Santa Barbara County Agricultural Commissioner Cathy Fisher has a good tip for solving problems that regular ol’ farmers have come up against with cannabis cultivation operations: Be a good neighbor.
It’s an earth-shattering revelation in these modern times, I know.
Doing something to your crop that could affect your neighbor’s very different crop? Talk to them about it.
It took five meetings of 11 people from the cannabis, traditional ag, and pesticide application industries to come up with that one. Apparently, the state’s weird rules about testing cannabis are just screwing crop growers in South County with avocado and citrus orchards. It’s gotten to the point where pesticide applicators won’t even spray orchards next to cannabis growers because they’re worried about being held liable for damaging all that kush.
Cannabis products are tested for 66 different pesticide ingredients, some of which are “quite benign” and “are actually organic materials,” Fisher told the county Planning Commission on Jan. 22. If one of those 66 little ditties is found in a cannabis product, they don’t get to sell it.
Can you imagine if that was the case for just any ol’ regular fruit or vegetable that we buy at the store? There would be a lot less produce available for purchase for one—plus it would be a lot healthier for us.
That just goes to show you that the state and other regulators—I’m looking at you Santa Barbara County Planning Commissioner John Parke—don’t actually care about our health, but they do want to make life as difficult as possible for cannabis growers.
Which is why it’s funny that Fisher felt the need to say that her presentation about the solutions to this whole pot-pesticide mess weren’t meant to be adopted as regulations or conditions to future cannabis cultivation permits. How would that look on a permit anyway?
Get to know your neighbors. Engage in an open dialogue if you’re going to spray potentially damaging chemicals on your crops. Let area farmers know when you’re harvesting, planting, and spraying. It’s just crazy talk, I know. How is this not something that people already engage in?
Why does it all have to be so incognito?
That’s also a question I might pose to the Santa Maria Valley Humane Society and the Santa Barbara Humane Society, neither of which will return the Sun’s requests for comment. Apparently, the two are merging, according to a benign item on the Santa Maria City Council’s Jan. 21 meeting agenda, and Santa Maria Valley Humane Society Executive Director Sean Hawkins is leaving for another position, according to a press release and a blog post in which he talks about how much he’s accomplished in three years.
What that blog post doesn’t mention is that the Santa Maria nonprofit also probably went broke in those three years—according to rumors that the Sun hasn’t been able to substantiate and an assumption made based on words from a city staff report: “The Santa Barbara Humane Society has adequate funding to be capable of honoring the lease provisions.”
So I’m just going to put these thoughts out into the universe: Know what’s going on? Send me an email. I’m jonesing for some drama!
The canary needs a fix. Send rumors and more to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 6, 2020.