Weed vs Cow

Sustainable Marijuana Agriculture

Do you know where your weed comes from? Next time you speak to your dealer, you should insist that he only supplies you with organic, outdoor, locally grown mooey, otherwise you're just another bong-smoking corporate neo-con.

It is commonly known that marijuana sustains the economies of entire South American countries, but what about that big Northern American country known as the USA? Some datasets will tell you that marijuana is their biggest cash crop:

So the price of this wonderful weed is inflated because of the associated risk-premium - but go ahead and cut the profits in half and you'll still agree that America wouldn't be the same economy without its thriving cannabis industry.

Therefore it seems right that in the quest for green nirvana some efforts should be made to regulate marijuana cultivation so that it can be grown in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. Of course, this is basically impossible when the product is illegal, as eradication is the only option considered by the authorities. Because growers will go to great lengths to hide their operations, the cultivation of marijuana will always be unregulated and therefore, highly inefficient. Once I realised this, I decided to conduct an amateur investigation of the impact that marijuana cultivation has on the land and air, but it seems that few studies have been made. Perhaps a reader of this post could point me in the right direction? What follows are some of the inefficiencies I could imagine.

Marijuana is often grown indoors

This means that our familiar outdoor friends are replicated indoors, at great expense:

• The sun is replicated with high pressure sodium lamps (typically 600 to 1000 watts).
• Humidity is regulated with a humidifier
• Wind is supplied with air conditioners
• Rain is piped in via hydroponics.

The cost of running all this equipment is astronautical. Electricity providers will quickly discover such unusually high power usage and call in an investigation. However, it is obvious that plenty of dope is still being grown inside of doors, so one can only assume that ganja farmers have advanced techniques for hacking electricity meters (perhaps more sophisticated than a blue cup sitting on top of the meter), cutting the provider out of the loop.

Power usage entails a fossil fuel burning entails carbon emissions entails global warming entails mass destruction and death etc.

Despite the cannabis plant being a hardy, prodigious grower, entirely suitable for the outdoors, and despite the high costs of establishing an indoor operation, the reduced risk still makes indoor cultivation far more attractive than outdoors. Even for the simple home grower, a cursory investigation of the literature at the wonderful Polyester bookshop gives a good indication of the popularity of indoor grow rooms. Drop by at their Brunswick Street store and you will find the outdoor grower to be far less catered for than the indoor grower:

• Cannabis Cultivator, by Jeff Ditchfield (focuses mainly on indoor cultivation)
• Jorge Cervantes Ultimate Grow DVD
• Marijuana Grower's Handbook: The indoor high yield cultivation guide, by Ed Rosenthal
• Marijuana Grower's Insider's Guide, by Mel Frank
• Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor / Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible, by Jorge Cervantes (the old edition of this book was only for Indoor growers)
• Marijuana New School Indoor Cultivation, by Jeff Motwa
• Marijuana New School Outdoor Cultivation, by Jeff Motwa
• Marijuana Success Indoors, by Ed Rosenthal

Even in the outdoors, serious grows will use extra lamps that require huge amounts of off-the-grid power, provided by a diesel generator.

Trunks and leaves are burnt away

The non-psychoactive trunks and leaves are often burned up instead of being used for something useful, like Hempcrete. Those boring brown bits constitute a lot of incriminating evidence, so if they aren't burnt they are dumped in places they shouldn't be.

Thus, as with the indoor cultivation, an opportunity for vast of amounts of carbon sequestration is squandered.

Of course, the real criminals here are the Police, who would, after taking their cut, rather put a torch to the produce - leaves, buds, branches and all - rather than be the slightest bit bit creative.

Grown in virgin forest

If marijuana is grown outdoors, the location has to be secluded, which usually means in the midst of virgin forest, on state land. Large scale operations certainly involve degradation of this land's undergrowth.

"Pest" animals may be poisoned or shot, even if these pest animals are cuddly sugar gliders or endangered marsupials. Diesel from makeshift generators leaks into the soil. Native vegetation is cleared. Water is "stolen" from streams. Large amounts of chemical fertilizers and poison are poured into the ground. Land is terraced, causing erosion. Scores of shady foreign-types camp out like a horde of vermin tourists. See the following article, which details some of these issues as they occur in Mendocino, California: "The growers that we investigate aren't the peace loving organic-growing hippies that you might imagine."

It should be evident that without all the stringent regulations usually applied to the agriculture industry, and with operations run by organized criminal groups, pretty much anything goes. Legal farming of legal commodities causes enough environmental degradation around the world as it stands - particularly the farming of livestock unsuitable to the land. At least this farming undergoes some form of regulation, and the farmers have personal investment in the land they own. But with marijuana being farmed on stolen land, under the radar of the law, there are no incentives left to make sure that some chemical does not poison the soil for decades, or that the plants being cleared are not on the verge of extinction.

Weed vs Cow

So let's pitch two greedy guzzlers against each other.

On the left we have doobie-devouring vegan. He smokes more than a gram a week. He doesn't ask his dealer where his pot comes from... and he doesn't care. But we can reveal it comes from an indoor grow in Queensland.

On the right we have a beef-eating suburbanite. He eats a beef barbecue three times week, pork chops thrice a week and lamb on Sundays. He doesn't ask his butcher where his meat comes from... and he doesn't care. In fact he doesn't even go to the butcher - he shops at Woolworths and Woolworths get their beef from Queensland.

The difference between a beef-heavy meal and a vegetarian meal is about 1.5 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. This factoid is widely available, and conveniently quotable and so therefore must be true.

In Australia, all that beef stomping around the paddock, with their hard European hooves, brings up an awful lot of salty groundwater that is quickly poisoning our country. There is also the opinion of the cow to take into account as well. All of these things drive this fat dude into heavy karmic debt.

The heavy smoker will get through about 5 or 6 plants over a year. How much energy does it take to grow 5 or 6 plants? Let's just focus on three most energy hungry pieces of equipment:

• Two 600 watt HPS lamps, left running 18 hours a day for four months, then 12 hours a day for two months.
• Climate control unit, on 24 hours a day for all six months.
• Heating element for water, also left on all the time.

As a rough calculation, lets say that adds up to: 1700kW for the lamps; 3400kW for the climate control; 100kW for the heating element. You can check my figures if you want and post some nasty, hatefilled blograge if you come up with something different.

Next we utilize our trusty factor of 1.155 for Queensland's kWh/co₂ emissions, leaving us with a grand total of 5.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted to grow those plants.

Whilst the plants absorb a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere, most of this is probably burnt away when the buds are smoked and the trunks and branches are destroyed.

WINNER: Cow, by 3.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum

What to do instead

Some sensible states around the world do allow a few plants to be grown for personal use. This seems to fluctuate over time - for example, according to this guy South Australia law has gone from allowing 10 plants in 1987, to 3 plants in 1999, back to 10 plants in 2000, back to 3 a few weeks later, and then all the way down to 1 by 2002. Even in the Netherlands, the use of marijuana is not such a free-for-all as your backpacking friend may lead you to believe - amazingly it is still illegal to grow marijuana in large enough quantities to supply the coffee shop, so the lax laws have succeeded in nothing but providing a shelter for the black market. What a waste!

In ideal, fantastic fairy-world, suitable land would be made available for sustainable marijuana growth. A strain would be developed that provided excellent hurds for paper and hemcrete production, but also potent THC-filled buds for entertainment and medical purposes. The world's marijuana industry would be held in as high regard as its red wine industry (by everyone that is, not just the already enlightened).

In the nihilistic, smelly pig-world that we are forced to live, one can only be encouraged to avoid the black supermarket and opt for outdoor, home-grown organic herbs whenever possible.

This is what is required for an outdoor plant to thrive: