The November 2016 state legalization of recreational cannabis prompted Siskiyou to examine a possible licensure and taxation system for local growers . Amidst sustained, vocal opposition, the proposal stalled for several reasons that further aggravated cultural and racial tensions: A key proponent of licensure was discovered to be running an unauthorized grow, three Hmong Americans died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to heaters in substandard housing, and a cannabis cultivation enterprise run by two Hmong-Americans attempted to bribe the sheriff. These developments were interpreted not as outcomes of restrictive regulations and criminalizing strategies, but as proof that, in the words of one supervisor, regulation was impossible until the county could “get a handle on the illegal side of things.” The sheriff encouraged this interpretation, arguing in an interview that statewide legalization was “just a shield that protects illegal marijuana” and efforts to regulate it would always be subverted by criminals. This anti-regulatory logic prevailed in August 2017 when the county placed a moratorium on cannabis commerce. Still, the sheriff argued for stronger powers, citing an “overwhelming number of cannabis cultivation sites,” which, according to the Sheriff’s Office, continued to “wreak … havoc [with] potentially catastrophic impacts” across the region . Just 1 month later, at the sheriff’s urging, the Siskiyou Board of Supervisors declared a “state of emergency” aimed at garnering new resources and alliances to address the cannabis cultivation problem. Soon, the Sheriff’s Office enlisted the National Guard, Cal Fire and the California Highway Patrol in enforcement efforts, and, by 2018, numerous other agencies joined,planting gutter including the Siskiyou County Animal Control Department, California Department of Toxic Substances Control, State Water Resources Control Board, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and a CDFA inspection station.
These alliances multiplied the civil and criminal charges cultivators might face . Ironically, California’s cannabis legalization has enabled a kind of multi-agency neoprohibitionism at the county level, one that reinforces older criminal responses with new civil-administrative strategies and authorities. The need to “get a handle” might be regarded as a temporary emergency measure, but it may also propagate new criminalizing methods and institutional configurations. The more enforcement occurs, the bigger the problem appears, requiring more resources and leading to a logic of escalation symmetrical to the much-critiqued War on Drugs . And the more cannabis cultivators are viewed as criminal, the less likely they are to be addressed as citizens, residents and farmers.Given concerns about biased county policy and enforcement, the Sheriff’s Office held the first Hmong American and Siskiyou County Leader Town Hall in May 2018 to “foster a closer, collaborative relationship with members of the Hmong-American community,” exchange information about Hmong and Siskiyou culture and educate attendees on county policies . According to public records, racial tensions surfaced at this meeting when some white participants expressed that “our county” had been “invaded” and that Hmong-Americans were not fitting into local cultural norms . Meeting leaders — both government officials and Hmong-Americans — however, identified cultural misunderstanding, rather than criminalization and racialized claims by whites on what constitutes local culture, as the core problem to be addressed. “Misunderstanding” was an inadequate framing, given that Hmong-Americans had attempted to make themselves understood by attending public meetings, forming advocacy groups, signing petitions, demanding interpreters and administrative hearings, and registering to vote since their arrival in Siskiyou. At the 2018 town hall, and numerous prior meetings, they emphasized their status as legitimate community members — veterans, citizens, consumers of county goods, local property owners, “good” growers and medical users — not nuisances, criminals, foreigners or outsiders.
In interviews and public forums many Hmong-American cultivators expressed a desire to comply with the rules. Their efforts, however, they said, were frustrated not only by linguistic and cultural differences, but also understaffed and underfunded permitting, licensing and community services agencies. Hmong-American cultivators routinely told us about their desires to settle down, build homes and plant other crops. “I’m growing watermelons, pumpkins and tomatoes,” one cultivator told us, but he was waiting for a permit to build his house, a process another interviewee reported took 3 years. Though the town hall meeting sought to address cultural misunderstanding, this framing overlooks how misunderstanding — of Hmong-Americans or cannabis producers generally — is produced by criminalizing enforcement practices. Properties given as gifts in the Hmong-American community were seen as evidence of criminal conspiracy, not generous family assistance; land financing networks evidenced drug trafficking organizations, not kin-based support and weak credit access; repetitive farm organization patterns suggested “organized crime” , not ethnic knowledge-sharing circuits. When Hmong-Americans, leery of engagement with government agencies and unfriendly civic venues, self-provisioned services, including firefighting teams, informal food markets and neighborhood watches, these actions were taken to confirm suspicions that they could not assimilate. Now that some Hmong-Americans are considering, or already are, moving away in response to county efforts, the sheriff’s prior description of them as temporary residents seems prophetically manufactured.Anti-cannabis pressure creates a precarious state of impermanence — a season’s crop might be destroyed, infrastructure confiscated and investments of limited resources lost at any moment, disallowing longer-term investments. The impermanence makes noncompliance and deleterious environmental and health effects more likely, thereby perpetuating perceptions of cannabis cultivators as nuisances and dangers.
As enforcement makes private land cultivation more risky, cultivators move “back up the hill,” namely onto ecologically sensitive public lands, thus substantiating characterizations of cannabis growers as criminal polluters. These stigmas even spread to county residents who do not grow cannabis themselves but if perceived to assist cannabis cultivation can face social sanctions. One agriculturalist reported receiving death threats after selling water to cannabis cultivators. Meanwhile, well-resourced cultivators have an advantage over small-scale producers. They can protect their crops from visibility and complaints by concealing them on large plots of land or inside physical infrastructures ; and for white growers there is the anonymity of not being marked as ethnically different and therefore subject to heightened scrutiny. Greater access to capital, land and racial privileges insulates some from visibility and criminalization, resulting in uneven development and disparities in California’s expanding cannabis industry. Additionally, jurisdictions like the Siskiyou municipalities of Mt. Shasta and Weed are welcoming regulated cannabis commerce, thus capitalizing on its expulsion from the rest of Siskiyou and benefiting entrepreneurs with social capital and network access to successfully navigate complex public regulatory systems.After a century of cannabis’s criminal exclusion in California, state voters have elected to integrate cannabis farmers into civil regulation. An important facet of evolving cannabis regulations is local determination. As one interviewee pointed out, a 1-acre farm might be permitted in rural San Joaquin County but would not make sense in downtown San Diego. Yet,gutter berries when cannabis cultivation is disqualified from consideration as agriculture by localities, as it has been in Siskiyou County, it can be substantively recriminalized and placed beyond the regulatory reach of civil institutions. Prohibitionist strategies that blur lines between civil and criminal enforcement lead to penetrating forms of visibility and vulnerability that produce inequity and disparity. The result, as this case illustrates, can be a narrow, exclusive definition of agriculture that affirms dominant notions of land use and community. The definition of cannabis cultivation as agriculture by the CDFA creates an opportunity for service providers and regulators — including agricultural institutions, public health departments and environmental agencies — to craft programs and policies that openly address the negative impacts of production. Owley advises that “if we treat cultivation of marijuana the same as we treat cultivation of other agricultural crops, we gain stricter regulation of the growing process, including limits on pesticide usage, water pollution, wetland conversion, air pollution, and local land-use laws.” Presently, however, many agencies are being enlisted in locally crafted criminalizing efforts, thus limiting their ability to work cooperatively with cultivators and address issues through customary civil abatement processes.
Though unregulated cannabis cultivation can pose threats to public health, safety and welfare, police enforcement is only one of many possible ways to address it. Siskiyou’s cannabis cultivators experience familiar agricultural challenges around access to land, water and credit. These challenges are amplified without technical assistance or institutional support. If recognized statewide as farmers, these cultivators would be better positioned to access agricultural training and support services, thus addressing ecological and social concerns around cannabis production. Additionally, new cannabis cultivators might be considered “beginning” farmers according to the CDFA, and minority farmers, including Hmong-Americans, who experience poverty at twice the national rate , would be considered “socially disadvantaged” under the California Farmer Equity Act of 2017 . Farmers with these designations would, in fact, be prioritized for technical assistance and support from farm service providers — if, that is, they were recognized as farmers. Uniformly treating cannabis cultivation as agriculture would also help enable the collection of accurate and robust data by researchers. This information base is necessary if agricultural institutions are to take an assistive and educational orientation toward cannabis farmers. Continued enforcement tactics that amplify distrust, frustration and confusion will further hinder data collection , leaving little basis to understand basic dynamics of complex, interdisciplinary systems like agriculture . In a criminalized situation, it is inevitable that information is metered and brokered by community leaders in ways that inhibit full understanding of cannabis cultivation. We suggest, for all these reasons, that a decisive break with enforcement-led, prohibitionist trajectories is needed and that agricultural institutions lead civil policy development and support farmers who cultivate cannabis. Agricultural service providers could play a leadership role in addressing the pressing needs of farmers — both those impacted by and engaging in cannabis cultivation. Yet, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension advisors, for instance, consistently report that they are currently prohibited from engaging with cannabis issues . Additionally, many county-based agricultural commissions, Siskiyou County’s included, feel that cannabis is not an agricultural enterprise and therefore do not see its cultivators as their clientele. Without leadership from agricultural institutions and agencies, the expanding cannabis cultivation industry is left to develop unevenly across the state — with wealthy private interests capitalizing in some locales while vulnerable and unregulated growers may retreat, to avoid criminalization, into ecologically sensitive areas. UC ANR and CDFA have an opportunity to fulfill their missions and facilitate, for a burgeoning farming population, greater parity in farmer rights, capacities and resource access.Organic strawberry production has become big business in California, generating more than $17 million in sales annually on over 1,200 acres—nearly 5% of California’s total strawberry acreage. But as producers have found, growing this specialty crop without conventional pesticides requires a new toolbox of pest and disease control techniques. For the past five years, researchers from the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems have been refining the use of trap crops in organic strawberry systems as a way to limit damage from the western tarnished plant bug and boost populations of the pest’s natural enemies. A serious pest native to California’s central coast, WTPB feeds on developing strawberries, causing gnarled, “cat-faced” berries with enlarged, straw-colored seeds. These damaged fruit can’t be sold on the fresh market. Although some organically acceptable sprays exist to treat WTPB, they’re expensive and relatively ineffective.A broad range of winter weeds in central coastal California, including wild radish, mustards, chickweed, lupine and other legumes, and knotweed, offer a winter food source for WTPB. As the rainy season tapers off in the spring and wild vegetation dries out, the WTPB adults move to flowering crops, including strawberries, and begin feeding. Trap crops planted along the edges of crop fields or within the field have the potential to limit WTPB damage by offering the pests a food source they prefer over the crop itself. “That’s the definition of a trap crop—that it’s a preferred host or food source for the insect you’re targeting when compared with the main crop,” says Sean L. Swezey, the Center’s associate director, and director of the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. Trap crops can also serve as habitat for beneficial insects, which can supplement pest control efforts.Once attracted to the trap crop, pests must be managed so that they don’t eventually disperse into the fields and damage the crop you’re trying to protect.