In honor of the cannabis de-criminalization advocate, Jack Herer, who made this book possible, we hope to help spread the word by relating a page or two of The Emperor Wears No Clothes with whatever is current in the cannabis community at the time we publish the page. Interesting, huh? We think so. And we hope it helps to plant fresh little seeds of knowledge into each and every one of you. Well, not quite, but hopefully you get the picture.
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Friday, 11 September 2009 00:00 |
 
Mechanical Engineering, February 26, 1937
"Flax and Hemp: From the Seed to the Loom" was published in the February 1938 issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine. It was originally presented at the Agricultural Processing Meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in New Brunswick, NY of February 26, 1937 by the Process Industries Division.
Flax and Hemp: From the Seed to the Loom
By George A. Lower
This country imports practically all of its fibers except cotton. The Whitney gin, combined with improved spinning methods, enabled this country to produce cotton goods so far below the cost of linen that linen manufacture practically ceased in the United States. We cannot produce our fibers at less cost than can other farmers of the world. Aside from the higher cost of labor, we do not get as large production. For instance, Yugoslavia, which has the greatest fiber production per are in Europe, recently had a yield of 883 lbs. Comparable figures for other countries are Argentina, 749 lbs.; Egypt 616 lbs.; and India, 393 lbs.; while the average yield in this country is 383 lbs.
To meet world competition profitably, we must improve our methods all the way from the field to the loom.
Improvements in tilling, planting, and harvesting mechanisms have materially helped the large farmers and, to a certain degree, the smaller ones, but the processes from the crop to the yarn are crude, wasteful and land injurious. Hemp, the strongest of the vegetable fibers, gives the greatest production per acre and requires the least attention. It not only requires no weeding, but also kills off all the weeds and leaves the soil in splendid condition for the following crop. This, irrespective of its own monetary value, makes it a desirable crop to grow. - Today land, and agricultural land in particular, is being encroached upon by urban development, and what land is still being farmed has long ago been depleted of natural enrichment. Grains, such as corn, wheat, and barley are among the most grown crops, and in order to keep production up, farmers must rely heavily on herbicides and fertilizers, often using GM seed that are resistant to these chemicals. Imagine if GM seed hadn't been forced upon the agricultural community by companies like Monsanto, and our crops could grow naturally again. Now imagine a crop that could be grown on depleted soils, without the need for chemicals, that could slowly over enough seasons, begin re-enriching the soils naturally. OK, stop imagining. It's now legal in the State of Oregon - Farm Hemp!
Like flax, the fibers run out where leaf stems are on the stalks and are made up of laminated fibers that are held together by pectose gums. When chemically treated like flax, hemp yields a beautiful fiber so closely resembling flax that a high-power microscope is needed to tell the difference - and only then because in hemp, some of the ends are split. Wetting a few strands of fiber and holding them suspended will definitely identify the two because, upon drying, flax will be found to turn to the right or clockwise, and hemp to the left or counterclockwise. - Kind of like toliets in Australia... (sorry to get off-topic).
Before [World War I], Russia produced 400,000 tons of hemp, all of which is still hand-broken and hand-scutched. They now produce half that quantity and use most of it themselves, as also does Italy from whom we had large importations.
In this country, hemp, when planted one bu. per acre, yields about three tons of dry straw per acre. From 15 to 20 percent of this is fiber, and 80 to 85 percent is woody material. The rapidly growing market for cellulose and wood flower for plastics gives good reason to believe that this hitherto wasted material may prove sufficiently profitable to pay for the crop, leaving the cost of the fiber sufficiently low to compete with 500,000 tons of hard fiber now imported annually.
Hemp being from two to three times as strong as any of the hard fibers, much less weight is required to give the same yardage. For instance, sisal binder twine of 40-lb. tensile strength runs 450 ft. to the lb. A better twine made of hemp would run 1280 ft. to the lb. Hemp is not subject to as many kinds of deterioration as are the tropical fibers, and none of them lasts as long in either fresh or salt water. - OK, the strongest and most resilient fiber is still the one we're having so much trouble producing legally?
Several types of machines are available in this country for harvesting hemp. One of these was brought out several years ago by the International Harvester Company. Recently, growers of hemp in the Middle West have rebuilt regular grain binders for this work. This rebuilding is not particularly expensive and the machines are reported to give satisfactory service. - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: economical and socially conscious, new machines do not have to be built from the ground up to bring this agriculture back to the U.S.A. They've been built here before, and if the machine parts aren't still around, the schematics surely are.
Paint and lacquer manufacturers are interested in hempseed oil which is a good drying agent. When markets have been developed for the products now being wasted, seed and hurds, hemp will prove, both for the farmer and the public, the most profitable and desirable crop that can be grown, and one that can make American mills independent of importations.
Recent floods and dust storms have given warnings against the destruction of timber. Possibly, the hitherto waste products of flax and hemp may yet meet a good part of that need, especially in the plastic field which is growing by leaps and bounds. - Plastics are still a huge field, helped to remain a solid resource by the advent of recycling; manufacturing used plastics into many new uses. However, with dwindling oil resources, and the outrageous amount of pollution and devastation to marine wildlife that petroleum based plastics have created, what's the hold-up on bringing a natural resource into the plastics industry? They want to stay in business for the long-term don't they? We recommend a cannabis bailout, rather than a financial bailout for this threatened industry.
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