Monday December 14, 2020
In todays report:
Click herefor the link to the video on youtube
The Chinese Strategy: Planning a roadmap to hemp’s future
The #chinese aim to boost yield per hectare by developing more efficient harvesting and processing technology.
With the global demand for natural fibers rising, but Chinese cotton facing market and environmental challenges, #hemp fiber farming and production has been targeted for growth. Transitioning from cotton to hemp also meets the 14th FYP’s objective to speed up low carbon economic development and increase efficiency in the use of water, halt soil erosion and address other problems caused by #cotton.
Technical advances such as “cottonization” of hemp fibers could recharge China’s big textile mills. And the Chinese are advancing textile science and technology. If China, already the world’s biggest producer of hemp fabrics, makes a big shift from cotton to hemp, it could have far-reaching implications for the global textile and fashion markets.
Cannabis is traditional in Chinese culture. And while 20th century propaganda stigmatized the species, the government can intervene to normalize hemp products for the domestic market through TCM and other hemp-based products. The TCM sector accounted for about $57 billion in 2019, equal to roughly 20% of the total Chinese pharma market, according to a report on CBD released earlier this year by U.S. researchers Arcview. TCM producers are developing new products and adopting Western design and marketing strategies to advance the sector, Arcview noted.
On the provincial level, Yunnan Province’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) sees hemp as critical to the #biotechnology industry which, along with hydropower and production of silicon materials, are seen forming the basis of the local economy. The provincial capital of Kunming has pledged the city’s support, recently unveiling a plan for the CBD sector that sets total revenue goals of 10 billion yuan, 30 billion yuan, and 100 billion yuan (€1.2 billion, €3.6 billion and €12.7 billion; $1.5 billion, $4.5 billion, $15 billion) at the milepost years 2022, 2025, and 2030, respectively.
https://hemptoday.net/the-chinese-strategy-planning-a-roadmap-to-hemps-future/
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Concrete shortage
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Latvian hemp farmer and hemocrete pioneer Kristaps Eglittis has developed a mini decorticator
the hurdmaster MD1000
The HurdMaster MD 1000 micro decorticator is intended for small farming and processing operations and for CBD and marijuana producers who want to capitalize on leftover stems. The machine is designed for separating the cannabis stalk’s woody inner core (hurd, shivs, shives) from the exterior bast fibers. The resulting hurd can be used for hempcrete construction, as animal bedding and animal litter, or as plant bedding. With additional technology, the separated bast fibers can be further processed for a wide, wide variety of applications.
https://www.amazon.com/Hempcrete-Book-Designing-Hemp-Lime-Sustainable/dp/0857841203
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https://hempcretedirect.com/benefits-of-hempcrete/
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Israeli startup says it has edited cannabis plant gene to resist fungus
CanBreed says this is the first time a commercial company has managed to gene-edit cannabis using CRISPR technology; hopes to create and sell sturdier cannabis seeds
Israeli startup CanBreed said it has used gene editing technology to alter a gene in the cannabis plant to make the plant resistant to powdery mildew, a fungus that can be deadly for the plant.
CanBreed said that to the best of its knowledge, this is the first time a commercial company has managed to perform genome editing on a cannabis plant. The editing was done using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology.
By editing the gene, the protein is not expressed, he explained, potentially resulting in a powdery mildew-resistant plant. Now the startup has to prove that these gene-edited plants are in fact resistant to the fungus, he said, and will do so working together with scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
CanBreed hopes that its cannabis seeds will allow growers to cultivate uniform plants in an efficient and repetitive manner, thus enabling cannabis cultivation practices that compare with those of other commodity crops such as tomatoes and wheat. Since cannabis is a medical plant, standardization and uniformity are required, and that can be attained by growing cannabis from stable seeds.