Marijuana cultivation in California is sucking streams dry, says new report

With its dense forests, foggy climate and rugged coastline, California’s Humboldt County has long been synonymous with its biggest cash crop: marijuana. Cannabis has thrived here — both before and since the state legalized it for medical purposes in 1996. The industry has been booming in the last few years, and with little regulation it has had a huge impact on the environment.

A report, published by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife earlier this month, quantifies some of that impact for the first time.

Researchers looked at marijuana plants grown outdoors, including those in greenhouses, on private land. They found that marijuana farming is overtaxing creeks during the growing season, which runs from May to September, a period of little rainfall in the state, the report notes. The water usage is so intense, in fact, that water diverted for marijuana cultivation likely exceeds stream flow in certain areas.

Additional research from state wildlife biologists that isn’t included in the report shows marijuana cultivation was partly to blame for several creeks that dried up last year.

A growing problem

The water-intensive crop requires an estimated 22.7 liters (6 gallons) per plant per day. Wine grapes, on the other hand, which also are widely grown in northern California, usually use just about 12.64 liters (3.3 gallons) per plant per day, according to the report.

The murky legal status of marijuana — it’s illegal for recreational use under California law and a federal offense to use it in any way — has made regulating cultivation difficult. Requiring growers to apply for permits or inspecting their farming operations would create a public record of their operations and expose them to potential federal prosecution. But state biologists began to notice a significant impact of marijuana cultivation on wildlife starting around 2009.

Persistent drought has put pressure on the state to more closely manage water resources. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, a source of water for drinking and farming, stands at 9% of normal levels.

But the expansion of marijuana farming in the state is the primary reason that water and wildlife managers are taking a closer look at its effects on water quantity and quality, says Cris Carrigan, director of the office of enforcement at the State Water Resources Control Board. Using Google Earth data, Fish and Wildlife biologists saw the amount of land used to grow marijuana approximately double from 2009 to 2012.

Through public education and enforcement, new efforts are underway to compel growers to secure permits for water diversion and discharge. But will marijuana farmers comply? Carrigan suspects the response won’t be overwhelming, at least initially.

“We started to regulate dairies 10 years ago, and some people are still in denial that we can regulate them,” Carrigan says. “I suspect marijuana growers will be like the dairy farmers, who are uber-libertarian and aren’t going to get permits unless they have to.”

Firm numbers on the size of even the state-legal marijuana market are hard to come by, partly because those in the business — from growers to retailers — don’t necessarily want to provide data, since marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

A California market research firm, the ArcView Group, estimates that the legal market grew 74%, from $1.5bn in 2013 to $2.7bn in 2014, nationwide. Medical marijuana is legal in 23 states as well as Washington DC. Four states — Alaska, Oregon, Colorado, Washington — now allow its recreational use.

California’s environmental regulators expect to see more land cleared for marijuana planting to serve the growing demand. They are already alarmed by the impact of existing farms.

Disappearing rivers

In the Fish and Wildlife report, researchers compared estimated water demand with stream flow data. The results indicate that growers are at times are diverting more than what three of the four creeks studied could support.

The creeks need a certain amount of water to keep coho and chinook salmon and steelhead trout alive, three species listed as threatened by the federal government.

Coho salmon spend their childhood in the creeks for a year before making their way to the ocean, where they will stay for two years before coming back to spawn, explains Scott Bauer, senior environmental scientist with the Fish and Wildlife and a lead author of the report.

“It’s harder for us to recover those species if we lose them every year. The impact cascades through the food web,” Bauer says. “There are other critters that rely on the returning adults for food. The commercial fisheries would be affected. The repercussion to both the environment and humans is significant.”

Bauer says additional research conducted last year in northern California — the results of which aren’t included in the report — show that four of five streams in the research area that reach marijuana farms went dry last summer. The only stream that didn’t wasn’t a source of water for the crop.

Anxiety on the ground

One of the desiccated streams was Sproul Creek in the Eel River watershed, dry for the first time in many years. The state’s water and wildlife regulators say marijuana cultivation and drought were likely to blame. In January, they inspected 14 properties along Sproul Creek in Humboldt County as part of a new effort to require growers to apply for permits to divert water and discharge waste.

Getting a water diversion permit from the Fish and Wildlife isn’t a new requirement, but it has been rarely enforced. To boost enforcement, the agency can now issue penalties administratively instead of going to court. Fines range from $8,000 per stream per site for diverting too much water to $20,000 for polluting streams with fertilizer runoff.

The California Water Resources Control Board began to look at how it could regulate marijuana growers last year and is currently developing a permit for wastewater discharge that growers in 10 northern California counties will need to get. Its North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board plans to release a draft of the permitting language over the next month for public comment, and the goal is to launch the permitting process by this summer, Carrigan says.

The water board can issue orders requiring property owners to reduce diversion. But those orders can be hard to enforce since California’s water rights law doesn’t specify how much or at what rate those who live along a stream can draw. Those property owners can draw as much as they deem reasonable for domestic use, and they don’t have to meter how much they take.

Bauer estimates that only 1% of the farms in Humboldt County, one of the three big marijuana production counties in what is known as the Emerald Triangle, has the necessary permits from the Fish and Wildlife for water diversion.

It’s natural for many in the marijuana businesses to be wary of the state effort to regulate them more closely, says Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the Emerald Growers Association, which is based in Humboldt County and represents growers, dispensaries and others in the business statewide.

But growers need to support regulations that reduce environmental impact and become more involved in public policy, he says. Being more politically active also makes it more likely for growers to get help in these drought years.

“The bottom line is unregulated agriculture has environmental impact. Our challenge is in how to regulate it,” Allen says. “It takes time. We are not going to be in perfect compliance tomorrow.”