With crops gone to pot, North Dakota fights for industrial hemp RAW STORY

Published: Saturday July 21, 2007 Print This Email This An article in today's New York Times features North Dakota farmer, school principal and state representative David C. Monson, who advocates the legalization of hemp for farming purposes. Six states have considered the legalization of industrial hemp, which has been banned on a federal level even though it only contains traces of THC, the psychoactive substance produced in much greater concentration in hemp grown for use as a recreational substance. "This is not any subversive thing like trying to legalize marijuana or whatever. This is just practical agriculture," says Monson. "We're desperate for something that can make us some money." Unfortunately, the DEA treats industrial hemp the same as it does "marijuana;" while North Dakota has legalized growing industrial hemp on a state level, it remains outlawed federally. # EXCERPTS: North Dakota is really pushing the envelope on this one, said Doug Farquhar, the program director for agriculture and rural development at the National Conference of State Legislatures. Legislatures in Maine, Montana, West Virginia and other states have passed bills allowing farmers to grow industrial hemp, said Alexis Baden-Mayer, the director of government relations for Vote Hemp, a group that presses for legalization, but those laws have not been carried out given federal drug law. This battle is decidedly, and Midwesternly, pragmatic. In 1993, scab, a fungus also known as Fusarium head blight, tore through this region, wiping out thousands of acres of wheat, a prized crop in North Dakota, where agriculture remains the largest element of the economy. Hard rains left water pooling in fields, giving scab an opening. The fungus has turned up in varying degrees ever since, even as farmers searched for a cure. On a recent afternoon, as rain pounded his 710 acres, Mr. Monson gloomily yanked the head off a stalk of his wheat, revealing for a visitor whitish, shriveled seeds  the telltale signs of scab. But hemp, Mr. Monson argued, offered an alternative for North Dakotas crop rotation. Its tall stalks survive similarly cool and wet conditions in Canada, just 25 miles north of here, where it is legal. And it suits the rocky soil left behind here by glaciers, soil that threatens to tear up farm equipment for anyone who dares to plant crops like beets or potatoes beneath ground. # The entire New York Times article can be read HERE.



