In a small town some 35km from Launceston, a pioneering bunch of women are turning the building industry on its head.
Known as the Trout Capital of Tasmania, Cressy – population 670 – is also home to cannabis fibre processing business, X-Hemp.
X-Hemp is the only cannabis fibre processing mill in Tasmania, one of only a small handful operating in Australia, and the only majority female-owned and entirely women-operated facility of this type in the world.
Founder and Managing Director, Andi Lucas, had two very specific goals in mind when she started the company.
One was to build more resilient homes for the rapidly changing climate; the other to empower women to fully participate in Tasmania’s economic and community life, specifically in rural areas.
X-Hemp grows its own crops and works with licensed Tasmanian hemp farmers, converting the grain stubble left from the hemp seed harvest into other saleable products. The grain stubble was previously being burned off as waste.
X-Hemp sells processed hemp for building materials, mulch for landscaping, bast for specialty paper production, and other outputs for alternative uses such as animal bedding.
X-Hemp was the winner of the Excellence in a Start-Up category in the 2023 Spirit Super Business Excellence Awards
To find out more, visit www.xhemp.au
From the ashes – and flood
However, the road that led to the launch of this award-winning concept was a devastating one.
“Losing one home to a catastrophic bushfire and then my next house nine months later in a flood – and experiencing these disasters in two different countries – really brought the realities of climate change front and centre in my life,” Andi said.
“There is no doubt that the events in 2013 fundamentally changed the course of my entire life. Up until that point, I was someone who had opportunistically taken different jobs across multiple career paths and sectors, and I hadn’t really put much thought into my broader legacy or thought about what type of professional lifestyle I wanted to lead.
“While I always considered myself to be reasonably environmentally aware, and am certainly not and have never been a climate change denier, directly experiencing the devastation caused by the increasing severity and frequency of natural disasters meant that I could no longer ignore the impact we’re having on our planet.
“I decided I needed to do whatever I could to try to mitigate the worst effects and that’s when I started working full time in the hemp industry.”
Healthy building materials
Looking at the effects of fire and flood on different building materials, Andi became painfully aware of how many carcinogenic and toxic compounds there are in some conventional materials.
“I really started looking into healthy building materials first, and from that point, I discovered a construction method known as hempcrete, or hemp lime construction,” she said.
“This is a type of construction that’s been around for thousands of years – I call it the oldest new building material in the world! But due to the prohibition of all cannabis, and the failure to distinguish the differences between plants that don’t have a psychoactive effect, a lot of the knowledge and expertise had been lost through the last few generations.
“One of the most attractive aspects for me for hemp building relates to the way the plant grows. Over about 100 days hemp goes from seed to full maturity. It can grow as tall as six metres high and the plants capture an enormous amount of carbon out of the atmosphere during this rapid growth cycle.
The many benefits of hempcrete
“By harvesting the stalks of the plants and processing them, we can capture that carbon inside the walls of a building. The added advantage of using hempcrete as a wall material is that the building itself is non-combustible, which means it is fantastic for bushfire areas.
“Beyond that, the extra benefits of the home being extremely low energy use means that we can be mitigating the draw on non-renewable power grids and reduce both the need for fossil fuel sourced heating and cooling, whilst also having beautiful healthy homes for people to live in economically.”
Having made the decision to start a hemp fibre processing mill in Tasmania in 2020, Andi immediately faced a challenge.
“People who lived and worked around me in this rural and regional area said how difficult it was to find staff,” she said.
“I always find that an interesting comment to make and usually find that when I question business owners who are having real difficulty retaining staff, they are seeking employees during hours that compete with school times.
“Having workdays that fall out of those times excludes a large proportion of our population of women who are bearing the responsibility of unpaid family care, either for young children or elderly parents.
“While there are obviously some men who do these amazingly important jobs in our society, the great burden of unpaid family care responsibilities will normally fall to the women within a family unit, and that burden of care excludes women from engaging in paid work opportunities.”
All female production team
Andi decided to create a company with a roster that factored in family-friendly hours – so she could tap into women in the community who were amazing workers and simply needed to be able to drop off and pick up their children from school every day.
“I have women who have been with me since the day we opened in 2021, and I have never ever regretted the decision to have an all-female production team,” Andi said.
“I have been incredibly lucky to find women who are more than qualified for the jobs we advertise and bring a completely different set of experience into our business.
“Sometimes I feel like my amazing team leads me!”
As any business owner would know, launching and sustaining a new enterprise is incredibly hard. And that is where the Boosting Female Founders Initiative came to play such a crucial role in making X-Hemp what it is today.
“If we had not been successful with the Boosting Female Founders Grant – which was awarded to us in late 2023 – X-Hemp would not have survived the last 18 months, and I would not have 10 amazing women working alongside me,” said Andi.
“In 2024, we experienced a series of disasters – both natural and man-made – including our factory roof being ripped off in a storm. If we hadn’t had the support of that Federal Government Grant, we simply would have had to close.
Venture capital challenges
“Even without those extra challenges, starting a business of this type is immensely difficult, and accessing capital is statistically more challenging for female founders.
“The numbers don’t lie and in Australia, an incredibly small amount of venture capital goes to female-led companies.
“Two years ago, less than 1% of all venture capital raised in Australia went to female founded businesses. There are structural and real biases that make it more difficult for female founders like me to raise capital for our businesses; however, that has not stopped me!”
Over the last 18 months, Andi has successfully raised $2.4 million through equity crowdsource funding and has the support of over 1,400 shareholders who believe in the work X-Hemp is doing.
“We will continue to raise capital and expand this company to show that we can be a real success, even in one of the worst economic climates that we’ve experienced in recent history,” Andi said.
Supporting women in business
Whilst Andi’s experience has been positive, she feels there is so much more that needs to be done to encourage and support women in business in Australia.
“From my perspective, we need to have a hard look at the way capital is allocated in this country.
“The reality is that people will tend to invest in people and companies that look and sound like them, and that is reflected in what we see around us every day.
“Wherever possible, we need to implement more blind application processes where age, gender and race are not included during pitch sessions to give folks a genuine chance at a merit-based assessment.
“Study after study proves that as soon as you remove these identifiers, allocations of funds tend to be distributed much more according to the wonderfully diverse demographic make-up of our population rather than to the demographics of the people who are writing the cheques.”
A true circular economy
Andi is not only proud of the products and services that X-Hemp offers, but also the impact the company is having on the world.
“It is immensely satisfying to run a company that we know is making a real and tangible difference on so many levels,” she said.
“X-Hemp’s existence means more money into the hands of our farmers and less carbon in the atmosphere. It means that healthy homes are being built in Tasmania and people are now living in non-combustible buildings and using little energy to heat and cool their houses.
“We know that X-Hemp has and will continue to supply materials that create what are known as hypoallergenic houses for people who suffer from allergies, and that the houses won’t mold and termites won’t eat them. Our business is also a true circular economy, as we grow crops locally, harvest and process them locally, and build locally.”
Andi also highlights the danger of relying on international supply chains.
“We are growing an industry that can replace the need for native forest logging, and after years of battling, we are poised and ready to scale.
Sky’s the limit for Australian hemp industry
“The sky is the limit for the hemp industry in Australia and around the world. More and more companies and various sectors are demanding carbon negative or carbon neutral materials in all aspects of life.
“The construction sector is one of the greatest polluters in the world, and we are able to supply that side of industry, along with putting natural fibres into supply chains that currently use synthetic ones,” Andi said.
“Hemp is a plant that can be used for food, medicine, and then all of these incredible natural fibre and construction applications. All we need now is the belief and support we feel from the community, our shareholders and customers to flow through to lawmakers and those who control access to capital investment, and nothing will hold us back!”