Hemp hemp hooray! - Hipster's high on crop's future
By: TOM VAN DUSEN, Ottawa Sun (CN ON), 10-09-05


CALABOGIE -- The Ottawa Valley's most prominent hemp hipster says the crop's proud tradition in Renfrew County should be resurrected, not only for its many valuable applications, but for its potential tourist-drawing power.

Sewing the mantra that hemp is "hip, hot and happening," Killaloe's Robbie Anderman made the suggestion last week during the "Beyond the City Lights" rural tourism conference here.

A hemp hustler for most of the past decade, Anderman suggested a history in the Valley of the historic plant often confused with cannabis should be researched and written. Emphasis should be placed on the former hemp textile and rope mill at Douglas.

In addition, hemp-related tools, clothing and other artifacts should be identified, collected and displayed; hemp-based foods introduced in area eateries; and a hemp souvenir item, such as a watertight fabric bucket, developed to sell to campers, who could travel the world bearing the Renfrew County logo.

EXPERIMENTAL PLOTS

In Eastern Ontario, many hemp promoters have come and gone on to other things since the mid-1990s, discouraged by legal issues and lack of marketing opportunities. A few experimental plots remain in the area these days, but none is grown commercially.

Anderman has endured. The bearded New York City native remains a dedicated part of the Ontario hemp network, which keeps on touting the merits of what's often billed as the first agricultural crop grown by humans 6,000 years ago.

To say Anderman is really into it is an understatement. A walking billboard in his hemp-cotton mix clothes, he even flogs "The Hemp See Dee" -- a compilation of songs and stories "celebrating the many uses of hemp."

Anderman puts his money where his mouth is. He's managing majority owner of "Cool Hemp," manufacturer of a non-dairy frozen dessert made from organic hemp seed at Tracey's Centreside Dairy in the Town of Renfrew and available in health food stores.

Cool Hemp, which contracts production of the seed it requires to a Peterborough-area grower, is ready to go to the next level with hemp "milks," single-serve novelties and other items.

Early last century, bumbling bureaucrats banned hemp along with cannabis, relegating the once-proud crop to the agricultural scrap heap.

Into the 1990s, hemp continued to get a bad rap due to the transgressions of its naughty cousin cannabis, more commonly known as pot.

While the two plants look much the same -- so much so befuddled potheads were stealing plants out of Kemptville College's experimental hemp plot -- the tamer twin contains only trace amounts of the active ingredient THC, which provides the "high."

After much lobbying, hemp was legalized in 1998. Now that you can legally grow it, harvest it and sell it for the seeds and fibre, markets are opening up, Anderman said, particularly since a U.S. ban on hemp food sales was lifted last year.

Uses for hemp are mind-boggling: Clothing, household items, construction materials, carpets, food additives, animal feed, wellness potions, paints, papers, fuel, rope, molded composites ...

Acre for acre, hemp can produce more easily digested protein than any other crop, Anderman said.

© 2005 H.U.M.A.N.: Hemp Users Medical Access Network - Toronto Medical Marijuana