Legal Cannabis in Oregon

Cannabis. I hear the complaints. 

"It's ugly." 

"It smells." 

"It changes my view." 

"There are all those workers on my neighbor's property." 

"It looks industrial." 

"I bought this property because I liked living next to a hay field." 

"I see a porta-potty." 

"I liked it before, when it was so quiet."

Don't complain. We chose this.

The cannabis fields we see are the result of free enterprise and public policy. By odd chance I played a role in this, both 40 years ago, and again today.

The changes are real, and from the point of view of neighbors who liked things "before," the change may be a big negative. Pear orchards and alfalfa fields are being replanted to fields of hemp under plastic, like on this photo of my own land. The view changed from something bucolic. The tractor in the photo is broadcast-spraying liquid fertilizer to be absorbed by the young plants' foliage.

Some of Southern Oregon's farm land had been in commercial orchards, but much rural farmland was fallow or neglected because no crop produced enough income to justify farming it. Now much of that under-farmed space is growing cannabis.

The land was protected as farm land for four decades. In May, 1973 Oregon's legislature passed Senate Bill 100, which created a blueprint for statewide land use planning. It set goals, and Goal Three was to protect agricultural land. It recognized that it was a vulnerable resource that would be lost forever if it were urbanized or divided into un-economic units. I was elected Jackson County Commissioner in November 1980, in a watershed political year that put Ronald Reagan in the White House. I was a Democrat and I said I supported the land use planning laws and would do my duty as a county commissioner to implement them. The occupation I listed in the Voters Pamphlet was "Melon Farmer." 

The county, under state mandate, essentially prohibited division of farm land into new, smaller parcels. Moreover, we essentially prohibited creation of new homesites. The result was a massive loss of market value for rural landowners. Rural land with marginal soils--even land that had never in history grown a profitable crop--was deemed to be "farm land," based on soils that allowed it to pasture animals for six weeks in the spring of the year. 

A great many rural landowners were furious. They said the value of their property was "taken" without justification or compensation. What can we do with our property? The answer was nothing much, and certainly nothing that made any money for them. Except for the commercial pear orchard land, which in 1980 had value as agriculture, rural landowners here were essentially preserving open space for their neighbors and banking land for some unknown future use. People had jobs "in town" to support the farm.

Rural landowners were given two tiny pieces of relief. One was state and county laws that assured their right to farm, free of complaints from neighbors. If the landowner grew garlic--a high value crop that the county cited as a potential use of land that would theoretically allow the farmer some income--and if a neighbor complained about the garlic smell, the farmer's interest came first. Tough luck for the neighbor. No complaining about smell, dust, sprays, or other traditional farm practices.

The second benefit was farm-use taxation. Since the land was farmland, and not eligible to become rural residence homesites, it would have the benefit of being taxed as such. This benefit has a catch: The landowner must farm that land for the purpose of making a monetary profit to keep that lower tax rate. 

I am such a farmer. My 65 acres of farmland is marginal land. It was a subsistence farm that survived the Great Depression because no one had borrowed money against it, and has stayed in the family because we had other income. I enjoy giving away the beautiful, vine-ripe melons I grow there, but there is no longer any money in selling them. They sell for less than the cost of production, at the same price today that I got selling them to local supermarkets 55 years ago. I lease land to a farmer who grows alfalfa and grain in rotation for rent that is just enough to pay the taxes and insurance on the property. The county annually sends me paperwork to document I am trying to make a monetary profit. I was just barely meeting that qualification. Until cannabis.

 

It was not apparent forty years ago, when we were preserving farm land so a farmer could potentially grow garlic--or pasture animals at a loss--that we were in fact preserving it so that it could grow cannabis. Finally, a profitable crop!

The country-side is dotted with lightweight structures of PVC pipe bent into an arc to be the skeleton covered with plastic, where people grow hemp under better-controlled conditions than in the open air. We also see permanent, industrial-looking greenhouses with big fans on the end and bright lights visible through the frosted glass.  From the outside they look like factories, with fences and locked gates. It is in fact what it looks like: A factory for growing cannabis.

A lot of Southern Oregon residents don't like the look, the smell, the change. But this new look is the result of public policy. If we want farmland, we need to accommodate farm uses. Cannabis is a farm use, and currently the most profitable one. If we want to encourage financial independence and entrepreneurship in a capitalist economy, then cannabis is what we get.

Southern Oregon's countryside does not look the way it looks by accident. We chose it. I recognize not everyone agrees, but I am happy with the choice. I like seeing farms be productive. Now many are. It fulfills the promise we made to rural landowners forty years ago. 

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