Festival barn with hemp all the way up the walls!

Mossagården has barely had time to announce that their festival will be off again this year - despite the ongoing pandemic. Now comes the next news: They will enter the construction industry, by refining their home-grown hemp into building materials! The first step will be to build the walls in the farm's barn with certified hemp so that it can house this year's artists, including Ebbot and Julia Frej, who will perform at the Mossagårdsfestivalen on 28-30 August.

In one length of Mossagården - the so-called barn - a newly restored stately building is emerging, with robust and soundproof walls consisting of hemp-lime. Here, the roof is also insulated with hemp, in this case, with organically produced hemp from the farm's own hemp harvest. The new barn will be the festival's natural gathering place, an ecological meeting place for those interested in the environment and food. Since the technology of building walls with hemp-lime is quite new in Sweden, an Italian professional team has been hired, and they are building the walls on the farm this week until Friday. At Mossagården, however, they hope to be able to take care of the process themselves in the future:

We are happy to continue working with the Italian team but prefer that the hemp and lime are Swedish-produced and organic. Therefore, we plan to build our own processing room next to highway 11, where our hemp can be prepared locally and turned into building materials in various forms, reveals festival general Ebba-Maria Olson.

According to Mossagården, hemp is the crop of the future and a piece of the puzzle in an impending global transformation. One hectare of hemp collects as much carbon dioxide as one hectare of rainforest. But another piece of the puzzle is organic farming, where the species richness of plants and pollinators is on average 50% higher. Research has also shown that nitrogen from artificial fertilizers does not lead to the same carbon storage as organic.

Hemp is a very climate-smart building material, but we must also reduce the use of chemicals. That's why organic hemp is so important. Hemp requires less pesticide spraying, but farms can spray the land before sowing. That is why ecological certification is so important - even in the construction sector, Ebba-Maria points out.