SALEM — Oregon is about to become the first Western state to permit its farmers to grow industrial hemp.
The owner of a business that makes hemp-based clothing, [Dena] Purich is excited about the possibility that the supply chain is one step closer to running from Oregon farmers to her Eugene-based Earthbound Creations. Right now, she and her two employees design and assemble men’s sports shirts, women’s skirts and other garments from hemp that’s grown in China, woven or knitted there into 100-yard bolts, and shipped across the Pacific Ocean.
State Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Eugene Democrat who championed Oregon’s hemp bill, did the same thing every session going back to 1997. Just as the issue moved from the fringes to the mainstream in Salem, Prozanski said he thinks recent action in statehouses, along with growing public acceptance of hemp as an industrial resource, will help compel Congress and the Obama administration to follow suit at the federal level.
“All that will have a very positive impact on getting things shifted and changed at the federal level,” Prozanski said. “I expect to see things change there within the next two years.”
A bill introduced this year in Congress with bipartisan sponsorship would make it legal for American farmers to resume growing hemp. An act of Congress would be unnecessary if the Obama administration decided to rule that industrial hemp no longer should be considered a Schedule 1 controlled substance, as it has been since 1970. Advocates of such a move, including Prozanski, say that’s the most sensible approach.
Oregon is not the best place in America to grow hemp. Hemp grows well in places where corn grows well, and the Pacific Northwest, rainy as it is, is fairly dry during the summer growing months. In Canada, Manitoba and Saskatchewan grow the majority of hemp and British Columbia, similar in weather to Oregon, only grows 2% of the nation’s crop.
However, Oregon has a natural base of hemp product manufacturing and hemp product consumers. We have timber mills lying dormant that could easily be converted to making hemp pressboard (strong as steel, light as wood) and companies that are already making hemp clothing, like Earthbound Creations, and hempseed and hemp-oil based foods and skin care products. We’ve got a very eco-conscious population that will buy up that stuff in a second.
So growing hemp in Oregon in places like the Willamette Valley, with access to irrigation, will be economically attractive to keep the supply of raw material close to the manufacturers. Especially in the first few years when only seven states have laws on the books ready to grow hemp from Day One.
