Whether you farm as your primary occupation, or have a Hobby Farm, be it a back yard garden plot, or like me you own some recreational property. (Mine is our Family-owned Hunting Property in Michigan, that includes chicken and a 1/3-acre fruit orchard), this Business Consulting Article may be worth a few minutes to read.
Hello, I’m Lou Sauer, Owner and Founder of Pro Biz Consulting, Appraisals and M&A Advisers, Inc. I consult to help business owners increase profitability and make more money. This may be to acquire a business as a Buyer’s Rep. Or to appraise an existing business to buy or to sell. But all of these efforts come back to increasing profitability and making money.
Until 2018, this was blocked by laws and hugely misunderstood. Since 2018, it is not just legal and socially acceptable, it is smart! In this article I hope to dispel the stigma wrongfully applied for decades and talk about the benefits and features. What if I were to say to you, fellow Hobby Gardener, “Hemp Can Save The World.”
“Wait!” you say. “That’s a marijuana plant!”
No. It is not. That is a mislabel. “Hemp is rope, not dope.”
But Hemp is far more than just the best rope material on earth. Hemp may very well be the most powerful plant ally we have to live sustainably on this planet!
According to Alex Corren’s blog post, we need to clean the air about hemp.
Hemp is a low-THC cannabis. But you don’t get high smoking rope.
Cannabinoids!
There, I said the word. That word got Hemp expelled – in the USA, for decades. But painting all cannabinoids with the same brush as “weed” or “pot” is like banning and blaming all grapes and grains during Prohibition when alcohol was made illegal. (Read to the end and learn that you don’t get ‘pot’ from Hemp and that cannabinoids are ‘all over in Nature’).
First, allow me to share why we need it more Hemp.
Listen up, Farmers: Hemp has the ability to feed, clothe, house, and heal us. And that is not all! It also has vast technical and industrial applications. That’s why growing this new crop can be profitable.
And this can be really good for Mother Earth as well as your bank account.
Think “Small Business – Hobby Farm.
Think Big Business – planting multiple acres if you are a Farmer.
Alex says, “Take a moment to visualize something with me:
Picture a vast sea of bright green plants as far as the eye can see. You can practically feel the rich soil they’re growing out of and you can hear the birds happily chirping as they fly overhead.
The sun is setting, and off in the distance you can see someone driving a tractor, harvesting a section of the crop and moving it to where it will be processed. Zooming out a bit from the field and you can see solar-powered factories with these bright green plants entering on one side. Out the other side are an incredible new generation of bioplastics, biofuels, health products, and more.
Zoom out even further from the agrarian utopia and you happen to notice that the forests are thriving, the waters are clean, and the stream of waste heading to sit in a landfill for eternity has slowed down significantly. It’s a wondrous sight that gives hope for the future of humanity and hope for the abundant Earth from which we emerged and will eventually return to.
Hemp is the single most useful plant on the planet.
It can help us achieve sustainability and even move beyond to regeneration. We need to adopt hemp more than it needs us, and the more people know about how versatile hemp truly is, the better.”
I am not going to go as far as Alex and say, “Hemp Can Save the World”. But as a Business Consultant, focusing on profit improvement I will say that the benefits of growing and selling Hemp in your Hobby Farm or Acreage go far beyond what cannabinoids such as CBD have to offer.
Here are 12 USES of the Hemp –12 Reasons You Can NOW Grow and Sell FOR PROFIT
1. HEALTH
Cannabinoids are compounds that have profound effects on the body and help us achieve homeostasis. The increasingly popular hemp-derived cannabinoid known as CBD is non-intoxicating and has profound positive health effects on all mammals. ***Hemp can be grown for high-CBD content, providing you with nearly all the medicinal benefits without any of the ‘high’ associated with THC-heavy variations of cannabis. ***
Personal Note: Before 2018, before the laws were fixed by Presidential Order, my own almost 90-year-old Mother was prescribed CBD by her eye doctor for Glaucoma. (She refused, however, because of the sigma, at that time). This is only one of a great many legitimate legal uses.
Again, worth repeating: Hemp can be grown for high-CBD content, providing you with nearly all the medicinal benefits without any of the ‘high’ associated with THC-heavy variations of cannabis.
2. FOOD
While cannabinoids are mainly derived from hemp leaves and buds, hemp seeds are completely
packed with nutrition! I bet you did not know that! I didn’t!
These humble seeds are one of the best sources of vegetarian protein on the planet and contain a perfectly balanced ratio of omegas 3 and 6.
It is claimed to be even better than fish oil.
The most common forms that hemp foods come in are hemp hearts (which is the meaty inside of the seed), hemp seed oil (which is pressed out of the seeds), hemp flour (which is ground hemp seed), and hemp milk (which is hemp hearts blended with water). Hemp food products are already available at mainstream food stores around the country and globally. Hemp Experts claim this is a powerful food source that you can literally survive by eating hemp seeds and nothing else.
3. HEMP FOOD FOR ANIMALS!
Hemp foods are not just for human! Animals in the wild absolutely love to eat hemp and will happily chomp down on freshly plucked leaves. Hemp provides just as many nutritional benefits for animals as it does for us. Farmers report that animals fed on Hemp are healthier. In our own agricultural past, before Hemp was as far from taboo as tobacco, it was grown among the list of feed crops. In fact, some people believe that we used to passively absorb cannabinoids from eating livestock that grew up on a diet of hemp.
4. HEMP PAPER
Hemp Fiber is probably the oldest recorded use case for hemp and played a pivotal role in the history of America! I am not kidding! Read on!
Hemp fiber is derived from the stalk of the plant and is extremely strong, long lasting, and can be used in a huge range of applications. One of the most important uses of hemp fiber is for replacing tree-based paper products. Hemp paper is, as expected, more durable and higher quality than tree paper. And hemp only takes 3.5 months to grow to maturity! The founding fathers of the United States chose hemp paper to draft the Declaration of Independence on, exactly for that reason.
So much for casting Hemp aspirations!
5. MANY USES OF HEMP FIBER
Hemp fiber can also be used to make rope, sails, and clothing — all of which are incredibly durable and have natural antifungal and antimicrobial properties. Hemp lasts far longer than cotton and is much more sustainable to cultivate. The fiber was the main reason hemp was cultivated back in the beginnings of the US. In fact, there was a point in history in which it was illegal not to grow hemp because they needed the fiber for rope on their military ships. (I bet you never heard that before!)
The oldest recorded use case of hemp for Fiber goes back more than 3000 years ago to ancient China. It’s been pretty much continually used since then.
6. BUILDING MATERIAL
Hemp is an absolutely incredible building material. The hemp ‘hurd’ (part of the stalk) is combined with water and lime to make hempcrete — similar to concrete but with several clear advantages. First off, it’s actually stronger than concrete. It’s also completely non-toxic and has natural anti-fungal and antimicrobial properties. It’s also entirely fire-resistant!
A very fascinating result of making hempcrete is that once set, the mixture pulls-in carbon from the atmosphere over years as it matures and hardens into rock. Through this process it also remains breathable. So basically, building a house out of hempcrete sequesters carbon over time while keeping the internal environment much healthier and cleaner than any modern building technique.
Even if you are building with more traditional materials, you can use hemp fiber as insulation in your walls. Instead of using toxic pink fiberglass filler or foam, you can use a natural plant fiber that has strong thermal properties is also mold resistant. It’s better for you, the environment, and any of your loved ones that the hempcrete structure is providing shelter for.
Alex mentions the “Kailasa temple”, the most famous of the cave temples of Ellora. And that hemp plaster was used 1,500 years ago in structures that are still incredibly preserved today.
7. BIOREMEDIATION
Pollution is a fact. Regardless of your passion, or lack thereof, in the so-called, “New Green Deal” there are a lot of places that have wreaked havoc on our environment. The industrial age, smokestacks, water pollution. Experts say that hemp has powerful bioremediation properties and can reverse some of the damage to soils.
Hemp is a powerful ‘bio accumulator’, which means that it can pull up toxins from our soils.
In only a few growing seasons, hemp can remove the toxic pesticides, herbicides, and heavy metals from our agricultural soils.
“The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.” (FDR) Environmentalists say that “hemp is supposedly one of the best tools we have at our disposal to stop the loss of our valuable topsoil while simultaneously cleaning up the massive mess we’ve made through the reckless practices of industrial agriculture and the mishandling of industrial chemical byproducts.”
8. TO ABSORB RADIATION!
Scientists tell us that Hemp can also absorb radiation! Hemp was successfully planted in some areas around the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan to absorb the radiation that was leaked out into the environment.
9. BIOFUEL
With the 2021 loss of the Keystone Pipeline and other restrictions, the price of gas has gone up a lot and expected to go much higher. EV’s, Electric Vehicles, are benefiting, but gas and diesel vehicles will be with us for decades. Biofuels are already here and guess what? Hemp can be refined into a biofuel. It is said it can alternatively power all of our present gas and diesel vehicles. Instead of extracting ancient carbon deposits from inside the earth, we can be growing our fuel effectively and sustainably. Hemp advocates claim it is also a much better option for biofuel production – that present biofuels contain GMO, such as from pesticide-heavy crops like corn.
This is good news for those who dis fossil fuels. The demand for hemp will have many in this camp as customers.
10. PLASTICS
Hemp can be successfully refined into plastic products. We’re only now beginning to realize how destructive our global plastic habit has become. Nearly all plastics we use currently will never break down in nature and are made from oil-based toxic compounds. Micro-plastics are also a new threat, endangering sea life and animals all over the world. Instead of all that, we can switch over to using hemp plastic — a completely non-toxic and biodegradable alternative. Sana Packaging is a great new company making hemp-plastic packaging solutions for the cannabis industry.
!
11. TECHNOLOGY
Hemp is being explored for applications in high technology. Hemp carbon is, of course, very high quality and has potential for use in computer chips and superconductors. Graphene is a future-material made of a single layer of carbon atoms. It has been successfully created with hemp and said to outperform many other source materials. Technology we rely on today contains components and mineral that are expensive to extract and rare, costly to process and problematic in their eventual disposal. Hemp has the potential to replace some of these electronic components.
12. 3-D PRINTING
Some people are even starting to 3-D print with hemp plastic. What’s next? Food Replicators like Star Trek? (I like to end with a bit of humor)
WHY I WROTE THIS
Now, are you with me that this is a crop you should consider for profit improvement?
Hemp has the ability to positively impact nearly every aspect of our everyday lives
It’s an incredibly resilient plant. No matter the reason for which it is grown, it will help to sequester carbon and improve our soils.
It grows to maturity in only a few months.
It is naturally resistant to pests.
It needs only ⅓ of the water that cotton demands.
I’m calling this THE HOTEST PRODUCT for the New Eco-Industrial Revolution!
AS PROMISED
Thanks for reading to the end. Here’s the (Read to the end and learn that you don’t get ‘pot’ from Hemp and that cannabinoids are all over in Nature) promise fulfillment:
As promised: Cannabinoids are mainly found in two places in nature — in animals and in the cannabis plant. That’s right, we produce our own cannabinoids (known as endocannabinoids) that interact with the same network of receptors and chemical pathways that the plant-derived cannabinoids (known as Phyto cannabinoids) do. This system is known as the endocannabinoid system, and a rapidly growing body of research suggests that this system is essential for the effective functioning of our nervous and immune systems.
All signs point towards cannabinoids and the endocannabinoid system launching a whole new era of scientific research and plant-based medicines. One of the leading cannabinoid researchers, Dr. Ethan Russo, even suggests that many common medical conditions are, in fact, cannabinoid-deficiency diseases. That would definitely explain why medical cannabis is life-changing for so many people.
Now you know why I am myself planting a few acres of Hemp. And why Buyers are hiring my company, Pro Biz Consulting, as Business Consultant regarding hemp.
I’m working with Buyers who see this product as a ‘profit improvement’ to everything from acquiring and transforming a wood pallet manufacturer to 10,000-acre Ranch.
Think like Henry Ford!
His original Model T Ford was made designed to run on hemp fuel!
And some of it was constructed of Hemp!
(True!)