Seeing as hemp
-is a weed and has little trouble propogating
-can handle growing in extreme conditions, including inside the house of a neglectful tennant
-Needs very little water
-can be converted into very durable paper, fabric and even hard-surface material
-Is very obviously flammable and would make a good substitute for kindling
-and what many people don't know, is that it has little value as a narcotic save for the specific strains that are used for smoking (and even among those- hardly any have any potent effects).

We are insane not to drastically expand on it as a legitimate industry- as we are clearly in no position to be able to accommodate cotton farming and wood-based paper anymore.

We've investigated growing hemp on some of our company's buffer land, not so much as a carbon sink, but more for replacing our forage crops we use to make mulch hay for rehabilitating disturbed ground. It's one of those typical 'weeds' that will grow easily, but to produce a significantly dense crop is very difficult and in our case will require irrigation. Still keen to continue trials, but keep in mind there is no such thing as a plant that can just be dropped anywhere and 'hey presto' it's a dense forest. Temperature and water influence hemp as much as any other plant. It's easy to get carried away with it being a cure all.

I know its old history, but hemp was chased into the drug register by the emerging synthetic products early last century. DuPont's nylon is usually cast as the main villain in this story. Think nylon stockings and nylon rope, and ask yourself if WWII could have been won without either?
Today it is emerging as a viable fabric, especially when blended with cotton. Various products are appearing from jeans to t-shirts, from underwear to evening wear. It's not as fine as the old finest cotton or the new superfine blend of bamboo and silk, but it does offer an environmentally attractive alternative to water-hungry cotton, a plant known to require increasing use of chemical fertilisers.
Medicinally its worth is only beginning to be properly researched.
We have wasted a century focusing on hemp's minor use as a recreation drug and applying the epithets of sex-crazed and psycho-druggie to anyone who advocates it as a product.
Now its catch-up time. Hemp played an important role in our past, and, I predict, it will play an equally important role in our future

King Hazza – Your tenants may well have been neglecting the property maintenance, but that would be because they devoting all their energies to the close management of their needy wacky-tobaccy crops coddled in their hydroponic gro-tube humicribs in the chosen ceiling/closet. So to use this quip to SUPPORT the notion that real-world hemp crops should perform magnificently under neglectful management compounds several logical flaws.

Halduell, if I was a cross dresser I daresay I’d be pleased with DuPont's actions, at least in regard to the preferred material for making stockings. And do you and King Hazza really believe the incessant hype about the plant’s alleged unnatural capacity to grow without normal rations of nutrient, water and management per unit dry weight? At what time of the day do you suspend your disbelief? When you get up? Sure some plants have slightly higher water use efficiency than some others but the claims are for an order of magnitude improvement; which is rubbish.

Yellow Kraken is right on the mark. As one who has actually tried growing it, she/he has found that it needs normal agricultural inputs of nutrients, water, cultivation, competition control (weeds) and protection from pests and diseases.

Proposals to produce hemp as a financially viable industrial feedstock will require reallocation of large tracts of cropping land (suited to combine harvester or similar) committed to the enterprise for a long term, development of protection (chemical, breeding, biotechnology or IPM) from whichever pest or disease proves to be its plague nemesis, major upgrade of road and water infrastructures, impact on the aesthetic of whichever location is finally chosen for the establishment of a major bio-refinery, one that is owned and operated by a profit-motivated corporation.

All of which I have no problem with but other biomass enterprises have been baselessly pilloried by Leigh and many others on the basis of opposition to all the concepts in the above paragraph. Because, believe me, large scale hemp production and processing into fibre or diesel will NOT be done on a cottage industry basis by a legion of idealistic Australian yeo-womyn/men.