Free Hemp Bound by Doug Fine Page B

harvest.
    Plants, I had previously thought, go in the garden. They don’t go into the manufacture of heavy machinery. To me, what I was looking at was as strange as a space shuttle or a senator being made out of industrial cannabis.
    â€œIt’ll make a lighter, stronger, and considerably more fuel-efficient vehicle than the usual composites that go into heavy industrial structural components today,” Potter told me. “And it’s grown by the farmers from the material it’s going to harvest.”
    That’s not just a cute locavore gesture. “Natural fibers are cheaper than synthetic fibers, to start,” Potter explained. “And this tractor’s body embodies a lot less energy in production than synthetic fiberglass body components.” Meaning, he said, “It off-gases far less carbon in production. Fiberglass is an energy-intensive process to make.”
    â€œWhy do you think The Hemp Reaper or whatever you’re calling it will result in greater fuel efficiency?” I asked.
    Potter pointed at a nearby hunk of “traditional” plastic. “Because it’s 30 percent lighter than that synthetic composite. That will translate to greatly increased fuel efficiency in the vehicle.” (Also, as we’ll see, it can one day be fueled by hemp.)
    Then he laid the zinger on me when I asked as skeptically as I could, “Are we really going to see hemp semi trucks? Hemp airplanes? Hemp as a major industrial component competing with or even replacing the major materials of today like steel, fiberglass, and petroleum-based plastics?”
    â€œI think it’s absolutely inevitable,” Potter said confidently and without pause. “It’s the only way we’re going to have structural materials in the future. We can’t rely on fossil sources anymore.”
    The smart men and women at the vanguard of biocomposite research are on the case. “We’ve moved beyond the experimental with this project,” Potter said, clomping the clear-finished hemp fiber tractor hood again. “We’re into the implementation of these things. This is going to be a commercial product.”
    Potter explained that, although the CIC is a nonprofit and government-funded, the center’s teams are allowed to be entrepreneurial. So when the tractor body’s field-testing is done, they’ll likely partner with a commercial vehicle-production company on the engine, transmission, electronics, and drive train—the moving parts, in other words. “Or,” he said, “you can buy the hemp body from us and design your own vehicle.”
    Holey Gazoley, I can’t wait to see that in the John Deere or Caterpillar showroom. A documentary called Government Grown mentions that International Harvester once made a combine that worked “with the tallest hemp stalks.” Surely that blueprint is somewhere.
    My hope is that the CIC and its partners will work the necessary features into the final product and release it on a commercial scale. That’d certainly be useful to our hemp pioneer Grant Dyck, whose harvesting equipment burst into flames (twice) in 2012. I hereby offer my online handle of Organic Cowboy as the tractor’s model name in exchange for a reasonable franchising fee. Though The Hemp Reaper is pretty good, too.
    I’m kind of expecting a call on one of these, based on Potter’s industrial intelligence report. “We have automotive industry designers coming by almost on a weekly basis asking, ‘When are these materials going to be ready?’” he told me.
    To address industry interest in all of its work, Potter said the CIC is developing a project called FibreCITY, which is a replicable franchising system for anyone who wants to open a fiber-processing facility “appropriate to their regional cellulosic needs in Kentucky, Australia, or China.” Could be you.
    That morning’s tour made me further