HEMP BOUND Live
Admittedly the competition is weak with only “Erik Estrada Sings the Standards” and “Yo Gabba Gabba On Ice” sharing the road this fall, but you really do want to check out the Hemp Bound live event tour. You don’t even need a babysitter: it’s family friendly except for a couple of photos of Harry Anslinger.
The rollicking and rigorous, funny and timely Hemp Bound show (like the book, only with slides and 17% more jokes) discusses a model for tri-cropping hemp. That means three uses for one harvest: seed oil (very profitable to Canadian farmers as we speak), fiber (hemp fiber is in Mercedes door panels today) and energy (through biomass gasification).
Here’s a sample as aired on CSPAN following a recent event in Denver. I’ve looked into it, and it’s pretty rare for a domestic hemp crop blessing to be broadcast on national TV. Same with a display of an 18th century hemp-bound book in mint condition. And for anyone not named Harrelson to be dressed head to toe in hemp.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?318921-1/book-discussion-hemp-bound
Hemp is returning so briskly that even I have trouble keeping up. Each day brings new developments, in policy and in the fields. At every Hemp Bound event so far, someone has approached me to discuss birthing some leg of that tri-cropping model that (I still can’t believe this) Willie Nelson calls “a blueprint for the America of the future.”
At the Colorado Hemp Expo in April, a fellow collared me at the refreshment stand and said, “I came here from New York to figure out where to invest in hemp and now I realize I want to wholesale those gasification units to farmers.”
Game on. This is not a dream. It is really happening. I have a dozen more stores like that, and the book is just out.
The tour is bouncing from South Carolina to Slovenia, but it starts in Hawaii. That one is called the inaugural Maui Hemp is Hope Conference and Workshop, and it’s close to my heart.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/hemp-is-hope-workshop-on-maui
The whole first class shebang is a labor of love by the the nonprofit Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance. Those good folks, with help from the Maui Farmers Union and the University of Hawaii Maui, are crowd funding this week to defray costs as they bring in hemp experts from around the world to the place that might need hemp the most: for soil remediation, local food and energy. Hawaii is on it — one of 15 current hemp cultivation states.
Then the tour moves to the 21st Seattle HempFest, before touching down in once and future hemp industry powerhouse Pennsylvania (Twice: I’ll beat the Mother Earth News Fair and at Franklin and Marshall College).
Then in to DC (keynoting the Hemp Industry Association Conference), Portland, California, and back to Colorado in October — in time for the first state-sanctioned commercial hemp harvest in the United States this century.
I’m excited about these upcoming two dozen tour stops, because they mean hemp is returning to the soil planet-wide. Once you read Hemp Bound, you realize that this is pretty much crucial for humanity’s survival. I’m particularly psyched to bid goodbye to petroleum-based plastics and chemical-soaked construction materials. Hemp’s out-performance of these is well documented in the book.
All of the fall and winter events are here at:
http://dougfine.com/events/upcoming/
And there you can also make contact if you’d like to book an open date.
See y’all there, if I can get the Monsoon-erased Funky Butte Ranch back diamond driveway re-engineered. The annual and expensive desert havoc is worth it, for the moisture in the cells and the hummingbirds in the datura blossoms alone.
-Doug
Funky Butte Ranch, NM
Hawaii State Senator Cynthia Thielen (R-Oahu) Tours a Belgian Hemp Farm
Doug Fine, Solar-powered Goat Herder (I-Land of Enchantment), Tours a Belgian Hemp Farm. (Farmer: Ingrid Maris)