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ninety million acres of mature forest. With hemp's ten tons to an acre, 
it would only take four-and-a-half million acres to satisfy our pulp 
needs. Even in a worst-case scenario - a single crop annually - it would 
only take nine million acres of hemp to supply the pulp.  The complete 
thing would be nine million acres.
HT: So you're looking at annual yields of hemp that compare favorably to 
tree yields that don't replenish for twenty-five years.
BC: Twenty, twenty-five years is a bare minimum. There are some specialty
trees, cottonwood for instance, from which you can get a crop out in 
seven or eight years.  But even those will not produce as much fiber per 
acre after ten years of growth as what hemp will do in a hundred to a 
hundred and twenty days. And not only that, hemp fiber is superior.
HT: Why is that?
BC: For several reasons.  Number one, it's superior in its strength to 
tree fiber.  Secondly, it way out-produces tree fiber. Lumber industry 
people talk about trees' renewability.  Yes, trees are renewable.  Oil is 
renewable, too, if you've got a hundred million years to hang around! 
It's all renewable, but is it sustainable?  Anytime you cut down a tree, 
it takes longer for the tree to grow than the life of the product that 
you're making from it.  So, it's not sustainable from that point of view. 
Now hemp, on the other hand, takes a hundred to a hundred twenty days to 
grow, and that's sustainability.
Additionally, there are a number of environmental factors to consider,
particularly in the making of paper products from pulp, the most 
important of which has to do with a substance called lignin.  Tree fiber 
has lignin in it. Lignin is extracted with chlorine, a major river 
pollutant that converts to dioxins and so forth. Hemp though, is very low 
in lignin, so low that you can use hydrogen peroxide to break the lignin 
out.  Which doesn't pollute anything.
So hemp fiber is superior in every way conceivable to tree fiber.
HT: What about hemp's effect on the soil?  After you grow it for five 
years is your soil going to be completely depleted?
BC: As a matter of fact, just the opposite.  Hemp is utilized to refurbish
soil.  Hemp leaf is fifty percent nitrogen.  You take the leaf and put it 
back down into the ground to enrich it.  The truth of the matter is we 
could take this damn clay soil out here in Oregon and make it into 
beautiful soil. Hemp is such a short crop that you don't have to rotate 
it, and you can grow companion crops with it.  Around the world hemp has 
been grown on the same ground for years and years without depleting the 
soil.
HT: You've invested in making prototypes of composite board with hemp 
fiber. How did you go about that, and were there any complications along 
the way?
BC: Well, as David explained, we contacted the wood engineering lab up at
Washington Sate University and sent them fifteen hundred pounds of hemp 
fiber from France to experiment with the composite boards.  And yes, 
there were immediate complications, because in this industry they're used 
to working with trees, which have short fibers.  The longest fiber, for 
example, in a Douglas fir tree is only three-quarters of an inch long.  
And when they took our hemp fiber and stuck if in this great big powerful 
mill that they got up there it immediately jammed.  So the first thing we 
found out was that hemp is far stronger than anything they're working 
with. So we cut it up into one inch and shorter pieces in order not to 
jam the machine, which we were initially afraid was going to cost us a 
lot in terms of the hemp fiber's strength.
HT: Did it?
BC: Not a chance. Our first board still came out to be world-class 
quality. But we also found out something else from making that first 
board, which is that we have a raw material that can be put into that 
system exactly as it is without changing it.  Without costing the mill 
owners anything in the way of machine investment.
HT: How big was the first board?
BC: The prototypes are all just little ones. Eighteen inches square.
HT: What are you aiming for in the way of a finished product with your
prototypes?
DS: Our product is called medium-density fiberboard.  It's the flagship 
product of the composite industry.  It's used in applications that range 
from furniture to backing in automotive panels.  The reason why we chose 
MDF for our prototype is because if you can produce MDF, you can produce 
a whole spectrum of other products.  It's an indicator of what the 
potential of the industry is.
HT: So we're looking at a hemp-composite wooden furniture substitute?
DS: Not at all.  We believe that with particle board we may be able to
eventually make structural beams for building that will literally rival a 
steel I-beam in strength. The first law in the science of composites says 
that all other things being equal, the strength of the product is 
directly proportional to the length of the fiber.  The longest fiber in a 
Douglas fir is three-quarters of an inch.  If you grow a fifteen-foot 
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