Brandon Keim has a post over at Anthropocene about the environmental costs of marijuana farming in California.
When thinking about agriculture’s environmental footprint, the usual suspects jump to mind: corn and cotton and soy, vast resource-intensive commodity crops. Marijuana isn’t high on the list. Yet perhaps it should be. “Despite its small current land-use footprint,” write the authors of a pot farming study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, “if changes are not made in the spatial pattern of its expansion, the boom in cannabis agriculture will likely create substantial threats to the surrounding environment.”
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While other researchers have studied pot’s intensive water requirements and the often-heavy use of pesticides by its farmers, Wang’s team focused on the contribution of farms to deforestation and habitat fragmentation. They found that marijuana farms, which by law are not allowed to be larger than one acre, dot the region’s forests like a patchwork. Often crops are planted on land cleared deep in previously-intact groves. This arrangement disrupts the core forest’s ecology.
Read the whole thing. The requirement for using small fields may have been put in place to keep large commercial operators from putting existing pot growers out of business (or some other well-intended purpose), but think about trying to produce industrial quantities of hemp plants using the farming methods more suitable to hiding from the narcs than protecting the environment.
I love when the Left eats their own.
The TV shows featuring game wardens, when it’s in a forested state, often show the damage caused by illicit pot growers, from the discarded piles of pesticide and fertilizer containers just lying around, to diverting the flow of creeks with makeshift dams, to threatening any hikers that may stray too far from the path with booby traps and sniper camps.
I can’t recall. Isn’t dope more water-intensive than other crops? This is a bad thing to grow industrially in a drought area as it only exacerbates it, I thought.
News stories from the area indicate that a lot of the pesticides used aren’t legal in the USA.
Now, where are they getting those? And who is bringing them into the country?
Not sure which cartel, but they’ve been in the business (frequently in National Forests) for a while. Easier to get seeds and chemicals across the border…
It’s non-native but probably not invasive. Darn it.
Here in Colorado they grow it indoors. Old warehouse space goes for top dollar since they put in a mezzanine and double the square footage. Our production facility is in such an area and on some days the smell is thick enough to cross your eyes.
Love to know the ENERGY costs of that. Plus what’s washing out into the storm drains or sewers.
Why does FiFi Furguson hate the environment? He’s already ruined sound, now the earth?
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