Up in California’s Emerald Triangle, just north of Cal Poly Humboldt and nestled between the Mad River and a community forest, HendRx Farm is a commercial nursery dedicated to cataloging the community’s work with the cannabis plant. What started as a simple 400-square-foot operation now spans almost 10,000 square feet across multiple locations, keeping around 200 varieties of clones at a time in their catalog and serving farms across California. Together, Daniel Hendricks, Jeff Schirmann, and David Lunsford have built a resource where the preservation of plants is paramount. The calling at HendRx Farm is to create a viable source for farmers to secure not only the clones that are high value right now, but also the ones that helped put this whole game together, strains like Ringo’s Gift, Arcata Trainwreck, or Skunk #1. HendRx believes the mission to procure and hang onto these culturally-significant cultivars is not just a community service but a responsibility. Every sprout has a story to tell, and HendRx is helping to assemble the Criterion collection.

I spoke with Hendricks while he was getting started on the clone selections for the next few growing cycles.

“With an operation like this, juggling orders for so many farmers, you have to be seasonally minded,” he said.

The company started in 2014, but for Hendricks, his days of growing can be traced back to the ’90s. Having grown up in Humboldt, he was attracted to cultivation and breeding early on, eventually finding companions who shared his enthusiasm for weed. Hendricks, Schirmann, and Lunsford bonded over the belief that a person has a right to farm, as well as a mutual thirst to learn the history of the cannabis strains that had proliferated throughout the West Coast. Together, the group became known for helping authenticate strains for growers.

“We were good at validating if something was the real version of what you were after,” Hendricks said.

In 2016, they chose to file as an official nursery after deciding it was not only what matched their shared passion but also what they felt the legal cannabis community needed most. Hendricks chuckled while describing their first setup.

“It was this tiny little square box that was barely big enough for all of us and the plants,” he said.

Today, they’ve developed that passion into a large-scale, thriving business that includes the launch of their genetic preservation library, where they authenticate, stabilize, and store cultivars that the community has deemed essential. Half of their main building is dedicated to this breeding project. The goal is to get up to 80 strains in the library, all independently bred, stabilized, and preserved through clones. Attaining this goal, Hendricks said, is in no small part thanks to their partner farms like SoHum Seeds and Hidden Prairie Farms, which grow these strains out and help them develop phenotypes for possible production.

“We rely on them for so much, in terms of testing the product by growing and smoking it, but hearing their stories about how it grew, seeing all the effort and coordination from around the community, that’s undoubtedly the most fun part,” he said.

It’s that feeling of community responsibility and respect that put HendRx in the unique position to preserve and become stewards of the famous CBD strain, Ringo’s Gift. Hendricks spoke about how this incredible story shows how the breeding and nursery community can work together to make sure something doesn’t disappear once the spotlight fades away.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

After cannabis breeder Lawrence Ringo’s passing in 2014, Hendricks was at a memorial service in Mendocino, where he heard Samantha Miller from Pure Analytics Lab talk about the first time they discovered the presence of CBD in Ringo’s Gift. She described how everyone on the call afterward was cheering and laughing and how inspired everyone felt. The HendRx team knew they had to hunt and find the seeds so they could, in some small way, do their part to honor this work. They worked tirelessly to find two variations of Ringo’s Gift, eventually called Katie’s Cut and Levi’s Cut.

After a lot of calls and messages, they managed to procure a hemp-compliant clone hunted to help treat the mother of a local client named Katie. Then, with the aid of Purple Caper Seeds (creators of the Chocolate Hashberry), the HendRx team was able to get their hands on a cut that had been given to Purple Caper by Ringo’s son, Levi Lawrence, in a parking lot in San Jose, California years prior. This cut, now known as “Levi’s Cut,” was another key part of HendRx’s efforts. Armed with two versions of the plant, they went to work. Hendricks started making 1:1 hybrids while Schirmann began to stabilize it with a hemp variety, and then the calls started flooding in.

People had heard about what they were doing and wanted to get their hands on this important medicinal strain to give to their friends. Among these calls were Levi and Danielle Lawrence, who then operated SoHum Seeds. After giving this strain back to Ringo’s family, to the very person who had handed over this cut in a parking lot years earlier, HendRx felt they had really achieved something important for the nursery community. Levi and Danielle Lawrence eventually chose Jerry Savage to operate SoHum Seeds to continue the Ringo’s Gift legacy, and Savage invited HendRx to be part of that mission. Today, HendRx manages facilities at SoHum Seeds in Whitethorn, California, where they operate an R&D section, along with garden space for Savage Farms.

After successfully working with the Ringo’s Gift through breeding and experimentation, Hendricks figures they’ve successfully created at least 50,000 Ringo’s Gift plants over the last two years.

“It’s definitely the most important clone we have, and it’s at the ethos of what HendRx does: preservation,” he said.

When it comes to the concept of cannabis and legacy, Hendricks said that they prefer to use the term “heirloom” when referring to their work since it “better holds the reflection of what these strains are: plants with a rich position in history and a huge potential value to the future.” For them, these plants haven’t yet finished writing the legacy they will leave behind. Part of their daily mission is ensuring these heroic varieties make it to the final battle. To Hendricks, “legacy strains,” as the term pertains to retail cannabis, are too expensive to keep alive in today’s market, given the current profit margins. This makes preserving genetics paramount to ensuring we don’t lose what we already have, as people today are planting less of the classics like San Fernando Valley OG and newer strains like Lemon Cherry Gelato.

“Preserving these strains ensures these plants don’t just leave behind a legacy, either because they stay valuable to the community or to the retail market,” Hendricks said. “It’s our duty to the community to preserve what the industry won’t save.”

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of heirloom, in reference to plants, refers to a variety that is not associated with large-scale commercial agriculture. Hendricks referenced how the inherent value in these strains isn’t just in their flavor, historical importance, or medicinal value but also in the untapped intellectual property value the industry has left on the table. If a brand figures out how to adapt an heirloom strain for scalable cultivation and makes it a flagship product, especially one that’s part of their company mission to give back to cannabis, then that in and of itself is a valuable brand identity that’s empowered by that cultivar. In a way, that’s part of the work HendRx is doing, along with The Humboldt Legacy Project on the famous cannabis strain Skunk #1. After being procured by David Watson and preserved by Marty Yip of Sensational Solutions, HendRx was entrusted with the Skunk #1 to work with. Together with the Humboldt Legacy Project, they’ve already started testing something they’re calling the HLP Skunk #1 No. 1 or HLPS1.

Currently, HendRx is in the second round of tester gardens grown through their partners in the project, MOCA Humboldt, which took home nine awards for their cannabis at the 2023 California State Fair. Hendricks remarked how together they are isolating possible production candidates like this HLP Skunk #1 No.1 but explained that the process is still a while away from a batch of clones being considered for retail because “some of these [plants] need commercial work and are perhaps unattainable under our current framework.” He went on to explain how the time and supplies required to grow a difficult heirloom strain, or something that takes 14 weeks or longer to finish up, often outweighs the possible return on investment, making them a harder sell during planting season.

“Things like this require a big price tag in order to break even,” Hendricks said. “Growing a field of something like Trainwreck really needs subsidized farming.”

Despite these concerns over sustainability in the current retail market, they were able to release a small amount from the first test garden to the public, including a survey created by HLP and HendRx that asks smokers for their feedback. Hendricks says the staff at MOCA Humboldt are all hyped about having this opportunity and someday being able to offer a product with an unbelievable history and proven provenance for smokers who want to try that old-school ’90s weed. 

How a Strain Gets Its Library Card

What does it take for a strain to end up in HendRx’s genetic preservation library? The answer to that is both simple and complex.

“It has to pass the three wise men,” Hendricks said, meaning all three owners of the nursery have to look at each case and approve it, but there are a few factors that majorly contribute to the decision. Cost is an important factor. It takes around $1,200 a year to keep a single strain stored away. Hendricks admits that switching to tissue culture would be a smaller footprint for storing their library, but it would keep things further out of commercial rotation and increase wait times for their farm partners. Another big criteria is space, not just in terms of where to store plants but also how to store multiple cultivars together so that there’s a healthy ecosystem. Inside their Noah’s Ark, everything is operating in a sort of hibernation homeostasis, and there’s always a potential risk involved in bringing them out and back into storage. If a strain can prove itself to have a valuable history, be free of pathogens, and can do well in its storage facility and pass the test for all three owners, then it becomes part of the genetic preservation library.

Hendricks made it clear that the library is about preserving older strains but that recent and current ones aren’t excluded from induction.

“It has to be important, not just cool, and it has to have potential value in terms of research, rarity, terpene breakdown, market value, or education,” he said.

He sees the mission as keeping these cultivars alive for the future, even more so than in the past. They recognize that the new heat and throwback strains from the ’90s might be more in demand than the hits of the ’70s, but that doesn’t mean those flavors don’t contain something super inspiring for the future. The whole thing is a lot like the preservation of music. There are more albums made in a day than you could listen to in a year, so deciding who and what gets preserved is a difficult task that requires a lot of dedication, research, and input from the community, along with a little bit of intuition sharpened by experience. One example he gave is Italian Icee, a strain that has gotten them a ton of positive feedback and is something they had a gut feeling about when it first landed in their hands.

Hendricks explained that it was a rugged, sunbaked German man who approached them. He looked like a guitar tech or a roadie for some band your uncle loves and he said he had something special they needed to keep safe. He came back the next day with a tiny piece of paper that held a pile of seeds and the instructions for his Mason jar technique for germination; all hastily scrawled out like the recipe for a wizard’s potion. It was a gut feeling the guys at HendRx had that led them to keep it. After all, Ice Cream Cake crossed with Blueberry Muffin is nothing to necessarily write home about, but HendRx had a hunch, so they had Royal Lief grow it out and select the pheno: Ice Cream Cake x Blueberry Muffin #4. After that, it traveled to the R&D site at SoHum Seeds, where it languished for a year and a half before a client came asking for an Ice Cream Cake cross. Now, six years after getting that crumbled scrap of paper, Italian Icee has done quite well, a success Hendricks modestly attributes to the strain finding the right home for its story rather than the HendRx team’s gut instinct for sniffing out a winner.

For every success story like this, there are a dozen or more heirloom cultivars waiting to find their voice in this evolving industry. I asked if any of these were becoming in demand with farmers last year in 2023, and Hendricks said that HendRx is getting a lot more requests from people wanting to try their hand at growing an heirloom strain, but producing orders on these cultivars takes a lot of time and labor so there are waitlists for many of the most recognizable names.

“The longest lines are always for Trainwreck, Sour D, and Tangie,” Hendricks said. “But the lines for NF1, XJ13, and GSC are right at their heels.”

Hendricks said his company likes to say the mission ends when you can find Sour D and Girl Scout Cookies in the garden department next to tomato starts and daffodils. The idea is that when they can create and maintain these strains for home gardeners and commercial growers alike, they no longer have to worry about these strains leaving enough of a legacy to be saved from extinction. Until then, HendRx will continue to expand the genetic preservation library to conserve and promote heirloom cannabis.

This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of High Times Magazine.

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The tale of Canna Country Farms is one of a multigenerational survivor from Humboldt County, California. Ted Blair, Canna Country’s owner and an award-winning third-generation cannabis farmer, considers the operation a model full-sun garden representing the best “the hill” has to offer. The farm’s geographical location helps, as being in the right location in The Emerald Triangle is critical to growing the best fire possible. Canna Country sits not too far outside Garberville, California. The town of about 1,300 people is southern Humboldt’s first major population center, just north of the Mendocino County line at Cook’s Valley.

Southern Humboldt is King

Some would argue that the Southern region of Humboldt County is some of the most ideal cannabis-cultivation lands in all of California. Numerous Emerald Cup champions in various categories dot the region, and, like Blair, many of their families have spent generations living off the land and the amazing cannabis it can provide.

When you’re talking about elite outdoor flowers grown by legacy survivors, southern Humboldt is one of the best places you can start, as far as Blair is concerned.

“We’re a third-generation farm that went legal, and our property is off the grid,” Blair told High Times. “We are a rainwater catchment. We’re in the ground. We plant a full-term sun, we don’t use any light, no light assist, and we’ve been creating our genetics for about five years up there.”

Blair immediately emphasized that they’re really all about family farming, being carbon-free, and doing things as natural as possible with all organic inputs for their plants. Also deeply embedded in the farm’s core values is trying not to do any damage to the environment.

We asked Blair if living off the grid has impacted his gardening style, given the connection to the land that comes with that kind of lifestyle.

“Absolutely, yes,” Blair replied, “I need to utilize the sun and do most of my heavy work during the day off of the electricity and try and save it for, you know, later at night. We don’t have to have any backup generator of any kind.”

Blair lived off the grid with his family when he was growing up, but they eventually got power.

The farm is a piece of property his family has owned for about 15 years. His mom helped him get started, and in the years since, he has taught his sons how to manage the farm and grow great weed, as contests in recent years have proven. In 2021, Canna Country took home second place for #26 in the sungrown flower category of The Emerald Cup and ninth for #9, followed by a sixth place win for #26 in the same strain and category in 2022. Last year, Canna Country Farms took home a second-place award in the non-infused pre-roll category for its collaboration with Huckleberry Hill Farms, a Whitethorn Rose and Canna Country #26 blended pre-roll.

Based on his many awards, it’s clear that Blair’s cannabis is unique, but he points out a lot is going on at the farm besides cannabis.

“We have fruit trees and persimmons and berries, and we have wild mushrooms in the winter,” Blair said. “We aren’t far from the ocean. So we have a boat, we go salmon fishing, rock cod, halibut, and crab.” 

Blair said he’ll be using the fish carcasses in an emulsion he is making for this year.

Blair went a little deeper into what makes the region so special; it’s the climate, but it’s also the experience that’s in the hills.

“Not only is it just awesome sun and weather, but planting in the same dirt for almost 14 years and regenerating the dirt every year, it keeps getting better and better,” Blair said. “So, having the great weather and all these applications that have their own microclimates, having our genetics that are rare, and then knowing how to cure, dry, and store and just keep it as fresh as possible. And those are things we really can’t teach. It’s just trial by error for me anyway.”

Locally Bred

Blair has been growing cannabis since he was 13. His older sister would toss her roaches off the back porch, and one year, two plants popped up. He started tending to those plants. His mother also always had a couple of plants in her garden that she would let him help with.

The backbone of Canna Country in recent years has been the breeding work they did five years ago. Blair has spent the past few years digging through all those seeds based on which crosses he was the most excited about. In total, he has 305 crosses from that season five years ago. The work has been steady.

A lot of the pollen involved in the process was community-sourced. Different farms had pollen available on different days. They would let folks know what day so they could come over and grab it fresh.

His favorite from the pack so far is the #26. It reminds him of the phenos he grew as a guerrilla grower in the hills during his youth. It’s green all the way through until it gets some purple at the end, exclusively on the flower itself. The strain is a pairing of Forbidden Fruit and Cherimoya.

“We had this strain that was nice, that #26 strain. [It] had that smell, and I couldn’t get out of my head that I remember from when I was a kid,” Blair said, “It’s woody, peppery, and spicy. It’s creamy. It’s got all these different flavors to it. I just fell in love with that immediately. That was our star, that was my star, and it is my favorite. And there have been several others.”

Right now, the farm has popped 47 of the strains from the massive breeding project. Usually, Blair would pop about 50 seeds of each cross. He is working on trying to get licensing agreements together and get the work out to people who want to do large grows but has found a lot of red tape in the process.

“I think to have your own strain that no one else in the world has to grow on your farm, we all recognize how important it is,” Blair said noting the #26 is currently their diamond. “Having that in our pocket is probably the only reason we survived.”

Another big winner from the breeding project was the #9. It brings together Humboldt Skunk and F4 Sour Diesel OG Kush for a very gassy experience that the farm calls unforgettable. The team at Canna Country promises a full-bodied high but said there is still plenty of cerebral activity.

Getting Legal

Blair noted that the red tape involved with licensing his strains is difficult on top of the fees that he already pays the state and county to exist, in addition to an assortment of other agencies such as the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Water Board. The farm does whatever it has to stay in good standing. For Blair, going legal was never an option if he wanted his work to keep going; it was a must.

“It was sort of like you had to join up if you wanted to keep doing what you were doing,” Blair said. “At that time, county officials were sending out these threatening letters. They were abatement letters. They were going to come out to your house and start fighting you and doing all this scary stuff. I wanted my legacy, my kids, to be able to do what they’re doing.”

When Blair decided to go legal, he had no idea about the kind of pain and suffering that he would face throughout the process. In our interview, he questioned whether he would still have done it if given a chance to do it over. As for watching other people go hard without jumping through the legal hoops, Blair loves his neighbors regardless of what side of the fence they’re on and doesn’t want any of them to have to deal with heavy enforcement.

Blair went on to explain the biggest hurdle in the legacy market besides the pound price crashing. He argued that just getting the product to market is a struggle in a market driven by THC percentages. Consumers do not often make their purchases based on factors other than THC potency, so Canna Country’s effort to highlight things like the terpene ocimene doesn’t always get the spotlight it deserves.

Packing Dilemmas & Selling Direct

As someone who is very earth-conscious, Blair has been blown away by the amount of packaging he is required to use in order to be compliant. He’s even more shocked at just how wild some folks get with it.

“It’s terrible, man. It’s terrible. If I roll a joint, there’s no stuff I throw on the ground. There’s nothing I throw in the garbage,” Blair said. “[If] we go into the dispensary and want to buy one cartridge, it’s like a pile of garbage, and then you got to buy the battery, and there’s a pile of garbage. It’s just insane what this has turned into.”

Blair feels one of the most helpful things for small farmers would be simplifying direct-to-consumer sales. The average distributor charges 17% of whatever they can convince the retailer to buy the product for. Being able to send things directly from the farm to consumers would be a massive benefit for growers. As the California industry potentially expands to other states, farm direct would mean delivering freshness and quality, especially in Humboldt.

In 2024, California cannabis testing facilities were required to adhere to stricter controls from the state. While these new restrictions should help get inflated THC numbers back to reality, Blair doesn’t think it will matter if consumers aren’t educated.

Those who buy Canna Country flowers understand that quality isn’t defined by THC percentages alone. Among the people buying Canna Country’s flowers is Farmer and The Felon, a brand that has previously won The Emerald Cup with its gear. Farmer and the Felon aren’t going to just toss things in their bags that would dent their reputation. That relationship is certainly another feather in the cap for Canna Country.

“Canna Country embodies the holy trinity of cannabis: genetics, the farmers, and terroir,” said Patrick Anderson, brand manager for the Farmer and the Felon. “For the past two years, they’ve been an exceptional partner, as they have harnessed this synergy to grow cannabis with wildly diverse profiles and unique effects.”

Keep an eye out for Canna Country Farms on competition podiums across California in 2024.

This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of High Times Magazine.

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Voters in Humboldt County last week soundly rejected a ballot measure that would have tightened regulations on the area’s famed cannabis industry. Known as Measure A, the initiative was defeated at the polls on March 5, with more than 73% of the voters casting their ballot against the proposal.

Genine Coleman, the executive director of Origins Council, a group representing California’s legacy cannabis growers, wrote in an email to High Times that the “defeat of Measure A demonstrates that the grassroots cannabis industry in Humboldt County is politically organized and effective, thanks to the Humboldt County Growers Alliance and their successful ‘No on A Campaign.’”

Had it passed, Measure A would have changed Humboldt County’s regulations for cannabis cultivation in a manner that opponents of the initiative say would have likely destroyed the local industry. The proposal was created and advanced by Mark Thurmond and Elizabeth Watson, residents of Kneeland, an unincorporated community in Humboldt County, the epicenter of California’s infamous Emerald Triangle cannabis cultivation region.

Measure A would have added several restrictions on cannabis cultivation businesses to the county’s planning regulations, ostensibly for environmental purposes. New rules would have included a cap on the size of weed farms at 10,000 square feet, a change that would have made more than 400 cultivators noncompliant with county regulations, according to a report from MJBizDaily. The ballot measure also would have prohibited noncompliant businesses from expanding their operations, including increasing water or energy use or expanding the space or buildings used for cannabis cultivation.

Additionally, the defeated ballot measure would have required public hearings for cannabis cultivation operations exceeding 3,000 square feet. The proposal also would have restricted weed farms located on two-way roads designed to accommodate traffic traveling at speeds of 25 to 40 miles per hour.

Measure A was fiercely opposed by many members of Humboldt County’s cannabis community, who feared that passage of the initiative could cripple the local cultivation industry. Some referred to the proposal as the “Karen Initiative” because a group of neighbors began work on the ballot measure after a cannabis grower set up a new operation in their community.

Humboldt Pot Growers Welcome Election Results

The voters’ rejection of Measure A at the ballot box was welcome news for Humboldt County’s cannabis community. Dylan Mattole, a cannabis farmer and chairman of the Humboldt County Growers Alliance (HCGA), said that the members of the trade group were encouraged by the results of the election.

“There’s a feeling of relief from knowing that our community accepts us and that we’re not going to have to keep fighting for the right to do business,” Mattole told SFGATE.

Mattole said that cannabis businesses spent $150,000 on the campaign to defeat Measure A. Although the fight against the initiative was an ordeal, he cited bringing the cannabis community together as a positive outcome of the situation.

“I feel like we’ve really advanced our standing in the community through this terrible situation,” Mattole said. “The silver lining in all this is that I think we actually advanced … the normalization of cannabis as just part of the normal business community.”

Watson, one of the lead proponents of Measure A, said that the results of last week’s election were not unexpected. The initiative was widely opposed by members of the community, including Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal, three of five county supervisors and city and tribal leaders, as well as the Republican, Democratic and Green political parties. Environmental groups including Cannabis for Conservation also registered their opposition to the ballot proposal.

“When the environmental organizations and all the elected officials came out against it, that was pretty much the kiss of death,” Watson told the Times-Standard.

Watson said that she spent a quarter of her life savings on the campaign to pass Measure A. However, it was not enough to overcome the resources mustered by the campaign to defeat the initiative.

“We were just totally outgunned financially and did the best we could,” she said.

“I’m 76, you can’t take it with you,” she added, saying that she would probably have donated a similar amount of money to environmental groups.

As the defeat of Measure A became apparent on election day, opponents of the initiative also said they were not surprised by the results.

“We were definitely seeing a lot of support leading up to the election. So I think we felt pretty confident going into it,” said Ross Gordon, policy director for the HGCA. “But, of course, we didn’t know until we knew, and so I wouldn’t say it was shocking, but I think we were definitely happy to see that number.” 

Gordon acknowledged that cannabis regulations should be reviewed continually. But he added that the process should be a collaborative effort that includes members of the cannabis industry.

“I think it’s been really unfortunate that for the past year or so, we’ve really had to focus on just maintaining the status quo,” said Gordon. “And I don’t think the status quo for small farmers is amazing right now. And I really think we need to be working on more hopeful affirmative projects,” he said, noting the organization’s support of AB 1111, a state Assembly bill that would allow small cultivation businesses to sell cannabis at events.

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A Humboldt County cannabis grower will pay at least $750,000 to settle a dispute with state water and wildlife agencies over alleged environmental violations at a 435-acre cultivation site in California’s famed Emerald Triangle. In the settlement agreement, licensed weed grower Joshua Sweet and his companies, The Hills LLC and Shadow Light Ranch LLC, admitted to violations of state water regulations over a period of several years. 

“It is critical for all cannabis cultivators to be environmentally responsible and protect California’s water supply and water quality,” Taro Murano, program manager for the State Water Board’s Division of Water Rights cannabis enforcement section, said in a statement from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). “Sweet chose to operate his business while ignoring regulations designed to protect the environment. He must now remediate the environmental damage he caused and pay a significant penalty. No one should get a business advantage by ignoring the law and harming the environment.”

The settlement calls for Sweet to pay $1.75 million for the violations, which include illegally diverting and collecting water from unnamed tributaries of the South Fork Eel River that cross the property. According to the settlement terms, $1 million of the fine was suspended, but Sweet will be responsible for paying the additional $1 million if remediations to the property are not completed as agreed.

Multiple Environmental Violations at Cultivation Site

The settlement cites several violations, including building an unpermitted pond on a waterway to collect water for irrigating cannabis plants. Other violations include the destruction of wetland habitats and stream channels, converting oak woodland to cannabis cultivation and failure to work with state and local officials to satisfy permitting requirements.

Yvonne West, director of the State Water Resources Control Board’s office of enforcement, said that Sweet and his companies did not have the authority to divert water on the property and use it for cannabis cultivation. According to an email from the water board to nonprofit news outlet CalMatters, Sweet took about 16.2 acre-feet of water, approximately enough to supply about 49 households for a year, for a total of three ponds on the property between 2017 and 2020.

“This case represents years of hard work by dedicated staff to remediate damage to streambed channels, wetland habitat and oak woodlands,” said Nathaniel Arnold, acting chief of law enforcement for CDFW. “The settlement also speaks volumes to the egregious nature of this case and should send a strong message to those working outside of state regulations to cultivate cannabis. Our natural resources deserve to be respected.”

Included in the settlement agreement is a $500,000 payment for water rights violations, a record penalty for such a violation in the state of California. The defendants are also required to remove unpermitted ponds and restore wetlands and waterways as part of the agreement.

Grower Says Penalty Is Unfair

Sweet believes that the fines are unfair and excessive and that the case could have been handled differently.

“If the full penalty and remediation costs were due today it would take everything I own,” Sweet said in a statement to CalMatters.

“Although I will follow through with my end of the settlement, I do not believe this is fair or just, and I believe I have already suffered way too much,” Sweet said in the emailed statement. 

“Even during our court-mandated settlement conference, they were asked why they would go after a small independent businessman with these type of enormous fines usually reserved for huge corporations that destroy ecosystems,” he added.

But state and local officials defended the settlement, saying it is justified by the actions taken at the property.

“The ordered penalties are modest given the scope of damage, the length of time the site has been left unremediated and considering the unjust enrichment or benefit to Mr. Sweet from running a business for several years without going through the necessary permitting process,” said Jeremy Valverde, assistant chief counsel at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, in a statement emailed to CalMatters.

Joshua Curtis, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board’s assistant executive officer, said that Sweet and his businesses “for years resisted our attempts to cooperatively work on restoration and recovery of those resources, leaving formal enforcement as our only option.”

“This was an ongoing use by Mr. Sweet and the penalties are over an approximately four-year period for unauthorized diversion and use of water to support cultivation,” said West of the water board. “Five hundred dollars a day, multiple violations over a four-year period, does really add up. And then again we did have the additional types of violations at play here as well.”

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Dry farms are rare in California, but the results people like Chrystal Ortiz of High Water Farm are able to pull off without watering their cannabis plants all summer are pretty amazing. Sure it takes a Goldilocks type of microclimate in the middle of Humboldt County just off the Eel River—the same neighborhood that hosts all the state’s dry cannabis farmers—but what those farmers are able to do is pretty impressive. It is certainly a leap of faith to start. Ortiz described the trauma of her first season trying dry farming as she watched the plants wilt before they adjusted to their new life on the dry farm, but it worked out. These days she pumps a lot of the product coming out of High Water Farm in bulk. She estimated about 70% percent of her product goes to brands that will use the flower to fill their jars, and the rest goes to hash companies. Dry-farmed cannabis has crazy terpene profiles that make for great hash.

Ortiz also holds back enough product to make sure she has enough cannabis to run great half-ounce deals at her shop, Herb & Market Humboldt in Arcata, which she runs when she isn’t splitting farm duties with her husband Noah Beck.

“We’ve had great weather so far,” Ortiz told High Times of the 2023 season. “We started super late because the field was wet pretty late. And so we didn’t get the plants in the ground until a week after [summer] solstice.”

Moisture retention in dry cannabis farming is critical, but for young plants too much moisture can still lead to a lot of issues. This year, Humboldt’s rainy winter led to the latest start at High Water Farm since they started dry farming in 2018.

How Dry Farming Works

The field, the quality of its soil, and the local microclimate all play a massive role in what is happening at High Water Farm.

Ortiz explained that dry farming is ideal in their area because the undisturbed redwood trees hold the water table, or the layer of water underneath the soil, in place.

“When you come in from the coast and you get to the very first Avenue of the Giants exit, you get just past the fog bank,” Ortiz said. “And then you’ve got old-growth redwoods that are like holding the water table. That’s really what I think is happening between the river and the old-growth redwoods on the Giants. They’re keeping water in the water table. So the fir isn’t drinking them all up like everywhere else where there’s been so much heavy logging, and we get that 20 to 30 degrees warmer than the coast. Yet, we’re still like 10 to 15 degrees cooler than Garberville.”

Every day the sun heats the soil, releasing stored up moisture from the night before and the morning fog. That moisture travels up through the roots and hydrates the plant, which keeps the soil ridiculously soft. 

First, the soil is prepped in the winter. It will need to hold all the nutrients that the cannabis plants will require to get through the season since they won’t be getting watered. One of the things in Ortiz’s favor is that the property is on an old alfalfa farm. Alfalfa is popular as a cover crop to help improve soil quality for cannabis farmers that plant straight into the soil. Ortiz and Beck grow alfalfa in the winter and then till it into the soil in the spring to help the soil hold nitrogen. They also use goats to eat the cover crops, and their droppings get tilled back into the already awesome soil.

Why is the soil at High Water Farm so dope? Essentially the same thing happens on the Nile River in Egypt, where every now and then a big flood deposits a massive layer of silt along the banks, a lot of the silt that washed down rivers in Humboldt includes sawdust from logging operations and mills. The last big flood in 1964 left a 10- to 15-foot layer of silt along the Eel River’s shores where the farm sits.

Ortiz said while they don’t find many rocks when they prepare the field each spring, old branches from past floods seem to work their way back up through the soil. They’ve taken to building little shrines with redwood branches that they discover around the farm.

The silt, in addition to the alfalfa-eating goats, is the backbone of the farm’s plant nutrition profile. 

“It’s just this kind of little Goldilocks zone where the river meanders through and it’s coming out just about sea level. We’re almost at sea level and so [the river is] coming out to the mouth pretty soon and it’s just swift and cold,” Ortiz said.

Always Improving

Every year there is still room for improvement. This year features some new hardware from one of the neighbors, a transplanter tool, that made getting the plants in the ground a cinch.

“It was even crazier than usual where we have our plants and little foragers and we shook all the dirt off and had them bare root exposed,” Ortiz said. “We just pulled the transplanter behind and dropped the plants in the trowel, and they planted. We planted the whole 20,000 square feet in less than six hours.”

When planting they will mix a little a handful of TerraVesco worm compost and some sort of good organic dry amendments. In the past they have also included Perfect Blend, Dr. Earth, or Royal Gold. Royal Gold has a new product called Crown Jewels that Ortiz used last year. After a little handful in the planting hole, and that’s it for the whole season. Ortiz estimates she only bought 10 or 12 small bags of amendments this year.

We asked what has changed the most about her mentality as she heads into her sixth season without any irrigation for her plants. She was quick to point to the deficiencies in the market that prevent her from going crazy with a bunch of different strains.

“The game has changed so much like trim, people need 200 pounds of one varietal,” Ortiz said. “We’ve really had to scale back on the excitement around a bunch of different flavors as weed smokers and realize we need to do what does really well in the dry farm.”

A Rare Breed

Ortiz estimates there are about six permitted dry cannabis farms in the entire state, and they are all located on either side of the river in her neighborhood. Some of her dry-farming compatriots nearby include Sensiboldt as well as longtime farmers Rosie Reynolds and Beth Dunlap. Better known as Farmer Beth, Dunlap has been cultivating on her dad’s old farm for 38 years, it’s where she grew up.

These three farms—High Water Farm, Sensiboldt Organics, and Cann-Do Attitude—collaborate on the Dry Farm Cannabis brand together.

“And we put a lot of stuff out under Dry Farm Cannabis, we put pre-rolls out, we put jarred weed out, we put bulk weed out,” Ortiz said. “And so that’s kind of an exciting collab because then between the three of us we can vend directly to consumers at different events and stuff.”

Ortiz said part of the reason it’s exciting is because it’s just more fun and easier to not have to be out there tooting your own horn. You can make a space and share it and each rep for each other.

Holding Space for Small Farms & Saving Humboldt

After spending many years deep in the heart of Humboldt County politics as legal cannabis emerged, Ortiz now considers her main activism as the dispensary, Herb & Market Humboldt, where she holds space for those small farms trying to hold on.

“We don’t have a ton of customers. We’re not super busy. But you know, there’s also like 100 dispensaries in Humboldt County and it’s like selling sand at the beach,” Ortiz said. “But it is a space where farmers can learn. They can directly interact with consumers and see why their packaging doesn’t work. Why their labeling doesn’t work.”

Ortiz’s dispensary allows farmers to have an experience that’s really hard for them to get outside of the region in the protected environment Ortiz offers and then go do events in other places down south where the direct-to-consumer cash is.

“So they get to try it here and I see them. I see it work,” Ortiz emphasized.

While Ortiz has enjoyed helping out local cultivators, she expects things to ramp up politically over the coming months as Humboldt County looks like it will have a culture-shifting ballot initiative that could damn the county’s cannabis industry forever.

Humboldt’s cannabis farmers allege that the ballot initiative, currently labeled the Humboldt Cannabis Reform Initiative (HCRI), was written by NIMBYs in Kneeland, California that are anti-cannabis and are way behind the times in the county.

“They went into the community and they lied to the community to get enough signatures,” Ortiz alleged. “It was pro-cannabis for farms 10,000 square feet or below only and blah, blah, blah, and turns out that they got enough signatures to get it off the ballot through nefarious ways. And now [the ballot initiative] is a really poorly written, really devastating proposition that threatens every single legal farm in Humboldt County.”

One of the scariest things about the initiative is it would become statutory law that would require another election to change. Some of the bad ideas include banning additional structures on cannabis farms, so cultivators wouldn’t be able to make any changes such as installing water tanks or solar panels. Arguably the most devastating part of all would be that the initiative would only allow for one cultivation permit per person per parcel, affecting many people who have spent years building out onsite distribution or manufacturing. The initiative would ruin them and the county’s cannabis industry.

The HCRI ballot initiative is slated to appear on the March 2024 ballot. Ortiz went as far as to say that it will be the end of Humboldt County’s licensed cannabis industry if it passes. There are so few licensed farmers right now as so many have already gone out of business. Ortiz thinks it’s going to be hard to see how much compassion we have from the cannabis community about keeping farms alive. She plans to talk to other business owners and note that if they support HCRI there won’t be any cannabis dollars left to spend at their establishments, period.

This article was originally published in the November 2023 issue of High Times Magazine.

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Small farmers in California’s famed Emerald Triangle are uniting to defeat a ballot initiative that could devastate what remains of the cannabis industry in Humboldt County. The proposal known as the Humboldt Cannabis Reform Initiative (HCRI) is a 38-page document that, if passed, would establish an effective ban on any changes to existing farms of all sizes within the county’s unincorporated areas.

“HCRI has been written to effectively discourage existing permit holders from modifying their permits in any way,” the Humboldt County Planning Department explains in a report analyzing the initiative. “This includes adding infrastructure intended for environmental protections or modification of activities or site configuration to adapt to the evolving industry. These restrictions affect the smallest of farms permitted in Humboldt County to the largest cultivation sites.” 

As written in the initiative—set to appear on the ballot as Measure A—“expansion” is defined as “an increase in the number and size of any structures used in connection with cultivation.” 

Cannabis advocacy groups in Humboldt argue the language around “expansion” would “remove incentives for environmental stewardship.” Waying in on the varying impacts if the initiative were to pass, the county’s planning department states it “will have dire consequences to the cannabis industry in Humboldt County.”

“The existing Humboldt County cannabis regulations are intended to encourage a well-regulated cannabis industry in Humboldt County, but the HCRI could have the opposite effect by making compliance so difficult that the legal market is rendered not viable in Humboldt County,” the county’s analysis states.

The planning department report on the potential impacts of the initiative outlines that the largest farms in Humboldt County range between 7 and 8 acres and states that there are currently four farms at this size. 

“For comparison, in Lake County there are farms in excess of 60 acres and in Santa Barbara and San Bernardino Counties there are farms in excess of 100 acres,” the county report states. “In a statewide market context, Humboldt County does not have large-scale farms.”

Another element of the initiative seeks to cap the allowed cultivation area for cannabis farmers at 10,000 square feet.

“Capping cultivation area at 10,000 square feet will result in all existing permits over that cultivation area becoming legal non-conforming, which means the site cannot be modified,” the county’s analysis explains. “Labeling anything over 10,000 square feet as a large-scale cannabis cultivation when other parts of the state are being approved for cultivation sizes over 100 acres is arbitrary.” 

The initiative is set to be on the March 2024 ballot and small farmers in Humboldt County are working to get the word out that if it passes it will amend the general plan, meaning that the cannabis provisions could only be changed by a vote of the people.

“Our family farm has multiple environmental certifications, but the HCRI would amend the general plan to define my farm as ‘environmentally destructive’ because my farm is larger than a quarter acre,” Dylan Mattole of Mattole Valley Sungrown said in informational materials assembled by the “No on HCRI” campaign spearheaded by the Humboldt County Growers Alliance. 

At a recent meeting of small farmers against the campaign held in Garberville, Mattole noted that, if passed, the initiative “will be the nail in the coffin” of the cannabis industry in Humboldt County.

“This is not light, it’s offensive, we’re on the defense,” Mattole said at the meeting held in a shuttered restaurant along the small town’s main street. “Our problem has a massive effect on the economy for the whole county.”

The initiative was written by Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, a law firm which also represented Calaveras Residents Against Commercial Marijuana (an anti-cannabis group that tried multiple times to get a complete ban on cannabis cultivation in Calaveras County) as well as Save Our Sonoma Neighborhoods (an anti-cannabis organization that has sought to ban cannabis in Sonoma County). 

Small farmers against the Humboldt County initiative argue that the wording of the HCRI is designed to appear like it is protecting small farms when, in fact, it would do the exact opposite.

“It is likely that the public does not understand what this initiative would do and signed the petition thinking that ‘large scale’ cannabis farms should not be in Humboldt County without recognizing that most of the so-called ‘large-scale farms’ that would be outlawed if the HCRI passed are the very farms that have existed in Humboldt County for decades,” the county’s analysis of the initiative states. 

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A cannabis farm raid in the Emerald Triangle took a turn for the worse, leaving a dog dead, and people have questions.

Los Angeles Times reports that outrage is growing as details about the incident unfold, given the farm held a license at the state level and was in the process of approval at the county level. As outrage grows, some locals are calling for the resignation of Trinity County Sheriff Tim Saxon. 

A 36-second video clip shows a Cal Fire officer fatally shooting a dog in a chaotic attempt to control the situation. The video was uploaded by Kym Kemp, who regularly reports on the Emerald Triangle. An officer says in the video, “Hey, don’t touch the dog, he just got pepper sprayed.” Keep in mind that an unlicensed commercial cannabis operation in the county is supposed to be a $500 misdemeanor.

On May 1-2, 2023, police from the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office obtained a search warrant in the Hayfork and Trinity Pines area. Agents with the North State Major Crimes Investigation Team, Cal Fire, the Trinity County Environmental Health Department, and the Trinity County District Attorney’s Office Victim Advocate assisted in the operation. 

SF Gate reports that pot farmer Nhia Pao Yang is not a native English speaker. But the officers shouted commands in English, so he walked towards them with his hands raised. One of the dogs on the site approached one of the officers, who shot the dog. 

The police report describes the dogs as “aggressive,” using the word three times, claiming the dogs were trained to attack.

“During the service of the Search Warrant at Nhia Yang’s property, Investigators encountered Yang who had five aggressive dogs on the property,” the press release reads, which was posted on Facebook. “Nhia Yang, was non-compliant with Investigators and attempted to keep Investigators away from him by standing near one of the aggressive dogs. When Investigators moved to take Nhia Yang into custody, one of the aggressive dogs attempted to attack an Investigator, who defended himself by firing one shot at the dog. The injured dog was transported to a local veterinary clinic where it passed away. Nhia Yang of Hayfork, CA was arrested for illegal marijuana cultivation, possession of marijuana for sale and resisting arrest.”

Saxon said the dog was killed by a Cal Fire employee and that Cal Fire was conducting an investigation into the matter.

Yang was later charged with unlawful possession of cannabis, lack of dog licenses, rabies vaccinations, unreasonable tethering of an animal, allowing a dog to attack or injure someone, and resisting arrest.

California’s Dual Licensing Mess

According to Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) records, Yang’s family has a state license for their small family farm, and they were in the process of getting a license under Trinity County.

Proposition 64 created a dual licensing system that requires farms to obtain both state and local approvals to grow commercial cannabis. Los Angeles Times reports that thousands of farms in Trinity County remain unlicensed. License applicants in 2021 were required to start over, when locals convinced a judge to overturn the county’s cannabis license system because it did not include an environmental review.

The DCC then issued a letter reassuring farms that it would take no action against those who lost their local licenses because of the ruling. 

Even the sheriff’s office admits that the dual licensing system isn’t currently working.

“What I wish for is that we would have a consistent policy throughout the state,” Trinity County Sheriff Tim Saxon told the Los Angeles Times. The dual licensing system, he said, is “placing many sheriffs in an uncomfortable situation, including myself.”

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I’m not here to talk about any specific brand or any specific strain, but in my capacity as a journalist, I have been tasked with truth-telling and to tell you the truth: I have been extremely disappointed with the lack of quality in the California rec cannabis market as of late.

We’ve all heard the news stories and the insufferable bitching from corporate cannabis CEOs about how the legal market just can’t compete with the traditional market, but past the press releases and the buck-passing, anyone in the cannabis space should be asking themselves: what exactly is standing in the way of truly good weed being widely available on legal shelves?

To find the answer to that question, I enlisted the help of some California and Emerald Triangle cannabis staples who have been around long enough to know what good weed is and/or have all managed to put fire onto dispensary shelves. Sourwaves is a long-time grower and meme maker who has lived in infamy for years for his unwillingness to take his foot off the industry’s neck when it comes to growing practices and quality.

John Casali of Huckleberry Hill Farms has been growing and living in the same valley of the Emerald Triangle for his entire life and has multiple awards under his belt including a 1st place Ego Clash win for the Riddlez rosin processed by Heritage Hash Co. Finally, Robert Gale of Humboldt Terp Council produces some of the finest concentrates I have ever had the pleasure of dabbing and is a vocal member of the Humboldt County community on the state of the industry and of cannabis in general. 

After extensive conversations with the aforementioned, I have boiled down the most likely causes of mass boof to the following three explanations:

• Excessive Government red tape/taxes

• Corporate margin slimming/market manipulation

• General lack of growing experience 

Uncle Boof-Smoking Sam

Almost every state has objectively bungled the way they set up their cannabis laws either to the tune of a “pay-to-play” market or a lack of foresight when it comes to issues of license caps or lack of maximums on canopy space or both.

“Basically overproduction and over-taxation have caused a race to the bottom and everybody is losing,” Gale said. “The other issues are, especially with flower, it has only a certain window where it’s good and it takes so long to get through processing, packaging and testing that unless you’re vertically integrated the weed’s already getting old by the time it hits a shelf.”

Testing is its own beast of burden. Every legal state requires some form of THC testing but with little to no guidance on exactly how that process needs to be performed, it has opened the door for manipulation and consumer confusion when they buy a 31% THC eighth that doesn’t get them high at all.

“There’s no set calibration for testing, one. Two, you can buy test results,” Sourwaves said, referring to the lack of regulations surrounding the methodology in which California labs perform tests. “You’re gonna pay more than the next lab but that’s what makes the lab popular. ‘Oh, my, THC is over 30%,’ that makes things fly off the shelf. There’s little tricks people do to make a test hot, like drying it super, super dry and stuff like that.”

In addition to overproduction and over-taxation, many cannabis industry business owners have lamented that excessive regulations on how cannabis businesses have to operate have caused industry gridlock and a slough of unnecessary money hang-ups.

“One of our biggest hurdles is having to go give [our cannabis] to a distributor who takes 17%, who doesn’t pay us up front. Then they give it to a retailer who doesn’t pay that distributor who doesn’t pay us. And then, if the customer doesn’t buy that product, or it takes them a year to pay the retailer, it takes a year to pay the distributor, who then in return takes a year to pay the farmer,” Casali said. “More [often] than not most of us farmers don’t get paid a lot of times.”

Revenge of the Chads in Rec Markets

The jury is out: big money is growing too much weed for their own good. Of all the people I’ve talked to in cannabis throughout the duration of my lifetime, scale is the number one cited culprit of boof production. However, extreme scale is also an extremely effective tool if you’re a really rich dude who wants to get into cannabis but would prefer if all the traditional market cultivators got conveniently arrested or set on fire. 

This mentality has led to market manipulation and pushing out of legacy operators by massive grow companies, some of whom have been accused (if not informally) of shmoozing and lobbying politicians for economically unsound favors like removing a one-acre cap on cultivation licenses, for instance, or generally making it easier for people to buy their way into the industry and weed people out who have less capital. 

“If a guy has a one-acre grow, it’s just basic economics of why the bigger guys cost less to produce a pound of weed,” Sourwaves said. “So, these goons over at Glass House got their costs probably between $30 and $60 a pound so if they need to go crash the market selling packs for $150-$250 It’s because and they know that these smaller farms cannot keep up with these low prices.”

For someone like Casali who grows only 5,000 sq ft of canopy, which he hand waters with his girlfriend/partner, it’s virtually impossible to compete with the margins set by some of the larger operators, so even if the product is vastly better in quality, it creates a situation in which the consumer is faced with a dirt cheap option decent enough to defend saving the $20-$40 extra per eighth they would have spent on something worth smoking.

“Growing in the Emerald triangle, it costs a lot more to produce a pound and in the country up in the hills, being environmentally friendly it costs us between $300 and $400 to produce a pound,” Casali said. 

“You have people who are solely in this to make money and this is America I’m not against making money it’s not that. The problem is that the weed sucks, right? So how do we make that better?” Sourwaves said. 

While no one I’ve ever talked to had a hard line for a plant or light count considered “too big to be dank” almost everyone could attest that once you pass a certain threshold, it’s basically impossible to produce quality bud and at the scale some of the California producers are producing at, it has created a perfect storm of dogshit.

“There’s a few people doing it, but they’re few and far between. I think a place like Fig Farms has managed to keep their quality up and slowly get bigger,” Gale said. “Man, it’s hard to scale quality. Most of the stuff that we view as quality doesn’t stand a chance to what the people are still producing on the traditional market.”

No Love for the Plant, No Knowledge About the Plant

I have never met a single grower worth their salt in my time as a weed nerd who didn’t love the plant and/or sacrifice an immense amount of time and hard work for the plant. Maybe that’s some hippie mumbo-jumbo I picked up whilst on acid in the Arcata plaza, but if every good grower on Earth says the same thing, there’s a pretty good chance they know what they’re talking about and they all stress that while it may be easier than ever to learn how to grow, you still gotta put in your 10,000 hours to be able to consistently produce the best representation of the plant.

One thing Sourwaves stressed to me in terms of growing techniques he believes lead to poor quality are high intensity, full synthetic nutrient cycles for big indoor grows which he thinks could be made incrementally better by the introduction of organic nutrients in addition to the synthetics. 

“When you’re feeding super high EC several times a day, and you’re forcing that plant to uptake all these nutrients because you’re using sensors to measure your dry backs, and it’s telling you how and what you need to feed that crap. Access to that information is so dope, don’t get me wrong, but the way that is being manipulated to push the crop to a higher yield, It does not result in a pleasurable smoke to the end user,” Sourwaves said.

The lack of experience and lack of love for the plant seems to extend to every part of the industry beyond just the cultivators.

“Even in 2018-2019 if you worked at a dispensary it’s because you loved weed and because you wanted to be closer to it, Gale said. “And now that we’re like five years into legalization, and the truth is you’ve got a lot of staff at dispensaries that applied to 10 different places, and the dispensary happened to call them instead of Subway or the shoe store or Orange Julius.”

Could it be that Mother Nature simply has a fail-safe from allowing herself to be taken advantage of by people who do not show her the love she deserves or is this more mumbo and more jumbo? Many growers I’ve spoken to firmly believe that when you put in the work, it comes back.

“Most of us, our parents, were part of the back to the land movement. They taught us that it’s just as important to take care of the environment and take care of the land and the more time and the more energy and the more love that you put into any kind of plants, whether it’s fruit trees, whether it’s grapes, or vegetables, or cannabis plants, the more time, the more energy and the more love you give them, the better they turn out in the end,” Casali said.

So what do we do about all this, asked the obnoxious journalist who was taught never to ask rhetorical questions. In a nutshell:

• We get rid of the excise taxes and any/all red tape standing in between the grower and the consumer so small growers can make a living.

• We put a reasonable cap on license size and/or the number of active licenses so the Chads can still play but don’t ruin it for everyone else.

• People growing cannabis for a living need to learn how to f***ing grow.

• Show respect for the plant and the plant will respect you.

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Aid is on the way for struggling farmers in two of the Emerald Triangle’s three counties, with funding available to help improve drought resilience and licensing compliance.

Cannabis for Conservation (CFC), a Humboldt County, California-based 501(c)(3) environmental nonprofit, announced $2.5 million in grant funds to assist small cannabis farmers through the California Department of Fish & Wildlife’s Cannabis Restoration Grant Program via the Qualified Cultivator Funding Opportunity, according to a Feb. 28 press release.  

Small farmers in the Emerald Triangle, an area where the economy is built on cannabis farming, have been “pushed to the brink” due to the impact of legalization, Cal Matters reports. It’s a region with over a quarter million people, and nearly everyone living in the region is either directly or indirectly reliant on cannabis. Cannabis has been the area’s staple crop since the ‘70s, with some farms in operation for generations. The rollout of grant funding couldn’t be more urgent, according to locals.

The two grants that were announced—Implementing Drought Resilience Strategies on Humboldt County Cannabis Farms and Provisional to Annual License Transitions for Trinity County Cultivators—will collectively assist 89 farms across eight priority watersheds with environmental work. 

“We see a great opportunity for conservation with this nascent industry, especially given that many farmers own large tracts of land in one of the most biodiverse ecoregions on the planet,” said Jackee Riccio, the co-founder and executive director of CFC.

CFC’s Drought Resilience Program aims to improve sustainable water consumption on some 17 farms. They will do this by installing rainwater catchment systems, increasing water storage capacity, and/or hardening and improving irrigation. This, they believe, will improve on-farm drought resilience and reduce direct impacts to water sources during low-flow periods. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “the frequency, intensity, and duration of drought events” is increasing at rates not seen before. 

The point of this isn’t to transform small farms into monopolies, however: CFC stipulates that none of these water improvements will be used to increase cultivation footprints, farm size, or number of licenses, but rather reduce or eliminate extraction from water resources during dry periods and in some cases, convert farms to 100% water storage.

The Provisional to Annual License Program, on the other hand, aims to assist 72 Trinity cultivators in achieving an annual County and Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) license. The grant aims to provide professional help to small farmers to finalize annual licenses, including “completing documentation for California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) compliance and Special-Status Species Mitigation and allow for a Technical Advisory Committee between CDFW, CFC, and the county to quickly resolve licensing obstacles that arise.”

CEQA is a California law dating back to 1970 that requires environmental review of proposed cultivation projects. All annual state cannabis licenses must comply with CEQA. The DCC may only issue an annual license once a project complies with CEQA. In addition, DCC has requirements for standard operating procedures, training employees, and how operations must be set up. 

CFC’s applied conservation approach focuses on collaborative, on-farm research, biodiversity enhancements, and environmental education. 

The goal is to bring together scientists and farmers to implement peer-reviewed conservation practices, with benefits provided to wildlife, land, and water. 

“Working with farmers and transforming monocultures into functional agroecosystems is a priority strategy among conservationists globally and we’re doing our part in that here, in the heart of cannabis country to return to the back-to-the-land values that this industry was born from,” Riccio added.

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An earthquake rocked Humboldt County on Sunday, shaking California’s famous Emerald Triangle cannabis cultivation region for the second time in two weeks. The earthquake on New Year’s Day, which measured 5.4 on the Richter scale, followed a stronger quake that shook the area on December 20, leading to the death of two people. Sunday’s quake was one of more than 300 aftershocks that have rocked the region since.

“It’s typical to have an aftershock that is about one magnitude unit less than the main shock,” Lori Dengler, a former geology professor and an expert on earthquakes and tsunamis, told local media after Sunday’s temblor. “So this is very typical of most aftershock sequences.”

“Today’s earthquake (was) clearly on a different but related fault,” Dengler added.

Sunday’s quake occurred at 10:35 a.m. local time and was centered about nine miles east of the Rio Dell area of Humboldt County, according to information from the U.S. Geological Survey. There were no reports of casualties or major damage, although California Route 211 through the area was temporarily closed to give inspectors time to check a bridge over the Eel River for potential damage associated with the quake, the California Department of Transportation reported. 

Earthquake Results In Power Outage

The temblor caused a power outage in the Rio Dell area, which bore the brunt of the earthquake that shook the area 12 days earlier. Pacific Gas and Electric reported that the outage affected between 500 and 5,000 utility customers, according to media reports.

Gage Dupper was displaced by the December earthquake, which knocked his home off its foundation. He told reporters he has been living as a “nomad” since then.

“Today was another pretty big one,” said Dupper. “Still feels like we are shaking to me. We just can’t catch a break it seems.”

Gage noted that he was working in Fortuna, adjacent to Rio Dell, when Sunday’s quake shook the area again.

“But even just here it felt like the ceiling was going to come down,” Dupper said. “We nearly lost our power here as well. I was in the middle of talking to a resident of the assisted living community I work for and you could just see the panic in their eyes when it started. She was just trying to pay her rent. It certainly tossed us around a bit.”

Sunday’s Quake Follows 6.4 Shaker Last Month

The earthquake that shook the Humboldt County area on December 20 measured 6.4 on the Richter scale and caused significant damage in the region. That quake injured 17 people and was blamed for the deaths of two residents, a 73-year-old and an 83-year-old, who died as “a result of medical emergencies occurring during and/or just following the earthquake,” according to a statement from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office’s Department of Emergency Services.

The December quake also resulted in a power outage in the Rio Dell area, with more than 72,000 customers affected, and a water main break caused the area to lose water service, as well. Damage from the quake was reported in Ferndale, Rio Dell, and Fortuna, Emergency Services Director Mark Ghilarducci said in a press conference in Sacramento. Damage was most extensive in Rio Dell, where at least 15 homes in the community of 3,000 were deemed uninhabitable. Another 18 homes sustained moderate damage, officials reported after a partial assessment of the area. 

Rio Dell’s water system was shut down while leaks in the vital infrastructure were repaired. The local firehouse was distributing drinking water, and portable toilets were set up outside City Hall for area residents to use. Local resident Cassondra Stoner said that she was shaken awake by the early morning quake that rocked the area last month.

“It felt like my roof was coming down,” Stoner said. “The only thing I could think about was, ‘Get the freaking kids.’”

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