Posts: 21113
-
Karma: 8,648
First of all, I posted that at 4am so it wasn't the most thought through post in history of the internet. Second, I hope that was a serious question, because it's going to get a serious answer.
In Forestry, you have tree farms, and you have clear cuts, patch cuts, and selective cuts. Selective cuts are the only ones that mimic natural habitats. Patch cuts can be good for the habitat that I won't get into here, but they have the same problem as clear cuts in that you're creating a big disturbance to the ecosystem by creating access roads, using heavy machinery, and whatnot. Tree farms are not their "natural habitat" as you say. They clear cut any trees that were there before, spray all the plants to ensure they don't grow back, and replace them with even aged monoculture trees in very neat rows worked out mathematically in order to gain the most growth per square foot. Most trees do not help the soil so they have to add a lot of fertilizers, which are not good for runoff. Hemp grows in nearly any soil and is a nitrogen fixer, so it actually helps rejuvenate poor soil. For the sake of this example, you could go into a clear cut which has low nitrogen levels after 80 years of monoculture tree growth with no understory and the hemp would help to rejuvenate the soil, and you could get a profit off of the plant once you cut down the hemp, you could use whatever part of the plant you can't use industrially, compost it, and put it back into the soil for further added nutrients.
Ideally, forests would not be cut down to plant hemp, it could be used by farmers all over the world during crop rotations who have soils poor, unstable soil, and actually be able to profit off of the investment rather than buying a bunch of fertilizer or laying aside a plot of land to not be used in a rotation. Also, trees, depending on the species, are harvested in 50-120(ish) year cycles. You can rotate hemp annually instead of every 80 years as you said, and it can grow much faster than most tree. It's not uncommon for hemp to grow 10 feet a year.
Anyways, there's your answer.
