UP IN SMOKE: A ‘monstrous problem’ created seven years ago haunts California’s weed industry.
Chris Anderson, the owner of Redwood Roots distribution in Humboldt County, can pinpoint the exact moment California’s small farmers were first betrayed. It was in November 2017, two months before legal sales were to begin, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture released rules that shocked the farming community: The state would allow legal pot farms to grow as large as they want.
“That was a monstrous problem,” Anderson told SFGATE. “That is where the collapse of the marketplace and oversupply came from.”
Keeping legal pot farms small was a key promise made to Northern California’s legacy farmers. Proposition 64, the initiative that legalized cannabis, blocked any farm from growing larger than 1 acre for the first five years of legalization. California’s pioneering pot farmers use small plots of land, and were worried they couldn’t compete against mega farms. They wanted five years to get a running start before large farms were legal, but suddenly that head start was taken away.
It’s still unclear why the state erased the 1-acre cap. Large farming interests in the Salinas Valley and Santa Barbara appear to have lobbied for the effort, according to reporting by Leafly News in 2017. A spokesperson for the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture said they changed the rule based on input from unnamed stakeholders.
The DCC said in a statement to SFGATE that Newsom, who was lieutenant governor in 2017, did not have authority over the decision nor did he endorse the change. But Newsom also declined to argue against it when asked by the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)
Judi Nelson, the owner of Sol Spirit Farm in Trinity County, said she supported the law largely because of the acreage cap, and can still remember Newsom making that promise when he visited Humboldt County.
“Newsom came up and stood there with us and said to our faces there was going to be this 1 acre cap,” Nelson said.
To revise and extend P.J. O’Rourke’s classic quote, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. And you can’t survive as a pot grower in California. That’s all you need to know about communism.