Welcome to this presentation on industrial hemp.
I'm gonna take you on a journey
that shows the remarkable impact
that industrial hemp and cannabis
and all elements of the cannabis plant
can have on every country.
And that includes medicinal cannabis,
that includes industrial cannabis.
And so the word hemp means cannabis.
When I use the word cannabis,
it does not mean medicinal cannabis
or recreational cannabis.
I will share my screen.
I'm the Chief Executive Officer
and International Marketing Director
of Textile and Composite Industries in Australia.
We're manufacturers of the world's most effective
and economic hemp decorticator.
I will explain what a decorticator is.
I'm Secretary of the Australian Industrial Hemp Alliance,
Australia's peak national body for industrial hemp.
And I'm on the board of the Federation
of International Hemp Organizations, FIHO,
which is now made up of 17 global organizations
that have created a global federation
to make sure that the development of all matters cannabis
progresses in a consistent way.
And one of the great problems with cannabis
is the ridiculous attitude of most governments to cannabis.
So this presentation is about industrial hemp
that I say, that we say,
our company says is a wonderful game-changing
agribusiness opportunity for Australia
and indeed every country on our spaceship earth.
This is a global game-changing agribusiness opportunity
that improves the environment,
sequesters carbon efficiently,
enables profitable and sustainable farming
and reduces the global usage of synthetic chemicals
and damaging products.
This presentation, whenever I make a presentation,
I make it in honor of Adrian Francis K. Clark,
the founder of Textile and Composite Industries in 1994
and the inventor of the world's best decorticator,
a decorticator that does not need reading of hemp.
I will just mute everybody.
Adrian died on 15 October 2015
and he was only 72 at the time.
In fact, 40 years, 70, no, 68.
He dedicated the last part of his life
to solving the major problem of the hemp industry,
how to decorticate without reading.
And while this presentation is focused on the hemp industry,
as I'm talking about it,
please understand that producers of medicinal cannabis
have a problem with the remainder stalk.
They're either required to destroy it
or they can't make use of it and they destroy it
because it's literally considered to be waste.
Our decorticator will enable eventually
when we help wake governments up
for medicinal cannabis producers,
for recreational cannabis producers,
to produce their products
and to have the remainder stalk decorticated
to produce wonderful, valuable products,
thereby increasing, guaranteeing profitability
for cannabis producers of all types.
Now I said that Adrian started this company in 1994
and I will tell you why he started it,
but that was a visionary step.
In 1996, he traveled to Kentucky and to Canada
with his brother Anthony Clark,
who is the current chairman
of Textile and Composite Industries.
I'm the chief executive officer.
And he educated people in Kentucky
because Kentucky was starting to take an interest in hemp.
He educated people about the problem of decortication,
went to Canada, did the same thing.
And his efforts from 1994 have had a significant impact
on the growth of hemp globally over the last 28 years.
Now, the most expensive step in using hemp
was the process of separating the hemp stalk
into its component parts of fiber and herd.
That's the process called decortication.
It's a strange word.
Until I got involved in hemp 10 years ago,
I didn't know what it meant,
but I do now.
Our company, driven by our philosophy of helping farmers
to become more profitable, independent,
environmentally green and sustainable,
developed a decorticating machine over the past 28 years,
not 27 years, that eliminates
these expensive processing costs.
Now you might say, why did Adrian do this?
Call from Patrick.
Why did he do this?
Because he was a lover of freedom, as am I.
That's the reason why I'm in hemp.
I fight for freedom in a range of ways.
I am Australasian passion provocateur.
I am a legal strategist.
I've practiced law for 20 years.
For the last 29 years, I have been a motivational speaker,
a speaker on passion, a speaker on leadership,
a speaker on strategy for business, big business,
medium business, small business.
But all of my work relates to freedom.
I'm also chairman of the Australian Institute of Comedy.
So, so everything I do.
So everything I do has a theme related to freedom.
Freedom.
Adrian could say, and I agree with him,
that the way to guarantee human freedom
is to have successful, profitable,
sustainable family farms.
Why?
Because farmers on the land, away from government,
away from capital cities,
they can tell government literally to get stuffed.
They can tell government to go away.
The alternative, which is the message
driven by big business, says,
oh, the only way that you can make money
out of agriculture is by having corporatized farming
with big companies running agriculture.
That is a guaranteed way for us to lose freedom.
I urge all people watching this presentation
to understand that small, medium-sized family farms
will guarantee human freedom.
Just imagine the alternative of we're all living in cities,
all cooped up, and there's major corporations running
big corporatized agriculture, monoculture.
That is a disastrous model.
That's why Adrian Clark started this, because he said,
so what's the crop that is going to most successfully
enable profitable, sustainable family farms?
He says, him.
He says, well, why aren't people growing hemp?
Because from hemp, you can make all sorts of things.
And the answer was that it's hard to make money from hemp
because of the problem of decortication.
So he says, okay, I will solve the problem of decortication.
So that's what he did when he started in 1994.
And I'm delighted to announce
that this big problem has been solved.
For the past 8,000 years, the only way to separate
the hemp plant, the stalk of the plant
into its component parts was to commence with retting,
the harvested stalk.
Retting is a rotting process designed to break down
the molecular bonds within the plant
via biological action.
Retting can be achieved in a number of ways.
Soaking in hot water, the Chinese do that a lot,
in huge vats of boiling water,
leaving the harvested stalks in the field
for three to six weeks, steaming the stalks
or a combination of those.
Retting is expensive, labor intensive, time consuming
and entirely inappropriate for our Australian climate.
So Adrian lived in Melbourne, Australia, where I live,
but also for many climates around the world.
But also, even if the climate is supportive,
it's still labor intensive, time consuming, expensive,
and also damages the fiber and the herd.
So he identified the problems as, gosh,
if we could identify that problem,
then farmers would grow hemp
and thereby secure their future profitability.
And I'm telling you now that hemp is incredibly profitable
and it doesn't matter how much of it is produced,
it can remain profitable.
Unlike most crops where if you push production up,
the price comes down significantly.
There are opportunities in the hemp industry
for farmers, investors, designers of machinery,
designers of industrial products,
designers of materials handling systems,
manufacturers of textiles and composites,
food and cosmetic manufacturers, retailers,
agricultural machinery suppliers,
agricultural support services.
Over the past few years, I've developed a mantra.
I have copyrighted this HP by four.
HP is the first and last letters of hemp.
HP stands for healthy products
that then help people become healthy,
that makes our planet healthier,
and at the same time producing healthy profits.
Healthy products, healthy people, healthy planet,
healthy profits.
So this one plant,
this one plant has 10 categories of products.
There's a picture for you to contemplate this.
So there's food, clothing, buildings,
medicine, medicinal cannabis.
I'll put into that side the recreational side.
In fact, that would be an 11th category, wouldn't it?
But we'll put it as medicine, recreational, fuel,
ethanol you can make from the herd, ethanol.
Like a country that imports fuel,
can use the hemp to make ethanol
so it doesn't have to spend its foreign exchange
on buying fuel.
And the other source of fuel is biodiesel
from the hemp seed oil.
Fertilizer, so using, so the hemp plant itself
becomes a fertilizer because it rejuvenates
and repairs soil.
Composite materials, so hemp fiber can replace fiberglass,
body care products, cosmetics, rope and twine,
baling twine, and packaging materials.
So the whole packaging industry
with the waste that it produces can be totally replaced
by biodegradable, compostable, recyclable hemp products.
Now, all of this, since we've solved the problem
of decortication, all of this can be done
in a reasonably economic way.
Whereas if you have to do the rating,
the hemp products become much more expensive.
So here's the sort of profitability for hemp growing.
This is the indicative numbers for one hectare.
It's reasonably accurate for US numbers as well.
So you have to buy the seed,
you have to grow it up to harvest,
and so you have a production cost.
Then you have to harvest and process,
and then you produce products for sale.
And these are accurate numbers.
The fiber from one hectare, which is two and a half acres,
2.47 acres to be precise.
So two and a half acres or one hectare
will produce three tonnes of fiber worth $7,500.
Seven tonnes of herd worth $7,000.
One tonne of seed for $3,000.
So that's $17,500 of farm gate value.
And the cost of producing that is your $2,000 growing cost,
your $4,000 harvesting and processing costs.
$6,000, take that off $17,500.
There's the potential there for eight, nine, 10,
$11,000 profit per hectare.
And in many places in America, around the world,
you can grow two crops a year.
Now the one element that this does not take into account
is the holding cost of your land.
So if you have to rent land,
then you have to take that rental cost
off your profitability.
Or if you own land, then of course,
the interest on that capital cost
has to be taken into account.
Hemp is very profitable when you don't have to do renting.
And that's what Adrian could see.
And when you look at one hectare doing this,
well, you can start to see that a 10 hectare family farm,
25 acre family farm can make $100,000 profit per crop.
So suddenly you start to see gosh,
communities in regional and rural areas
can literally start to lift them out of struggle streets
by relying on this magnificent plant.
So let's look at the cross section of this plant.
The hemp stalk is made up of two key parts,
the fibre on the outside and the herd on the inside.
This is the case for every cannabis plant,
whether it's produced for medicinal purposes,
for seed purposes,
all the cross section of the stalk looks like this.
So get hold of a stalk and cut it
and have a look at it yourself.
The herd is approximately 70% by weight
and the fibre is 30%.
And the challenge is to take the fibre off the herd.
That's what we do.
And you can see the uses to which you put the herd.
The herd, so animal bedding, mulch, chemical absorbent,
fibre board, insulation, concrete, the fibre is rope,
netting, canvas, carpet, biocomposites,
non-woven clothes, shoes, bags.
And then the whole stalk, which is a less profitable way,
but the whole stalk can be used for biofuel,
but it's much better to use the herd for ethanol,
the biofuel from the seed, as I've talked about,
paper products, you can use the whole hemp stalk
to make pulp, cardboard and filters.
So this is what a ideal fibre hemp crop looks like.
So when I talk hemp crops,
there are two ways that people talk about it.
You have a seed crop or a fibre crop.
Fibre crops go tall and straight like bamboo crops.
They can go to 10, 12, 15.
In fact, we've had reports in America
of 18 foot high fibre crops.
Now they're the same seed as a seed crop
but they're planted close together
so that the plant grows up.
Now these crops grow in 90 to a hundred days.
Look at that.
That's just ridiculous.
It's 12, 13, 14 feet in a hundred days from seed.
So it's not permanent.
You have to plant the seed and this is what it grows to.
And this, every part of this biomass is valuable.
Anticoidicator that overcomes the problem of retting.
This is what it currently looks like.
This machine is a machine,
two of these machines are in Pennsylvania
and we are having lots of inquiries with people
all around the world who's starting to understand
value of hemp.
This machine is fully computer linked,
internet of things linked.
All of the elements of it are cross-referenced
so that it can't be damaged in use.
But it's a pretty sophisticated machine.
It costs just under half a million US dollars.
And the way that it works is that conveyor here,
you send the, after you've harvested the hemp.
So you have to literally slash the hemp
and then bring the stalks to this machine.
This machine sits in a shed in a factory
and you bring the stalks,
then you send the stalks up this conveyor.
And then the decoidicator itself decoidicates
and the fiber comes out this chute.
And on this side, so the chute goes out the back there
and the herd comes down this side.
Or here's another view, the herd comes out here
having been fed in on the other side of the machine.
And literally it's a mechanical process
where it separates the fiber and the herd.
It's not 100% separation, it's 85 to 90%.
So that means there's a small amount of herd in the fiber
and there's a small amount of fiber in the herd,
both of which can be separated quite conveniently.
Another important principle is we're talking about
a natural crop.
So that the rules for the operation of this machine are,
if you put, like any machine, if you put garbage in,
you get garbage out.
If you imagine this crop here being harvested,
look how beautiful and straight that is,
and you then feed that straight stalk up the conveyor,
it's gonna give you a much better result
than if you've got a crop that has been dried
and damaged or got lots of branches.
The decodicator was designed for fiber crops,
but it will decodicate anything.
It will also decodicate cannaf and other,
it will decodicate flax, for example.
But we're focused on hemp because hemp fiber
is the strongest natural fiber on the planet.
Now, this is the development journey.
Have a look.
This is what the D8 decodicator looked like in 2012.
Isn't that, that's when I joined the company 10 years ago.
That's what it looks like now.
That's what it looked like then.
So it's been an amazing development journey.
Then that machine became this machine.
So this machine is operational in Victoria.
It's a demonstration machine.
The essence of the D8 is in there.
It's protected by confidentiality,
and anyone who buys one of our machines
has to sign confidentiality agreements.
This machine then developed into this next version,
which has all of the safety requirements for Canada,
America, Europe, Australia,
and also has digital linkage back to head office
here in Australia of the operations of this machine.
And so this machine that you can see on the screen
now has turned into this machine
with even more enhancements.
So hemp fiber and herd is now significantly
more cost-effective to produce without retting
by using our D8 decoarticator.
The D8 now enables, this solves the problem
of hemp being a very real substitute for existing products.
On the left, you can see raw hemp fiber
that comes straight out of our machine.
And then if you want to make textiles,
you have to degum it.
It's a cottonized process.
You have to take the gum out of it.
It takes about 40% of the weight,
and then it becomes cotton-like.
And from this, you make yarn.
And once you have yarn, you can make any textiles.
And not only yarn, you can also make non-woven materials.
So the question of the fiber itself can be turned
into lots of non-woven materials, the raw fiber.
And then if the textiles, you have to degum.
That's an extra cost.
All of these, the setting up of that plant,
that's more sophisticated,
and you do not have to go
to the end sophisticated products immediately.
You can start on the easy stuff first.
The secondary product after fiber is heard.
Heard can be used to make hempcrete, paper,
cellulose product, plastic, cellulose materials,
fuel, ethanol, building products and building walls.
It's like wood chip.
The two guys on the left are standing on a big pile of heard.
And you can see a handful of heard on the right-hand side.
Just one moment.
Sorry about that, Ali.
As I'm sure you know, I will be available
for questions arising from this presentation.
And my contact details are also
at the end of the presentation.
So this is what a hemp, heard and binder wall looks like.
This is called hempcrete.
This wall gives maxill insulation, yet it breathes.
It's fire resistant, fantastic for fire prone areas.
And hemp houses made, sorry,
and this material is termite proof, mold proof,
and you can also make low cost housing from it.
Now to give you an idea,
for a smaller house from one hectare,
from two and a half acres, you can make one big house,
two medium houses, or three smaller houses
from one, from two and a half acres.
So, and very cost effective.
And these houses also maintain a cool temperature in summer,
a warm temperature in winter.
It's just the world's best building material.
Here's an example of a, of a hempcrete wall.
You can do all sorts of designs in it.
These were some local Australian aboriginals.
You can color it any color that you want.
And if it's facing the weather,
you put a weather sealant on it that still breathes.
So water can't go through, but air can.
And that's the wonderful way that hempcrete performs.
Now hemp composites are light and strong.
So you picture that fiber that replaces fiberglass.
It replaces carbon fiber in certain applications,
and it reduces the cost of using carbon fiber.
When mixed with carbon fiber,
it makes carbon fiber less, less, less,
less liable to shatter.
It makes it more flexible.
Shipping pellets, we made shipping pellets
that you can see on the left-hand side there.
A normal wooden shipping pellet weighs 80 pounds.
That shipping pellet that does the same job
as an 80 pound shipping pellet weighs under 20 pounds.
So it saves on shipping costs.
Now on the right-hand side is a car made
out of a hemp composite body.
So hemp composites are incredibly light, strong,
and therefore fantastic for electric vehicles as well,
but also for a whole range of products.
Using, if you picture anything made out of fiberglass
and plastic can be made out of hemp composites.
So there are 10 significant advantages of hemp.
Number one, it's environmentally clean.
Number two, it efficiently and effectively sequesters
carbon dioxide, 22 tons of CO2 per hectare,
and the value of that CO2 is between 80
and heading up to $200 a ton.
So this is another profitability element of hemp.
It uses minimal fertilizers
and can be grown with zero chemicals.
Efficient water usage, it uses 70 to 80% less water
than cotton.
It improves the soil.
It's excellent, healthy, attractive profits.
The products are natural antibacterial,
antimicrobial, anti-mold.
Each product that you can make from hemp,
now I said there are 10 categories,
over 25,000 different products.
Now, so how can I have so many different products?
Well, if you just take the medicinal side,
you have your flowers and the buds,
and you can do a whole range of products
from just the flowers and the buds.
25, some people say close to 50,000 products.
We haven't bothered to do the numbers.
You can value add to hemp raw materials in multiple ways,
and you can supply local and global markets.
So if markets don't want a certain product,
the beauty of hemp is you start producing a different product,
different strokes for different folks.
And I've said before that hemp can be a magnificent
import replacement for African countries in particular.
I've spoken to many people in African countries
over the years,
and they say, where are we gonna export?
No, you don't have to export.
You grow it locally, you use it locally
so that you don't have to import stuff from other countries
and use valuable foreign exchange.
We say the best value added hemp based products
to focus on the next five years for local and global markets.
So I've got these in order, there's six here,
and there's another nine there.
So fiver for clothing,
I have to have my coffee, love coffee.
Fiver for biodegradable weed metting.
So instead of using black plastic for weed metting,
use hemp fibre.
The herd for hempcrete and other building purposes,
you can make insulation from the fibre.
The herd is fantastic for horse bedding
and poultry bedding and other animals.
And one of the issues with poultry is the disease issues.
By using hemp, by using hemp,
by using herd, this is for the,
it's incredibly absorbent,
it reduces disease amongst animals.
Of course you grow the seed,
so you can use that for local planting
or export for planting purposes.
Then you can use the seed for food.
So hemp seed when it's used for food is called seed.
If you're gonna be using it to plant other crops,
it's called grain.
Seed for cosmetics, so you get the oil from the cosmetics.
And also the remainder materials from the seed itself
have various uses, including bread making,
including beer making.
Number nine, fibre for composites,
particularly shipping pallets, building components,
car parts, caravans and trailers.
Tenth, fibre and herd for edible food containers.
Just imagine this, you make with potatoes,
and hemp fibre, you make a small container,
you put a hamburger in it,
at the end you feed that to the pigs,
and the pigs eat it, and it's healthy for the pigs.
Fibre and herd will replace most plastic applications.
Herd for ethanol, fibre for ropes and bailing string,
fibre for medical bandages,
because it's natural anti-microbial, anti-bacterial,
it reduces infection.
And then herd for garden mulch,
it's the most amazing garden mulch.
I put it on my garden, most mulch after a couple of months,
the weeds start coming through.
Herd suppresses it far more effectively.
And the price that I put into the earlier financial analysis
showed $1,000 a tonne for herd.
But if you sell it by the pound at a home depot
or a supermarket to local farmers,
they will pay two to three times more
than you would at the farm gate for big use.
So herd for garden mulch can become very profitable
to the home gardening market.
So, successful competition against other products
and successful global hemp industry growth
requires five strategic initiatives.
And I'm heading well,
I'll be finished in about 10, 12 minutes,
so you can set your planning.
Number one, five strategies.
Number one, generate market demand for hemp
rather than farmer push.
We need to identify well-funded and successful businesses
that have already publicly committed to reduce
their negative environmental impact.
And we need to educate them about the potential
for unretted hemp to be the way
that they can solve their environmental challenges.
Now, I haven't talked about three big tidal waves
that are happening on our planet.
Number one is the ESG tidal wave.
That relates to this environmental issue.
ESG, big companies have to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions.
ESG stands for environmental, social,
and governance policies.
Big list of companies right around the world,
their share price is being hammered
if they don't take the right steps on these matters.
The second big tidal wave is the circular economy,
which means reducing waste.
Hemp helps that.
Third, the whole movement towards health.
And you've heard with my mantra HP by four,
hemp is all about health.
So hemp is beautifully positioned to ride,
to surf these three tidal waves of ESG,
circular economy, and health to magnificent success.
That's why it's a global agribusiness game changer.
Secondly, second strategy,
embrace an abundant philosophy and not one of scarcity.
Hemp can radically improve the lives of 70%
of the world's population who today can't afford
to buy a new cotton shirt.
Future sustainable economic growth will come from this 70%,
not the existing 30% of consumers
who've got plenty of money.
Additionally, standards of living rise
and consumption per capita increases,
industrial hemp will be desperately needed
as the prime source of new raw materials on our planet
produced in environmentally clean ways.
Thirdly, third strategy.
So go back, get clear, generate market demand.
Our strategy is not to go to farmers
and get them to grow it, then try to sell it.
No, we go to the end users and say,
do you want this stuff?
And then when we get the contract from them,
then we go back up the supply chain to the farmers.
Secondly, embrace an abundance philosophy
and not one of scarcity.
Thirdly, avoid commoditization.
Do not fall into this trap.
Avoid the current fate of oil producers,
although right now they're doing well.
Iron ore producers, sugar cane milk producers.
In their cases, it's the traders
who make the bulk of the profits,
not the producers or the growers or the farmers.
Do not give away this magnificent raw material
at a cheap price, just because it's convenient.
And risk and reward follows risk.
If farmers don't wanna take any risk,
they go, oh, well, look, I'll just sell it cheaply.
I'll get a contract and sell it cheaply.
Good, you lock in a profit,
but the profit's nothing like what's possible.
Now, there will be cooperatives formed,
which is a great way for small farmers to come together
to make this whole process happen.
Fourth strategy, harness the skills, experience
and relationships in local communities
to identify the hemp products that should be produced
and then supply the hungry markets
that want these products both locally and globally.
So when you think about any country, any state in a country,
one of the 50 states in the US,
what do we need in this state?
Because so many products can be made out of hemp,
so you make it locally, produce it locally,
don't have any transport costs.
And then you say, well, what skills have we got
in this state?
And there could be skills in a particular place
that then enable global markets to be accessed
because of those special skills.
And then fifthly, we have to educate local
and global businesses in this strategy
that are committed to ESG and Circular Economy Principles
that industrial hemp is the solution
that they've been seeking.
Hemp can be grown using organic, biodynamic
and biological farming practices.
Whoops, I've got an extra hand.
And organic is the lowest level of chemical free,
biodynamic is one level above it
and biological is the highest level.
You don't have to use harmful chemicals to grow hemp
successfully.
Hemp is naturally antibiotic and it cuts UV rays
when you're wearing it.
Hemp enables regional industries and economies to flourish.
Here's my proposition to you.
Industrial hemp without reading can make an immediate,
inspiring, nurturing, positive, sustaining
and life-giving difference to the planet.
Your job, whoever you are watching this presentation,
is to share the ideas, insights and possibilities
that have occurred to you, where you live
or through your connections,
because you've experienced this presentation
to create a surge in economic activity,
jobs and skills development.
And I want you to understand,
I want you to understand where did jobs come from?
They come from entrepreneurs, from people doing things.
When you sit on your bum and do nothing,
nothing gets created.
But when people go out there and do wonderful, healthy work
and convert this magnificent crop
into the wonderful solutions that it can,
it creates job opportunities.
It creates economic activity
and money is simply a representation for human activity.
And where I said right at the start,
this company was started 28 years ago in 1994
to enable farmers to be profitable,
but for everybody on the whole supply chain
to be profitably engaged in hemp.
And I say that hemp is the most amazing plant
that God has made available to us.
It's been around for 8,000 plus years.
We at Textile and Composite have solved the biggest problem
of converting hemp into profits, which is decortication.
And the only reason why hemp is not the preeminent
agricultural broad acre crop on the planet
is because of political influence,
because of the influence of the oil,
the hydrocarbon industry of certain global elites
who do not want hemp to succeed.
And my vision for hemp is that local communities
can literally grow hemp
and tell the rest of the world to get stuffed.
Hemp enables a community to be totally self-sufficient
because it's got 10 categories of products.
The first three, the first four, the most important,
food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and the fifth one, fuel.
What else do you need?
And the other point I make is that if all you had to eat
was hemp seed, you would survive.
It would be pretty boring,
but hemp seed would enable you
with a wonderful source of protein that it is
to survive on that as a food source alone.
So you can see that a small community
could literally go off grid and to live a magnificent life
without having to have the influence of globalist agendas,
of corrupt medical officials to live healthy lives,
to have a magnificent experience
of this thing we call life on earth.
Get into hemp, it's the future.
Thanks for listening.
I'm now readily available for questions.
So please unmute yourself when you have a question.
And to make this sensible,
you use the reactions tab below.
You go to the reactions tab,
you raise your hand and I'll handle the questions in order
so that there's not seven of us talking at the same time.
So questions, comments, thoughts?
Great.
Hi, Charles.
So thanks again for doing the presentation.
My question is this.
I know you said we should reach out to the off tickets first
and we do agree.
And I saw in your,
some of that one of the attachments you sent
that you offer some sort of consultation or in that process.
Yes, we did.
What does it take to get that part?
Because what I'm thinking is we would start there
and kind of form our relationship with you guys
so that we can come up with a plan together.
And then I saw that you had a few other options as well,
as far as joint ventures and things.
But because, like you said, we should decide exactly,
depending on which area we are,
which type of products that we put out.
And Craig, in any group that watches this,
and so we'll make it specific,
but also this presentation can go to other places as well.
It's a great question that you ask.
And you start to go, what problems can hemp solve?
And then you go, okay, so what connections do we have,
do you have that we can access?
Because the world works through relationships.
And you start to go, okay,
if you turn your mind to this question,
where do you have relationships?
So you can go to strangers.
It's much easier to go to people we have relationships.
And this group, any group has identified problems.
Now there are huge problems on the planet.
So the question for each group is to say,
well, what problem do we want to solve?
Now, if we're focusing on Africa,
an African country will say, we need economic activity.
That's true.
And so the starting point can be,
well, in your country, what do you spend export dollars on?
Or if you think of Haiti, if you think of Cuba,
if you think of Central American countries,
whose economy, whose GDP is way below that of America.
So why is that?
The answer is because people haven't got jobs.
And then you start to go,
I wonder what jobs we could do.
And then you start to go,
what could we produce in Haiti with a crop,
with Ndekordeka, we then got herd,
we could ship that herd to Kentucky.
And we've got people doing stuff.
And the key to lifting people out of poverty
is to give them useful, valuable, sensible, healthy jobs.
And because there's 25,000 different products
that can be made,
it doesn't mean that there's one answer to this question.
And so we have to use what's called,
we have to use our imagination.
And you start to go, gosh, I wonder what would be possible.
And then because of my experience,
because of the 50 plus years I've been in business,
I can help guide, have connections too.
And the other issue that will happen
is that there are people in the world, individuals,
there are over a thousand billionaires
on this planet today.
Okay?
There's plenty of money.
And so you say, well, who do we get the money from?
Going to a bank is a bad strategy.
My question is, who do you know
as a second or third level connection,
go, a big billionaire, for example,
who says, I'm concerned about, let's take Haiti,
or let's take an African country.
I'm concerned about what's happening in Malawi.
We find that billionaire and we do a pitch to them.
So hey, we've got the imagination,
we've got the skills.
All we need is $20 million for you to make a big difference
using hemp in a particular place.
Make sense?
Yes.
And then as far as the facility,
do you recommend that we do, say in the DRC,
do we do a multi-purpose facility
with all the other supplemental pieces of equipment
as far as like the degumming, the dryers,
and all those other things to support multi products?
No, I say, do not do degumming at the start.
Okay.
Because globally, just to give you a context,
the Federation of International Hemp Organizations,
there's 200,000 hectares, half a million acres
of hemp being grown around the world.
It's nothing.
Okay.
And so if in, for example,
you use the Democratic Republic of Congo,
you say, right, well, what should we produce?
And we start by producing the fiber and the herd.
We bail up, you get a cotton press, a wool press,
squash the fiber after the court occasion
and ship that to China, ship that to Turkey.
There's such a demand for hemp fiber,
you don't have, don't over-engineer it.
Unless there are textile experts in a particular group,
or unless there are textile experts already in the DRC,
but you can also send that fiber
to other textile producing countries in Africa,
because Africa produces a lot of textiles.
So don't over-engineer.
Keep it simple for the first one, two, or three crops.
And then as the profits start coming in,
then that attracts more money.
Okay.
So initially we would just start with just the D8
and what else?
All it needs is a harvester.
You need to, then you need a planter.
Now we need, we got jobs, okay?
So in Australia, we use an air seeder.
Now an air seeder is very efficient, they're not expensive,
but they can be hired as well.
So you plant the seed, it grows, it then needs to be cut.
So it can be cut by hand, it can be had jobs that way.
Or you, you know, so the slashing process in the quick,
and then I recommend that it go to seed.
So as it grows taller, it goes to seed,
then you need a harvest, take the seed off the top,
and then straight after that comes
the harvesting of the stalk.
So picture the, here's the stalk,
it's got the seed at the top, take that off the top,
because that's valuable.
Then you got the rest of the stalk,
that gets cut and brought to the decorticator,
and then it's produced in the fiber and herd.
And then you've got four products, four raw materials.
You've got seed, you've got the fiber,
you've got the herd, and you've got the dust.
And the dust is cellulose, it's also valuable.
All right, I got a question.
Can I get one then?
Peace and blessings, everybody.
That's on the call.
All right, so I spoke to my people in Queens, right?
And what we have is I invested in a digital farmers market.
So I got a bunch of gang of people
that have a farmers market,
and it looks just like you in Africa.
Like they got these structures with tarp and the whole nine.
So I spoke with one of them men,
and what I wanna do is I wanna connect with the guys
that have the machine that's in Pennsylvania,
and I wanna purchase some of the board
or whatever that I can purchase,
and I wanna build a farmers market booth
out of the product, and I wanna tape it and everything
so I can use that media that I make as promotion
to help move forward, to show people
how we can take small things and create bigger things
with this opportunity.
So I'm willing to pay for some board
that I can make a farmers market storefront out of.
Is that possible?
There are a number of ways to do that.
I'm happy to talk about how you would do that
to do the promotion at a farmers market.
We attend a TCI, a textile,
an air company, but also the Australian industrial hemp allies.
We attend four exhibitions each year,
and we've got beautiful products to demonstrate.
You don't need to make it out of hemp.
We've got a whole bunch of products
that are available to be shown,
and people are fascinated by,
and I'll show you pictures of it at some point.
People are fascinated by all the possibilities with hemp,
and there's some wonderful ways to demonstrate to people
what hemp is capable of doing,
but you're absolutely on the right track
to show people what's possible to shift their mindset.
Yeah, I wanna build something.
I wanna build a small farmers market store first,
and then I'll create a relationship
with whoever I get the board from,
because once I do this,
then everybody else's booth gonna be wanting
to be made out of this,
because right now they're having an issue
with the way that they make it,
and those tops and everything, they leak.
So people are losing things.
So this is like you said,
everything about moving forward
is finding a solution to a problem.
So I found a place, man, where I can demonstrate.
Yes, I see what you're,
so the farmers market,
these are all the farmers who come in out of the open
and it's pouring rain,
and they wanna know.
Yeah, and they losing product.
Rain is going down into the chart.
So I was like, yo, we can build out the first store
out of the hemp creek boards and everything,
and then put something waterproof on the outside of it.
The rest of the market is going automatically follow suit,
and I already got the right to take the whole production.
Yep, very good.
Good, excellent thinking.
We'll talk about it.
Next question.
All right, that's the only thing I got.
I just need to do that.
Excellent.
I'm delighted there are no questions.
Hello, Keith, I'm delighted you know questions,
which means that I explained the story.
I do have a question.
I love questions.
Yeah, so here in the US,
is machine, do you have a prototype of that machine
here in the US at all?
Yes.
And where is it located?
Not a prototype, an actual machine, two machines.
Yeah, and where is it located?
What state?
Pennsylvania.
So we could actually go out and actually see that.
Yes, subject to certain methods.
Yeah, okay.
Because the simple answer on just going and have a look,
it becomes very time consuming
for people who bought the machine
to then have people coming to have a look,
oh, that's very interesting.
The far better solution is for us to have a machine
that we have available to demonstrate
to all the farmers exposed,
the farmers, what do they call them?
In Australia, we have these big field days for farmers.
And so our game plan is to have a machine in America
that goes around to all of the farmers conferences.
That is the best way of doing it.
Yep.
You call it farmer's fairs here in the US.
That's our plan.
Keith, that's what we're planning to do.
And it's only because of the madness of COVID
and the unwarranted government lockdowns,
it slowed us down in our plans,
but it requires a fair bit of money to make a machine,
ship it to America and then have it driven around America.
And then have it driven around America
at all of these expos, but that's the game plan.
Okay, so a couple of other questions.
What other machinery is competitive to this?
What other machine, if someone says,
well, I'm using this or I'm using that.
Is there another machine in the marketplace
that does a similar function
that we're gonna run up against?
It doesn't matter, Keith.
It does not matter.
I'll tell you why.
Number one, I'm satisfied that our machine
gives the greatest return on investment.
That's the only test that matters.
Number two, return on investment is the test.
Number two, I said before,
there are half a million acres of hemp growing globally.
One of our machines will decorticate
two and a half thousand acres over the course of a year.
So doing between one and two tonnes of stalk per hour.
Now that's a lot of volume.
This is a moveable machine.
It takes half a day to move from one site to another.
And you can buy a European machine
that costs 10 million euro, 15 million US dollars,
where our machine costs less than half a million dollars.
And they will do 10 tonnes an hour, but it's fixed.
You have to bring the stalk to that machine.
Now, I'm not concerned.
I don't know of any machine that's better than ours
or gives a better return on investment,
but I have no need for our machine
to be the only machine in the market because...
I've seen it was a boy, I might get out.
Because the...
Our machine will only do two and a half thousand acres
over the course of a year on average.
And our vision for just for Australia
is we need a million hectares,
two and a half million acres for Australia.
America will be 10 million acres.
That will need thousands of machines.
Doesn't matter, I'm not worried about that.
Because you can never produce too much hemp.
That's the point.
Hemp solves so many...
You don't have to convince me.
Also, my question is,
what are the barriers that you have found
that you run across in terms of
having someone purchase this machine?
What are the key one or two or three barriers?
Sorry, Keith, you got...
There's a bit of background noise.
Say that again.
I was asking, what are the one or two barriers
that you have found in selling and marketing this machine?
The buyers for end products.
That's all.
Buyers for end products.
The fibre, herd, seed, dust.
Those are your barriers, is that what you're saying?
Yep.
The second barrier is people say,
I wanna see the machine operational.
Okay?
Most buyers go, I wanna kick the tyres,
I wanna do this, I wanna do that.
That's the second barrier.
But the first barrier, and quite frankly,
we are more profitable if we hire the machines out to farmers
than sell the machine.
Okay?
That's a better financial outcome.
Right.
It is a business model.
Yeah.
We do both.
We sell the machine and we hire it out.
Yeah.
Now, farmers, why are farmers not growing hip?
The answer is because they're not...
The supply chains are more difficult.
But of course,
but of course, the...
Of course, the profitability,
of course, the profitability of anything follows the risk.
And so supply chains in hip are more complex.
So that's a big barrier, Keith.
But those barriers,
because politicians keep putting barriers in the way.
For example, if you're producing medicinal cannabis,
you'd have to destroy the stalk
after you've made your crop,
after you've produced your crop.
So, but the biggest solution to driving the demand...
Got a question.
Hang on, is to educate the market.
And I've got two more minutes
because I'm finishing at 7.30.
All right, Keith?
So that's the other barriers.
Market demand and then supply chain issues.
And thirdly, I want to see the machine in action.
Yes, next question.
What's your name?
All right, real quick.
So I know that the model that Keith and them used
with their investors was they gave them an opportunity
to go to the farm and actually see the plants grown.
What I'm saying is, is it an opportunity for us
to create one walkthrough where we can collectively go
and see these machines in operation?
So we can go back and do our thing.
Yes, because Craig knows who...
Craig knows the operator of this machine in Pennsylvania.
So Craig can have a conversation with Jerry in Pennsylvania.
All right.
You can keep it on what we're talking about
because I know we all want to see it.
My last question, my last question is,
your company that's in the US,
do they have an exclusive on the US?
No.
No one will get an exclusive.
Okay.
Keith and I, I already spoke with Jerry
about you guys coming to see the machine in operation.
Okay.
I'm very, I'm not happy about people using the machine
to suit themselves, have a look at it,
and they've got no resources to do what they say
they think they can do.
I don't want to waste anybody's time.
I know, that's not us though.
So that's why, so Craig and...
That's not what this group is about.
It's up to Jerry and the whole team in Pennsylvania.
So that's all.
So if they're happy, I'm delighted.
Okay.
All right.
It's 7.30.
Thank you everybody.
And please, I will send this recording.
So I do urge you now, I have found
when Adrian Clark first started educating me
about the decodecator and him,
I found I kept asking him questions
that he had previously told me.
And someone asked me another question and I didn't know.
It took three, four, five times to deeply understand
what he was telling me.
And there's benefit in re-watching the recording
for anybody who watches it
to more deeply understand the issue.
So thank you everybody.
Wonderful to be with you, Craig.
Well done for organizing.
Thank you for the questions.
I love questions because your questions help me
to keep developing my thinking
as they have over the last 10 years anyway.
And I look forward to sharing this journey
because I promise you that I am absolutely convinced
it's not possible to grow too much hemp.
I'm absolutely certain of that.
And hemp can solve so many global problems.
It's very exciting for me,
provided that we get government out of the way.
Thank you everybody for being here.
I will now stop the recording.
All right, I look forward to getting this.
Thank you.