Just Some Common Sense
While waiting impatiently for the medical bureaucracy to do its thing, I recently stumbled over a worthwhile video sponsored by Patagonia, an unusual clothing company. We spend many millions of dollars each year for products, mostly from China, which include hemp, a very useful fiber that needs nothing but decent soil and water to grow. Between its fiber and seed oil, it’s pretty useful. It enriches the soil with each crop too, so fertilizers and pesticides are unnecessary. It used to be a staple crop in the U.S. – the cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined – and production was ramped up further in WWII. Then, since the War on Drugs, the Feds made it illegal to grow or sell, since it could not acknowledge any development in the field and so won’t accept any difference between what is now called Industrial Hemp and Marijuana. Thing is, industrial hemp was specifically developed to make it useless for drug production. You can smoke industrial hemp until you get sick, but that’s all you’ll get out of it. It’s now a staple, profitable crop – elsewhere.
There’s a movement afoot now to change Federal law to allow farmers to grow industrial hemp, because it represents a stable and reliable cash crop that allows small-acreage farmers to raise a crop that is simple and inexpensive to grow. Some 29 states now allow it on an experimental “research” basis, but farmers have had to run through Read more…
Strolling Amok 