 Welcome to this evening's presentation on food system and cannabis, changing dynamics and perspectives. We're super privileged to have this amazing panel of speakers this evening for you, and we're going to get to that very shortly. First off, a little bit about the Food System Network. The Rogue Valley Food System Network establishes a collaborative community of leadership to develop and advocate for a healthy and sustainable food system here in the Valley. Educating the community on important issues facing our food system is critical to our mission. So thanks once again for joining us in this important conversation tonight. At the conclusion of tonight's presentation, we'll take questions and answers from the audience. There'll be people circulating around the room with note cards to take your questions. So if you have a question, please raise your hand. We'll pass you a note card, and then we'll collect those and have the moderator ask those questions of our panelists at the end. So first off, a little housekeeping before we get started. Bathrooms are down the hall to the left. And please feel free to stick around at the end of the evening to network and talk to folks that are here and share a little bit about what we've learned today. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to our moderator, Megan Fairman. Megan is the Education Programs Director for Rogue Farm Corps. She's a board member of a greater Applegate. And she's also a partner at By George Farm in the Little Applegate Valley. Welcome, Megan. Hi, everybody. I'm just going to give you a little bit of history as to how we ended up here together in this room tonight. As you may or may not know, in late 2016 at the request of the community, the Rogue Valley Food System Network formed a working group specifically focused on exploring the impact of cannabis production on the food system. That working group put on a series of community stakeholder meetings in 2017, including an educational forum for the general public, which looked a lot like what we're going to do here tonight. And also included a series of community meetings around the Rogue Valley to hear about challenges and opportunities regarding cannabis and food production in specific locations. Last fall, Rogue Valley Food System Network worked with community facilitators in Grants Pass, Talent, the Little Applegate, Rogue River, and the Bigger Applegate to host these local meetings, and we'll hear more about these findings tonight from Vince. In the last year, we've seen a lot of change with legislation happening in other states, the regulatory process changing here in Oregon, and a changing marketplace for cannabis. We still think understanding the facts and how we may be able to work together for a better food system is relevant and important. So with that, I will introduce you to tonight's panelists who can help us understand the current landscape and issues. Right next to me is Dr. Vince Smith. He's an associate professor and chair of environmental science at Southern Oregon University. He holds a joint appointment in the departments of environmental science and policy and sociology and anthropology specializing in environmental and agricultural sociology. His work explores the relationship between environmental behaviors and the responses in a range of contexts, including sustainable agriculture, environmental education, and sustainable tourism. Dr. Smith's current research explores the impact of the cannabis industry on Rogue Valley food systems and the environment. Next to Vince is Sonny Jones. Sonny is a lifelong Oregonian and has a degree from Oregon State University in bio-resource research. She worked in pesticide regulation and enforcement for 12 years before making the leap to cannabis in 2015. When not scratching her head over cannabis regulations, she can be found napping in the woods, kayaking the willamette, or chasing one of the bruiser bros around the sassy sunflower house. I don't have any inside information on that, but maybe by the end of tonight we will. Josh Lombard is a Southern Oregon regional representative for the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, the department which administers the statewide planning program. He covers Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties. Jake Johnstone is here from Josephine County. He has worked for six years for the Oregon Water Resources as a hydrographic technician. He's been an assistant water master and is now the new water master of section D14 in Josephine County. He is a Southern Oregon local, a dog lover, and an avid outdoorsman. He spends his free time rafting and snowboarding, depending on the season. Peter Gendron is the founder of Omnibudsman Enterprises, a leading cannabis business developer and compliance specialist for private industry in Oregon. Peter has served on the board of directors for the Oregon Sun Growers Guild since 2014 and as president since 2016. As Oregon's premier advocacy organization in the cannabis field, the Oregon Sun Growers Guild has worked extensively with both the state and private groups in the cannabis sphere. And finally we have Elise Higley, a farmer out in the Applegate Valley. She and her husband Jeff own and operate Oshala Farm, a mid-scale 113 acre family farm with over 60 varieties of medicinal herbs in production. Over the last six years they have learned through blood, sweat, tears, and laughter, excuse me, what it takes to be a domestic herb farmer and how to keep herb farming financially sustainable while staying true to the earth's centric values and organic practices. Elise is passionate about bringing people together to work towards sustainable solutions that will preserve our Valley's agricultural heritage. Thank you. Without further ado, turn it over to Vince. So very briefly what I'd like to do is I'd like to talk a little bit about what our findings were from all of those stakeholder groups that were mentioned earlier. The intent behind these groups was to get a better sense of what kinds of opportunities and threats community members felt were present when we asked them questions about how the cannabis industry, the landscape changing around the cannabis industry would impact food production. So what I'll present tonight is the themes that came from those conversations. So all of the conversations were, we took notes during those conversations, several different researchers then read over those notes and created a series of themes. We're going to talk about each of those themes tonight. There will be ten of them. As I talk about those themes I want to make it clear that this is what we were told. What I'm not suggesting is what we were told was true. So I'm not going to suggest that I agree with each of these things. This is simply what individuals identify as the major threats or the major opportunities associated with this changing landscape. So here's just a brief look at each of those research themes. I'm going to go into depth on each of them. In many cases these research themes were neither pro nor con. They were both. So they were discussing a specific aspect of the impacts that the changing cannabis industry has in Southern Oregon. As an example of that, when we look at resource distribution there will be some cons there that relate to a sense that resources are being, there's competition among resources and there's also a conversation there about the way that resources are being shared among those individual enterprises. So let's talk about each of those individual components for just a couple of minutes. One of the major discussion points that occurred during these meetings was conversation about regulatory framework. So these were individuals who discussed complex regulations. For example, you might have a series of individuals talking about the fact that they felt like federal and state government was overreaching into the cannabis industry while the very next conversation revolved around the need for more regulation around the cannabis industry. So we discussed this and we described it as regulatory framework, but of course the conversation here is deep and it's complex. One of the other things that came out of these conversations was the sense of policy confusion. And this is not just true of cannabis, it's true in a lot of areas, but these were individuals who expressed that they didn't understand the policy and how to apply to them, often stating things like, I went to the website, I made the calls, I still don't understand what I can and can't do or what I shouldn't and shouldn't do. And then finally one of the things that came up here was a prevailing conversation that came from a wide range of different stakeholders. Cannabis growers and food producers, concerned citizens, they all discussed the need to address what they described as black market intrusion. So there was that conversation piece that happened here as well and in most of those cases it had to do with what will be dealt with in terms of regulation to control black market intrusion into legal markets. So the second grouping of conversations that we heard over and over again revolved around land use policy. And there's again a lot of different conversations that happened inside of this, but they had to do with things like EFU zoning restrictions. So these had to do with people saying, well, why is cannabis being restricted to EFU properties or exclusive farm use zone properties when in many cases those individuals are bringing in soil as opposed to using native soils? And of course there were other individuals who expressed the concern that they were being told that they had to be on EFU zone properties, but they would really rather like to be somewhere else. Again related to that has to the idea that there were some concerns, particularly among growers that have been here a long time, that some cannabis growers were destroying native soils through the use of gravel, sand, compacted sand and so forth. So that conversation was captured into this particular theme. The common questions of fencing, traffic, noise, smell, the kinds of things that have been happening here for a long time, those kind of conversation pieces were also placed here as well as cost of land. And those are two different things. So one was that land prices are increasing and individuals were concerned about that. And the other piece here was that there is the possibility of cannabis growers leasing land to food producers. And that's a new opportunity that was developed there. So a lot of cannabis producers talking about the fact that they own a lot of land but are only growing on a portion of it. Is there a possibility of collaborating with food producers to be able to better utilize that space? So we included that into this category as well. Of course the conversation also revolved around financial capital. We were looking specifically at how does the capital movement in the Rogue Valley impact agriculture generally, but people wanted to talk about it in broader areas. For example, there was conversation pieces about the increase in community capital associated with this financial capital. So small town or rural development possibilities associated with increased revenue, increased sales, increased buying power for shared equipment and infrastructure. That was a really important one that came up over and over again. So this is a case where if there are shared equipment needs across a wide range of agricultural sectors, perhaps the increase in cannabis sector in the Rogue Valley will benefit food producers as well. So thinking here, among other things, for example, around irrigation infrastructure that could be improved as a result of that. And then the last one, which we heard both people agreeing and disagreeing with all the time, was the potential for tax revenue to benefit the state or to benefit the region. And there was a lot of conversation about that and we've since done some research on that that maps how tax revenue is generated and where it's just distributed in the state. And there was a lot of contestation around the distribution of those resources. But that was also included here as both an opportunity and a challenge. The next category we defined as agroecological principles, this related to everything having to do with how cannabis impacts environment. Again, these are both pros and cons that are addressed here, but these were both opportunities and challenges that these community members expressed. So one, this came oftentimes from cannabis producers themselves talking about neighbors who perhaps didn't have a clear understanding of how to grow without pesticides or herbicides. So the overuse of pesticides being described in some environmental groups involved also talked about, for example, raptor mortality associated with the overuse of rodenticides. The use of monocropping was also a concern that was discussed, again, by both food producers and cannabis producers, talking a little bit about the challenges associated with monocrops. Pollinator death was another issue that was talked about, particularly with people who don't have a clear sense of how to spray. So if you are new to the agricultural sector, it doesn't matter what you're growing, you may not have a clear sense of how to spray without doing damage to pollinators. Soil health also described here that's had to do with both soil compaction associated with, for example, the development of a high tunnel, but also having to do with residual chemical usage. And then a conversation piece that was new to me was a number of the cannabis growers who participated in these described the need for different composting regulations. They described it being as difficult to compost, given regulations that they were facing and they were really interested in, and using that as a strategy for building soil. So all of those relate to this issue of needing to better understand the impact of cannabis on the environment. There's also this other piece here that I described as the human social cultural capital piece. That's a lot of terms in one category here. But there were a lot of individuals who wanted to talk about the impact that this has on communities. And as you might imagine, these conversation pieces were also contested. In fact, in one particular case, within maybe a 45 second span, one individual said, what's most exciting about cannabis is that it's bringing a group of people to Southern Oregon who have not been here before. Our region looks more diverse ethnically and racially. And about 45 seconds later, someone said, one of the most difficult things about cannabis is it's bringing these outsiders who have never been here before who are more racially and ethnically diverse than we are. And so those changes, whether you regard them as pros or cons, was something that was very important to individuals who participated. They also talked about increasing crime and labor relation issues. Again, I'm not addressing whether or not these things are real, but there were perceptions among participants that there was an increased crime and the need to address labor relations. And that happened oftentimes around exchanging labor, and we'll talk about that in a minute. There was also a conversation piece that happened during these meetings and has happened in other meetings as well with concerns around sex slavery following the cannabis trade. And that has been documented in other communities, not in ours that I know of yet. But there are individuals who are particularly concerned about that and are looking into that. Another thing that I saw here, and it was the first time I'd ever encountered this, was that gentrification was being described in a way I'd never heard it before. So gentrification is usually used as a term to describe an urban area becoming more expensive. In this case, there were almost always descriptions of rural gentrification. So rural communities, traditionally farm-based rural economies, feeling like there was a wealthier group of farmers moving into the area, often described these people as wealthy hipsters from Portland. That was sort of the perspective of the individuals who were there. And in fact, most of the growers who I've gone and visited have described themselves as wealthy hipsters from Portland or Seattle. Not all, of course. And then this concern of boom and bust economy, and that's going to be addressed tonight, I think, by others. The concern that, you know, can we predict what will happen to our industry in the future? And that's a particular concern for cannabis growers, of course, because your livelihood's on the line. It's also an issue for people who are interested in community infrastructure and what might happen if community infrastructure falls apart in the future, as it, of course, has in other industries in Southern Oregon. One of the things that came up over and over again was the need for education. That's going to be addressed tonight by my panelist colleagues. For example, cannabis farmers regularly calling me and others asking for training, and particularly the interest there is what role will OSU Extension play in this. And that becomes an important talking point. And unfortunately, there are not a lot of public agencies providing that support to cannabis growers, and they mention that regularly. They want to understand regulation better, which is one of the reasons we're here tonight. There was a lot of conversation about the need for medical research. Can we make any of these claims with any sense of certainty? And unfortunately, the answer to that is largely no. There hasn't been a lot of medical research in cannabis to date. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence, but there has been very little research evidence. And that has to do with the fact that it's been very difficult for research agencies to actually do that research. It's been restricted in most cases. So we can't tell you much on that subject. And of course, cannabis growers are looking for opportunities to talk about this in ways that are backed by peer-reviewed journals, for example. There's also this conversation about farm consultants, which isn't very interesting. So a number of food producers said that they have managed to find a niche in providing farmer assistance to cannabis growers. So they say, we've been here for 25 years, we know how to grow. But our neighbors have moved in and are growing cannabis, but they don't know a lot about growing. They haven't done this before, and so they're providing some consultation, and there's a growing market there in economy. Research distribution is the classic challenge here. There was conversations about the illegal use of water, and this was almost always, to my surprise, cannabis growers accusing other cannabis growers of stealing their water. What I didn't see so much, which I expected, was community members who were concerned that their municipal water was being sucked up by cannabis growers. Although I've heard that statement elsewhere. There was this conversation about buying out water rights, who's got the water rights, and perhaps people with more money will be able to purchase those water rights. So that came up again. There was this conversation that took place on multiple occasions about utilizing the cheap electricity in Oregon. I know that if you live in Oregon, you might not find it cheap, but if you live anywhere else in the country, you certainly would. So is it a possibility, for example, that cannabis growers are taking advantage of a resource or an industry that could otherwise be used elsewhere? Labor resources, we hear this one a lot if you've been watching the news around these issues. So cannabis growers are using labor. Wine growers use labor, and there's concerns that those individuals are in competition with one another. There's also several times people brought up regional housing shortages and attempted to correlate that to the growing cannabis industry. Again, I'm not suggesting that I think that that is true, but that was something that came up widely. Equipment inputs being unavailable across the agricultural sector. I think several of you probably can talk to that better than I can, but as a food producer myself, I can certainly relate to that. So there have been shortages of certain equipment and supplies as our economy grows. Again, that probably has nothing to do with cannabis specifically. The sector has simply changed. And then just available land in general, whether you're a cannabis grower or a wine grower, you're going to grow mixed vegetables. The availability of land and the cost of that land came up a lot. So let me just talk a little bit about stigma and cultural change. There was a lot of conversation about the concerns around stigma. So federal stigmatization, the concern that I'm dealing with a cash economy because of stigmatization. Food producers talking about the fact that they wanted to collaborate with their neighbor and cannabis grower, but they were concerned about what their buyers might think of them relating with a cannabis grower. So there are stigmatization issues across the board that people talked about. Corporatization was yet another. So there was a lot of conversations about outside interests, outside money, big money. That way it was often described as big money, corporate interests. What was fascinating about this is that one person in the group would describe what corporate growing looked like, and the next person would be that exact person, and they would describe corporate growing as something else. So this was always someone describing something other than themselves. And this is a classic fear of the other. So we're afraid that someone else is going to come and change something. And then we are concerned about who's going to lead these efforts. So who's going to be involved in advocacy? Who's going to be involved in providing training? Will they be industry-wide meetings? And if so, where will they be held? And there is this overwhelming sense, and this is probably not surprising for those of you who have lived in the state of Jefferson. There isn't any understanding in Salem that statement comes up over and over again. So that's what we learned at that stage. What we're trying to do now is to get in there and begin research. So those are a lot of research questions. So now our job is to see if we can develop research that will answer some of those questions or determine whether any of those concerns or opportunities are real. And I'll leave the solutions to the rest of my colleagues tonight. That's a pretty good setup, right? So I'm Sunny. I'm with the Oregon Department of Agriculture. I'm the Cannabis Policy Coordinator. Our former director, Katie Koba, back in 2015 when all of this started said, gee, this is just another crop for the purposes of agriculture. We regulate some 230-odd crops in the state of Oregon. This is one more. Welcome to the family. And that's really what we've tried to do as best as we can, given some of the restrictions that we're subject to. So for ODA's purposes, Cannabis is the umbrella term that covers both marijuana and industrial hemp. Given the federal concerns about this crop, ODA doesn't directly regulate marijuana. We do, however, retain authority for those things that we have authority over. That's not true in other states. Oregon said, okay, ODA has authority over pesticides. ODA is going to retain authority over pesticides when it comes to marijuana. And so in the back is this really fun infographic that we have. I recommend you grab one on your way out. It has my phone number across the bottom. And what I'd like to do is talk to you about where ODA has a role to play and then also talk to you about industrial hemp, because like I said, we do directly regulate industrial hemp within the department. So starting with pesticides, obviously training is an opportunity that we're looking at and looking for taking a step back. Traditionally, large commodities would have commissions. The blueberry commission, the wheat commission, the mint commission, and it's groups that ODA can work with, those commissions lobby for those agricultural interests. That doesn't exist for cannabis yet. And it has made our job harder because there isn't one or two voices speaking for the industry. There's a lot of small voices or groups that can be large, but they may not all agree with each other or communicate with each other. They may have disagreements within themselves. And so the first thing I always throw out is you guys need to, the cannabis industry, not you guys, see those people in Salem. The industry, both on the hemp and the marijuana side, I highly encourage folks to look at forming a commodity commission. That's going to give the industries a stronger voice in Salem, both with your legislatures as well as with the state agencies. If you're an agricultural crop, you need an agricultural commodity commission. So looking for opportunities to connect with ODA, again, Katie Koba in 2015 said, yes, it's another agricultural crop. However, we're working with folks who may not traditionally be used to working with government. We need a point person for them to work with. We also know that there's a lot of overlap between OLCC, having direct regulatory authority over adult use, marijuana, as well as OHA over medical use. So we need somebody who can communicate with those agencies and make sure as they're putting rules into place, they don't step on our authority. So that's how I got hired, moved over from our pesticide enforcement program. So looking at those pieces that we do have authority over, pesticides is one of the biggest ones and one of the biggest ones that has lots of opportunities for improvement. Pesticides are regulated by the federal government through the US EPA. They do a lot of risk assessment. They require them pesticide manufacturers to provide a lot of information so that they can do those risk assessments. And that's how they determine where those pesticide products can be used, what crops they can be used on, and at what rates. The library will close in 30 minutes. So we have a crop in Oregon that is used for food that is not recognized by the federal government. Therefore, we truly have no registered pesticides for use on cannabis because of how that federal framework and then the delegated authority to ODA within the state. We do have our own state laws for regulating pesticides that mimic, but we don't do the risk assessment. We don't have the capability or the staff. So one thing that we have done in Oregon is try to take a moderate stance to meet our requirements under our cooperative agreement with the Feds while providing people with tools knowing that we'd rather have people use less toxic chemicals if they're going to be using the chemicals. So let's give them a list. So ODA put together some criteria and some of these would be organic. I get a lot of phone calls. Well, it's organic so I can use it on canvas, right? Well, yes, so is botulism, but that stuff's nasty, right? Organic means it's naturally occurring. It has nothing to do with where that pesticide can be used, what crop it can be applied to. So we have criteria in place that basically says the active ingredient, so what chemical is being effective. A pesticide is anything that kills, repels or mitigates a pest. That's your geek definition because it's the government they added in rooting hormones. It doesn't kill, repel or mitigate anything, but it's a pesticide under the federal law. So the EPA has said certain active ingredients are low enough in toxicity that don't require a tolerance for use on food crops. That's criteria number one, criteria number two, you have to have a label that's broad enough to drive a truck through. If you talk to anybody who works in pesticide enforcement or crop consultants, et cetera, the label's the law. You have to follow the pesticide label in regards to where it can be used, what rate, et cetera. So some of them are broad enough that it's like green edible plants outdoors, right? That would meet the criteria. And then the third criteria which does not typically come into play is it has to be if a pyrolysis test has been done, i.e. what happens when you smoke it, it can't have failed. And the reason that doesn't come into play very often is back in the late 80s, the EPA decided that your chance of dying from cancer from smoking tobacco is higher than your chance of chronic conditions due to exposure of the pesticides on tobacco. So they don't evaluate tobacco for chronic exposure to pesticides. At all. They look at acute exposure, so what happens to the person making the application, what happens to the person harvesting that plant material, drying it, is it going to cause skin irritation, et cetera. But for those who are actually smoking that material over the course of their lifetime, they've literally come out and said, you're going to die of cancer before we care about what the pesticides are going to do to you. That's another reason when people say, well, why can't we just use the pesticides that are used on tobacco? I don't give tobacco to medically compromised children. We give cannabis to medically compromised children, and we have to regulate to the most vulnerable in our population. So pesticides are tricky. We have a guide list. The department is not saying that those products are safe. We're saying that it would not be illegal, as that for Gubby speak, for use on cannabis. And that's the best that we can do at this point because it becomes recognized at the federal level. Hemp in the farm bill going through this year might just help start that process and get our foot in the door. So pesticides, if you're familiar with cannabis, you know that it all has to be tested quite a lot. I think it's tested for 59 different active ingredients. Those rules are not through ODA. Those are through the Oregon Health Authority. And those are not tolerances. Again, they have not done a risk assessment. What they did is they looked at what chemicals do we know that folks in the industry have used traditionally before it was legalized? What can the labs, what level can the labs detect a reasonable rate that doesn't cost more than it already costs? So they came up with 59 different active ingredients. If a grower fails for that, that gets reported to ODA. Because other than two of those active ingredients, if a grower applied that chemical, it would never be legal for use on cannabis. They've illegally used that pesticide and ODA is going to follow up because that's what we do. Because we're trying to encourage people to do the right thing and we know that it's new for many people in the cannabis industry, we've established what we call a compliance assistance program, the one-time shot. You agree to a violation. It doesn't count against your license with our sister agencies, typically OLCC. We go out and sit down with the grower and say, what are you doing? Tell us everything that you used will work through with the grower why those products are not appropriate if they have that. And it goes on their record for three years. If they have future violations, it's a no-go and they're going into a full enforcement process which means we're going to detain all the plant material on the farm, meaning they can't remove that plant material from the farm. We're going to sample everything that is growing in production or already stored. And if it shows up at all, we're going to require them to destroy it. So that's kind of pesticides. That probably has been one of the hardest pieces for the agency. ODA doesn't get any additional funding. It's for cannabis other than my position. I'm funded through pass-through funds from OLCC and our pesticide program is paid some from general funds from the state, but primarily from pesticide registration fees. So manufacturers of pesticides have to pay a fee in order to sell those in the state of Oregon. That has caused some general agriculture to be concerned that ODA is now spending a significant portion of our time working with people who fail on the cannabis side. Do we have the same amount of time to work with our general ag customers? And that's part of the reason that we did this compliance assistance program. So food safety is another really cool one, I think, that came after Measure 91 passed. So the legislature said that cannabis is no longer an adulterant in food. So that means our food safety program comes into play. So from the point that something leaves the farm and it's no longer the raw agricultural commodity. So in the cannabis industry typically that's going to be somebody making an extract or a concentrate to the person making, let's use the stereotype, the brownie, down to the retail store. Everybody has to have a food safety license. And that is looking at basic sanitation. That was not happening under the medical program previously. So I think that is probably a positive thing. It does require that additional level of regulation. That is paid for by fees. So that hasn't impacted our agency as much other than we do have additional licensees now that we're working with. You're going to hear about where do you get your water later, but what happens to the water leaving a farm, right? That's under ODA through our Ag Water Quality Program. Beth Peterzak, if you've worked with her, is your Ag Water Quality Specialist down here. You cannot impact ground or surface water through your agricultural activities, be it erosion, be it chemicals, either fertilizers or pesticides, that is covered under the Ag Water Quality Program. So that has impacted our agency. There's been a lot of opportunities for work, especially in the southern Oregon area associated with that in cannabis. If you buy something by weight, like at the grocery store, or you mail something through FedEx and they weigh it, that scale will have an Oregon sticker on it, the outline of an Oregon sticker. ODA has licensed that scale, and we've come out and verified that you're getting a pound if you're paying for a pound. I didn't know about that until I started working for the agency. You'll also see a similar sticker on your gas station pump. We've checked to make sure that you're getting a gallon and that you're getting the octane you're paying for. Weights and Measures Program has definitely seen an uptick because you have to have scales for this industry. Some of the scales are the same scales that folks would be using for selling gold, right? Because you're selling a gram. That's been an interesting opportunity for us to work with the industry. The last one is our Voluntary Fee for Service. Vincent mentioned not having extension, again, because it's not federally recognized. OSU won't touch it. Their legal people are adverse to them losing money from the feds. So where do you take an insect to have it identified? Where do you take plant material to figure out if it's got a fungal or viral disease? Well, you can't put it through the mail. But you can drive it to Salem and we have Fee for Service and our lab can do that because our lab is not paid for by federal dollars. So you know it's a paradigm shift when you hop in the elevator at ODA in Salem and wonder if you're going to get a contact high because somebody brought three or four really beautiful, but not 100% beautiful or they wouldn't have brought them in, cannabis plants. I don't know that I ever thought that that would happen. I think it's great. It's just probably why I got this job. And then the other piece is the industrial hemp. So industrial hemp is just cannabis with 0.3% THC or less, no more than 28 days prior to harvest. In Oregon, you have to be registered to grow it and you have to be registered to process it basically. So if you're taking the raw hemp and turning it into something else, you have to have a handler registration. We started issuing registrations in 2015. Oregon has actually had a hemp law in the book since 2009. The legislature didn't provide any funding and it wasn't until after the 2014 Farm Bill that we chose to start issuing registrations. And we've just seen exponential growth. And I think that's a really awesome opportunity here in the state of Oregon. So I will leave you with that and maybe I prompt in some questions for you during the Q&A. Joshua Bombard, I work for the State of Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. I cover Jackson, Josephine and Douglas counties. I'm based out of Medford here. I want to just, you can go to the next one, sorry. I want to just kind of give an overview of the statewide land use planning program first to kind of provide some context. We've had, in Oregon, we've had a statewide planning program for about 45 years since the enrollment of Senate Bill 100 in 1973. The program has a foundation of 19 statewide planning goals. They're kind of the overarching, kind of the backbone of the land use planning program for Oregon and it really differentiates us from almost all of the other states in the country. Goal three is the applicable one for tonight. What it states, as you can read, is agricultural land shall be preserved and maintained for farm use consistent with existing and future needs for agricultural products. So I think that those are some key words, not only existing agricultural products and existing agriculture but future agriculture. That's things that we don't know about right now, but that we need to protect our land for. In 2016, the Senate enrolled the recreational marijuana program and it defined marijuana. And what it did in that, the key point here is that it defined marijuana as a farm crop. So it put, as Sonny said, it kind of lumped it into the category of a bunch of other farm crops. How many did you say, 230 something farm crops? But what it did, which was different was it allowed it to be regulated using reasonable regulations. That line should be up a little bit. The reasonable regulations. So that differentiated marijuana from other farm crops. Industrial hemp, I didn't have that on the slide here, but industrial hemp doesn't have that caveat. It's treated like any other farm crop. Marijuana is a little different in that it provides local jurisdictions to go above and beyond from a regulation standpoint what it would normally do for a traditional farm crop. So what are reasonable regulations? You know, there's a lot of subjectivity there, but generally speaking, we're talking about things like setback, noise, odor. The library will close in 15 minutes. Please bring any items you find to check out in the circulation desk on the first floor now. All right. Setbacks, noise, odor, water use, lighting, canopy sized, waste management. Those are the type of things that local jurisdictions can, if they choose to regulate, they can choose to regulate in a different way than they would regulate typical agricultural products. Some of the other considerations, something that's very pertinent down here is the discussion about what land use is, what zones essentially should they allow a recreational marijuana production and medical production for that matter. It's primarily important for Josephine County. I don't know how many of you are from Josephine County, but they weren't as proactive maybe as some other counties and it's kind of created some issues there because they've really delayed kind of making that decision. And now, I mean, there's a lot of people growing in many different zones legally because they've been able to do that, mostly because Josephine County wasn't very proactive in putting together regulations to differentiate or decide whether they wanted to, say, restrict it in rural residential areas or in industrial zones or allow it in certain areas. And then if a county chooses to restrict or allow for that matter it in different zones than just your exclusive farm use zones, say your rural residential zones, the county does have the ability to provide more regulations than what they would have been able to do if they just allowed it in your exclusive farm use zones, because as we know our rural residential zones have quite a few more homes, right? There's concentrations of homes to have a higher concentration or higher level of impact to existing residents there, so they can take that upon themselves to do that. The point here is that it's really up to the local jurisdictions, the counties, if they choose to come up with these kind of regulations in many of the counties across the state have done it differently. One of the things I wanted to point out here is that we have a very high concentration, no pun intended, concentration of recreational and medical grows in Southern Oregon. As you can see here I was doing a little research for this and 20% of the processors or recreational processors in the state are in Jackson and Josephine County, 36% of the producers, so the growers of recreational marijuana are from here. And just as context, Josephine and Jackson counties make up about 7% of the population, so it's quite a disproportionate amount of people that are growing or producing marijuana in this area. And then this next slide just shows the medical thing to back that up as well. Same kind of stats, 27% of patients in the state are in Jackson and Josephine counties and 32% of the medical growers are in those two counties as well. Vince pointed out some of the land use challenges that they've heard through their discussion, so this is going to be kind of more of a review if anything. The things that we hear about and the concerns that are raised regularly with us has to do with impacts associated with greenhouses. So not only do you have the noise and traffic, the intensity of maybe a type of farming that hasn't been in that area before, it's more akin to like say a truck farm or something like that which may not have been suitable for a particular area, but now they're seeing that type of agricultural commodity happening. And then the compaction of soils which Vince brought up, I mean, we have a very limited amount of high quality class 1 and 2 soils in this region here. And we're seeing because I think of the culture, the industry that they buy property or lease property with this high quality soil, they bring in a whole bunch of DG or aggregate compacted on top of that soil, and then they bring in a bunch of soil and put raised beds in. So that was something that only happens when the commodity is a really high value commodity. So we haven't really seen that very much up until now. Water use, neighborhood, community conflicts, definitely Williams has been on the list of communities which has seen some drastic kind of community changes. And as Vince pointed out, there's people on both sides of that discussion. And then the increase of land and housing prices. So housing prices, Jackson, Josephine County are on the rise. As you can see in both these charts, it's a very precipitous rise. 10.7% increase over last year in Josephine County, 7.1% increase in Jackson County over last year. Like we all know that there's a housing affordability issue going on. How much marijuana in the cannabis industry plays into this? I don't think there's any research out there as far as I know that exists to show that. But it's probably not helping the situation. And this I thought would be is kind of relevant in the context of the kind of the community neighborhood dynamics. You know, I was hearing a lot of concerns from people that live in the Williams area and other small communities a couple years back. I think that's kind of toned down a little bit recently. But the point that they were making is that the people that were moving to the area and they were doing farmers were out of town or so right. There were people coming from out of state often. They were changing the dynamics of the area. This research here that was very recent research from Portland State University looked at farm property sales from 2010 to 2015. So it's limited because that really started before recreational marijuana was legalized. But I think it helps to kind of illustrate and set kind of the standard that we can compare to later on. What this is showing is 14% of the farm property sales during that time frame were purchased by people from or corporations from out of state. So we'll be able to kind of look back on this when the new research and new data comes out to see what that actually means. Is it really changing or is it staying the same? In this one I thought was quite relevant. If you look at the per acre cost of the median sale price per acre of farmland. I was really amazed that Josephine County was ranking higher than Jackson. I mean Jackson has quite a bit more people right. There's quite a bit higher demand for housing. So I think this probably illustrates to a certain degree some of the dynamic that's happening. It's hard to know exactly but I thought that this was a good relevant slide. So what are some of the opportunities? Of course there's both some of the issues that are created but then there are also opportunities. One of the interesting opportunities that we've seen as a state is that there's often been, since the land use planning program came into existence, there's been a criticism like people aren't getting the highest and best use for their property. If only they could sell their farm and split it up and build houses on it, then they'd be able to make a lot more money and we should allow that as a state. We have some philosophical principles that are kind of working against that. But what's happened here is that the highest and best use on farmland is often cannabis now or marijuana now. So that's changed the dynamic and what actually is happening at the counties is people are looking as to say in Jackson County where they've not allowed recreational marijuana on rural residential land. People are coming in to look for land and they're looking to try to buy rural residential land and convince the county to convert it back to EFU so that they can grow marijuana on it. So that's really interesting. Marijuana is a high value agricultural product. And it's really akin to the number one from the 2016 which I think is the latest data of agricultural commodities. It's really akin to greenhouse and nursery products which are the number one agricultural commodity in the state of Oregon. So we have to kind of think about it in that perspective a little bit that it's not that different than a lot of the greenhouses that are going up on class one soil or class two soil in the Willamette Valley. Not seeing that's good or bad. I'm just putting it out there. And then I think what we'll hear about later is it does provide supplemental income for farmers where they're really trying to grow other products and this is supplementing that. I think that's it. All right. Thank you. That's Watermaster for Josephine County. Is that too loud? OK. I'm actually kind of standing in for Siobhan Haynes who's the Jackson County Watermaster. Siobhan Haynes and I went to Illinois Valley High School out in Cave Junction as well as going to SLU. So when I said local in my little introduction bio there we are very much local. So Siobhan and I have the honor of representing the Oregon Water Resource Department covering the Rogue Basin which we've jokingly referred to at times as Jackson Fiend County. And as you can see by the analytics or the statistics that people have put up we do have the densest population and concentration of cannabis grows in the state. So we get involved in a lot of conversations and Salem with those Salem folks about water and cannabis. I only have a couple of slides. I'm really just going to be speaking mostly. But this photo here or this slide here this group up here is our Water Resource Commission which is a seven member panel that is kind of nominated. They are public members. They can be farm owners what have you and our department basically reports to the Water Resource Commission which is what they what they are on kind of the goings on and when they have quarterly meetings. So this was a couple years back we had the commission as well as some other folks from Salem come down and a couple 15 passenger vans and drive around and look at cannabis farms which many of them had never seen before. There was a misconception that they were still hydrangea sized bushes and that it was a small thing. So it was very interesting and good experience to get some folks out and show them what's going on with cannabis and Southern Oregon and water use. So real quick the Oregon Water Resource Department when you apply for a water right there's not a field for what's your crop. We don't really track which crops are associated with water rights. Hold on. Okay did everybody get a library card. I just want to make sure. We don't actually have that analytic. It's something that's somewhat maybe of an oversight and it's not from a perspective of trying to specifically do regulation one way for different crop types. It's more of an oversight on our part of having that statistic to say there's this much hay and this much blueberry and this much cranberry and this much cannabis and hemp. But the way we regulate with cannabis farms is like any other farm. With Oregon Water Law there's a pertinency which means that your water right is pertinent to the land that it's on. You can have the source be surface water groundwater reservoir and then what you're doing with the irrigation on that is really dependent upon the water right itself. It's not crop specific. When we think about Oregon Water Law we also have to acknowledge that as has been pointed out by Josh with the Josephine County having its no pun intended growing pains of land use. I get phone calls all the time is Josephine County Water Master and the phone call starts with there's an illegal grow next door and I'm like well let's unpack that. A lot of folks think that county land use supersedes Oregon Water Law and that's not the case. It's actually the opposite. If it becomes if they go through the Luba appeals and they decide not to allow our five growing in Josephine County that's not going to affect any water rights that are associated with the land that would be a county issue. Water Law again, Siobhan likes to say we don't care what kind of grass you grow as long as you have a water right if you're going to sell it. So that's really where that one ends up with land use. Oh hey that's great. So when we look at the changing landscape of cannabis in Southern Oregon and water use some of the ways that this is affected our department and this slide is great for this is we've had a dramatic increase. A new groundwater applications wells are a very easy efficient way to irrigate your lands. You're not beholden to some ditch agreement and you don't have to deal with the surface flows and regulations therein. So we had in 2000 2014 I believe we had about eight groundwater applications for Jackson and Josephine County and then in 2015 with the legalization of cannabis that number shot up to about 70. And that's just for our area. We still have the same amount if not less because of state budget crunch for people reviewing those applications. So what that translates to the landowners is that what used to take six months or so now takes up to two years which has been very difficult for folks who are looking to invest in this new industry or looking to get off the ground and get started on that because now they've got a truck water while they go through that process. So that's been a difficult situation for the department to try and accommodate that. Another thing that I've been running into a lot is there's a fear sometimes of dealing with government agencies. If I call the water master about what I intend to do or what I may be doing and I find out that what I'm doing isn't exactly above board I'm out of luck and then I'm not going to be able to do what I'm doing. We work on voluntary compliance as much as possible. If there's a way to help a landowner get into compliance with their intended agricultural uses we'll go for that and try and assist people. Obviously if it's illegal use then it gets regulated and shut off. But the point being opening the dialogue and having that communication with your water master or you know a regional assistant or something along those lines kind of gets you that process moving to try and figure out what you can or cannot do to be above board with water use. So in that there's a very large component of education. We try and any chance we get do something like this where we'll speak to the public about water use and what water law looks like, what a pertinency means. The fact that there are in fact irrigation seasons is a big one for folks especially folks who come from out of state. There's a lot of states that don't have the water law that we do and basically if you have a library card you can do whatever you want with water. But no there are states where if the water runs through your property you can do pretty much whatever you want with it and that is not the case. Here waters of the state are pretty much defined by anything that leaves your property a defined channel if it's a groundwater source, creeks running through that kind of thing. So we really try and work hard on educating folks on Oregon Water Law and what they can and cannot do with their water. In that we have had a significant increase in number of complaints and I would say loosely 70% to 80% of my complaints in Josephine County are directly related cannabis. I would make it clear that not all of those lead to an actual infraction, not all of those lead to a situation where they're... Oh, yeah, this is, but let me just finalize my thought on the complaints. Not all of those lead to an infraction. A lot of them might go out and I find that they're in compliance. It's more of a public policy or a public perception. Cannabis has still got a stigma to it. Josephine County was about 51-49 so it's pretty split as far as how people feel about it. This is our hockey stick graph and that is our groundwater applications. And so as you can see, significant increase. I was in Salem over the last couple of days. I worked with the groundwater guys and tried to get some new numbers. They said it's plateaued and we've seen someone of a dip actually at this point, which is reflected in I think a lot of people's work with cannabis at this point. Where'd you find these anyway? I must have been Siobhan from last year. Yeah, thanks Siobhan. It's good looking out. Oh, did I? It's what happens when you forward emails on your cell phone from Salem. So some other things I wanted to focus on. I want to talk about myths real quick and I don't know where I'm at for time. But there's a lot of myths going around about water. And I think that there are folks who've come into this industry, be they realtors, land use consultants, or consultants that'll give you the turnkey of how to get you set up in cannabis. And sometimes they misrepresent water or water rights and it's not necessarily nefarious. They might not know that a non-canceled water right doesn't necessarily mean there's water there. If it's a ditch that doesn't exist anymore and it's never been moved to cancellation. That's a water right what we would call kind of on paper. So I find that the education component a lot of times is folks moving in, buying their property, calling me and being like, who do I contact about this ditch? And I tell them the ditch hasn't existed in 30 years. So now they bought a piece of property, they put in infrastructure, they put in money, and now they're faced with the scramble, this uphill battle of what do I do for water. So that's two minutes. I'm long winded. So that's been something that's interesting. The due diligence component of buying a property is huge. I strongly recommend anyone who's interested in purchasing land for agriculture, regardless of what they intend to do with it, contacting your water master. We're understaffed and we'd like to respond faster but we will get to your situation and your request and try and inform you about water on that property if there is in fact water rights. That's really it for me on that. I'm sure there'll be questions for the Q&A session. Siobhan Haynes again is in the county building here. I don't have any of his business cards. My business cards are on the back table. If you'd like his contact information just see me afterwards and I can give it to you. But ultimately it's a new industry in the area but we basically approach it like we approach any other agricultural crop. So thank you. My name is Peter Gendron. I'm the president of the Oregon Sun Growers Guild. I also own my own business, omnibudsman enterprises, can of business development. I'm very heavily involved with this and I get the wonderful privilege of talking to you tonight about what the structure of this looks like from the state's point of view and what's coming back to the counties here. We pop up the next one. The next one. So a little background. Measure 67 passed in 1998 that gave us our medical law. We didn't have formalized dispensation in the state of Oregon until after the dispensaries were codified in the 2013 and 2014 legislative sessions. There are too many bills in this to go into in a short period of time. It's a very complicated area of law. It's possibly been the most litigated outside of the court system of anything we've seen in Oregon's history. There is no tax on medical marijuana products any place in the state. We hit a peak of over 450 retailers back in the beginning of this current regulatory process in the start of 2015. At that point in time I was serving on the Oregon Liquor Control Commissions Licensing Compliance and Enforcement Committee. I currently serve as the president of the Oregon Sun Growers Guild, elected to that position. From 450 plus medical marijuana producers by the end of this particular cycle, we're now down to four statewide retailers and the producer numbers are off the chart. We began to tax retail sales to adults through medical stores in 2016. At the end of 2015, October of 2015, we began to allow sales through the handful of existing retailers in Oregon to the entire adult population as part of the passage of Measure 91. So for OLCC retail, that's Measure 91. That's adult use legalization in Oregon. Early sales began medical dispensaries October 2015. Those dispensaries began immediately transferring through the paperwork process in order to apply for OLCC licenses. This process took most of a year for the earliest applicants. We started to see our first full retailers online about 12 months after the first applications were approved. We currently have a 17% tax on OLCC retailers, but for early sales to fund the program, we actually taxed the first year of sales at a full 25%. This is something that the state saw was necessary because the OLCC basically had to borrow $9.7 million out of the general fund to get their programs up and running. So as we moved into 2017, the state tax went to the permanent tax rate of 17%, and local communities, municipalities, were allowed to introduce local option taxes of 3% on cannabis products. Some of those votes occurred in 2016. The majority of those votes occurred in 2017. An interesting point of note here is that, regardless of whether the jurisdictions voted in favor of allowing OLCC participation, over 101 municipalities voted in favor of passing the 3% local option tax, even though cannabis isn't allowed for retail sale in half of the counties in Oregon, and in fact, even in some of the counties in Oregon where it is allowed for retail sale, it's not allowed in the entire county. I'm going to go to Marion County for an example. I have an office up on Capitol Street for my business, Omni Budsman Enterprises, and Marion County proper does not allow cannabis cultivation or distribution. However, Salem proper does. So Salem is an enclave there where we have a robust cannabis economy, but relatively limited access to cultivation. They're shipping everything in from other places around the state, especially from southern Oregon, Josephine and Jackson counties, which are a heart of cultivation. This is how the state tax is distributed under the current structure. We don't have time to go into all of the history of it, but this hasn't been modified too extensively since the passage of measure 91. 40% goes to the general education fund. 20% goes to mental health. I'll come back to that one in a minute. 15% goes directly to the state law enforcement fund. 10% goes to cities based both on the population and the number of licenses. This was a modification that was made in a subsequent legislative session. I'll touch on that in a minute. 10% goes to the counties based on the total available grow canopy size. Another thing that was modified after the passage of measure 91 and prior to our conversation today, 5% for drug and alcohol abuse prevention, intervention and treatment services. That's remained unchanged since the original draft language of measure 91. So sales and revenue. What are we doing with this? Oregon in 2016 on OLCC retail stores. This does not include the medical stores that were transitioning into OLCC. This is just a OLCC retail store as we're talking about here. Over $292 million in revenue that was brought in over $69 million in taxes. In 2017, we saw that jump to over $420 million with $72 million collected in taxes. Our current biennium's estimate from the State Department of Revenue, 147.8 for revenue is what we expect to be coming into the state coffers that's going to be distributed under this program in our current biennium. The next biennium's estimate, and this is where I'm going to start to kind of depart ways with our actuarials, is $202.5 or $202 million in change. These numbers have been projected out for 10 years. There's a relatively steady rate of growth projected at averages around 7% a year. We're not actually going to see that specifically. There are a couple of things that are going to happen in the market in the meantime that the bean counters in Salem haven't taken into account yet. This is generally, this is what we're looking at, the initial $69 million and then the $72 million. And then we're going into the hundreds of millions relatively rapidly. This is distributed now only among the counties that allow OLCC licensed businesses. Remember, the medical program is not taxed in Oregon. And as we get on to the next slide, the businesses pay the tax monthly by the end of the following month. So it's a pretty common tax structure for collection from the state's point of view. The state makes disbursements quarterly. The target is to make those quarterly in the following quarter. However, right now we still have about a four to five month lag time as we're dealing with compliance with the licensees that are operating within the system. Initial disbursements were statewide, but the legislature made a modification to that. So as you'll see shortly, those disbursements now only go to what we call the opt-in counties. Half of the counties in our state have not opted into this program. Some of the counties have only opted in partially, so the municipalities in those counties that have opted in are the beneficiaries of revenue that is generated within their borders. The rest of the county, for example, in the case of Salem and Marion County, Salem is the beneficiary of a dozen and a half OLCC retailers. Marion County as a whole is not receiving any of that revenue anymore. The 2018 legislature has allowed out of the initial start-up funds that we pulled for the OLCC, nine and a half million dollars has been paid back. They have a budget there, it's about five million dollars a year, that's now going to be taken beginning at the start of 2020 from the OLCC funding that is collected through marijuana license revenue specifically, and that is going to be used statewide for enforcement of Oregon's cannabis programs. The state has identified four counties which are at the highest risk of diversion statewide. Josephine and Jackson topped that list, followed by Lane and Multnomah. Each of those counties and their administrators, in your case, your county commissioners will be able to apply for a slice of that five million dollar annual disbursement. It's going to be given out one quarter at a time based on perceived need, and that is going to be established by a committee which is formed by the state legislature. So when it comes to enforcement, the state is looking at using this tax revenue to enhance compliance in a way that we literally have never seen before. They are planning on using marijuana money to make sure that the cannabis cultivators are completely following the rules and the laws of their jurisdictions. The distributions won't be even, they'll be given on a merit-based basis, and our federal attorney general is going to be weighing in on how that money is distributed. This addresses local, state, and federal concerns when it comes to both cultivation and enforcement. We have a host of departments here that are in this. Their fingers are in the pie. The Oregon Medical Marijuana Program, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission are obvious. The Department of Justice and the Department of Revenue have spent a substantial amount of time on these rules and rulemaking. The Department of Agriculture, of course, Sonny Jones is here today. The Department of Health. And then you get into other departments. Local planning, local building, state police, local police, forestry, water, DEQ. There is barely any agency in this state that doesn't somehow have its fingers in the pie for one reason or another. As we're dealing with this issue of the growing and developing industry, we see that the regulatory hurdles have yet to be completely defined. That's part of why we're here today. So we missed one slide in there. I think that was the blank one. I don't know why it didn't come through. That was a formatting error. That slide was actually a kind of a big one because it had state tables on it that had to do with revenue distribution. So one of the things here, just to touch on it really quickly, we started out giving the initial revenue to all the counties in Oregon. Then we subsequently had votes that either allowed or disallowed cannabis cultivation, both countywide and in specific cities within the counties. So initially, the entire pool was distributed statewide. What's happened since then is the revenue is now being focused, opt out counties no longer get a share of that revenue. And opt in counties get the revenue share weighted in part based on their actual level of production. The original formula from the state level left Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington counties getting the benefit of the majority of the tax revenue. We restructured the tax revenue distribution. It excluded the opt out counties from getting any of the benefit of the medical and now adult use marijuana sales. And it channeled that all back to the counties based in part on production. Instead of just being a straight distribution based on sales, we weighted it based on production as well. So that benefits counties like Josephine and Jackson very much. There's one question that's going to come up here on where is all the money going? How much money did Josephine County get? How much money did Jackson County get? You can't actually define all of that because the state legislature and their infinite wisdom decided they weren't going to report those numbers county by county. I can give you a couple little tidbits that will help. Josephine County got $206,000 on the last disbursement last year. These numbers are kind of hush hush for the state because we're still dealing with a commodity. In Oregon it's a regulated commodity, but it is not federally legal yet. And the state is concerned about productions for its agents and agencies in the city and county governments. So where we're at right now, why isn't Southern Oregon getting more money because it's such a big production area? We are not getting more money in part because of the fact that our governments have discouraged production and development. We're still involved in a court suit in Josephine County right now over this issue. So we haven't necessarily received the full benefit. What we're going to see in the future on our revenues going up at a more rapid rate than they are statewide is this balances out and as we balance out production distribution. It's an interesting time to be up here and to talk about the industry. And I wanted to, when Maude asked me to speak, my first gut instinct was no, I am not going to go up there and talk about what we're doing with him just because we've kind of just really kept it quiet. It also made me think, well, I probably should speak about it because if I feel that way, other people probably feel that way. And I think it's important to speak about the financial benefits that hemp has given our farm, but also some of the decisions that we've made as hemp growers and wanted to share that with you to hopefully just make people more aware about the important decisions that come to play in growing it. So, you know, our farm is a really diverse farm or 113 acres over 60 acres is in Woodlands and we have about 35 acres in production and we grow 70 different crops. So about three years ago, we were one of the first, I think, handful of farms in Oregon that registered as for hemp license. And we did that because we had a contract for it and most of 90% of what we grow on our farm is actually contracted for herbs. We grow for big medicine making companies and we talk to them in the winter, find out their needs. We grow specifically for them and when it's ready, we let them know and we get it out to them. And, you know, three years ago when we were faced with this contract, we thought we were really trying not to get into the whole cannabis world. I mean, when we were doing farmers markets for over four years, I would say the majority of our food farmer friends were growing. We used to joke it was to subsidize their food growing habit. So, and that's because food is not cheap. And you wonder why so many food farmers are growing cannabis because people don't want to pay, but it really costs to produce food. And that's the reality. So for when people start complaining about, you know, so many, you know, pot farms and cannabis and all this thing, I'm like, yeah, because nobody wants to pay, but it costs to produce food here. So meat, produce, you know, are you going to the farmers market or are you going to Costco to buy your food? So those are questions I ask people if they're not being supportive. Totally not for the big huge grows with lights all over and greenhouses and type one soil and permanent greenhouses. And I want to talk a little bit about that. But at the same time, we need to look at our culture of the community and how we can be more supportive of food in our area because I think that that is really at jeopardy right now. So one of the things I do want to share and people can ask questions later is over. We have about three and a half acres of hemp. It's certified organic. That in itself was a real battle. We actually have been certified by Oregon TILTH for years in our since our farming career. And when we came in for our inspection, they would not certify the hemp and we were really taken back because we thought, well, this is the program and it wasn't. We were told it wasn't a pilot program. It was a program program. And so my question was to the certifier is you don't regulate any of our other sales. Hemp is federally legal and why do you have a problem with it? So we actually revoked our certification and had to go through a whole new process in the middle of a growing season because we believe so strongly that that certification company should have stood by us and be supportive of farmers that are trying to make a living. And so I just want you to know that when farms take on these tasks like this, it's not always easy. It's extra work and we also have to kind of just realize that it's not always easy decision making process, right? All of us are looking at all the hemp fields that are coming in with rows and rows of plastic. We don't use any plastic on our farm for anything. It was really interesting to hear you speak, Sunny, about the regulations of pesticides. I was thinking to myself, wow, I mean, we give food, fruits and vegetables to children and, you know, people that are in compromised health, but yet we don't have the same regulations on pesticides for that too bad. So, you know, it is something to really think about. It's important we've never actually had to spray anything on our farm, not even certified organic Omri certified product because we believe that our very top priority is soil health and diversity on our farm. Next comes our financial sustainability because you can't be a sustainable farm if you don't have financial sustainability, so that's important as well. You know, we have these, you know, we have a background in all kinds of great certifications and things we wanted to do and then we actually got our farm and we had a big mortgage payment to pay. It was like, wow, now, you know, growing in crops is a lot easier than the food forest we had imagined, you know, getting these looks of like, wow, this is more difficult and so we do have to make decisions like that. But I think having diversity on the farm is so important and that's something that I think I'd like to see more in the cannabis industry just like in the grape industry. How can we encourage people to have more diversity on the farm so that we do have good health in all the plants, good health for the planet and we have land that we can grow, you know, for generations to come. We talked a little bit. I heard people mention about greenhouses. Greenhouses have been forever. It is a huge industry. I think one of the differences we're seeing here in our community is that there's greenhouses that because of their infrastructure, their electrical infrastructure that they need for the lighting, which is not normally happening in the Willamette Valley with their greenhouses, because they can't really afford to have lighting on there for the crops they grow, but here you need to have permanent flooring for that electrical permit. And so they're getting permanent cement flooring because they're trying to get permitted through the county and do the right thing, but yeah, they're putting it on Class 1 soil. And so those are long-term effects that, you know, yeah, I guess we could clean it up and dig out the cement, but anybody who grows gardens or farms knows that the land is never the same after you take that cement away, not to mention how much it's going to cost. Also, all the infrastructure that's coming in with electrical infrastructure. We've got people putting in major infrastructure, and that actually goes when these farms go out of business and we think, oh, well, good, we'll snap up that land. It'll finally be affordable again. That infrastructure for that permanent electrical components that were in there goes with the land. So you might have your mortgage along with a thousand dollar payment to Pacific Power. So that's something like these are long-term effects that are happening with people we're making today. Just like 40 years ago, people were making decisions to spray DDT and it's still in our soil. So in the Rogue Valley and everywhere, but, you know, it's here. So I think it's just so, we have such a, it's such, it's an opportunity, but it's also a huge responsibility of how we farm and how we can create kind of a safe environment for everybody to speak about. Practices and feel comfortable and feel inspired by others is just really important to us. So that's one of the reasons I came out today. Yeah, this green rush, it's amazing, right? I mean, you just, can we take that picture down? It's like, thank you. You know, you hear all the money coming in and then you think $200,000 Josephine County got after all that tax money. But, you know, part of the reason I think Josephine County property is more money for ag land is because they have less stringent regulations. So it's a lot easier if you're doing grows in Josephine County than it is in Jackson, which I'm grateful because I'm a Jackson County resident. So our farm is in Jackson County border. So, yeah, just talking about the greenhouse part, you know, monocropping just so important to have diversity. That really is where we need to look at these decisions and the future of what we want to happen. I think that's really where we're looking at. What do we want to be known at? I like the, you know, southern, southern, southern outdoor, what's it called? What's your organization? Yeah, the sun growers. Like, do we want to be known for having outdoor grown, whatever product? Do we want it to be organic? Like, what do we want to make for ourselves? Honestly, what's happening in the hemp industry is for us, we've seen, you know, the price go from, wow, that's pretty good. It's not what marijuana was, but it's okay. We're herb farmers. We get sometimes $5 a pound. So we're like, it's just pretty much the same work for us, you know, and then going down and down and down. And so for us, it's really looking like big ag is coming into hemp just like pretty much everything does end up happening. So I think we kind of need to carve out a niche for ourselves in the hemp industry. We need to have that in southern Oregon and really looking at what do we want to offer? You know, do we want to offer organic outdoor grown hemp where people know and respect the growing practices? Thank you, Bree, for being one of our loyal customers and this really helped us. Like, for us growing hemp, it has changed our farm. We got to pay off so many bills that we would have never gotten to do otherwise. So I want to share that. Thank you. Yeah, I just really am looking at where we're going in the future. You know, I look at hemp and it's been a good opportunity, but I also think it's, it's very every year we think, well, this could be the last year. So what are we going to do with it? We're going to invest in infrastructure that we know that will sustain our farm for years to come. And we're not going to do, we're not going to make decisions and make buildings or, you know, wherever do, do things that are frivolous. We need to look forward because, you know, the goal is to be able to sustain your farm and the land. And you want people to be up, you want your kids, your grandkids, other people who want to come into farm to inherit something that you're proud of. And so I really just urge all of us as a community to come together and see how we can create that. And I'm open to any other questions. So yeah, thanks. Good update, actually. And there's been some things changed since last year. So very helpful to hear from you all. We have a few questions here and maybe a few more will come in. There are some questions on legal matters and enforcement. And I'm happy to run them by the panel to see if anyone knows, but just going to point out that that's not the expertise of anybody up here. So we'll see how we do on that. But there are some water questions, as you might have anticipated. I have a blue microphone. You do. How about that? One of the questions is how is existing water availability protected? So if the applications, sorry, the handwriting is a little hard to read. If the applications could potentially reduce surrounding water tables and access, is there an onus for proof or validation? How are you determining who's getting new water rights, I think? The water section works on that. And in that they're incorporating in our real-time gaging station network, which we have 53 of those in the southwest region, roughly 260 in the state. We also look at what surface water rights are in an area before they would grant any kind of water right. The water availability model is public. If you can navigate the Oregon Water Resource Department website, which is a difficult chore unto itself, you can actually find a water availability model for any drainage that you're in. The vast majority of the surface water sources in Jackson and Josephine County are already fully allocated. We do have things like rainy season storage programs that you can apply for. But when it comes to groundwater, we have observation wells around the state that we track quarterly. We'll be doing those again in this area this month. And we've been doing some of those for as much as 50 years. And so we look at those numbers and try and look at trends when they're making the decisions to grant new water rights. There are setbacks. Some of the first setbacks for applying for a groundwater right is does the well meet minimum well construction standards? And is it within a quarter mile of a stream or waterway? So those are ways that we try and protect the resource. But again, we do have an actually pretty elaborate water availability model system that we consult. And then the other aspect of that, and it was something that was in a slide that came up behind me while it was blabbing on, is that cannabis is an actual interesting opportunity for conservation. If you take flood irrigation, which is a traditional practice, which is fairly inefficient, and someone buys a 100 acre hay parcel and now they're growing in a few greenhouses and they've got five acres or 10 acres of hemp, it's a more water efficient crop. So it's an opportunity for some conservation opportunities, maybe leasing some water in stream. So again, to answer the question in a circuitous manner, we do have a water availability model that we do consult. And then for complex transfers, there's a public comment period. And for some water rights, there's a public comment period. ODA representatives have indicated Oregon does not comply with the hemp regulations in the 2014 Farm Bill, as our program here has no research component. As a result, Oregon hemp farmers and handlers are not protected. Is the state of Oregon making any changes in their program to be compliant with federal hemp direction to protect Oregonians in the hemp industry? You can grow hemp under a research program through the State Department of Ag or State Land Grant University. So that would be Oregon State University. Our legal beagles have said that the program as it stands, they would defend it as being Farm Bill compliant. However, we recognize those concerns and so the 2018 legislature addressed that in House Bill 4089. And I'm having a very long day because I started out in Salem at a rules advisory committee for hemp specifically. And we went over draft rules for three hours this morning that do include research components. So right now you have to tell the department on how many acres you plan on growing. We're looking at expanding that to include why you're growing. So are you growing for floral, for grain, for fiber? And then also requiring at the end of the growing season, not only how many acres did you tell us you planned on growing, but now tell me how many acres you actually grew and how many pounds did you grow? And so we are looking at enhancing the research component of Oregon's hemp program. The legislature also named it in statute the Oregon Hemp Pilot Program to address that concern. So that is definitely recognized by the state and the agency is working on that. So if you are not on ODA's listserv for industrial hemp and you want to follow that, I highly recommend that you sign up. You can either catch me afterwards or if you want to write it down, you go to oda.fyislashsubscribe. And that gets you to all of ODA's email lists, one of which is specific to industrial hemp. I also manage one that is general to cannabis as well. Thank you. Jackson and Josephine counties were one of the top four for diversion. And there's some questions about how much revenue people might speculate as being lost to the black market. If anybody wants to take a stab at that. And then is there a conflict between county and state regulations and enforcement versus the benefit of the revenue coming into the local economy? There's an issue specifically for our federal prosecutor Billy Williams. One of the things that comes into the discussion and diversion is that Oregon's total production is less than the diverted production from one quarter of California. The way they break it up by geographic regions. So when it comes to orders of significance or importance, our federal attorney has a specific job to do and one of his jobs is to make sure that the programs we've created in Oregon keep Oregon's cannabis in Oregon to the best of our regulatory ability. That is part of the reason for the new allocations that are going to be broken out of that $5 million. It'll be sectioned off quarterly beginning at the start of 2020 to address that concern. What is the actual quantity? It's a drop in the bucket compared to one quarter in Northern California's unregulated production. I think between our medical programs established in 1998, the passage of measure 91, the work that we've done both within the cannabis community and working with the state house on this, Oregon's diversion is a drop in the bucket. In fact, one of the things that indicates the fact that we've been doing a really good job at containing diversion is the fact that we have a surplus of cannabis in this state right now. I'll just add one thing to that, which is that while that data is not presently being developed, it is certainly easy to develop. So cannabis has a unique remote sensing signature from a satellite imagery, so it is very possible for us to determine total production in any county at any time. That's how most satellites were actually developed intentionally for that purpose. The first satellites that hit orbit were actually designed to try to track wheat production and Russia at the time, and we can do that in cannabis as well. In fact, those remote sensing signatures are so respond that you can see inside of housing as well for that cannabis. So it certainly could be tracked if people wanted to look at it, but I wouldn't even try to predict what production looks like. Yeah. I have water questions, but maybe you could just provide a little information, Jake. If there's only one well on an agricultural property, can it be used for agricultural irrigation? The way Oregon Water Law works, ORS 537-545, the domestic exempt use of a ground water source for domestic well. You're allowed up to a half an acre of non-commercial lawn and garden. You're allowed up to 15,000 gallons a day of use, which is a significant amount of water. And they base that off of a previous idea that a house holds 275 gallons, and you can have developments where it's a community well system. Anything over that requires a water right, but you can get a water right off of a domestic well. Again, the two things to look for doesn't meet construction standards, and is it 1320 feet or a quarter mile from a stream or waterway? Those are your two big red flags right there. So in answer to the question, if there's one well on the property and you file for a water right out of it, you could irrigate as much as you filed for the water right for. And if it is, let's say, an OHA garden, a medical garden, or a personal use garden, and it's less than half an acre, and it's not a commercial enterprise, then you could do that as well just as if it were tomatoes or what have you. So people toss around the phrase ag well, any well is entitled to the domestic exemption. It's just if you want to go outside of that exemption, it requires a water right or permit. What is happening on the legal litigation side? What sorts of court cases are being pursued? And to what end? This is going on statewide right now. Josephine County attempted to pass last year ordinance 2017-002. It went before the Land Use Board of Appeals. It was found wanting. They did not issue correct notice to the residents of the county. The county appealed that the appellate court, they wanted more complete ruling from Land Use Board of Appeals. The appellate court, without much comment for them, upheld the Luba decision. There were several other points of clarification that Josephine County wanted on its ordinance, and the fact that the ordinance had not been given appropriate notice to the county residents was enough for the Land Use Board of Appeals and the appellate court to overturn 2017-002, send it back to the county. At this point in time, the county commissioners are still considering whether they're going to move forward with another iteration of that this year or next year, but that's being discussed by the commissioners and their legal counsel right now. That's probably the biggest issue in the case because seeing that they were losing at the court of appeals, Josephine County has also brought case in federal court, requiring the federal government to declare that they're not obligated to uphold the state's cannabis laws because the state's cannabis laws don't align with the federal laws. I've talked to some attorneys who believe this has already been settled in another court. We're waiting for a couple of more weeks for a ruling back on whether the federal appellate court is going to hear Josephine County's case. That's probably the most contentious case in the state right now. Generally speaking, these things tend to be neighbor to neighbor. There aren't a lot of situations that we've gotten into statewide where we've had counties taking on individuals or vice versa. We've had a number of counties, I'd say Polk County is one of them, where they approached this with the viewpoint that they weren't interested in participating in measure 91, but their citizens were interested in it and after being presented with compelling evidence, Polk County wrote some of the most cannabis-friendly for development regulations in the state and Marion County is going to be revisiting this at the ballot box this fall, as well as a couple of other counties. Klamath Falls just yesterday got enough signatures to put dispensaries on the ballot for Klamath Falls specifically, not for Klamath County, but if that passes in November, they will be regulating marijuana cultivation distribution in Klamath Falls proper. The rest of the county is still open for hemp farming though. Those are a couple of the biggest cases going on right now. Jackson County, as anybody who lives here knows, has been back and forth. Jackson County doesn't have the most friendly regulations, but the atmosphere here right now is much more hospitable than we expected it to be a couple of years ago and I think things are going to continue to improve. And I've seen this statewide. I've worked with people in all of the legal counties in the state and a couple of the counties that are working on legalization all the way out as far as Harney County. As this becomes normalized, then people no longer feel threatened by it and the lawsuits fall by the wayside. But for the meantime, we still have the Josephine County case being litigated this summer. We'll have ruling on that by, well, harvest time. And I would just jump in with many crops in Oregon. We deal with coexistence issues. You know, grassy growers weren't very happy when wine grapes moved in. The wine grapes are very sensitive to some of the herbicides that the grassy growers use. And so you've got wine grapes coming in saying, well, my crop is worth a lot of money. Right? So to heck with you. The grassy growers, well, I've been here forever. So to heck with you. I dealt with that a lot in the pesticide program. We have other issues of coexistence. We're seeing that with both marijuana and industrial hemp among themselves. If somebody lets something go to seed, there's concerns about pollen transfer within marijuana and from marijuana to hemp or hemp to marijuana. So there's concerns of coexistence there. And there's one, and I don't know all of the details about it, but there's an interesting situation. I think it's in Yamhill County where the marijuana operation hasn't gone in yet, but they were getting approval from the county, I think for a production site as part of their grow. And a local vineyardist is concerned because they are a biodynamic farm and are concerned about the odors from the cannabis grow affecting their wine. And I think there's some interesting right to farm stuff that is wrapped up into that as well. But it's gotten nasty. The vineyard owner, somebody cut the tail off of his cow, reached through the fence and cut it off. So there's some interesting things that play with coexistence issues. Marijuana isn't completely covered by right to farm. Industrial hemp is. So that provides some interesting things with this time place manner stuff that Peter has talked about. If I can follow up on Sunny's comment on the Yamhill County case, that case was settled. It did not reach a judicial verdict. The cannabis farmer in that case decided to pull out of the situation. It wasn't worth the hassle for him. The neighbor's complaint was actually the most absurd complaint that I've seen lodged in a court of law in Oregon to date, which is that it was going to make his wine taste like weed. The judge was willing to entertain the notion. At that point, the cannabis cultivator or proposed cannabis cultivator looked at his lawyer and the lawyer looked at him and they went. And thank you to Megan for moderating this evening's panel as well and asking the questions. So again, thank you all for coming. The Rogue Valley Food System Network is pleased to have you at this event. Like I said at the beginning, we originally convened this conversation so that we can all learn more about these complex issues in the intersection of cannabis in the food system. And we are still learning ourselves. So if there are issues that you see that are important in the food system, not just with cannabis in the food system, please bring them to us as a Food System Network. Reagan, Emmons, contact information is there on this slide. We are interested in providing forums for issues around the food system into the future. So please do stay in touch. And with that, I think we'll call it an evening.