Hemp Bound
This is the book that Willie Nelson calls,
“the best book of the year.”
The billion-dollar plant that’s going to change our diet and farms, help restore our soil, and wean us from petroleum.
Order Hemp Bound
Turns out your roommate with the lava lamp was right. Get ready for the game changing plant that’s going to feed the world and free us from fossil fuels while putting small farmers back to work. Yes, a writer of Doug Fine’s renown realized going in that the stat sheet on hemp sounded almost too good: its fibers are among the planet’s strongest, its seed oil the most nutritious, and its potential as an energy source vast and untapped? But he’s just researched it from the field, and guess what? It’s all true. In fact he’s uncovered new locavore energy application models that could and should change the energy economy (and improve the atmosphere) forever.
Hemp’s one downside? For nearly a century, it’s been effectively illegal to grow industrial cannabis in the United States—even though Betsy Ross wove the nation’s first flag out of hemp fabric, Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence on it, and colonists could pay their taxes with it. But as the prohibition on hemp’s psychoactive cousin winds down, one of humanity’s longest-utilized plants is about to be reincorporated into the American economy. Get ready for the newest billion-dollar industry.
In Hemp Bound: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Next Agricultural Revolution, bestselling author Doug Fine embarks on a humorous yet rigorous journey to meet the men and women who are testing, researching, and pioneering hemp’s applications for the twenty-first century. From Denver, where Fine hitches a ride in a hemp-powered limo; to Asheville, North Carolina, where carbon-negative hempcrete-insulated houses are sparking a mini housing boom; to Manitoba where he raps his knuckles on the hood of a hemp tractor; and finally to the fields of east Colorado, where practical farmers are looking toward hemp to restore their agricultural economy—Fine learns how eminently possible it is for this long misunderstood plant to help us end dependence on fossil fuels, heal farm soils damaged after a century of monoculture, and bring even more taxable revenue into the economy than its smokable relative.
Fine’s journey will not only leave you wondering why we ever stopped cultivating this miracle crop, it will fire you up to sow a field of it for yourself, for the nation’s economy, and for the planet.
In Doug’s own words: This book didn’t feel like work (OK, maybe researching hemp oil presses in Manitoba in February felt a little like work, but the Hawaii and Belgium parts didn’t). I knew I was on to something big, and realized mid-way through my research that I would be publishing this book just as the U.S. Congress was re-legalizing this longest-utilized of plants. Yep, rejoice, patriots! Hemp is about to be legalized in the U.S., and soon North Dakotans, Coloradans and Kentuckians will be growing our food, fuel, industrial components and clothing. This has been simply an amazing project to investigate. I got to drive in a hemp-powered limo, meet Czech women-owned hemp cooperative farms, even see an actual tractor body made out of hemp (it’s already in BMW door panels). And yet here (for a brief time longer) it’s a federal felony to grow it, even though Americans consume a billion dollars of Canadian hemp every year, mostly in health food products. I know I consume thousands personally.
The book is a blueprint both for the putative hemp farmer and entrepreneur (based on what I learned from the rest of the world’s head start) and a model for just a little thing called weaning from petroleum (something I’ve been keen on every since writing Farewell, My Subaru). Popular Mechanics, in 1938, said hemp had 25,000 applications. Let me give you an advance tip about two of the biggest ones (they’re interconnected): domestic hemp reintegration represents a viable, community based energy grid model — one which Germany and Austria are already taking advantage of — as well as a soil-restoring nutritive superfood. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, just part of the reason that the Persians have called hemp The King of Seeds for three Millennia. Hope you come along and enjoy the ride. Me, I’m off to milk the goats. I’m excited to soon be feeding them locally-grown hemp seed.
What People Are Saying
Hemp Bound is the best book of the year. The issue is simple: farmers need hemp, the soil needs hemp, forests need hemp, and humanity needs the plant that the good Lord gave us for our own survival. Hemp Bound tells us with detail and humor how to get to the environmental Promised Land. Doug has created a blueprint for the America of the future.
— Willie Nelson
In Hemp Bound, Doug Fine convincingly describes the proven value and amazing potential of the non-psychoactive variety of the cannabis plant. You can eat it, drink it, read it, tie it, wear it, drive it, live in it, and make money growing it, all while saving the soil and protecting the climate. This is an important story, engagingly told.
— Dr. William Martin, Senior Fellow, Drug Policy, Rice University's Baker Institute, Houston, Texas
If ever anyone needed proof that government meddling in markets is injurious to innovation, Hemp Bound dispels all doubt. With science and humor, Fine paints an alternative and optimistic future—one that makes growing hemp seem as exhilarating and necessary as clean air. Fine’s style and storytelling ability make this is one of the most fun books you’ll ever read about the future of farming.
— Joel Salatin, author of Everything I Want to Do is Illegal
Doug Fine’s engrossing and eye-opening book reveals hemp’s role as a new source of food, energy, and raw materials. This absurd war on one of the world’s most useful plants is about to end, and everyone can declare victory.
— Mark Frauenfelder, founder, Boing Boing
The U.S. dominated the worldwide hemp industry until 1937, when it became illegal to grow hemp here, ostensibly because of its connection to marijuana. For more on hemp, its historic uses, agricultural promise (it may restore farm soil damaged by decades of practicing monoculture) and its potential to provide sustainable energy, I encourage you to read Hemp Bound, a newly published, entertaining and informative book by Doug Fine.
— Dr. Andrew Weil
I never dreamed industrial hemp had so much promise until I read Doug Fine's Hemp Bound. The book is not only fun to read, but it passes along fascinating insights about a farm crop that produces many food and fiber products is adapted to areas where corn and soybeans are rarely profitable. As the author points out with gracious good humor, industrial hemp is not medical marijuana, and it should become a major farm crop in America as it has elsewhere.
— Gene Logsdon, author of Gene Everlasting and Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind
A sweet, logical and funny argument for the potential of one of the world’s most dynamic cash crops.
— Kirkus
Fine is a…storyteller in the mold of…Douglas Adams.
— Washington Post