Hemp Bound Read Free Page A

legislative discussion.
    So even though Senate and House FARRM Bill negotiations timed out during the 2013 federal government shutdown, I think hemp legalization will have happened, if not by the time you’re reading these words, then by mid-2014. 5 Sure is proving to be a page-turner, though, complete with six-month-long cliffhanger.
    From the perspective of a patriotic American who’s just researched hemp’s potential from Canada to Hawaii, Germany to Colorado, things are moving from fantasy to reality so quickly that it’s kind of making me believe in a societal version of The Secret —ask for what you think’s best for your nation’s economy, the planet at large, and your children’s future, and you will get it.
    My excitement is perhaps best described this way: Ten months ago, I was shocked that Congress was even discussing hemp seriously. Suddenly I’m confident that future editions of this book will be printed on U.S.-grown hemp paper. 6 In fact, in these pages we’ll be meeting two of the farmers who will be making it happen. It’s been a dream since my I wrote my first book that not a tree would have to perish in order for me to publish—particularly since the idea of a sustainability author printing on shredded forests for some reason felt a little ticklish to me. Smarty-pants audience members were always asking me about that at live events, especially at those dang college talks. Now it looks like the paper itself will soon be soil fixing.
    Humans, after a seventy-seven-year break, are returning to one of the most useful plants ever bestowed on them. And it happened while I was in the middle of writing about said plant, so I had to stick this note in here to hammer home the point that by the time this book hits shelves and e-readers, we might have hemp drapes in the White House Situation Room. 7
    I mean for practical reasons. Hemp fabric is less flammable and longer lasting at a lower cost than the leading brand. So when you see farmers, energy companies, and policy makers from places like North Dakota and Kentucky expressing outrage in these pages about their inability to capitalize on the production side of the exploding worldwide hemp phenomenon, you can bet they’re rubbing their palms together now, just a few months later.
    That’s because the U.S. market’s well ahead of the politics. It is expensive to have to import hemp. The plant is popular enough to do it, but it’ll be a pleasure not to have to, folks in the business tell me. Which is to say, people are already making real wampum from hemp.
    As John Roulac, founder and CEO of Richmond, California–based Nutiva, the seventy-million-dollar company that makes omega-balanced and mineral-rich hemp seed oil, puts it, “Our company has doubled in size each of the past two years, has been growing 41 percent per year since 2006. Inc. magazine named us one of its fasting-growing companies in 2010. That’s only going to continue. Look for hemp to grow fencerow-to-fencerow in the heartland. It’s going to displace the corn and soy duopoly in the American Midwest.”
    Hemp Pioneers

    John Roulac, Founder and CEO, Nutiva
    Given that I’ve been pouring a tablespoon of Nutiva’s organic hemp oil (Canadian-grown, for now) into my family’s breakfast shake every day for half a decade (to the tune of about eight hundred dollars per year and willingly counting), I thought it worthwhile to ask the company’s fifty-four-year-old founder about his personal and entrepreneurial journey. Turns out his arc is similar to that of a solar electrician friend of mine in New Mexico, who’s so busy that he describes himself as a “failed hippie.”
    â€œI was a forest activist in the California redwoods in the 1980s and early ’90s,” Roulac told me. “And the opponents would say, ‘If you’re not gonna cut down trees, where will our houses come from?’