How is this a good thing?
Because while they're growing, a lot of things happen. Birds make nests in them. Rodents eat parts of them. Owls go there and eat the rodents. Insects lay their eggs in the bark. The St. Joe paper company has forests here, and for part of the year, they let people go on the land and cut firewood, so I've been there. Planted forests are nice forests. Not as good as a wild forest, but still better than monoculture.
I would think that higher productivity was the basic goal with crops.
IIRC There are varieties of hemp that produce far higher yields of usable fiber/acre than any species of trees. This means that fewer acres would need to be planted with the hemp which would free up acreage for other uses, even trees if that's your priority.
Higher productivity is another way of saying more carbon from the atmosphere is being converted to fiber.
Only per unit of farmland. And it's also another way of saying that there are more nutrients pulled from the soil, which is much more important than carbon per acre. When you're talking about carbon, it comes from the atmosphere, which is everywhere. Furthermore, the sequestering of carbon has to do with the amount of carbon in the final product, not the means of its production, and the amount of carbon in hemp fibers is not too different from the amount of carbon in trees.
Furthermore, wood has other uses than paper. You can sequester its carbon for hundreds of years in furniture and houses. How long does paper, rope, and clothing last, before it's burned and left to decompose? OK, there are some libraries, but there's a lot more wood in most structures than in the books they contain.
Anyway, the idea that hemp frees up units of land that could otherwise be left wild is potentially one that can be argued. However, how many farmers who want to grow hemp are actually going to let some of their land revert to nature? To a zeroth approximation, I'd have to say "none of them." The amount of arable land doesn't change all that much. It's only gone up by about 5% since the 1950s. I certainly haven't seen it go down.
Perhaps you know more about agriculture than I do. That wouldn't be too tough. Are you a farmer? It's my impression that tilling has gotten a bad rap from the greenies who think that another dust bowl disaster is always right around the corner.
No, I'm not a farmer. I may know more about agriculture than you do, as I have worked on scientific problems concerning the environment, some of which in collaboration with people from an agricultural University, but it doesn't really matter.
I'm not objecting to arguments in favor of hemp or thinking that a rational discussion cannot be had. I'm not saying that there are no environmentally sound arguments in favor of hemp. I'm just saying that presenting hemp as an environmental cure-all, which is how I usually see it being presented by hemp-advocacy organizations, is naive and stupid, of the kind that in my experience I come to expect from people who smoke an awful lot of dope.
