5. Hemp is the future
We have all heard a stoner or two bloviate about how “Washington and Jefferson grew weed.” That stoner is technically correct, but hemp is a rather different thing than the sticky, icky, that dude thinks Ben Franklin and the boys were blazing. If an acre of hemp will provide as much fiber as two or three acres of cotton, a farmer in the late 1700’s would have been daft not to plant some. Advocates seem to have a tendency to oversell its usefulness and it is difficult not to. The aforementioned Franklin used it for paper and today it’s used in molded plastics, composite automobile parts, food, and T-shirts. With Canada closing in on $1 billion worth of hemp production yearly and Canadian farmers making more than three times what an acre of soy will bring, it’s use will likely only increase. You can’t really get “high” from smoking hemp, but it sure would be a better fuel source than corn.
