Tucked away in a field behind a poplar bush a 15 minute drive north of Dauphin, Man., a small field of cannabis sativa is already waist high.
Not the weekend project of long-haired teenagers looking for illicit riches, this crop is an industrial fibre variety that proponents say could change the way prairie farmers look at hemp.
On June 23, the spring-seeded plants had suffered from the cool weather and were just beginning to poke out of the ground.
The fall-seeded hemp, planted Nov. 1, on the other hand, was clearly showing the benefit of an early start, with stalks already the size of a man’s thumb.
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Lower leaves, shaded out by their counterparts higher up, were yellowing and dropping off. The few weeds brave enough to make an appearance had already clearly lost the race and were doomed.
The seed, a fibre-only hemp variety called Petera that was registered in 2007, lay dormant in the ground all winter and started germinating once soil temperatures became favourable.
Research into the potential advantages of fall-seeded hemp is being funded with a $55,000 grant from ARDI, the Agri-Food Research and Development Initiative, which has invested $600,000 in the fledgling Canadian hemp industry since a 60-year ban on cultivation was lifted in 1998.
Test plots have shown that the strain, which will be commercially available in 2010, is capable of yielding up to four tonnes of field-dried biomass per acre, according to Chris Dzisiak, a board member of the Parkland Industrial Hemp Growers Co-op Ltd. (PIHP).
Hemp is vulnerable to weed competition during the first month after germination, he said, but after that, no weeds common to the Prairies can keep up with its phenomenal growth.
“Once it starts to bolt, it grows two to four inches a day,” said Dzisiak.
“It really takes off. If you come back in a month, this field will be 12, 13 feet high. The stems will be as thick as my wrist.”
As the co-op has found out, growing the hemp is one thing. Raising the capital to build a plant to process it into marketable fibre is another, he said.
Funding efforts aimed at setting up a local processing facility, which raised more than $1 million in the community of less than 10,000, have stalled.
Provincial support worth $3 million and federal grants were not enough to convince private venture capitalists to buy a stake in the proposed $18 million fibre processing plant, he said.
“They weren’t interested in being the first, and this would be the first of its kind in North America,” said Dzisiak.
Still smarting from the failed Dauphin-based Rancher’s Choice beef slaughter facility project abandoned last year, the Manitoba government is unlikely to have much appetite for backing a new, untested start-up project.
But as local farmers wait on the sidelines, the market for hemp fibre is growing, especially in Europe, where it is being used as an environmentally friendly, non-toxic home insulation material to replace fibreglass bats.
“If it takes five units of energy to make fibreglass insulation, because you’re starting with rock, hemp only takes one unit,” said Dzisiak. “And we’re sequestering carbon at the same time.”
The failure to get the hemp processing facility off the ground is particularly vexing, he said, given the many uses for hemp fibre. They include non-woven matting, carpet backing, composite structures and panels, and the cloth used in landscaping to prevent soil erosion.
Joe Federowich, chair of the PIHP, and one of the largest hemp grain growers in Canada grew 2,000 acres of grain hemp last year and 4,000 the year before.
He is excited by the potential for new fall-seeded hemp varieties because they offer advantages for his cropping strategy.
Like most other crops, the earlier hemp can get started in the spring, the higher the grain yield will be at harvest time.
“That means more income in my pocket.”
Hemp grain is selling for 50 to 55 cents a pound, but unless the crop has been contracted, finding a buyer can be a struggle, Federowich said.
“The hemp market just isn’t big enough,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger just barely apart.
“They always talk about the market getting bigger, doubling. But if it’s only this big and you double it, that’s not much.
“It just needs more time to grow. Canola took 20 years to get off the ground.”
Pellets for fuel
Coldstream Alfalfa Processing was recently awarded an ARDI grant of $47,700 to test the viability of converting its mothballed pelleting mill to make fuel for pellet stoves from biomass.
Possible feedstocks could include switchgrass and hemp hurd, the spongy core of the stalk that is left over after the fibre is processed.
With 11 pellet stove manufacturers in Manitoba and most of the pellets imported from outside the province, owner Chris Skuter said biomass pellets could offer home owners and businesses an alternative to fossil energy sources for heating without the bulk and mess of storing firewood.
But before full-scale use of the hemp hurd byproduct could begin, the proposed hemp processing plant must be built to ensure a steady, locally produced supply, he said.
“We need to have a plant before we can go ahead,” he said.
