The SiteVisit

Transforming Perceptions of Hemp in Construction with Steve Barron, Owner at Margent Farm

• James Faulkner

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What if you could revolutionize the construction industry while healing the planet? Join us as we chat with Steve Barron, a former director turned eco-conscious builder, who is doing just that. Driven by a deep commitment to sustainability, Steve shares his remarkable journey from the creative world of directing to the promising fields of hemp farming in Cambridgeshire. Discover how his innovative approach is paving the way for hemp to become a cornerstone of sustainable building practices, offering fast-growing, carbon-sequestering materials with incredible potential.

Explore the exciting world of hemp-based construction materials as we compare traditional building methods to innovative alternatives. Steve guides us through his personal project—a modern house constructed with prefabricated hemp panels—showcasing their acoustic benefits, strength, and seamless integration into contemporary design. As we navigate the challenges and successes of sourcing and processing hemp locally, you'll also uncover the historical uses of hemp fibers and their transformative potential for the construction landscape.

We delve into the rebranding of hemp and its adoption in the construction industry, addressing the need to shift perceptions away from its association with cannabis. Steve discusses the regulatory hurdles and manufacturing challenges faced by the hemp industry while highlighting the growing consumer awareness of sustainability. Imagine a world where buildings proudly display their green credentials—this episode offers a vision of that future and the steps we can take to achieve it.

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Speaker 1:

Hello Steve, how are you doing today?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm good Thanks.

Speaker 1:

So all the way from England the other side of the pond. Well, for us I've got to go the entire country and then I've got to go over the pond because I'm on the west coast of Canada. So what's it like over in the UK there?

Speaker 2:

It's pretty cold, cold and wet, but it is most Decembers, thankfully it's cold and wet because we don't want it to change too much, but it's yeah, it's a nice place to hang out. I do love Vancouver, though.

Speaker 1:

You've been here before.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I spent a year there doing a TV series, actually.

Speaker 1:

A TV series.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Wow, were you a producer or something. I'm a director actually oh, cool, okay, and is that a hobby you're doing now?

Speaker 2:

What the TV or the.

Speaker 1:

The directing yeah.

Speaker 2:

No, it's my main job. It's what I do. I've actually got into this construction world really as trying to find a way to put back and to help out the environment, as everyone's hopefully. Who's got any sense is going to try and do, but I still my main income is. Most of my days are working in television.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's pretty cool. It's nice to have some more creative people in the construction industry adding their other world views into construction, so that's pretty cool. So whereabouts in London are you?

Speaker 2:

I'm London Fields, which is Hackney in London, in East London.

Speaker 1:

Hackney. That sounds like something haphazardly Sounds hackney, hackney.

Speaker 2:

That sounds like something haphazardly. Yeah, it's quite a cool area full of kind of creative people, but my main sort of residence is the farmhouse the hemp farmhouse that we built in Cambridgeshire. It's about an hour and a half from here.

Speaker 1:

So an hour and a half from where you are now, Is that north, east, south? Where?

Speaker 2:

Pretty much north.

Speaker 1:

North okay.

Speaker 2:

Pretty direct north. Yeah, Okay, cool In the Cambridge world. Ah, nice Okay.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's cool. So two Brits talking about hemp in construction, that's going to be interesting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, just to qualify that I did grow up in England, but I was actually born in Dublin in Ireland. Oh, okay, that's just to pinpoint it exactly.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha Okay, well, let's get into it. Welcome to the Site. Visit Podcast Leadership and perspective from construction with your host, James Falkner. From construction, your host.

Speaker 2:

James Falkner. Business as usual, as it has been for so long now that it goes back to what we were talking about before and hitting the reset button you know you read all the books.

Speaker 1:

You read the email, you read Scaling Up, you read Good to Great. You know I could go on. We've got to a place where we found the secret serum. We found the secret potion. We can get the workers in. We know where to get them. Once I was on the job site for a while and actually we had a semester phone group and I ordered a pre-finished patio out front of the sidechillers.

Speaker 1:

I was down at Dallas and a guy just hit me up on LinkedIn out of the blue and said he was driving from Oklahoma to Dallas to meet with me because he heard the Faber Connect platform on your guys' podcast. Own it, crush it and love it, and we celebrate these values every single day. Let's chat. Let's chat a little bit about, um, your farm, because you have what was the? What was this interest in becoming involved in hemp? To begin with? Like, what is the? What is the? What is the? Is it the fact that it's a, a type of material that's prolific in terms of, you know, being able to grow quickly? It's, doesn't take a lot of energy to grow it's and it's very tough? Like what? What's what made you say I'm going to start to grow this in the margin farm?

Speaker 2:

well, that's the canadian connection, really. Um, I was, uh, I wanted to try. A granddaughter came along in my life and I thought you know what I've been going to tell her when she's 12 years old and um and uh, you know about the future and what we did as our generation. I felt hadn't really done enough and I went looking for some sort of ecological impact I could make, either through farming or through some other carbon sequestration. And my friend Fonda, who actually is from Canada, she said that over in Canada there's quite a lot of work going on with hemp and hemp was she was talking specifically about CBD and this is about seven, eight years ago and she said that it apparently is this wonder plant.

Speaker 2:

So I went researching we both did, actually, we both went researching online and found a hemp farm in uh in the uk, in oxfordshire, and met a lot of really nice people who were running it as a kind of cooperative, uh, a non-profit cooperative, and they, they were telling us quite a lot of uh what this plant has been and where it's been for the last hundred years and how it's been through such a been so ostracized and not jumped upon as something that could be of value and, as I looked into it, the technical side of it was that it grows so fast and so dense and so tall and so strong that it sequesters carbon at a really fast rate, faster than most plants. I mean bamboo's right up there, obviously, but we don't grow bamboo in the UK.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so take us through that.

Speaker 2:

So as it's growing, it's absorbing the carbon it's absorbing the carbon as it's growing and because if you take a field of absorbed carbon you'd find the biggest field you've got just about is a hemp field, because it's taller, bigger, closer, bigger biomass comes off of that acreage.

Speaker 1:

So is the. I'm going to be totally naive here in these questions, so bear with me going to be totally naive here in these questions, so bear with me. So when we talk about the, the difference between a hemp plant and a pot plant, are we talking the same things? That you're getting the same yield of um cannabis as you are hemp like when these fields are they, are they essentially um drug factories is? Is that the byproduct of growing hemp? It's not so.

Speaker 2:

It's totally two different things well, no, it's very much the same thing. It's all called cannabis, okay, everything. Hemp is just a word, that kind of is it like a nickname for the industrial use of cannabis? I see, okay, and cannabis isn't all hallucinogenic. There are hundreds of strains of cannabis that have no impact for THC, which is the hallucinogenic.

Speaker 1:

Right, that's the hallucinogenic. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:

So what we're talking about when I talk about the big fields of growing large amounts of it, it's the plants that don't have that hallucinogenic.

Speaker 1:

They look exactly like the other cannabis plants, except they're bigger and stronger ah, okay, cool, okay, so, but they do have some kind of like butt on them and that's perhaps only a cbd kind of a thing. Do they all have cbd?

Speaker 2:

yeah, you can extract cbd from them. Okay, yeah, 95% of them have CBD, but a much smaller percentage have THC.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha, okay, so let's just call this the crop for building materials, yeah, and other products, for instance. So where you are, how big are these fields of this stuff?

Speaker 2:

Not big at all. We've got the worst sort of rules in growing in this country than there are in other countries like Canada. Canada, really, to get a license to grow hemp or cannabis in Canada, as long as it's not THC content, it's pretty straightforward in Canada. In the UK we have to get a license for three years from the Drugs and Arms Department of the Home Office, which is people that don't really understand farming or construction, but they understand drugs and because it's called cannabis, yeah it just gets lumped in with that.

Speaker 2:

It gets lumped in with it. So it's very hard to get the permissions. And once you have the permissions, for instance, you're not allowed at the moment to extract the CBD from it because they don't understand CBD. So we can import CBD like crazy like we do but we can't actually as farmers, we can't actually process for CBD and we can't grow our plants to gain CBD. We can only grow them to get the fiber from the stalk and get the seeds from the head, and the seeds must be used for food, like you're crushing it for oil, which is a very good oil, and we've done that. But we have to then throw away our leaves and flowers where the CBD is at its biggest amount. We have to throw that or burn it or bury it. We cannot process for it, which is a crazy, ludicrous legislation that has to change one day.

Speaker 1:

Do you think it's perhaps part of the fact that if they were to open that up, then they would have to check and regulate different strains and that would be even more homework for them to do?

Speaker 2:

Well, they've already done that. They've only allowed out of known strains about 160, 180 strains that are known around the world. We're only allowed 13. They've checked 13 of them. Oh, I see, Okay, and then you're right. They stopped spending the time doing that and said, okay, you've got to choose one of these 13, and you can grow that with this license. And that is a problem, because the climate that they grow in is different in every country and you can get ones that are more suitable to the climate in the middle of the UK, to the climate in the north of the UK. If we had more again, legislation gave us more choice.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so you have a product on your website that emulates basically corrugated roofing or siding, a product.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's siding. That's what we've used it for. It's a rain screen. On the side of our buildings we built a farmhouse out of hemp. On the inside it's like hempcrete, which I'm sure you've come across before. It's a building block. It's not concrete. It's a form of crystallized inner fiber of the hemp and that has been used for many years as a building block in places that want to use it. It's about the fifth of the weight of concrete, of traditional concrete blocks, but it's not completely load-bearing and it needs some sort of structure to help it get fully load-bearing.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that's the interesting part. So, for instance, if we were to take a concrete cinder block, for instance, that has the hollow core, so that cinder block versus the hemp version of it, so the cinder block would be load-bearing, the other one would not, is that?

Speaker 2:

correct. Yes, exactly, it would be part load-bearing and it would need the other half of the load to be borne by either wood which can be. You know, I'm just talking a plank of wood per meter. I see it's not half and a half or anything like that in terms of what you're seeing, what, what you're using okay.

Speaker 1:

So in terms of the um, some things you know, people might not know at least I don't know, so I'm going to assume other people might be a little bit, you know, opaque on this as well is uh, so it's the the the stock fibers from the plant that are processed, and then they are the fibers that are in, uh, you know, blocks, for instance.

Speaker 1:

Um, are they, you know, quarter inch fibers like? What sort of size did that did they get, and how do they get stripped out of the? So what's the processing, is it? They get crushed first and they get into a blender kind of situation, like an auger kind of thing. How does that work?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's processing where you separate the fibers, the outer fibers, which are called the bast fibers, okay, for a thousand years used, uh, more than a thousand years used by the romans, uh, to for shipping, because there's a strong, super strong fiber, um, that's the bass fiber on the outside.

Speaker 2:

So you strip away that outside bass fiber and inside you have this, uh, woody core, okay, which, uh, you can do a number of different sizes, uh, you could have a quarter of an inch sizes and cut them all up and put them all together and then add lime to that mix and a bit of water and you're mixing up what is a version, a hempcrete, really A hempcrete. Okay, or you could leave them like we did in the house. We left them about an inch or two long and had them so that they were exposed in the house. You can see on our website and on our Instagram at marjan underscore farm, you can see the website where I mean sorry, the Insta where it's exposed as an inner building block because we wanted to tell the story of how the hemp was within the whole house.

Speaker 1:

So I'm just looking at that now. So where do I see that exposed on your website, on the Margin Farm website? Is there a picture of it?

Speaker 2:

You should find it on the website and better to go to Instagram. That's where all the photos are really Okay At margin underscore farm.

Speaker 1:

At margin. This is interesting to check this out. Let me have a look here.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you'll see, there's a bunch of articles from magazines and newspapers and stuff and you should see the pictures.

Speaker 1:

Okay, margin Farm, here we go. Okay, all right, okay, oh yeah, wow, okay, yeah. Geez, that's crazy. Have you got the inside? I do, yeah, I do. So I'm actually looking at, uh, yeah, so in between, what would be considered um insulation, it looks like you have. You have some two by fours that are, two by sixes that are looking like 16 inch centers, typically for typical framing, and then yeah, and then you and then you have hemp in there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they are actually cassettes 52 cassettes that we poured the hemp. We're laying down that we poured the hemp in and it's set, and then we brought them to like a prefab oh, I see, so that I got you right.

Speaker 1:

So what's the dimensions of those, of those panels then, of those?

Speaker 2:

they're generally, they're all. They're slightly different around the house, but eight, eight foot by four foot, sort of oh crazy.

Speaker 1:

Okay, but they're thick, though. What's the thickness of those things?

Speaker 2:

thickness varies in depending on which wall you're doing. Our architect has done it specifically for what works for the building. We've got a brick building next door to one of them, so it has a slightly smaller thickness, but we're talking 8 to 10 inches of that.

Speaker 1:

So that's going to be really good for acoustics. Obviously, the silencing of that, so that's going to be really good for acoustics.

Speaker 2:

obviously the silencing of sound. Yeah, you're in there and it's like you're in a recording studio Perfect that's cool, yeah, nice.

Speaker 1:

And then I see that you have like sort of a ceiling soft kind of material. There Is that hemp as well.

Speaker 2:

That isn't hemp. It could have been, but it was our architect's favorite panels that were available at the time. It's kind of a spaghetti wood, a waste wood mix panel, and that's what she wanted to put on the ceiling.

Speaker 1:

So this is cool. So I mean, you've basically made a model of materials for a, you know, and the house doesn't look super old looking. It actually looks pretty cool, pretty contemporary looking, and the house doesn't look super old-looking unless it looks pretty cool, pretty contemporary-looking.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it was, grow your own home was what we were doing. That's pretty cool. You know, the field was 30 meters away and we didn't know whether the hemp would grow, but we needed it to grow and grow well, and it did. And so that first year we found processing a few hours away, which was good, an hour away, I should say in Leicestershire, which was good and we sent them round bales. They sent their round bales into a machine, a decorticator, which actually separated out the two fibers. There's a little film which helps you, show you understand the process. It's on Margin Farm and Dazeen, which is an architectural. I don't know if you've been on Dazeen D-E-Z.

Speaker 1:

I have been on that, but I haven't seen your thing specifically.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Dazeen, If you put Dazeen Margin Farm you have a little one-minute, one-and-a-half-minute film that just shows the process from growing to fixing the final rain screen on the house.

Speaker 1:

So it's interesting. I'm looking at a. You know, there's another website, which is a Canadian one, called Hemp Block Canada, and on there I'm seeing load-bearing hemp blocks, hempcrete blocks, okay, which is crazy. So yeah, they've got some full-on.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, canada was well, you know, seemed to be well ahead of it when we started getting involved in terms of having more growing, far more. I think there was like 100,000 acres growing, whereas we in England would be lucky to find 10,000 acres of hemp growing. Because of that legislation problem.

Speaker 1:

So what's the? Do you think there's just a stigma around hemp in general because it's attached to illicit drugs that are considered illicit in lots of places, obviously socially acceptable these days. But you know the cannabis is. You know as many places in the world. You got cannabis on you in an airport and it's big trouble. So you know it's still considered in many places, you know, problematic.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think the stigma is still there, definitely, but it's not. It's it's easing away. It's easing away. Now. We need to find ways of doing things and people are. People are, uh, are more and more getting on board the idea. I think when I started seven, seven, eight years ago on this project, uh, when I mentioned it, even to my friends, it was all an eye roll of like, oh you know, with the hemp and things, and now that's gone away. You say that and they said they've heard about it. Right, they've read about it, or they they're more open to understanding what, uh, what it can do so do you think that there's an element of um?

Speaker 1:

let me just think here. So when you think of there's a number of initiatives that come into a building project, there is. There's this like concrete and traditional building materials obviously are ubiquitous, like everyone uses those just because it's like the sure thing, it's the. We're just going to get this done If budgets are tight and timelines are tight. We're just going to get this done. If budgets are tight and timelines are tight, we're just going to go with the old standard and it's tried, trusted and true, regardless of what it's doing to the planet.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes people just are not even thinking about that, especially smaller projects. You know you see a lot of institutional jobs that are being done. That you know, especially, you know, government-tendered kind of projects. This is a situation where they have made climate commitments, they've made environmental commitments and you know they have to have their buildings pass a certain criteria in order to move forward in general and they've made a commitment over time. Those ones. You see these alternative building products being used or being considered also with green roofs, all that kind of stuff. So as we sort of move forward when, in order for products like this to really really hit home. There needs to be this lowest common denominator. Is going to be considering using it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think that is slowly happening as well, but it needs more help from the government. There needs to be. It's like a tax on smoking you should have a tax on the harmful products that you can buy, but also, at the same time, what's being developed. Even recently in France there's a new concrete mix which is 70% of it is natural, doesn't have the harmful carcinogenic that you associate with concrete. Those things are happening For the first time. They're really happening, so pretty soon that's got to get out there and be the cost the same as doing it the bad way, and then you can make an easy choice because it's not about cost then, and I think that that is slowly happening.

Speaker 2:

I know there's um, there was an entrepreneur, uh, at adaptivate, another company in england that were doing hemp, uh, plaster, and they're now into being cued. They're into all the big um, you know, home depot type uh, uh, institutions and uh, it's, it's starting to happen. Um, but uh, yeah, we, we can't let it be that, uh, it's cheaper to uh to to use bad stuff. That just that equation's got to go away yeah, no, I uh.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting, like when I like drywall is one of the craziest ones to me. I just look at the process that it that is required for us humans to be able to look at a perfect wall, and it's all about that, it's. It's. It's us like if you go into a like a louis vuitton store or a I don't know high-end, you know high-end goods store, uh, where clothes, for instance, are the, are the, the item for sale where you're, there has to be a specific focus on that. You see a lot of minimalist design in terms of highlighting those clothes and very often it's just white, white walls, perfect joins, perfect white, white, white looking. You know, all the way down to the floor, all the way into the wall, up to the ceiling, and we have to have drywall to accomplish this. And you look at what has to be done to make that happen. You gotta have the steel stud behind there, you gotta have the drywall, you gotta have the. You got to have the steel stud behind there. You got to have the driveway, you got to have the screws, you got to have the mud, you got to have the edging, you got to have tape, all this stuff that has to be done in order for us to accept that as luxury. And when we, in order for change to happen, there needs to be, the model has to change. So if a Louis Vuitton store was like the model for what luxury was, and that was not the perfect white wall, that was something else then you would see other types of brands try to emulate that, because they're all trying to emulate value. They're all trying to emulate how do we provide a feeling or notion to our customer that is going to make them feel better? It's going to give them that one bit of lift that defined themselves, defined themselves. So this is a human condition we have of why we end up having to use the things that have consistently been able to make us feel better, and that is construction that looks clean, like for things to be white, like white. White white in the world. Think about it. White paint like white, white white in the world. Think about it. White paint, white drywall, mud, white building materials. The white pigment itself has created so much environmental damage. Just that color, just that fact. You see white in nature, but it's not that same kind of pigment. You know, it's a natural, occurring white. If you take a white petal from a flower and you you know you're not getting white pigment from that. It just will eventually just go and trend, go transparent when you get it wet. So I know I'm going totally into the weeds here and it will make sense at some point what I'm trying to get at here.

Speaker 1:

But in order for us to accept hemp, for instance, as a building material and make that ubiquitous along all building material choices, I think that it's brand, the word hemp and all of the associations we have. Like if I sit to say to the average person, hey, what do you think of a building block or a building material in hemp? And as soon as I say that word hemp, they double click on that word in their attention and a whole bunch of associated items come into their conscious. Right there they start to think, okay, well, hemp they'll go, marijuana they'll go. You know burlap kind of bags they'll go. Like a weird, you know sort of, you know craft kind of material, that kind of stuff, sort of bohemian, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1:

That's the what many people, when they double-click on the word hemp, that's what comes up in their minds, that's what they've been given over time. So it's almost as though hemp has already cannibalized itself as a word. It has way too much baggage. There needs to be some other term for this. It needs a rebrand like badly. It needs to be some other term for this. It needs a rebrand like badly. It needs to be called something else entirely. And if it was something that had no connection whatsoever to the plant no connection to cannabis, no connection to CBD, thc, any of that I think it would have a better shot at becoming this building material or a substrate that you could have multiple applications for.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean I think you're right to a degree. I'm hoping people are gaining more knowledge about it and once they do, the stigma will die away. I feel it depends where it gets to. We don't have to call it hemp. I mean we're Margin Farm, we're not Margin Hemp Farm or anything. When we do our corrugated panels, they call Margin Farm corrugated panels and they are a brand in a way, or we are a brand in a way.

Speaker 1:

Well, you are definitely. You are definitely a brand, I guess, where I'm going with it in order for these materials to sort of be imported and exported all over world markets. You're going to have regulation around that just because of the material itself, like if you were to say, let's say, at the United States-Mexican border we have a shipment of hemp prefab panels that are coming through the border. They're going to be like let's check that out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and we've sent samples all over the world. You know, 50 to Canada, 50 to the United States, mexico, australia, everything. And you know they're tile samples of natural fibers. Yeah, you don't have to stay home Fair enough. Yeah, but it're tile samples of natural fibers.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you don't have to stay home Fair enough, yeah, but it is kind of interesting though. I mean, I think that we are in this world of everything's a brand, everything's an image, everything has a meaning, and it just kind of bites ourself in order to have progress, to move forward. We're so worried about what we think of ourselves that we're kind of wrecking the planet at the same time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully your podcast helps avert some of that.

Speaker 1:

Well, we'll see. I mean, you know, one conversation at a time is really all I can promise. So let's just talk about these corrugated panels. So it kind of reminds me it's funny that you know we're both English and you know, in our home in England we had two acres of sort of gardens. We weren't rich, by the way, we just lucky we had this. We lived in a old military hospital potting shed, which is you know where all the you'd pot your plants and all that kind of stuff, and it had a roof, but it was, I think it was made of. It looked like fiberglass, I think fiberglass, but it was transparent or translucent or opaque.

Speaker 2:

No it was.

Speaker 1:

It was translucent, but it looked. It was the exact same form factor as your corrugated.

Speaker 2:

Yes. You know the sort of wave shape. Uh yeah, there's uh zondulum. There's a few different products that uh that do that.

Speaker 1:

They're plastic basically yeah, it was old school though, but it definitely had fibers in it. I could see. I could see it had sort of a yeah, I think it was uh reinforced, I think it was fiberglass. To be honest, yeah, yeah, that's old school, like english.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they were very efficient, but now they're going to take 500 years to decompose. If they do yeah, and if they do, little pieces will go into everybody's food.

Speaker 1:

Okay, here we go. This is the interesting part, let's just take us through. Like what is your vision of the world, of you know, sustainable materials and what have you learned over this time putting your farmhouse together and also selling this corrugated?

Speaker 2:

products to other, you know, construction projects, etc. There's an enormous industry that's very hard to make any kind of movement in, to push it across to any other way of thinking. So, on a scale, on anything like a scale, but I've learned that people are open to listening about it and uh, that if, if, uh, we can get investment, uh, the right sort of investment. And we've, we've had investment and there's more, there's more coming, and we've hooked up with a company we're building hemp houses now as we speak who who are inspired by us, uh, to build, um, you know what. Their plans are pretty big and they've raised millions to begin that and that's what it needs. And because we don't have the infrastructure for it at the moment, we don't have the facilities to do it on any kind of scale.

Speaker 2:

It's partly because the UK most of manufacturing went out of the uk and it went to europe and it went to india and and china and everywhere else. It's partly because of that anyway. So, um, but people are starting to talk local, they're starting to say where did that come from? They're looking at products and saying which wasn't happening seven, eight years ago. It wasn't happening before david attenborough came along and did his plastic show, which was amazing and had a massive impact on on what we've. You know what we were doing to our oceans and and and anti-plastic thing. And people are now buying christmas presents on quite a big scale where they're thinking more about. I mean, plastic is still being bought like crazy, but there is a lot more thinking, a ton more secondhand shops have come along for people to buy clothing. That doesn't mean that you have to get something made really badly and cheaply and in a nasty way in another country. You can get it instead of it being shipped in.

Speaker 1:

What do they call that? Like single-season fashion or something like that? What's the term for it? Fast fashion? I think it's called.

Speaker 2:

Is that what it is?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, like the czars of the world. Well, it's actually czars not as bad as some of the other ones. I mean, some are just awful.

Speaker 2:

I'm sure Vancouver is a great place for that, because I even met people there that were doing re-sewing old clothings and putting together old jeans and re-renovating them for new use, but I think that thinking wasn't on anything like the scale it is now seven, eight years ago. So I've learned that people can positively look at it, but it's going to be very hard and we don't know the answers is what I've learned as well. We don't know how long our corrugated panels will last in extreme cold and extreme heat. They've been up for seven years and what's happened to them in that time is they've just changed color, the way wood changes color when it's exposed to daylight.

Speaker 1:

You can paint those. I guess right, or does that lose some benefit?

Speaker 2:

but it's gone back to the hemp color. It's gone, it's poured its way back to the hemp straw color. I see it began as before. It had the resin that took it to a dark brown. I see, because the resin which we didn't talk about, but the resin that goes into the uh, the hemp, before you thermal compress it into the shape. The resin is a farm waste resin made of oat hulls and bagasse and corn cob and things that are waste on the farm and are thrown together. So it ends up being a dark brown mush that you turn into a liquid and we use it to dip our hemp fiber mats in, to then thermal compress them into the corrugated shape.

Speaker 1:

So I think there's two points that you made there. One, specifically, is around construction that it's so vast and then it's sort of difficult to break through and create change within. And you know I would say that you know people are doing. The majority of construction projects, keep in mind, are they're reacting to what the customer wants, not what they want. So I don't think the construction industry necessarily is to blame. Like those hardworking people who are putting projects together, are putting their blood, sweat and tears to make something happen. They're mostly just delivering on someone else's vision of something that wants to be done and they're getting paid a fee for it. And you know, I think, that there is. It comes to if significant change needs to be made, it needs to come from the companies and the individuals who are creating these projects. That's where the push needs to come from. It needs to come from the top, because a construction company is not going to risk not getting a job because they're pushing a particular product.

Speaker 2:

This won't do it well, I think it also needs to come from government. What's happening fairly recently is in the World Court in the Hague, they're bringing in ecocide, which is a crime like genocide. Oh, ecocide, okay, yeah, something that will be used to charge companies and individuals who are doing bad for the environment. Now that's a massive step whether they can police it and put it through and get this to happen. But if that way of thinking came from the companies as well, and the governments, it's particular. If governments say, no, that's illegal, you can't do that, that's ecocide.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, they can barely police, you know, war crimes, yeah, yeah, I doubt that it's going to happen. But you know, maybe you know, maybe the I always find that you know violations of things that are difficult to or sorry are difficult to or sorry or easier to collect. The levies, for instance, or the or the fines for typically go through. For instance, you'll notice that, um, let's, let's say that a particular bylaw in a, in a in a city, um, let's say you're not allowed to cycle on the sidewalk, okay, or on what do you call it in England, sidewalk? No, it's a pavement, pavement. Oh, on the pavement, chap. Yes, so you're not allowed to cycle on the pavement?

Speaker 1:

Well, that would mean a bylaw officer would have to stop people who are doing that, have some sort of altercation and then try and find a way because there's no licensing on the bikes to then go and have to find a way to collect the fine. Okay, total hassle. Whereas parking tickets are fantastic because there's a license plate and there's a rule that's posted and they get to passively stick a ticket on, create a record and then attach it to some other license and be able to collect the money. It's zero friction whatsoever, they just get to slap this thing and collect. So I think and the reason I'm bringing that up is that if there was this eco side, for instance, it would be very easy to just have policy and be able to just slap on fines, specifically, and then they would have to collect. So, rather than, if we think about war crimes, war crimes are kind of like having to stop the person bicycling on the pavement you have to have altercation.

Speaker 1:

So perhaps, there, you know, I think there's something to be said for that. So perhaps there, you know, I think there's something to be said for that. These passive fines, uh, maybe they start, you know, uh, on a tighter jurisdiction, you know like local towns, and then it goes to certain counties, and then it goes from then to countries and you know then continents, etc. So maybe it can sort of expand that way but.

Speaker 1:

I think that that that makes perfect sense in terms of you know what we're doing to the planet.

Speaker 1:

You know I think I kind of. I keep going back to drywall. That one, to me, is the biggest offender. Like I look at it and I'm like God, like what have you ever seen? Like.

Speaker 1:

So you know, I renovated a property recently and we took a wall down. I'm thinking, shit, where's all the stuff going? And it's awful. Like you got drywall with paint, three layers of paint on it, there's glue, there's like all this stuff, and it's not useful. It's got screws in it. So like these materials. And then you go to a building, a particular garbage dump, and they say, no drywall. You're thinking, okay, well, where do I have to take that? I have to take that to a special place because they have to do something specific to it. But you know, we're in this time right now, where we're all excited about the new shiny thing, like I'm all excited about the new clean wall I'm going to get, and I'm not thinking about where the old crappy one that I had to take down went. So do you think it's sort of just a change in mindset? We have to sort of snap ourselves together.

Speaker 2:

No, I think it's an investment, and An investment in what, though?

Speaker 2:

specifically? Investment in getting you can make a drywall out of natural fibers so that when you dump it you're not doing any harm to the environment. So, is there a hemp drywall product? There is, we don't have it. There is one that's coming through the company I was mentioning, the plaster company, adaptivate adaptivate they they've got one that's just releasing, uh, this company that we're working with, hemp span, who are doing the um houses in the uk, they're look, they're developing something, uh, and it you know, it's not.

Speaker 2:

It's not there it needs to be. It needs to have money thrown at it and and, uh, it can and it can be got. And what you said earlier about it being it can't be the expensive option, no, exactly. So, somebody, the investment's got to also be in the fact you're not going to make any money out of it until it reaches a level of spread and therefore becomes viable.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I mean, I was just looking at, you know, hemp drywall panels and it's interesting that they, because I think you kind of need everything to go along with it. Obviously you need the. You know the gypsum that's in a drywall board. Yeah, you know that's that powder. Yeah, you know that's that powder. Yeah, so you know that there would obviously be what the hemp would replace, and then I guess you could have a hemp paper that would be the front, the paper side.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, hemp paper from the pulp has been done. It's been there forever.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we've been printing hemp business cards for, you know, 15 years now. Yeah, we've been printing hemp business cards for 15 years now. But then I mean the reason that the drywall and I'm getting specifically into drywall because I just find it interesting, you know, having the opportunity to talk to you about this and sort of envision. We know how things could be in especially your farmhouse if you would have had a panel that you could have made perfectly, that you could have painted over, you could use, you know, sort of more environmentally, um, responsible paint perhaps.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, clay paint yeah, if you would have had, you know, a drywall or a drywall replacement panel, and it came with all the different things.

Speaker 1:

Like you know, I watch when you, when they put the corner bead on, they there's a specific glue version of a drywall paste that sticks that in. You know the different compounds that they have, and there's there's the finishing cut, there's like the, the main compound and there's a finishing compound. But if you had all of those complementary products, the entire drywall system and it was in hemp, and then let's just say I think what would make sense from the governmental side is is you would get a rebate for using them. So I don't think, like in terms of the manufacturing side, to get to that economy. The economy is a scale in order to be able to provide that much product and be able to provide that much product and be able to compete against a tried and true drywall industry, you're obviously going to get some. There's going to be political pushback there. You know there's going to be companies that aren't going to want those ones to come along.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and there'll be companies that will adapt to it and, uh, want to be at the head of it, at the head of a river, any kind of a revolution.

Speaker 1:

who's smarter, who are not, you know, trying to fight it hopefully well, hopefully, yeah, um, but it just would make sense if, if you like, I I've always thought with what what is very, very, very cool is for there to be, on every building that's built, for there to be a plaque that has perhaps a QR code on it or it has a building materials listed on it. That is the. It's the story of the intention of the humans that made that, and I think that that's an important thing, especially as you get to larger buildings, institutional buildings. The effort that went into making those less of an environmental impact, I think needs to be advertised, and we're in a world now where people virtue everything. Everything anybody does these days is trying to add some little bit of splash of color to their identity. It doesn't matter if it's a company, it doesn't matter if it's a person.

Speaker 1:

Companies are an extension of people. Typically, people want to work for companies that have good brands and do good things and makes them feel better. They can be at a barbecue and say I work at company XYZ and they go oh, wow, god, yeah, that's fantastic. You know you must be XYZ kind of person if you get to work there. All of these types of you know, altruistic motivations that people have can actually positively affect the planet if we architect it the right way.

Speaker 1:

So if you have that plaque that's on the front of the building, there people get to virtue that and the result is no one wants to put well, we use the worst materials and wreck the planet the most on that plaque. There's just no way. It would always have to be a positive. So it pushes people to be proud of things. So we're in the Instagram world. If a company's all finished building a build and they're all standing around the particular area of the entrance or whatever, and there's the plaque and they're all like here you go, this is what we did. Wow, that's an Instagram moment. You have to do it. We need to be in the. You have to do it.

Speaker 2:

And once that starts, to kick in all of these, you know, alternative building products.

Speaker 1:

They're all going to kick ass yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think you're absolutely right and there should be that and there should be a way of saying the amount of carbon coming into that project and the amount of carbon going out, and how neutral, or how I mean negative, is positive, but if we can get that for them to all give us more, that we've drawn more carbon out in making that building than you have.

Speaker 2:

You're ahead of it and you have some sort of a QR code that tells you exactly how those calculations have been made and how they add up Now, how the mathematics work in that.

Speaker 2:

That's what we, as you say, if we get used to that in the future, I think we're, you know, in five, ten years' time, I think we'll be there if people keep, you know, wanting, wanting it, and uh, um, and it keeps growing and people understand it and you know there's a whole new generation of school children who are coming through and they're learning this in their classroom now, which I'm in the uk anyway, it's great. They're learning about the importance of the soil, the importance of what we do and what we release on the atmosphere and the badness of certain things, and hopefully they can be changed with these new generations. I mean I'm really excited. I've got grandchildren. In fact there's another one, a fourth one on the way and you know, I think for their future they'll grow up in a different way where they do care about this. I know it's very hard to change people's mindset now, but there will be a mindset that starts in a better place.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, the only thing I would hope for the UK is that there is a. The new replacements of the society there are going to give a crap as much as the altruistic Brits who have spent all this time becoming conscious.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

That's. The only threat, I think, is with this global world we have. We've got people moving in and out of countries and bringing their baggage from one to the other, and all the work that we're doing, as you say, teaching school children to do these things, these are luxury initiatives.

Speaker 2:

These are the initiatives that you do when all things are okay and you are not struggling just to survive yeah, although growing understanding about growing in in a world where you know there's famine everywhere, you know understanding how to at least I mean it's impossible to cure what, the scale of what is going on. But if we, you know, if that knowledge can go in everywhere, go into all generations of all cultures, then it's going to make a difference in everywhere.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, hopefully. Well, good on you, man. I think that's pretty cool the stuff that you're doing, and, yeah, it'd be interesting to check back with you another time and see if you've got some more construction projects. I think it's an important thing to be doing, maybe looking at those blocks, looking at some other things you could be doing there, and that drywall side of things. I mean, that is, even if, even if, yeah, even if you could make this would be very cool if you could make a um uh, corner bead made of hemp or a j channel like a j edge, which is just that little edge that goes on the edge drywall, but that was made of hemp, like the entire hemp system. There's so much to be done there and I think, I think you know the first step of you doing the corrugated panels is pretty cool, but it just shows that you could do anything. That is, you know, if it was inside, the opportunity is inside, I think, because we don't know what it's going to do outside. You know, for the elements, et cetera.

Speaker 2:

But all the acoustical stuff yeah there's so much opportunity inside, yeah, yeah pretty cool. All right, well, this has been cool, cool. Yeah, thanks, Steve, and yeah, we'll see what happens over the next few years.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so your website. Let's just go through that again. So you have margint margin, farmcom, and then you're on linkedin, obviously, and then on instagram I don't think we're on linkedin, are we?

Speaker 2:

I'm not on it. I know that you're not.

Speaker 1:

You're not on. I think we found you, I think through linkedin, at one point, but anyway, maybe not um are you, I might have signed up for it about 10 years ago, but I've never used it. Okay, and then so on Instagram.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the Insta is the best way because that keeps pretty current and it's got gaining followers on that.

Speaker 1:

So that is Margins. So M-A-R-G-E-N-T underscore farm is where that can be found. All right, well, that's pretty awesome. Okay, steve. Well, it was a really pleasure. It's a great pleasure to meet you, and best of luck with everything.

Speaker 2:

And thank you very much for your time. Okay, all the best, all right, speak soon. Okay, thanks, see you, okay, thanks.

Speaker 1:

Bye. Well, that does it for another episode of the Site Visit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for our monthly newsletter at sitemaxsystemscom. Slash thesitevisit, where you'll get industry insights, pro tips and everything you need to know about the SiteVisit podcast and Sitemax, the job site and construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. Sitemax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building.