The outdoor cannabis growing season, now more than half over, is rapidly approaching the harvest, which is the most exciting as well as the most perilous time of the year. Exciting because the plants are beautiful to behold; perilous because there’s the risk of rip-offs and arrests. Many factors, including the weather, determine when the harvest begins and ends, though there isn’t a grower who doesn’t fear heavy autumn rains and crave hot, dry days and warm nights.
Ever since June 1, I have monitored the rapid growth of a large plantation that I call Green Acre. Most of the marijuana that will be harvested there will not reach the market as dried flowers, but rather as “dabs,” which my dictionary defines it as “a product extracted from the plant and concentrated into an oil.” For the past five years or so, dabs have to a large extent replaced the old-fashioned, less-potent “joint.”
This year’s harvest at Green Acre will probably be the last. The county will not likely allow it to operate again in 2018. This year it’s squeaking by.
Still, Green Acre has brought almost no additional traffic to the surrounding roads, and there are no unpleasant smells from the garden. The men are paid $25 an hour, starting salary. They don’t have weapons, except for a BB gun to drive off marauding ground squirrels. I have not seen any environmental degradation of the land, air and water. The whole place is on drip irrigation that saves water and garbage is properly disposed.
But is it a legal grow? Probably not by the standards of Lori Ajax, the “pot czar” in Sacramento, and yet it’s not blatantly illegal by the rules made up by Sonoma County officials on Administration Drive in Santa Rosa. Indeed, Green Acre is in the limbo land where many local pot farmers find themselves this transitional year, before new stiff regulations go into effect on January 1, 2018. Not surprisingly, many Sonoma County residents scoff at the impending changes and say they’ll take their chances as outlaws on the marijuana frontier, a territory that they know all too well.
The farmers at Green Acre agree that rules are necessary, and that they offer a check on scofflaws who would otherwise steal water, pollute streams and cut down stands of trees. Still, they don’t like the new marijuana bureaucracy here and in Sacramento.
Located near the geographical heart of Sonoma County, Green Acre is surrounded by vineyards, vegetable farms and sheep. Planting started late in the season; the growers had to work overtime to catch up. Some of them have grown pot for decades. Others are newcomers who are quickly learning the trade. One young man came of age in his father’s landscaping and gardening business; he’s now learning the marijuana trade.
The farmers at Green Acre expect that the weed will sell for about $1,000 a pound. That’s a lot less than the $4,000 a pound they earned in the 1990s when they were independent operators. The legalization of medical marijuana in 1996, and then recreational cannabis in 2016, and the rapid expansion of land devoted to cannabis — as much as four times this year alone — made it a foregone conclusion than the supply on the black market would increase and the price would drop. It will probably go down again because of the glut on the market.
Still, if you hope to harvest 1,000 pounds, that could add up to $1 million. It’s not easy money and it’s not an easy life, either, working eight hours a day under the hot sun. There are expenses for equipment and machinery and salaries to lawyers and consultants who help navigate the maze of regulations that Sonoma County has created.
The farmers at Green Acre — some local, some from counties to the North — work for the property owner, who rarely shows up. The foreman takes his job seriously and expects everyone else on the team to do the same. Occasionally there are disagreements about how to best cultivate marijuana, but the men agree to disagree. You could rightly call them not only Jacks of several trades, but masters, as well. I’ve watched them operate tractors, electrify the farm and set up their complex irrigation system.
So what’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, except that the men may well find themselves unemployed as marijuana becomes increasingly corporate. Meanwhile, they’re making their way through the season; on weekends they drink beer, make pizzas in their wood-fired oven and entertain friends and family. And they get high.
The most challenging part of the season took place during a weeklong heat wave in June when it was over 100 degrees and the plants, which were still in one-gallon containers, had to be watered frequently to prevent them from wilting and dying. With a hose that stretched 300 feet, it took several days to water hundreds of baby plants. By the end of July, they looked big and healthy, and with the help of an organic, liquid fertilizer they were growing fast.
What drives these farmers? Money is part of the equation. They’re also motivated by a love of the marijuana plant itself and a desire to see the crop through the entire growing season. Think of them as professionals in an industry flooded with amateurs. Several are married, have families and are raising their kids to be respectful of others, play by the rules and go to school during the academic year. The kids don’t smoke dope. Their dads don’t allow it.
Politicians and lobbyists in Sacramento and Washington D.C., as well as local officials, will determine the future of marijuana in Sonoma and elsewhere in California. Farmers at Green Acre and others like them will also have a say in the world that’s still to come. In fact, they’re shaping it now by helping to develop what might be called best practices.
Over the next two months, I’ll monitor the acre of marijuana that will come to look like one huge plant. I’ve seen the spectacle before. I expect to see it again.
Jonah Raskin, a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, is the author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, published in French and English, and shares story credit for the feature length pot film, Homegrown.
