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hemp bound
HEMP PIONEERS
Mark Reinders,
HempFlax Deputy Director,
Oude Pekela, The Netherlands
The meadows of northern Holland were still frosted when I set of
on an autumn morning to visit the nearby HempFlax headquarters
in Groningen province. Perhaps the coolest part of my research
for this bookand thats like choosing between favorite ice cream
avorscame very near the end, on the HempFlax factory oor.
Thats because I found myself watching (and in turn touching) the
actual hemp bers that go into Mercedes and BMW door panels.
These emerged in clumps from a mechanized separator that sent the
remaining hurd down a diferent chute (for use as cat litter).
Operating like a page out of the 1938 Popular Mechanics article that
hailed hemps twenty-ve thousand uses, HempFlax also sells parts
of the European industrial cannabis plant harvest for textiles, paper,
and building insulation. The vast, noisy factory I was touring this
chilly morning churns out more than 1,400 pounds of hemp ber
every hour.
Even though the company does four million euros business every
year, its boss, 32-year-old Mark Reinders, told me that nding mar-
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hempucati on i mmersi on course
kets for the locally harvested hemp is like jugglingwe sell the bast
ber and then have to nd markets for twice as much of the shiv.
On the agricultural side, the business requires constant innova-
tion, too. Reinders pointed to a giant harvester parked next to the
factory and said that his mechanics still have to jerry-rig equipment
to t a particular elds dual-cropping needs.
See here? he said, hopping up about eight feet to the harvesters
hood. We welded a forklift mast up top here so we can harvest the
leaves and owers higher up on the plant, he said. That gives us
a market for juice and shakes before the main blade cuts the stalks
down at sixty centimeters to begin the ber-retting process. Hey,
presto, another kind of dual cropping invented. I was blown away
that theres still no standard hemp-harvesting modus operandi, even
in the relatively mature markets of Europe.
I loved that all of the hemp for the HempFlax factory has to
date come from surrounding farms on the Dutch countryside, but
Reinders said that price competition from GMO corn has forced
the company to buy farmland in Romania as hemp ber demand
increases worldwide. This really gets his goat. Its being grown for
inefcient energy, not food, he said. Its ridiculous.
He hopes the high corn price problem is temporary, because
Europes soil needs hemp. I came to hemp because my fathers a
farmer and he cultivated it in 1996 as a cash-providing bridge crop
that was a soil restorative, Reinders told me back on the factory oor
as I snatched an armful of the most combed, highest-end bast ber
from the end of a factory conveyor belt (it was so soft to the touch
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hemp bound
that I felt like I was squeezing silky air). I liked how fast it grew and
that it was pesticide free. So I interned here as an industrial engineer-
ing student, and after I graduated from business school, (company
founder) Ben (Dronkers) brought me on.
The privately owned HempFlax, which Reinders described as on
its feet, stable and on a twenty-year, uneven climb to consistent prof-
itability, was already supplying European automakers by the time he
came on in 2007. The way that happened is the template was already
in place for natural bers like ax in automotive components,
Reinders said. And a combination of its ber qualities and market
forces made hemps position progressively stronger. We should thank
the auto parts contractors as much as the auto companies. It was the
parts suppliers who were looking for afordable quality to keep their
own costs low.
When I mentioned that North American hemp farmers have no
modern experience taking care of a ber harvest, Reinders nodded
gravely and agreed with Canadian hemp researcher Simon Potter
that we were talking about a vital body of knowledge that requires
expertise. We actually go to the elds to do the harvesting rather
than letting farmers bring in the harvest, he said. With ber, the
motto is quality in, quality out. A farmer might be worried about
rain and want to end the retting when the ber is still gray. He has
his own priorities. We come in and say, Wait three more days. You
want the ber to be a dark yellow for the high-quality applications
like textiles and industrial components. And so the North American
hemp ber learning curve begins.