Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News

May 29--Henry Ford once built automobile fenders and doors from industrial
hemp, saying they were stronger than sheet metal.

Today, companies such as Adidas, Reebok, International Paper, Calvin Klein and
Mercedes Benz are eyeing industrial hemp, a tough, fibrous plant with
thousands of uses and a colorful past.

"It's going mainstream," says Ken Friedman, president of the Hemp Industries
Association in Seattle, Wa.

Although no one is making automobiles from hemp, Mercedes Benz has pledged to
build parts such as dashboards from it, according to Friedman.

Clothing is one of hemp's hottest growth areas, according to Friedman and
others. They say hemp fabrics are stronger, more insulative, and last longer
than cotton.

"I am extremely interested in hemp textile fiber for spinning and weaving in
U.S. mills," Hugh McKee, of FlaxCraft Co. in New York, wrote in a recent
letter to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer
Protection.

Hemp can be used instead of plastic, and it makes a solid substitute for wood
in products ranging from paper to particle board.

During World War II, when the U.S. Navy used hemp for deck ropes, Wisconsin
grew more than 30,000 acres of the plants a year and had 10 processing plants.
Shortly after WWII, hemp was banned because of its similarity to marijuana.

Using hemp yield data from World War II, and basing it on current paper pulp
prices, farmers could earn profits of $190 to $480 an acre, according to the
United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory in
Madison.

Hemp yields more than four times as much sustainable pulp per acre as timber,
according to the North American Hemp Council.

But can this plant with a thousand uses make a comeback as a major cash crop?
It depends, experts say, on whether industries embrace hemp, and whether
states drop their bans on it.

Ten states, including Wisconsin, are currently considering dropping hemp
growing bans. In part, they are responding to pressure from farm groups and
manufacturers.

"It's going to be driven by the private sector or it isn't going to happen,"
says Bud Sholts with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and
Consumer Protection.

Farmers could make money from growing hemp, says Neal Jorgensen, associate
dean of the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

"Prices have been favorable where they raise a lot of it," Jorgensen says.
"And when you think of all the paper mills in Wisconsin, 85 percent of their
raw materials come from out of the state or out of the country. Hemp could be
a local source."

Hemp is grown legally in about 29 countries in Europe and Asia. But
experiences there have not yet proven its economic viability, according to
U.S. agriculture officials.

"Unless the economic viability of industrial hemp production is evaluated by
serious field trials and pilot scale processing in the United States, hemp
fabrics and paper uses will likely remain a very small niche market satisfied
by imports," a United States Department of Agriculture report states.

But the hemp industry is growing despite government indifference, at best, or
hostility at worst, says David Morris, with the Institutute for Local
Self-Reliance in St. Paul, Minn.

The institute seeks ways to strengthen local economies. Morris believes hemp
could help do that, especially in rural communities.

"Farmers who want to grow hemp aren't looking for government handouts," Morris
says. "They just want a chance to grow it and see what happens."

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