Vineland context: today's pot farmers

[pynchonoid]

Green hills

While San Francisco debates zoning for pot clubs,
somebody still has to grow this semilegal medicine –
and it's not always safe.

By Ann Harrison, San Francisco Bay Guardian

DEEP IN THE hills of Mendocino County, past three
locked gates and up a winding dirt road, the trimmers
at Green Mountain Farm are bringing in the harvest.

The marijuana plants, which stand four to seven feet
tall, are garlanded with dense clusters of fragrant,
seedless buds that must be carefully picked and cured
before they are dampened by winter rains – or seized
by law enforcement, which has set a record by
destroying well over one million marijuana plants this
year.

The 50 trimmers at this clandestine grow site work
16-hour days for three weeks, hand-trimming top-grade
marijuana destined for medical marijuana patients and
dispensaries in San Francisco.

"It's a race against time," says Antie M, manager of
the Green Mountain Farm collective, which is
cultivating 280 plants for 125 patients.

Under state law, caregivers and patients are permitted
to grow marijuana for a group of patients and can be
reimbursed for their expenses. In exchange for
allowing the growers to post medical cannabis
recommendations from patients' doctors at the grow
site – providing some degree of legal protection for
the growers – the patients receive free cannabis. Most
collectives meet their expenses by selling their
surplus pot to dispensaries or directly to other
patients.

Each patient at this collective will receive a quarter
pound of free cannabis, plus a chance to take in
beautiful scenery, eat good food, and listen to live
music.

While San Francisco city supervisors haggle over
cultivation limits and zoning restrictions for medical
cannabis dispensaries (see sidebar), there's another
reality taking place a couple hundred miles to the
north. Whatever the supervisors decide, someone has to
grow all the pot that gets smoked by patients in the
city – and no matter how friendly city officials are
to the end product, the growers are still hounded by
law enforcement.

The trim camp at Green Mountain Farm is only one of
many such gatherings taking place throughout northern
California this month. And this constellation of
quasi-legal outdoor marijuana grow sites doesn't just
cultivate exquisite medical cannabis.

The farmers who tend these plants are also creating
environmentally and socially responsible cannabis
farms very different from the armed, old-school,
commercial marijuana plantations that feed an
insatiable market but often damage the land.

An estimated 80 percent of the medical cannabis
consumed in San Francisco comes from outside the city.
Let's follow some of these buds as they make their way
into town. [...]


http://www.sfbg.com/40/04/cover_pot.html



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