CBD Conversation with Steve Barron

CBD Conversation with Steve Barron

Introduction:

Joining Anuj Desai (the host) is Steve Barron, a director and hemp farmer - in fact, he purchased a hemp farm right here in Cambridgeshire! This conversation is a fascinating insight into multiple industries which hemp farming can support, demonstarting just how environmentally friendly it can be.

Summary:

  • Hemp is low in THC, usually below 0.2%.
  • Hemp grows better in warmer climates.
  • There are different varieties of hemp. Some strains will be great for rope, while others will have more CBD content.
  • You can create Hempcrete for building and cladding.
  • Per hectare, hemp will absorb more CO2 that any other commercial crop. 

Why we love it:

With all the questions and research surrounding CBD it’s no wonder it can be a bit of a minefield to learn about! We take our role of creating pure CBD of the highest quality seriously which is why our focus at BeYou is on science, innovation, and products. As a leading CBD brand in the UK we're beholden to the regulation set out by the MHRA preventing us from making claims about CBD. While this often makes it harder for us to answer some of the questions we get, there are some experts in the field that you can go and listen to.  The question is, where do you start, and who do you trust?

People have often asked us to do a podcast to help spread our knowledge and those CBD experts we are in contact with. However, we also have an obligation to use our time pushing boundaries and taboos. So we prefer to leave podcasts to seasoned industry experts who have these conversations in an attempt to empower all of us!

The Cannabis Conversation is a podcast which gets deep into CBD as an industry. We provide it as an external resource to give you a starting point for your own research and to help you get started on your CBD journey. We know a lot of you prefer to read about CBD so, hit play and read along, or just listen, or just read(!) and see what all the hype is about.

It is hosted and led by Anuj Desai, a commercial advisor, lawyer and founder of Canverse – a leading consultancy in the cannabis industry.

We’ve been listening to this podcast since it started so we suggest you go and find it on your favourite podcast app and save it. If you love it as much as we do, please take a moment to review it on iTunes.

Listen & Learn:

The Transcript:

The Cannabis Conversation. A European perspective on the emerging legal cannabis industry.

Welcome back to The Cannabis Conversation. Thanks again for joining me. I hope you've been enjoying the series so far. I've had some really good feedback, so thank you all for your kind words. I'd like to give a big shout out to Ira Banaji, who's been helping me with my social media. I'm no expert in this area, so that's very much needed. So thank you very much, Ira. I've got a great show for you coming up. Now we're turning our attention to hemp, what it is, and what it can be used for, and the fantastic benefits to the environment that come with it. So let's get cracking. Hope you enjoy the show.

Okay, welcome back to The Cannabis Conversation. Today I have Steve Barron on the show. Steve is CEO of Margent Farm in Cambridgeshire, which is a hemp farm. And Steve certainly walks the walk because the farmhouse at Margent is made entirely from hemp. Steve has a great backstory starting in entertainment, but is now focusing on hemp production and is a passionate advocate for its use as an industrial material. He is the ideal person to help us understand what hemp is and how we could use it in the future. Steve, welcome.

Thank you.

So before we jump into your personal journey into the world of hemp, can you just give us a bit of a 101 on hemp, what it is and how it differs from marijuana?

Yes. Yeah, the term hemp, it refers to the uses of the plant, and in particular in history it's been really called industrial hemp because its uses are for products and for materials. It's been used in things like for rope and construction materials, paper and so on. And that is really the hemp side of things. It's a number of strains of the cannabis sativa plant that provides the materials for that are under an umbrella of industrial hemp. In itself, it is one of the oldest food crops and one of the oldest fabrics that has been used on this planet by humans. And in terms of how it differs from marijuana, marijuana is generally the cannabis indica plant, although sativa as well, because of crossbreeding, but it's all become a bit of a mismatch, but basically you can measure in the type of strain you have a very low content of THC with hemp, THC which will get you high. Whereas with hemp, you're really dealing with a plant that has maximum 0.2% of that high and you'd have to smoke the whole field and you'd probably get sick before you got high, so.

So essentially, hemp is a low THC content variation of the plant.

Yeah, there is at least a hundred strains of the cannabis plant and many of them don't have the THC. And then there's hundreds of strains of the marijuana plants, because they've all been made and doctored over the years.

Sure. That's good to know. And where and how is hemp farmed? Is it the same sort of conditions as marijuana or is there kind of specialist attention and different ways of treating it?

It will grow in different ways in different parts of the world and certain strains will fare better in warmer climates, Mediterranean climates or whatever. And others will fare very well in Northern European climates. Perhaps you'll get three and a half meters of a certain type of industrial hemp plant growing in Thailand because of the amount of sunshine hours and things in it and that same strain might also work in Northern Europe, but it would only maybe give you two and a half meters of growth.

Great. Following on from that, in the way that you said at the top, hemp is mainly used as a material, but in a number of different ways. Are there different varieties of hemp that are great for rope versus fabric versus other types of material?

Well, it's really... It spent the last 80 years as an ostracized plant because of it's marijuana cousin, so it's been kind of not studied and really in a way that other plants have. But definitely there are strains that have a better tensile strength, which so straight away you can get this stronger tensile strength, longer fiber, that will suit much better for rope, will suit much better for any fiber composites. It's all being studied. At the moment, we're working with Cambridge University on a number of different projects at the moment. And part of that is really the going down to the molecular level and seeing what it's all about as a plant. So we don't know. We don't know so much about it. But we do know that yes, the right variety will give you great rope or will give you an alternative plastic. A certain strain will have a real high content of cellulose, which is the building block for plastic. And then others will have more CBD content for cannabidiol and its uses which are fantastic in terms of a food supplement.

Yeah, we've talked on a previous show about CBD and its potential, but equally it's sort of unknown cure-all sales and marketing spiel that's been batted around so we were starting to kind of understand a bit more about it. There's a few things that you said which were really interesting. One of them is that hemp, similar to marijuana, has been understudied because of the prohibition of the intoxicating variety and so that's really interesting to see that hemp has similarly been held back in the same way. What's going on with the Cambridge study that you mentioned?

We got together with Dr Dausch Rashad, the head of Natural Materials Innovation at Cambridge University under the architecture wing at Cambridge, which is looking into different materials for building. And so we got together and we started developing initially actually a camera case, which is on our Instagram thing at the moment, and is as an alternative with a similar strength to fiberglass as an alternative for products, electrical products, or things like Hoovers or whatever that don't need the strength of carbon fiber and don't want to be one of those horrible plastics that are contaminating our seasoned universe. So that is the aim with what we're doing. We also got another few projects with them I can't talk about yet but we will be getting onto very exciting, real study of this plant and what it can do. And we're working with somebody who's worked with natural material, Tim Swetman, for a number of years in the Cambridge area producing product for a Mayfair sustainability center at the moment.

And also for our house that we're building, we've used the inside of the hemp plant for the insulation value of Hempcrete which was invented 25, 30 years ago, we believe in France, by a woman who used it for her building. It's a great, not fully structural version of concrete, like a breeze block that comes as Hempcrete. And we've used it in our farmhouse for insulation and the structural part of it comes by putting it into, prefabricating into wooden sustainable cassettes. So it's poured into that, it solidifies with the addition of a little lime and it crystallizes and becomes this super insulating building. So what we've done is... And that's been done before, but we happen to have grown our own.

And sorry, it's called Hempcrete?

Yes, Hempcrete is its name.

Sure.

And a lot of people have used it. Even on Grand Designs, they built some things on it. In this country, far less than say France, which is by a way ahead of it. And even parts around this buildings around the black sea that are made of Hempcrete. They have this amazing value. So our farm house is built out of that and then we decided that we wanted to go one step further and actually clad the farmhouse in the fibers from the outside of the plant.

So we took those and used some technology that's been developed in the car manufacturing world to put those fibers together with a bio resin from farm waste, which consists of oat hulls and bagasse, a form of farm sugar. And the whole thing is then compressed, in our case, in a tool that is a corrugated shape. So we've ended up with a corrugated farmhouse that looks like a sort of semi-industrial but definitely a farm type building, which is basically a recreation of the plant on the big scale. Because it has all, the inside of the plant is the insulation, and the outside is the cladding of the house.

Fantastic.

So it's kind of... Think it's a little bit revolutionary but given by Grand Designs the accolade, Kevin's green heroes by Kevin McCloud for this year. So in May, they're launching their Grand Designs live and we've been showcased then with this new product, which we hope to get out there and get people to use as an alternative for plastic, obviously for bitumen, which is very commonly used on roofs and garages and Aluminum or for any kind of steel corrugation that we could get something with the strength that-

Brilliant.

... for cladding.

That's really... Congratulations on the accolade. So just to sort of recap, I suppose it adds to the strength of the material in terms of the fundamental strength of the building material. Has it also got kind of environmental benefits in relation to CO2 and things like that?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean the figures for sequestering CO2 are really fantastic where, because it grows so fast, it has a hundred days of growing. So you plant it and with little or no water, unless you're in a really hot climate, you are then growing for a hundred days. This thing will grow for a hundred days and give you two and a half, three, three and a half meters, depending on your strain. And in that time, what it's doing is one hectare of industrial hemp would absorb approximately 15 tons of CO2, making it one of the fastest CO2 to biomass conversion tools in existence. So CO2 per hectare, hemp will absorb more annually than any other commercial crop or commercial forestry.

Wow.

So, that is an enormous advantage upfront. In fact, that's what made me want to get a hemp farm because I was looking, researching for something to help give back to what my generation environmentally have done. To get some of it back from my granddaughter. And that was my motivation to come into this and I went looking around and a friend of mine sort of brought up hemp as a possibility, in particular with human health. Then researching it and learning more about it and getting together with Joe McGann at hemp and in Oxfordshire, who was already growing, and learning from him a lot and research about how much this plant can give apart, from the very moment of growing, made me think, right, well I don't know quite what I'm going to do but I'm going to get a farm and I'm going to start growing because straight away I'm doing it rather than talking about it. Helping get those steps back towards where we all need to go to have a planet that we haven't mapped out.

So there's a real sustainability drive to your hemp mission, which is great. A lot of interesting things there. I heard, and correct me if I'm wrong, that after the Chernobyl disaster in the eighties that they planted hemp around that site, because it's very good at-

Yeah. I heard that as well. I didn't verify it. I don't know. I didn't meet any Russians that said, "Yeah, we did that." But it sounds like... I mean the taproots on the plant go down way down, so you would think I can see.

Very good at sucking up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's going to absorb all kinds of stuff, so nitrogen and possibly all the bad stuff from Chernobyl, so that would make sense.

I guess the main thing that I think would probably interested a lot of people given it's kind of high profile as a topic at the moment is around plastic and finding alternatives. Can you talk a bit more about that area of hemp and the research and the work that you're doing in that area?

Yes. It turned out, and I didn't realize this, but I looking into it I found that the EU, in particular the European car auto trade and industry, were using quite a lot of natural fibers because they found them to be lighter, cheaper, and therefore save gas and go towards what their legislation was saying. You cannot just keep producing this stuff that gets thrown on the trash. So it wasn't even that environmental a constraint for them. It was more they would save money out of doing it this way. But the Mercedes C-Class and all kinds of auto companies actually made hemp and flax in layers into the doors, into the panels, into the trunks of cars. And that has been going on for 15 years.

Wow.

Now who knew that? I didn't know that and they didn't want to advertise it possibly because they felt it was obviously cheaper than wood. But it was more that you can't tell your customer your car is actually made of straw and you can't tell your customer that its cousin will get your high. Those two things. So you can see how, and hemp was really ostracized, so it wasn't something that they were ever going to shout about. But, it was basically being developed in Europe. So I thought, well, but it's been hidden and nobody's used it and shouted about it and gone about it that way. So I thought, let's get the message out there. And this is why we came up with this corrugated product straight away because we thought if we can show that we can use it for a cladding and say it is hemp instead of hiding the fact that it's natural and hemp, we're saying it is.

So that's our job as a farm and a brand that we've set up, Margent Farm, which is to really shout about how good this plant is for us and how we need to load it, we need to grow it and we need to keep studying it now and put it back into our human society which it used to be in 8,000 years ago. They're still finding in India, temples that are made of hemp. Tibet that have what is now called Hempcrete, but have those breeze blocks forms of, yeah, and in temples they built and they're still standing now.

It's good that you're promoting this now more loudly. Have you found that the general perception of it is changing?

Yes. Since we started, as I said, bought the farm just over two years ago and started growing in that first season. Since then and at a time everyone, the perception was... Straight away my kids thought I was having a midlife crisis. My friends all thought I was turning into a drug lord. And so there was that whole perception. You'd always get that little smirk, that smile, even from people who smoke weed.

Me doing this podcast is my midlife crisis. Exactly.

Yeah. The perception has definitely changed. In those couple of years, what's happened is knowledge about CBD has grown amazingly and far and wide. So suddenly it's like people saying, "Okay, that plant's got other things and it's got other enzymes that could be really useful." Alongside that, those companies like Planet Organic and all the health food shops getting hemp seeds that give you tremendous amount of Omega 3-6-9 and protein, that is all was happening as people were getting a bit more health savvy, even in the last few years. And then alongside that, along comes David Attenborough. And he does that program about plastics. And that has changed the world.

That program alone, he deserves everything we can give him because nothing could have changed it that fast except an emotional impact, widely watched impact, from an amazing piece of cinematography and this thought process that we're putting back to everyone without blaming and shaming, but like just saying, "This is beautiful. Do we want it to be with us. Do you want it to be with your kids? Because it's not going to be if you carry on living the way we live and we have to change. So that realization on a much bigger scale. It was obviously there, it's been there for many years and many decades. There was many advocates of it and soldiers of change and environmental issues. But now it's really widespread.

It's the kids coming out of their classrooms, age five, six, seven, knowing that plastics are bad. That is amazing. Once it's gone into the education system, that is a tremendous step forward. So I'd say in the last couple of years, it's moved amazingly. The perception has changed. So now I talk about hemp and people are like, "Cool, I hear it's great for blah. I hear it's great for CP. I hear it's this. I hear it's that." And that is very exciting that it can happen that quickly. And so it's kind of changing what we need to do and how we need to say it and things because it's moving.

That's a good message. And glad to hear Attenborough was a real catalyst for this. He's so revered and it's such a well-made program that I'm not surprised. My six year old is lecturing me on use of plastics, so it is great to hear that. One of the things I probably should have asked you about earlier is, so it's clear that the Margent Farms is developing hemp from a material perspective, but is the plant able to be used for CBD as well or is it one or the other that generally happens in the process?

Unfortunately, we've got a real problem with CBD in the world generally at the moment. And nobody quite knows from the government level why it's so good and why people are finding it so useful and in their lives and so they're a bit worried about it and they're also a bit wanting to get involved in it. So right now, as a farmer, and there are obviously a lot of farmers in this country and farming is a really difficult occupation that is weather dependent and market dependent and you have to make all these decisions and you can come under heavy bombardment from insects to environment to whatever. What we've really discovered with, or what I've discovered with farming, is that farmers are treated so badly, it just makes no sense. This law exists, you have to get a license to grow hemp. So I went ahead and applied for that license and got that license. And it's a three year license and it costs £500 and it says, "You can grow industrial hemp. You must be careful that people don't think it's the wrong level of THC and you must keep it below 0.2 THC."

And then you can grow it. And then you can get the seeds off it and use that for oil or you can get the seeds off it and let them go to a protein or any other food. And you can use the fibers and you can take the fibers off and do what you want to do with your making of mattresses or whatever you're going to do with it, construction materials. But you must take the flower, chop it off and destroy it and not process it, keep it, use it in any way and not extract CBD from it and not extract anything from it, which is absolutely crazy.

So it's a huge amount of waste then, quite apart from this madness of it.

It's a waste because we can import it. I can buy it in this country, but I'm not allowed to extract it unless I get into a farmer license, a pharmaceutical license, I mean PH farmer. Then you have a license to take THC, you have the license to take the CBD, which is a completely different plant. So the holy grail for farmers undoubtedly, for the value of a crop. And the way to get this crop grown and to really have it spread across the country, which it needs to do for all the reasons that we've said. The way to do that is to have it a cash crop. Have a value. Now, there isn't enough value in the fiber. There isn't enough value in the shive. There's value for people using them, but for the farmer, you'd have to farm on quite a big scale. So it's like 10,000 acres in this country.

There's 4 million acres of wheat being farmed in this country, 10,000 of hemp. Because financially you can't get the balance of that. If you had the CBD, it would be worth far more than wheat. It would be hundreds of thousands of acres would be grown in this country which would be giving our CO2 a good battering and it would make total sense for farmers financially and in every way. And it's not allowed. So anyway, with everybody else alongside the British Hemp Association, everything. We're all lobbying the government and saying, "It's not fair. That is not fair on farmers. Everyone's complying with a 0.2% of THC. We're not talking about growing marijuana. You've taken away a food essential from a crop and we have to destroy it. That's just bad."

Very frustrating, very frustrating. And not providing the right incentive to produce a crop that would be very useful and beneficial for the environment. That's really good to hear that point of view because I'm sure, I didn't know that stuff, so I'm assuming they'll be useful. So are there any kind of crazy uses of hemp, as a material, that you've kind of come across because... Maybe Hempcrete sounds a bit crazy to all people, but as you say, it's been used for a long time and possibly from many hundreds of thousand years ago. Are there any new modern uses that people are looking at?

Well, I think that's more the development of the plastics. That's more what we're doing with Cambridge and there's a factory in Huntington. That is what we're finding out really, how far to go with a fiber. We've given some of the hemp mat that we grew to, for instance, to Ben Ainslie's team for the America's yacht because they feel that the potential for it inside the hull, the carbon fiber hull, it could reduce the amount of carbon fiber they use, which they'd love to reduce. It actually sucks the resin through the system. It draws the resin, which is very useful for them. That's one thing we've done. We've done a seat, a hemp seat, for a go-kart company that works really well. And we're looking at all kinds of things. We've been approached by quite a lot of interesting designers as for collaborations for different products. Surfboard fins, there is endless possibilities. It's actually, there's way more than we could sit and list.

I'm sure. I'm sure. So you've laid out the benefits, so what do you see as the real challenges and hurdles? One of them you mentioned is the just a simple economics of incentivizing people to grow the crop. But what are the other kinds of hurdles to wide scale adoption?

The hurdles in this country are technology and the industrialization of it. And in France for instance, they can produce those mats, those non-woven mats, at a really great rate for the car auto world. And we've got nothing like that in the UK. We've got no company that really can get to that sort of level of production. We've got a number of mills up in Yorkshire, some really great people actually who own Mel's herbs. It certain could come with the help of the government towards that. They have parts of that process, but not all of it. So that is getting together and saying and committing to it. Because if we have the technology, we can obviously make it all cheaper. One of the barriers for it to replacing plastic is that we are addicted, as a society, we're addicted to cheap plastic. We've come up with this thing, which is amazing, which is terrible for our environment in its process and in its end of life.

Both ends of it are terrible. In the middle, it's great. We love it. It's cheap. You buy it for 99p in a pound store. We've got to get off of that addiction. And that's one of the biggest barriers we've got where we have to live life differently. We have to treasure what we buy more and buy good stuff for the right reasons that has been made and can be disposed of in the right way. And we've got to pay a little bit more for it, but if we care for it a bit more we'll do it, like the plastic bags. We're paying for plastic bags because we think, okay, well, I understand why I'm doing that and I shouldn't be doing this so I'm paying for it.

We have to get that now across the globe. So it's a slightly different way of living we're all going to be doing because we're so used to the consumer with a cheap deal. And we have to get off that. If we don't get off that, we'll never replace plastic. And what stands in hemp's way is the price of it. It's going to be more expensive. It's not as easy a process. It's a natural process. But we can definitely replace it if we all choose to.

So, kind of is economies of scale issue in terms of cost but equally the change in approach and mindset and how we value goods and things that make our life easier. Certainly with young kids, I'm often telling my kids that they need to look after their stuff a bit better, but that applies to adults as well as kids as well. So that, yeah, it's really good to understand the barriers that are holding it back. But it sounds that you are having lots of interesting conversations and very esteemed organizations as Cambridge University and I'm sure lots of other people are taking it very seriously. This all bodes well for the future, I would say.

Yeah, it definitely does. I think everybody, or everybody that we're coming across, is on the right track. They're, "How can we help? How can it work? How can we make it work?" We don't have all the answers and there's going to be a number of years of transition. Lego have just, recently they've scrapped a factory, a plastic factory, and spent $150 million on building a factory that now makes their bricks out of natural materials, out of plants. So when you get bigger companies to do it, you've got to get the ones who care enough to afford it, because it is a hit that they're going to take. But they're obviously a hugely wealthy the company and they've gone for it and that's great to hear.

Really good. And yeah, as you say, it sets the example to everyone else and it makes you more open to the idea. So, yeah, good on Lego for doing that. Cool. So, one of the things that I have been focusing on on the show is people's story into cannabis in general, but in your case hemp in particular. You've got very interesting backstory. So would you mind sharing a bit about it? I know you still do some of your entertainment work, but what prompted you really to look at this new... It's a very bitch a question, sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fine. I'm from the film and TV world, I've done quite a few as a director films over the years and television things and I-

And can I just say, directed the Billie Jean video. Sorry, I had to get that in there.

Yeah. I just spent the eighties doing music videos, which was amazing. And then I got asked to do feature films and I ended up doing some mad films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Coneheads and some odd ones and then TV like Merlin and The Durrells and things over quite a period of time. And what I felt was, because I think as each decade comes along, you get to your thirties, you get to forties, you get to your fifties. When I got to 60, which is a few years ago. I said, "What am I doing in the next 10 years? What does this all mean?"

Now am I going to repeat the last 10 years and the 10 years before, which I've enjoyed, but I felt like I wanted to move across on a different road and in particular, my daughter had a daughter. And I looked at his granddaughter and I thought, it just messed with my head, and I thought... I saw it from a different point of view. What's the world she's going to be living in and what have I done towards it? And I thought what I've done is nothing towards the stuff that our generation has obviously deteriorated this planet. And I thought I couldn't spend the next 10 years not trying to reverse some of that. And so that was really motivation-

Brilliant. Very inspiring actually. Did you find it challenging to begin with? It's quite hard at any stage to change?

Yeah, very challenging. I knew nothing about farming. I knew nothing about manufacture. What I knew was that from my world in film, when I did well in films and videos and things or in that success, I'd often taken a risk. I'd often done something that I didn't know about. I'd often end at the unknown. And sometimes they were the biggest successes I had where I went where kind of into a unique spot. So I thought if I apply that to this and go for farming, I'd find people. Because again, in filmmaking, you build a team around you and you go for people that are obviously better than you at what they do because then you're going to learn from them and the end product's going to be better. So I've just built a team really around me and the project managers is Mike Redford and Katherine Brown.

Mike has his own organic farm. So all around me, farmers are saying, "You can't go organic because it's a waste of money. It's just too expensive to be organic. Your crop will be tiny and it will be destroyed." And Mike stood throughout it and said, "No. We're going to convert to organic." So this year, our third year, we are organic. We're an organic farm. And I love that he also told me and taught me and said, "Look, if you put a margin around your farm of say six meters, then wildlife that doesn't want to live in the hedge and it doesn't want to be in the crop or the older soil that has been farmed but it has got nowhere to go. So all these fields with nowhere for it to exist." And so we put margins around all our farms.

That's why we call it Margent Farm, because the Shakespeare word for margin. So, those sort of bits of inspiration on the way. I very quickly went to Cambridge university because they were only just up the road in Cambridge here so I just thought, even though I didn't know anybody, but a friend of a friend knew somebody in sustainability that I didn't even know they had a sustainability leadership program. We went there and were greeted with open arms about the study of it. And so it's been really, even though I've known nothing about it, the people that have jumped in around have more than made up for my ignorance.

That's fantastic. Really inspiring. I think big career change. It is a step into the unknown but good to understand that how important the people around you to help you with that. So I think you alluded to it a bit before, but coming towards the end, did you get any funny reactions from any people? I think you said earlier when you said, "I'm moving into hemp"

Yeah, that was the first. Your immediate friends, you say, "Look, I'm going to buy this farm. I'm going to get a license and I could be growing hemp." And then I was literally got this license by being checked out by the police and it being something that have I ever been busted for drugs before, because I won't get a license. Anyway, they were amazed because they, they thought I was entering into a new field and becoming Narcos. They thought it would came to mine. And yeah, it had some mad stuff on the way. In fact, I live in a flat in Barbican with the farm where the house is still not quite finished, although it's livable now. I, more often in Barbican, doing my day job as it were.

And when we first ordered the seeds, we ordered a ton of the hemp seeds once we got the license and they accidentally got delivered to my flat in the Barbican. So my neighbors were like, "Hemp?" By the ton comes into my flat. It was supposed to go to the farm. But anyway.

That's great. Yeah. Certainly the genesis of this show is to pick up on the fact that it's much more in the public consciousness. And as you say, things are moving fairly quickly because things are happening at different paces all around the world which is sort of moving everyone on in general. So it's really good. I guess. Finally, do you have any advice for anyone that's interested in finding out more about this and-

Well, I suppose the advice is about hemp, it has so many possibilities. I think just try and be creative with it. Be prepared that there's a really, there's a lot of elements to it if you're going to grow it. It's a crop that you just need the right agronomist and the right people advising how to get the best out of it. Farming is very tough. It's not fair on farmers. My advice is, if the law changes then that's the time to jump in financially and into hemp, which obviously we're all hoping it does in terms of it being a crop that you can get CBD off. Because I think I said, but the real holy grail is a crop that can give you that CBD, that can give you the fiber and give you the shive for construction and the leaves for tea and you're using the whole plant and you're really able to take that whole plant and get the best out of it. And financially, that is the way forward.

Sorry just to ask. What is the shive?

Shive's the center of the plant, which is the woody core. So the fibers are on the outside and the woody core is on the inside, which is where a lot of the cellulose is. You separate the two, you end up... Because the fibers can be used for clothing and for woven mat or non-woven mats. And then inside is this. It usually goes to farm waste. They actually use it for horse bedding or animal comfy spots, as they were. Or it gets chucked back onto the land for nutrition. But it often is wasted but when using it from Hempcrete, they're building a house in Scotland, a house in Devon. A Hempcrete house is going up as we speak.

So that is great. Often, they're buying that shive, that center of the plant, from France. Which is a bit crazy. We should be getting all from the UK. Other advice, I'd go to the BHA website, which is the British Hemp Association. They talk a lot of sense and we're, as a group of farmers, we're trying to get legislation changed and anyone who can help support that would be amazing.

Cool, great advice. Lovely. I hope it inspires people to find out more. And I think the sustainability and the ecological angle is so compelling that no doubt we'll hear much more about hemp in the public consciousness to come. Cool. Well, thank you very much, Steve, for your time today. It's been really, really good to chat and I'm sure everyone got a lot from that show.

Great. Thank you so much. And thanks for caring and being interested in your time.

Pleasure. Thanks, Steve. Sorry. Thanks for joining me for that show. I hope you enjoyed it. Found it particularly inspiring speaking to Steve there and I love the angle that he came from of why he got into hemp and I think it hopefully shows that it's never too late to try and do something different with your life. Please check out the website in the next couple of days, I'll be putting up show notes and a transcript if you want to revisit it. And as always, please share, like, rate, review, do all those things because that would be really helpful. Next week's show, we'll be talking specifically about CBD and giving you a bit of advice on what to look out for when you're purchasing your CBD products, because there's tons of stuff available and it's not entirely clear what's good and what's not. So I've got a couple of guys that will be pointing out the right things to look for. Cool. Until next week. Cheers. Bye.