Why Aren’t We All Wearing American-Grown Hemp?

Image credit: Aliya Wanek hemp and organic cotton canvas jacket

We were promised hemp fashion.

Since the 1990s, we’ve been told that soon we will all be wearing sustainable, local, American-grown hemp fabrics. That it would replace king cotton and become the new must-wear textile for conscious consumers.

It seemed like it might finally happen in 2018, when the Farm Bill removed hemp as a controlled substance. There was a gold rush into growing hemp, with 580,000 acres planted in 2019.

And yet, even in my ultra-sustainable closet, hemp failed to take over, while CBD products flooded stores. The few hemp pieces I own are from China. That’s a shame, because it’s sustainability promises as a crop are strong and myriad. Hemp as a fabric is stronger than cotton — it’s said to break in, not break down, making for products that will last your lifetime. It’s sweat-wicking and anti-odor, similar to merino wool, meaning you can treat hemp products like denim products and go a long time between washings.

First discovered thousands of years ago in the Himalayas, hemp was used to make Christopher Columbus’ sails and the first American flag. Why can’t we get it together and bring all-American hemp back to our fields, our mills, and our homes?

Well, as with many things in sustainable fashion, the hype has gotten way ahead of the actual facts. Let’s get into it.

How much more sustainable than cotton is hemp?

Before you can learn about hemp fashion, you need to understand what hemp fabric is. It’s a bast fiber, meaning it’s made from the stem of a plant. Other bast fibers include jute and flax (a.k.a. linen).

While closely related to the cannabis plant you smoke, hemp lacks enough THC to get you high. Despite this, it was swept up in the 1937 illegalization of growing marijuana, with India following suit in 1985 due to pressure from the U.S.  Since then, China has come to dominate the global hemp industry both in volume and fiber quality, followed by Nepal and some Eastern European countries.

Industrial hemp is in turn split into three categories: oilseed (which is used for food and CBD), fiber, and a hybrid that is used for rougher products like paper or rope.

According to the CFDA and other internet sources, “hemp produces 250% more fiber than cotton and 600% more fiber than flax [linen] on the same land, and has the highest yield per acre of any natural fiber.” Unfortunately, I was not been able to confirm this statistic. Instead, I found that hemp yields an estimated 1,300 pounds of fiber per acre, versus somewhere between about 600 to 1,400 pounds for cotton fiber, and around 500 pounds per acre for flax. That’s anywhere from equal to double cotton, and 160% more than linen. That’s still an improvement!

And you don’t need to fluff (pun intended) hemp’s statistics to make it look good even compared to linen. Hemp is as hardy as a weed — the federal government has spent millions ripping up wild hemp plants (the kind that won’t get you high) that have sprouted of their own accord in roadside ditches.  Hemp is ready to harvest within 100 days of being planted, compared with 150 to 180 days for cotton.  According to Soucing Journal, hemp uses half as much water per season as irrigated cotton and requires no pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizer. (Though sometimes farmers can and do use fertilizer and herbicides to juice production.)

Hemp is so good for the soil, that it’s been known to grow for 20 years straight in the same location without any need to rotate crops in or replenish the soil health, according to the National Hemp Association. It provides excellent ground cover for crop rotation, and there’s evidence that hemp can draw heavy metals out of the soil it’s grown in, and so can be used for bioremediation of toxic sites.

Wow, hemp does seem pretty perfect. There must be a catch. And there is! But first, a little debunking…

Is hemp anti-microbial?

I’ve seen fashion brands claim that hemp is anti-microbial. But according to this review of the scientific literature, its anti-microbial properties are related to CBD oils, which are harvested from a different type of plant, and from a different part of the plant. Hemp fiber won’t kill microbes or give you a sense of calm when you put it on. Sorry.

Like with other natural fibers, advocates might have also conflated its odor-fighting properties with anti-microbial properties. Just like bamboo rayon and merino wool, it’s simply easier to wash or waft the odor away from hemp than from synthetics.

Why isn’t hemp for textiles grown in America?

Fortunately for your nerves but unfortunately for fashion, most of the hemp grown in the U.S. is of the CBD-producing variety. And after the initial hype, the 2019 hemp growing season was seen as a “disaster for farmers,” with an overabundance of CBD-variety hemp rotting in the fields because there wasn’t enough CBD processing capacity in the states. Acres planted in 2021 dropped 80%. A hemp fiber processor located in the U.S. that has produced for Patagonia and construction material companies said in 2019 they couldn’t find enough of the textile variety to process.

There have been questions about whether a domestic hemp textile market could ever be established in the U.S. For comparison, it’s only possible to grow the commodity of upland cotton in the United States today because of subsidies and crop insurance for farmers. Otherwise, cotton farmers would be completely wiped out due to cheaper competition from Asia and Africa. The rejoinder from sustainable fashion optimists is that those cotton subsidies should just all be shifted to hemp.

Could hemp replace cotton?

But that is too simplistic of a solution. Hemp, while stronger and longer-lasting than cotton and linen, is also somewhat stiffer and coarser. Until recently, it was only ever used for things like rope and sails, or as a last resort for low-income rural folks.

With new processing technology, pure hemp feels like rustic linen and makes for beautiful sheets, sundresses, and lightweight men’s shirts and suiting. Fashion brands that sell what they call “cottonized” hemp still blend it with other fibers. Patagonia imports hemp from China (photos of the process here) and blends it with Tencel, polyester, and cotton, and Levi’s cottonized hemp products feature denim made from hemp and cotton blends.

Why aren’t hemp textiles made in America?

It’s in the processing of the hemp plant to make it ready for weaving that things get more complicated.

The first step is retting, a process to break down the freshly harvested plant. This can be done with water, chemically, or through dew-retting, in which the stalks are laid out in the field for several weeks to let weather and microbes do the job. Up until now, North American farmers could only do dew retting, as the other processes require specialized facilities that North America didn’t have. Next comes skutching, or removing the fibers from the inner core. This is a mechanical process that hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Once dried, hemp is dipped into a vat of caustic soda to de-gum the fiber. Then the fibers are readied for spinning in the hacking step, by shaking out the pulp and combing and carding the fibers. Then, finally, it’s spun, starched, bleached, and scoured with soap and water. Now, you have a fiber.

Most hemp of a quality high enough for textiles is produced in China and Hungary using water retting. If it’s not regulated, the nutrient-rich wastewater can be dumped into local waterways and can suffocate aquatic life (similar to dumping fertilizer into rivers). The certification GOTS does require that wastewater from water retting is properly handled. There are few GOTS-certified hemp fiber producers, mostly in China and Germany.

It’s been a slow process in the States to get facilities that can process hemp into fiber up and running. That hemp company in Kentucky that produces fiber for Patagonia? It filed for bankruptcy in January 2020, mainly due to conflicting federal and state regulations around the legality of hemp.

Despite these setbacks, there are some textile startups such as Bear Fiber, Renaissance Fiber, BastCore, and Panda Biotech working to scale up hemp fiber processing.  Bear Fiber said in December 2022 that it was producing hemp fiber for Vans. And Cone Denim, the heritage mill, debuted in 2022 a ridiculously sustainable collection of fabrics made from American cotton, Kentucky plant-based indigo, and American hemp processed by BastCore.

Still, these products are experiments and aren’t readily accessible to the consumer looking to buy American-grown and processed hemp.

How can we bring American hemp back?

This is all very exciting, but there’s still work to be done before we can reclaim our heritage of American hemp clothing.

First, the federal government needs to make hemp fully legal and take away all the red tape so that it’s as easy to grow and process as cotton. University extensions need to fund and engage in research to breed the best fiber hemp for each region. Then, we need investment in technology and manufacturing facilities that can process and mill hemp into a fine fabric. Finally, we need a tariff system that financially supports hemp fabric manufactured in the U.S., so that it doesn’t have to compete with artificially cheap fibers created in China.

In the meantime, you should still try out at least one hemp fashion product! Imported hemp-cotton blend products still have a big advantage over pure cotton products in terms of sustainability… even if they don’t bring a sense of calm and relaxation.