Small Business Weed Growers: Inside Mom-and-Pop Pot Farms

On the cusp of California's landmark Proposition 19 marijuana vote, it's important to remember how a long-developing underground network of boutique weed farms across the state have set the stage for legalization. Both hobby breeders and small business-style mini-farms have not only diversified and strengthened the plant's strain, but their proliferation has brought down costs and boosted the economy. According to the Washington Post:

Ironically, the government's international war on drugs proved an enormous boon to marijuana cultivation in the United States. By 2002, as much as 10,000 metric tons of cannabis were cultivated annually, according to a government estimate. Jon Gettman, a criminal justice scholar, used this figure to argue that marijuana had become the nation's biggest cash crop, with a conservative value of $35 billion at a time when the corn harvest was $23 billion and soybeans $17.6 billion.

In a extensive look into the inner workings of small-time growers and individuals, the Post uncovered the relative ease with which one can cultivate their own weed plants, whether in a garden crop or inside a home beneath special growing tents. Its proliferation is much freer these days, particularly since the cessation of the failed War on Drugs and legalization of medical marijuana in California and other states.

But with mainstreaming comes corporations. And as the Post reports, now that the outlook for weed legalization looks good, longtime mom-and-pop pot growers are starting to mobilize to combat the big-business growers that will inevitably follow:

Some growers are wary of Prop. 19, believing its passage would attract large-scale commercial nurseries. Already, there is speculation that wineries in Napa and Sonoma would get into it, as would big tobacco.

Separately from Prop. 19, the city of Oakland is preparing to issue four permits to allow large-scale commercial cultivation of marijuana for medical users. Harborside's founder and chief executive, Steve DeAngelo, remarkable for his pigtails and porkpie hats, is considering throwing one of them (hat, that is) into the ring. He joins me in Ramsay's cutting room cum office. "The debate moves from whether cannabis is going to be legal to how cannabis is going to be legal," he said.

We won't know for sure for another day. But even in the unlikelihood that Prop. 19 fails this time around, it's clear the weed business won't and isn't.

Read the full article at the Washington Post.