>>> Part 2 of 4...
David  Seber:  I was born and grew up on the East Coast.  I attended two
universities, Fairleigh Dickinson College and the University of Denver, 
in which I hid in the late sixties until coming in contact with the whole 
counterculture movement.  I've been a hemp enthusiast ever since.
In 1980, after working in the ceramic tile industry and doing 
international business representing Japan, Korea and Brazil in the US 
market, I went into the lumber business.  I established a redwood lumber 
yard down in southern Oregon working with William - who taught me 
everything I know about the lumber business - and I've been associated 
with it ever since.  Eventually we came to the conclusion that it was 
time - because we had made a good part of our living from wood - that we 
ought to give something back to the forests and decided to look into 
establishing hemp as an alternative for wood.  When we started looking for
a place to begin we came up with the idea of fiberboard.
HT: How did you come up with that?
DS: Well, after making an initial study of "hemp activities" that were 
going on, we determined that no one was doing anything in terms of 
construction products whatsoever.  Then I came across a book called 
"Modern Particle Board and Fiberboard Manufacturing," and William and I 
learned what the industry was about. The author's name is Tom Malone, and 
I called him.  It turns out Tom is the foremost expert in wood 
construction composites in the world and runs the wood products 
laboratory at the Washington State University.  We went to visit him and 
presented him with what we thought was the potential for the use of the 
hemp fiber in replacing wood.  And not only did he confirm to us the 
impending timber shortage and the real need for a substitute, but he felt 
hemp had great potential.
HT: How did you go about beginning the actual work on the idea?
DS: We immediately made an agreement to enter into a formal contractual
relationship between our company, C&S Specialty Builders, and Washington 
State University, then went about locating and importing some fiber for 
him.  I ended up connecting with the French Hemp Institute of Le Mans, 
which provided us with fifteen hundred pounds of hemp fiber.  At the same 
time, we started making our initial contacts in the lumber industry to 
see if we could generate some interest in what we were doing. And 
although we were initially met mostly with snickers, there were a few 
people who were interested in the idea.
Now when you talk to production-level people in the lumber industry, you
don't ask, "How did the wood turn out?"  You ask, "How was the fiber?"
If the fiber's good, you know you have good stock coming back. If the 
fiber is bad, you know you're in trouble with the lumber you're going to 
receive.  Inside the industry everyone anywhere near a production 
capacity relates to wood not as wood, but as fiber, and we were really 
on to something with the fiber aspect of what hemp could do.
HT: So you're confident hemp fiber has applications.  Where did you go 
from there?
DS: We started to approach various sources to see if we could, first, 
import the fiber, and second, whether we could get manufacturers 
interested in producing products out of such a thing. I am still working 
on locating sources to import this raw material because even for our 
trials we need a pretty massive amount of hemp fiber.  The lumber 
industry is built on the concept of giant volumes, continuous production, 
and very low profit margins relative to the value of the product.  When 
you talk about your average composite factory, you're talking about a 
place that uses anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred dry tons of 
biomass in the form of wood chips every day, seven days a week.  That's 
how the industry is set up.
So we started to design programs to show the industry how they could
switch over, how we could present them with a replacement fiber for wood 
that they literally could use in their existing facilities. Because the 
amount of wood fiber that's being used is so massive, we couldn't find 
any other plant that has any hope of giving us enough raw material to 
supply the amount of fiber that's used from the forest today.
HT: Didn't C&S come up with a number like ninety-four million acres of 
timber versus four million acres of hemp?
BC: It's about that.  According to the US Forest Service in Washington 
State, in the Pacific Northwest forests - which are the most productive 
forests in the world today - the average yield per acre, per year, is 
four hundred fifty-nine board feet. Now, if you take that four hundred 
fifty-nine board feet of lumber and you dry it down, take all of the 
moisture out of it, you have about seven hundred pounds of fiber per 
acre, per year.
HT: What do you get with hemp?
BC: The very first crop of commercial hemp harvested in England recently -
and they don't know diddly yet - produced four tons of fiber per acre.
HT: More than ten times the yield.
BC: And that was in a hundred and twenty days. A good hemp fiber crop will
give you up to ten tons per acre in a hundred to a hundred and twenty 
days. Which is twenty times as much production as with timber.  Now 
consider that every year in the United States we use forty-five million 
tons of tree fiber for paper alone, which takes the annual growth of 
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