It is one thing to offer negative criticism, which we did regarding Meta’s proposed AI data center in Richland Parish.  It is also necessary to offer positive alternatives to the thing being critiqued.  We offered a few ideas but nothing substantive in the previous essay.  We wish to correct that here.

Richland Parish, as the name implies, is a place where farming predominates (lsuagcenter.com).  Rather than deny the history and culture of the parish by imposing a destructive AI data center, the people there should let the past inspire the future.

There are two promising possibilities in this regard:  creating industrial products from river cane and/or from hemp.  Both have long histories in Southern life.

River cane has been around for millennia:

‘Once a dominant feature of the southeastern United States, canebrakes dominated hundreds of thousands of acres along floodplains and stream bottoms. Large expanses of canebrakes were often described by early explorers in the Southeast. In the 1770’s, William Bartram explored much of the southeast United States and describes canebrakes often in his description of floodplains and creek bottoms. From these descriptions, it appears that canebrakes were both ubiquitous and expansive’ (rivercane.msstate.edu).

It is extremely fast growing, up to 1.5 inches/day in the springtime (Ibid.).  The Native Americans in Louisiana relied on it to make various items:

‘In central Louisiana, the U.S. Forest Service is spearheading efforts to restore river cane, a bamboo-like plant that played a vital role in Native American culture for thousands of years. This significant piece of tribal heritage has become increasingly rare, prompting an effort to bring it back.

‘Rose Fisher, an elder of the Jena Choctaw Tribe, takes me to a roadside patch of river cane in the town of Jena, Louisiana.  . . .  Holding up a nearly 200-year-old basket made by one of her ancestors, Fisher highlights its importance. The basket was likely used to store or dry food, she explains. Additionally, river cane has been crafted into various tools and instruments, including whistles and blowguns’ (‘River Cane’, heartoflouisiana.com).

In addition to these traditional uses, bamboo grasses like river cane can be used to make a wide array of products:

‘Bamboo is a category of fast-growing and widely distributed perennials having unique physical and mechanical properties. The mechanical properties of bamboo are often higher (typically by two to three times) than those of conventional timbers, and it has become a very important raw material for the household/ building industries. Bamboo has been commercially used for the production of indoor and outdoor floors, furniture, and structural timber for building. Some performance defects/ drawbacks of bamboo have been effectively remedied, due to the new technologies, such as bamboo scrimber, which facilitates the market penetration/ acceptance of bamboo-based household and building products’ (Qiu, H., Xu, J., He, Z., Long, L., and Yue, X., ‘Bamboo as an emerging source of raw material for household and building products’, bioresources.cnr.ncsu.edu).

The market for bamboo products is expanding rapidly:

‘There are about 100 bamboo species that are economically important. In the 1980s the total revenue of bamboo and its products reached 4.5 billion US dollars. In 2005 the global bamboo product market was about 7 billion US dollars. By 2015 the number had grown to an astonishing 60 billion US dollars.

‘China is rich in bamboo resources and has a global leading level in the research and utilization of bamboo. In 2017 its industrial output value of bamboo was 35 billion US dollars, ranking first in the world, and it increased 11.2% compared with that in 2016 (Dai et al. 2017). More and more attention has been paid to the economic benefits and social value of bamboo, and the development prospects of bamboo products are expected.

‘ . . . Bamboo fibers have been used in many industries, for example the garment/ textile, automotive, pulp and paper industries. Due to its excellent durability, fire safety, environmental impact, user safety, energy efficiency, and so on, bamboo is one of the ideal raw materials for the production of sustainable household/ building products. In fact, the household/ construction sector accounts for 30 to 40% of the annual bamboo consumption in the world’ (Ibid.).

Combining a manufacturing facility at the Franklin Farm megasite in Richland Parish with surrounding farms dedicated to growing river cane is one possibility.  Pairing a factory with farms dedicated to growing industrial hemp is another.

Hemp is also embedded deep within Southern history:

‘George Washington, the first president of the United States, was a hemp farmer at the famous Mount Vernon (Fike, 2016). The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper, and the first American flag was sewn from hemp cloth. Hemp was grown by many farmers in America for primarily food and seed and were even required by law to grow it in the 1600s’ (‘Industrial Hemp and its Uses’, lahemp.net).

While the US turned away from hemp in the 20^th century, other countries continued to grow it and to use it in industrial products of various kinds.  China and France are two of the main ones:

‘Qinggang County in China’s Heilongjiang Province expects to harvest hemp from 40,000 acres (~16,200 hectares) in 2021 as the government increases its support for development of high-tech solutions in the world’s capital of hemp textile production. The planting area for industrial hemp in Qinggang county has steadily grown from 1,500 acres (~607 hectares) in 2016 to feed a robust field-to-shelf industrial supply chain. Qinggang County officials say 6,600 acres (~2,600 hectares) of hemp were planted for research purposes alone in the county this year. Heilongjiang Province accounts for half of the world’s production of hemp fiber, and Qinggang County makes 70% of that output; all hemp yarns exported from Heilongjiang Province come from Qinggang, according to provincial officials.

‘ . . . A comprehensive research program involving universities from Heilongjiang Province and partners from the Ukraine and Canada is developing high-yield hemp varieties, optimizing combine harvesters for stalks and seeds, and introducing bio-tech methods that allow production of hemp textile fibers in an environmentally friendly way using enzymes; the fibers can then be processed alone or together with other fibers on existing cotton gins’ (‘40,000 acres of fiber hemp fuels China’s ‘one county, one industry’ strategy’, hemptoday.net).

But it is France, the mother of la Louisiane, that offers the greatest inspiration.  There, too, hemp farming had also declined badly, but it is seeing a renaissance today:

‘Cannabis sativa Linn, commonly known as hemp, is a hardy plant going back to medieval times. Production in France boomed during the 17th and 18th century when its tough fibres were used to make canvas and ropes for sailing ships. In around 1830, at the industry’s peak, some 173,000 hectares were farmed. But the rise of synthetic materials in the mid-20th century made the fibre less attractive.

‘Hemp production has tripled here over the last decade to reach 24,000 hectares, making France the world’s third-largest producer after the US and China, and leader in Europe, where it accounts for more than a third of the EU’s production. “We now have 1,550 farmers nationwide and it’s a fast-growing sector,” says Franck Barbier, head of the professional body InterChanvre that represents hemp growers’ (Alison Hird, ‘Hemp, the ‘green gold’ that France hopes will help cut carbon emissions’, rfi.fr/en).

Like river cane, hemp is very hardy and fast-growing, and there are other benefits aside from those:

‘For a start it’s one of the world’s fastest-growing plants. “It can grow up to three metres [about 10 feet—W.G.] in just five months, and around 10 centimetres [about 4 inches—W.G.] a day in the month of June,” Barbier explains as he strides through a 10-hectare field in Aulnoy, 60km east of Paris. The plant’s dense canopy deprives weeds of light, thereby reducing reliance on pesticides. “It doesn’t need any products to control disease or pests – no weedkillers, fungicides or insecticides. So it’s good for farmers to no longer have to use such products,” he says. And thanks to the plant’s powerful root system, it can delve two metres underground to fetch water, allowing it to grow throughout drier summer months without the need for irrigation.  . . .  Barbier says hemp is of interest as a rotational crop since its ability to regenerate the soil means it can increase yields of winter wheat “by around 8 percent”’ (Ibid.).

And then there are the many industrial applications of hemp:

‘Everything in the hemp plant is useful. The protein-rich seeds are hulled to produce foodstuffs and oil for cosmetics, while whole seeds can be used in animal feed. The tough stalks are processed in hemp mills where the fibrous outer layer is separated from the inner core, known as hurds. Hemp fibre is used to make paper and textiles. And as a lightweight, durable substitute for plastic, it’s increasingly used in car manufacturing. But it’s perhaps in the construction industry that “green gold” – as it’s sometimes called in France – is making the biggest strides. Both fibre and hurds are used in the construction industry, whether in “hempcrete” – a mixture of lime, hemp hurds and water – hemp wool, or fibre-board insulation’ (Ibid.).

Hempcrete has a long history in France, going back to the 6^th century:

‘The oldest structure in Saint Céneri le Gérei dating back to the Merovingians is the old stone bridge crossing the Sarthe river. The fact that it has survived antiquity is a miracle, the secret to how it survived is shocking.

‘A stone and mortar bridge crossing the river point was constructed by the Merovingians who ruled the area around 500 AD. Upon closer inspection the secret to its longevity is discovered… Hemp!

‘The bridges ancient stonework has been held in place for centuries using mortar made from hemp.  With a mixture of more than 10% hemp, the hemp mortar has held the bridge together longer than any other structure in the village, not to mention its the only structure that has had to withstand the rivers punishing current.

‘The hemp mortar’s immortality comes from its ability to breath.  Typical mortar cracks and chips to pieces as the mortar expands and contracts with typical temperature and moisture influxes.  Hemp has the amazing ability to absorb moisture, allowing the mortar to take in and release the excess water when conditions allow.  These abilities have allowed the bridge to survive as other structures turn to ruble’ (‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters, 500 AD’, thecannachronicles.com).

Any building material that can survive centuries of outdoor weathering is worthy of attention.

Now, given Louisiana’s long history and achievements in agriculture, there is no reason to doubt that our farmers in and around Richland Parish, with God’s help and St Martin’s prayers, can be as successful in producing the necessary quantities of river cane and/or hemp as feedstock for a processing plant on the Franklin Farm site.  As demand for these products increases here in the States and around the world, Louisiana should rise to the challenge and join the production of the goods that cane and hemp can yield.  Such an agriculturally based industry would be a natural fit for our people.

An AI data center is not.  Not only does it not produce any tangible goods that could contribute to the good of society; not only are investors souring on AI in general as a good investment – ‘As technology companies fail to produce good profits, investors are no longer star-struck by the promises of artificial intelligence (AI) and want actual results.  The change in the mood also comes at a time when fund managers are warning of the hype around the AI. Recently, Goldman Sachs and Elliot Management have warned investors that the AI is overhyped and that promised AI applications would neither be cost-effective and nor likely to address real-world problems’ (‘’Show me the results’: Amid poor profits & warnings, investors unimpressed by AI’s unfulfilled promises’, firstpost.com) – an AI data center in the middle of a Richland farm field would also require an influx of foreign workers to staff up.  Some would come from Leftist California; others from foreign countries, India, South Korea, etc.  Such an influx would have a devastating impact on the quiet, Christian, Southern culture of Richland Parish.

Taking a broad view of this project, quite apart from the exploitation of a people and their natural resources, it appears to be a clever way for West Coast Leftists/globalists to create a bridgehead smack in the middle of a deeply conservative area of the South from which they can then expand outwards, disrupt the local culture, and remold the Louisianans in their Gnostic, anti-Christian image.  That may sound ‘conspiratorial’ to some folks, but this is how the demonic Left operates:  They game things out far in advance and work systematically to implement their goals.  The Right, to their discredit, does not work in so far-sighted, organized, and disciplined a manner, and as a result the Left has taken over many important institutions in the States – from local public libraries to Christian seminaries to the armed forces.  The folks in Northeast Louisiana would be foolish to welcome a globalist corporation like Meta into their region to begin such subversive work.

Yet there is another way, the agrarian industrial way, and we hope the people of Richland Parish will choose it rather than making themselves bond-servants of a man – Mark Zuckerberg – who views their Southern, Red State culture as ‘deplorable’.