The World’s Most Understood Crop: Industrial Hemp and its Economic Benefits
When most people hear the word hemp the first thing that comes to mind is marijuana. While hemp and marijuana are of the same plant species, Cannabis Sativa, they are different plants with their own chemical makeup. Hemp has been known as one of the world’s greatest agricultural crops of all time with a wide variety of uses. Unfortunately the United States still sees hemp as drug and the manufacturing of hemp is still illegal today. The United States is outlawing one of the most economically beneficial and functional crops of all times because of its cousin marijuana.
Hemp was the world’s greatest agricultural crop for more than 1000 years before Christ until 1883 AD (Herer). The manufacturing and cultivation of hemp has been used for thousands of products and many different industries including producing a majority of the world’s fabric, fiber, oil, paper, and even food. The earliest known fabric was made of hemp around 8000 BC (Herer). Ninety percent of all ships' sails from at least the fifth century BC until long after the invention of the steam engines in the mid- to late-19th century were made from hemp (Herer). Many of the ships’ logs, maps, and charts were made on hemp paper from the time of Columbus to the early 1900s (Herer). In the first century AD, the Chinese found that hemp paper lasted 50 to 100 times longer than most preparations of papyrus and that it was 100 times easier and cheaper to make (Herer). Eighty percent of all humankind's textiles and fabrics for clothes, tents, linens, rugs, drapes, quilts, bed sheets, towels and diapers were made principally from cannabis fibers in much of the world until the 20th century (Herer). Presidents Washington and Jefferson both grew hemp and Americans were even legally bound to grow during the Colonial Era and Early Republic (Hemp