Sacramento County supervisors retain water-waste fines on pot growth

http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article29249722.h...


July 28, 2015


By Brenna Lyles


Sacramento County supervisors Tuesday broadened a recent ordinance declaring outdoor marijuana cultivation a waste of water, maintaining higher fines despite objections from medical marijuana advocates.

After banning all outdoor marijuana growth in the unincorporated parts of the county last year, the Board of Supervisors two weeks ago categorized that activity as water waste, subjecting it to additional fines of up to $500 per day.



Dozens of medical marijuana advocates appeared at board chambers Tuesday to protest the July 14 ordinance. They said they were unfairly being singled out and that board members should focus water-related enforcement on large water users.



Supervisors on Tuesday altered the original ordinance by defining any illegal water-reliant activity as a form of water waste rather than marijuana cultivation alone, according to Ted Wolter, chief of staff for Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan.



The ordinance will have the same functional outcome in terms of marijuana cultivation, said Wolter, but will expand the range of county water waste violations subject to
citation and fines.



“If, because of the continuing drought, the board found it appropriate to prohibit the installation of new turf, for example, the ordinance would consider that water waste as well,” he
said.



While Sacramento County residents can cultivate nine plants indoors for medical use, exceeding that limit is also subject to penalties for illegal growing and water waste.



Local medical marijuana advocacy groups remain dissatisfied. The amendment does not help medical marijuana patients and merely plays with language, said Ron Mullins, general manager of Sacramento's Chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.



“It actually makes it more difficult for everybody because they can pass any law against county code and then automatically a fine structure can come into play,” said Mullins.



Many activists fear for those who depend upon small-scale cannabis growing for their medical needs.



“Often they can't afford either dispensary prices or face problems growing indoors under the restrictive ordinance Sacramento County has,” said Deputy Director of California NORML Ellen Komp.



NORML activists at Tuesday's hearing called it a “politicization of the drought” and a diversion from what they considered bigger water waste issues – fracking, local Nestlé water bottling, as well as regional rice and almond farming. A protest rally and march directed by local marijuana
advocacy groups followed the hearing in downtown Sacramento.



Komp says Sacramento County's water waste ordinance is the first of its kind in California, and she said that MacGlashan has an agenda against marijuana.



MacGlashan said she originally proposed the amendment on the basis of a statistic published by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife that states a single marijuana plant averages 6
gallons of water used daily.



Fish and Wildlife senior environmental scientist Scott Bauer said in a phone interview that a single plant can use between 5 and 10 gallons per day during its growing period, numbers based on search warrant findings and a document published by marijuana advocacy group Emerald Growers Association in 2010.



“These are the numbers the Department of Fish and Wildlife uses and will continue to use,” Bauer said.


Komp called these statistics a “worst case scenario” and an overexaggeration.

 

Cal NORML Challenges Fish & Wildlife Figures on Marijuana Water Consumption


http://www.canorml.org/news/Cal_NORML_Challenges_F...


August 3, 2015 - California NORML has written to Scott Bauer of
California Fish and Wildlife questioning his often-repeated estimation
that marijuana plants use 5-10 gallons of water every day throughout
their growing season (June-October). This figure has been extrapolated
to cause law enforcement to overestimate the water consumption of
gardens they raid, much as they have always overestimated plant yields
and prices.

Public officials such as Sacramento County supervisor Roberta MacGlashen have cited the figure as a reason to double fines on marijuana patients, meaning growing even a single outdoor plant in the county can be cause for a fine of up to $1000/day. The Sacramento Bee has editorialized against using water on any outdoor cannabis plants.

From what Cal NORML has been able to uncover, Fish and Wildlife did not measure or calculate their water usage estimate,
but rather lifted data from a 2010 paper from the Humboldt Growers
Association and other sources, such as a paper from Chris Van Hook of
Clean Green Certification that was written in 2013 to encourage cannabis
farmers to store water.

Articles co-authored by Bauer in Bioscience and PLOS both cite a 2010 Humboldt Growers Association calculation of six gallons/per/plant/day, based on commonly used irrigation methods (towards the end of the document).

But while HGA farmers tend to grow extremely large plants, those
eradicated in the wild generally receive far less attention, meaning
they are much smaller and therefore require only a fraction of the water
used on plants that look more like trees (see photos).

The authors averaged an estimate by Mendocino Sheriff Tom Allman that large marijuana plants require one gallon of water per day and Van Hook's statement that in extremely hot weather, large plants can use up to 15 gallons per day to bolster their figure.

In an email communication, Van Hook told Cal NORML that at the time
he collected data (in 2010) for his 2013 paper, "water was not an issue.
I have seen some real improvements since then which is a testament to
California agriculture. Just like any agriculture when a problem arises
responsible farmers work to improve. I would like to see a new study
with some of the water saving improvements I have seen out in the
field.”

Bauer and his co-authors state:

Water use data for marijuana cultivation are virtually nonexistent
in the published literature, and both published and unpublished sources
for this information vary greatly, from as low as 3.8 liters up to 56.8
liters per plant per day.

This is quite a wide range. They continue:

The 22.7 liter (6 gallon) figure falls near the middle of this
range, and was based on the soaker hose and emitter line watering
methods used almost exclusively by the MCSs we have observed.

However, how long or often the crops were watered cannot be known from this information. They continue:

Because these water demand estimates were used to evaluate impacts
of surface water diversion from streams, we also excluded plants and
greenhouses in areas served by municipal water districts.

Which is exactly what the Sacramento Board of Supervisors oversees.
Legal experts say it's questionable whether or not growers charged
criminally can also be subjected to fines under local ordinances, so
it's likely that Sacramento's ordinance will affect only backyard
growers.


COMING UP WITH BETTER DATA

So far, Sacramento NORML and Cal NORML have canvassed growers from 11
outdoor farms in El Dorado, Placer, Humboldt and Mendocino counties.
Water usage has ranged from 1 gallon/plant to 3.5 gallons, although
plants were not necessarily watered daily, and less water was used while
the plants were still immature. Growers also often scale back on
watering at the end of the season, to encourage flowering. Six gallons a
day is possible for July and August, but not for 150 days, said one
farmer from Mendocino county. The average number of gallons used on plants daily was 2.30 in NORML's study.



The more pertinent way to look at the issue is in gallons of water per gram of marijuana bud produced.
A representative from the Mendocino Cannabis Policy Council said his
members tend to grow 2-4 pound plants, with the yield directly related
to the amount of water used. Roughly, MCPC and Emerald Growers
Association estimate that an average of 1 pound (454 grams) is yielded
using an average of one gallon per growing day. So a two-pound plant
would require an average of two gallons per growing day, and a
four-pound plant would use four gallons. The Small Growers

Using the gallon/day/pound ratio means one gallon yields about two
grams of processed bud at a growing season of 240 days (a figure which
can be reduced down to 90 days with the use of light-depravation
techniques). Two growers in Humboldt county said that they reliably grow
two-pound plants watering with 2.5 gallons/day (but not necessarily
every day). Taken in total, both estimated that it took an average 2/3
of a gallon daily to yield one gram of bud. A farmer in Mendocino who
uses water conservation techniques estimates using only 0.3 daily
gallons per gram of bud. Adding in two farms in the Sacramento area, one
that got 1.22 grams/gallon (using Smart Pots that may have lead to
evaporation) and a second that yielded 0.87 grams/gallon, Cal NORML
calculates an average of 0.72 gallons needed daily to produce a gram of
marijuana, no matter how many plants are grown.

Since a “joint” of marijuana is about 1/2 of a gram, this means a
dose of medical marijuana requires less than half a gallon of water. A
hamburger requires over 100 gallons of water to produce, and a serving
of rice takes around 50 gallons. (Source: UNESCO via LA Times).

TURNING WATER INTO WINE VS. WEED

We have also investigated the often-repeated statement that marijuana
uses twice as much water as do wine grapes, from the Bioscience article
at:

http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/06/19/biosci.biv...

Using the author's figure of 22 L (6 gallons) of water per plant per day from June - October, they state:

...if we assume a planting density of 130,000 plants per km2,
water application rates would be approximately 430 million L per km2 of
outdoor-grown marijuana per growing season. For comparison, wine grapes
on the California north coast are estimated to use a mean of 271 million
L of water per km2 of vines per growing season. Marijuana is therefore
estimated to be almost two times more “thirsty” than wine grapes, the
other major irrigated crop in the region.

But let's look at the output from those acres planted, and the total acreage.

Estimates say that about 150-160 gallons of wine are produced per ton
of grapes. The amount of grapes grown per acre of land can vary from
2-30 tons, with 4 tons seeming to be the most commonly used figure.
Using 8 tons of grapes per acre, we calculate that 26 gallons of water
are required to produce a 4-ounce glass of wine. This comes close to the
26-29 gallons/serving of wine from UNESCO data. (For some reason the LA
Times, citing UNESCO, says it takes 3.48 gallons of water to produce an
ounce of wine, which is why we had previously reported it took about 15 gallons of water per glass; calculating directly from UNESCO the figure is 7 gallons per ounce and 28 gallons per glass.)

By contrast, we estimate that between 1-1.5 tons of marijuana are
produced per acre. Using Fish & Wildlife's figure of 430 million L
per km2, this means between 0.63-0.95 gallons of water are used per
1/2 gram serving of marijuana, or 27-41 times less than the water it
takes to produce a glass of wine.

Now let's look total acreage. In 2014, the USDA reports
that the total acreage of wine grapes grown in California was 615,000.
Our estimates for total acreage of marijuana required for California
consumption is 800 acres (with no space between plants); 3000 acres
would be a ballpark figure. That ups the differential by a factor of
200, meaning overall wine production uses 5000-8000 times more water than does marijuana in California.

Wine production has been extremely damaging to rivers and creeks in critical salmon-spawning streams. For the past several years, Emerald Growers and other groups have been educating farmers about fish-friendly growing practices and the Small Farmers Association drought management plan calls for goals of 1/2 gallon to 1 gallon per plant for daily use.

CULTIVATION BANS IMPEDE WATER REGULATORS

Certainly, Cal NORML is concerned about severe, localized problems
regarding large marijuana farms and water use. Bauer's articles are
about local problems that the press has wildly extrapolated on. PLOS
study co-author Lori Pottinger said in answer to an email from Cal NORML
"I hope we conveyed that this was a localized problem, that was
certainly the intent."

Taking a statewide view, even using Bauer's figures marijuana uses a
tiny portion of the water used yearly in the state on almonds (3.7
million acre-feet); grapes (2.8 million acre-feet) and rice (2.2 million
acre-feet). Commercial agriculture in California uses an estimated
25-45 million acre-feet of water. By comparison, the cannabis industry is estimated to use a mere 3000-15,000 acre feet of water per year. That means cannabis cultivation uses 0.04 percent or less of all the water used for agriculture in California.

In fact, at a recent hearing in the Capitol on the drought,
all the fisheries experts spoke about the problems in the Delta (e.g.
Shasta Dam and the Thermolito) but all the law enforcement panelists
focused on the Emerald Triangle. Big Ag, in the form of rice farmer and
Congressman Doug LaMalfa and his successor Sen. Jim Nielsen, and billionaire pomegranate and pistachio farmer Stuart Resnick via his contributee Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
have been instrumental in keeping water flowing to farms.
Coincidentally(?) LaMalfa, Nielsen and Feinstein are all against
marijuana legalization.

Ironically, counties like Sacramento, Butte, Shasta, Tehama and
Fresno that have cultivation bans will be unable to sign up farmers for the Central Valley Water Board's pilot program regulating water use and discharge, due to be finalized in October.

Cal NORML has long worked for regulation of commercial marijuana
gardens at a state level, and is participating in discussions about AB
266 and AB 243, which would finally provide oversight on the state's
19-year-old medical marijuana law.