I couldn’t possibly drive south without my first stop being my best friend Hanna’s hemp farm. It’s an hour south of home and she’s been inviting me to come down for the past 6 months and somehow I just never got around to it, but I am SO glad that i finally made it there. I’ve been watching Hanna devote so much love and passion and focus Into this project since she began it with two other guys and to see the fruits of her efforts I felt a lot a lot a lot proud of her. This is a girl who is going to change the world, one little rainbow sparkle at a time.
You know those moments in life where you are struck by the acute feeling that you are living inside of a sculpture? You look around and it is as if everything you see is pure art? That is how it feels to witness the hemp farm. These people, such rich and golden characters, playing out their roles upon a backdrop of this great big hemp crop which is contrasted so strongly by the endless acres of monoculture soy that surround it.
Industrial hemp has only recently been legalised in Australia and it is going off with a bang. Food grade hemp is hitting the shelves everywhere and many brands are introducing a hemp product into their range. Look out for it on the menu in your favourite cafe, it’s invading kitchens everywhere! And for good reason! Hemp is a “complete” protein meaning it is not only high in protein (seeds 25%, powder 50%) but it also contains the amino acids that the body needs to break down the protein and make it usable. Infact, the body needs 9 “essential” amino acids from the diet to function properly, as it can’t make them itself and guess what? Hemp has every single one. That’s right, all 9! The seeds are also rich in essential fatty acids and the omega-3 and 6 in hemp is in the exact ratio 3:1 that the body needs to absorb it! No wonder hemp food is all a-go!
The hemp farm here started as a collective between a few different people with the intention of producing organic industrial hemp fibre in a permaculture/polyculture context. Hemp fibre is one of the oldest known plant fibres to be used by man with evidence dating to 10,000 years ago. The fibre is the strongest and longest plant fibre in the world and can be used to make anything, from clothes to houses to cars! Actually Henry Ford (the founder of the ford car company) created a bio-plastic car in 1941 that ran off a fuel made of hemp and other plant derivatives. The body of the car was also made in part from hemp. He was a big hemp supporter and even had his own crops! His vision was to “grow automobiles from the soil”. Unfortunately as the cultivation of hemp was outlawed in 1937 it was impractical for the company to mass-produce a car that was heavily dependant on an illegal crop, however with the new changes to hemp legislation a French company is re-looking at the original design so watch that space!
Most importantly I feel, Hemp use can reduce global warming. Yep, you heard me. It can not only prevent it but has the potential to actually turn the ship around. It sequesters phenomenally large amounts of carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere per acre and locks it up inside it’s fibres. It’s biomass is 40% carbon! And the truly great thing about industrial hemp is that carbon will be locked up in the end product such as building materials and cars instead of re-entering the atmosphere where it captures heat. Imagine if our houses and cars and clothes actually reduced atmospheric carbon just by their very existence! How wonderful!
So all this being said it’s no wonder I think that Hanna and Leon are complete legends for getting involved and birthing their very own hemp farm. And what a beautiful farm it is. Surrounded by beautiful swamp box country with rows and rows of glorious hemp, it’s like something out of a dream! But they don’t just grow hemp, they also grow delicious big juicy watermelons and bucket-loads of tomatoes. As time goes on they aim to experiment with growing more and more species in situ with the hemp to showcase how hemp can be grown as a polyculture. Awesome!!! And what’s even more impressive is these guys are just doing it. By hand. Grassroots style. They’re not funded by anyone, they’re just a group of down-to-earth beautiful humans who recognise that things like this need to be done to make the world a better place, so they’re picking up their shovels and doing it.
Currently the farm is working on upgrading it’s watering system and getting proper irrigation online and mulching, mulching, mulching as a defense against those voracious summer weeds. I really hope we’ll be back in time for the hemp harvest and I can’t wait to see what this crop gets turned into after it’s processed!
“Why use up the forests, which were centuries in the making, and the mines, which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?” ~ Henry Ford
Food Oasis 