 Food System Network, which is a local group of people working within the food system. Our network's council consists of representatives from organizations, agencies, businesses, and groups who are all working on various aspects of the food system related to agriculture, health, and nutrition. These groups include All Care, Rogue Farm Corps, Access, Sodexo, and the Three Rivers School District, Folia Farms, Southern Oregon University, Rogue Valley Farm to School, OSU Small Farms, By George Farm, and the Josephine County Blue Zones. And I just wanted to take a minute to ask those of our council members who are in the audience to just stand up. So if you'd like to learn more, they're all clustered together, it looks like. If you'd like to learn more about the Food System Network, these are great people to talk to. The network's purpose is to convene conversations related to food, agriculture, and nutrition in the Rogue Valley. We also support new projects that are related to food, and we provide forums for people working on these issues to network and seek solutions together. So last year, the Rogue Valley Food System Network met to discuss the priorities for the 2017 annual year. The growth and development of the cannabis industry was noted as the priority focus by multiple components of the food system. Stakeholders noted the potential for changed land use law, water use, markets, and collaborative opportunity as reasons to explore this changing landscape. Agricultural landscape change is a common occurrence, as it is in Southern Oregon and throughout the country. An agricultural emphasis on pears, grapes, and cannabis are just three of our most recent industries. But a dive into our history suggests that we've done much more. We were at one time known for our production of prunes, for peaches, for walnuts, for our dairies, for tulips, and more. The expansion of the cannabis industry is perhaps one of the more complex landscape changes we have faced based on federal versus state legal dynamics, economic potential, and a long history of prohibition that has led to the need to rediscover thoughtful growing practices and regulations. Despite the complexity, it is clear that the changing face of agriculture in the region poses outstanding opportunities and very real challenges for existing business. My hope in facilitating ongoing discussion this year is to leverage opportunity and thoughtfully plan and mitigate for challenges. I've been impressed already this year as we've met in various groups by the willingness of so many to volunteer both time and talent to conversations that will improve our region. Thank you for your civility, for your willingness to learn from one another, and your love for our remarkable region. I hope our panel presentation tonight will be interesting and informative. So just a little bit tonight on how we're going to move forward. So we don't have a policy agenda, that's not our intent. The Rogue Valley Food System Council is an educational body, as our hope tonight is to inform. So tonight we'll be about thoughtful dialogue that we hope will illuminate the opportunities and challenges associated with a changing landscape. We hope for this dialogue will lead to informed decision making, business ventures and planning, but our goals as an organization is exclusively to promote shared understanding. Our goal tonight is to help promote an understanding of the way in which the cannabis industry interacts with other aspects of the agricultural industries in the region. We have designed our limited time together to promote an understanding of a wide variety of issues tied to that changing agricultural landscape. We are not here to judge or criticize any perspective or any industry. We are also not a policy-making body, we are simply here as an educational facilitator. This meeting will be followed by a series of community-based conversations with interested stakeholders. We invite all of you to participate in those meetings and we'll provide time at the end of this panel presentation tonight to connect you with the individuals facilitating each of those discussions. You will note that several of the communities that will be represented in those discussions are up on the wall right now. We'll be organizing folks who are interested in participating in those discussions into those communities at the end of tonight's discussion. So our panel discussion today will not be a venue for sharing our own individual perspectives or experiences, but each of those community conversations will be, and we hope that you'll participate. Tonight we've invited key stakeholders to address us in a area of expertise. We invite you to listen, to take notes, and to learn. We hope that many of you will be able to join us in our community conversations for further discussion with a much broader understanding of our region based on what you learned tonight. Please join us this evening for a civil and respectful opportunity to learn from each other. Your goal tonight is primarily to listen and to understand the perspectives of others. Your opportunity to articulate your own perspective will be presented during those community based conversations, which will be held in August, September of this year. As our panelists speak tonight, you may find yourself with questions. As questions come to mind, please raise your hand and you will be handed an index card in which to write your questions. Stu and Megan will be providing those index cards. There's Stu, Megan's on the news outside at the moment. We have a very limited amount of time tonight, and depending on how many questions are posed, we may or may not get to all of them, but we're going to do our very best to try to answer other questions or to allow our panelists to answer our questions. I'd ask you to remember that we're not in any position to steer legislation, nor do we have any interest as a body, as a roadway system network in doing so today. We hope that you will enjoy hearing from our expert stakeholders this evening, meeting professionals in your field, and promoting shared understanding with those in the room. So with that, Mod's going to introduce our panelists tonight. So we've, I don't know how well you can see the agenda that's up here, but we've given our panelists about 10 minutes each, and we've asked them to respond to four questions that will put, it's the next PowerPoint slide. So we'll post that so you can see what the questions we requested them to answer. So I'm just going to go ahead and introduce the panelists now all at once. Siobhan Haynes is our first speaker. He's the Oregon Water Resource Department District 13 Watermaster serving Jackson County. Siobhan has worked for OWRD for around 13 years and has lived in Southern Oregon most of his life. Chris Jagger, our second panelist, is owner-operator of Blue Fox Farm, a 40-acre organic vegetable farm in the Applegate Valley of Southern Oregon. He's also the owner head consultant for Blue Fox Agricultural Services, a full-service agricultural supply and consultation company focusing on ecological solutions for the modern farmer. Both his farm and its agricultural services use living soils as a foundation to scale farming operations efficiently and profitably. Daniel Sweeney, our third panelist, is a viticulturalist and farm labor contractor working in the Rogue and Applegate Valleys. He was manager at Quail Run Vineyards for four years and has worked on farms and vineyards around the country for the last 15 years. Josh Labombard, our fourth panelist, is the Southern Oregon Regional Representative for the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. He covers Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties. Josh has been with the state for close to six years. Our next panelist is Megan Lanier. Megan has a strong background in technical research and writing and over 14 years of experience in land use consulting. She thrives on helping clients navigate the permitting system to guide and assist in making property owners' ideas a reality. Having been in the valley for the last 15 years, Megan has developed a great working relationship with Jackson County and other local and state departments. And our final panelist is Michael Johnson. He's a cannabis industry professional who currently is the chief of operations for Siski Sun Grown, a recreational producer and processor. Michael has extensive cannabis industry experience with previous executive roles in retail, wholesale distribution, farming, and extraction facilities. So, as Vince mentioned, we won't be taking questions, but if you'd like to have a question posed to the panel after the completion of the panel, please raise your hand. And someone will bring you a note card and a pen. And with that, I think we'll have Siobhan come up. Good evening. My name is Siobhan Haynes, and I am the water master for District 13, which covers Jackson County. So, of course, you know, with cannabis cultivation comes water use, and most any cannabis cultivation requires the need of a water right. And so the agency I work for is the agency that issues water rights for many different uses. And the majority of uses that use water in this area is for irrigation. And so with cannabis cultivation, with many things, if you're going to grow something, you need to water it. If you're going to grow it to sell it, you need to have a water right. So there's many types of water rights, like I said, mostly it's for irrigation. A lot of the interest for this area right now has been well water use. You know, there's different types of cannabis cultivation. There's the OLCC Avenue and there is the Medical Avenue. So anything that is the OLCC Avenue has to have a specific certificate of water right. If you're doing stuff with the medical side, then you can use your well that doesn't require a water right. So this is a handout that we give to most any water user. It's kind of geared towards cannabis cultivation, showing like the exemptions for water use from a well that don't require a water right. And so the main exemption that we are concerned about here is the watering of up to a half of an acre of a non-commercial lawn and garden. And so that's a lot of the stuff that we deal with nowadays is trying to figure that fine line between what is considered commercial and what would be considered allowable under the groundwater exemption. And so pretty much if you're watering something under a half of an acre and you're not selling it, you can use your well water without needing a water right. Next slide. And so kind of a few observations that we've dealt with recently. We've had an increase in new groundwater right applications in the Rogue Basin. A lot of those groundwater right applications don't get approved because of the proximity of that well to surface water source. And we've been seeing a large number of complaints and concern about water use directly towards cannabis cultivation. So next slide. So there's a little slide just showing the number of groundwater applications. My agency has received since 2004. We've received about 40 groundwater applications in the Rogue Basin, mostly Jackson and Josephine County until January 2015. And so since January 2015, this graph is a little old. We've received 100 and we've got 106 groundwater applications in the 18 month period. 58 of those have been in Jackson County and 46 of those have been in Josephine County. And majority of those have all been directly associated with some type of cannabis cultivation. The real interesting thing about this is it's a different type of use. Most of the irrigation or water use in the area is specifically irrigation. 95% of these new applications are for a character of use that is considered nursery. And what that nursery use allows folks to do is water for a longer period of time. So next slide. And so a lot of times when we might see we get called out for water use issues directed towards cannabis cultivation, it has to deal with the half-faker exemption. Oh, thanks. It has to deal with the half-faker exemption. And so what we have to do a lot is we're doing a lot of just simple geometry, counting plants and raised beds or circles and grow bags. And we're finding a lot of the time, a lot of the complaints that were received. Most people are within that half-acre watering because they're within the medical component. Some of the other things we're seeing is like the type, different changes in irrigation methods. Here's an aerial photograph of the same piece of property over time. The first photo showing typical sprinkler irrigation. So this landowner is using water over, I think it's about five acres or so and sprinkling the entire parcel. But because the crop got changed to cannabis, it's a drip system. So in fact, they're using a lot less water but having the same type of footprint over the years. This image is kind of a similar thing. It's from flood irrigation to a drip system. The image on the upper right is typical flood irrigation out in the Williams Creek area where they different crop type now. It's cannabis, so no more flood. It's sprinkle, so I'm using a little less water. And I threw in this picture of a friend of mine, his son, on a different piece of property. But I really like it because it shows some of the old flood irrigation methods, like siphoning water from a ditch flooding property. We've been working a lot with irrigation districts. Most irrigation districts operate on a flood irrigation, but with the new industry cannabis not having to flood anymore, but bulging that water use, banking it in a small temporary facility and then applying it to lands as they need to see fit. So here's another example of what was historically flood irrigation, but a new crop type coming in and using water a little bit more efficiently. And that's pretty much about all I was talking about, but I'm sure there's lots of questions and I'll feel free to answer more questions at the end. Hi, I'm Chris Jagger at Blue Fox Farm on the Applegate Valley. I've been out there for about 15 years growing up to 40 acres of vegetables and I've seen the changing landscape since we've been here. Not for the worst at all, I don't think. It's just different. And one thing I would really like to point out to everybody is that this is a very nuanced conversation. I think it goes way beyond just cannabis. I think it's an agricultural conversation that we should all be having. And I think in relation to the food system, I'm personally seeing the food system change rapidly. I think cannabis has an effect on it. But I also think that there's bigger players at the food system right now, which is consolidation and corporatization versus food system. And so that's something that actually I'm more concerned about. But tonight what we're talking about is how cannabis is affecting the food system. What I would say is I'm talking about soils and soil fertility, and soil is the number one thing to me as a vegetable farmer. And that comes right down to this whole concept of stewardship. And we all can be stewards to our piece of land that we're on. It's just how we decide to steward that land. And so what I would say is that I have seen vegetable farmers steward land effectively. I've seen cannabis farmers steward land effectively. I've seen horse ranchers steward land effectively. And I have seen orchardists and vineyardists effectively. I've also seen the complete flip of that as well. And so I think it's something that we all need to be careful is not to generalize whenever we're trying to look at new things that are coming into our lives. Because I can be really quick myself to make opinions, which probably four or five years ago if you had asked me my opinion on this, it would be very different than what it is now. And four or five years ago I saw as the landscape was changing and all of a sudden I didn't have the same workforce available to me. And I very quickly said, oh, it must be these cannabis farms that are coming in and they're taking all my workers, you know. But then I pride myself in not jumping to conclusions and really investigating more deeply and saying, well, what actually is taking all of my workers away? And this does relate with soil because I know that's what I'm talking about. And so I started looking at that and I started reverse engineering back and I said, okay, well, where is the workforce and why is that limiting how much land I can grow on, which means increase my production and have a viable livelihood. And I started looking around and realizing that the workforce was going away for a multitude of reasons, increase in labor costs. The fact that I think that our culture nowadays doesn't value hard labor and hard work the same that we have in the past. And also just that there's a lot of other places that people can go and make better money. And so I said, well, let's look at this and see where I can help this industry make a change because I had these wonderful class one soils and I was like, man, I'm in this class one soils and I'm working it. And I started seeing soil trucks coming around the valley and I was like, well, why are people bringing in soiling? Because I had no idea at all, you know. And I started looking into like, well, where's all this soil going and what is it doing? You know. And as I investigated that, I realized that it wasn't just everybody that was growing cannabis was bringing soil in. There were people like Michael's farm that are going in the ground and I said, wow, I shouldn't just go ahead and blanket statement and say, you know, this industry is doing this because that wasn't the case at all. And so I started going case by case. And then I started putting my name out there and saying, hey, I want to know more about your industry. And then all of a sudden the cannabis industry started reaching out to me and saying, well, we want to know more about what you're doing because we're going to start scaling up here as legalization comes on. And we want to figure out how to farm on scale. And so I realized that there was this place for this conversation to start happening, you know. And I said, well, man, I need to create a venue for this and how do I facilitate this? And so I created Blue Fox Ag Services as a way to consult and interact with people and yet continue my living. And then I also created the Living Soil Symposium as just a venue to get everybody together and start talking about like these issues that we're talking about tonight and give people a way to facilitate and change how they're growing their systems. And after all of this kind of started developing, I started realizing that the reason that all these soil trucks were coming out in the valley and filling pots and filling raised beds and scraping people's pads was because people didn't know any other way necessarily because the cannabis industry started underground, indoors, hydroponically, and people were working with these systems that they knew how to work with. And when your livelihood depends on it, you don't really want to change your system. And so what I found was I found a lot of people were starting to be more and more open to these new ways, which were actually old ways, of just growing in the ground. And we had to start developing systems that would be able to prove that you could get the same results. You could get the same cannabinoid profiles. You could get the same yields. And so that's something that I've been working on the last three or four years is using my expertise in farming for 20 years growing vegetables and helping the cannabis community to figure out how they can do the same in the ground because as they see their costs start to go up and then their returns go down, they have to figure out how to tighten their margins. And so that's the main thing that I would say about the world of soil fertility and the food system and the interaction of it is that I am concerned about it in a certain respect, but in another respect, like I just see it as another leg of agriculture. And I'm excited to see how it will evolve over the coming years. And I'm okay with these rocky waters that we're in right now because a lot of people there's... It's interesting. Everybody I talked to before I came here tonight and once I got here, everybody was kind of not sure why we were all here. Like nobody really knew exactly what we were trying to drive home. And that's okay. I think that's great. And I think that this should be a starting place for us to all be in one room and ask questions and wonder what the hell is going on and how is this going to change the face of agriculture and how can this be another industry just like grapes or just like pears or just like vegetables. And there are going to be problems along the way and I feel like the best way to deal with that is to come up with solutions. And that's honestly what I'm trying to do with my other enterprises that I've created is it's not to figure out a way to capitalize off of it. It's a way to continue the conversation with everybody and have it in this open format. So I know that's kind of a long convoluted way to relate to soil fertility, but I just don't feel like we can get into stewarding our land unless we figure out the human aspect of it first. And so that's something that I'm most interested right now. So that's pretty much all I've got. Okay. So just to, yeah, thank you for that, Chris. That was great. And just to piggyback on that a little bit is the point about generalization is a really good point. And I think that's part of the issue we're dealing with here in this entire conversation is cannabis agriculture. And as Chris said, they're pretty much one thing. They're all happening in the same places. And it is a mistake to generalize that they're one thing. I think I've got my list of the questions that the organizers asked, but real quickly, agriculture itself, when you generalize, you say agriculture vineyards this and that, I think an important thing, oh, by the way, I'm here to talk about labor. Sorry. So one of the things when you talk about farming in general, you know, Chris is farming 40 acres. I'm currently farming about 150 acres in the past. I've been farming up to 400 acres here in the valley. And so scale is critical when assessing labor. Chris's traditional labor force might be a dozen interns through the summer. I'm looking at 20 to 60 folks mostly from Mexico. And as Chris said, we've had labor issues in farming in general for a while. You know, you've got small scale agriculture intensive veggie production and other small scale producers tend to have fewer people. They tend to be college age, and here I am generalizing, but they tend to be college age folks doing internships, learning a craft, learning as apprentices or interns, and then moving on and about. And I'm dealing with a migrant or really a local but immigrant labor force. And then as farms get bigger than the operations I'm running, you see mechanization and then supplement with some other, typically again, Mexican labor or immigrant labor. So farming is an industry scale. We've been facing labor issues since well before anything happened to do with marijuana, well before anything happened to do with current administration for decades. Farm labor has been hammered. Again, same reasons. Chris said you've got the work ethic of the up and coming generation of farm labor age folks in the country and you've got restrictions on immigration, but you also have what's going on in Mexico, and I don't mean to generally say Mexicans, you know, we have folks from Guatemala, but almost everyone who works with me is from Mexico, so I'm using that term, but really you've got global forces at play. We've got, in Mexico you have rising rate of education and what you see with rising rate of education is decline in birth rate and so also in Mexico you have now a country that is a net farm labor importer and so we don't have the same available labor from Mexico that we've had on the mid-scale. And then circling over to marijuana as an industry, I think you've got multiple industries within that realm as well, you've got rec, which is new, you've got medical, which has been around, and you've got bootleggers, and that's the folks who are growing solely for the black market, and then there's some interplay between some of those, but I think it's, again, as Chris was saying, when you have the pressures tightening on rec and their margins growing thinner because there's more marijuana available and labor's getting tighter and their expenses go up and you've got the medical folks who, you know, their market is limited theoretically, what you'll see is the most robust and sort of sustainable realm is in the bootleg, but that's conjecture, I understand. So real quick into my personal experience and then I'll address the questions that the organizers asked, I went into the season thinking that I didn't have much of a labor problem. Mod had asked me earlier on in the season about this talk and I said, well, I don't know if I'm the person to talk to because I don't think that much of the Mexican labor force that I'm working with is interested in working in marijuana. I can generalize as to why that might be, but really it's been a little stigmatized in their culture. A lot of them have questionable immigration status and so they may not feel like working in an industry that they've received to be less than above board. And then you've got, you know, the history of where they've come from, marijuana doesn't have a great rap in Mexico. So, but this year I've started to see and I've heard from small scale veggie farmers, yeah, they've been losing folks out to cannabis for years. This year I'm starting to finally see loss of supervisors, loss of farm labor hands, workers on the field and it's not a generalization or a guess as to where they're going because I'm being told they're going to go work in cannabis or as they call it, marijuana, but they're going to work in marijuana because it pays, it pays so much more than we can afford to. And I'm a contractor, so I don't actually pay out of pocket, but I still can't justify to my clients, hey, I need to pay people 20 bucks an hour, but that's the going rate as I'm told for marijuana production is 20 bucks an hour for field labor and that is what it is, that's what we're dealing with and it really does in my opinion raise a question of equitable wages for farm labor. Are they setting a bar that we all need to rise to if we're in other ag sectors, do we need to figure out how to be able to pay competitive wage or is this an artificial standard? And I don't have an answer to that, that's one of my questions. But I do know that farms need long-term labor to create equitable situations and I am concerned that some farms won't make it through this bubble, but to address the questions that the organizers posed to us here, how and where to food system and cannabis industry intersect, land, water, labor, all the things we're here talking about, and farm service industries, so any contractors who are doing irrigation, running heavy equipment, trucking, any farm supply resources, there is equal demand, if not outpace demand and again in the same way you have labor, being influenced by the available dollars in cannabis, you have these other resources being influenced. Sometimes it's hard to get a trucker to come out and I've heard, I'm friends with a lot of contractors and they joke with me what they charge the marijuana guys because they can, you know. So describe changes you have seen to the food system in recent years related to cannabis industry. Well, land prices have gone up dramatically. Labor has become more difficult to secure. I was talking to the extension agent today and it's like the other guys are asking me, can I get, you know, can I hire some of your lab interns to come do field work for me? They're just having a hard time nailing down folks. And it's not, again, this isn't, I'm guessing that it's going to cannabis, we're being told, like I'm going to go work Trim and Reef or setting up trellis in cannabis farms or laying out plastic in the big hemp fields. So it's a real competition there. Challenges I see the cannabis industry presenting to the food system, increased pressure on labor and other resources. We have to figure out how to motivate folks to grow food when there's an easy way to make more money growing marijuana. What opportunities do you see the cannabis industry affording the food system? It's certainly a wealthier local market because as profits are high right now folks are able to afford more expensive local produce. And I don't know, one of my questions is, is that a net gain for the food system? If you've got wealthy clients around, well that might be good, that might help you raise your labor. So a guess at a solution, just to wrap up here, how am I doing on time? Okay, a guess at a solution, same solution for everything, which is spend money where you want to see it grow. So if you're into supporting family farms, spend money at the farmers market. Spend money where the family farmers, the local farmers are selling their produce and that's pretty much the best thing you can do if you want to see the farms weather the storm. If you have finished writing down your question, please go ahead and raise your hand and Stuart Megan will come and collect them. Thank you. And this is Josh on land use planning. I'm Josh. So my department, Department of Land Conservation and Development, administers the statewide planning program for the state of Oregon. Statewide planning has been in effect for 44 years now since 1973. We have a foundation of 19 statewide planning goals, 14 of which apply to Southern Oregon. And the intersection of food system, cannabis industry and land use really comes down to a couple of the goals, but primarily goal three, which is agricultural lands. So our goal for agricultural lands is essentially to preserve and maintain agricultural lands for agricultural production. So it says they shall be preserved and maintained for farm use, consistent with existing and future needs for agricultural products, forests and open space and with the state's agricultural land use policies. So in regards to cannabis, this came from the legislature, so it's in revised statute. Senate Bill 1598 specifically called cannabis or marijuana a crop for the purposes of farm use. So essentially in doing so, what it did was put cannabis into the same category as all the other agricultural commodities that we see in the state of Oregon. So that's an important thing as we discuss this. That's not something that we can change. Well, that's something the legislature could change, potentially, but as far as staying out of policy, that's not something that we can change at the moment. So it's a matter of working with that existing framework and that existing definition. The Senate Bill also established that or allowed that jurisdictions... Sorry. Sorry. It also prohibited or also allowed for reasonable regulations to be established by jurisdictions. Can everybody hear me now? Okay, okay. Got it. So counties are doing this and cities are doing this quite differently across the state. In southern Oregon, across the state, the things that counties have considered to be reasonable regulations are things such as setbacks, noise, things that address odor, water use, lighting, canopy size, waste management. So that's something that counties have taken different approaches with across the state. Down here, primarily, we're talking about Josephine and Jackson counties. Jackson County adopted what they considered to be reasonable regulations a while ago. What is it, a year, year and a half ago? Josephine County has still not done that yet. So Jackson County, for instance, took into consideration something else and one of the things that they thought about was whether they wanted to allow cannabis growing on rural residential land. So because the legislature termed marijuana a farm use, it allowed outright where any farm use is allowed. In rural residential land, the primary use of rural residential land is really for residential. And then there's secondary uses like farming, agriculture, things like that. So it's to a large degree up to the counties to decide how they want to permit that or whether they want to permit that. They could allow it outright. They could allow it with certain specific conditions like additional setbacks, decreasing canopy size. Jackson County decided to not allow growth on commercial recreation growth on rural residential land. So far, Josephine County hasn't made a decision on that. They did put out a referendum on the ballot, which suggested that the community supports prohibiting it on rural residential land, but they haven't acted on that yet. So we were asked, you know, what are the challenges and opportunities? So I'm going to start with the challenges and move on to the opportunities. I'd like to end on a good note. So we've seen, I've heard a lot of concerns from citizens across both counties, primarily Josephine County. This isn't an exhaustive list. These are just some of the things I hear quite a bit about. The first thing is about greenhouses. And in particular, I think what people are concerned about is kind of how they term it to be like the industrialization of agriculture. They're seeing a lot of indoor growth happening. And I think, you know, some of you, the previous panelists spoke about that as to why that might be the case. But we're seeing with that a lot of community impacts because primarily because of noise with greenhouse fans. We're hearing concerns about the compaction of soils and essentially at least from a perception standpoint the loss of those soils indefinitely because of the compaction and the, you know, and paving over those soils. One of the main things that I like to emphasize, and I think we all know it intuitively, that we have a high concentration of producers in Jackson and Josephine County. In fact, in the two counties alone, we make up a third of the OLCC permitted grows. So, you know, we don't make up anywhere near a third of the population or a third of the size of the state. We have a third of the grows though. So it's something that, you know, if you think about it that way, it's like if they were dispersed a lot more, if we had a lot less of them, we'd probably have a lot fewer problems. But that's not the case here because we have a particular climate that's hospitable to growing cannabis. And then what was touched on earlier is the price of land, especially the price of land with irrigation rights. In Jackson County, it's EFU land because it's not allowed. Cannabis growing is not allowed on rural residential land. So we're seeing definitely an increase in land values on EFU land that has irrigation rights. And in Josephine County, because it is still allowed on rural residential land, we're seeing an increase on both rural residential and EFU land. Mod, can you go to the next one? So this is just a snapshot from Zillow about the increase. I don't know if you guys can see that. Sorry if you can't. But it's basically showing the year-to-year increase on sales, home sale prices. And this includes properties that are vacant and properties with homes. But what I wanted to point out was, you know, you look at, say, Williams, they've seen, and Wolf Creek, it looks like they're the same. They've seen a 24% increase, year-to-year increase. They've seen a 30-year increase in prices. So the median home price right now in Williams is $302,000. Isn't that interesting? So this, I think, easily illustrates, and I did the same thing with Jackson County, but there are too many cities to talk about. And it's a little bit more complicated in Jackson County. There's some different dynamics here. But I think this points out the fact that the price of land is going up, and that it's affecting everybody, including those who want to purchase land to grow things other than cannabis. So what kind of opportunities are there? Well, from a land use standpoint, one of the opportunities, I guess, positive benefits that I see is that up until cannabis became as prevalent as it is in the legal form that it is, our department and the local jurisdictions were getting a lot of requests to convert farmland into residential use. What would often be said is, you know, we can't grow anything on this property. Why shouldn't we be able to get the highest and best use of the property, which often translated into residential use? There's... I'll wait for that. So, you know, we have some philosophical issues and some statewide planning goals that really try to minimize residential development on rural lands and urban sprawl. So, to a certain degree, the cannabis industry has taken some of the heat off of the conversion of land because it is an agricultural commodity, and what we're seeing is a lot more interest in purchasing land, assuming that it has irrigation rights to grow cannabis on. And oftentimes, because they are often bringing their own soil in, they're not as concerned about the soil quality. So the ideal circumstance, I think, would be for properties that don't have high quality soil, but have irrigation rights to be able to get as many of the cannabis grows that we can on those pieces of property, because one of the things that I didn't list on that other list was the fact that we're seeing, in addition to the greenhouses and the compaction of soils, what we're seeing a lot of is prime farmland being purchased, not necessarily for the actual soil capabilities, but because it's land with irrigation rights. And we know that that type of land is in very short supply in this area, and to the extent possible, if we can try to get the, you know, the cannabis grows onto soils and property that aren't insutable, I think we should try to do that to the extent we can. The last thing, and I don't know if Daniel I didn't quite hear, but, you know, what we often hear is, you know, obviously that the age of farmers is continuing to go up. We're trying to encourage younger farmers to get into it. We've got obviously some conflicting things with the cost of land going up. One of the opportunities, though, here is for farmers that farm things other than cannabis to use cannabis as a supplemental income for them. And I also wanted to take the opportunity to point out this is not 2015 data, but this is Oregon's top 20 commodities. The commodity I highlighted, greenhouse and nursery, it's the number two commodity in the state of Oregon and I think it's been number one in the past as well. So I point that out because I've talked to the department of, our representative for the Department of Agriculture recently about this issue trying to prepare for this and what he said is really cannabis growing in the greenhouses that we're seeing and the proliferation of greenhouses and indoor growth isn't very dissimilar isn't very dissimilar to the greenhouses of the nursery stock and things that we see up in the Willamette. So it's just something that's of interest, you know, and I'm not giving any opinion here, but it is that is the second top commodity in the state of Oregon. So that's all I have. Can you go to my happy slide now? My name is Megan Lanier and I'm with Lanier Land Consulting. I'm a land use consultant and a planner here in the valley and I have been for about 15 years. Really a lot of my experience in going over some of the questions that they pose to us is a lot of what I hear on both sides of the community. We've been predominantly prior to the cannabis industry all I did was regular land use. We would do vineyards, we'd help people get dwellings established in conjunction with farm use and what we've seen now with the cannabis industry is a lot of my land use experience is now going in that direction just because there's a big demand for it. We have a like I said before, a lot of what I get out of the different communities and trying to compare the traditional farming practices if you will to the cannabis industry is that they have a lot of similarities but there are a lot of challenges and going to the questions here, let me just get to them really quickly I apologize, I'm going to have to look up here how and where do the food systems and cannabis industries intersect and one of the things I've seen in my experience has been that the they intersect and a lot of things have been actually mentioned so far, water is a big one that we were encountering I've encountered also land values a lot of people come to me in trying to purchase land to make sure it's the right land for whatever their project is and we've seen just an enormous increase in cost of housing, vacant land especially land that has irrigation rights but a big part of it of the how they also connect is really just with and with labor I think all of these things have actually been mentioned this evening describing the challenges the changes I've seen in the food system in recent years related to the cannabis industry a lot of this is a lot of the changes that I have seen is is the use of land not being and I think Siobhan had some very good slides showing how you have an entire field being farmed and now you'll have like a one-acre 40,000 square foot production site and one of the things that I've seen become an issue for some of my clients who are actually leasing land to cannabis people are they'll have 35 acres of irrigated land one acre is getting irrigated and what a lot of people don't understand is if you don't use those irrigation rights they will, they can go away so there's become a little bit more of a concern about that and how we should be able to is there a way that we could possibly coexist that gets to into some of the opportunity situation at the end there but I think a big part of it is making sure that we have those, that we can try to preserve those water rights for people for the future because cannabis you know maybe this particular person isn't going to be successful in what they try to do and the next thing you know we're resorting back to grass hay or we're resorting back to some sort of other farm use traditional type of farm use some of their challenges acquisition of land kind of goes back to that too their inability to acquire it the traditional farmer just because they don't have the income that a lot of the cannabis industry does so it's getting harder for them to lease land it's getting it's more expensive for them to lease land it's more expensive for them to purchase land and that's kind of become a pretty big problem at least I've experienced challenges that we see the cannabis industry presenting to the food system some of the really my only experience in this has been in talking with some of my other clients who have I have a client who owns an orchard and they've explained to me that their biggest concern was labor it was already becoming a little bit of an issue like that was stated before and they're actually finding that it's a lot harder now the challenges that they've come into but again the irrigation is a big issue too that's another challenge that we're considering is not losing those irrigation rights on these large parcels of land and being able to make sure that people are using their water rights appropriately because a lot of people think oh I've got water rights off this creek and what they don't understand is that the water rights were done correctly they would have been mapped in a certain areas to where those can be used and a lot of people are not using them in those areas there's another another challenge that we've seen is people not using their irrigation properly in terms of opportunities to see the cannabis industry affording the food system network I really think that one of the things that I would like to see just because I've represented both sides of the industry is a coming of them together to be able to utilize all of the land so that we're not having a 30 acre 100 acre parcel of land sitting fallow for the most part with the exception of wherever the grow area is or the green houses are going to be because in general I think even the largest I've seen has been anywhere from 3 to 4 acres and it's just because it's very well spread out but it would be really nice to see the rest of that land utilized and for us to be able to preserve their irrigation rights one of the challenges that I've heard from some of my other cannabis clients is their concern of what's being sprayed on some of those other farms because whatever there's a very very restrictive amount of things that can actually be sprayed on cannabis so if you have a neighbor who, hey let's share this land but they're growing seems to be like every 10 minutes that's happening so the big challenge that I think that the cannabis industry has said to me is that there is what are they spraying on it there could be spray drift especially if you have an outdoor grow indoor grows can be a little bit more controlled but still there's concern with that as well so though that might be an opportunity I think there's going to have to be a lot of communication agreements and I really would love to see that go that way the other option is what Josh mentioned to is actually doing multiple grow sites on one parcel so that you can actually maximize the amount of land being used and also and make sure you can preserve those water rights I do believe that it has created a lot of opportunities a lot of my cannabis plants do very much support the local economy going to farmers markets it's something that is actually very something that I've seen as actually being very encouraging one of the what I'm also seeing as an opportunity to is a lot of the cannabis farmers actually taking on the opportunity to actually do other types of farming on their land because they now have control over what's being sprayed on them or what they can do with it and they're trying to expand into other areas so that we can hopefully utilize some of that land so from a land use perspective it's kind of a having these two crossovers a little bit interesting we're dealing with both the cannabis industry and then our traditional farming practices and I think there's going to have to be a lot of conversations and I think this is a really good symposium to have and to be able to keep the communication open I think that's the best way that we're going to be able to survive in the future my name is Michael Johnson I'm the chief of operations for Siski Sun Grown we're a recreational cannabis producer we're out in Williams we've got a single tier two recreational farm it encompasses about two and a half acres of land that's about 2500 plants we've also got an Oregon Department of Agriculture licensed hemp field next door on a separate parcel so I've been in the cannabis industry for about 10 years before I entered the cannabis industry I worked as a food farmer when I graduated high school I realized I wanted to come farm period and that led me into the the woofing program willing workers on organic farms and that's how I began so food production especially organic food production is really dear to my heart and something I care a lot about when I entered the cannabis industry here in Oregon I started as a medical marijuana patient and a small time medical marijuana grower as a lot of you know cannabis production here in southern Oregon is not new it's been going on for a long time primarily it's been happening in parcels that are not your typical ag parcels people have had to hide for the most part and so they haven't been out in the flats in the prime ag land and they haven't been using agricultural water rights for the most part so they brought me here to talk about regulation and when I consider regulation and what it's doing to both the cannabis industry and the food systems to me the primary benefit that I see is it's bringing cannabis into its rightful place as an agricultural crop and bringing it out of the shadows because it truly is an agricultural crop and rather than using domestic wells and being on residential parcels and up in the hills it now gets to come on to the ag land use water that's designated to be an agricultural crop and you know to start bringing revenue and revenue into the community as well as taxes to the community so you know as we leave the black market and the medical industry which is starting to go away the recreational industry I think provides a lot of opportunities I've seen a lot more money coming in that's available for food farmers you know when I go to the farmers market I can see the cannabis farmers spending their money on food which I think is a good thing I think economic vitality is something that directly supports the food system I think in general you know I used to work for Barking Moon Farm Melissa's here tonight they were my first farming gig in southern Oregon and one thing I got to see with their farm is you know the trouble with labor and many people have mentioned it here it can be slightly redundant the bigger problems I do see for the food industry is the lack of labor because cannabis farms are able to pay a higher wage that's something that I don't have an easy answer for however I see higher minimum wages for working class people as a benefit to our region in general and I think you know lower wage employees getting more money is only going to help our community in a variety of ways they're going to be able to eat healthier they're going to be less dependent in general and so I see the money coming in from cannabis as kind of a tide that can lift all boats I guess you know in closing I want to share one example which is from our farm the farm that we purchased for Siski's Sungrone previously a food farm that we then converted into cannabis it was a hay farm and any of you who know about hay farming it uses an incredible amount of water it doesn't provide many jobs and it doesn't provide much revenue in general to the person who owns the field and so the folks we bought the field from it was a five acre parcel they told us they used 50,000 gallons of water a day through the dry season to flood irrigate the field and the net revenue they were able to bring in was less than $10,000 over the entire season and they had no jobs created it was one gentleman who worked the field we've turned that five acre field into 20 full-time jobs over a million dollars in annual revenue and we use a fraction of the water that they were using previously so I think there's a new model that's being set forward all cannabis farmers are not alike they've talked about the greenhouse complexes the paving over of prime farmland degradation of rural residential communities with light pollution, noise pollution etc we're trying to provide an example of a way to do large-scale cannabis farming where you don't engage in those activities where you plant directly in the soil, use the prime ag soils, we don't truck in mountains of potting soil we don't have noisy fans we don't have high powered lights our farm looks a lot like a vineyard and so as Chris Jagger mentioned in his speech this is a nuanced conversation and so it's important not to generalize but to really understand that there's a lot of different things here there's a lot of different moving parts if we can encourage the right types of production and the good actors there's a lot of opportunity here and the synergy between cannabis farming and food farming I think provides just a really great thing for southern Oregon so thank you okay I think this question is going to be for Daniel or Chris and it in regards to labor so what compensation can the average field hand production expect wage, hourly, annual benefits, insurance and what effect does this have on the attractiveness of farming to the younger generation? I'd say mid-skill brand new 12, 1250 with skills, 14, 15 and then depending on your legal status your eligibility for benefits varies yeah and I would say you're talking grapes, right? talking grapes and pears, yeah so that's something that I think is interesting to take note of here is that I've always had that challenge too I've wanted workers and I've said well why not go to the vineyard workers but I couldn't afford to pay them that for a long time so it's kind of a similar story but we started everybody out at $12 an hour now benefits food, produce I'm looking forward to the day that we could have other benefits in healthcare but the margins just aren't there and with the increased minimum wage going up it's a question I want to pay everybody a living wage but if the margins aren't there then I'm challenged to be able to do that honestly the price of produce of vegetables hasn't really changed much since the 70s think about that for a minute I don't know if that really has anything to do with the cannabis industry or not I think it just is that we don't put a lot of value on our food so yeah quick follow up is a company I was with before where I am at now which was a family farm they were in the 14-15 for folks who had been there for years and some foremen are making $20 an hour, $22 an hour one last thing that I would mention is what does this have on the attractiveness of farming to the younger generation I don't know there is a lot attractive anymore and that's not being cynical either that's just being honest organic farming was really groovy and really cool for quite a while and then I think we kind of ran the gamut and a lot of people realized how hard it really is it's hard that's what it takes to produce food and so are the robot overlords going to take over maybe I mean you know I mechanize as much as I can I have to to that very point not to keep going back and forth here but to that very point the attractiveness not only labor but if you are a young person here with agricultural ambitions and you want to start a farm there are a lot of disincentives because I can go buy a farm back east for 10th of what I can buy a farm here for thank you both so this question began to be answered a minute ago I think it would be worth revisiting and I suspect Siobhan you are going to have the best answer here although others could jump in the question as posed is this since the footprint of cannabis irrigation is smaller are water rights subject to forfeiture who is monitoring and then the following question who is regulating agricultural wells so there are NPCs here and then you definitely are a panelist so it's a pretty good question yes generally the footprint for a cannabis grow is much smaller than the historic footprint of possibly the prior crop that was there and most likely the footprint of the water rights there's many options for landowners to either use a portion of their water right that they're not using in stream so therefore it's protected and has its beneficial use that's a benefit for everybody another option for those water rights is that they can transfer them to another parcel or some other person downstream to use and the portion of the question is who's monitoring it it's kind of an honor system because yes it is comical so if a water right is not used for five consecutive years it's subject to cancellation my agency isn't in the realm of going out and finding water rights to cancel because we like it when people are able to use their land to their best abilities usually when a cancellation comes into play is if a parcel hasn't been used for their water rights for extended period of time and a new land owner comes in and so that new use or that resurrecting that new use affects a water user downstream then usually that's when the cancellation comes into play and it's specifically a land owner process to go through I have two quick questions that way oh yes the domestic wells and where's the question what was the question about different questions who regulates agricultural wells and so my thought on agricultural wells would be a well that has a water right for agricultural purposes and so once again it's an honor system so that if there is a water right generally it's up to the land owner to kind of monitor themselves I'll go out once in a while and kind of verify that parcels that are using water that have the proper water right and they're applying it to the lands that they're supposed to be applied to any newer water right or change to a new water right or old water right will require measurement device criteria and so that's method that's an agriculture well or a water right can be monitored because there's going to be specific criteria for measurement and reporting associated with that water right so while you're here we've got another water question so the question is are canals not federally regulated and is there a conflict in using federally regulated water on a federally illegal crop wow that's a great series of questions our canals federally regulated it depends if it's federal water going through the canal it can be federally regulated if it's the proper size then the canal can be under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers there's many canals like these in the Klamath Basin that are regulated by the feds so the second question is is there a conflict in using federal regulated water on a federally illegal crop from what I understand the federal government is not allowing the use of federal water for cannabis cultivation where that comes into play as two examples are water that's stored in Lost Creek Reservoir and Applegate Reservoir both of those storage facilities are operated and maintained by the federal government but landowners who live downstream of those facilities can enter into contract with the federal government for them to release water down either the Applegate or the Rogue River for those individuals to pick them up they can convey it to their property part of that contract is identifying what you're going to grow and from what I understand the federal government is not entering into contract for anybody who's using that water to grow cannabis so it's a federal requirement although my agency is the agency that issues water rights we don't regulate the federal government's discretion on which type of crop they would like to deliver water to alright as I asked the question Michael why don't you start coming up this is going to be for you I think it's a pretty easy one for you is there a limit on how large a cannabis plantation can be on EFU land and if there is a limit who is enforcing it yes so there are limits it depends on what style of production you're doing indoor or greenhouse or strictly outdoor but for an outdoor farm the limit is 40,000 square feet of canopy so they regulate the amount of canopy that you're growing of mature plants that would be flowering plants and so you can choose to spread out your 40,000 square feet of canopy over a larger area 40,000 square feet is just under an acre I think an acre is around 43,000 square feet and so our farm for example spreads out that 40,000 square feet over two and a half acres so you're allowed to do that but as far as who's regulating that that's the Oregon Liquor Control Commission is in charge of recreational cannabis they come out and check out your canopy designation before you're ever allowed to begin and then they do come out and do random inspections and annual planned inspections and so if you're foolish to go outside of that you jeopardize your licensure this one would be for Josh if you want to come up so Jackson County decided to allow cannabis cultivation on resource lands only given some of the conflicts discussed here tonight is it possible to revisit the zoning requirements yes so I'm assuming what this is asking is whether Jackson County could revisit it and allow on rural residential land is that right whoever asked this so to go back and take it away from resource districts or to allow on rural residential land I think is the question that's fine I can answer both of them so Jackson County as far as I understand it wouldn't have the ability to retract and disallow cannabis production on land where farm use isn't allowed outright permitted use so that's that would be EFU land that would be their forest land so their woodland resource zones the other side of that is rural residential they decided to prohibit it outright on rural residential lands just Fee County like I said hasn't made a decision yet but other communities have made decisions some of them some counties have allowed them but with more restrictions so minimum lot sizes they say you can't do cannabis grows recreational cannabis grows on rural residential land that's under 5 acres or under 10 acres or you need a 100 foot setback from your property line or a neighbor something like that so there's the ability for Jackson County to go back and allow it on the rural residential land if they would choose to but they didn't Jackson County's currently had an opportunity where some hearings officers have made some decisions regarding production sites on our own lands you can actually do it if you were doing it legitimately and legally prior to but only for medical purposes so you would have to go through a non-conforming use application and whereas they were not actually approving those before they have actually had some new case law established to where they are approving them now this question was addressed to me I'd love to hear how others answer it so I'll take a stab at it and then we'll see how folks want to respond it's a rather complex question so I'll pose it the way it was written here and then we'll talk a little bit about it it says when marijuana growing became prevalent in the Illinois Valley a friend said quote it's going to be interesting to see how much pot we can eat end quote how do you see the transition to cannabis affecting the percent of local food grown for consumption by local people do you think we will see an overall decline in regional self-sufficiency in food production so I'll take a stab at that so that is what I do research on right now I look at food security and food insecurity in the region and ask questions about how we're doing in that regard one of the things that we found over the course of studying how food is produced in our region is that we actually are more food secure than most communities are and far less food secure than most of you probably imagine so when I say that we are more food secure than most communities it's sort of a goal for large communities in the United States today to be 2% food secure by 2020 so that has to say they produce 2% of their food in our valley it looks likely based on our estimates and models that we are producing somewhere between 6% and 10% of our food in our valley at the present time so the question is how would cannabis production change that I don't know the answer but here's what I know largely what is controlling us not doing better is not us not growing it it is not buying it so it is the market the market that's the holding point here so if we or somehow able to incentivize individuals to buy local food or local cannabis then we would accomplish what's being asked here now whether individuals feel and this is possible I actually think this is an opportunity whether individuals begin to feel like buying local cannabis products is a way to support the local economy and become more interested in buying local generally then I think food producers and cannabis producers both win in that regard on the flip side is a potential negative which is it was not posed directly in this question is there is also a potential for for local lands to be purchased by non-local companies and either food or cannabis in which case individuals who are buying local food might not be supporting local businesses so what I had to say I'd love to hear how others would respond to this question it's multifaceted panelists you want to take a shot come on up this to the person who asked the question but this plays right into the generalization that Chris warned against and that I was warning against is saying oh is cannabis going to impact you know local food it's is this the question here overall decline in regional self-sufficiency and food production the factors that are impacting that are way bigger than cannabis that's pretty much all I have to say about it and some of those factors well yeah there are many factors and a number of those factors play themselves out in the farm bill and the way that Oregon benefits are in this case fails to benefit from that bill so what we do in Oregon in large measure what Josh put up there is our top 20 crops don't necessarily get the same kind of incentives that other things do so we don't always benefit the same way others do okay Ma do you want to ask a question not sure Michael you might want to take this or Chris or maybe Siobhan can you detail in comparison the amount of water used by hay farmers, veggie farmers vineyards and cannabis does cannabis use more water than other these other ag products and that was someone referred to that but alright so part of the water right process is kind of figuring out how much water is required for irrigation and so in the road basin determined by the basin plan to for the area this was created in I think in 1964 it was determined that in order to adequately irrigate one acre of land you needed a total volume of water that would equal four and a half acre feet of water so imagine one acre of land four feet deep of water that was determined how much water was needed for irrigation and I believe that was directly related to growing hay and so what is the rates or the instantaneous rate required to irrigate up to 80 acres is one cubic foot per second which is roughly 444 gallons per minute if we would use that model to compare other crop times for example cannabis you could probably grow a lot of cannabis on 80 acres and use a lot less than 449 gallons per minute so hopefully that helps answer that question I'm going to jump into that question a little bit too so this was mentioned a couple of times already but one of the things that I answer a lot to is the chair of an environmental science department at Southern Oregon University and I'm asked a lot about what role agriculture plays in our water issues in the region and so people say often well agriculture accounts for the vast majority of water use shouldn't we stop producing on agricultural lands there's two problems there one we'd like to eat and the other is that it's addressing agriculture as one body so flood irrigating hay and drip irrigating tomatoes are very different water strategies and so it's the same way across the board regardless of the agricultural crop it depends on how you're watering it and who's choosing to use the water and what way they're using it so it's certainly a big difference the question I was given to ask is the one that was just answered and so I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question to our panelists that is on my mind so for the last three or four months we've been holding meetings with stakeholders and asking questions about what they see is a challenge in the food industry or the cannabis industry what do they see as challenges how can we resolve those challenges how can groups resolve them and overwhelmingly one of the things that's come up over and over again is what kind of concerns do you have in your industry regardless what your industry is what interests moving into Southern Oregon whether that be cannabis producers, food producers or individuals perhaps who are interested in a large scale development so I'm curious how others feel about that and perhaps is there an answer to individuals feeling really good about the place that we call home really you want to bring that up? I do it's terrifying oh man well we live in a free market economy I don't necessarily want to see corporate interests come in and destroy what I have so I continue to build my relationship with my customers and my community and I hope for the best that's kind of I think that's the best answer I can give without getting into like hours long debate about what I'm doing I just know that as I continue my craft and continue to do better and build that relationship and I mean use the internet and social media to strengthen my presence and be hopeful I guess I mean that's not the answer to it all though because yeah I'm concerned about it and I'm not even concerned about large cannabis farms coming in you know there have been talks for years about large corporate vegetable farms coming in as land values and when we saw the drought in California happening there was a lot of farms that were looking to come up here in Klamath Falls area and there are berry farms that were bought up in the Willamette that are out of the area what does that mean for our food system you know it's it's something that I think that we all need to keep the conversation open and I think that it's really important to just keep our relationships strong among others you know I'm not sure how else to add to that so so to answer that question in regards to cannabis here in Oregon it's definitely something that's concerning to me personally and to a lot of people who have been invested in the Oregon cannabis industry for many years even prior to recreational when cannabis was legalized here in Oregon they formed a committee in the legislature and in the initial drafts of the rules they had there were residency requirements that were put in and we were very hopeful hearing those discussed by the legislature that you'd have to be a resident of Oregon for some of them said two years some of them said four years but it ensured that you had to have been here prior to recreational cannabis to be able to participate in this and we were very hopeful unfortunately lobbying interests got that removed and so now that there is no residency requirement we are seeing large corporations from out of state and even from out of the country coming in and buying large tracts of land in the Applegate and in Williams where we live and it's frightening because they're far more capitalized than we are your average Oregonian cannabis farmer is a mom and pop organization trying to stay alive and to see large corporations with millions sometimes tens hundreds of millions of dollars coming in I've heard from some of these individuals and they have an extermination program in mind they'd like to get rid of the mom and pop cannabis farmers and they have a model to basically sustain losses for years while the mom and pops are blood dry and so it is a concerning development unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it now it goes back to voting with your dollar and if you are concerned about it supporting local farmers both food farmers and local cannabis farmers and that's the best we could do so corporate interest coming in is a very very common phenomenon in vineyards where it happens all over the world industry gets established and then next thing you know big guys from NAPO or from wherever come in and what we see so we can all imagine the impacts it's just going to exacerbate the exact same stresses we're already under increase those same stresses so with vineyards you know land here may have gone up in price but it's still 25% of what it is in Napa and Sonoma and their land prices are going up we will see corporate investment here especially in vineyard land and as orchards phase out no offense to any orchardists I guess one of the strategies to deal with that is to if you have the ability to become a producer yourself because what we see are two types of takeovers there's people who come in and buy large tracts of land and plant vineyards and or whatever and begin producing as direct competition but there are also people who come in and this is a new phenomenon we're seeing here you know most of the grapes grown in the valley here are going to Willamette Valley probably 80-90% so we're already exporting to other interests a lot of our crop in vineyards especially in pairs you know how many pairs leave the valley almost all of them so I guess my point is what we're seeing more and more of recently though are people who have small holdings planting vineyards and just supplying larger houses and so it does keep the majority of that labor and that economic stimulus as local dollars the corporations basically become our customers and so if you have the power to affect things that way I'd encourage anyone in this room to consider contracting with those folks to keep them from owning your land this question is why aren't vineyards facing similar complaints as cannabis? because vineyard economics are a fairytale yeah the people who own vineyards are rich and I mean not all of them the you know Chris built his vegetable farm I don't know I imagine you built your vegetable farm from the ground up starting with small acreage and I'm sure that you did the same Melissa and vineyards don't work that way there are very very few vineyards that are planted by someone with a dream and no money that's not how vineyards work they're you want me to elaborate on that? well why aren't they facing similar oh complaints I thought you were talking about economics yeah no so why aren't they facing similar yeah it's a very interesting question if you want to look at them as part of the drug industry which I do vineyards I mean we're producing alcohol it's not that different we don't have big noisy greenhouses and we're not paving over class one soils so that's why we're frostfans though yeah we do so we're kind of grandfathered in with some of the luxuries that our forefathers have you know established and there's a 2000 year you know history of viticulture it's sort of the social cachet for better or worse I'm not saying it's right but for better or worse there's no stigma with wine unless not to the same degree does that answer the question yeah okay so this could be for anybody and I think someone must have used this language because the question came up what does synergy with food farmers mean so I'm not sure which of you use the term synergy between the two industries anyone you could both come up all three of you so what I meant by synergy is the two working together and feeding off one another I think Chris Jagger has a great example of someone who is focusing on food farming but is also using his knowledge and resources to interlink with the cannabis farmers help them develop better practices help develop revenue for his systems from cannabis farmers to support his food farming and I think working together and bridging the gap is going to make a better system overall I think one thing the cannabis industry really needs is to move out of some of the old methodologies that are really energy intensive and wasteful and mimic some of the practices that food farmers have already ironed out over the last hundreds of years and so yeah that's the synergy I speak of is just kind of a linking of arms sharing of knowledge sharing of practices hopefully spending each other's revenue each other's crops to help support one another and benefiting the community as a whole yeah I think one example of synergy that I've experienced is I've become a better vegetable farmer now that I've interacted with a lot of the cannabis community because I've started thinking of it as agriculture and the cannabis community is my R&D branch my research and development branch because they had the time, the energy to be able to test and try all these methodologies that I just don't have the time or money to do and so I can tap into this network of people and say like really you can do that with this and you can do that with that and then I'm sharing information back with them saying no this is how you hook up a tiller to your tractor you know which it's huge it's huge and so that that's the synergy that I experience and it's really beneficial I think once I realize it's all lumped under agriculture and Oregon agriculture and it's something that we have here that's like very very unique I mean this is honestly the best region in the world to grow anything so I think that that synergy should continue. This question is very specifically for you Michael although others of you may have interest in the question is very simple what will keep the price up now that it's legal I mean in short it's not gonna stay up. Prices are coming down fast the price of cannabis has been in a bubble forever and with the lack of scarcity and now we're moving towards surplus in the cannabis industry prices are gonna come down and margins are gonna get slim if you want to keep your price up quality that's the main differentiator so those who grow really high quality using organic practices and then utilizing traditional business methods creating a brand doing marketing doing outreach to your consumers and really building an identity around your product beyond just kind of a nameless bud those are the things you can do to keep your price up but if you are a cannabis farmer the prices you've seen in the past are not gonna be there in the future and that's what happens with commodity farming. The question doesn't address recreational but it does say that it is legal but I think there's an important distinction to make this is something I said in my segment was you've got we can't turn a blind eye to bootlegging because as my understanding is talking to medical growers and rec growers who I know which are many the medical what he's talking about is very very true you can see rec prices drop but when you've got bootlegging happening you don't see the price drop because it's going as an export so that's I don't have a solution for that but that's why I was saying you'll see the most sustainable growth most sustainable market as illegal operations for those sending their excess medical out of state. Here's a question for any of you that feel called how can we encourage or foster both cannabis and veggie? I'll take a stab at that a couple of thoughts one I just heard from our panelists which is civil conversation which doesn't happen very often I don't mean that very seriously I don't think it happens very often at all I think we we look for ways to reinforce our feelings and our thoughts and we surround ourselves by individuals who can help us do that but we don't have a lot of civil conversation with individuals for whom we don't understand their perspective or their background so I think in part what will help the industries that we have in the room today grow is by us uniting together and helping strengthen our economy and our region and that's going to require us to have civil conversation the other thing I would comment about is something I see frequently I've done a lot of work in grocery stores so I do a lot of consumer questionnaires and I do some work on consumer focus groups trying to understand why people buy what they do so you've probably witnessed this and perhaps it's been you and it's certainly been me at times in my life when you're at a grocery store and you're looking for a commodity of some form perhaps you're looking for green beans or corn and what folks do is they typically for the item that is the cheapest on the shelf in fact we teach our children that regularly I certainly see that even in elementary schools they teach them how to shop consciously by shopping for the cheapest product but we don't do that when we buy an automobile we don't look for the cheapest car out there and then buy that one we might choose to but that's not how we define ourselves as a conscious consumer but that's what we do in agriculture almost always I help under folks understand that that's not how to be a conscious consumer I think we can probably improve the economy of the cannabis and food industry in our region you all have your thoughts together now, you can follow me with more thoughtful comments so I'm going to attempt to ask this question it's a rather complex question so I'm going to attempt to I'm going to ask it as it's stated here and then I'm going to try to get the conversation and then I'm going to see if I can yell at me regenerative, diverse and localized forms of agriculture are at the front line of counter corporate chemical and GMO based food systems what is being done in our GMO free valley to move this type of agriculture forward on a broader scale as we now see with hemp to show this could be done also with monocropping for example in pairs and grapes so I don't understand why I understand the question I don't know how we're going to get to the bottom of it in just a few minutes but one question we can ask from this is are there thoughts on how to integrate hemp, cannabis production generally grapes and pears or grapes or pears into systems that are not just monocropped fields others of you working on those issues make the statement that's a good one yes so we're in agriculture where there's a forefront that we're all figuring out right now through regenerative agriculture is the next step which sustainable agriculture has been the way so many of us have tried to be for so long and then we realized that just sustaining doesn't just do it we have to regenerate we have to create more than what we started with and so there are a lot of systems for that now whether it be and I don't think that any one way is the best way to do it I think integrating permaculture and low and no-till systems and look at reduced water usage irrigation systems and figuring out any of these crops that are that you mentioned any of them can be put into any of these systems it's just figuring out how to do it like you said in a profitable manner and setting up that system is one thing and then having the labor to back it up as another so I think that labor is something that we're just going to keep coming back to here in this conversation so I fully know how I'm going to formulate my farm to be what it's going to look like in the next 20 years I mean I've been a row crop vegetable farmer for 20 years and I'm finally starting to look at how I can have a holistic system that's perennialized annualized and producing cash crops that can support my family and my workers but if I don't have the labor to do that then it makes it really challenging to implement that so I don't know is that kind of answer so just to address the monocrop in pears and grapes I think I've seen two vineyards and zero orchards that are monocropped every vineyard or orchard that I know of minus those two has either a perennial or annual cover crop often flowering often managed to be encouraging biodiversity so just briefly I just wanted to say in the regulated cannabis industry right now there's really stringent controls on what pesticides you can apply to your crop and there's testing involved with all of the cannabis products and that separates it from the conventional food and vineyard and orchard industries where you can use a lot harsher chemicals to combat pests and so with less weapons in the arsenal I guess to be able to combat pests in a agriculture like cannabis it makes us start to consider things like perennial planting and companion planting to try and attract beneficial insects and to be able to create a healthier environment and so our farm this year just went on a large perennial companion planting project we planted over 500 perennial plants all around the perimeter and right next to some of our cannabis crops in hopes of just creating more biodiversity in a healthier ecosystem and this last year we saw a large amount of the cannabis grown fail for banned pesticides once it came to market like a large amount millions and millions of dollars were failed and went into quarantine and so the more that happens I think there's going to be a push to diversify and to move away from monoculture and cover cropping and perennial planting are just two ways that we can do that I'm going to ask this final question of our panelists and then we're hopeful that we can engage you briefly in an opportunity to engage in this conversation through some regional community-based conversations in your hometowns we hope so the question was posed and this is a common one we've seen many times it reads traffic use on rural Josephine County roads has vastly increased over a recent past causing safety and wildlife concerns what regulatory mechanisms can be utilized to address these problems so I can't necessarily speak to what can be done regulatory-wise to handle what's going on on the roads but I think there's something to acknowledge that's often not understood when cannabis was legalized in Oregon something similar has happened in other states as well in Colorado which is that a lot of people move here and grow cannabis but not under the licensed paradigm there's many many people that have come to Oregon Williams Josephine County in the last two years to come here and grow cannabis who are not licensed producers and what I see out in Williams is a lot of the community is upset about the influx and they're not understanding the difference between correlation and causation yes there's a correlation that there's been an influx since recreational marijuana has been legalized but the causation is not on licensed producers and I think that needs to be understood so there's a lot of people flying around on the roads there's a lot of people who are not good community members who've come into town who don't care about the local culture or the ecosystem but blaming that on the advent of recreational marijuana is a mistake and I think that needs to be understood I'm glad that was finally brought up I was just in Williams yesterday driving around and it's very apparent that there are a lot of grows most of which are not probably permitted either as medical or recreational, commercial recreational so the impacts we're talking about I think have a lot to do with the evolving nature of this industry right now and I like to use the term the Wild West you know it seems like it's obvious that this is a new thing especially at the magnitude and what you're seeing and the degree that the communities are seeing this it will evolve over time and I think part of the evolution is going to be the enforcement of the illegal grows that are out there so right now I don't pretend to be an expert here so this is going to be pretty general a lot of the revenue that's been that the state's been getting from the cannabis industry has been sitting there they haven't been acting on it right now it's my understanding that that when they do start to utilize the money from an enforcement standpoint they're going to be enforcing the illegal grows I think that's going to have a lot to do with with the impacts and lessen the impacts that you all are seeing in your community I had was sitting on another panel and this question came up and it's a big difference between Josephine County and Jackson County the minimizing the impacts is the fact that Jackson County has regulation on it I mean it's not perfect and there's certainly some kings with it but I think that a big part of it is that Josephine County doesn't have any regulation when you have no regulation it's really hard to enforce something that's not in writing essentially I know as far as, is this the question where's the question I do know that Jackson County Rhodes department is currently trying to figure out some ways to help minimize some of the impacts to their roads they can't really do anything about private roads because and that's I think where the big concern comes in because private roads are privately owned and maintained but in terms of doing on public impact public roads being impacted by some of the traffic that's being generated they are actually now requiring that a lot of people pave their aprons to their driveways to help mitigate the amount of gravel that comes onto the public roads so they're trying to take small steps there's not a whole lot that they can do for some of the other private roads though please join me in thanking our panelists tonight