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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norrie with you. Filmmaker Doug find back with us after about four years. He's also a best selling author Regenerative hemp Farmer and solar Powered goat Herder. His latest book, American Hemp Farmer, was nominated as the Santa Fe Reporter's Book of the Year and is now a featured documentary that has won the Best New Mexico Documentary at the twenty twenty four
Santa Fe Film Festival. Willie Nelson calls Doug's work a blueprint for the America of the future, and Doug's focus for fifteen years plus has been sustainable living for regular folks. Doug, welcome back, have you been?
Oh? Thanks so much for having me back, George. Life is great here in New Mexico.
Thank you, looking forward to this tonight. Exactly what is a solar powered goat herder?
I guess you could say we're all solar powered, right, I mean, we need that son. But having grown up in the New York cub Verbs and looking at my life today with solar panels on the roof doing goats, giving us our you know, zero carbon mile local milk, and homeschooling the kids and all that stuff. It's a different lifestyle than I would have expected when I when I started.
Out, well, good, good for you. Now hamp been Cannabis marijuana virtually the same, except there's a difference in the THC levels right as one.
Hundred percent correct. The only difference throughout history, people generally didn't have a delineation, you know. I started in modern modern times when when psychoactive cannabis was was banned for seventy seven or so years, But for most of history, people just used the plant for what it was useful for, whether it was rope, clothing or ceremonial.
Now, the hemp was legal back in the early thirties until William Randolph Hurst decided to try to get this thing illegal. What happened.
The head of alcohol Prohibition, Henry Anslinger, had on his hands, a sizable budget and a lot of people that he wanted to keep their jobs when alcohol Prohibition ended, and it was sort of an explicit effort alongside some yellow journalism, as you mentioned, with Hurst, to just sort of create a problem that didn't exist. Take one of humanity's longest utilized plants and sort of make it enemy of the people,
and that really sunk in. You know, some people still feel that way, and it took a while for me to realize just how useful this plant is. I mean, I'm even wearing hemp clothing right now.
I remember years ago, I was doing my local Nighthawks show at Saint Louis and I had a guy on who was processing hemp as fuel, and he was driving around Saint Louis and what he called his hemp Mobile. And the thing worked. It really ran.
On a diesel engine. It runs great. I can vouch for it too. Some colleagues of mine bought, you know, third hand, an old Mercedes limo that supposedly used to belong to the wife of Philippine ex Filippine dictator Marcos and Melda Marcos's limo, and they put it was a diesel, it has to be a diesel engine, and they put hempseed oil on it and I wrote in it and it drove smooth and quietly, So I can vouch that
that really really works. The issue being hempseed oil is such an incredible nutritive component, just straight up food for the whole family. That the question is, huh, do we eat it or put it in our vehicles?
Doug put things in perspective for us in terms of legality. Now with marijuana, cannabis, and hemp, where does all that stand? What's legal? What isn't?
The hemp plant, which at this moment means a very low level of the as we discussed, the psychoactive THHC is fully legal in all fifty states. The catch is, it's a catch I don't like, but it's a reality. If one wants to cultivate it, one has to get a permit from the government, which comes to inspect your ranch. I'm a big fan of government coming on my property. They come once a year when you have a state ham program, and they take a sample to make sure
that the plant is below that THHD level. Given that I only cultivate when I when I'm cultivating here on the ranch, I only cultivate for things like food, seed development, and fiber, there's nothing psychoactive. It's odd. It's not to my kids. They're saying, right next to it, we're grow the hemp, we grow tomatoes, and right next to that we grow beans. Why is the government coming here to test this other food that we eat this seed. So it's it's legal about you know, you might say with
an asterisk. When it comes to psychoactive cannabis, it's it's there. There's a road to legality. Uh. It was recently changed in that federal scheduling of narcotics from Schedule one the most dangerous to Schedule two. But it's fully legal in many states, including my state of New Mexico. There's less regulation uh for growing personal quantities of psychoactive cannabis than there is if you want to grow hemp for food.
And why, Doug, have you gotten behind this push to get the American farmer to grow more hemp? What's what's the benefit here?
There's a benefit to us the customer, and there's a benefit to farmers. I'll start with us. Hemp speed has a what many nutritions consider an ideal balance of omega fatty acids, making a nine, six and three. So in other words, it's very good, good for you. It has gamma in aic acid in it, which is difficult to find in foods that aren't meat. I happen to eat meat, but for those who don't, it's a compound associated with anti inflammatory properties and other health bearing properties. So it's
a genuine, genuine super food. So there's a benefit to us. You know, there's there's a struggle around the world really with the diabetes obesity. Hemp is really a positive on that nutritively. The other reason why I got behind it so strongly is that many farmers is you know, no news to anyone. We we all know there's a farm aid. We need a farm aid because farmers need aid. Farmers, especially independent farmers, are struggling. And because hemp has a
high value. If these regulatory hurdles can be erase and hemp is cultivated a critical critical mass, I'm talking about you know, millions and millions of acres, because we have several hundred million acres of corn, soy, and wheat and we don't necessarily want to eliminate those. But if we get hemp into that those heavy hitter into the ballpark of acreage that's going to be I mean a lot of family farms in rural communities have a chance in economic recovery.
Interesting take. Can hemp also be used as paper?
It sure can. In fact, I have and used as stationary part hemp paper, it's about thirty percent hemp. The draft of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson was written on hemp. It was because the fibers were so very common. It was tended to be pulped into lower grade paper, no less thirty or usable. But when you actually wanted to tell the king you were, you know, declaring independence, then you kind of put it on parchment
or something super fancy like that. But hemp was a go to And I can tell you from researching for the American Hemp Farmer film and book. I'm very lucky to be invited to George Washington's Mount Vernon estate, where again, for the first time since seventeen ninety nine, hemp has been cultivated. George Washington, our first president, was a tremendous fan of hemp. It's not very widely known why he
was such a fan of it. It's because he used it in his fishing netting when he fished the Potomac River, which sometimes provided the majority of his Mount Vernon farming income. So hemp was very, very valuable to our founding fathers.
And I had also heard that hearst back in the thirties. One of the other reasons he didn't want Hemp around is because he owned a lot of forestry and was manufacturing his own paper mills for his newspapers, and he didn't want Hamp to get in the way of that. Is that true?
Well? You know, I when I when I when you, when you hear that part of the history, you you you think it very likely is true. I often say when I hear some of the stuff of like well and may connect the dots. He didn't like Himp. He did have investments in these other things. Was an obvious conflict of interest, you know, contributing to this terrible journalism
that villainized one of humanity's longest uh cultivated plants. But I'll tell you, George, if I had a time machine, that would be a place I'd go, some sort of wood panels club where the where the uh where the you know uh prominent business folk of the day gathered. I'm sure over a brandy he might have admitted that just just that. But thank heaven, uh, Hemp is back.
I have the high ranking person at Mount Vernon. What would George Washington say if he had heard Hemp had been banned and she said he would he would think that was criminal.
Absolutely, so it's legal. Now what are you proposing?
First and foremost lowering some regulations to make it easier for farmers to cultivate hemp, especially independent farmers. But I'll tell you how I would love to see it used. In the American Hemp Farmer film, we profile these farm young newlyweds in Vermont and they grow farm to shelf organic hemp. They grow from the flower side of the plant. Oh, there's you know, there's multiple parts of the plants that
are very marketable. We've already talked about the seed, which is pure food and by the way, no THHC or psychoactivity in that. You know, children can eat hempsey and do you eat hemp seed? It's to go to kind of food before soccer practice in many parts of the world. So that's the seed side. But in the film We Cultivate, we cover these farmers in Vermont who grow for the flower components non psychoactive with their called cannabinoids within the flour,
such as CBD. Many people have heard of CBD since it's popularly used for natural pain reduction and that kind of thing. So in answer your question of what I'd
like to see or flour. I'd like to see many, many independent farmers bringing value to their communities by not just selling a raw farm commodity to a middleman and kind of not making much money, not doing much for their community, but rather marketing farm to product their hemp CBD products so that they the farmers, receive eighty ninety percent of the dollar that we customers pay instead of the ten cents or so that most farmers, let's say, received for their corn. And the only other side of
the plants we haven't mentioned two things. One is fiber. Fiber is tricky because it requires large acreage. Right now, China kind of lea it's the fineberg market. But hemp clothing, I can tell you it's extremely comfortable. I'm wearing jeans right now as the original Levi's were made from hemp, and it's unbelievably durable. I will still be wearing the same pair of hemp jeans in ten years. They're not going to rip. Their extremely strong. And the last side
of the plant that's really important are the roots. We have a lot of stress included soils. Obviously around the nation and around the world, hemp has a remarkable quality as what's known as a Fido remediator a clean soil.
And we can talk more about that in the specifics of that and studies that have shown that, but for now, to answer your question, what I would like to see is when we look at farm reports, farm markets and we think about these major crops that are important to America's food supplying farm farm economy, that HEMP be up there with the big the big players like a corn, soy and wheat and cotton.
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