Dear Friends
I want to thank you for supporting Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm. It’s been a pretty amazing journey thus far, and I am grateful for your support.
We had a good harvest last year, and learned more. That’s to say, that our fiber crop last year was from new seed, it grew well, and we were able to hand harvest. We processed about 200 pounds of flower for tinctures , salves and teas, and are working to understand the subtle differences in the varieties.
The CBD ladies, from Sunrise Genetics, loved the north country, they were the largest and furthest north. That northern sun is good for plants.
We loved growing the CBD plants, but are committed to the work in the materials economy and the food economy. We are taking a whole plant approach.
That’s to say, that fiber is one part o the plant, herd another and then seed. The seed becomes hemp hearts, and that’s what we are looking at for pasta. We are working with the North Dakota State University to see about how to create our hemp pasta. We hope to bring the production here to the White Earth reservation.
Then we are working on the fiber part. Thats a crazy story. Who killed the hemp industry and where is the body? There was once a thriving hemp industry in North America, after all the word canvas comes from cannabis. That’s a lot of sails. The mystery of where is the body is what we’ve been trying to solve at Winona’s Hemp, and the neighboring Sisseton Dakota Oyate Nation is also interested in materials economy and hemp.
We continue our work on the mystery: In our three years of investigating, following interesting, dead end, and crazy leads, we are looking at European and Chinese technology, because the body has disappeared from the crime scene here. Remnants of an American hemp industry have been buried by seventy years of fossil fuel economics.
We had to look to China for our equipment. We purchased a Chinese decorticator and rope making equipment to begin some small scale production, and are also interested in buying a hemp brick maker. All of this can provide some locally scaled learning models which we hope to share at our Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute.
We are hoping to make a deep winter greenhouse using hemp brick construction and train some people in hemp construction. After all, if we are going to have millions of pounds of hurd, we might as well learn how to use it well.
With support from Patagonia, our best leads on making hemp textiles are in Europe. France and Belgium kept the textile industry going, including canvas. Linen canvas is still made in Belgium and is the highest quality canvas in the world. That’s where we are going. We are sending Don Wedll, one of our people, to England and Belgium in March to look at some equipment, and we may also attend the Eastern European Hemp Conference in the Czech Republic this fall. It’s possible that some of the equipment we might want or the scale we might want is in Eastern Europe. This is a mystery and we intend to solve it.
Our work in the upcoming month is to shore up seed varieties for this upcoming year, determine our fertilizer options and field varieties, assess options in food/pasta hemp, and develop a new round of business analysis. At the same time, we continue to pursue the mystery of processing,
The next economy, the New Green Revolution is going to be about cooperation, not competition. After all if you want to change the world you will need some friends.
Many people interested in the same questions will be joining us a the Indigenous Hemp Conference at the Maplelag Resort, Callaway MN on March 4, 2020.
Our goal is to develop an ecologically sound integrated materials economy using cannabis, focused on textiles, building materials and foods. That’s the whole plant approach. Some options seem to be highly energy intensive, others may use caustic chemicals, but we know that for thousands of years, cannabis has been an essential part of a materials economy. So we learn together. We are sure that tribal nations in North America can build a sustainable economy for the future.
As far as the broader economics, we are really not going to make a million bucks any time soon. But we are going to grow the New Green Revolution. That’s the cannabis economy. Minnesota issued seven permits in 2015, 550 in 2019. We hope to transform their enthusiasm to the materials economy. We will do this together.
We once had a choice between a carbohydrate economy and a hydrocarbon economy. The wrong choice was made, and now we begin again.
Hemp, or cannabis is a plant with l0,000 uses, and we are just relearning this opportunity to do something right. After all, if you could replace plastics in a materials economy, synthetics in the textile industry, and opioids in the drug industry, why wouldn’t you do that?
The plant corresponds to the needs of our society more than ever, it sequesters carbon at a rate higher than almost any other crop, can be used to create low carbon buildings, can feed you, clothe you, and fuel your tractor.
This is the New Green Revolution.
Thanks for joining us.
Miigwech,
Winona