While the long hemp Bast fiber has been used in human culture for tens of thousands of years, the short Hurd was commercialized only about 100 years ago, for making paper.
It’s great that some are pursuing ancient fiber-based products today, but I suspect the big bast or hurd items in the future haven’t even been invented yet.
Some technical item for some narrow technical industry, say a graphene whatsit, or a nano-this or -that, or like I said it hasn’t even been invented yet.
Perhaps the one key advance to unlock a bold new era for industrial applications of the Cannabis plant has yet to be discovered. Gasohol transformed the corn industry, feed lots and then later vegan soyfoods made Glycine max a powerhouse today; both number around 100 million acres in the U.S. while hemp would be delighted to see 50,000.
Talk Elon or some other Great And Powerful Wizard into mandating just 1% bio-sourced material in new civic projects and EV batteries. The EU mandated 5% bio materials and car companies started using hemp fiber, some turning the higher cost into a marketing advantage.
Large civic projects are on the drawing boards around the world, and hemp bast fiber has use in concrete as a rebar-type material, among many other applications.
Even the old-school mining and oil/gas industries can still use bast hemp fiber for rope, as it doesn’t spark. And then there’s the old standby: maritime use. Or perhaps CAFOs will find feeding animals hempseed waste results in some profitable gain, so they grow 800,000,000 pounds of seed to get 60,000,000 pounds of meat.
But tomorrow’s hemp industry will look nothing like today’s. As different as your grandpa’s broadacre fiber hemp is from today’s indoor horticultural drug hemp, so will today be from tomorrow’s.
Create the future you want or someone else will. There have been 100 times more advances in the last 10 years in hemp than the first 10,000. Serious technical and medical discoveries, and more by the month.
I’ve been following the field for over 30 years and every week I look at the most recent CannaSearch Daily News posts. I’m delighted by one discovery or another in both the seed/grain side as well as fiber, with more every month.
Broaden your horizons, drug hemp exists only because racist marijuana laws prohibit the real thing and with 92% support for legalization, not bound to last. Ironically, THC or stony hempenoids were never one of the “25,000 products from hemp” because THC wasn’t even discovered until 1964.
The hempen canvas is blank af rn, it’s like 1917 in the automobile industry. Be the Hempindustrialist like “industry uncle” Ben Dronkers of HempFlax and Sensi Seed, or the late Anita Roddick of The Body Shop.