Creating a hemp-based wood alternative

Matt Baum:
So all of this background prepared you for where you are now, basically?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. But nothing can prepare you for hemp.

Matt Baum:
No.

Greg Wilson:
But yeah, right place right time. One of my buddies is like, “Man, you’re standing under the basket, and the hemp basketball just got passed to you. All you got to do is let it [crosstalk 00:08:03].”

Matt Baum:
Yeah, literally.

Greg Wilson:
Not that easy.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Okay, you’ve been throwing the word algorithm around a lot. And you named your company Fibonacci, who is a pretty famous mathematician and has his own sequence and everything. I’m guessing that’s on purpose because you guys are math nerds.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
So, how do you apply this algorithm going from things like bamboo, to Eucalyptus, to scrap wood? How do you apply this to hemp which… I mean, bamboo is more of a plant, I guess. It’s a woody plant, but it’s got to be completely different. I mean, how did you even end up in this ballpark? Was it just something that you started talking to people and thought this could be possible, let’s mess around with it, or did you know this will work based on other stuff you’ve done?

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah. I figured it out in 2010, we used to call it weed wood. I didn’t even really know the difference between any of this stuff. When in China-

Matt Baum:
That’s marketing right there, man; the stoner house buying population.

Greg Wilson:
Here’s the problem, people involved in that don’t usually buy higher end home goods.

Matt Baum:
Go figure.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
They have different priorities.

Greg Wilson:
Now I can say that they are the hipster population-

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
… is a great demographic for us, because I mean, look at me, wearing flannel, I’ve got a beard.

Matt Baum:
You got the look.

Greg Wilson:
I like the environment.

Matt Baum:
There you go.

Greg Wilson:
And then you also have the population that grew up in the ’60s that are on to their forever home, and that are looking for nice things rather than the cheap vinyl or cheap tile that goes into their place. They’re looking for something that’s comfortable and that’s eco-friendly, and that makes them feel good. Because a lot of what it is, you can buy anything for a buck.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
But if you want to get that warm wood feeling in your house, it has to be wood. It can’t be vinyl that looks like wood. If you want to get the eco-friendly element where it doesn’t have VOCs being emitted all through your house, everything, you got to use the eco-friendly [inaudible 00:10:12]. You can’t use formaldehyde. And so all the corners that you can cut, not making it here in the United States, or using dirty glues or chemicals or whatever coatings and stuff on it, make it cheaper, and make it a heck of a lot more commercially viable. But then you’re not telling the truth when you’re saying, “Hey, eco-friendly building material. There’s no added VOCs here. There’s no negative aspects of this. We’re paying all our guys fair.” Where are we live at, it’s inexpensive. Plus Kentucky is not an expensive place to live. And we pay a living wage to everyone here at the factory where you work here full-time you can buy a single family home in town.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Greg Wilson:
And that gets passed through into the cost of making the product. But that’s the right thing to do.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Greg Wilson:
So there’s where we have a big difference, or a big problem that we have is you can buy cheap flooring for four or five bucks a foot. You can buy American made flooring for six or eight bucks a foot, or you can buy eco-friendly early-adapter, American-made flooring for eight or 10 bucks a foot. And we’ll get better, but it’s all a matter of scaling and how many hours in a day.

Using Kentucky hemp to make hemp wood

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure. So tell me about the process. Before we started recording, you walked me through a little bit and you were like, “This does this and there’s the hemp, and then this comes down here.” And I was just like, “Oh my God, this looks amazing.” How does it work? You’re in Kentucky, so you’re in hemp country right there. Are you using local stuff? Are you using scrap? Where’s it start? What does it start with?

Greg Wilson:
Everything comes from within 100 miles of the plant. And actually, most of it comes from within 60. Because the round bales, you only get about 12 tons on a truck. And so your transportation cost is a large factor. It’s also a big carbon footprint. But the cost, if you go outside of 60 miles, then you’re only able to run two trucks a day. And when you’re running two trucks a day, you take a load in the morning, take a load in the afternoon, then it costs a lot more. It ends up getting close to 20% of your cost of raw material.

Matt Baum:
Jesus.

Greg Wilson:
So the closer you are the better.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, farm to table, almost.

Greg Wilson:
If you go to 100 miles with the square bales, you’re good because it’s still pencils out to the same. You can get 16 to 20 tons per truckload.

Matt Baum:
What’s the difference between a square bale and a round bale? I mean, I literally know nothing about this. So talk to me like I’m a third grader.

Greg Wilson:
Self-Explanatory, square versus round.

Matt Baum:
Really? It’s just more compact or?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, it’s a circle. Think about stacking a bunch of circles together.

Matt Baum:
Got you.

Greg Wilson:
So you a whole bunch of-

Matt Baum:
Okay. So it’s literally just space?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. Literally like a bale of hay.

Matt Baum:
Okay, that makes sense.

Greg Wilson:
You’ve seen a picture of a square bale of hay when you stack a bunch of Legos together?

Matt Baum:
Right.

Greg Wilson:
Fit a lot tighter.

Matt Baum:
I was just overthinking it. Okay.

Greg Wilson:
And then a round bale is a round bale around-

Matt Baum:
Literally a round bale.

Greg Wilson:
… like you saw out there, that when you try to stack those on a truck, you get about a quarter, maybe 40% less volume on one trip.

Matt Baum:
Wow. So it really does make sense to do this closer as well, almost farm to table, if you will, because your carbon footprint is lower, you’re spending less on transportation, and you’re getting the stuff right in where you can pull it in the factory and make beautiful wood out of it.

Greg Wilson:
There’s an input table right there.

Matt Baum:
It’s gorgeous. So take me through the process. The hemp comes in, then what happen?

Greg Wilson:
So the hemp comes in here. It is field dried. So it’s less than 15% moisture content. It comes in and it gets stuck on this machine that we had to invent. That guy, Charles, we met earlier, he is the machinist here. He came up with a way of unrolling it like a roll of toilet paper. And actually, the powers behind the scene, kind of the wizard from the Wizard of Oz, is Dario Dumont. And he lives in Tasmania and him and I work on these projects together. So he’s my engineering mentor. And then you have Jimmy Song, who lives in China and he works on the bamboo, and him and I cut our teeth together, working on that. And so, the strand woven Eucalyptus then were me and Jimmy Song, and that’s how we met Dario. And when he got involved with the strand woven Eucalyptus, then he brought the project smarter to us because that was a forestry grant in Tasmania.

Matt Baum:
This is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
So then roped both of them into doing this.

Matt Baum:
You’re like the A-team, you all have specialties. This is great. And it just came together.

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah, kind of, sort of.

Matt Baum:
And you’re like [inaudible 00:14:55]. This is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
Dario came up with the concept of unrolling a bale of hemp because it has to get picked up. Actually, the format of the raw material coming in is what blindsided me. Because I was just doing lab scale, it looked like a stalk, a piece of bamboo. It was a pole.

Matt Baum:
Right. That’s what I’m thinking in my head, sort of picture it.

Greg Wilson:
But how do you get that out of the field by the thousands of tons? Yeah. Well you have to use existing equipment, which is used for bailing hay, then now use it for bailing hemp and modify it a little bit. And so then these bales come in, we had to come up with a concept of how to take it apart. So if it gets picked up, like a snail shell, like that, then you just reverse that to be able to unroll it. So when it’s getting rolled, it rolls it that way like a fruit roll-up, now it rolls it backwards.

Matt Baum:
And spin it the other way.

Greg Wilson:
Like roll a toilet paper.

Thanks to Blue Forest Farms

Matt Baum:
Let’s take a quick break so we can talk about our partner this week, Blue Forest Farms. Blue Forest Farms prides itself on a full seed to shelf process that is completely organic from selectively breeding their own high quality varietals growing their plants locally in their sun-kissed organic Colorado farms, monitoring the state-of-the-art extraction process and even engineering the best tasting formulas. Blue Forest Farms or BFF, as we call them in-house at Ministry of Hemp, ensures quality at every step in the CBD product creation process. They even have a very cool numbering system that helps you figure out what’s your number based on their six different CBD oils. Maybe you’re looking for a full spectrum, unrefined hemp oil, or you’re looking for pure CBD isolate with absolutely no THC. Or maybe you would be interested in their new sleep formula. It’s a CBN advanced formula, number six, their latest organic CBD oil. They sent me some and I’ve been using it. And I’ve got to say, I’ve been sleeping very well, which is great because I just ran out of my other one.
Blue Forest Farms has a CBD oil that is perfect for any of your needs. And you can find more information about their farm, the genetics, and how their extraction process works over at blueforestfarms.com and then head over to bffhemp.com and check out and buy their products. By the way, if you use the code ‘MINISTRY’ at checkout right now, you’ll get 20% off your first purchase just for listening to the show. Head to bffhemp.com, and of course we’ll have links to that in the show notes for this episode, and use the code MINISTRY to get 20% off your first purchase.
You guys are always contacting me and asking, “Matt, where can I get good CBD? Who is a good CBD company?” Blue Forest Farms is fantastic. We are proud to be partnering with them and I am so excited to recommend them to you guys. Again, head to bffhemp.com, check out their whole line of CBD oils, including their latest number six, which combines the benefit of CBD with a concentrated amount of CBN that’s going to help you get to sleep. And don’t forget to use the code MINISTRY at checkout to get 20% off and let them know you listen to Ministry of Hemp calm to get your information, and you want to support businesses that support us. And now back to my conversation with Gregory.

The process of creating hemp wood

Greg Wilson:
So we came up with this big arm that comes down and you stab a spike through the middle and you hold it up and this arm comes down and pushes it. And then it goes into a crushing machine, which actually we found an old plywood roller and hooked up the plywood roller and married the speed of the roller up to the speed of the bale on roller. So one of them pushes it while the other one pulls it and it breaks open the cell structure of it. And it feeds down a conveyor table and it gets rolled up again into a smaller bundle and chain link fence. And that way it keeps it spaced out, but we can dunk it into the glue. And the glue is actually plywood glue, the pure bond plywood glue, which is the eco-friendly soy-based, but we dilute it down by a significant percentage, so it’s very liquid. And-

Matt Baum:
Is that because you’re using hemp instead of plywood, basically?

Greg Wilson:
No, because plywood, you encapsulate or you roll it on top of the wood veneer.

Matt Baum:
All right.

Greg Wilson:
Well, ours we soak it into, so we dump the hemp for 10 minutes in it, and it’s big rolls. And then these rolls are unrolled on to these racks that go into the dryers that I showed you earlier. We took a bunch of tobacco barns. Actually, the most recent one, we took a rail car, flipped it on its side so we can get the nine foot width, hooked up the guts from five different tobacco barns flowing 75,000 CFM of air through there.

Matt Baum:
Oh my God.

Greg Wilson:
And then we hook all of these different elements that require heat to our bio burner. So we use the same fluid that you use for solar panels called glycol. You burn the ground up waste hemp that we have here, grind it, burn it. And then it transfers that heat to our ovens and dryers. So the same guts, we took the fans out of the tobacco dryers. We got the guts, the radiators, the heat transfers out of there too. So we hook all those up, blow the fans across the hot air, then it dries out the head.

Matt Baum:
So you’re using your own hot air to dry… from a different machine to dry out the hemp as well.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. And we actually circulate it. So it hits the highest temperature requirement first and then drops. So the oven gets hit first, and then it can recirculate that same fluid to go to the drying, which uses a lower temperature. And then it feeds it back into the bio burner, which heats it back up and sends it through the circulation path again.

Matt Baum:
This is amazing nerd engineer magic you’re talking about right now. And I think-

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah, this is all we do.

Matt Baum:
You’ve kind of just answered my question with like, “Why are you the only one?” Well, because you have to invent this stuff. It’s not out there. Like you guys are building this to do this.

Greg Wilson:
As we go, all the equipment. So and-

Matt Baum:
And you’re copywriting all of this, I assume. So you can be like, “Me, I did.”

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah, there’s patents and trademarks and mayhem all over it.

Matt Baum:
Nice.

Greg Wilson:
Trademark the word HempWood, trademark the logo. So if you see hemp wood being manufactured anywhere in the world, it’s us.

Matt Baum:
It’s you.

Greg Wilson:
Then it goes to our next station. We’ve taken a whole bunch of agricultural equipment from the cotton industry, the tobacco industry, the bamboo industry, you name it. And actually our best employees are guys that we got from the ag school here. So the reason we’re based in Murray is because the first people to plant hemp since World War II was Murray State University.

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Greg Wilson:
And so everybody that’s working on the farms, the school has five farms, they somehow, some way know something about hemp, because that’s one of their prime things here.

Matt Baum:
That’s so cool.

Greg Wilson:
This area doesn’t get huge yields for crops. We only get like 200 bushels an acre of corn, whereas if you go to Iowa, you get 250. So here does a lot more of the specialty crops. That’s why Kentucky is known for tobacco, and Kentucky is known for sorghum, and Kentucky is known for hemp.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
Kentucky is known for horses, because if you get a little bit farther west and a little bit farther north, then you’re in better soil and better climate for growing your row crops. So here’s the edge of row crops. But that’s why the school here gets into all these different specialty crops. And that’s why they’ve been researching hemp. And they set up the agricultural hemp innovation center, and they actually created an incubator for me to land here over top of some of the bigger universities-

Matt Baum:
Not only-

Greg Wilson:
… [crosstalk 00:22:41] out west with one of the Oregon schools.

Matt Baum:
Not only your raw materials, but you’re drawing from a pool of education as well that’s right there.

Greg Wilson:
Shoot, half of the employees here come from there-

Matt Baum:
That is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
… whether interns or whatever. Buy yeah.

Matt Baum:
That is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
Oh, yeah. And people that worked on a farm factory works easy for them. As farm workers, you got a roof over your head, right?

Matt Baum:
Yeah, man. It’s a huge plus.

The science behind HempWood

Greg Wilson:
Absolutely. But yeah. So getting back into the process, once it comes out of the dryer, we batch it again. And we’ve got a catalyst scale. Charles welded up these enormous racks for us so we can take it and batch for each block. So we have a uniform amount, which is the algorithm to… You’ve got 14 steps. So it’s algorithm that has to hit these numbers in order to make a uniform piece of material at the end that outperforms our target being Brazilian cherry, which is the high end benchmark of global wood. So-

Matt Baum:
Okay. When it’s done, is it the same? Is it stronger? Is it as strong as Brazilian cherry or?

Greg Wilson:
It is harder than hickory, has the same density of Brazilian cherry, and it is made in the USA in four months.

Matt Baum:
That is amazing.

Greg Wilson:
So it performs like a tropical hardwood, it has… stability is greater than Oak, harder than hickory, density of Brazilian cherry. So you can tick all the boxes of… There’s your mainstream American white Oak. That’s our price point that we’re trying to get to. That’s what everybody talks about. Red Oak. If you’re really into wood, you know that red Oak is not the Oak that you want to use, white Oak is. So red Oak costs half the price, it’s not as great for furniture. When you go to a box shop and you get your flooring at Lowe’s or Home Depot, and they’re like, “Oh, hey, solid Oak flooring,” is typically red Oak.

Matt Baum:
It’s red Oak.

Greg Wilson:
Red Oak doesn’t work as well. Well, it’s more susceptible to moisture than white Oak, so that’s why furniture is made out of it. White Oak actually works a lot better. It doesn’t chip and fracture and crack. So we’re trying to target white Oak as the mainstream, but we’re trying to outperform it by getting the density of Brazilian cherry, so if the density is higher, then so is your hardness, and so is your stability, because the density-

Matt Baum:
It lasts longer, better when it gets wet, I assume.

Greg Wilson:
Yep, absolutely.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
Anyway, so getting back into it, again, we weigh it out, we batch it. We stick it into the press, we spray some more organic acid on it, which is the activator, which causes that cross-linking to happen, that we stole those proteins from the soy flour and impregnate it into-

Matt Baum:
Okay. [inaudible 00:25:23] all together, literally.

Greg Wilson:
3000 tons of pressure.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. Okay. I mean, the press is 24 feet tall, so 1200 gallons of hydraulic fluid [crosstalk 00:25:37].

Matt Baum:
Wow. What? Okay.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:25:40] two flatbeds and three containers, and then we had to assemble it for 45 days.

Matt Baum:
Oh my god.

Greg Wilson:
We had to design that whole thing too.

Matt Baum:
It sounds like you built this around this monolithic monster machine basically.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you have to crane this thing in through the ceiling.

Matt Baum:
Right. I picture you guys worshiping it like a god before you go to work daily.

Greg Wilson:
And we painted it hemp green.

Matt Baum:
Oh, nice. Very nice. So after it comes out of there it’s-

Greg Wilson: (crosstalk 00:26:11)

Matt Baum:
Oh, that’s him? Oh, wow. That is a monstrosity. Oh my god. So after it comes out of there it’s hemp wood, it’s done.

Greg Wilson:
Oh, no, it’s still got a week’s worth.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Creating hemp products sustainably

Greg Wilson:
So that process I just explained is a two-day process. You’re talking 36 to 48 hours from hemp stock to pressed into a mold. But then it has to go into an oven for 10 hours. And that oven we took… Actually, the first one we bought off the Facebook marketplace, there was an old motorcycle powder coating oven, and we were making our four foot blocks in it. And then we just recently got our new oven, which is a 20 foot container that we ripped apart, and we hooked up a 10,000 CFM blower on it and then hooked it into our bio burner. And so the bio burner then transfers the heat first, because that requires a higher temperature-

Matt Baum:
Which is the oven?

Greg Wilson:
Right, blows the hot air across the molds and bakes them and then recirculates it back to our dryers, which then throws the secondary heat. And because it’s too hot, then it actually has to throw it through a pipe that’s surrounded by another pipe full of water. And so it can actually heat the water to the temperature that we need because it only needs to be 100 degrees instead of 250. And so then it heats the water, which then recirculates through the dryer. And then the glycol goes back to the bio burner to get reheated and sent back out.

Matt Baum:
And this keeps you from having to have some stupid machine that just makes heat for this or just heats up this element. You have one machine that’s already making the heat and you’re taking that heat and pulling it everywhere you need it to go along the steps of the process.

Greg Wilson:
I replaces like four and a half million BTUs per hour of natural gas.

Matt Baum:
Jeez! Okay. That’s impressive.

Greg Wilson:
It creates a couple of thousand dollars a month worth of energy.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
From a couple of thousand dollars worth of dumping fees we would had… In reality, we were just throwing it out in the field. I mean, we’re all farmers.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
You’re not allowed to burn it in the open. And so you it’s what we call ditch filler.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
But there’s only so many ditches [crosstalk 00:28:19].

Matt Baum:
[crosstalk 00:28:20] mountain maker at some point, otherwise.

Greg Wilson:
Well, the first year we got mount hemp more, then ended up having like 150 tons of hemp that we couldn’t use because it got moldy or it got left out, or [inaudible 00:28:34] species. We had to try all the different cuttings as [inaudible 00:28:37] didn’t work, and all these different ways of trying to harvest it, ended up with like 150 tons of hemp. And it’s still sitting at the university farm.

Matt Baum:
Oh, wow.

Greg Wilson:
And so, yeah, we’re trying to get the ag fraternity to burn it at homecoming to try to get rid of it. They’re not going to let that happen.

Matt Baum:
Can you feed it to the race horses or something or? I don’t know.

Greg Wilson:
We do feed it to pigs.

Matt Baum:
Okay. So let’s get back to the wood though.

Greg Wilson:
Okay.

Matt Baum:
So now you’ve baked it. Is it done?

Making hemp wood, the final stages

Greg Wilson:
Nope. Then we have to take it and demold it. So it’s in these huge metal molds, it weighs 330 pounds inside of the mold and six foot long, six inches by six inches wide. A [crosstalk 00:29:19] weighs-

Matt Baum:
One six foot piece weighs 300 pounds?

Greg Wilson:
Including the metal mold around it.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
The actual wood inside, it’s 90 pounds, for a six footer or 60 pounds for a four footer. So then you have to open this out. So we have a jackhammer and an air gun. We’re opening these molds and you’ve got to take it with a crane, lift it upside down and pry it open. But then we had to come up with a machine to be able to automate that. So that’s just arrived from the fabricator, but we haven’t got to put it into play yet. We got hit with a $51,000 tariff on that, as well as the automation equipment to go into our press because the government, I guess, wasn’t real favorable towards making American manufacturing jobs, or maybe they just had their heads in the sand.

Matt Baum:
It’s funny because they keep saying that they are, so hmm. I wonder who’s lying. Ah, it drives me insane.

Greg Wilson:
It’s an election year, so.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Greg Wilson:
I can say that our local Congressman, Congressman Comer, is doing everything he can for us.

Matt Baum:
That’s great.

Greg Wilson:
But on a federal level, crickets. So these blocks come out, and then we open the mold, we’ve got an automation machine for that. And then they have to rest for a couple of weeks to stabilize.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
And then we have a saw, we just got our new saw in. We have to come up with a means of cutting it properly because our regular wood saws weren’t strong enough. And so our old baker resaw, now we’ve turned it into a fully automated, like 50 foot long saw, where it cuts the edge-

Matt Baum:
So this is so dense that you can’t just use a wood saw on it? A normal wood saw won’t cut it?

Greg Wilson:
No, it’s too strong.

Matt Baum:
Wow. That’s incredible.

Greg Wilson:
I had a hell of a wrench into our business plan.

Matt Baum:
I’ll bet.

Greg Wilson:
Because we were going to sell the wood, now we have to cut the wood because everybody initially said, “Oh, yeah, I’m a big wood guy. I got a big saw, send it my way.” And then they said, “Yeah, it’s a losing money operation [crosstalk 00:31:18] that stuff.”

Matt Baum:
“You broke my saw.”

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. And burns up your blades and breaks and everything. And so now, it came back to us, we got to cut the wood into the usable sizes for the manufacturers. So then we had to go and get a frickin hundred thousand dollars saw.

Matt Baum:
Good Lord.

Greg Wilson:
So then the wood is cut, and then we put into our balancing rooms, which once again, draw the heat from our bio burner to keep them at a certain temperature, and a dehumidifier in there. So you circulate dehumidified warm air, and then it causes it to dry out in about two weeks. And then we can turn it into flooring, and furniture, and picture frames, and cutting boards, and what we call home goods and [crosstalk 00:32:01] woods, there’s cabinetry and stuff like that.

Growing hemp for hemp wood

Matt Baum:
So what’s the color like? Because I mean, hemp is green and wood is not. At what point in the process are you like… Is the abuse on the cellular structure? I mean, that looks like wood, what you’re showing me. Is it just what you do to it you end up like that or are you adding something to it or taking something out of it to get it to look like wood? Or does it just end up looking like wood?

Greg Wilson:
We’ve had to do a whole lot to do that. But have you ever seen how wheat sun-dries? Wheat grows in a field and it’s green, right?

Matt Baum:
Sure. But it drys brown.

Greg Wilson:
And it sun dries and it turns a woody color, right?

Matt Baum:
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess, yeah. I mean, same with your grass clippings even, you know?

Greg Wilson:
Yep. So the key is to get it at a golden brown point before it molds, because if it molds, it turns black. If it’s too early, it’s green. So you got to, once you cut it, let it set for two or three days on one side, turn it over, let it set for one or two days in the sun, and then bale it up and get it out.

Matt Baum:
And then you go, “That’s the color we want, that looks like the cherry wood or the Oak or whatever we’re going for, get it in here and let’s turn it into wood.”

Greg Wilson:
Yep. Now, there is no cherry wood about it or anything like that. It is more of a Oak color. And then actually, there’s something called the maillard effect that happens in the glue, which I didn’t even know about until this happened. But the maillard effect is like the browning of gravy.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I was going to say [inaudible 00:33:31]. And the maillard effect is like one thing we talked about when you’re searing proteins, the same thing.

Greg Wilson:
Protein to carbohydrates .So we’re stealing the proteins from the soy, baking it in an oven, and then it turns brown. So you’ve got the hemp stocks with the brown from the soy, which gives it the look it has.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing. That is amazing. Instead of cutting down a tree that you said… It takes how long to grow before you can cut it down for wood?

Greg Wilson:
For Oak, usually 60 to 80 years is standard for Oak. And then a lot of times when you’re getting into your tropical hardwoods or old growth forest, you’re talking 100 or 200 year old stuff. Or even, I mean, as long as it’s been growing, if it’s old growth, they haven’t cut that forest before.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
That’s why the big deal about plantation forest versus old growth. Plantation, when someone was responsible enough, first time they cut it down, they planted something else there, and then you can get it in the cycle. Whereas if it’s old growth, then it becomes a mature forest and it’s got a whole different ecosystem that’s going on underneath of it, because you get that huge canopy that goes up. And once that canopy goes up, then you typically have your more traditional trees, at least in our area that are able to support more life. Maybe not from where they hide in it, but your nut trees and your… Like your walnuts and your acorns and different things like that, that take a lot longer to grow than your traditional trees that come up first or your poplars and your pines.
And your poplars and pines, 20 years, that’s a mature tree, maybe 40 years. Whereas your slower growing hardwoods are your Oaks and your hickories and your black walnuts and your ash and things like that. And so usually you have that cycle where the fast-growing ones get up first, and then your slower growing ones come up, but they eventually overtake your poplars and your pines. And that’s how you see an old growth forest come about.

Matt Baum:
So hemp-

Greg Wilson:
So we’re trying to replace those.

Matt Baum:
You’re replacing it with hemp and the hemp that you’re growing, that you guys are bringing in, how long is that growing?

Greg Wilson:
Four months-ish, three to four.

Matt Baum:
So four months versus 60 years, more or less?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah.

HempWood vs. traditional wood

Matt Baum:
Good Lord. Okay. And so when it comes to making wood-

Greg Wilson:
Numbers don’t lie.

Matt Baum:
When it comes to making wood, how many acres of forest are we cutting down to… I don’t even know the terms to use here, to make X amount of wood versus acres of hemp to make X amount of wood?

Greg Wilson:
So what we produce per acre of hemp that we get can replace about 30 Oak trees that are 60 years old-ish. It’s debatable how many trees grow on an acre.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Greg Wilson:
Once it gets up there, then the canopy goes out. And so you actually have spacing in between the trees and everything. So is it a direct one for one replacement on a yearly basis? Probably not, but if you’ve got 60 years to have a crack at it, I guess it would be… It’s probably more like 40 to 50 of those years, you’d have a direct replacement. Or even if it’s half, if it replaces every two years what you can grow on an acre but you can do it 30 times-

Matt Baum:
That math catches up great.

Greg Wilson:
… in the same 60-year. [crosstalk 00:36:49] And it’s pulling all the carbon out. I mean, I’m not a carbon nerd or anything. I’m a bow hunter. My whole thing is, I need an Oak tree to hang my tree stand on, when a deer comes [crosstalk 00:37:02].

Matt Baum:
Sure. Yeah, so you can shoot a deer or a turkey while it walks by or whatever.

Greg Wilson:
Absolutely. So if somebody comes and cuts down all my Oak trees, then all of a sudden, I’m going to be hunting from the ground, you don’t get nearly as much.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Is this the future of wood? Is this where we’re going?

Greg Wilson:
No.

Matt Baum:
No. Why is that?

Greg Wilson:
This will be a single digit percentage replacement for wood.

Matt Baum:
Why?

Greg Wilson:
You’re never going to replace because Oak, because Oak is a good thing. And if it’s done properly, having a wood floor or wood furniture that’s sustainably harvested, or is made here in the United States is always going to be the dominant player. And that’s not a bad thing. But if it can take care of some of those ones that are just clear-cut, or if it can take out some of those ones that are cutting areas that shouldn’t be cut, or if it can reduce some of that pressure by being, say, 3% or 4% of the hardwood industry, that’s where it’ll go.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
Because there’s nothing wrong with Oak. There’s something wrong with us that take advantage of it in the wrong way.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, doing it irresponsibly.

Greg Wilson:
Correct. I mean, I work with wood. I love wood. There’s nothing wrong with wood. When people say, “Oh man, you’re trying to take out wood jobs.” No, we’re not.

Matt Baum:
See, now I-

Greg Wilson:
(crosstalk 00:38:31) another type of sawmill.

Matt Baum:
That’s where I was, like, “Oh, man, he’s trying to take our wood job.” I’m like, “Take out the wood jobs. The wood jobs are bad.” So I was really surprised to hear you say, no, it’s not bad. It’s just, it needs to be done responsibly. And right now it’s not being done responsibly everywhere.

Greg Wilson:
A lot of it is. The majority of your people are doing it the right way. But it’s a lot more profitable to do it the wrong way.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Greg Wilson:
I mean, that’s what it all comes down to.

Matt Baum:
That’s pretty much every industry, unfortunately.

Greg Wilson:
And most things in life are.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Greg Wilson:
If you want to buy something made in America, expect a 20% premium. That’s just the way it is.

Building with HempWood

Matt Baum:
So what do these guys think about you? What do they think about a guy like you, who loves wood within the wood world and now you’re doing hemp wood? Are they making it funnier? Do they think you’re some kind of crazy hippie? Are they into this?

Greg Wilson:
It’s a mix. At the end of the day, people are genuinely good. And at the end of the day, people are trying to provide for theirs, whatever that is. And so if someone’s doing hardwood trade out of Africa, they’re probably not going into it saying, “Hey, I want to do this the wrong way to become overly wealthy.” They’re probably saying, “My customer gave me this order and it has to fit their budget. And that’s fine.” And the people that are doing those same types of things, more often than not, look at us, not as a disrupter that’s going to put them out of business, as, “Hey, maybe I can sell your wood too.” And so, I don’t know, instead of being a dick, it’s oftentimes better to just kind of be nice and work with people.

Matt Baum:
Right on. I love that answer. That’s great. I know, coming from our show where we do hemp education, we can get lost in the cheerleader aspect so much so that it’s easy to be like, “No, those guys are wrong. They’re doing it wrong. These guys are doing it right. We’ve got to stick with these guys.” And the answer is probably working together. The answer is saying like-

Greg Wilson:
Oh, absolutely.

Matt Baum:
… combining hemp wood with Oak, and showing like, “Look, they can both work together really well.”

Greg Wilson:
Why would you want to skirt 90% of the industry expertise? Why would you want to try to get around people who know how to work with wood? Why not just say, “Here’s a new product, play around with it? Tell me how it seals. Tell me how it sands. Tell me how it does this.” And share it on our platform. Because our big thing is, if somebody buys hemp wood from us and make something out of it, the trademark of, “Hey, this is a HempWood product,” goes right along with it. So they can say, “Hey, I’m making hemp wood tables, stack our logo on it.” And then actually, they can share it on our different platforms, whether it’s sending it to us, and we’ll put it on our social media, or putting it up on our website. And we send customers their way, and we allow all the different people working on it to tell each other how it works, and to avoid a bunch of those costly mistakes that end up getting people frustrated. Because it’s not the same as your traditional woods. And so very often, if you tell somebody how to do something, give them a 10-minute tutorial, they can avoid half of the mistakes that would cause them to reject a new material.
We’re still in that infancy stage of what we’re doing. And so our flooring right here, in order for people to be able to use it easily, and for us to be able to make enough of it, we lay it up on plywood, but we find eco-friendly plywood that uses the same glues that we use. And then when someone’s laying this piece of floor, it performs the same as a engineered Oak, which is the majority of your Oak flooring industry.

Matt Baum:
So the guys that work with it know what they’re getting and know how to use it, because it’s going to perform same way.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. It’s a choice you have to make. And it’s not an easy choice, because making a buck ain’t easy. And you got what, 20% of the population that’s unemployed because of COVID? I mean, you got all types of situations and scenarios that are almost impossible to comprehend all of them.

The impact of COVID-19

Matt Baum:
Right. How hard did COVID hit you guys?

Greg Wilson:
COVID (censored by Matt) everything. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that on air.

Matt Baum:
You can say. No, it’s an adult show, don’t worry.

Greg Wilson:
So when COVID first came, luckily, we had raised some money before that to build out the plant. And so our sales turned off, our factory was shut down for six weeks. We weren’t allowed to manufacture.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
And so we had almost no sales except for the stuff that was happening online. And John stuck with it and he went home for like a week and then said he couldn’t deal with that anymore. And just kept coming back into the office. He was like, “I’d rather be here.”

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
We weren’t allowed to have production because we have more than 10 people in a space. And so we shut for six weeks and then we had to open up with all these stupid rules that I understand, but it also kind of counteracts the other ones because we have to have like hand washing stations. But we don’t have a septic in order to capture all greywater that comes out. And so you’ve got to have… But you’re allowed to have a soap dish and a hose bib as long as it doesn’t have a base in underneath of it. And so we put these up with hand sanitizers everywhere and getting employees at the time is hard. And we still have double the absentee rate that we normally have.
Our customer base turned off, significantly, turned back on, now has turned back off. Our prime customer, people who like what we do are typically in your 20s, 30s, 40s; they typically are a homeowner, very often they’re associated with urban area. Maybe they’re not living in the urban area or maybe they work into it, and so they’re around… What I say is, someone who walks to work choking on tailpipe fumes usually cares a little bit more about the environment than somebody like myself. I live on a farm. It’s actually an organic farm, but I don’t do the paperwork for that. That’s the guys that actually take care of it. I just have the 30-some acres right around the house as like trees, and I got some cows, and I got some chickens and stuff like that. But for me, pollution isn’t a thing, I can pee outside, it doesn’t matter.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
But when you’re in a city with that many vehicles and that many people and all that stuff, thinking about the environment is a much bigger thing because you see what that many humans can change.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Greg Wilson:
And so most of our sales go to urban areas, or people that are in urban areas that don’t have a second home that’s in the mountains or on the beach. A lot of times it’s going into… It was hospitality, so ecotourism hotels and restaurants, sushi restaurants, and yoga studios, and stuff like that. COVID turned all that upside down. And so cannabis companies started buying hemp to build up their shops.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool.

Greg Wilson:
Because they were deemed to be essential everywhere, where hotels and restaurants all shut down.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool.

Greg Wilson:
And so, yeah, our industry friends kind of picked it up and said, “The election is coming, we’re going to still be building this stuff out.”

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Greg Wilson:
It’s on the ballot in all types of states. And so we haven’t quite mastered how to talk to, or work with cannabis companies because it seems like a significant portion of that market segment are consultants and resellers that don’t actually have skin in the game or break and motor.

Matt Baum:
I’ve talked to a lot of them. So yeah, I know what you mean.

Greg Wilson:
A lot of my news feed turned into mask salesmen and gloves salesmen during COVID. But I can say that that’s where people are already accepting. So you don’t have to explain hemp to those people-

Matt Baum:
Right, they’re in.

Greg Wilson:
They already get it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, you’re preaching to the choir.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. So yeah, COVID threw everything [inaudible 00:46:57], and we’re still turned upside down. We’re stuck with the plan of continuing to build out and automate the facility while we let the whole market… What we can’t control will work its way out. And so we have to just keep building, keep moving forward. And what we do need to do is we need to get everyone per stakeholders to support the product by buying some hemp wood. Go to hempwood.com and, well, you can see all the stuff that’s on there. We’ve got our office number on there. Yep, sales@hempwood.com. You can contact us and just kind of be part of the solution, because it takes a village to get this thing off the ground.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Greg Wilson:
And man, is it wearing hard on… Well, we started in 2018. We got our factory operational in ’19, and we actually had our finished goods ready to launch at NoCo the end of March, and then at the North American Wood Flooring Association at the end of April.

Matt Baum:
Just in time that you shut down.

Greg Wilson:
And so we’ve had all four of our trade shows canceled. And it’s been a dog’s breakfast with trying to scrape that back.

Matt Baum:
But even in a perfect year, it would still be difficult, but with this garbage, oh, my God. I mean, it’s got to be a nightmare.

The future of HempWood

Greg Wilson:
Oh, yeah. It’s insane. The only thing I know to do is just trust our team to keep working.

Matt Baum:
Right, and just keep going.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, keep the publicity going, because we’re literally in the middle of a field. It was corn this year, it was hemp last year. We’re in the middle of the field. The closest town to us is five miles. And so there’s not a whole lot of foot traffic that happens due to COVID.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
The only way that we can get it out there and let people know is through stuff like this.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, and talk about it.

Greg Wilson:
And we just started traveling again. And so we’re literally driving around every week. We go to a new city with a trailer full of hemp wood try to figure it out. I can say that builders, for the most part, the younger generation say, “Well, that’s cool.” We get over a 90%, “Tell me more” rate. But then converting to actual sales on large scale build out, everyone wants to kind of see how it works and what it does and what’s happening. It started with friends and family and members of the company.
I actually build something new every Sunday out of it. Sunday afternoons are for making something out of hemp wood. And so I can speak intelligently about how to make it. So this past Sunday, I made a chicken coop. That doesn’t count, that was out of pine. Sunday before I made a cabinet for my wife, and we put it up in the bathroom. And so I had to figure out how to laminate lamellas onto plywood to be able to build a cabinet out of it. The doors are solid on the front, the face is solid, but then I had to get skins on the side. And so the number one reason that cabinetry makers, which are typically still made in the US, were not accepting of the product is because we didn’t offer plywood that had the face on it to do the skins on the side so it looks like it’s all hemp wood.

Matt Baum:
Right. And so they couldn’t get it to match or sync up.

Greg Wilson:
Yup. And so I do go and start working with that and say, “Hey, it is possible, look this way.”

Matt Baum:
That’s R&D, though. It’s just R&D, is what you’re doing.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. Before that was building coffee tables. So I actually made the table during COVID… Our first table was made, and we made it out of a solid and it was way too heavy. And so we chopped that into three… Actually fell under the knife, maybe a month ago, and chopped it into three coffee tables because the table weighed over 200 pounds. So you couldn’t move it around. So that was three coffee tables that are like 70 pounds.

Matt Baum:
But if a tornado hits and you climb under that thing, you’re fine. Like it’s not blown away.

Greg Wilson:
In case somebody comes to shoot up the office just-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, just turn the 200-pound table over and you’re fine.

Greg Wilson:
So just working through all that stuff. The picture frames came about because we took it to our cabinet door manufacturer, and said, “Hey, what can you do here?” We need something that we can sell direct to people were showing up last year like crazy at our factory, just wanting to do tours. But people don’t buy wood. Nobody has tools to just buy [crosstalk 00:51:31].

Matt Baum:
Yeah. You don’t just walk in and, “I’m going to buy some wood, please.” “How much wood can I buy for $15?” Or whatever.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. But everybody that tours the factory, we now figured out where you end the tour in the wood shop and we say, “And here’s picture frames for sale.”

Matt Baum:
You always end in the gift shop. That’s the rule, you always end in the gift shop.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. Now here’s the next one. The number one question that we get about hemp wood; the number one thing people do when they get a piece in their hand is smell it. The number two thing or the number one thing that they say to us is, “What happens when it catches on fire, you’re going to get high and the firefighters? This and that.”

Matt Baum:
Give me a break.

Greg Wilson:
So now we’re making firestarter logs, so I can say, “Why don’t you buy some firestarters and then tell me?” So when people come up with a smart ass comment about, “Well, are you going to get high in case it’s on fire?” I say, “Buy some logs and you-“

Matt Baum:
Yes, one way to find out, huh?

Greg Wilson:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
So let me ask you, on the subject of burning… And I’m not going to ask you that stupid question. Does it burn like normal wood? I mean, or it doesn’t? I wouldn’t assume so because it’s so dense.

Greg Wilson:
Correct. So higher density causes lower flammability, as well as being a composite because it has a glue based out of that soy. It actually burns much slower and it smokes much less.

Matt Baum:
So it’s safer, too.

Greg Wilson:
And the smoke is actually… It’s cleaner smoke. It’s white smoke rather than black smoke. And that actually comes from the soy burning. Go figure. When we built that bio burner and we had to burn the residuals in there, when we grind it up, it came out white. I was like, “What the hell is that?” And then all of a sudden we found out that was from the soy.

Matt Baum:
That’s the soy. So it’s even safer from like a flammability perspective too.

Greg Wilson:
Yes, it is less flammable than your traditional woods, especially your softwoods. It is less flammable than your traditional hardwoods like your Oaks and your hickories because the density is higher. So it doesn’t catch on fire as easy.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
I want to thank Gregory again for coming on the show. We had an amazing talk and it went on for much longer than this. And there’s actually a podcast extra you’ll be able to check out with me and Greg talking about his farm and some other things he’s involved in. That’ll be up for our Patreon Ministry of Hemp Insiders. And I’ll tell you how to become one of those shortly here.

Of course, you can find all the links to HempWood and HempWood’s Instagram and their Twitter feed and everything they’re up to in the show notes for this episode.

That’s about it for this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. And I know I promised you that there was a show about Delta-8-THC coming, and it is coming. I’m just trying to put it together and get the right people to talk about it. So in the meantime, check out our Delta-8-THC FAQ. What is Delta-8-THC? It’s all about this new cannabinoid. And you can find that article on ministryofhemp.com, along with a new review of Healist Naturals body relief lotions, really nice for everyday aches and pains. Check out that review as well.
Again, huge, thanks to BFF for partnering with us. And you can find links to their site and information on how to get 20% off your first order in the show notes. And speaking of shownotes, here at Ministry of Hemp, we believe that a more accessible world is better for everybody. So we have a complete written transcript for this episode in the notes too.

If you dig this show and you like what we do on the site, then do us a favor and become a Ministry of Hemp Patreon Insider. Go to patreon\ministryofhemp, and any amount of money you give, makes you an Insider and get you all kinds of cool stuff like early access to articles, podcast extras, like the one I mentioned with Gregory, and all kinds of other cool things that we’re doing. It is the best way to support Ministry of Hemp.

And if you want to help support this podcast, drop us a review, a little star, or a quick written review, wherever you are downloading or listening to podcasts. It really helps us to get this information in front of people that are looking for it. And that brings us to the end of the show where I like to end the same way every time by saying, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and vote next week if you haven’t already. Oh, and make good decisions to, will you? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp, signing off.

The post Hemp Wood Alternatives: Sustainable Building Materials With HempWood appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this week’s episode, our host Matt talks to Mark Reinders, CEO of HempFlax, one of Europe’s largest industrial hemp producers. Hempflax uses almost every part of the hemp plant to make everything from CBD products to pet bedding, plastics, and insulation. They talk about the history of hemp prohibition and how Europe’s hemp industry got a 20-year head start on the U.S.

In the show, Matt also mentions our new introduction to CBG. Check it out!

About Mark Reinders and HempFlax

Mark Reinders is CEO of HempFlax, Europe’s largest independent grower and processor of industrial hemp in Europe.

HempFlax has operations across Europe, with over 2,200 hectares of hemp expected to be harvested in 2020. Processing the whole hemp plant enables HempFlax to maximize revenues across their six business lines: Nutraceuticals; Hemp-based Plastic Replacement; Construction; Animal Care; Horticulture and; Genetics & Cultivation.

Mark has been with the company since 2008 and was appointed CEO in 2016. From 2016 to 2019, he also served as president of the European Industrial Hemp Association, Europe’s foremost coalition of the industrial hemp-processing industry. He remains on the board of directors today.

Brought to you by Receptra

Thanks to our partners at Receptra for making this week’s episode possible. Try Receptra Serious Rest 25 to help you get deeper, better sleep. This unique product combines top-quality CBD with chamomile. Matt shares his experience with Receptra Serious Rest in this episode, and we’ll have a full review coming later this month.

Want to try Receptra? Use coupon code MOH15 to get 15% off your order!

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

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Hemp in Europe: Complete Episode Transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 52 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “Hemp in Europe”:

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. Before we get started today, I just want to say thank you to our partners at Receptra. Receptra is one of the brands that we partner with on ministryofhemp.com and later on in the show I’m going to tell you all about their Serious Rest gel capsules and Serious Rest chamomile tinctures. I’ve been using them myself and I really like them and you can find their whole line of high-quality CBD products over at receptranaturals.com. Thanks again to Receptra for partnering with us and helping us to bring you this show.

Matt Baum:
Speaking of this show, today my conversation is with Mark Reinders of HempFlax. HempFlax might not be a name you are familiar with, but they’re one of Europe’s largest hemp purveyors. They do everything. You’ll hear us talk about it, but they are involved in so many different aspects of the hemp world that allows them to use the entire plant, including the dust that comes off of the plant while they are creating hemp fiber. It’s incredible. Now you may be asking yourself, “Matt, why are we talking about hemp in Europe when we’re supposed to be focused on hemp in the United States.” Well, we are still focused on the hemp in the United States and trust me, this conversation’s going to all come back around to that, but I thought it would be really cool to talk to someone working in the industry in a country that is a lot more hemp friendly.

Matt Baum:
Now, that’s not to say we’re not hemp friendly here, it’s supposed to be legal, but as you know the FDA and the United States government have not exactly been leading the charge on how all of this hemp is going to be regulated in the States, short of letting the States shake it out on our end. A similar thing is happening in the European Union and the UK as well. You’ll hear more about that shortly. Let’s get right into it. This is my conversation with Mark Reinders. He’s the CEO of HempFlax, Europe’s largest independent grower and processor of industrial hemp. HempFlax has operations across Europe, with over 2,200 hectares of hemp expected to be harvested in 2020. Mark has been with the company since 2008 and was appointed CEO in 2016. From 2016 to 2018, he also served as President of the European Industrial Hemp Association, which is Europe’s foremost coalition of the industrial hemp processing industry. He remains on that board of directors today. Needless to say, Mark knows what he’s talking about. Here is my conversation with Mark Reinders.

An introduction to hemp in Europe

Matt Baum:
Now, HempFlax is not a name that we really know in the United States, but you guys are gigantic. Can you tell us a little bit about what HempFlax does?

Mark Reinders:
Yes, I can. We are in the business for 25 years already in growing, harvesting, and processing industrial hemp and we are one of the pioneers of the post-war industrial hemp industry in Europe. We are founded in 1994 with entrepreneur Ben Dronkers and Ben founded HempFlax in his vision to bring industrial hemp back as being a legal industrial crop. He saw the possibilities of hemp from the Hemp Museum in Amsterdam. He’s also the founder and owner of the Hemp Museum in Amsterdam and Barcelona. There he learned about the past uses of hemp in the Golden Age. The big sailing ships had ropes and sails made from hemp fiber.

Matt Baum:
Right, right.

Mark Reinders:
Sailors were dressed in hemp fiber based clothing. The brewings in the ship was made with hemp. As you know, after the Prohibition industrial hemp completely disappeared.

Matt Baum:
Let’s talk about that for just a second. I’m curious, was there the same hemp prohibition in Europe that we saw in the United States? Because right after World War II, hemp pretty much vanished and was treated very much like marijuana as a crop and has slowly been coming back. Same thing in Europe?

Mark Reinders:
Yeah. It was a worldwide global thing hemp, because it was the prohibition on UN basis. There were some countries, for example like France, they had some kind of exemption in that time already. The big revival of industrial hemp happened in the late 80s, early 90s, when more and more countries changed their legislations in such a way that made possible for farmers to grow industrial hemp. To be very clearly on that, they did not remove cannabis from the scheduled list, but they made exemption rules industrial hemp. In the Netherlands, for example, the prohibition is not valid for hemp that’s meant for fiber and seed production, as long it’s grown in the open soil, outdoors, and that’s how the Netherlands dealt with it. The problem we have today in the world is each country is making their own exemptions on the prohibition, because the prohibition of the scheduling of cannabis is still in place.

Mark Reinders:
That’s why we are looking very forward to the United Nations single convention meeting that should’ve taken place last year, being postponed in March and now it’s being postponed in December, that cannabis is getting descheduled as soon as possible as an industrial crop, so we are not falling under the convention rules anymore.

Matt Baum:
Can I ask, is it similar to the States where they say that hemp is basically anything with a certain amount of THC or below and then anything above that is still scheduled? Is it similar?

Mark Reinders:
Yeah. Now, the exemption rules are same, but we are still, let’s say, under the prohibition of the single convention, but the exemption rules are based on 0.2% THC. US and the States 0.3. We have European countries mostly 0.2. You have some countries like Swiss, for example, made one percent rules, but 0.2 is the general rule in Europe.

Matt Baum:
Here we’re dealing with a very similar issue that you are, but it’s state by state. The United States hasn’t ruled as a federal agency on hemp yet, so we have states making different rules for hemp, which is ridiculous and hopefully it sounds like you guys are about to get out of that. I think we’re stuck in it for a little bit here. But because you were able-

Mark Reinders:
Right. In Europe, we have the same thing. Not every country has the same rules.

Matt Baum:
Right. Of course.

Mark Reinders:
Except you have … Also, they’re on state level differences. In the Netherlands, for example, we are not able to harvest the flowers and the leaves for CBD production.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Mark Reinders:
The Dutch exemption is only valid for fiber and seed production, so I’m not touching the leaves and the flowers and the dust crops. But, if I go 10 kilometers in that direction, meaning east-

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
… I’m in Germany and we have crops in Germany as well, because we’re that close to the border. In Germany, it’s industrial hemp. It doesn’t matter if you use it for the roots or the fiber or the seeds or the leaves and the flower, as long as you stay below 0.2%.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
It’s industrial hemp and growing at a farm. We don’t care what you do with it. I think that’s how it should be, because it’s really strange that governments are for you deciding what to do with the crop and what not.

Matt Baum:
Right. Especially a crop that’s not a drug at this point, that is essentially harmless from everything we’re finding. Can I ask, is that why you have locations in Germany and Romania and the Netherlands? It’s because different places are … The rules are different basically and you can do different things there. Is that the case?

Mark Reinders:
No, we didn’t choose different locations because of the rules, because Germany and the Netherlands was already there because of the geographic location of the factor.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
Because of what I said, we are really on the border of the Dutch-German border. Our growing area is 50 kilometers around the factory because the transport of raw materials, the straw, is a very voluminous product, so it takes a lot of trucks to do that, so high transport cost. That’s why we try to keep our growing area as close as possible to the factory. That’s why we have a part in Germany as well. Of course, now as a coincidence and change in the difference and rules and regulations we have in the [inaudible 00:09:14] that we can grow CBD in Germany as well. The Romanian factory, actually we started farming in Romania in 2012, because we were looking for expansion and we have to decide or we expand the Dutch factory, meaning putting a bigger production line in, but then we also needed more growing area to grow our crops.

Mark Reinders:
We suffered from a lot of competition for agriculture land around us, mostly by the bioenergy industry, the biomass and for biogas. We said, “Okay, we’re taking another location, more southly and different climate zone,” to one hand spread our climatal risk, because we’re operating here on more sea climate type in the Netherlands. Where Romania, we have a continental climate type and we are more southly, so we can harvest the seeds as well. In the northern European operations, we do not harvest the seeds because the hemp starts flowering four weeks later compared to Romania and then I end up in September with my harvest of the seeds in the Netherlands. I need three weeks of drying and retting in the fields and then I’m ending up in October and I need to get my stalks dry from the field. To get something dry from the field in the Netherlands in October is very difficult because of the climate. It’s very risky. Where Romania actually this weekend, we started harvesting the hemp and the seeds are ripe.

Matt Baum:
Oh, wow.

Mark Reinders:
Because of the continental climate, we have relatively dry, good weather up to November, so we have a lower harvest risk if we do seeds.

Matt Baum:
So it’s like just a much longer growing season where you can do different things-

Mark Reinders:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
… overlapping each other basically?

Mark Reinders:
Because even more southly latitudes, we can sow earlier. In Romania, we’re sowing in the mid of March, end of March, where in the Netherlands we do end of April, mid of April.

Getting a head start on hemp

Matt Baum:
It sounds like HempFlax was founded in the 90s, so you guys had a much longer jump on the hemp business than we’ve had in the States. You’re one of the first fully veritably integrated hemp companies, is that correct?

Mark Reinders:
It’s correct. The reason we are veritably integrated is on the one hand we want to make the supply chain as short as possible. The more companies or chains you have in the supply chain, the more expensive the product gets.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Mark Reinders:
Each chain has its profit margin being calculated over the profit margin of the previous chain. You get the so-called movement effect, it’s called in economics. The product gets too expensive.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
On the other hand, because we were the pioneers, we were one of the first, there was nothing there. If you want to bring something to the market you had to do it for yourself-

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
… from the seed to the end product. It starts in the farming with a special harvest. Believe me, in the first year as we tried every type of harvest that was out there commercially available and all of them we have destroyed completely because hemp is a very difficult crop to harvest. If you cannot buy something in the market you start building yourself something.

Matt Baum:
Sure. You may as well design it.

Mark Reinders:
Then you end up with a machine that’s pretty expensive, so the farmers are not likely to invest in it, especially when it’s a new crop and a new company. They’re curious in buying and investing in harvesting equipment, so we have to do it. In the factory as well and the end products as well. The other reason is that we do the harvest ourself is very quality based reason, because we have a very strong feeling that quality starts in the field and not in the factory.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Mark Reinders:
By controlling the harvest, we’re controlling the quality and this has to do with drying and retting. We are more likely to wait till after the rain to get a crop in, because we know we get a bit more retting and better quality fiber. Where a farmer says, “It’s going to rain next week,” I’d take the crop in now because then I have it in before the rain.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
It’s a normal thing for a farmer, but then you don’t have the best quality of fiber, because you need the fiber to be … You rett it a little bit.

Getting to know HempFlax

Matt Baum:
Let’s talk about what all HempFlax does. You’re involved in nutrition. You’re involved in animal husbandry. You’re involved in plastics, fibers. What don’t you guys do with hemp? It seems like you started from the root literally and you go all the way up to the flower. What was the first thing HempFlax invested in when this started?

Mark Reinders:
Well, the very first thing is we started separating the fiber and the core from each other. That was the first step, so-called decortication. We started in an old flax mill in the early 90s, but then we found out pretty quickly that the flax equipment was not suitable for processing hemp.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
We found out pretty fast that hemp needs specialized equipment. Also there we started developing decortication equipment to decorticate the hemp, so that’s why we have now a breaker mill system. Not hammer mill, but the breaker mill system, that breaks the fiber loose from the core and then we make a separation. And then we had raw fiber and shives. The shives were packed as horse bedding and the fiber went to the paper industry for cellulose, because it was raw, unrefined 80% pure fiber. It was not suitable for the automotive industry, not suitable for any application. While we were doing that, we started developing more equipment and we learned more how to do it and we were able to refine the fiber, get the fiber cleaner, so then we had new markets opening up. We ended in the automotive industry in supplying fiber for interior parts and for door panels as a fiberglass replacement that you need high-quality fiber. From the animal bedding, we also said, “Okay, we had horses.” We made small packages for cat litter-

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
… for rabbits, guinea pigs and so on. We started marketing in the retail, so we had equipment to pack in smaller size. Then, we start selling the fiber to an insulation manufacturer for making hemp insulation. We thought, “Hey, that’s nice. We can develop the market here as well.” We start buying back the fiber and we start selling the insulation here to build a market and recently, actually this is funny, in June, we were able to take over this company and is part of the group also to make the supply chain shorter.

Thanks to Receptra for sponsoring our podcast

Matt Baum:
Let’s take a quick break to talk about our podcast partner this week, Receptra Naturals. You can find them over at receptranaturals.com and of course I’ll have links in the show notes to tell you all about them. We’re super proud to be working with these guys because they make such high quality CBD products. Receptra has been around since 2015 and they’ve been operating with one major guiding principle and it’s super simple, the truth is curative. That’s Rusty Scott, the founder of Receptra Naturals said that. What they basically mean is the product that they represent on their label is exactly what you’re getting and it does what it says it does. In this case, they sent me some of their new Receptra Series Rest camomile tincture. This is a 25 mg dose, right? They have a very easy-to-read dosage dropper and one milliliter represents 25 mg of the Series Rest Nighttime CBD. This one comes in a vanilla mint flavor and it’s made with full spectrum hemp extract and chamomile to help you sleep.

Matt Baum:
I’ve been taking it for about two weeks now before I go to bed. I’m a very light sleeper and I have to say I’ve been sleeping very well, so I am going to be asking them for more of this. It is a fantastic product. The flavor is not overpowering by any means. You shake it before you take it. I take it about an hour before I go to bed and I can feel myself relaxing. Not so much getting drowsy like a sleep aid would make you, but relaxing and getting ready to go to bed and not worrying about all the stuff that’s in my head spinning around. Also, I find myself sleeping really comfortably and well. In the morning, I don’t wake up groggy. I don’t wake up feeling hungover, which is something that a lot of sleep aids do. I don’t feel cloudy at all. I just had nice restful sleep and like I said, no grogginess, no cloudiness. I don’t feel strange at all.

Matt Baum:
Their label features a QR code, where you can get the lab results, which is something we always push for, and the ingredients are right here. They’re very simple. Organic MCT oil, organic sunflower oil, Receptra hemp extract, organic flavors that include vanilla and peppermint, natural flavor of chamomile, valerian root extract and organic linalool. All right, I don’t know what that one is, but it is organic and it’s all written right there, which is good. Right now, the Receptra people are being so cool. You can head to receptranaturals.com, make an order and use the code MOH15. That’s capital M-O-H and the number 15 to get 15% off your order, just for being a Ministry of Hemp listener. You’re supporting a great company who is supporting The Ministry of Hemp and you’re going to get a better night’s sleep too. Everybody wins here. We can’t thank them enough for supporting our podcast. We love getting great brands to you guys. If you’re having trouble sleeping or you want to check out any of their other line of CBD products, head over to receptranaturals.com and again I will have that link featured in the show notes for this episode. Now back to my conversation with Mark Reinders.

How HempFlax uses all of the hemp plant

Mark Reinders:
To make a long story short, we use every single part of the hemp plant. We don’t throw away anything-

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing.

Mark Reinders:
… even the dust coming from the whole process. You can imagine if you do a lot of mechanized processing of those hemp stalks, you have a lot of dust, about 20% turns in dust and we call it hemp flour. That sounds a bit more expensive. We sell it as an additive to growing media and this growing media has been pelletized and being sold into the rose breeding industry-

Matt Baum:
That was amazing.

Mark Reinders:
… as growing medium. It’s even exported all over the world. My, let’s say, secondary revenue stream is being upgraded to a high-end growing medium being exported to Korea for rose breeding. We don’t throw away anything here. Everything is being used. That’s why we’re active in so much markets because literally we are an upside down factory. Normally, if you look a car factory, for example, you have a lot of parts and iron and the wheels, electronics and everything is being put together. All those thousands of parts being put together and end of the day you have one product, a car. We are all the way around. We have one raw material called hemp and that goes in a factory and we are separating and refining it in all these revenue streams. If I want it or not, I’m getting all these revenue streams and I have to sell it. For that reason, we are active in so many markets.

Mark Reinders:
Actually, the sales department is being split into business lines. We have a business line construction material being managed by people who know about construction material and have the know and experience. We have a business line animal care for the bedding and animal mattresses and wool and all kind of stuff. We have a business line industrial applications where we have nonwovens for door panels, boat fiber, compounds, pellets, granulates for inaction molding and compounding. That’s really the business line for industrial applications. We have a genetics business line where we sell our sowing seeds, but also our harvesting equipment, like the double cut combine we’re selling there. We have a business nutraceuticals that’s been defined into food and food supplements, where of course hemp seed oil, protein powder, but also the whole range of CBD products is being [inaudible 00:21:45] from CBD raw material into extracts, into premixes, up to white labeled, ready-to-consume products like tinctures and capsules.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
We have a business line horticultural, where we sell the growing media, the growing medium enhancers and mulch layers for flower pots and top soil. Definitely have a look at our website, because there’s really too much to mention-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, there’s a lot.

Mark Reinders:
… in one [crosstalk 00:22:11].

Matt Baum:
There is a lot going on. It kind of looks like you guys started … You looked at what you were doing fiber and said, “Well, where else can we take this part of the plant and plug it into the world,” and you found little pieces, mostly recently insulation. That’s a Germany company that you guys bought, is that correct?

Mark Reinders:
Yeah, that’s correct.

Sustainable construction with hemp

Matt Baum:
What is that like moving into something like that? Did someone approach you and say, “Hey, we could use this to make insulation,” or did you approach this from your point of view and say, “We can make insulation and we should buy it and control it ourselves, there’s a huge market here”?

Mark Reinders:
No, actually this specific company [inaudible 00:22:51], was working with hemp insulation for a long time. Actually, they were the pioneers in hemp insulation. We used to supply them with a lot of fiber in the past and then one time there came an opportunity. The current investor wants to quit and wants to shut down the company, so we said, “Okay, if you want to shut down, we want to take it over because we feel comfortable this market has a future.” What you see these days, the whole COVID thing realized people more than ever before that we have to change the way of living.

Matt Baum:
Yes, absolutely.

Mark Reinders:
Not that we have to go back to Middle Ages and stop living. No, we can still live. We can still enjoy a warm house and a good insulated house, but we can also do that with different type of materials.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
Doesn’t always need to be a synthetic material or a mineral material with a lot of CO2 emission in the production. We can also make a good housing with good thermal properties with better materials, because you have to realize at the moment you insulate your house, you’re CO2 saving at that moment already. We have a negative CO2 balance. Even you add all the CO2 emissions we have for transport, processing, harvesting, field work, and so on, the crop took more CO2 from the air than we are emitting in our production process.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing.

Mark Reinders:
If you look at the CO2 balance of a mineral wall where you have to crush stone and melt it and make fiber out of it or glass wall insulation or synthetic insulation, they’re very high CO2 footprints in the production. Of course, with insulation in a house it saves energy in the summer or in the winter, sorry.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
Not in the summer, because it’s not keeping your house cool. It is ineffective. It’s a sustainability [inaudible 00:24:35].

Matt Baum:
Right. You’re starting off underwater basically. You’re starting off with something-

Mark Reinders:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
… that may cost CO2 just to build before you crush it into something else, so that’s incredible.

Mark Reinders:
Yeah, that’s the whole thing about our material because it’s good already for day one, because otherwise if you insulate your house with rock wool, for example, your house needs to save energy for a couple of years before it’s earned back its own energy for production. In the world, if you talk about sustainability too many times we look at the sustainability if a product is in use. There’s electrical cars on the street or the house is insulated, but we believe and I think that’s the only valid methodology to talk about sustainability is the lifecycle assessment. Look at the total lifecycle of a product, what impact that gives on our planet and our environment and on our climate. Because if you just look at the news, we just had in the Netherlands 18 days of summer heat that’s more than 25 degrees. That’s very special for the Netherlands. We never had that in the history of meteorology measurements. The five hottest summers since the measurements were taken of the climate to place … The three hottest summers took place in the last five years.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Mark Reinders:
We see the melting of the polar ice is going faster and faster every year. On the other hand, the whole COVID pandemic where people had to lockdown, air transportation shut down, we saw how quickly the air quality improves again in cities and in environments. We also learned how regenerative the world can be. Of course, I’m not saying we can undo the climate change in one year. It will take decades and probably generations to do that, but if we don’t start today what will happen.

Matt Baum:
Right. Every day we don’t start we push things back probably another five or 10 years.

Mark Reinders:
We have alternatives. We can’t say because we’re … The alternatives are there and of course in volume we are still very small, but imagine what we can do if the concept we have like HempFlax is being bigger and being used in more countries. Therefore, again, we need to have clear legislative environment-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Reinders:
… where industrial hemp is not falling on any prohibition. It’s free to use. Because only then we can succeed and we can accelerate our growing and we can bring those products to the market that’s so necessary these days.

Using hemp in cars instead of plastic

Matt Baum:
You’re working in replacing plastic parts in cars. You’re working in insulation. What is adoption like right now? Are companies open to this idea? It seems we’re a little resistant here in the States and I think quite honestly it’s only because there aren’t more companies like HempFlax in the States that are able to do this. We’re still building this infrastructure. What’s it like in Europe? When you came to car companies and said, “Hey, we can replace all those plastic knobs with hemp plastic.” Are they adopting this? Are they going for it?

Mark Reinders:
That reminds me, I didn’t answer the question before, because those developments was initiating it. A lot of time companies are reaching out to us. “Hey listen, we have a product now. We’re using glass fiber, we are using mineral fiber, synthetic fiber, can we replace it with you,” and off you make a product out of it together with the development of that company.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool.

Mark Reinders:
That’s how it went with the car companies and car companies first said, “Hey, we can’t use this fiber in this way,” because they were used to glass fiber and glass fiber is every day the same because it’s not dependent on the weather, it’s not dependent on the climate. It’s every day same length, same quality. Where a natural fiber like hemp fiber, we need variance in the quality because it depends a little bit on the weather and the harvesting moment and the situation.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
It’s both a very learning process, but I think it succeeded a lot because today we’re supplying fiber for door panels for the Mercedes F, C, and A type.

Matt Baum:
Oh, wow.

Mark Reinders:
For the BMW, 3 and 5 series. For the Jaguar, for the Bentley and even for the Bugatti Veyron.

Matt Baum:
Oh, wow.

Mark Reinders:
The Bugatti Veyron, I’d like to tell you, because it’s not making me very rich because while I’m telling you this the factory produced enough for them for a whole year to use.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Mark Reinders:
But the [inaudible 00:29:22] is because they are using it. They’re not using hemp fiber in the door panel to make this 1,000 horsepower car look very green at the end of the day because look it’s hemp fiber in the door panel, not at all. They use it because it gives weight reduction over carbon fiber. Actually, they are using it because of a better mechanically performance and that’s what I like. I want to sell our products because it’s better, not necessarily because it’s more sustainability.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
That’s the sound effect.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
That’s the extra.

Matt Baum:
That’s a plus.

Mark Reinders:
People are buying things because it’s better for them. Better performance, better quality, better internal climate.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
If you can make something that replaced something not sustainable, but it’s better, then people will buy it.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Mark Reinders:
You make the world sustainable because the people are buying it.

Matt Baum:
So do you see-

Mark Reinders:
That’s my vision.

Matt Baum:
Do you see a future where HempFlax has a Formula One car that is a body built out of hemp plastics and whatnot? It’s a little lighter than the other cars, but it’s faster.

Mark Reinders:
I’m looking more Formula E. I think it does … fit a bit better there, but yeah it’s possible. Yeah, why not? Because the carbon fiber … Well, speaking about CO2 emission in the production, carbon fiber is a CO2 bump.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it’s a monster.

Mark Reinders:
It’s amazing the energy input on the CO2 emission. It’s a nice fiber, strong fiber. You can make a lot of great, nice lightweight materials with it, but the LCA is terrible.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, so you said there’s some variance between plastic fibers and carbon fibers and glass fibers. Are you figuring out ways to shrink that variance, to make it to bring these a little more-

Mark Reinders:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
… in line?

Comparing hemp in Europe and U.S.

Mark Reinders:
I think if you look at our production line, again it starts in the field and I think with all respect there’s a lot of … It’s still missing in the US, because you’re still working with your first crops and I see sometimes postings and pictures and movies. Oh nice, we tried it before, doesn’t work. Good luck. It’s really petty, because there’s a lot of trial and error there and it’s amazing how much errors we made in our life. Some errors we made twice to be sure. That’s a whole learning process. Actually, if I look at the production line we’ve built in Romania, it’s already better already compared to production line here we have in the Netherlands.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
Just because we work with the production line ourselves and our engineers we have are the operators of the machine. The operators, the guys working with it and machinery every day, they experience the problems, they see improvement.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
We give them the freedom to implement the improvements and for that reason I think we got a better production line. And then, we are able to combination harvesting in the fields and processing that we are able to make a very standard type of fiber that can be used in the automotive. If we are not able to do that, we cannot supply to the automotive industry.

Matt Baum:
Exactly, yeah. Especially something like that automotive industry where you have safety standards and whatnot that have to be very rigid in case an SUV crashes into one of those Mercedes. I’m sure they brought you each one of those cars after they fitted these. They said, “Thank you so much, here you go,” and you’ve got one each, right?

Mark Reinders:
No. No, not at all.

Matt Baum:
I’m sorry to hear.

Mark Reinders:
Not going to fit in the budget. One maybe in the future.

Matt Baum:
You brought up a point. It kind of blows my mind how far behind the States is because of the Prohibition and how we thought about this. Even now, when we have people in Europe, such as HempFlax that are literally 20 years ahead of us in working with this, we still haven’t fully connected and looked to say, “Hey, how are you guys doing that? We could use a little help over here.” We’re getting it together, but what do you think the future is for HempFlax? Where do you go from here? You guys have already … You’re in almost every business I can think of, from agriculture to industrial, what’s next?

Mark Reinders:
And then what’s next? Of course, we’re looking at America with great interest-

Matt Baum:
Yes.

Mark Reinders:
… and for some quite time already. Since 2015, after we finished the Romanian factory, we looked at the US, but at that time the federal legislation was not there yet. Early ’18, doesn’t look like it was going to happen. In the end, December ’18, the Farm Bill was signed finally, but up until then we couldn’t do anything.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Mark Reinders:
Because if it was not legal on federal level I could not open a bank account. I could not ship it to every state, insurance policies-

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
… all those things you need as a company. Because I cannot go to my energy company with a bag of money and I want to pay the bill of this month, you know?

Matt Baum:
Right. You’re effectively [crosstalk 00:34:25] a drug dealer at that point.

Mark Reinders:
Yeah. I can only operate in a fully legal environment, so we had to wait till the Farm Bill was signed and then the Farm Bill was signed and then everybody was jumping on it. Of course, in the whole CBD craziness we said, “Okay, well, let’s see what happens, because.” I was very worried because I learned of so many acres of hemp were being sown without people having a harvesting machine, without having a market, without having the whole supply chain. I think it’s just a waste of energy and capital there, also for the farmers growing a very nice hemp crop, but not being able to sell it or harvest it. I have one free advice really and it’s no offense, but if you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a factory and you don’t have the proper harvesting machinery, do not plant hemp.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it’s insane.

Mark Reinders:
Hemp is an expensive crop. It will cost you money when you plant it. It will cost you money when you harvest it. It will cost you even a whole lot more money if you start processing it. It only returns your money, at the moment it’s in a truck heading your customer, including invoice and get your invoice paid.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Mark Reinders:
At that moment you get your invoice paid, it can easily be two, 2-1/2 years after the moment you planted the hemp.

Matt Baum:
God.

Mark Reinders:
That’s something you have to consider. If you don’t have a customer, do not. Last year, we got a phone call in October from a US guy. He said, “Hey, I have 800 acres of hemp.” I need to call my harvester. So when? Next year is a no? Next week. But, listen this double cut combine is weighing 25,000 kilograms.

Matt Baum:
Right. We can’t just like put it in-

Mark Reinders:
It’s not something I can send to you with DHL Overnight Express.

Matt Baum:
What about piece by piece though? What if we took it apart, packed it up?

Mark Reinders:
No, I gave the suggestion hire an ethanol flame, maybe that works.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, there you go.

Mark Reinders:
It will be a costly flame, but amazing. If you plant hemp you should have a harvesting at least with bought harvesting machine because 120 days after planting it’s harvesting time. If you have to import machinery from Europe or whatever you have to plant it on a farm. If you’re thinking about a ’20/’21 crop you have to plant it today already. Start planning your harvest.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It’s crazy because we’re very pro hemp and we are pushing hemp education and we want to see it succeed and I love that farmers are getting interested in this, but we just experienced this massive hemp bubble last year that burst because we had so much planted and there was literally no one to make fiber out of it, no one to dry it, no one to process it. A lot of trucking companies wouldn’t even ship it, because they don’t know. It’s terrifying. It’s so terrifying. I feel like you guys are sitting across the pond sort of watching the rats eat each other right now to see who comes out the strongest, you know?

Mark Reinders:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
I’m jealous.

Mark Reinders:
Those are interesting to see, but sometimes I was a bit worried because I’m a farmer son myself and I know also hearing Europe, let’s say, [inaudible 00:37:44] effect, we also have quite some insolvencies in Europe from hemp processes that didn’t make it. They didn’t have customers in place and farmers not in place. And then the problem is hemp gets a very negative call, because farmers think you plant it, you never get paid, people get bankrupt and then in the end if there comes people in the company that really is taking up the good job and wants to do it right, it’s not able to get farmers because farmers are getting suspicious because there are very negative experiences from colleagues.

Matt Baum:
Or they saw what happened to the guy next door and said, “No.”

Mark Reinders:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
“I’m not doing that, that’s crazy.”

Mark Reinders:
And that’s what worries me a little bit. In order that hemp in US get successful is really time that a company steps up and tries to do it right this time. Think before you plant, that’s my free advice I wanted to give.

Matt Baum:
It’s a [crosstalk 00:38:42] scary time right now.

Mark Reinders:
Have a look at Europe. We have once a year. This year was online, but the hemp conference of the European International Hemp Association. Technically, there is … The worldwide hemp industry is present there. There’s a lot to learn there, lot to know. Maybe next year it will be real life. Up to them. We do everything at the moment online. It saves me a lot of traveling by the way.

Matt Baum:
We look forward to working with you guys hopefully sometime in the future. I don’t know. I mean, things are still pretty [crosstalk 00:39:12] up in the air and kind of messy, but if you want to come over and show us how it’s done we could use a little guidance, honestly.

Mark Reinders:
Yeah. If they allow me to go over again.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, no doubt. [crosstalk 00:39:22] Yeah, you don’t want to come right now, it’s kind of a mess. Let us clean up this COVID business first.

Mark Reinders:
I will. I’m afraid we’ll stay like that for a while.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, unfortunately. Mark, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your time.

Mark Reinders:
No problem.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
I got out of bed early just to do this. I want to send a huge thanks to Bethany who set this interview up. I didn’t realize that Mark was in the Netherlands and it was a little earlier than I expected, but I feel like I still sounded pretty awake. I just want to touch on one of the most interesting things that Mark said in the end of the interview when he brought up that American farmers who are choosing to plant hemp need to make sure they have a customer first and it’s true. One of the major reasons that hemp producers had so many issues last year with their harvest was because there’s just not enough infrastructure in place to take all that hemp and turn it into everything that it needs to be, whether it’s CBD or fiber.

Matt Baum:
Just today, I got an email for someone that was posting a comment on one of our older podcast episodes about how they were a farmer and they needed to know where they could sell their hemp. That is the wrong way to do this. You have to have a plan in place. You just have to. While we encourage everyone to look at growing hemp and get into growing hemp, you still have to make sure that there is infrastructure there and you have the proper connections to get that hemp where it needs to go so you can make money. Because at the end of the day, you got to pay your bills. HempFlax is obviously in a country that is a lot more accepting and helpful when it comes to this kind of stuff and the US is moving in that direction and we’re going to get there. I really do believe that. In the meantime, be careful and just like Mark said, “If you don’t have someone to sell that hemp to, maybe you shouldn’t be growing it.”

Matt Baum:
That brings us to the end of another exciting episode of The Ministry of Hemp podcast. I want to thank everybody that has been listening and downloading and commenting and call with their hemp questions. You can call me at 402-819-6417 with any of your hemp-related questions or you can shoot them to me in an MP3 at matt@ministryofhemp.com. Nothing is off limits and we love to answer your questions on the show, just like we did in the episode before this one. Next week on the show, we’re going to be talking about a new technology that could revolutionize testing when it comes to hemp and testing is a hot button issue. Remember, you got to keep everything below 0.03% THC. When you have a plant that looks like marijuana and smells like marijuana, it can be very hard to convince certain members of law enforcement that it is in fact hemp and not marijuana.

Matt Baum:
If you need more Ministry of Hemp in your life in the meantime, head over to ministryofhemp.com where we have a fantastic story that is all about CBG. It’s an introduction to, and I’m going to say this totally wrong, but I’m going to try it, Cannabigerol. Actually, I think I nailed it, but Cannabigerol or CBG is very hot right now. This is a great article that will help you understand just exactly what this cannabinoid does and why so many companies are featuring it.

Matt Baum:
You can also follow us on all of our social media @ministryofhemp/ministryofhemp everywhere and if you want to take it a step further head to Patreon/ministryofhemp and become a Ministry of Hemp Insider. It is the best way to help us to get this message of hemp education out to other people and it helps us so very much. Any amount you give makes you a Ministry of Hemp Insider, gets you access to podcast extras, early access to articles and bonus articles too. I cannot say thank you enough to everybody that is already supporting us. Like I said, if you want to help get the word out there, head to Patreon/ministryofhemp.com. Become a Ministry of Hemp Insider. I cannot stress how much it helps us spread the good word of hemp. Speaking of which, at Ministry of Hemp, we believe an accessible world is a better world for everyone, so you can find a full written transcript of this episode in the show notes as well. Huge thanks again to Receptra for being our partners in this one. Check them out at receptranaturals.com and I’ll have a link to their site in the show notes as well that’ll tell you more about their new Serious Rest for nighttime, full spectrum hemp extract with Chamomile.

Matt Baum:
All right, that about does it, but I like to end the show the same way every time, but saying 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 Hemp In Europe With Mark Reinders of HempFlax appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, our host Matt recaps 2019’s year-in-hemp news and then sits down for a conversation with CEO and founder of Hempitecture, Mattie Mead. The two discuss Mattie’s history, his belief in renewable construction and hempcrete’s present and future.

Show notes

Early in the podcast, Matt mentions these key takeaways from the 2019 Hemp Industry Daily Forum.

We’ve also written quite a bit before about hempcrete, including how hempcrete is used in Australia, the benefits of hempcrete homes and even a unique hempcrete doghouse. In the video above, we profiled the Highland Hemp House, a unique retrotfit of a 1970s home with hempcrete.

Over at Hemp Magazine, our Editor Kit wrote about the issues blocking hempcrete’s acceptance in the U.S., including his interview with Mattie Mead. We also mentioned Just BioFiber, the awesome Canadian company making hemp-based building blocks for life-sized buildings.

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.

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.

Hempcrete And The Future of Sustainable Construction: Complete episode transcript

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

Matt Baum: The Ministry of Hemp Podcast is brought to you by Life Patent, 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, Life Patent understands their customers are people seeking relief. You can learn more about the entire line of CBD-related products at lifepatent.com.

Matt Baum: Welcome to Episode 24 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. My name is Matt Baum, and I am your host. Folks, this is the final show of 2019. Today on the show, we are going to continue our theme of hemp as an alternative. Last time you might remember I spoke to Morris Beegle from We Need a Better Alternative about hemp woods and hemp plastics.

Matt Baum: Today we’re going to talk with Mattie Mead from Hempitecture. They are working with a very exciting concrete alternative called, you guessed it, hempcrete. We’ll get into all that in just a minute. But, first, with this being the final show of the year and, oh, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at hemp, a year in review 2019.

2019: The year in hemp

Matt Baum: You probably heard me talk about it plenty of times on this show, but as I’m sure you know, 2018 we saw the US farm bill that essentially legalized the growing of hemp in the United States. It made 2019 a very exciting year for hemp. 2019 marked the first American legal harvests of hemp in the US, and with that came a spike in interest in the plant itself, not just for CBD but like we’ve been talking about, alternatives in construction, alternatives in fabric, alternatives in paper.

Matt Baum: We saw the hemp market hit a billion dollars. We saw CEOs of hemp companies popping up on Forbes 30 Under 30 list that they put out every year. There’s been a lot of new studies released showing that CBD really is helping people with things like pain and anxiety and homeostasis, which we are finding out is more important than ever.

Matt Baum: With that, we’ve seen the rise of thousands of new CBD-based shops opened by small business owners, who are doing the hard work and making sure that they’re stocking good products that come from good hemp farmers. We saw famous sports athletes speaking up and saying they want to make CBD part of their recovery regimen. With that, a CBD sponsorship for a major sports women’s soccer championship game that was on television.

Matt Baum: All in all, it was a great year for hemp, but there are still some problems too, though. We saw Washington bringing the DEA in to work with hemp legislation. We’ve got some fights there that will be fought. But 2020 is looking pretty bright, too. The Hemp Industry Daily, which is a great website if you haven’t checked it out, dropped an article on December 11th about the five business takeaways from the 2019 Hemp Industry Daily forum, where they brought in several huge names in the hemp business, and they had a lot of very positive things to say for the market going forward in 2020.

Matt Baum: Obviously, there is a huge CBD bubble right now, and if it is going to continue to grow, one of the conclusions that they came to is the price is going to have to come down, making it more available to everyone. That is going to happen now that we’re seeing more and in production legally in the States.

Matt Baum: The fiber market for hemp is showing real potential as well. As textile producers learn more about how hemp can be incorporated into materials they are already working with, that market is going to explode. It looks like some predictions are saying the market next year could grow by as much as $25 million to $50 million.

Matt Baum: Basically, there is no end in sight for the hemp marketplace, but we need to make sure that we are still getting the right messages out there, that we are still doing this the right way, and we are educating not just the public but the business sector that is going to go into this, because they are the ones that are going to lobby Washington to let them do this the right way.

Matt Baum: Hemp has made a lot of progress in 2019, more probably than in the last 50 years, here in the States anyway. But it’s up to us to make 2020 an even better year. So keep preaching the word, get out there, and express your interest for hemp products. Look for people that are doing it the right way. You can always do that at ministryofhemp.com. Now let’s get to my interview with Mattie Mead of Hempitecture.

Introducing Mattie Mead of Hempitecture

Matt Baum: Now, Mattie, one of the things that you guys are famous for is hempcrete. We’ll get into that, but first I want to know how does someone like you find their way to this company working with hemp in an industrial sense. Where’d you come from? What’s your origin story?

Mattie Mead: That’s a great question, and I love telling that story because it’s rooted back to my time as an architecture student. In 2012, 2013, I was finishing my architectural studies degree at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which is a liberal arts college in upstate New York, about 2,500 students. So pretty small, but the cool thing about going to a small school like that, especially with a liberal arts focus, is you get to learn a lot of different subjects and really get a diverse education.

Mattie Mead: When I went to college, I was not initially intending to go to school for architecture, but my whole life, I had been a creative. Kindergarten onward, I was very much so interested in the arts. My first semester of college, I didn’t have any art-related courses, and this was after four years of high school where I was in the advanced placement art program and spent a lot of my time working in different mediums.

Mattie Mead: So my first semester of college, I didn’t have any art courses. I was like, “Wow! Something is really missing for me here,” and I became interested in the architecture program there. I viewed architecture as a practical application of art. I have the utmost respect for artists-

Matt Baum: Absolutely, yeah.

Mattie Mead: … but I didn’t see myself as being a career artist trying to make it that way. Architecture just seemed like something that was an extension of my creative desires. So I enrolled in this architecture program, and it surely was life-changing for me. I had really incredible professors and teachers around me.

Mattie Mead: But really where the Hempitecture story begins is while I was studying architecture, I got on a fast track with that program, which allowed me to diversify and expand my education. I undertook a minor in environmental sciences. It’d been a split education where it’s like I was spending part of my time in environmental sciences, part of my time in architecture.

Matt Baum: Sure.

Mattie Mead: And I had this light bulb moment where I was thinking about we consider the natural world. It’s its own entity. Then in the world of architecture, we consider the built environment separately. It’s not that common or often that we really think about the relationship between the built environment and the natural world. We just impose the built environment on the natural world and hope it meets our needs. To me-

Matt Baum: I suppose that’s true. You can look at all the glass and steel everywhere, yeah. We just drop buildings where they need to go, not where they should go, right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, exactly. There was one specific statistic that I mean I still share to this day, and that statistic was that buildings and their operations are responsible for 40% of our domestic carbon footprint and approximately 40% of our domestic energy consumption.

Matt Baum: That is massive.

Mattie Mead: If we don’t change the way we design and build, we’re not going to do anything, or we’ll do very little about, I’m sure, the problems with sustainability in our built environment.

Matt Baum: That’s 40%. That is a huge chunk, too. We’re not talking like a little sliver. That’s massive.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, it actually makes up more of the domestic energy share than the transportation industry-

Matt Baum: God.

Mattie Mead: … which is fascinating when you think about all the planes, trains, cars on the road. The CO2 footprint from those is less than the operation of our built environment, the CO2 footprint that that creates.

Discovering hempcrete & earth architecture

Matt Baum: So getting into this pushed you into this ecological mindset basically, when you started to discover these things?

Mattie Mead: Absolutely. It pushed me into this ecological mindset. My senior year, I had a little bit of, I guess, flexibility in how I was able to continue my senior year because I’ve taken care of a lot of my undergraduate requirements. So I decided to do a thesis study. That thesis study I titled The Contemporary Relevance of Earth Architecture.

Mattie Mead: So now this time I’d never even heard of hempcrete. I had not even a slight bit of awareness of it. But actually what was fascinating to me was vernacular archetypes, so wattle and daub, cob, rammed earth, straw-bale, which are used in various different parts of the world.

Matt Baum: Okay, real quick. I don’t know what any of that is. What are we talking about there?

Mattie Mead: They’re all different styles, natural building techniques.

Matt Baum: Okay, okay.

Mattie Mead: So rammed earth is essentially using a specific kind of clay-based soil and compacting it with great pressure, and forming walls out of earth.

Matt Baum: Okay, sure.

Mattie Mead: If you think of New Mexico, kind of southwestern-

Matt Baum: Like adobe buildings and whatnot.

Mattie Mead: Totally, totally. It’s that kind of archetype. In my research, I learned about hemp lime, hempcrete being used in France, primarily at the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands. When I discovered that, it was this moment of like, oh my gosh, this is exciting to me and I want to pursue this and, perhaps most importantly, what a missed opportunity for the United States. At this time, I think they were [crosstalk 00:11:25].

Matt Baum: How long ago was this? I’m curious. How long ago was this when you first discovered it?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, so that was 2012 and 2013.

Matt Baum: Okay. How long have they been working-

Mattie Mead: I have to say-

Matt Baum: … with this stuff in Europe at that point?

Mattie Mead: Oh gosh, for over a decade at least.

Matt Baum: Really?

Mattie Mead: There is now evidence of hemp-based building materials going back thousands of years. There was a UNESCO world heritage site discovered, I want to say, in India that they excavated, they found hemp-based building materials used in a temple of sorts. There might be even a bigger history to the use of hemp and lime as a building material, or hemp in general as a building material. But what really got my gears turning was this modern day present use of hemp lime in these European countries.

Matt Baum: Sure. From there, that’s what gives you the push to start Hempitecture. Am I saying that right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah. It’s like hemp architecture, Hempitecture.

Matt Baum: Got you.

Mattie Mead: That was really the crux point of founding Hempitecture. I remember the day that I came up with that name. I was in the car with my entrepreneurial mentor, who actually was an alumnus of the same college that I went to. I was interning for him one summer, actually, my senior year interning for him. I said to him in the car, I said, “[KB 00:13:15], hear me out. Hemp architecture. Hempitecture,” and he goes, “Oh, that’s good. You need to write that down. Write that down.” Then that was-

Matt Baum: Did anybody ask you if you were insane? When you first started and told people like, “This is what I want to do. I want to go into building materials made of hemp,” did anyone say you’re crazy?

Mattie Mead: They said I was beyond crazy, to quote your word, “insane”, yeah. I mean early on, there was so much pushback. Also, I think it’s important to contextualize where I was. It’s interesting to consider that now. At the time, I was in upstate New York. Don’t get me wrong. I was born and raised on the east coast. I love the east coast, but probably less progressive than some other places in the United States. So I feel like perhaps had I been in Colorado, people would have been like, “Right on, man. Go for it.” But in New York, people were like, “You’re out of your mind. This is never going to happen. You’re talking about building homes from a substance that is on … It’s federally illegal. It’s on the Controlled Substances Act. You’re out of your mind.”

Matt Baum: Or at least importing materials that are going to be so expensive that the beginning of your cost starts way higher than someone that’s just going to go rip rocks out of the ground and crush them up, right?

Mattie Mead: Right, right. It was tough for me because I was so optimistic and so gung-ho on making this my reality. It wasn’t about me, it was about the potential impact that this venture could have from both a sustainability standpoint, but also from a societal benefit standpoint. Once I learned about the health benefits of it and how people whom are living in hemp-based homes feel better, they’re healthier, they’re exposed to less toxins, I really saw this as an idea that could have been an impetus for good.

Mattie Mead: The naysayers were … It was disappointing to me, but it never quite deterred me enough to totally step away. Although I will say there’s definitely some times that it was questionable whether or not I would try to move forward.

What is hempcrete?

Matt Baum: Sure. Let me ask you now that hemp is legal and we’re growing hemp in the United States, is it easier? Are people saying, “Oh man. That’s a great idea”? Are they singing a different tune to you now or are they still like, “Pfft. Good luck, kid”?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, I think it’s going to slow transition and revolution in how people conceptualize and think of industrial hemp. So my senior year of college, I was promoting this concept in business plan competition. I was going in front of venture capital judges actually promoting a product concept. It wasn’t like, “Hey, I want to go out there and build hemp buildings.” It was a material concept for creating an interlocking, insulating building block that can go together just like Legos …

Matt Baum: Yeah, hemp Legos, basically.

Mattie Mead: … which now [crosstalk 00:16:37] out there on the market. Early on, people were like, “You’re out of your mind. You’re crazy.” Then a few states are adopting industrial hemp regulations and then it started to become a little bit more normalized. Now you flash forward to today where the farm bill was passed 2018, and now in New York and the northeast is a region that’s actually leading the industrial hemp bioeconomy. I mean they’re doing a lot in [crosstalk 00:17:07].

Matt Baum: All of a sudden they’re paying attention now in the east, huh?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, yeah. And so, it’s funny to look back and see the same place that I was five, six years ago, kind of like saying, “No, it’s never going to happen,” is now, like, where it actually is happening, but there’s still so much further that we have to go for this to really become a United States-based industry. We’re really still just at the start, especially with the farm bill passing in 2018.

Matt Baum: So tell me about the hempcrete itself. Let’s talk about how do you make hempcrete? I mean obviously you’re not just pulling a plant out of the ground and grinding it up. I mean what goes into it? What part of the plant are we using? How do you guys do this?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, that’s a great question, Matt. So hempcrete is a biocomposite. That’s a fancy word for saying more than one natural-based thing that are combined together. We’re using the wooden core of the industrial hemp stalk, which that one core, you grow fiber variety industrial hemp.

Mattie Mead: There’s a lot of steps before you can get that wooden core that meet the needs of a building-grade product. It goes through a decortication process, which that concept there is important. Decortication is so essential to this industry as a whole because without decortication, you don’t have a way of separating different plant constituents into their valuable end uses.

Mattie Mead: With the plant itself, primarily what we’re concerned with, initially at least, was just the core. We want clean core, we want it free, about long fiber. I’d also like to explain the hemp stalk is this vertical mass that’s wearing a jacket. Before you can get into what’s inside the jacket, you have to take the jacket off. That process really requires specific machinery. But once that jacket’s taken off, you’re left with something that looks identical to wood chips. With wood chips-

Matt Baum: Okay. So we’re basically taking it apart and putting it back together at this point.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, you’re taking it apart, you’re getting your different parts that you need, in this case the core. Then that core is what is mixed with your binder. The binder is the other very crucial and critical element, and it’s often the less talked about part of the hempcrete biocomposite. It’s slightly less sexy than the hemp component of it-

Matt Baum: Fair enough.

Mattie Mead: … but it’s, in my opinion, just as important, if not even more important. Primarily, hempcrete is created-

Using the whole hemp plant (or not)

Matt Baum: Let me ask you before you go any further. Before you go any further, let me ask you, if I’m a farmer and I’m growing hemp … And this might be a silly question. If it is, I apologize. But I’m a farmer and I am growing hemp for CBD. I am going to sell the flower, basically, for CBD. Can I use that same plant to sell it to someone like you who’s going to use it to make hempcrete, but perhaps the stalks?

Mattie Mead: That is not a stupid question, and there are many bright minds that are working on that exact question right now, because that’s a huge problem with the CBD industry. What do you do with your leftover biomass that is a lot less valuable than the flowers themselves? When you look at a-

Matt Baum: If you can make it more valuable, farmers are going to grow more of it too, if we can say, “Well, hey, I’m not just selling the flower. I can also sell this pulp or the internal parts to the Hempitecture guys and they can make that.” Now you have a value-added crop, right?

Mattie Mead: Absolutely. Right there you’re getting at the heart of the goal of full spectrum utilization of the plant. You want to utilize all components of it. Nothing goes to waste.

Matt Baum: Cool.

Mattie Mead: But there’s a challenge with that, and that challenge is that fiber variety industrial hemp is grown with different agronomical practices than CBD hemp is grown. There are a lot of similarities, and this is putting it in layman’s terms and there are people who could do much better than I could at elaborating on the subtle nuances and differences. But, primarily, CBD is cultivated very similarly to cannabis. It’s very manicured. It’s got spacing that allows the plant to become more bushy. It often has more flowering tops than, say, a fiber variety wood that grows more similarly to other bast-style crops, flax, kenaf, jute.

Mattie Mead: And so, one of the problems is because of just some of the ways that CBD hemp is grown, it’s more difficult to process. But I’m hopeful, and I know that there are people out there and hopefully people that are listening to this that are working to tackle that issue of how do we divert this waste from the CBD industry and turn into something valuable. I’m hopeful that we’ll start seeing that coming online very, very soon.

Matt Baum: But the plant that you’re looking for is basically more of a beefy, fibrous plant that is grown for that fiber.

Mattie Mead: Correct. We could really get into the weeds, no pun intended, about-

Matt Baum: No, we don’t want to get too scientific here. I mean I’m not a scientist, so we want people to enjoy this show.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, yeah. There’s dual-crop varieties which make you can get a little bit of CBD, you can get food, you can get fiber, you can get hurd. But, primarily, from what I’ve seen, a lot of the agronomical practices surrounding industrial hemp are, “Hey, we’re growing this for CBD,” or, “Hey, we’re growing this for fiber.” It’s very specifically purposed.

Building with hempcrete

Matt Baum: So after you guys get the fiber, it’s decorticated. You take the jacket off, as you said, and you got those wood chips. Then what happens to it?

Mattie Mead: So we send those to a project site, at the project site where the building is already structurally framed out because hempcrete is a non-load-bearing material. Hempcrete is a bit of a misnomer to a certain extent, just in that people think it’s a concrete replacement. It is not. But rather it’s-

Matt Baum: That was my next question, actually.

Mattie Mead: Yeah. There’s a bit of a movement right now that I really respect and appreciate, of people starting to label hempcrete as hemp lime. Hey, call what it is because hempcrete is, as I said before, a biocomposite derived from hemp core and lime. You have it on site there. You have your building framed out. You need to combine it with the binder before it can really do anything, binder and water. The binder is like the magic glue that sets off this reaction. Why limestone? Limestone, calcium carbonate, a calcification reaction occurs when you mix limestone with water.

Matt Baum: That’s the same as concrete, basically, right?

Mattie Mead: It’s a little different than concrete in the sense that the reaction, the calcification reaction, is actually spurred on by pretty available carbon dioxide. This is where the really exciting sustainability impacts come in with hempcrete. Well, there’s numerous sustainability impacts.

Mattie Mead: But the material itself, carbon dioxide is pretty available in the atmosphere, within the calcification process, returning to a solid-state calcium carbonate with the hemp core embedded within this binding matrix. Essentially, if you can imagine, it’s like taking a white powder, mix it with water, and you add in the hemp core. That is the essence of hempcrete.

Matt Baum: Okay. All right. I see it working now. So we’ve got it there and it can be poured. From what I understand, there’s three different ways. You can pour it in a form or you can make it into bricks. Then you can also spray it like an insulation.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You nailed it there. The first style we call cast in place. That’s tamping it into form boards. Cast in place has … It’s truly an artisanal, beautiful approach, however, very labor-intensive.

Matt Baum: Right.

Mattie Mead: The second approach that you named there, blocks, blocks are great. They’re a nominal building material. Most people know how to work with [TNU 00:26:47] or other styles of block. There are some challenges, though, with blocks. How does the block integrate into a structural frame? If you’re making blocks, it’s not that likely that you’ll be making blocks on site, just because if you’re making them on site, why wouldn’t you just take the hempcrete and put it in form boards? And you’re subject to environmental conditions, the weather, temperature, humidity, so on and so forth. Then the third approach-

Matt Baum: Blocks would be something perhaps they would order and say, “We need this side blocks,” and they come in. Then you just throw them together, basically, Lego-style, right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah. There are a few companies out there, Just BioFiber in Canada, that is making an interlocking building block, really similar to the design concept that I had for interlocking building blocks when I was an undergraduate student in 2012. We are now making small batch order of blocks within our new space that we’re calling the Hempitecture Innovation Lab. We now have a brick and mortar space where we’re doing experimentation, innovating new products, and creating small block quarters for specific projects in mind.

Mattie Mead: For instance, if you had a tiny house you wanted to build and you said, “Hey, I want to build a 400-square foot house. How many blocks will we need?” well, we can make those in our new lab now and send them out after they’re cured, after being climate-controlled.

Mattie Mead: But the third option that you talked about there is really exciting and it’s something that’s new, or at least it’s new in the United States, and that is the spray-applied method. Spray-applied is very different than that cast in place artisanal approach. It’s much more, in my opinion, in line with how we build conventionally here in the United States. Oftentimes, insulation products, dense-packed cellulose or spray pump, it’s sprayed into the wall cavity.

Matt Baum: Right. They cut a hole and they squirt it in there, more or less.

Mattie Mead: Pretty much. Speaking simply, it’s similar to that. You could have a house sprayed out pretty conventionally. You have to make some substitutions to make hempcrete work. But now we’re able to spray-apply hempcrete. We can cut off 50% of the installation time from a cast in place approach with our system and that we’re distributing here in the United States called the Ereasy, which was invented in France.

Mattie Mead: And so, we’re now using that system on a lot of projects. We’re looking to get that system in the hands of more American builders. Shot out to [Amerishonver 00:29:50], a company from Pennsylvania, who is soon to be new owner of this.

Mattie Mead: We’re excited about this because this really democratizes the ability to effectively install hempcrete. What that does is it brings the cost down. It takes it less out of this sort of like artisanal, cast in place world, and democratizes it with something that more people can use. Ultimately, our goal is to [crosstalk 00:30:20].

Matt Baum: Yeah. If you can pick up a hose and you can turn on the machine, you can spray it, right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah. I mean I wish it was exactly that easy, but there’s like [crosstalk 00:30:30].

Matt Baum: I might be reducing it, I apologize.

Mattie Mead: It’s like standing next to an airplane jet when this thing is on.

Matt Baum: Oh, wow!

Mattie Mead: It is a powerful, loud system. But that force there, and the system as a whole, allows you to install this material just so much more quickly than the cast in place. [crosstalk 00:30:58].

The future of building with hemp

Matt Baum: What is the benefit of that? Let me ask you because I know this is load-bearing. What is the benefit? Is this acting as insulation or is it forming the walls? What is it doing?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, hempcrete takes the place of multiple materials. Primarily, by function, it’s an insulation material that does so much more, because the material itself is able to regulate moisture, humidity. It’s a vapor-open material, which is very contrary to the building science that we popularly accept here in the United States, where we do this thing where we build buildings and we wrap them in plastic, and we wonder why there’s mold problems and moisture issues.

Mattie Mead: It takes the place of your insulation, but it’s a monolithic material, meaning it’s continuous. There’s no breaks in it. There’s no thermal bridging. It can bury your structural frame, which oftentimes structural frames are made out of wood. You’re burying your structural frame in a material that’s fire-proof. That’s another benefit of it. It’s completely fire-proof. Especially now as conversations become more sensitive regarding wildfire and resiliency and the risks that we’re now facing as a result of, perceivedly, climate change, hempcrete is the solution for that.

Matt Baum: That’s amazing. Can I ask, is load-bearing hempcrete in the future? Is that coming?

Mattie Mead: I would say yes. I think there have been successful attempts in load-bearing hempcrete in the past. However, my inclination is to say that when you bring hempcrete to load-bearing capacities, it often has a density that’s much different than conventional hempcrete, which, therefore, makes it act much less proficiently as an insulator than it would with a lighter, more airy mix. And so, you would be substituting that structural capacity for the capacity of the material being [crosstalk 00:33:20].

Matt Baum: Okay, okay. I see. Yes, it’s coming, but we’ve got to do some work first to make it not only efficient, but as efficient as the stuff we’re using now, basically.

Mattie Mead: Yes. Yes, exactly.

Matt Baum: I live in Omaha, Nebraska and I decide, you know what, I’m building a new house. I’m going to call the Hempitecture guys. Can I call you and say I want to use hempcrete in my house that I’m building next week, or am I going to run into a bunch of problems with the city and with building permits and whatnot?

Mattie Mead: That’s a really good question, Matt. I would say if you call me and you said you needed hempcrete next week, we might be able to help you out, but it might be tough. Generally, working hemp lime into your construction program requires it being configured from the onset of your project. It really does require a full design program, which means from day one or pretty early on of design development, the architect is considering the use of hempcrete.

Mattie Mead: I mean we’ve been doing this now for about six years and we’ve had conversations with thousands of people over the years. However, we built fewer than a dozen hempcrete projects. Where does that number disconnect? It’s that hempcrete, for some reason or another, depending on the project, it can be difficult to implement, to be honest.

Matt Baum: I’m sure. I’m sure.

Mattie Mead: It’s easy to work with, but it can be difficult to implement. And so, that’s why recently we’ve expanded our focus at Hempitecture to have another product line. We’re now offering a new product that we call HempWool, which is a fiber batt insulation replacement. If you said, “I’ve got a building project. I need it insulated next week,” we would tell you, “I think you’re a little late in the game for hempcrete, but here’s a product alternative that is still hemp-derived. It meets probably 60% to 75% of the benefits that hempcrete has.”

Matt Baum: That’s awesome. It’s the kind of thing where this can be implemented anywhere in the United States now. You’re not going to run into permit problems and whatnot.

Mattie Mead: No. No permit problems. It could be implemented anywhere in the United States. It could be implemented by any person who’s ever installed insulation before, which is a huge benefit because hempcrete is a bit of a trade knowledge, a bit of a craft to it. Whereas with HempWool, you could substitute, “Hey, I’ve decided I don’t want to live in a toxic box of spray foam. I want to live in [inaudible 00:36:05] nurture my health.” HempWool is the answer for you when you’ve already gone down a conventional design program.

Matt Baum: It sounds like the future of hempcrete, and correct me if I’m wrong, but hempcrete is the future. It’s great and it works really well. But the future of hempcrete is making it easier to use and easier to implement.

Mattie Mead: Very much so. That’s something that we’ve been working on from the start, is how do we make this more approachable, more accessible, diversifying our product line so that if hempcrete doesn’t work for you, how can you still incorporate healthy sustainable material into your home?

Mattie Mead: One thing that I would just throw out there is as a company, we’re really looking to cultivate a community of people across the United States and internationally that are like-minded and sharing the same goals that we have. And so, we’re always open for collaboration. If people ever have questions for us, they can feel free to reach out. We’re expanding our team so we can service more projects, so we can have more impact, because, at the end of the day, what this is about for us is cultivating that community and creating positive change in the world and impacting our environment in a positive way.

Matt Baum: Man, and we love to hear that stuff here at Ministry of Hemp. That’s exactly what we’re looking for and that’s why I’m talking you today. Mattie, thank you so much for your time, man. This was great.

Mattie Mead: Thanks for the opportunity to be on here, Matt. It’s much appreciated.

Final thoughts from our host

Matt Baum: Yeah. Thanks again to Mattie Mead for coming on the show and for a great interview. Of course, you’ll be able to find all about what they do over at Hempitecture in the show notes of this very episode.

Matt Baum: That about does it for Episode 24, the final episode of 2019. I want to thank everybody that supported the show all yearlong. We don’t have a show without you guys. The easiest way to support the Ministry of Hemp Podcast is to go to iTunes and submit a star rating or even a written review if you have a little bit of time. It doesn’t even have to be long. It really, really helps get us out in front of people that are searching for this information and spread the good word of hemp education.

Matt Baum: As always, you will find a full written transcript of this show to make it accessible for everybody, because at Ministry of Hemp, we believe that an accessible world is just a better world for everyone. If you’ve got some time off during your holiday break, be sure to jump over to ministryofhemp.com. Kit has a fantastic article about hemp and the FDA. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter so you can get hit with the latest in hemp stories and hemp education every week. We don’t bother you too much, and the stuff we do send you, it’s good stuff, trust me.

Matt Baum: Be sure to follow us on social media @MinistryOfHemp on Twitter, /MinistryofHemp on Facebook, and feel free to shoot me an email, Matt@ministryofhemp.com with your hemp-related questions, or you can call me too, 402-819-6417. Leave a message and Kit, who I mentioned earlier, the Editor in Chief of ministryofhemp.com, and I might answer your questions on one of our Q&A shows. These can be questions about any part of the hemp business. We love to hear from you so please send us your questions.

Matt Baum: For now, this is Matt Baum with Ministry of Hemp Podcast reminding you take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is the Ministry of Hemp wishing you a happy new year, and signing off.

The post Hempcrete And Sustainable Construction With Mattie Meade appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

“Most people who go there have already discovered it’s made of hemp,” hemp advocate Dick Clarke told the Ministry of Hemp. “But they are surprised to see how normal it looks — what were they expecting I wonder?”

Continued Clarke:

“(They’re) equally surprised at how nice it feels inside, and how comfortable it is. This is when the lightbulbs go on about temperature and internal humidity control. It’s fun to watch. Then when they start talking, excitedly, they are blown away by the quiet acoustics.”

‘The most comfortable home I have ever slept in’

Clarke from Sydney-based firm Envirotecture won the Paul Dass Memorial Prize in the BDA National Design Awards, for outstanding building design for the house near Mudgee, northwest of Sydney.

He has been building hemp homes since 2013. AK Constructions Mudgee built the award-winning house, with a design by Envirotecture, and the hemp building materials supplied by Australian Hemp Masonry Company (AHMC).

“Having visited the house in a cold winter time, I can say that it is the most comfortable home I have ever slept in,” said Clarke.

“While there was frost on the ground outside, we slept under a light blanket, with no additional heating. The house has a sense of settled quietness which is hard to understand without experiencing it.”

The hemp home cost about $700,000. Thats about 15% more than a normal timber and fibre cement building. Clarke told us they’ve struggled to get Australia’s construction code to acknowledge the unique benefits of hempcrete and the Grattai house.

It’s not the only award-winning hemp home in Australia. In 2017 “Balanced Earth” in Byron Bay, a trendy spot on the country’s east coast, won the New South Wales Master Builders Award for Energy Efficient Housing.

AHMC have been developing the Australian hemp construction industry since 1999 and supply Building Code of Australia (BCA) compliant green building products, consulting services and also give training and advice.

AHMC manufacture lime binder, hemp-lime render, and insulation products in Sydney. Their materials are low-embodied energy, thermally efficient and greatly reduce energy use in buildings. They developed and tested them over six years at the Australian Centre for Construction Innovation at the University of New South Wales, and then for a further six years in the field.

Hempcrete homes built regularly in Australia

Klara Marosszeky, AHMC managing director, said they had built 140 hemp homes. With multiple occupants living in them there could be a total 400 people residing in a hemp house thanks to AHMC.

AHMC builds houses on a regular basis in Tasmania, Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria. They were about to start on homes in Queensland and South Australia, as well as New Zealand. There are currently nine builds underway, mostly in New South Wales but also in Victoria and Western Australia. This was despite the misconception, she said, that Australia didn’t have its own hempcrete building products.

“We’ve had feedback from people from homes in Mudgee for example where it’s been 40 plus degrees for over a week and it doesn’t get hotter than 27 inside a hemp home,” Marosszeky told the Ministry of Hemp.

“So (hempcrete) works thermally in a whole range of ways. 

She continues “It’s light thermal mass, it’s highly insulative and because it’s a breathable material (it’s) vapor permeable, it draws moisture out of the atmosphere, so deals with humidity very well.”

In February, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, declared the 2018-19 summer the hottest on record. 

Meanwhile regional New South Wales is undergoing a record drought, which is where hemp — a drought-resilient hardy crop that can guarantee farmers income during these periods — also comes in.  

‘Miracle house’ made from hemp

The manager of a community radio network in Victoria also installed two unrendered hemp walls during the retrofit of his home. He discovered working there was the equivalent of working in a sound booth. He’s now building a hemp music studio, said Marosszeky. 

One award-winning house in the Sydney, built under the city’s flight path also has both acoustic and thermally insulative benefits thanks to hemp.

The house has a sense of settled quietness which is hard to understand without experiencing it.

Dick Clarke, award-winning hempcrete architect

Others hemp homes in Australia include a family with teenage aged triplets with muscular dystrophy who require wheelchairs. Clarke designed their house in central-west New South Wales. Locals dubbed it a “miracle house.”

“What had to be designed was a home where three people in wheelchairs could get around without busting the house to pieces,” said Marosszeky.

“In a normal home that wouldn’t work so it’s sort of like a mini hospital size building. And the community built it.”

Australias first commercial hempcrete building

More recently AHMC carried out their first commercial build at the Innovation Centre at the Cape Byron Rudolf Steiner School in Byron Bay in New South Wales. It’s Australia’s first commercial hemp building. AHMC consider construction of the new maths and science centre a major milestone for hempcrete in Australia. 

Marosszeky first began looking at hemp in the mid-1990s when she started searching or an alternative to timber, not to stop using it altogether, but to use it more carefully.

“We haven’t got our heads around forests and how much we need how much vegetation we need to keep going on the planet to be able to harvest the amount of emissions that are out there,” she said.

“Hemp just immediately goes into that and it has this history of durability.” 

Marosszeky continued: “It has the health benefits, so good indoor air quality, and then it hits these targets for thermal efficiency.”

Training others in Australia to build hempcrete homes 

Marosszeky has run workshops for years, teaching people to build hemp houses, providing formal and hands on training on building with hemp masonry or hemp lime construction materials for builders, building designers, architects and owner builders. 

This could be a pole structure, standard pine frame or construction which starts on stone in wet or tropical areas or cold regions. AHMC distributes training manuals which detail everything needed for a code compliant home.

In Australia, there is demand for hempcrete homes for health. 

“We know what is inside our buildings is making us sick,” said Marosszeky, adding that molds don’t grow in hemp buildings because they have breathable walls.

“A huge amount of buildings in Australia and everywhere in the world have got molds, molds are responsible for about 75% of allergies with respiratory and skin allergies.”

“She added: “so it’s quite an important thing to not have molds in your home because that’s what’s triggering all of your allergies.” 

AHMC also work closely with farmers and processors in Australia. They are currently setting up for early stage investment. 

The post Hempcrete In Australia: Hemp To The Rescue During Heat & Drought appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

The Highland Hemp House is a unique hempcrete home in Bellingham, Washington.

Originally built in 1969, owner Pamela Bosch wanted to replace older, toxic building materials with something healthy, sustainable, and eco-friendly. The answer was hempcrete, made from combining the hurd (woody core) of industrial hemp plants with lime and water. Bosch hired Hempitecture to oversee a total hempcrete retrofit.

Previously, Hempitecture created a hempcrete retreat center at 7,468’ in Idaho’s Lost River mountains. Idaho Basecamp uses the center for yoga classes and other events to help people feel in touch with nature.

HIGHLAND HEMP HOUSE: HEMPCRETE IS HEALTHIER & MORE SUSTAINABLE

Why choose hempcrete? Hempcrete is more breathable, making it healthier for occupants. Hempcrete is mold-resistant, pest-resistant, and fire-resistant. It’s carbon-negative, since it’s absorbs CO2 from occupants over time. Hempcrete is an energy efficient insulator, completely non-toxic and even has great acoustics.

Best of all, Hempcrete is so easy to work with anyone can learn. To create hempcrete walls, builders first mix, then spread the hempcrete into forms. After it dries, the forms are removed, and the walls will naturally grow even more durable over time. Highland Hemp House is frequently open for workshops, tours, and hands-on building. So far, they’ve put in over 1150 hours of labor and poured over 587 batches of hempcrete.

As work continues, Pamela Bosch hopes Highland Hemp House will be “a physical testament to the beauty and potential in hemp building.”

Thanks to TAAP Media for video production assistance.

The post Highland Hemp House: Sharing The Beauty & Potential In Hemp Homes (VIDEO) appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

It’s called hempcrete. This combination of chopped hemp shiv and lime binder is durable, sustainable and carbon negative. Lime is an abundant quarried material and hemp is a renewable biomaterial — both safeguarding the sustainable future of hempcrete and our planet.

HOW DOES HEMPCRETE PROMOTE HEALTHY HOMES?

Hempcrete is a breathable matter, absorbing moisture from the air when humidity is high and releasing it again when humidity levels drop. This ensures that water vapour can pass in and out of the wall rather than becoming trapped and causing damp problems.

When cooking or in bedrooms at night from the occupants breathing, there is often excess moisture in the air. Hempcrete absorbs this moisture into the walls to be released later, discouraging damp. This in turn combats the formation of fungi and mold spores which are damaging to human health.

The regulation of humidity has been shown to inhibit the spread of viral and bacterial infections, allergic reactions and respiratory conditions. This ability to regulate air quality reduces the need for powered air filters and ventilation systems, allowing for truly healthy homes.

WHAT ABOUT HEMPCRETE AND PEST CONTROL?

Hemp is naturally fire-retardant and pest-resistant. Because of these properties, there is no need to add the chemicals which are usually added to building materials, including formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen and VOCs have been implicated in both asthma and allergies. The omission of these chemicals obviously contributes to the health of the occupants of the house.

Hempcrete can be used to build new healthy homes or add an extension to your existing home, perhaps a “granny annexe” allowing elderly parents to move in with their children in a healthy environment or a “relaxation room” for family members to unwind and breathe deeply.

HEALTHY HOMES AND HEMPCRETE: WILL THE BENEFITS WEAR OUT?

Hempcrete is an incredible material which has negative carbon emissions. This means that it absorbs more carbon dioxide than is produced by building it.

Even in this form, when hempcrete has consumed more carbon dioxide than it has left in the atmosphere, it remains breathable, so homes continue to be rainproof but remainpermeable to gas and moisture in the environment. Hempcrete homes will stay healthy for life.

What with the growth of green building, interest in healthy homes and and widespread need for sustainable building materials, hempcrete is set to be the home building material of the future.

The post Here’s Why Hempcrete Is The Greatest Innovation in Healthy Homes appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

It’s called hempcrete, a composite made from fibers of the industrial hemp plant mixed with lime.

The United States is perfectly positioned for a hempcrete building boom. Interest in green building is growing as people seek out sustainable, low-cost alternatives to traditional buildings made from petrochemicals or dwindling natural resources like wood. At the same time, the stigma around hemp is disappearing as more learn about the plant’s benefits. Hempcrete has unique health benefits and, because it enables low cost, modular design, it could even be a part of the solution to America’s affordable housing crisis.

“It’s just an awesome material,” declared Greg Flavall, CEO of Hemp Technologies, a leading builder of hempcrete homes. “I’ve never seen anything like it and we have studied other materials like flax, corn stalks, linseed oil stalks, even wood, and hemp wins by far hands down.”

In 2009, Hemp Technologies oversaw the first permitted hemp home build in North America, in North Carolina. However, hemp’s uncertain legal status sent Flavall to New Zealand, where the crop was legal to grow for use in building materials. He’s traveled the world helping create hempcrete structures ever since, working on everything from jungle cabanas to wine tasting rooms. Now that hemp is becoming popular in the U.S., demand for his services is skyrocketing here too.

We recently caught up with Flavall to learn more about why hempcrete is better than other green building materials, and to hear about one of his most recent projects, a home retrofit which could soon be part of an upcoming TV show on hempcrete homes.

HEMPCRETE IS HEALTHY, SUSTAINABLE AND AFFORDABLE TOO

Agricultural hemp is the close cousin of psychoactive cannabis or “marijuana” (the plant people consume to get high). While marijuana is prized for its flowery tops, hemp is grown for its tall, fibrous, leafy stalks which are a little bit similar to bamboo. Hempcrete is made from hemp shivs, which are the fibrous, woody core of those stalks, also known as the hurd. The shivs are chopped up into chips, which are mixed with water and a lime binder to form concrete-like stone slabs that have a pleasant, earthy appearance that many people find appealing.

Hemp is a more sustainable option than many other commonly grown crops, because it requires very few pesticides and can easily be grown in very dense plots. But the benefits don’t stop there, especially when it comes to hempcrete homes.

“We have seen, anecdotally, reductions in healthcare cost and absenteeism because of living in a hemp building,” Flavall said.

Like many aspects of hemp science, more research will be needed to prove how significant a health benefit hempcrete can have for its occupants, but Flavall’s claims make sense when you consider the many documented beneficial characteristics of the material. Much like the original hemp plant, hempcrete is known to be extremely pest resistant. It’s also extremely durable and fire resistant, which is especially important when Flavall builds in environments like New Zealand, where both rain and seismic tremors are extremely frequent.

“Hempcrete works so extremely well. It dries out, it continues to breathe, and it makes the indoor quality of living phenomenal.”

As hempcrete dries, it absorbs the carbon dioxide produced by the occupants and grows harder, essentially turning to stone. Not only does this make the building stronger, but it makes hempcrete into a carbon-negative building material by leaving less of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere than is produced by building with it. Even in this form, hempcrete remains “breathable” — homes remain rain proof but permeable to gases and moisture are less prone to mold and better for the overall health of their occupants.

According to Flavall’s calculations, hempcrete buildings in the U.S. remain carbon neutral even though most of the hemp used in current building projects must be imported from overseas. It’s also a surprisingly affordable option: he said it meets or beats other common building materials in up-front costs when used properly, in addition to incredible savings on heating and cooling costs over the lifetime of the building.

“At the end of the day when you turn the key to move into your new home you’re at the same price as regular construction,” Flavall said.

MAKING FRIENDS WITH HEMPCRETE: HEMP HOME RETROFIT BECAME A ‘RELATIONSHIP BUILDER’ FOR PETERSEN FAMILY

“Our hempcrete project began with a passion for natural building,” Stacey Petersen told us.

After other sustainable building fans tipped her off to their work, Greg Flavall and Hemp Technologies led a major hempcrete retrofit of the Petersen family’s home, located in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, in December 2017.

The simplicity of working with hempcrete allowed everyone, even family friends, to participate in the building process.

“It’s not rocket science to build like this and it really brings people together,” Petersen recalled. “It was a relationship builder on top of having our house insulated with hempcrete.”

Stacey’s husband, Jon Petersen, is the Pastor of Ministries at Desperation Church In Liberty, Missouri, and their embrace of the hemp is another sign that the stigma around this misunderstood crop is disappearing. Not only are they already planning their next hemp project using leftover supplies (“a greenhouse or a mother-in-law cottage,” Petersen told us), but they also use CBD oil, an extract of industrial hemp, to ease symptoms of severe epilepsy in their 10-year old son, Jeriah.

A growing body of research suggests CBD oil helps kids with epilepsy, and that’s been true for Jeriah as well. While not a miracle cure — he still suffers from severe seizures that sometimes land him in the hospita l– the supplement seems to reduce the number of seizures. Perhaps even more importantly, Stacey Petersen believes it helped the family wean Jeriah off a potentially dangerous medication which was actually making his symptoms worse.

‘There’s one kid in Colorado who’s been trying to wean this drug for a year and a half, it’s so intense, and we were able to do it in about 2 months.”

The Petersens are continuing to use CBD as Jeriah explores other forms of treatment, and his illness also inspired their interest in hempcrete. Since Jeriah uses a wheelchair, the Petersens swapped their previous multi-story home for single-story 1960s house of about 2300 square feet.

“My son, obviously he has a lot of challenges so we need healthiest living environment possible for him,” Stacey Petersen said when I asked her about the appeal of hempcrete.

But she also told us she loves that hempcrete is fire and termite resistant, and requires very little upkeep. “Anything to make my life more simple I’m all about that!”

HEMPCRETE HOMES ON TV AND HEMPCRETE AFFORDABLE HOUSING: LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

The retrofit of the Petersen’s new home was filmed for a prospective new TV series, “HT Global Hemp House Build,” currently being developed in a partnership between Flavall and Diana Oliver of Thunderbird Productions, producer of the Hempsters documentary series. The show is currently seeking sponsors, but they’ve already filmed multiple episodes including the one featuring the Petersens which will be cleverly titled “The Hempster and the Pastor.”

Flavall and Oliver worked together on a pilot episode in 2011, along with Ervin Dargon of Mingo Video, but the sudden death of Flavall’s business partner, Dave Madera, from cancer, cut the initial phase of the project short. The first episode is dedicated to Madera.

Last year, with Flavall once again building with hempcrete in the U.S., they decided to revive the show.

Oliver told us, “It’s a homeowners dream to lessen their carbon footprint and build a beautiful house to last generations that is mold, pest and fire retardant.”

The timing for a show like this seems perfect to Flavall, who said interest in hemp and hempcrete is booming. Even though he’s been legally building with hempcrete in the U.S. and elsewhere for almost a decade, he credits the current rising interest to the spread of marijuana legalization.

“I’m a Baby Boomer and I’m seeing a lot of those Baby Boomers coming back to me and saying ‘I guess now that it’s legal to smoke it’s legal to build with it.’”

Next, Flavall hopes to help tackle the affordable housing crisis in the U.S. by building add-on units to existing homes, made from hempcrete. “We have a lot of interest from people who have the ability to build an addition or retrofit their garage or put up a detached ‘granny flat.’”

Hemp can help “bring their mom and dad home, or bring the kids home, whichever it is, and create additional space with low impact.”

Between the growth of green building, and widespread interest in “tiny homes,” Flavall believes hempcrete has a big future in the United States.

The post Hempcrete Homes Are Sustainable, Durable, And Healthier To Live in appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

An average household in Alaska spends more than $500 per month in heating cost during the winter months.

With most houses still being heated with diesel, it costs $7-$10 per gallon to heat a home. Jack Bennett and his startup NUNAWorks is looking to fix this unsustainable and inefficient practice through hemp. For Jack, building homes out of hemp in Alaska offers more than just sustainability benefits. It has an immediate impact of helping the livelihoods of rural Alaskan residents.

Houses built out of hempcrete offers much higher insulation that traditional homes, which would help reduce the energy costs by 50–70% annually for families.

To understand NUNAWork’s mission and background, we started our discussion with how it all got started.

Let’s start from the beginning. What was your background before getting involved in hemp?

Jack Bennett: I was working with the non-profit Community Works West in the Bay Area helping to raise awareness about the impact violence and mass incarceration have on communities. We worked specifically on how these situations impact children and create the same cycle of violence. The Community Works program, Project WHAT!, was able to raise $2 million for funding to help support these kids.

That’s a pretty amazing initiative. So how did you get from the Bay Area up to Alaska?

JB: I’m originally from Fairbanks, Alaska. Military service brought my folks up here in the early 70s. I grew up in a Korean Noodle Restaurant in Fairbanks. I then left for San Francisco for several years studying at Cisco Networking Academy, practicing self-care techniques and working in social justice. I then decided to come back up to Alaska with my partner and was looking for new inspiration when I ran into hemp and hemp homes. My goal has always been to bring sustainable restorative practices to construction in our communities.

What got you interested in hemp?

JB: I found out about hemp through the national publication of the North Carolina Hemp Home. The architect wanted to build an allergy free home based on the synthetic sensitivities his baby daughter had. She couldn’t be around typical synthetic home materials as it caused severe health problems. For me, this made complete sense! As an advocate of organic foods, clean water, and natural healing remedies, it made sense that we should build using all natural material. This is good for both the people and planet.

Tell me a bit about your vision with hemp and hempcrete?

JB: I am living in the vision. Since last fall, my crew has experimented with hemp insulation material before we started building with it. We read every book on hempcrete and consulted with hemp builders from all over the world. We learned from case studies of failures with hemp walls. Through all this, we have created a Portland Cement replacement with our lime based Hemp-Bond Mix that is locally sourced.

Portland Cement creates 40 billion tons of carbon waste. Our Hemp Bond Mix has zero carbon footprint that is stronger than cement, impervious to water, has a longer life cycle, self-leveling, and does not have to be cooked. Our aim is to continue to develop these indigenous technologies tailored for rural Alaska to give it away to a community that has funding to start a pilot home in the village.

There’s a real need for this in Alaska as we are impacted by high cost of energy. It costs an average of $7-$10 a gallon to heat a home with diesel. This impacts average household income by around 50%. With our lime-based hemp insulation material, families could save up to 70% of their heating bills.

What is the policy for hemp in Alaska? Are there any pilots or research going on?

JB: There’s an Alaskan Senate Bill for the commercialization of Alaskan hemp. They actually took out the “research” clause, and are aiming to get to full commercialization. Last year, the senator that led that bill was awarded one of his bills (but not this one). According to his aide, it looks likely that this bill will pass in 2017.

Will hemp be popular in Alaska?

JB: From my discussion with folks here, the older generation are aware of it, but not so much with the younger generation. Most people are not aware of hemp having all these industry applications.

I actually just attended a city hall in Homer this past week, where the governor was having a Q&A. I actually got a chance to stand and present my case about hemp. I also brought some samples with me that I passed around to show what hemp shiv looks like. The crowd was amazed at the potential of this plant.

What did the governor have to say about it?

JB: The governor didn’t have as much to say at the time, but it seemed like he was genuinely interested. But the mayor did ask if I could come back and do a presentation to the city council at a future date.

Is hemp suitable to grow in Alaska?

JB: From what I’ve learned, hemp was grown in Alaska in 1963. A state agronomist had a partnership with University of Wisconsin to test out hemp in the delta region of Alaska during the summer months. They were testing to see if hemp would grow during the long days in Alaska. It worked, so it’s been proven that hemp can grow in this state.

I’d like to dig a bit more deeper into the details about the hemp home. So how does a hemp home actually work? Does it look and feel the same as other homes?

JB: When you ask someone who’s been in a hemp home, they’ll tell you that they notice the difference right away. It smells better and you just feel better.

Hemp is a replacement for drywall, OSB plywood, fiberglass insulation, polyurethane foam replacement. I found that 55% of the world’s energy consumption is construction-waste related. Hemp homes have zero construction waste. So by building hemp homes, we’re doing our part to reduce your carbon footprint.

Did you know that France is building 2 million houses out of hemp this year? Hemp usage in construction is projected to increase by 80% by 2020.

Wow, I had no idea. That’s amazing. So in the long run, how do you think this will benefit Alaska?

JB: This is about sustainability and the local economy. This solution will allow us to build energy efficient, allergy free, affordable homes. If we’re able to grow our own hemp, the hemp farming will also help cut high freight costs and bring countless industries to Alaska.

Currently, what are your biggest challenges and obstacles?

JB: The freight cost of bringing hemp to Alaska. Since hemp farming is still in prohibition here, I have to import it until a bill passes.

What stage is NUNAWorks in? What’s the goal of 2016?

JB: We are working to build a model of the hemp home to show people what hempcrete can do. We were actually developing this sustainable home before I even found out about hemp. After doing more research, we decided to add hempcrete into our vision. So now the first floor will be made out of rammed earth and the second floor will be made out of hempcrete. We’re envisioning a home that will be completely sustainable, even the energy source (solar and water).

The timeline of this model home is before the end of 2016. We don’t have that much time, but we’re hoping to get the structural and exterior work done before the winter comes. This will allow us to work on the interior during the cold months.

How can our readers help?

JB: The primary goal is to raise awareness of hemp. Here’s some ways you can start adopting more hemp:

1. Start to slowly convert to wearing hemp clothes.
2. Experiment with hemp seeds by trying it on your salad dressings, yogurt, smoothies.
3. Start your own micro green business working with local chefs or packaging micro greens for store fronts.
4. Start your own hemp building project in your community such as a hemp shed.

If you’re going to build with the hemp, start practicing with your shiv and binder. Every climate is different of how much ratio you have to use. It’s not just something you can watch on YouTube. Also, consider making the investment to engage in a hempcrete workshop.

Thanks so much for your time today Jack. Best of luck and I’m excited to hear more about your model home as it finishes up.

The post Building hemp homes in Alaska could save millions in heating cost appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.