Australian and international hemp consultant John Muir in hemp crop.
HEMP has a bright future in our cropping districts, with eight-week turn-arounds and omega oils oozing from the seeds when pressed.
Just watch the monolepta beetles - apparently the crop is so seductive they just can't help themselves.
But to comply with the law the drug content of these paddock plants must measure less than 1% THC content.
There are varieties out there that can pass the test, but it's not easy getting enough seed to be commercial.
British-born PhD student Matthew Welling has been studying these variants at Southern Cross University in Lismore for the past few years now, just completing first class honours and now embarking on a doctorate on the same theme.
Funded by Ecofibre Industries Operations, the research could find a way of providing a nursery industry with the basis for a legitimate crop
Nonetheless, the risk for reward ratio is high indeed. Produce is nothing short of remarkable: Tough, elongated fibres suitable for everything from clothes and rope to industrial filters. Oil-rich seeds suitable for human consumption with by-products perfect for animal feed.
Getting commercial quantities of correct seed, suitable for either food or fibre and complying with THC requirements, is not easy. And this is why Matthew is working hard to classify variants, with the end result being to supply those seeds.
"Our over-riding aim is to characterise the germ plasm," Matthew said.
At the moment the plant sciences faculty at Southern Cross University manages a collection that Matthew has developed as part of his first class honours degree.
During his next phase of study he is keen to dig deep into the plant's past, and hopes to find the original genetic composition before it branched off into the many varieties we have today.
He intends to unravel the genetic information stored in these individual plants and see if he can find clues to where they might have originated. And that local stamp can help researchers isolate desirable traits.
"For instance the THC quality can be higher or lower in different regions," Matthew said. "So the question is can we select for that?"
Turpenoids are another range of compounds produced in cannabis, and one of them, canobidolic acid, is valuable to pharmaceutical science and has the potential to benefit human health.
So there are at least three separate market channels for legal modern hemp - all of them promising. But the industry will need seed to grow and thrive.
In the old days, plant traits were selected for things people wanted - like fibre for rope. And they didn't care that it also produced THC. Nowadays things are different.
"Selecting for fibre is not necessarily counter selecting for THC," warns Matthew. And so he expects that detailed genetic analysis will isolate varieties very accurately, at a young age.
"Before people waited for the plant to become sexually mature before they could see its traits. With new methods we can type them at only two to three weeks old."
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