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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> With Hemp you cut out ALL the arguments you've listed for folks not getting 
> off their arses and producing an alternative fuel.  

As Gene Logsdon says in his book "All Flesh is Grass" --- ''The corn and 
soybean monopoly looks to ethanol as its lifesaver, but studies like those 
done by 
the Land Institure of Kansas suggest that when all is said and done, it a 
takes about a gallon of ethanol to make a gallon of ethanol.'

Hemp is different.  But it only mitigates the arguments, it doesn't cut them 
out.  Unlike corn, hemp CAN have a positive Energy Retrun on Energy Invested. 
 
There have been reports of hemp yielding as high as 300 gallons of oil per 
acre. But these were very intensely cultivated, and therefore very expensive, 
experimental plantings and an energy intensive extraction process.  Even at 
300 
gallons, it was not necessarily a postive return on energy invested.

If you cold press hempseed, you get far less oil, but it is the highest 
quality and can be used without refinement.  But the yield is closer to 20 
gallons 
per acre if it is grown  with little chemical fertilizer, little added water, 
and little machinery, and processed without adding heat and chemicals.  

So hempseed would help the fuel situation a little, the general fuel 
situation, that is.  But only a little.  If every available bit of idle land 
was 
devoted to hemp cultivation, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared 
to the 
1.2 billion gallons of oil the US uses every day (29 million barrels @ 42 
gallons a barrel).  

Although no one is suggesting that our fuel use continue unabated and be 
supplied entirely by hemp, it is instructive to reailze that even if we got 
the 
experimental high yield of oil at 300 gal/acre and it cost us nothing in 
energy 
to produce it, it would still take 4 million acres of hemp harvested every 
DAY 
to replace our oil consumption.  

On a homestead and using less energy and chemical intensive cultivation and 
processing methods, we are still faced with the prospects that an acre of 
ground devoted to hemp would produce about 20 gallons of useable fuel.  
Double that 
for argument's sake and then double it again.   Can you devote an acre of 
ground and all the work and resources it requires to get 80 to 100 gallons of 
fuel?  Yes, if you use very, very little fuel.  But if, for example, a person 
were to commute 20 miles away to a job and got 20 mpg in their diesel, in a 
couple of months the labor of cultivating an acre of fuel crop is used up.    
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