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Heyzeus
climber
Hollywood,Ca
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Dec 28, 2012 - 11:53am PT
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Veteran Emerald Triangle pot growers see their way of life ending
Pioneering marijuana cultivators in the hills of Mendocino and Humboldt counties are being pushed to the margins by the legalization they long espoused.
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
September 29, 2012, 5:03 p.m.
LAYTONVILLE, CALIF. — In the mountains of Mendocino County, a middle-aged couple stroll into the cool morning air to plant the year's crop. Andrew grabs a shovel and begins to dig up rich black garden beds while Anna waters the seedlings, beginning a hallowed annual ritual here in marijuana's Emerald Triangle.
In the past, planting day was a time of great expectations, maybe for a vacation in Hawaii or Mexico during the rainy months or a new motor home to make deliveries around the country.
But this year, Andrew and Anna are hoping only that their 50 or so marijuana plants will cover the bills. Since the mid-1990s, the price of outdoor-grown marijuana has plummeted from more than $5,000 a pound to less than $2,000, and even as low as $800.
Battered by competition from indoor cultivators around the state and industrial-size operations that have invaded the North Coast counties, many of the small-time pot farmers who created the Emerald Triangle fear that their way of life of the last 40 years is coming to an end.
PHOTOS: Up in smoke
Their once-quiet communities, with their back-to-nature ethos, are being overrun by outsiders carving massive farms out of the forest. Robberies are commonplace now, and the mountains reverberate with the sounds of chain saws and heavy equipment.
"Every night we hear helicopters now," Anna said. "It's people moving big greenhouses and generators into the mountains."
Andrew, 56, and Anna, 52, who agreed to be interviewed only if they would be identified by their middle names, live in a rambling house down a trail through tanoaks and Douglas firs. Their electricity comes from a windmill and solar panels, their water from a spring. They cook on a wood stove and use an outhouse with a composting toilet to conserve water for their crop.
Though they are not complete back-to-the-landers — they have a nice car, satellite TV and Internet access — they keep their gardens relatively small, tucked in the trees throughout their property.
Among their plants, they post their own medical marijuana cards so that if they're raided, it looks as though they're growing under the aegis of state law. But because dispensaries generally prefer the more potent weed grown indoors, they still sell mostly to the black market, where mom-and-pop growers now struggle to compete.
"These big commercial growers have really ruined our business," Anna said.
Until recently, life in the hills of Mendocino and Humboldt counties had changed little in the decades since hippies from the Bay Area began homesteading here. The pioneers initially grew marijuana for themselves and to make a little money.
Then in the 1980s, cultivation of high-grade seedless marijuana opened the possibility for big money as it brought a higher premium. Many of the farmers cashed in. But many remained small and discreet to avoid attracting the attention of state and federal agents.
They raised their families where they cultivated. They drove beat-up Subarus and small Toyota pickups, pumped their water from wells and chopped their own firewood.
The mountain hamlets operated like breakaway states. Marijuana farmers paid for community centers, fire departments, road maintenance and elementary schools.
Even today, small cannabis-funded volunteer fire stations and primary schools are scattered throughout the ranges. And the local radio station, KMUD, announces the sheriff's deputies' movements as part of its public service mandate.
But the liberalization of marijuana laws in the last decade upended the status quo.
From Oakland to the Inland Empire, people began cultivating indoors on an unprecedented scale at the same time that growers from around the world flooded the North Coast because of its remoteness and deep-rooted counterculture.
Now, with the market glutted, people are simply planting ever-larger crops to make up for the drop in price.
Longtime residents complain that the newcomers cut down trees, grade hillsides, divert creeks to irrigate multi-thousand-plant crops, use heavy pesticides and rat poisons, and run giant, smog-belching diesel generators to illuminate indoor grows. They blaze around in Dodge monster trucks and Cadillac Escalades and don't contribute to upkeep of the roads or schools.
"They just don't care," said Kym Kemp, a teacher and blogger in the mountains of Sohum, as locals call southern Humboldt County. "They're not thinking, 'I want my kids to grow up here.'
"Now there are greenhouses the size of a football field that weren't even there last year," she added.
Kemp said she feels her region is being colonized and worries about the colorful, off-the-grid people that small cannabis patches long supported.
"So many people who live here are just different," she said. "They don't fit in regular society. They couldn't work 9-to-5 jobs. But they've gotten used to raising their kids on middle-class incomes. What are they going to do?"
Tom Evans, 61, a small-time grower in northern Mendocino, said the sense of peace and self-reliance he moved here for 30 years ago is disappearing so fast that he may leave for Mexico.
"It used to be a contest to see who could drive the oldest pickup truck," said Evans, a former Army helicopter mechanic who sports a woolly gray beard and tie-dyed shirt. "There's just been this huge influx of folks who have money on their mind, instead of love of the land. A lot more gun-toters. A lot more attack dogs."
Evans lives in a small rented home that generously could be called a fixer-upper. He said he doesn't have a bank account or credit card, and his Honda Passport has more than 300,000 miles. "It's 'make a living, not a killing,'" he said.
His friend, a bear of man who goes by the name Mr. Fuzzy, noted that it's not only outsiders causing problems.
"You know the weird part, these are our kids too," he said.
It's a recurring lament among longtime growers. Some of their own children are going for the large-scale grows, big money and fancy cars.
The larger irony is that the marijuana pioneers are being pushed to the margins by the legalization they long espoused.
"Ultimately we worry about Winston or Marlboro getting some land and doing their thing," said Lawrence Ringo, a 55-year-old grower and seed breeder deep in the wilds of Sohum. "We see it time after time in America — big corporations come in and take over."
Ringo saw the 2010 marijuana initiative, Proposition 19, as a ploy by Bay Area activists to dominate the market with giant warehouse grows in Oakland.
He suspects plenty of people will still want high-quality, organically grown cannabis but fears the big business interests will dictate how marijuana gets regulated. Ringo points out that Colorado, the one state that fully regulates marijuana, helped push most growing indoors and place cultivation under the control of large dispensaries.
"We're afraid of losing what we've been doing for 40 years," he said.
As competition drives prices down, even chamber of commerce types acknowledge that the North Coast economy is at risk. Pot kept things afloat as the logging and fishing industries declined. Restaurants, car dealerships, banks, hotels and dental clinics all depend on marijuana money.
"There's probably not one business that doesn't benefit," said Julie Fulkerson, who founded a home furnishings store and comes from a prominent third-generation Humboldt family.
Walk into the upscale Cecil's New Orleans Bistro in small-town Garberville and you'll find growers in dirty T-shirts unpeeling rolls of $20 bills to pay for martinis and $38 steaks. More soil supply and hydroponics shops line stretches of Highway 101 than gas stations, and trucks laden with bags of soil and fertilizer kick up dust as they make deliveries on the most isolated roads.
During harvest, hardware stores put out huge bins of Fiskars pruning scissors, the preferred tool for marijuana trimmers. Safeway stocks so many turkey bags that an outsider might wonder how such small locales could consume so many birds. The sealable, smell-proof bags are used for storing and transporting weed.
"I wouldn't survive … if it wasn't for growing," said Tom Ochner, 54, who runs a country store and rental cabins outside of Covelo — a business called the Black Butte River Ranch. "Owners realize this is what makes their business go."
Concerned about the economics of legalization, Humboldt banker Jennifer Budwig studied the amount of pot money entering the local economy.
Using an extremely high estimate that law enforcement seized 25% of the total amount of pot grown in Humboldt, she found that the crop generated at least $1 billion a year — of which $415 million was spent in the county. She said the actual figure could be several times higher.
Legalization "has the potential to be devastating," she said.
Some small growers, like Anna and Andrew, still hold out hope that they can beat back the deluge of industrial marijuana.
There's a market, they say, for sun-grown weed among discerning users who appreciate the nuances of regional variety.
A grower just down the road said he hoped to start promoting "Mendocino terroir."
"How can sun-grown not be better medicine?" Anna asked. "If you're sick, you want something that has chemicals in it? You can't grow indoor organically. Not to mention the fossil fuels it burns up."
But even if boutique weed has some potential, the couple still sense that their life in the mountains is changing for good. The next-door neighbor recently had a home-invasion robbery, and a young man down the road was shot in the face during a deal.
Andrew goes back to planting the new crop. He used to have the radio on all day — something to engage his mind during the tedious work.
He doesn't anymore.
He keeps it quiet, listening for intruders.
joe.mozingo@latimes.com
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 28, 2012 - 11:55am PT
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Good one, Heyzeus, I was gonna post that back in Sept.
"There's just been this huge influx of folks who have money on their mind,
instead of love of the land. A lot more gun-toters. A lot more attack dogs."
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Brandon-
climber
The Granite State.
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Dec 28, 2012 - 12:49pm PT
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I'd see a lot of my foothills friends stressing out, figuring out how to get a job if it happened. But, in the scheme of things, it seems that full legalization would do a solid for nature.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Dec 28, 2012 - 12:54pm PT
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Jebus, I know 5 growers who were all for legalizing it. Had 99 plants, and a bitch ate one. They knew what was up and they were ready to move on from their little business venture. But yeah, they said the seedier elements... not really hippies, more like aspiring meth heads... up Eureka way were opposing it.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 28, 2012 - 12:55pm PT
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Locker, the problem with having to build extra electrical infrastructure is
that even solar isn't the 'green dream' many think it is.
Just ask the tortoises.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 28, 2012 - 12:57pm PT
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Dingus, I knew I could rely on you to question that but even if it is 5%
that is a lot of juice.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Dec 28, 2012 - 01:03pm PT
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The problem with solar is we are still in the mindset of relying on huge corporations to make it feasible.
If all those soon to be out of work pot growers would take some initiative and get into solar retrofitting, it would go a LONG way.
No point in shading the tortoise habitat when you could shade building, parking lots, and highways in SoCal. No huge corporation is going to be able to pull that off, it takes too much agility and adaptability. They rely on the economy of scale to generate their billion dollar profits. But a few smart people with some skillz could easily knock out some solid solar panel installations with multiple benefits.
From the class I taught last semester... CA uses ~200,000 GWh of electricity a year.
1000W bulbs x 12hrs x 1 bulb/2 plants (?) = 6,000 Wh/plant
5,000,000 plants, plus whatever locker smokes = 30,000,000,000 Wh = 30 GWh for all the indoor plants in CA
30/200,000 = 0.015%
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Sierra Ledge Rat
Mountain climber
Old and Broken Down in Appalachia
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Dec 28, 2012 - 01:10pm PT
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we are still in the mindset of relying on huge corporations to make it feasible.
No, we are not.
The corporations are in the mindset..... They don't want you to be energey independent, they want you to have to buy energy from mega-corporations.
These corporations are buying up (and burying) as many patents as they can that involve energy independence.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Dec 28, 2012 - 01:18pm PT
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So we, as a society, are just letting it happen? Nope! "We" are directly contributing to it... "we" are part of the mindset... because "we" aren't investing several thousand in personal solar energy... "we" are selling those parents... "we" are wasting energy and pretending the only cost is what our bill says. You are part of "we" whether you like it or not.
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Brandon-
climber
The Granite State.
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Dec 28, 2012 - 01:18pm PT
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If all those soon to be out of work pot growers would take some initiative and get into solar retrofitting, it would go a LONG way.
I know a few solar installers. Some of them are growers who took the initiative to further their knowledge.
I'll be specific. I have friends who own land in the foothills and are very much oriented to living a back to the earth lifestyle. All produce is grown in their prodigious garden, and either eaten or canned.
Their grow is 99 plants, with a card. Indoors and all organic.
They vehemently oppose legalization because it will decimate their income source.
They are good people and good friends, but their cries for continued medical use and no legalization seems disingenuous to me. They are just looking out for their bank accounts.
I don't understand why there can't be a replica of our current produce system. The general populace will get commercially grown bud, a'la Budweiser. Then, the bud snobs (me) will buy their stuff from local growers, a'la farmers markets and going to a local farmer for your produce. That's how I roll for whatever produce I don't grow in my own humble garden.
It's all taxed, from the big farmers to the local farmers market.
I don't see anything wrong with this model, but then, I live in a small town in NH full of rednecks and hippies. Both demographics are full of regular smokers.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Dec 28, 2012 - 01:20pm PT
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Community Supported Anything
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Brandon-
climber
The Granite State.
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Dec 28, 2012 - 01:37pm PT
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I sleep easy not only from the sweet medicine, but also knowing who grew it.
In the last year I've made a conscious decision to buy primarily from growers I know.
Less mold spores, better product, peace of mind knowing that my money is going into a friends hiding space, rather than Mexico or abroad.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Dec 28, 2012 - 02:07pm PT
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The central valley is already a failing agricultural system. No need to add to the water stress, over irrigation, and erosion by mass producing weed. Just make it like home brewing... you can grow your own and give away an ounce for Christmas... you just can't legally sell it.
Problem solved.
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Tobia
Social climber
Denial
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Dec 29, 2012 - 11:18am PT
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The Klamath Basin has been getting trashed by one means or another since the white man first laid his eyes on it.
I just finished a book, River of Renewal: Myth & History In The Klamath Basin by Stephen Most. From gold mining (which I am guilty of), overfishing, hydroelectric dams and irrigation both the wildlife and people have suffered. The book was published in 2006 and ended on a positive note with people coming together to make changes to restore the natural balance of the area.
Cannabis growers weren't mentioned in the book, probably due to the smaller number of growers and their impact on the environment being hidden with their crops.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Dec 29, 2012 - 02:13pm PT
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Less mold spores, better product, peace of mind knowing that my money is going into a friends hiding space, rather than Mexico or abroad.
And how do imagine that is accomplished?
Why do you think knowing the person who grows your weed means that you know HOW they grow your weed?
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Dec 29, 2012 - 02:16pm PT
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^ uh, cuz you help cut it from the plant, trim it up, and know they have a similar desire for quality products as you do? Same reason people prefer homegrown, vine ripened tomatoes over store bought choss shipped from Mexico.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 29, 2012 - 02:39pm PT
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If it were legal and regulated, each grow would be under environmental protection laws just like any other industry. It is against the law to dump these chemicals even if you are a goat farmer.
If it is regulated, and the grow sites are known, then it is pretty damn easy to construct a criminal case under local, state, and federal law. That is what my wife does for a living.
It is a simple thing to go for legalization. Just like Alcohol, which ruins more lives in a year than weed will in a lifetime.
First, our prisons are full of a small category of offenders: drugs, including weed, mental illness, which is now the defacto mental hospital of this day, and other non-violent crimes.
If you are caught with weed without a tax stamp on it, then that means it is from an illegal grow, such as Mexico, and you will get a massive fine. Enough to send you to the poor house.
If we can increase the domestic supply of Marijuana, then it will hurt the profits of the ungodly brutal Mexican Cartels.
All weed should come from a "born in the USA" card on it.
To finish this up, I was watching "Gangland" on TV the other night late and those gang members, even in prison, are lost causes for society. If any of them straighten their lives out, fine. If they get three strikes, we need to ship them to something like Devil's Island and stop wasting money paying for them.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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Dec 29, 2012 - 02:45pm PT
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Base...You are a smart man...But Moundhouse would be more appropriate than Devil's island....RJ
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Dec 29, 2012 - 02:46pm PT
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Ship them to Australia
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Brandon-
climber
The Granite State.
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Dec 29, 2012 - 02:47pm PT
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John, I know how it's grown.
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