High on potential
There’s a heady air around New Zealand’s hemp industry, with farmers enthused about the possibilities in health and business. Gerard Hutching reports.
This year’s inaugural hemp conference wasn’t your usual agribusiness gathering. Federated Farmers representatives were few and far between, even if farmers may have much to gain if the hempgrowing industry takes off.
And in between the respectful applause for speakers, the conference in Wellington occasionally had the air of a revivalist meeting, with telling points punctuated by whoops and cheers.
But as delegates were at pains to point out, they weren’t getting high on marijuana because hemp is not a drug – rather, it was over the economic, environmental, and medical possibilities that hemp growing might offer.
‘‘I don’t know what people were expecting – to see a bunch of hippies perhaps,’’ conference chairman and the chief executive of Hempstatic Richard Barge says.
There is reputational risk around the word cannabis, he says. ‘‘It’s quite polarising and there’s not much we can do about the fact industrial hemp is a form of cannabis. Our cousin the marijuana drug form has a negative connotation.’’
The big opportunities were in relation to health and sustainability. Not only was there a need to grow hemp, but also processes needed to be invented to create products.
‘‘We have talented people that can create solutions and improvements for growing and processing our annual crop into a wide range of exportable products and technology in food, fibre and medicine,’’ Barge says.
Before any of the opportunities can be realised, the laws relating to hemp need to be changed.
At present, growing for hemp oil is the only legal commercial activity, with a thriving niche arable industry of 200-300 hectares centred mainly on the mid-Canterbury region.
Food safety authorities are looking to follow Australia to allow hemp seed to be used in food by changing regulations under the Food Act, the Misuse of Drugs Act and the Medicines Act.
These law changes, expected later this year, will allow hemp seed to be sold as a food in New Zealand, in addition to the current legislation allowing the local sale of hemp seed oil. Hemp seed meal is a byproduct of the oil business.
‘‘We would like to see the Government interpret the regulations to enable the industry,’’ Barge says.
Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor has warned that Labour’s coalition partner NZ First is wary and does not want to see any encouragement of drug abuse, but Health Minister David Clark is open to transferring responsibility for hemp to the Ministry for Primary Industries.
‘‘We don’t want to encourage that [drug abuse] but we have to front to the reality there is confusion across all the lines of use,’’ O’Connor says.
‘‘As a Government we endorse the use of medical marijuana, but we need to ensure people are using it in a way that doesn’t put them at risk, or the reputation of medical marijuana at risk.’’
He also cautions enthusiasts that New Zealand already grows a lot of fibre, such as wood and wool, so the challenge is to use hemp to make high-value products.
Barge says delegates were pleasantly surprised by the presentation of Dr Stewart Jessamine, from the Ministry of Health, who appeared to have made a 180-degree turn in becoming supportive of enabling the industry.
Among the claims made for hemp are:
Hulled hemp seeds are filled with healthy essential fatty acids such as alpha-linolenic acid (ALA, Omega 3 and Omega 6) and gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) and are high in fibre, iron, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, zinc, vitamin E and magnesium.
The leaves can be used as a vegetable.
Its fibre can be employed in myriad uses, from clothing to furnishings.
Dairy farmers can grow it as a ‘‘mop crop’’ to soak up excess nutrients and then feed it out to their livestock.
Even concrete can be made from the fibre.
Delegates’ presentations and views ranged from the matter-offact to the inspired.
Andrew Davidson, from Midland Seeds in Ashburton, took a commonsense approach. He has been contracting growers to raise hemp seeds for the last 17 years and said they viewed the plant as just another crop in their rotation.
At $4000 per hectare, returns are above milling wheat ($3600/ha), and on a par with feed wheat or barley. It has several key advantages over cereal crops, however – hemp is a short-duration crop of only 90 days, while autumn-sown cereals can be in the ground for 10 months. It can also be spring sown.
Legally, hemp crops must not be seen from the road so as to avoid unwanted attention.
Fears have been raised that growers might plant cannabis for drug use within the seed crop, but it would be counterproductive to try to hide high-THC dope plants in a hemp crop as this would result in a
dilution effect through cross pollination, rendering the plants useless.
Hemp requires little in the way of agrichemicals. This is in part because of the short duration of the crop – the plants are not in the ground long enough for pests and diseases to become a significant problem.
New Zealand has a thriving industry growing seeds of many crops for overseas growers. However, at the moment it cannot grow hemp seed for export. Midland Seeds has been cultivating its own lines for some time.
Retired horticulture scientist Dr Mike Nichols is in favour of growing hemp for medical purposes but sees snags in growing it for seed.
‘‘In small plots birds clean up the seeds. It’s better grown in large areas where they can’t eat all of them.’’
To people who claim hemp is naturally immune from pests, Nichols recounts the tale of harvesting some and bringing it back to Massey University for study. By the time he arrived at his destination the car was full of insects.
There is a lot of work to do on evaluating the best cultivars, sowing dates, plant densities and their pathogens. Because of the prohibitions surrounding growing hemp, he knows of only
five peer-reviewed papers on cannabis yields.
Nichols says New Zealand risks losing out on a profitable industry, in the same way it once turned down the chance to grow poppies for legal codeine and morphine.
During the 1950s Kiwi scientist Ralph Ballinger was the world’s lead researcher into poppy growing, but his work never resulted in an industry.
Instead, Tasmania now supplies 40 per cent of the world’s legal codeine and morphine, earning more than A$200 million a year for the state.
Deloitte Australia has researched the economics of growing medical marijuana. Its work was presented by Andrew Gibbs, who is a partner in Wellington.
The Australian report estimated the expected number of patients for conditions such as multiple sclerosis, HIV/Aids, epilepsy and cancer would be 30,400 a year – an estimate many at the conference felt was well short of reality.
Total costs ranged from $75 per square metre to grow outdoors, to $2291/sq m indoors.
Cookie Time founder Michael Mayell, who also launched Nutrient Rescue in 2016 and the Drinkable Rivers in our Lifetime campaign, is a hemp enthusiast.
He says he is ‘‘playing around with new food product ideas’’ based on hemp and encouraging other people because it was a huge market.
‘‘I think we’re growing the wrong grass in New Zealand, or, as Richard Branson said, we should swap cows for cannabis.
‘‘New Zealand needs to move from the lamb age to the cow age to the hemp age. I’d like to see the whole country get behind this incredible and so very misunderstood plant.’’
The CO2 uptake of hemp was four times as much as trees. If New Zealand’s 10,000 dairy farmers grew hemp on one quarter of their land, ‘‘the net environmental impact would be a game changer’’ and farmers would be able to profit from other uses.
‘‘Planting hemp isn’t just a win for the environment, it produces an annual profit which will increase over time as markets are found for more and more of the plant’s constituents.
‘‘There are 100 cannabinoids and other nutrients in hemp leaves. It’s an incredible superfood and people could be eating and juicing the leaf for its micronutrients and antioxidant properties, as they do with spinach and kale.’’
Nigel Slaughter, co-founder and head of Ligar, a company that develops materials which extract medicinal cannabinoids from hemp, says he agrees with O’Connor that it is pointless for New Zealand to try to compete with other countries in growing fibre.
He instances NZ Merino, which has forged partnerships with Icebreaker, Danish footwear company Glerups and Dutch firm Best Wool Carpets. One of the new clothing materials on the drawing board is a combination of merinohemp, offering durability with flexibility and warmth.
‘‘It’s an incredible superfood and people could be eating and juicing the leaf for its micronutrients and antioxidant properties, as they do with spinach and kale.’’
Michael Mayell