HOW MARIJUANA COULD SAVE CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURE

While a Legalized Marijuana Crop Wouldn't Solve All of California's
Agricultural Woes, It Might Still Keep the State in the Green.

The three-hour Northern California drive from San Francisco to Nevada
County passes through some of the cream of the state's agriculture
industry: dairy, alfalfa, rice, almonds, grapes. On both sides of the
freeway stretch enormous crop rows, interrupted only by the state
capital of Sacramento and a number of small towns.

Last fall, I made the trip north to visit a medical marijuana farm in
the mountains above Grass Valley, a scenic town in the foothills of
the Sierra Nevadas. The area is well suited to marijuana cultivation:
The land is cheap and sparsely populated; the climate is mild.

When I arrived, I found a ragged property -- a small home at the end of
a rutted dirt road and a couple of rudimentary drying rooms
constructed of plywood and tarps. Enclosed by a wooden fence, the farm
overlooked a pristine, pine-filled valley.

The garden was impressive and unimpressive at the same time. Compared
to the expensive industrial farming operations I had passed on my way
up, it was tiny and unsophisticated. And yet the plants were
remarkable. Many were taller than 6 feet and of extraordinary girth;
they were held together by an elaborate system of plastic netting.
From their limbs hung heavy, densely crystallized buds, each waiting
to be dried and trimmed.

Since California voters legalized medical marijuana in 1996, and
particularly since the state Legislature specified how much pot could
be cultivated for medical purposes, in 2003, growing marijuana in
California has become extremely lucrative. The street value of the
state's crop was roughly $14 billion in 2008. Walking through the
garden, it wasn't hard for me to see why -- each pound of buds
harvested from the enormous plants would fetch upwards of $3,000 at
medical marijuana dispensaries.

Farms like the one I visited have helped guarantee stories about
marijuana entrepreneurs. Last year it netted a healthy profit for its
young bohemian proprietors, who ensured that it stayed within legal
cultivation limits. During my visit, one of them told me the cliche is
true: A second gold rush has hit Northern California.

But in all of the press coverage of marijuana, one story has been
overlooked. It has to do with the health of California's agriculture
industry. The most bountiful farming region in the world, the Golden
State is contending with three potentially catastrophic problems:
population growth, dwindling water resources and climate change.
Marijuana could potentially provide a bulwark against a future of
steadily declining crop yields.

California is a farming utopia. Its mild climate and rich soil have
allowed farmers to build on it an agricultural system of unparalleled
sophistication and value. Half of America's produce, and a large
portion of its dairy, comes from California.

And yet the idyll evoked by the Golden State's nickname, while not
misplaced, conceals a dark and abiding problem. Ever since the end of
the 19th century, when systematic irrigation was introduced to
California, water -- or, more accurately, a lack of water -- has shaped
the state's agricultural history.

In the last 90 years, a vast network of reservoirs and aqueducts has
been built to capture and transport water throughout California. It is
an enormous feat of engineering, and so far it has delayed the
detonation of what Mark Reisner (who wrote Cadillac Desert, the
definitive history of the West's water woes) referred to as the
"ecological time-bomb" hovering over California.

But that detonation may be on the horizon. Most of California farmland
is semi-arid, and each year, the state's population grows by an
average of a half million people. By 2040, this makes for 50 million
Californians, and competition for water between farmers and city
dwellers will be intense.

So it does not bode well that the flow of the Colorado River, from
which Southern California gets a substantial portion of its water, is
declining steadily. Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and
Nevada are all taking their full allotments of water from the West's
largest river, which has been so deeply desiccated over the decades
that it no longer reaches the ocean, in Mexico.

Nor is it comforting that groundwater -- much of it fossil water that
cannot be replenished -- is being sucked dry across the state.

But particularly alarming is the likelihood that climate change is going
to permanently shrink the most important source of water in California:
the snow that amasses in the Sierra Nevadas. Every year between the
months of November and April, when temperatures drop below freezing and
Pacific storms slam into its western flank, the range named for its
white-tipped peaks becomes a natural reservoir, collecting an enormous
volume of frozen precipitation. As the snowpack melts in the spring and
summer, a steady flow of freshwater is released into the valleys below.
That water accounts for the Sacramento Delta, California's primary
aboveground water source.

In 2004, a group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers
used complex modeling tools to project what will happen to the
snowpack if climate change continues to progress under a
"medium-warming scenario." The results were bracing. By 2050, the
researchers found, global warming will shrink the snowpack by up to 50
percent. By 2100 the figure rises to 90 percent.

The gravity of this finding, which has since been supported by
research out of Purdue University, is difficult to exaggerate. It led
Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist appointed energy
secretary by President Obama, to tell the Los Angeles Times last
February that should climate change continue at its current pace,
"We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in
California."

For 50 years running, California has been the No. 1 agriculture state
in the nation. What threatens farming in California threatens the
state as a whole. Agriculture employs more than 1 million Californians
and generates more than $100 billion in economic activity, excluding
marijuana revenue. If California faces a future of diminished
cropland, could pot break some of the fall?

To call the growing scene in Northern California a hippie redoubt
would be an exaggeration. Many rural Northern Californians have been
growing pot for decades. But an environmentalist ethos is common. The
proprietors of the farm I visited ate organic food and did their
gardening listening to podcasts of NPR and Democracy Now. (One grower
I met had listened, over the course of the growing season, to the New
and Old Testaments, Dante's Inferno, Moby Dick, and more than 50 This
American Lifes.) Many farms have solar panels; high-grade growers
commonly mix their own organic fertilizer.

Still, by no stretch of the imagination is outdoor pot farming -- even
at the high end -- an environmentally benign process. That was one of
the first things the lead grower on the farm I visited pointed out.
They work to be environmentally responsible, he said, but there's no
way to get around the fact that marijuana is a thirsty crop, and
growing big plants requires a considerable amount of water.

Worse, most of the low-grade marijuana in the state comes from vast,
entirely illegal growing operations tucked deep into national parks
and national forest up and down California. Funded primarily by
Mexican drug gangs, these farms are violently ecologically
destructive. Their growers run miles of irrigation pipe through
pristine wildland, cut down sections of forest and chaparral, apply
enormous amounts of toxic synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, and
abandon the detritus of a five-month growing season immediately
following their harvest.

By the end of California's most recent drought, which began in 2007,
state and federally operated reservoirs were at their lowest levels
since 1992. Many farmers were forced to let their lands lie fallow. If
this and worse represents the state's agricultural future, shouldn't
marijuana eradication efforts be stepped up, not relaxed? Pot isn't
food, and while more and more Americans consider it a benign
recreational stimulant, most still do not. The idea that valuable crop
water is being used to grow pot is upsetting to many people, including
farmers.

But stepped up eradication is not the direction in which California is
heading. Last year Tom Ammiano, a state senator from San Francisco,
introduced legislation to fully legalize marijuana as a way to create
new tax revenue for the state, which is in a deep fiscal trough. In
the fall, Californians will vote on a ballot initiative that would
fully legalize marijuana cultivation and make smoking pot legal for
Californians over the age of 21. (It's import is mostly symbolic,
though -- should it pass, the federal Justice Department almost
certainly would move to invalidate the measure or yank out its teeth
in court.)

Proponents argue that legalization would drive the enormous,
ecologically disastrous farms run by Mexican mafias out of business.
Legalization, they say, would lead agribusiness to take over the
low-grade, mass-cultivation sector of the industry; those companies,
in turn, would be regulated by the state to ensure responsible farming
practices.

But they have so far failed to note a potentially more important
virtue of marijuana legalization, namely that in an increasingly dry
century, it has an enormous ecological -- and by extension economic --
advantage over California's other cash crops. The advantage derives
from a simple metric: price. No crop in California, including the most
expensive wine grapes, even remotely approaches the price of marijuana
by volume. In 2008, a comparably tiny marijuana harvest, concentrated
in a handful of Northern California counties, generated twice as much
revenue as the state's second leading cash crop, dairy.

According to an analysis conducted by state officials, the market
price for marijuana would likely drop by half or more if it were fully
legalized. But they also believe the drop would be accompanied by a
significant growth in the number of people buying pot -- they put the
figure at 40 percent.

That projection is deeply provisional, but it's reasonable to assume
that the overall market for marijuana would grow significantly were it
legalized. Such growth wouldn't be painless -- many small Northern
California pot economies would suddenly have to vie with lower prices
and, potentially, competition from powerful agriculture corporations.
And of course the "October Millionaires," the Northern Californians
who rake in cash at the end of every fall harvest, would have to
develop new business models -- perhaps modeled after Northern
California's rich boutique wine industry -- or risk extinction.

But while fewer individuals would get rich, the industry dedicated to
the cultivation and sale of marijuana would expand. That would mean
more work for agricultural workers, more associated economic activity
and more taxes. Of course, it would also mean more resource use. More
marijuana would be grown, requiring more land, more energy and,
critically, more water. And when that marijuana is harvested and sold,
it would cost less. What then would separate it from any other of the
state's major cash crops, other than the fact that it's not food, and
thus unessential?

There are two answers. First, while growing outdoor pot is not
especially ecologically benign, it's far more benign than raising
commodities like cattle, rice or alfalfa. Consider: Agriculture uses 80
percent of California's developed water supply; alfalfa soaks up a full
20 percent of that. The alfalfa is used primarily to create forage for
feedlot and dairy. That means that 1 gallon out of every 5 used in
California goes to a crop that humans can't eat.

People don't make a meal of marijuana either, of course. But measured
by water, marijuana barely registers on the California's water scale.
A pound of pot requires, at the outermost limit, 250 gallons to grow,
which means that a large serving of it requires about a half pint of
water. By contrast, an orange takes 13 gallons water, a glass of wine
32 gallons, and a hamburger 600 gallons.

The second reason marijuana has an ecological advantage again is
price. Even if it were legalized, it would still take far less of it
to generate substantial economic activity for California than any
other of the state's crops. If following legalization market prices
for the pot grown on the farm I visited dropped by half, a pound of it
would still cost $1,000 to $1,500 dollars.

Many advocates believe that California and other states will soon
fully legalize marijuana. Whether they're correct is a matter of
considerable doubt. Although popular support for the legalization of
medical marijuana is growing stronger in some parts of the country,
experts say it is unlikely that the Justice Department would agree to
look the other way if a state legalized marijuana outright.

If that's true, it means that for any state to fully legalize pot,
Congress and the president will have to create legislation granting
them the right to do so -- not an unfathomable event, necessarily, but
also one unlikely to occur any time soon.

But even presuming that a substantial portion of California's pot crop
continues to come from illegal, ecologically destructive farms -- as
well as high-grade medical marijuana collectives like the one I
visited -- the overall environmental footprint, including the
cumulative water usage, of California marijuana industry is barely
worth mentioning compared to the industrial farming operations that
produce the state's other leading cash crops.

As of the writing of this article, in late February, California has
spent three months inundated by El Nino-driven rainstorms. And yet
reservoirs around the state were still only half full -- a testament to
the severity of the state's most recent drought. Due to El Nino, 2010
looks less bleak than it did three months ago. That is a welcome
development, considering that the drought forced 23,000 farm workers
out of work in 2009 and idled 300,000 acres of cropland in California.

But El Nino is a temporary reprieve. Circumstances are conspiring to
produce in California a water crisis of unprecedented proportions.
Although the U.S still retains a statistically relevant proportion of
citizens who are skeptical about the greenhouse effect, there is no
scientific question that significant climate change is now inevitable.
California is going to get hotter and drier; the question is not for
how long, but how much hotter and how much drier.

Although the press has paid the issue relatively little note,
scientists and state officials are acutely aware that California's
agriculture industry is facing an uncertain future. They are likewise
cognizant that marijuana is a potentially substantial economic
resource, in a state roiled by fiscal and economic crises. But very
few people seem to be talking about the two in combination.

In researching this article I called scientists, academics, drug
policy experts, marijuana legalization advocates, representatives of
various state agencies related to agriculture and water, and the U.S.
Forest Service. All were apologetic; none could provide me with
specific knowledge or insight into the relationship between marijuana,
agriculture and the state's ecological future.

The explanation was simple: Marijuana is illegal, and therefore there
exists only the most basic data on it. But there may be another
explanation, too: When we think of agricultural, we think of citrus
and cattle, grapes and almonds. We don't think of pot.

Recently I drove from Wolverton, a backcountry ski area high in
Sequoia National Park, down Highway 198 into Fresno, and on to San
Francisco. The 198, which skirts a large portion of the southwestern
Sierra Nevada, is among the most breathtaking of California's
beautiful drives. For the first hour, I was sandwiched between redwood
trees and 6- to 8-foot-high snow banks.

But I soon descended into the Central Valley, and the verdant
grasslands of Tulare County. At one point, near the town of Dunlap, I
drove through an enormous citrus farm; lining the road for more than a
mile were 30-foot-tall orange trees dripping with fruit. It was a
stunning reminder of California's status as an agricultural
powerhouse; it seemed totally alien to consider marijuana in the same
context.

But from an economic and ecological standpoint, marijuana is an
agricultural product, like any other. Out of sight, it nevertheless
dominates the rest of California's farming bounty, as impressive as
that bounty is. This in mind, it seems worthwhile for any discussion
of the merits, or demerits, of California's marijuana industry to take
into account the state's warming future. What role will marijuana play
in an agriculture landscape less golden than parched?