The Lower Sioux Indian Community near Morton, Minn., has just over 1,100 residents and 1,473 acres of mostly sandy soil, but it could soon lead the nation in the production of hemp-infused building materials.
Construction is underway in the Lower Sioux community, also known as the Mdewakanton Tribal Reservation, on a 20,000-square-foot manufacturing campus in Redwood County, Minnesota. The Lower Sioux are already growing hemp on their acreage and plan to transform it into a building. material made of lime, hemp and water called hemp concrete. They plan to use hemp concrete to build houses for the tribe members.
“We’re not yet a fully formed, cohesive, vertically integrated system, but we’re getting there,” says Earl Pendleton, a former elected member of the Lower Sioux Tribal Council, who led the effort to both grow hemp and build. a campus with a production facility to produce hemp concrete. “We’re finally at the point where we can build with it. And that’s when I knew this was the final step, the final stage.”
A steel frame for the production facility has been erected in the community and contractor Loeffler Construction and Consulting is working to complete the $6.2 million project completed in late April. The project is funded by money the community raised from its existing hemp program, sustainability grants and loans.
The long history of hemp construction
While hemp concrete has been used overseas as a building material for decades, and has been used to make complicated projects in France since the 1990s, making it in the United States was not allowed by law federal until the 2018 farm bill legalized the industrial production of hemp, the sativa portion of cannabis (the marijuana plant) that has been used for hundreds of years in products such as rope, textiles and paper. In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act effectively banned the production of hemp in the US, despite the fact that the part of the plant that produces hemp has almost no tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive chemical in cannabis.
Hemp comes from the same plant species as marijuana, but legally, “marijuana” refers to cannabis that has more than 0.3% THC by dry weight. Any part of the plant with less THC content is legally considered hemp. The inner woody core of the hemp plant (reed or hurd) is mixed with a lime-based binder, water and sometimes additional pozzolans to make the building material known as hemp or hemp lime.
The mix is a lightweight, self-insulating material that can be formed into blocks, poured into place, or sprayed between framing cavities to set like stucco or plaster. Hemp can be grown in 90 to 120 days and is able to grow in adverse conditions as it is a weed.
A Cambridge study found that the fibrous plant can absorb about six tonnes of carbon dioxide per acre during its growing phase, making it a much better option for capturing CO2 than trees.
Building materials are responsible for around 11% of carbon dioxide production worldwide, so alternatives such as mycelium (mushroom roots) and algae are being used in building materials to reduce that number today, but none of these materials have the longevity and long-lasting track record. -use of time, safe and effective that hemp makes.
Before the 1937 act, hemp panels were used in Henry Ford’s Model T automobile. Hempcrete was approved for use in residential construction by the International Code Council in October 2022.
The US Hemp Building Association, a member group of the US Green Building Council exhibiting at the Greenbuild Fair, is working to get hemp concrete and other hemp products approved for the its use in commercial construction, but it is still in the testing phase of its application for the International. building code, board member Tai Olson of the Chicago-based US Heritage Grouphe said in the organization’s newsletter.
“We’re really looking for a way to incorporate two elements, thermal rating and fire rating, into commercial building codes,” Olson said.
Hemp has a future
After curing, hemp creates a rigid air and water barrier and is non-toxic and resistant to mold, fire and infestation. China is the world’s largest producer of hemp, followed by France, but so little is produced in the United States that building product manufacturers have not invested in the machinery to transform hemp into blocks because most farmers who grow legal cannabis have already done so. engaged in the cultivation of strains of the plant that can be sold to lucrative legal dispensaries. In addition, many state laws still make it difficult to grow and process the plant, even though industrial production was legalized under farm law.
Many states still prohibit bank loans for the processing of any cannabis products, for example, but reservations like the Lower Sioux Community can make their own laws about these products.
Pendleton, formerly treasurer of the Lower Sioux Indian Community Tribal Council, saw the opportunity hemp offered to his community in the early 2010s. The reservation’s Jackpot Junction Casino has been the community’s main source of income over the past 35 years, but as the novelty of casino gambling has worn off and the population on the reservation has expanded since 2000, the per capita cut from each Lower Sioux family . the casino’s $30 million annual profits have shrunk.
About half of the community’s residents are full-time homeless. Pendleton thought that creating an industry that trains the youth of the community in the construction, farming, and selling aspects of commercial hemp products offered a better future than gambling enterprises.
The state of Minnesota ran a hemp products research project through the University of Minnesota system in 2016 that involved growing primarily to research the properties of the fibrous material and how it could be marketed. The Lower Sioux seized the opportunity under Pendleton’s leadership.
“This is the year I think we started with a small acreage,” he recalls. “At the time, it was tied to a research project, higher education, for research purposes, but in 2017 it was allowed for commercial purposes, so we could use it and sell it.”
“We sold the green (cannabis), which was really the only part of the plant there was a market for at the time, and we made a good return that covered our growing costs,” Pendleton explains. “We ended up with the stock of the plant, which is the hurd (or chips) and the fiber. We paid for our crop by selling the green and that made the heating basically free.”
Construction in the Lower Sioux community
The Lower Sioux have already built demonstration projects, a shed and a two-room building with wood frames and sprayed hemp concrete. They process some of their hemp into hemp concrete at off-reserve commercial facilities.
“Trying to produce it here in the community when we’ve never grown a crop in our 80-plus years of existence, that was a huge effort in itself,” says Pendleton.
There is potential to plant hemp on 300 acres and at any given time grow hemp on 100-200 acres with a common crop rotation. The test seeds came from New Genetics in Colorado and the Dun Agro Hemp Group, a Dutch company with a processing facility in Indiana. Dun Agro seeks to partner with Native communities that have the sovereignty to decide to build production facilities in the US
“We already have teams housed in another facility,” said Danny Desjarlais, director of community construction for the hemp campus project. “As soon as this campus is finished, we’re going to bring that equipment in and get it up and running and hopefully have it up and running, you know, within the first two weeks after we move into the building.”
Desjarlais was a carpenter who was considering becoming a long-haul trucker before Pendleton brought him the idea of hemp production.
“Ear was the one that hired me 19 months ago” for the hemp construction project, Desjarlais says.
The processing facility will be the first fully integrated hemp concrete facility with its own growing operation nearby in the US if completed in time for April. By producing and processing their own hemp, the hemp block and foam it creates has the potential to be less expensive on the open market than growers who buy the plants elsewhere and then process them because of the economies of scale. of scale that can be achieved. eliminating shipping costs, distributors and, for foreign producers, import tariffs and fees.
