Colorado farmer harvests first US commercial hemp crop in 56 years

[Jesus Malverde]

Colorado farmer Ryan Loflin made history last weekend by harvesting the nation's first commercial hemp crop in 56 years.

Hemp advocates said Loflin's harvest is a landmark event that could one day lead to larger-scale domestic farming of hemp for industrial uses such as food additives, cosmetics and building materials.

Hemp is genetically related to marijuana but contains only trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive substance that gets marijuana users high.

Loflin's 55-acre crop in southeastern Colorado's Baca County won't yield large amounts of hemp-seed oil and other by-products but is "quite significant symbolically," said Tom Murphy, national outreach coordinator for advocacy group Vote Hemp.

http://www.willitsnews.com/marijuananews/ci_24265917/colorado-farmer-harvests-first-us-commercial-hemp-crop

[srican69]

1. hemp is not the same as pot

[Bandit]

7. Hemp is EXACTLY the same as Pot, just with much lower THC elements

It was designed for it's fiber and oils but it is Cannabis Sativa.

[Puzzledtraveller]

2. The R's put a bill up here and it was shot down.

By our D governor, wth.

[truedelphi]

3. This is not true. A man living in the Sioux Nation Reservation

Was doing this, and the Bush Administration shot him down. Worse than that, the Obama/Holder Admin allowed the indictment to stand against him...

The crop being planted was the first commercial harvest. And it allowed the man to hire others off the reservation into good paying jobs.

The individual had to spend all of his profits on legal fees to avoid doing hard time.

End the damn war on some drugs.

[Jesus Malverde]

8. I think the difference the feds got to the SD field before it could be harvested properly...nt

[kestrel91316]

4. That was fast!! I guess it really IS just a weed, lol.

[flowerbells]

5. I remember hemp rope

Now we get sisal rope, but I remember hemp rope, back in the 1940s and 50s.

[kentauros]

6. We had some 2" hemp rope

that we used for taking down all of our 80+ year old post oak trees (they died of a disease.) It took the weight of those sections with only a little stretching. I can't estimate the weight of those sections (some were about eight feet long) but one was heavy enough that when it was accidentally dropped, it punched a hole in our driveway! And yet that hemp rope held up those sections without breaking.

I'll have to ask my father if he still has that rope, and when he got it. We were still using it up to the 1980s