Hemp: the super crop episode of the SRUC Podcast (Transcript)
00:00:00 Alexa Green
Welcome to another episode of The SRUC Podcast. My name is Alexa Green and I'm a Research Associate at SRUC’s Rural Policy Centre.
00:00:08 Alexa Green
On today's episode, we're going to be talking about hemp: the super crop; its potential markets, and the legislative hurdles that need to be overcome to grow the crop in Scotland.
00:00:21 Alexa Green
Today I'm joined by Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur who heads up SRUC's Biorefining and Advanced Materials Research Centre. Mark Boucher Gibbs, a Principal Consultant with SAC Consultancy, and Anna Mitchell, of Castleton Farm. Anna and her husband Ross grow hemp and sell hemp-based products like hemp seed oil from their farm shop on the outskirts of Laurencekirk in Aberdeenshire.
00:00:42 Alexa Green
Mark, if we could start with you. I wonder if you could begin by explaining to our listeners the benefits for Scottish farmers in growing hemp.
00:00:47 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
Yeah, sure. I was just doing a bit of research on the crops that are growing in Scotland at the moment and looking back at the government statistics on cropping over the last couple of years.
00:00:57 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And we're just predominantly cereal heavy in Scotland. We've got about just over 500,000 hectares of what you might arable crops and that would include your cereals, your oilseed rape, potatoes and and veg. At any one time 84% of that is either barley, wheat or oats. You know we talk about cereals as being an exhaustive crop.
00:01:18 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
They're not restorative in the same way that perhaps legumes are or other break crops. So there is a real need to bring in another crop such as hemp.
00:01:29 Alexa Green
And Vijay coming to you, it would be great if you could explain why hemp is such a useful crop.
00:01:34 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
Actually, hemp is a unique multipurpose crop.
00:01:53 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
It has the vast potential to make agriculture and materials related to the sector carbon neutral and provide huge economic benefits to farmers, especially from rural areas across the world, including Scotland. Currently it is being explored in building materials, biofuel, textile, fabric and even as a bioplastic materials as a potential substitute to traditional synthetic plastics.
00:02:19 Alexa Green
Anna, can you give us some insight into how the process of growing and producing products with hemp has been at Castleton Farm and share any challenges you've faced along the way.
00:02:29 Anna Mitchell
Well, it's been a learning curve. This was a completely new crop for us and new products for us to make and sell. We've had a lot of help from two local rapeseed growers who then produced oil. So they've been very helpful and the main product that we produce currently is a culinary hemp oil.
00:02:51 Anna Mitchell
Which we bottle and sell in our own farm shop and farmers’ markets. We are looking to make the oil into some other products such as mayonnaise, pesto, salad dressings. So we're just kind of at the start of that journey.
00:03:06 Alexa Green
And Mark, Anna, can you tell us a bit about how you would harvest hemp?
00:03:10 Anna Mitchell
As we use our combine harvester to harvest the crop, this is done normally in the end of September/beginning of October. The seeds go through the combine and then we mulch the straw the fibre back into the ground. The seeds are then cleaned, dressed and then go through the press, which extracts the oil from the seeds.
00:03:32 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
I've really been looking more at hemp as an industrial fibre crop, so here I'm really talking about if you're taking the crop to fibre stage rather than the seed. One of the attractions with hemp is that really tends to go in perhaps after other spring crops. So probably sewn around early May and it, of course, increases its biomass pretty quickly.
00:03:51 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And sort of August, September you'll then cut in the crop and the one downside I think we have at the moment is that it's then left on the ground for a period of four to six weeks to ret. And what we're wanting to do in that retting period is for sort-of the natural biology systems to start breaking down the crop such that when we come to decorticate it we can separate out the pith from the fibre.
00:04:19 Alexa Green
So Mark, you've used the term decorticate. Can you explain what that means?
00:04:25 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
Yeah. So when we talk about decortication, the fibre that is used in the industries that Vijay is talking about has to be extracted from the plant as a whole.
00:04:35 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
So if you can imagine you've got a six-foot piece of hemp stem. There will be fibre in that and there will be a pithy centre to it - and that's often referred to as the shiv.
00:04:47 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And the reason we decorticate is that we want to separate the fibre from the shiv. And the retting process we refer to is the period that we leave the crop on the ground after it's cut for that process to start happening biologically.
00:05:08 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
So that when the hemp is then fed into a decortication machine - and it is a mechanical process, so it is actually stripping the plant apart and separating out in the same way that you would sieve out different components - it sieves out the pith and leaves you with the fibre.
00:05:20 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And then you've got the byproducts of that, for example, that might be used for animal bedding or briquettes. So there are multiple uses other than obviously the fibre extracted.
00:05:33 Anna Mitchell
As for other products that might be possible, that would be maybe more through using the straw, the fibres. However, at the moment there's no decortication plants anywhere near us. So that's a massive hurdle to allow us to be able to use that, but there's definitely an opportunity going forward to be able to make some products from the fibres.
00:05:58 Alexa Green
Awesome and how accessible would you say these markets are to Scottish growers?
00:06:04 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
There's only probably upwards of 1,000 hectares growing nationally at the moment. There's plans afoot with the York University in Hemp 30 project to increase at a hundredfold over the next 10 years. So you know they're trying to get up to 30,000 hectares. But I think the important thing from farmer's point of view is to try and get into the added value side of the supply chain.
00:06:26 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And actually having barn full of uncorticated hemp obviously isn't optimising on the value of a decorticated product, and I think where a lot of the work will go, we'll be trying to increase these supply chains or improve the supply chain such that farmers can form cooperatives and perhaps decorticate the hemp and then sell the hemp in to industry as a decorticated product.
00:06:48 Alexa Green
And I believe, Vijay, that you recently started on a University Innovation Fund research project looking at how we can build a network of growers and other stakeholders in Scotland to maximise the benefits of this crop. How is that going?
00:07:01 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
It's going great.
00:07:02 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
We have been in communication with the few farmers and industries dealing with hemp. However, there are not majority of the farmers in this business at the moment. As you know, there are a lot of legislative issues.
00:07:23 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
We are currently working with one of the IBioIC-funded projects, with industrial partners being IGS and Cambond. There, we are looking into the use of hemp for insulation applications to replace traditional stainless steel or other materials.
00:07:32 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
We are trying to manufacture carbon neutral building materials in this project and these materials have the potential to replace aluminium, fibreglass, composites and other materials.
00:07:49 Alexa Green
That's great. Thanks for sharing more about that.
00:07:53 Alexa Green
So a question for Mark. Do you think that there is a specific role for hemp in the new agri-environmental schemes which could form part of Scottish Government’s new Agricultural Bill?
00:08:04 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
Potentially yes. It's often talked about hemp being used to reclaim perhaps unproductive ground.
00:08:14 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
I think the way that hemp grows not only is there a carbon story there, there's also an ability for the plant to sort-of pull nutrients out of the soil to increase organic matter through the carbon it sequesters.
00:08:24 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
So I think you know you growing hemp means that you're putting on less pesticides, less fungicides, less herbicides. The microbiota have a chance to improve in the soil. And when you're doing your carbon audits, for example, then you've got a crop that actually has very low nitrogen requirement.
00:08:48 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And when you think that typically 70 to 80% of farms emissions arrive from imported artificial fertilisers. There should be an incentive there to bring it into an environmental scheme, such that in the same way, perhaps that you have an overwinter stable followed by green manures, you could have an overwinter stubble followed by hemp.
00:09:09 Alexa Green
Can you tell us about the legislative environment that hemp is in and the other incentives that you think policymakers could use to increase uptake from farmers?
00:09:18 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
Well, at the moment there is a Home Office licencing requirement. It comes under the controlled drugs licencing requirements and the timescales for licencing that are in place at the moment slightly conflict with farmers’ requirements to plant sort-of late spring/early summer. Applications have to be made by February for approval to go forward to a an application stage for a licence and those are usually considered through March and April. And there have been some instances whereby the licence hasn't been issued in time for the crop to be planted.
00:09:49 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
So I think in terms of talking with the Home Office, it would be good to try and bring that forward, you know, to prior to Christmas. So we can get these licencing certificates in place.
00:10:00 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
It's not overly cheap, it's about £500-£600 to apply for a three-year licence. I think in the future hopefully the Home Office will become slightly more lax in terms of where the crop needs to be sited. At the moment they're saying it really needs to be away from public footpaths and sight lines from roads et cetera and that can be limiting for farmers.
00:10:20 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
So I'm sure as uptake comes requested more, they'll take that into account, that farmers obviously haven't all got that luxury.
00:10:29 Alexa Green
Great. So one final question to all of you. You've clearly demonstrated the benefits of hemp. But what do you think the main barriers are from stopping farmers from growing it? And how do you think these could be overcome? Anna? Maybe we can come to you.
00:10:46 Anna Mitchell
The legislation is complicated, so that's obviously a barrier to people starting to grow the crop and then at the moment there is definitely a bit of a niche market for the products that we're able to produce from it. So we need to get the products a bit more mainstream so that people can see that there is going to be a market for their crops.
00:11:06 Anna Mitchell
There is a great potential for this crop in Scotland. It's got great health and environmental benefits. And, you know, we're just at the start of a very long journey to get a market established for these products and you know, any help that could be given to help us do that would be greatly appreciated.
00:11:26 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
I would like to echo Anna that hemp has huge potential and it is a big challenge to find a good market for any of the product, including bio-oil or as well, bioplastic or another materials. So supply chain is a big challenge because when we go for large scale production we need to have a sufficient supply chain to convince industrial partner that we can address their needs.
I think the main restrictions are related to legislative rules where farmers need a licence to grow hemp. It's not so easy. So farmers need to go through a lot of bureaucratic things.
00:12:03 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
Also, there is lack of awareness among people about the benefit of hemp except medicinal one. Obviously people know lots of benefits of hemp, but like Anna said, now they are exploring the use of hemp-based fibres for some another application. So hemp has huge value.
00:12:20 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
Currently it's mainly being explored for CBD oil that we call cannabidiol derived from cannabis, and it is a natural remedy for many ailments. Also there are some issues related to supply chain, low profitability and lack of technical assistance like Anna was mentioning.
00:12:40 Professor Vijay Kumar Thakur
They don't have access how they can use process to extract these fibre more efficiently and then weather is also a challenge depending upon the location of the farms, so these are few challenges that need to be addressed.
00:13:00 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And I think one of the sort-of slight warning flags is OK, we know Scottish Scotland's climate is a bit more close window in terms of we don't get the perhaps open autumns that they do in the South. And I would have thought there will be perhaps talks as to how we can improve that or reduce that retting duration process in the field, so we don't have such risk exposure.
00:13:20 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
But then on the plus side, we are talking about using existing farm equipment. So you can simply just mow the crop leave it on the ground. You can rake it to dry it. You can windrow it and then you can bail it with a conventional bailer. So the farmer probably has most of this kit on farm already. There are modified mowers that will cut at two stage three heights, so cut at metre intervals. People are using those sort of modifications to improve the retting process.
00:13:54 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
But at the end of the day, you do have an end product which is bailed much in the same way that you would bail hail, straw and actually you're talking about a fairly bulky products. And I know hay and straw might go from, you know, the South East of England across to the West Country to the livestock guys.
00:14:14 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
But you have to take into account that you know, transport costs mean that really you want fairly localised infrastructure and I think half of the battle on the new crop like this is actually finding out who's doing what out there already.
00:14:29 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And networking, you know it's important that we link up with people like Vijay and the Hemp 30 project. There will be a need to upscale or on C-multiplication, on breeding, and that might mean hubs that supply into a local decortication plant at a cooperative style.
00:14:48 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And so you know, I say to policymakers, look, we need money for innovators to grow these potential cooperative hubs.
00:14:57 Mark Bowsher-Gibbs
And we need people to take the lead and get local hectarage built up in the knowledge that there is a supply chain in place.
00:15:04 Alexa Green
That's great. Thank you so much for such an interesting discussion. It was really great to have you all on today.
00:15:11 Alexa Green
SRUC's Rural Policy Centre is a knowledge hub for rural Scotland and we engage and collaborate with researchers, businesses and communities to share the latest knowledge with policymakers in Scotland. To find out more about our work, please visit us at www.sruc.ac.uk/RuralPolicyCentre or visit the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.