Taliaferro’s Spruce Grove farm, perched on a ridge about 3,000 feet above sea level, usually rises atop the fabled Humboldt fog. But on a recent morning, dense clouds concealed the vast valley below and obscured nearby mountain peaks. Across the ridge, a burn scar from the 2020 August Complex fire that destroyed more than 1 million acres slashed the land.
This year, Taliaferro is looking to cut costs by hiring just 14 seasonal employees for all seven farms, down from 28 in years past. He’s also looking to replace damaged equipment with cheaper materials like PVC for the greenhouses instead of metal, and plastic for the water tanks.
“We lost an entire summer’s water storage,” he said. “I’m not entirely sure what the remedy is for that.”
‘Outdoor is still the gold standard’
Some 50 minutes away in Mendocino County, Nikki Lastreto and her husband, Swami Chaitanya, sit side by side on their living room couch surveying dozens of small containers filled with cannabis samples for this year’s Emerald Cup, known as the “Academy Awards of cannabis” within industry circles.
Lastreto and Chaitanya were snowed in for four weeks when a bitter storm blanketed the bumpy two-mile road that leads to a large meadow where their 190-acre homestead houses their eponymous brand, Swami Select.
On an unseasonably cold April day, the road in was slick with ice and mud as Chaitanya’s SUV bucked and bounced through a maze of trees.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University, Chaitanya traded his East Coast upbringing for San Francisco in 1967 and worked as a filmmaker and photographer before turning to cannabis farming. Now 79, Chaitanya, who was born William Allen Winans, wears a long white beard and the white robes of his adopted religion, Hinduism. His likeness emblazoned on Swami Select containers has become synonymous with craft cannabis.
Lastreto, a former television and newspaper journalist, holds a notebook and pen as Chaitanya picks up a nugget and closely inspects it with a magnifying glass. He pinches and squeezes the sample, sniffing it for quality.
“Look how dry this one is,” he said, handing the unimpressive nugget to his wife.
Lastreto, 68, jots down a note, and the couple moves on to the next sample. It’s just the third year indoor cannabis entries are allowed in the Emerald Cup and already they comprise a majority of contestants, Lastreto said.
Despite its popularity among consumers and retailers, Lastreto and Chaitanya both prefer organically grown marijuana exposed to natural sunlight rather than the artificial lamps of indoor operations. Nutrients from the sun contribute to better terpenes, naturally occurring compounds that determine the scent and flavor of pot and contribute to the healing powers of the plant.
“Outdoor is still the gold standard,” Lastreto said.
Still, indoor cannabis has quickly overtaken outdoor marijuana in the legal market. Farmers are able to cultivate year-round and can better control the conditions for each plant. As a result, indoor cannabis has flooded the marketplace, making it difficult for small outdoor operations like Swami Select to compete.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
