The media and certain west coast folk and some universities and politicians are just gushing about how hemp fiber is going to save USA agriculture.
That is just a very bright neon warning light that folk will be in over their heads on this deal.
I got into a coop that was going to make fancy looking particle board a few decades ago. Small goals, simple production, find their little market..... when they got to production, man the wood pulp/ particle board/ plywood folk just undercut anything going on and crashed that coop down fast! It was a bloodbath.
The cotton and wood pulp lobby is large. They already make very good natural fibers, and they have a large, large supply of growers, product, transportation, export markets, and local processing of their fibers.
So now along comes this huge wave of let’s all save the family farmer and produce hemp fiber and put it in everything, and make it a third crop to rotate with corn and soybeans, it’s going to be huge!
Well with that kind of buildup it’s gonna be planted all over, and folks with more money than brains will invest in this wonderful product that can’t fail, after all every politician and university and business papers are talking about it...
After a year here is this pile of hemp fiber.
Where does it go? Who is going to use it? It can make clothes, it can make paper, it can be used in concrete. Sure. But do you think the cotton folk will just go away, the paper mills will turn down wood fiber, the fiberglass makers will stop making fiberglass?
Those products are mature, they work, they have their infrastructure in place. They can cut their price 25% to preserve their market share.
Hemp is building from scratch, gonna be a lot of big costs to get it rolling.
So we are flooded with unreasonable expectations, flooded with a rush to overproduce, and then we hit the reality of a limited market.
It’s a recipe for disaster.
Let’s say it does a slower growth, and does succeed. So, what happens to folk growing cotton, making wood pulp? Making fiberglass? You are putting them out of work, so they either grow the hemp cheaper than you because they already have the infrastructure and access to the textile markets, or you kill off those family operations. What did you gain? Folk lose interest in supporting hemp real fast when that reality sets in.
A whole lot of nothing.
As a small specialty market hemp fiber would be fine. It’s already used here and there. But as promoted, as 1/3 of our crop acres for the wonderful hemp.....
That’s a joke.
You might want to compare it to ethanol. It will suffer the same cycle,
Ethanol got some help form the govt to get the infrastructure in place for a decade. That all ended years ago, only thing left is the govt mandate to use it to help improve pollution issues from gasoline, and those protections are rapidly being axed by your big oil industry. As we now produce most of our crude oil here in our own country, the incentive to use ethanol is fading, jobs are here either way, no one really cares about the environment and the oil lobby is really good and really strong.
Hemp fiber will grow briefly and then burn out rapidly on the same curve, as the USA is a big exporter of fibers already there is very little incentive to get behind a big hemp subsidy. More hemp,less cotton, why bother?
Public opinion and interest lasts maybe up to a decade. It takes longer then that to get an industry going.
Ethanol is a good product, it lowers pollution, it produces a small net energy gain, it allows use of cheaper crude products to blend with high octane ethanol making our gas supplies larger and cheaper. And still, it is fading away because big oil hates it, and public opinion is fascinated with big suvs now and doesn’t care about the rest.
Hemp fiber was a cool nitche market. As a major crop, it has no reason to exist other than politicians and wild public opinion favors it for a brief moment. The market doesn’t support it existing.
Maybe I’m wrong. It’s fine if I am. I’m all for a new crop.
If you have dollar bills burning a hole in your pocket, be really, really careful investing in hemp fiber? Cart before the horse.
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