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Since we’re talking about hemp I thought I would replay this interview with Jim Savage too! We’d love if you’d join  http://organicgardenerpodcast.us11.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e3e16d6ddb7c0acd9e17348ed&id=b6a8f6bd31&e=e16e7400c4 (Organic Gardener Podcast Facebook Community!)   http://www.greenbuilt.co () Hemp Home Tiny+ Jim Savage from http://www.greenbuilt.co (Greenbuilt Hemp Homes) is here to share his dream to change the world by creating a healthier planet for his grandchildren to grow up in. After studying the multiple uses and benefits of the amazing hemp plant for concrete, insulation, food, material and clothing, plastics and paper he took his knowledge of supply. When researching Jim I found this great article in the http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/nyregion/cannabis-construction-entrepreneurs-use-hemp-in-home-building.html?_r=0 (NY Times) where you can learn more about hemp homes. The other day Mike was scrolling through his Facebook feed and said, hey wifey, check this out, you’re gonna want to interview this guy! And I contacted him and here we are. It’s a little bit different because we are not going to talk about gardening but I think listeners will maybe want to live in one of these houses… Way back  in the early 90s I had a little hemp business, I made backpacks and clothes and everything out of hemp fabric on my treadle sewing machine but I knew nothing about business so it ended up fading away… Tell us a little about yourself. After about 8-9 years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, people were first displaced by Katrina and then were living in these toxic environments, toxic trailers for years! I said to myself, there’s really something terribly wrong about this, and something else has to be done. At the time I was doing something else for a living. That just got something under my skin, and then a few years later when the houses in Haiti were what fell down on people and killed them because their homes were made out of concrete, I said I have to do something about this! I said where can we find a sustainable, healthy, non-toxic material for housing that’s not gonna kill people? That’s actually gonna be good for people’s heath and good for the economy in Haiti was in terrible shape. Then I started looking in the third world generally and seeing how poorly their economies were doing. One of the amazing things is when you look at Haiti, this is an island is made out of limestone, and there are no cement plants in the country of Haiti, so they were  importing cement from the multi-national companies and they paying more for cement in Haiti then in the SouthEast US and their houses collapsed on them during the earthquake. So I tried for a few years to do things in the third world, I had a project in Mali in West Artful, ended with coups, and change in government. The people who were involved in the project were forced to leave. We needed up in a situation where I said what am I gonna do about this? I believe in this material. What I had seen in Europe, really nice buildings, carbon sequestering non-toxic some of them were really beautiful a couple of homes built in NC, hemp is not legal to grow in the US. Industrial hemp which has virtually no thc, is still considered to be a schedule one controlled substance in the US. I started looking as cannabis started becoming legal, it was sort of the tail wagging the dog, hemp started to move towards legalization. http://www.ncsl.org/research/agriculture-and-rural-development/state-industrial-hemp-statutes.aspx (In 2013, the farm bill, did allow research and pilot programs to begin, it was  signed in Feb 2014, by President Obama). Almost 30 states have passed laws legalizing industrial hemp, we think it will be pretty soon we will be able to grow industrial hemp. The hemp has a whole lot of different applications, besides the inner woody core for building products. You... Support this podcast