Pubdate: Sun, 14 Oct 2012
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388

SMALL-TIME POT GROWERS EDGED OUT

LAYTONVILLE, Mendocino County - In the mountains of Mendocino County, 
a middleaged 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.

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-thelanders - 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 multithousand-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 middleclass 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 (Humboldt County) 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 
(Mendocino County) - a business called the Black Butte River Ranch. 
"Owners realize this is what makes their business go."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom