| The Billion-Dollar Crop |
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| Friday, 04 September 2009 00:00 |
  “NEW BILLION-DOLLAR CROP” February 1938 - Mechanical Engineering Magazine: “THE MOST PROFITABLE & DESIRABLE CROP THAT CAN BE GROWN” Modern technology was about to be applied to hemp production, making it the number-one agricultural resource in America. Two of the most respected and influential journals in the nation, Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering, forecast a bright future for American hemp. Thousands of new products creating millions of new jobs would herald the end of the Great Depression. - Mainstream media is finally looking at Cannabis as a profitable & desirable crop, but the focus nationally is not on the uses from cannabis hemp, but rather the medical and recreational benefits from the marijuana plant's ingestion. CNN Money - How Pot Became Legal. Because of the printing schedule and deadline, Popular Mechanics prepared this article in spring of 1937 when cannabis hemp for fiber, paper, dynamite and oil, was still legal to grow and was, in fact, an incredibly fast-growing industry. Also reprinted in this chapter is an excerpt from the Mechanical Engineering article about hemp, published the same month. It originated as a paper presented a year earlier at the Feb. 26, 1937 Agricultural Processing Meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Reports from the USDA during the 1930s, and Congressional testimony in 1937, showed that cultivated hemp acreage had been doubling in size in America almost every year from the time it hit its bottom acreage, 1930-when 1,000 acres were planted in the U.S. - to 1937 - when 14,000 acres were cultivated with plans to continue to double that acreage annually in the foreseeable future. The Popular Mechanics article was the very first time in American history that the term "billion-dollar"* was ever applied to any U.S. agricultural crop! *Equivalent to $40-$80 billion now. - Now, in 2009, the "billion-dollar" number has been thrown around so much by U.S. Gov't bailouts of failing banks and automotive industries. At CannabisSense.com, we have to wonder when our government will begin to support agriculture again, as well as other socially responsible industries for a change. Experts today conservatively estimate that, once fully restored in America, hemp industries will generate $500 billion to a trillion dollars per year, and will save the planet and civilization from fossil fuels and their derivatives - and from deforestation! If Harry Anslinger, DuPont, Hearst and their paid-for (know it or not, then as now) politicians had not outlawed hemp - under the pretext of marijuana (see Chapter 4, "Last Days of Legal Cannabis") - and suppressed hemp knowledge from our schools, researchers and even scientists, the glowing predictions in these articles would already have come true by now - and more benefits than anyone could then envision - as new technologies and uses continue to develop. As one colleague so aptly put it, "These articles were the last honest word spoken on hemp's behalf for over 40 years..." [Read this Whole Chapter at Jack Herer's Official Website]
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