Miracle fiber ramie too difficult to pick

So, farmers, it looks like you’d better get in touch with your county agent. Your ramie crop was terribly under-reported again this year.

As a matter of fact, I can’t find one report of a ramie harvest in the last few years – even though it was envisioned as late as the end of World War II as the cash crop that would replace cotton in the Louisiana farm economy.

“Fertile, versatile Louisiana soil and [the] mild, even Louisiana climate are working out another potentially great agricultural-industrial enterprise which promises not only to produce great wealth but also to challenge the present unrivalled position held by linen,” the Louisiana Conservation Review proclaimed in early 1930.

“Ramie, the plant whose ancestral home is in China and whose fiber is said to be the strongest known … is the new resident which has made itself completely at home in Louisiana,” the magazine continued.

There was only one problem to clear up – or maybe two, both related. It had to be harvested by hand and cleaned by hand. There were no machines to pick it or to clean it.

But, if those obstacles could be overcome, the Conservationist promised, ramie could do almost anything. It “can be woven into table linen, napkins, collars, shirts, handkerchiefs, hosiery and incandescent gas mantles. Ramie will also blend with natural silk, weave embroideries, upholstery, … laces, lingerie, sewing thread, costly fine paper, tent canvas, automobile tires, costumes, and can be used in more than a hundred other ways.”

Unnamed authorities were quoted as saying “the world can use all the ramie that can be produced, if the price is right.”

And the reason the price was not yet right “is the absence of an efficient process for economically and dependably decorticating the fibers from the rest of the plant.”

That problem had not been solved by the time World War II erupted, but the tough fiber showed its stuff during those years.

According to a 1947 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, ramie was used by the U. S. Navy and Merchant Marine for the ropes and lines needed in abundance aboard a ship, but it was probably in bomb-torn London that it was put to its best use.

“In the fighting of fires that broke out in the wake of the London bombings, all-ramie fire hoses … [were] capable of carrying water under normal pressure without leakage. When water mains were broken by explosion, the water supply could be maintained by the use of flexible sections … woven of ramie and that were as large as 14 inches in diameter.”

The Reserve Bank thought that ramie could prove to be a versatile commodity in the post-war world, and that it might even be made into the paper that we use to print money and in hospitals.

It can be used to make “crisp, opaque papers that are so tough that they can be torn only with great difficulty,” according to the Reserve Bank report. “Paper of this sort would be valuable for legal documents, carbon paper, and bank notes.” Since ramie had almost no lint, “it could be superior to other materials for surgical pads, dressings, bandages, and operating gowns.”

But, alas, ramie still had to be hand-picked and machines to clean it were still too primitive to be profitable.

We could probably solve those problems with today’s technology. One of those new 3-D printers could probably spew out a machine to clean the ramie using—what else—paper made from ramie.

All of which would be just in time to be of no value as we move into a digital world that needs no paper, no matter how tough or versatile.

Maybe we better keep planting cotton.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.