Let's set the record straight - hemp is not a miracle crop

In March of this year, the US state of Colorado opened registration for the first legal hemp crop in the USA in 56 years, the first among the 10 states where hemp has been made legal to do so following a landmark federal farm bill in January. Hemp advocates countrywide rejoiced - and boy, there sure seems to be a lots of these advocates. Just take a quick look at social media and you'll see things like this facebook page with over 125,000 likes and this twitter account with over 58,000 followers all dedicated to the hemp plant. It's hard to imagine that if for some reason other bast crops such as flax or jute were prohibited we'd see this many people dedicated to their legalization.

Of course, the reason so many "activists" have rallied to the cause of this humble fiber and grain crop is its association with its narcotic cousin, cannabis. Because of this, the pro-hemp movement is made up largely of free-spirited folks with little to no agricultural knowledge who are prone to hyperbole when it comes to extolling the virtues of Cannabis sativa. Namely, some ideas that get thrown around a lot are the notions that hemp is a miracle crop and that legalization of hemp will save the world. These are talking points which are being reiterated by fairly respectable American liberal publications over and over again.

Pictures like this can be found all over social media. It should be clarified that hemp has not been proven to be effective medicine and it cannot produce plastic - there is however plastic fiberglass which uses hemp bast fiber as filler. For example BMW's new i3 electric car uses hemp-based fiberglass in its interior paneling

And I'd just like to break it to any hopeful Americans - hemp is no miracle, and it won't save your country.

Here in Canada we had the sense to legalize this harmless crop way back in 1998. Canadian farmers have been seeding hemp for 16 years now - long enough that I can remember biking past a few hemp fields as a kid in Hastings County. Over the years total hectarage has varied widely as farmers experiment with this new crop, but so far its peak was in 2006 with 19,458ha, the majority of that being in Manitoba's Parkland Region where there is a hemp cooperative focused on grain production.

19,458ha is not a lot. Consider that in 2006 Canadian farmers seeded 807,975ha of flax, a similar crop also grown for both its grain and bast fibers. And flax is by no means a major crop in Canada itself. Contrast those two crops to canola, Canada's most popular oilseed, which saw well over 5 million hectares seeded in 2006.

So why hasn't hemp farming taken off as expected here in Canada? A few major reasons.

Firstly, grain hemp has a fairly narrow range of uses, since its oil has too low of a smoking point to be useful in frying. Hemp nut and hemp oil have been limited mainly to use as a food grain and as a dietary supplement respectively, mostly for sale to that same crowd who love hemp for its association with cannabis and supposed miracle health benefits. Hemp is by no means a staple food, the market for it is niche and thus small.

Secondly, there has been a lack of a domestic market for fiber hemp. Prior to 1998 Canada was without any major facilities for the processing of bast fibers. The production of flax, at the time the only bast crop grown in Canada, had always been oriented towards grain due to the low value of flax bast fibers. The price for flax straw has been so low for the past few decades that farmers in the prairies have simply taken to burning any remaining straw in their fields after grain harvest rather than waste money baling and transporting it. Even today given that hemp bast fiber is a niche market in North America with only a handful of fairly small-scale manufacturers as buyers, and that the process of separating bast fibers is quite intensive and requires multiple expensive pieces of equipment, the industry remains at a standstill.

At the moment the only existing processor of fiber hemp in the country is Kenex Ltd. in Chatham-Kent, which focuses mostly on grain hemp but also buys low-grade hemp straw and processes it into bast fiber for export to the USA. The operation is fairly small. When interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1999 after the first major harvest of Canadian hemp, Kenex Ltd.'s general manager had this to say of the year's minuscule 1,021ha Ontarian hemp crop,

"It’s given us one hell of a glut of grain and fiber. There’s been a major overestimation of the market that’s out there."

Not very encouraging words for the budding industry. Since then, through trial and error, farmers and processors have learned where the market is for hemp and adjusted accordingly - away from fiber and dual-purpose production and towards grain production.

And, thirdly, hemp harvest is a difficult ordeal. Hemp was initially used mostly for the production of rope, and attempting to reap a hemp crop is a lot like trying to mow a field of rope. It wreaks havoc on harvesting equipment intended for use on much more tender crops. Even the best sicklebar mowers used for fiber harvest clog frequently, and combines are often slowed to a halt during grain harvest when bast fibers make a mess of headers.

France is Europe's largest hemp producer and the second
largest producer in the world after China, with segmented
fibre production for the manufacture of cigarette paper
comprising over 70% of the total 11,637ha crop in 2012.
Despite being a world leader in hemp production with the
majority of European hemp hectarage, hemp accounts for
only 0.0004% of total French farmland, which goes to
show the small size of the global market for hemp
(Image: hectares of hemp by département, CETIOM)

Studies coming out of Europe have highlighted a lack of adequately suited harvesting equipment for hemp, especially for fiber. And that's in a region where hemp production has never faced prohibition and there are several major producing countries of hemp, such as France. Though some specialty harvesting equipment exists in Europe for segmented fiber hemp, as of yet the only method for whole-stalk harvesting of fiber hemp is the use of sicklebar mowers intended for grassland operations, followed by repeated tedding (fluffing up the crop with a rake to speed up the drying process) and windrowing (pushing mowed crop into neat rows which can be easily collected by a baler).

This harvesting process is labour intensive, produces only fiber of moderate to low quality, and ultimately nets a low price for the farmer compared to many crops of equivalent soil requirements such as winter wheat. Until a harvesting system is developed that allows harvest in fewer passes and greater control over retting (a process by which the fibres are separated from the stalk's woody core, usually performed in the field), fibre hemp will continue to be very infeasible for farmers in North America.

So while I applaud those adventurous farmers in Colorado who have seeded 1,273 acres this first year of legal harvest of a crop which should have never been prohibited, I'd like to ask advocates to tone down the "miracle" rhetoric and not to expect American hemp to become anything other than what it has achieved here north of the border - a niche crop with a whole lot more hype than real market opportunity.

Processing vegetables: a missed opportunity for the eastern Ontario economy

Field vegetables grown for the processing industry is an Ontario speciality, and a profitable one at that. As of 2010, the value of vegetables grown for the Canadian processing market totalled over $128 million, with 48% of total production coming from the province of Ontario. In 2013 alone Ontario Processing Vegetable Growers (OPVG), the provincial marketing board responsible for negotiating contracts on behalf of farmers, secured contracts for over 450 farmers with 19 different food manufacturing facilities.

Only issue is that not one of these contractees, neither farmers nor manufacturers, are located east of the GTA. In fact OPVG itself only has organized district committees extending as far east as the border of Hastings County. Everything beyond that is no man's land as far as vegetable processing is concerned. So why aren't eastern Ontario producers growing for the vegetable processing industry?

It's certainly not a production capability issue which limits us - field vegetables are already a regular crop on many eastern Ontario farms which produce for pick-your-own, farmer's market stalls, or CSA sales models. Sweet corn, the most important processing crop by area, is practically a staple come July in the Ottawa valley.

And it's also not an issue of required capital investment - the majority of southern Ontario's processing vegetable crop is hand-harvested, and in fact many of OPVG's contracts actually mandate hand harvest. While there is mechanical harvest equipment on the market designed specifically for larger processing vegetable operations with significant hectarage, the high value per hectare of processing vegetables can make hand harvest worthwhile at any scale, large or small. As an example, take the above-linked hand harvested butternut squash contract. At 2014 prices of $138.50/tonne with the average winter squash yield in Ontario at about 20 tonnes/hectare, a farmer could count on a $2770/hectare revenue - double or triple that of many conventional rowcrops grown in eastern Ontario.

No, the major roadblock to processing vegetable production in eastern Ontario right now is access to buyers, who are currently concentrated in the manufacturing belt of southern Ontario. Transportation from field to buyer is an out of pocket expense for farmers, and when your only buyer is a 600km truck ride away it's usually more financially feasible to produce what can be marketed closer to home. In eastern Ontario's case, that has tended to be limited to dairy, beef, corn and soybean production. Especially now with the collapse of the local pork industry, eastern Ontario farms are becoming increasingly less diverse and sticking to those four products.

Just take a look at this business directory for eastern Ontario food producers. You'll find a number of companies under the cheese, meat, grains and cereals sections. But flick through the vegetable section and you'll find nothing but on-farm operations marketing directly to the public.

Without any processors within a reasonable distance, this is the only available option for vegetable farmers - to sell directly to consumers. What few local processed goods are produced in the area are made entirely on farm by the farmers themselves for sale to locals. Given the relatively low population of rural eastern Ontario these operations have a small consumer base and consequently tend to be small and low-income themselves.

This is at a time when unemployment in the region remains above average and many rural eastern Ontario communities are attempting to diversify their agrifood sector in response to the collapse of other local industries such as forestry. And vegetable processing seems a prime candidate for an agrifood diversification opportunity since unlike many industrial sectors in the province it is an expanding industry - especially in the manufacture of frozen products.

While most of the food processing sector suffered from competition with imports after NAFTA, the vegetable processing industry has remained strong and even managed to net a $9 billion export:import surplus. As well, it's one of the only industrial sectors in Ontario where employment numbers have actually been increasing over the past 10 years, due in large part to the expansion of the frozen vegetable industry. (Source)

Since despite local government effort to attract food processing industry there is an absence of local processing corporations, it seems like any potential future for processing vegetable agriculture in eastern Ontario will be entirely contingent on the development of value-added agrifood industry - that is, industry owned and operated by farmers' cooperatives themselves. However, as has been noted before, eastern Ontario is far behind the rest of the country in the development of value-added agriculture,

"One wonders why there are so few value added Agri-Food businesses in Eastern Ontario. According to data from the United Counties of Prescott-Russell, only three such businesses are established in the area. As for Stormont, Dundas, and Glengarry counties, one finds branches of large corporations such as the Kraft Company, but within city limits...

...in 1996, the United Counties of PR and SDG sold $364.47 million worth of agricultural products. This level of sales is comparable to that of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick individually. Yet, almost all of those products are directed in areas other than our counties for processing. And so is the additional cash flow."

And it's a lack of social and economic development that prevents this kind of value-added development from taking place - most notablly manifested in eastern Ontario in the continuing youth emigration as less and less options remain for rural youth, the lack of educational development among the east's sizeable francophone communities (over half of the francophone population in eastern Ontario reports reading comprehension levels of 1 or 2 out of 5, signifying extreme difficulty reading), and the increasing difficulty of achieving financing or subsidy in an era of austerity.

So long as these conditions persist and sufficiently diversified agrifood industry doesn't take root in rural eastern Ontario, farming in the area will continue to be dominated by more conventional livestock-oriented production and sale of raw cash crops for processing in other regions - and the production of processing vegetables in the region will remain nothing but a missed opportunity.