Can we odor abate outdoor anything? Like sewage plants with open-air treatment ponds, for instance—Nipomo, I’m talking to you. Who doesn’t love the smell of poo on the fresh morning air?
We arguably should be doing something about that smell—but can we really?
“In the north, we have many complaints of odors particularly with ... things like broccoli and cauliflower, even people objecting to what I think is the great smell of cilantro being harvested, so odor again is subjective,” Santa Barbara County 4th District Planning Commissioner Roy Reed said during a May 8 meeting where a Buellton cannabis cultivation project was discussed.
The outdoor cultivation project in which 3rd District Planning Commissioner John Parke seems to believe that perhaps it’s possible to control that skunky, fruity, flowery, weedy scent that can waft into the air.
“There are scents that come from the growth of it,” he said.
Humans have a very hard time controlling the natural breeze, air flow in the great outdoors—according to a company that touts its outdoor odor control product for cannabis. Cannabusters offers advice to small-scale, backyard growers—plant something else that’s pleasantly smelly like lavender, jasmine, mint, or basil.
But for larger operations, “a massive plot of rosemary isn’t the solution to all of your problems.” Cannabusters claims that its product can use “oxidation” to stop the scent of cannabis right in its tracks.
It’s hard to believe that vaporizing the scent away is even an option. But maybe that’s the solution to Parke’s pressing problem with cannabis. Maybe we could require anything smelly to use this vaporizer. Watch out broccoli, odor eaters are coming for you! Or, perhaps, we’re just holding cannabis to a higher standard than we hold any other agricultural product to in Santa Barbara County, just ’cuz it can get you high!
Parke’s problems didn’t end with odor, though. He continued on about the potential runoff from hoop houses, which is a pretty standard agricultural tool in the county.
“I’m going to want a better answer to the question, to tell you the truth, than, ‘It should be absorbed by the surrounding soil,’” Parke said.
As Reed, who seemed to be the voice of reason during the discussion, put it: “In the Santa Maria Valley we have thousands of acres of hoop houses, but yet during the rainy season, we have not yet been washed into the sea.”
“I wonder if these hoop houses were used for caneberries, blueberries, if the objections would be similarly great with respect to drainage,” Reasonable Roy said.
I wonder too, Roy.
But the odor lingers, just like it does in cannabis greenhouses outfitted with dry vapor-producing technology designed to neutralize airborne odors.
According to one Carpenteria grower who spoke to Environmental Health Perspectives Publishing, the technology worked, kind of. The smell? It was less, “but it still existed.”
Odor-eating is still an evolving field, and expecting an outdoor grow operation to be scent-neutral as a caveat to issuing a permit is bonkers. But I’m not in charge, and I don’t make the rules—which seem to change if you’re cannabis, amirite?
The Canary doesn’t need cannabis to fly high. Send mint to [email protected].
