THE HEALING COLTURE

«Hemp is a sustainable and environmental friendly crop that can provide valuable raw materials to a large number of industrial applications. Traditionally harvested at full flowering for textile destinations, nowadays hemp is mainly harvested at seed maturity for dual-purpose applications and has a great potential as multipurpose crop. However, the European hemp fiber market is stagnating if compared to the growing market of hemp seeds and phytocannabinoids.
To support a sustainable growth of the hemp fiber market, agronomic techniques as well as genotypes and post-harvest processing should be optimized to preserve fiber quality during grain ripening, enabling industrial processing and maintaining, or even increasing, actual fiber applications and improving high-added value applications»¹.
«Climate change (increases in temperature, changes in precipitation and decreases in ice and snow) is occurring globally and in Europe; some of these observed changes have established records in recent years»².
Hemp farming is able to efficiently mitigate the climate change interfering with the causes of the Changes. A renewable resource is also defined “sustainable” if the reproduction rate is equal or higher than the consuming rate. This concept implies the need of a rational use of the renewable resources; water and greenwood are nowadays renewable resources used in an unsustainable way. The hemp production chain is an excellent example of circular economy, a sustainable chain from the environmental, social and economic point of view. Hemp farming heals the environment during the growing phase, for several reasons.