A MALLEE farmer who planted his first round of hemp crops has hailed the environmentally friendly and diverse plant as “the crop of the future”, appealing to other local farmers to get on board.
Tony Smith recently planted two hectares of hemp, with plans to grow up to 50 hectares.
“We’ve had the farm for about 145 years, but the river over the last 15 years has been a little unreliable, with it going dry on us, so we wanted to look at a crop that isn’t going to perish if there was no water in the river,” he said.
“Hemp seemed to be the thing to go with. It is great for the environment, there are so many benefits to the crop compared to leucaena or cotton, and so many more things you can do with it.”
He said hemp had up to 60 different uses, but he was growing it for the fibre and the seeds.
“We will send it down to Melbourne and it will be used for building products,” he said.
“It can be used in hempcrete, which is used to build houses. They make boards out of it for flooring, it is used for installation, it is used for weed matting, it is used in the fire wall of cars because it is fireproof up to 4000 degrees, clothing – there are numerous uses.”
Mr Smith said hemp was also an environmentally friendly crop.
“Trees are renewable for building but it takes 10 years to grow a tree, they take carbon dioxide out of the air and produce oxygen and hemp does the same thing but better, and you need less of it to do the job a tree does,” he said.
“It also uses less water and makes your soil better once you grow it.”
Mr Smith said there were very few hemp farmers in the Mallee but he expected it to grow in popularity.
“It is not big at all because you have to go and get a license and jump through hoops to grow it,” he said.
“You have to have a good criminal record, have an audit done on your property and it can’t be too close to schools.
“It has to be three per cent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis) or below. They come and do a walk through of the crop three times a year and if the THC is over five per cent you have to destroy the crop.
“It’s a small industry now but they want more people to grow it in Australia, so they don’t have to import so much. They’d rather have an Australian market so I think it will grow quickly.”
