Legal Kentucky Hemp Gets Real; Let the Best Product Win the Market

For years, Kentucky farmers have ground their teeth down to stubs watching Canadian hemp farmers rank in the profits on the crop that grows nearly wild here in Kentucky. No more.

Janet Patton at the Herald:

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture is gearing up to grow hemp this year after a letter from Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway indicates that farmers will be allowed to sell what they produce.

The state began making plans after President Barack Obama signed the U.S. Farm Bill in February that included language at the behest of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville, to allow universities and state agriculture departments to grow research plots of hemp.

On Tuesday, Conway's office sent Agriculture Commissioner James Comer an advisory letter indicating that "absent any federal guidance to the contrary, (the Farm Bill) appears to exempt hemp pilot programs from the Controlled Substances Act, allowing the sale of hemp in Kentucky by those programs."

Comer said this will make a world of difference. Before, he said, some farmers were worried that they might have to destroy the crop. But the bill calls for researching marketability, so selling appears to be OK, Conway's office concluded.

Look out: don't get crushed by the stampede of Kentucky farmers running to sign up for hemp licenses. Because while all marijuana can do is relieve pain, industrial hemp can replace virtually every petroleum-based product in the economy:

• Food, both indirectly as fodder for cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep and other animals we eat, and directly  in many delicious dishes  at home and in restaurants.
• Fuel, in all the different forms needs for cars, for airplanes, for ships, for trains and for industrial machine.
• Energy, as a substitute for oil, gas, biomass, ethanol or anything else to operate energy-generating plants that keep the lights on in your house and the battery working in your computer
• Plastic, in the form of a nearly infinitely flexible material that now requires petroleum to manufacture everything from medicines and pharamaceuticals to cosmetics, pesticides, diapers, cell phones and doggie toys.

Hemp - industrial hemp growing like a weed right here in Kentucky - is going to need about one growing season to put the entire fossil fuel industry out of business.

And that's why the stampede right behind the one for licenses is going to be the one of million-dollar lobbyists screaming their lies about how hemp is useless and dangerous and unamerican and communist and muslinterrist and also gives you AIDs.