Recently some Victorian farmers and engineers invented a hemp decorticator

By Rex Ellis

Source: theislanderonline.com.au

I don’t make my living as a farmer, but I grew up on one [dairy, fat lambs and almonds] and I owned a grazing property on Kangaroo Island for ten years. I was a jackeroo and overseer on sheep stations for six years, so perhaps this seemingly irrelevant information is to establish a bit of credibility with farmers.

Most of my occupation involves travelling around Australia by various forms of transport. I know and meet a lot of people involved in agriculture and understand that the average farming operations only return 4 per cent on their investment. There are exceptions – those that are sustainable and doing extremely well [the minority] and those that are unsustainable and heading downhill from slow decent to out of control.

Most of the small to medium sized country towns you pass through have increasing numbers of shut shops and businesses.

In a country like Australia, this should not be the case.

Some of the readers would be aware of Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Hemp act’ of 1937 which was the catalyst for what is arguably the greatest environmental scandal in modern times. I suggest that if you are interested [and you should be], you google ‘industrial hemp’,www.textilecompositcom.au. 

This will open up an extraordinary Pandora’s box of the continuing scandal and suppression of the facts by powerful lobbies, in particular the cotton industry, major agribusiness corporations and chemical conglomerates, to name of few.

Recently some Victorian farmers and engineers invented a hemp decorticator that can separate the fibre, the hurd and the seed in the one operation. 

This is an extraordinary development. It means that 95 per cent of the hurd and fibre can be recovered, compared to just 15 per cent previously. Industrial hemp has over two thousand uses and can be grown with little water [the more the better for greater yield] and no herbicides. Up to three crops a year can be grown on the best land with more water. The ground is greatly enriched by the waste material after each harvest, and because of the minimal input, the returns are exceptional. Imagine the thousands of hectares of land in the Riverland and other places lying idle or supporting unsustainable or unprofitable crops.

Uses of industrial hemp include textiles, clothing, building material [fibre board, insulation, hempcrete]. Industrial products such as animal bedding, mulch, boiler fuel, chemical absorbent paper, printing, newsprint, packaging, cardboard, netting, canvas, carpeting.

Food derived from hemp seed is what is holding up the ‘hemp revolution’. In all other western and developed nations you can buy food made from hemp seed in supermarkets. 

Yet you cannot legally do so in Australia and New Zealand despite the fact that food standards of Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) have recommended COAG meetings that it should be legalised immediately. That is another scandal.

Until hemp food is legalised, the industry is crippled. We have two legs of a three legged stool. There is the fibre and the hurd, but the third leg has been denied – the food.

A good hemp crop produces three tonnes of fibre per hectare, seven tonnes of hurd and one tonne of grain. The world market is wide open. A growing number of farmers are becoming aware of the potential of industrial hemp, and the ripple needs to become a tidal wave. This has the potential to revitalise agriculture in 

Australia, as well as opening a multitude of manufacturing opportunities. 

Rex Ellis’s outback books are available www.safarico.com.au, or call (08) 8543 2280.