The Hemp Feed Coalition… is pleased to announce a landmark achievement with the tentative approval of Hemp Seed Meal (HSM) for Laying Hens at the recent Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO) Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX…
— from a press release from the Hemp Feed Coalition, August 2024
Okay, yes. Hemp is not marijuana, exactly. They are both cannabis plants, but differnt. Sort of like the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Hemp is really poor quality marijuana. But nutritious.
The government — and now, chicken farmers — use the word “hemp” to mean cannabis that contains 0.3 percent or less THC content. THC being, of course, the main chemical that gets you high. You have to smoke a lot of hemp to get stoned.
How did hemp get defined at 0.3 percent? Apparently, this definition was first proposed in 1979 in a book by Ernest Small called The Species Problem in Cannabis: Science & Semantics, wherein he bemoaned the fact that it’s difficult to distinguish hemp and marijuana because there’s no actual taxonomical difference between the two. Hard to tell the one from the other, when they are both cannabis. Until you smoke it.
So when you can’t judge the book by its cover, or a plant by its leaf, science to the rescue.
Author Ernest Small acknowledged that 0.3 percent was an arbitrary number. And you don’t have to be stoned to agree with him. Which is a good thing, because smoking cannabis with 0.4 percent THC — legally, marijuana — is not going to give you a buzz.
I’ve been seeing a lot of hemp products lately, even in the grocery store, like “hemp milk”. Turns out, hemp is highly nutritious, Marijuana is also highly nutritious, but that doesn’t explain “the munchies”.
So we finally get around to the chicken farmers, who are always looking for inexpensive but highly nutritious feed for their hens and roosters. And the Hemp Feed Coalition celebrated a recent veterinary victory — which could also be seen as a political victory — when the FDA-Center for Veterinary Medicine bestowed their approval for feeding ‘Hemp Seed Meal’ to chickens. Then the Association of American Feed Control Officials voted to approve hemp feed at their annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on Wednesday, August 7, 2024.
48 states voted in favor; 2 states abstained from voting. So our chickens will soon be eating cannabis seeds, it would appear.
Yes, good things can happen in Texas, in spite of everything you’ve heard.
I suspect, however, that the Hemp Feed Coalition doesn’t really know what effect 0.3 percent THC will have on chickens? Maybe they’re more sensitive than humans?
I can imagine a future scene — hundreds of chickens laying around, all with the munchies, but too stoned to do anything about it.
One question that remains. Will the chickens now contain 0.3 percent THC? That would be another great reason to eat at Chick-Fil-A.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.