Hemp Bound Read Free Page B

That led me to hemp fiber, one of the strongest in the world. Then I discovered that the seed is one of the most nutritious available.”
    That discovery still moves Roulac profoundly, judging by the fact that for about the next eight minutes I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with the guy’s love song to hemp oil. It’s making him rich—the we’re hiring button on the privately held company’s home page is large—but clearly Roulac was feeling it.
    Highlights from his serenade include this, when I asked how hemp oil compares with other omega-rich oils like flax: “Flax is fine, hemp oil is divine. Hemp has what flax, chia, and fish oil don’t: both GLA [gamma linolenic acid] and CLA [conjugated linoleic acid]—omega-6 fatty acids that are superfoods. GLA is an anti-inflammatory, and CLA is a building block of cell membranes, to just scratch the surface on those two. So hemp has a better fatty acid profile than flax. The shelled hemp seed—the hemp heart—is a gift from the universe. One little seed gives you magnesium—a master mineral involved in three hundred chemical processes in the body—zinc and iron. Vegans in particular can be short on those. Hemp is just nutritionally superior to flax and will surpass flax sales in the coming decade.”
    And it went on like this for a while. Let me tell you, as someone who finds living preferable to the alternatives, I was all ears.
    The business side kind of blends with the societal side with Roulac, and on both counts you can’t accuse the fellow of failing to think big. “Our goal is to change the way the world eats, and to improve the food systems across the food chain. And we’re already doing this.”
    How so? “Today we’re working with states like Kentucky to get hemp grown domestically. I testified there,” he told me. “But our biggest issue is that we only sell certified organic seed and oil, and there isn’t the infrastructure yet with hemp. Believe it or not, even though GMOs are banned in Canadian hemp, which is a nice gesture, today most Canadian farmers are GMO farmers who use hemp as a bridge crop for three months and there’s plenty of pesticides applied the rest of the year at least. It’s part of the GMO cycle. We working to build that organic market.”
    For that reason, toward the end of our conversation, Roulac added a challenge to consumers: “If you want to see a green future, buy organic hemp. The more organic hemp you eat, the more organic hemp will be planted, and the healthier the planet will be.”
    Now, I’m a journalist of some experience, and I recognize a line out of an industry trade group playbook when I hear it. But I’ll cut Roulac some slack and include his talking point, for two reasons. First off, he’s talking about a plant that it is at the time of this writing a federal felony to cultivate. And second, as a sustainability writer for two decades who’s just back from visiting a lot of hemp farms and reading a lot of hemp research, and as a fellow who’s had to work with drought-affected soil on my own ranch, I can tell you he’s right.

    While I’ve got you thinking big picture, and before we launch into the plant’s most lucrative digital age killer apps, I thought it might be helpful to include a quick, explicit definition of hemp. That’s because it’s finally sunk in, after several years spent researching an industry that’s indeed growing 20 percent a year (and that’s just the hemp seed oil market), that such growth means a lot of new people are coming to the topic all the time. These folks will want to know what exactly this plant is we’re discussing.
    Even some of 2014’s U.S. farmers will be fresh to the species, given that Canada’s cultivators can’t keep up with demand, meaning a much-needed cash crop is ready to roll Stateside. Now. The North