Despised Weed Adds Value to Farm Land, 1931

Farmers of the Imperial Valley, in California, have found wild hemp, a familiar weed, will in two or three months replenish exhausted soil as thoroughly as alfalfa and do the job more quickly. Wild hemp grows abundantly from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast, and from the Mason-Dixon line south to an undetermined point in Central America. In a few weeks it towers seven to ten feet high and is of jungle thickness. According to D.E. Creighton, assistant farm adviser of Imperial County, discovery of its ability to enrich soil may prove the greatest advance in farming since water was brought in to irrigate the American Desert.

During the months when the soil is “resting” the depleted land is plowed and seeded with wild hemp. Tractor machinery then plows under the luxuriant crop, stalks and all. The formerly-despised weed is now said to be adding from ten to twenty-five percent to the $12,000,000 crops of the Imperial Valley.