Hawaii, hemp capital of the world?
For eight years, the Hawaii Farmers Union United Convention has been a key knowledge bank for farmers from Australia to Singapore, Kenya to Britain. Now, hemp and cannabis are working into the model. Doug Fine was there in the mountains farm country of Maui, Hawaii, and brings us this report about the role hemp and cannabis play in that vital playbook for humanity’s future.
In Hawaii, you can get three harvests a year in wonderful growing conditions.
Doug: “Basically it boils down to; Hawaii, organic, hemp. The farmers I talked to, they want Hawaii to be the hemp capital of the world. I’ve seen that soil, that compacted sugar soil that we are working on to bring back to health. Hemp is an extractor of heavy metals in soil.”
Hawaii Farmers Union Convention
Through soil workshops and field demonstrations, all while fed on delicious, nutrient-dense food, farmers come here to teach one another. That is, they are networking in the most nerdy way — you’ve never heard so many theories on building magnesium in soil.
Since the cannabis plant is so new to many modern farmers, the convention’s hemp sessions were particularly well-attended.
Longtime Hawaii Senator Mike Gabbard chairs the Aloha State’s agriculture committee. He said the state’s farmers are more than a little ready for a lucrative, soil-building crop.
Even Hawaii’s Governor, David Ige, showed up at the Convention
Even Hawaii’s Governor, David Ige, showed up at the Convention — a week before the U.S. elections — to show support for hemp and food independence in Hawaii.
The President of Hawaii’s Farmer’s Union, Vincent Mina, is himself a farmer of organic micro-greens. For him, gathering on a chunk of volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is about sharing knowledge with a concrete goal in mind: a return not just to regenerative agricultural independence, but to a regionally based overall economy. And Mina says hemp is part of a planet-wide journey of recovery that starts with the world’s farmers.
Doug: “When the Farmer’s Union Convention ended, my belly was full of righteous local food, and my mind was filled with new soil building techniques which I’ll In turn share with other farmers around the world. But my work wasn’t done. I dashed off to the neighboring island of Oahu to harvest hemp as part of the state-funded University of Hawaii seed development project.”
More than 500 attendees from four continents are here today to learn about independent agriculture and the way the hemp/cannabis plays into the future of humanity.
Doug Fine is the bestselling author of Hemp Bound and Too High to Fail. Visit him at dougfine.com and @organiccowboy on social media. Check out his presentation at the 2018 Cannabis University in Amsterdam:
In December, industrial hemp has been legalized in the USA through the 2018 Farm Bill
And with legalization comes regulation and as such, one of the biggest differences for current and prospective hemp farmers is that they will no longer be dealing with the Department of Justice (DOJ). Instead, they will be dealing with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) or the state government. To be classified as hemp, the crop needs to contain less than 0.3% of THC.
“It’s going to be a challenge,” said Bob Hoban when asked about this shift of the Departments shift. Robert (Bob) Hoban is one of the leading lawyers in the cannabis and hemp industry. He has worked as a cannabis policy professor at the University of Denver, where he taught cannabis policy courses in Colorado and across the globe. We got to interview Bob at the FAAAT conference in December last year.
To learn more about what this means for the hemp industry and CBD in particular, make sure to check out our write up on the 2018 Farm Bill.
