Hemp farmers find new use for their unusual crop

A hemp farm thought to be one of the last remaining of its kind in East Anglia is hoping to use its surplus to help build houses.

Kitty Wilson Brown and Claire O'Sullivan have been growing hemp at Wakelyns Farm in Fressingfield, Suffolk, for the past four years to turn it into colourful fabrics.

Hemp has been used for its fibre in England since the 5th Century, and between 1500 and 1800 it was extensively used to make ship ropes and sails, but the industry declined and there are just a few growers left in the region.

Wilson Brown and O'Sullivan have now teamed up with Chloe Donovan, who wants to use the crop in house building, such as for insulation.

The use of hemp for fabrics can be traced back to the Anglo Saxons who wove the crop for their clothes.

Later the Tudors used Hemp for naval ships in their ropes and sails and at that time, Suffolk and Norfolk produced 8% of all of the UK's hemp crops, according to Wilson Brown and O'Sullivan.

However the industry became uneconomical with the introduction of cotton and its association with marijuana led to regulations.

Today the crop requires no fertiliser, no herbicide, no pesticide and no irrigation, but growers do require a licence from the Home Office to ensure the crop contains low levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound that produces a cannabis high.

Wilson Brown and O'Sullivan set up Contemporary Hempery as a way to revive the UK hemp weaving industry.

O'Sullivan told BBC Farmwatch, it was a "no brainer" and the crop grows at about 3cm (1.2in) per day.

"You can make textile from it, you can build houses from it, you can make medicine from it," she said.

"It has more protein than soya, it's a phenomenal plant for humans to raise," she added.

Wilson Brown explained that it had taken them five years of mastering the crop's growth, its processing and spinning.

She said they do everything by hand as there is no infrastructure left in the country and nowhere that they can send the crop to be spun into yarn.

"We love that we've connected to all this process, and it's always going to be at the heart of what we do," Wilson Brown explained.

"But we do hope in the future we can grow the crop, we can send it off and get it back as yarn.

"Because right now, we've spent I don't even know how many hours, millions of hours doing this, and if we work that out per cost, it's going to be a very expensive bit of fabric."

Donovan, whose family were tenant farmers near Beccles, Suffolk, set up Natural Building Systems five years ago to build sustainable homes.

She works to make homes from timber and hemp, but said most of the hemp had to be imported from France as so little of it is grown in the UK.

But with increasingly hot and dry summers in the UK, she believed there was a future for hemp once in the country.

Now surplus from The Contemporary Hempery will go to Natural Building Systems for the company's construction projects.

Donovan said the hemp can be used as an insulation material to improve the performance of buildings and to help absorb moisture.

"It buffers internal humidity and that means buildings are less likely to get problems with damp or mould and condensation," she explained.

"But also it means that they're less likely to overheat in summer, which is obviously critical at this time of year.

"But what we've done is taken those materials that require usually quite a lot of skill and put them into a pre-manufactured kit to make it easy to build so that anyone can do it."

Donovan said they were aiming to ensure the hemp would cost the same as conventional materials and that within five years it could play a "pivotal role" within the UK construction industry.

A government spokesperson said: "The government has recently eased rules to make it easier for farmers to grow industrial hemp for lawful purposes.

"However, we have no plans to remove the requirement for a licence to grow low-THC cannabis, or to enable the supply of cannabis leaves or flowers under industrial hemp rules."

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