(Andrews 34) Washington's August 7 diary entry clearly indicates that he was cultivating the plant for medicinal purposes as well for it's fiber. (Andrews 34) he might have separated the males from the females to get better fiber, but his phrase rather too late suggests that he wanted to complete the separation before the female plants were fertilized and this was a practice related to drug potency rather than to fiber culture. (Andrews 34) British mercantile policy hampered American hemp culture for a time during and after the colonial period by offering heavy bounties on hemp exported from Ireland, but the American plantings continued despite this subsidized competition. .
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At various times in the nineteenth century, large hemp plantations flourished in Mississippi, Georgia, California, South Carolina, Nebraska, and other states, as well as on Staten Island, New York. The invention of the cotton gin and of other cotton and wool machinery, and competition from cheap imported hemp, were major factors in the decline in United States hemp cultivation. The decline in commercial production did not, however, mean that marijuana became scarce. As late as 1937, the American commercial crop was still estimated at 10,000 acres, much of it in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Kentucky. Four million pounds of marijuana seed a year were being used in bird feed. During World War II, commercial cultivation was greatly expanded, at the request of the United States Department of Agriculture, to meet the shortage of imported hemp for rope. Even decades after commercial cultivation has been discontinued, hemp can often be found growing luxuriantly as a weed in abandoned fields and along roadsides. Indeed, the plant readily spreads to additional territory. The area of Nebraska land infested with weed marijuana was estimated in 1969 at 156,000 acres. One acre of good land yields about one thousand pounds of marijuana, enough for almost one million marijuana cigarettes.
