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  • From: "Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] gas prices
  • Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 12:30:12 -0800

Small problem with your calculations. You get 3 to 4 crops per year per acre with hemp. Hemp does quite nicely once started with little or no water or fertilizer.

Sure, it might not cure *all* the problems at the current consumption rate but it would put a great big dent in it because it is the one thing you can grow that you don't need fossil fuel to process because you use the hemp itself to fuel the machinery you need to process the seeds for oil.

Lynda
----- Original Message ----- From: <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com>

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. </HTML>
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