Can Joey Pendleton Restore Hemp in Kentucky?

Two hundred years ago, commercial hemp was the biggest industry in Kentucky - bigger than coal, bigger than tobacco, bigger than bourbon, bigger than horses.

Kentuckians made virtually everything from hemp: clothing, rope, paper, shoes, floor covering, horse bedding, soap and shampoo, even building material.

Today, people all over the world are benefitting from products made from commercial hemp - made in Canada, not Kentucky. It's long past time that changed.

Within the next three weeks, State Sen. Joey Pendleton plans to take a group of Kentucky farmers to study the industrial hemp trade in Canada where the crop has been grown legally for the past 10 years.

Pendleton, D-Hopkinsville, has introduced a bill for 2010, renewing a push to legalize industrial hemp in Kentucky as a cash crop and as a source for alternative fuels.

"The timing is right," Pendleton said. "It would give farmers another crop to raise." Production of hemp is already legal for research purposes in Kentucky but is untried due to federal barriers.

Pendleton's bill comes at a time when federal legislation decriminalizing hemp for industrial use has been introduced in Congress and proponents are encouraged by stances taken by the Obama Administration.

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The bill calls for an assessment fee of $5 per acre for every acre of industrial hemp grown, with a minimum fee of $150, to be divided equally between the state and the appropriate sheriff's department.

Phillip Garnett, a Christian County farmer, said he plans to go to Canada with Pendleton to investigate industrial hemp farming as a potential "new source of income and energy." Pendleton said he'd pay for his portion of the trip.

Garnett who raises tobacco, corn, wheat, and soybeans, said he wants to know more about the economics before he would consider raising industrial hemp. But he said "I'm always looking for alternative crops, and it sounds like it makes sense."

Pendleton says he sees new hope that federal barriers will be lessened, pointing to positions taken by the Obama administration.

In February, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the federal government was going to yield medical marijuana jurisdiction to states. As a state lawmaker in Illinois, Barack Obama voted for a resolution urging Congress to allow the production of industrial hemp.

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Kentucky is one of eight states that allows hemp research or production.

The federal government has given North Dakota State University permission to grow industrial hemp for research purposes under strict security measures, but money has been an issue.

In Kentucky, a similar bill filed in the 2009 General Assembly by Pendleton was not given a hearing.

But for 2010, state State Sen. David P. Givens, R-Greensburg, the chair of the Senate Agricultural Committee, said he is interested in seeing new economic studies.

The most prominent studies on the profitability of industrialized hemp in Kentucky are a decade old. They reached conflicting conclusions.

Read the whole thing.

Hemp still grows wild virtually everywhere in Kentucky; you can find it in most fence rows, where farmers have given up trying to kill the stubborn, um, weed. Go ahead and smoke it if you want, but given hemp's lack of THC, you'll get a better high from dandelion weeds.

Read about the Kentucky Hemp Museum here.