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Hemp Is on its Way to Your Car Battery and Many Things You Haven’t Yet Imagined
by Doug Fine
Huffingtonpost
The first digital-age domestic hemp crop is being harvested as I write. The subtle decrease in seismic activity currently puzzling Virginia geologists can be traced to Thomas Jefferson ceasing to spin in his grave for the first time in 77 years.
For a century USDA biologists conducted taxpayer-funded hemp cultivar research for farmers, after all. They did this in a Virginia meadow that is today the Pentagon. And why wouldn't they, in support of a key crop supplying the Navy with rope and earning millions for farmers from Wisconsin to Kentucky (when millions meant something)?
Then there was this weird quirk (Google “cannabis prohibition” if the cause of the quirk is news to you), and it took a tucked-in provision in the 2014 federal Farm Bill to allow hemp research to restart.
As I learned while researching my latest book, Hemp Bound, this longest utilized of agricultural products (today defined as “cannabis with less than point three percent of psychoactive THC”) is offering up a genuine opportunity to provide food and energy independence for the U.S. and beyond while stimulating a multi-billion-dollar agriculture-based economy. It might even lead to fewer resource wars. Just that.
This is what happens when you cultivate a plant for 12 millennia. It develops a broad range of helpful properties. Want some in-the field proof?
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Every Day is Earth Day
Source: http://www.riseearth.com/2014/11/hemp-is-on-its-way-to-your-car-battery.html
