Legal pot brings environmental rules
Many growers electing not to apply for permit
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — At a state briefing on environmental rules that await growers entering California’s soon-to-be-legal marijuana trade, organic farmers Ulysses Anthony, Tracy Sullivan and Adam Mernit listened intently, eager to make their humble cannabis plot a model of sustainable agriculture in a notoriously destructive industry dominated by the black market.
In line with a 2017 study that found marijuana grows are more damaging, plot for plot, than commercial logging in Northern California forests, Anthony said he has seen too many destructive grows. Trash-strewn clearings. Growers heaping fertilizer at the foot of a centuries-old sequoia tree. Wild streams diverted for irrigation.
“It really bothers me when I see some of the other operations, the treatment of the land,” he said.
He came from Northern California’s remote Lake County with his two business partners for the state-run seminar on just some of the water regulations pot growers must follow when California — the United States’ biggest economy and biggest producer by far in the underground U.S. cannabis market — legalizes recreational marijuana for licensed and permitted growers and sellers in the New Year.
Complying with water laws alone would mean daily record-keeping, permit applications, inspections and more, state officials said. The three growers took in the volume of new environmental rules but were confident they could comply, said Sullivan.
“Oh, yeah, it’ll be possible,” she said. “It’ll just be a longer road” than they expected.
Hopes are that legalization will help rein in environmental damage from black-market grows, much of it in Northern California old-growth forests. But early signs are that only a fraction of growers are applying for permits immediately as recreational marijuana becomes legal here.
At the briefing earlier this month, state regulators and consultants hoping to do business with pot farmers notably outnumbered the growers. Rachel Begonia of West Sacramento, one of those consultants, wondered aloud: Where were all the other cannabis growers scrambling to comply with environmental requirements?
As legalization and all of its environmental oversight for farmers who go legal approach in just a few weeks, “either they’ve got it in the bag, or they’re going to try to fly under the radar,” Begonia figured.