Streaming TV shows and movies directly to your home is a breeze with Netflix. As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch TV and movies on your PC, Mac, mobile device, or television. Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to Netflix dot com slash stuff and sign up today. Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, how
does hamp work? When most people think about fibers for cloth, what they think about is things like cotton or wool. With cotton and wool, you can comb them out, spin them and create thread very easily. This thread is great for making cloth that's soft to the skin, but it's not very strong. Hamp, on the other hand, is a lot like flax and flaxes where linning comes from. In both hemp and flax, the fibers are in the stock of the plant. The fibers are something like the threads
you see in a stock of celery. Their long, stringy and tough to get at. The fibers you comb them out of the woody part of the dried stock. The fibers tend to be coarser than cotton or wool. But they are very strong. This strength makes hemp great for things like rope. The reason why hemp shows up in organic magazines and catalogs is because it's very friendly to the environment. For example, environmentally conscious people like these aspects
of hemp. First, cotton raised in the United States requires millions of pounds of pesticides of fertilizers. It's a very intensive crop that takes a lot out of land. Bugs like bowl weevils love cotton, and they must be killed with insecticides. Hemp, on the other hand, is a weed. You can grow hemp using much less fertilizer and pesticide. Second, hemp fibers can be used in many different ways. With hemp. You can make cloth, paper, cardboard, fiber board, and lots
of other stuff. By using hemp for paper and construction materials, pressure is removed from forests. Hemp also grows much faster and more densely than trees do. The problem with hemp is that the hemp plant is also known as the cannabis plant, which is also known as the marijuana plant. This connection to marijuana is what makes hemp such a
hot issue in the United States. There are varieties of fiber hemp that eliminate the drug component of the plant to a large degree, But the concern is that it would be very easy to hide drug plants in a crop of fiber plants. So at the moment, hemp production in the United States is stalled and it's a source of continuous debate. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email
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