As part of cannabis debate, General Assembly must decide whether to allow marijuana farms

Got questions about Virginia’s laws on weed? We’ve got answers in our FAQs on the state’s cannabis policies.

Steve Earle tells us it can be easily done. “I take the seed from Colombia and Mexico /
I just plant it up the holler down Copperhead Road,” he sings on “Copperhead Road.”

Molly Tuttle tells us it can be easily done, too. “In the Blue Ridge mountains with the whispering pines / They used to grow tobacco then they made moonshine / But there’s something better in the back of the barn / Down on Dooley’s Farm,” she sings on “Dooley’s Farm.”

I hate to question two of the leading musical chroniclers of our times, but are they right? How easy is it to grow marijuana outdoors in Southwest Virginia?

It would seem pretty easy. In 2015, authorities found 30,255 pot plants growing on Bull Mountain in Patrick County. At the time, they said it was the largest seizure ever in the state. Historically, Appalachia has been a good place to hide your cannabis crop for the obvious reasons: lots of mountains to shield the view and fewer people to rat you out. The latest Drug Enforcement Administration figures show that while California always tops the list of marijuana seizures, Kentucky comes in second for the most pot plants confiscated, with West Virginia coming in third.

It’s not hard, then, to imagine that if Virginia legalizes the retail sale of cannabis (and with it, the large-scale cultivation that would be needed to support the market demand), then Southwest Virginia would become a prime spot for this new industry.

But will it?

That depends, in part, on what the General Assembly decides in the coming days and weeks. The two bills moving through the legislature take different approaches to whether outdoor cultivation would be allowed.

The Senate version — SB 241 from Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach — explicitly allows for outdoor cultivation. In fact, it specifically bars the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority from banning cannabis farms.

The House version — HB 698 from Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax County — would allow the authority to ban outdoor cultivation if it saw fit.

All this might wind up being for naught if Gov. Glenn Youngkin eventually vetoes whatever the legislature comes up with — he’s made it clear he’s not interested in legalizing retail cannabis. However, the governor has also made it very clear he wants a sports arena in Alexandria, and some Democrats hope that agreeing to cannabis legalization, however reluctantly, might be the price he has to pay to get that stadium authority through the General Assembly.

The larger context here is how much the state should do to make sure a brand-new cannabis industry benefits all parts of the state economically. For our parochial purposes, that means how much will either of these bills benefit Southwest and Southside? While the House bill would allow regulators to close off outdoor growing (which presumably would be in rural areas), it also requires that licenses for cultivation and processing be distributed evenly across the state — with at least five cultivation licenses and at least five processing licenses in each state Senate district. The Senate bill allows outdoor growing and also instructs regulators to take into account whether applicants for licenses are from places officially defined by the federal government as “historically economically disadvantaged communities.” The Small Business Administration’s map shows those designations cover much of Southwest and Southside (along with some other parts of the state).

For our purposes today, I’ll focus just on the outdoor cultivation part.

First, we must ask a threshold question: Would Virginia be a good place to grow cannabis outdoors? Just because people have managed to run fairly large illegal pot farms doesn’t mean it would make economic sense for a legal business. Those illegal farmers don’t really have much of a choice; a bona fide cannabis company would have other options, and there will be accountants running the numbers to determine which one has the best return on investment.

To answer this question, I turned to Michelle Jarvis, a lab scientist at Lake Superior University in Michigan, which in 2019 became the first college in the country to offer a degree-level cannabis program. “There’s no reason cannabis couldn’t be grown in a number of VA microclimates,” she told me by email. “Choosing the timing and the varieties would be important for success. It just may take some trial and error to get everything dialed in.”

The main challenge, she said, is humidity. “Generally speaking, humidity during the last few weeks of flowering might be your biggest enemy. … I know VA can be very humid in the summer/fall. Humidity leads to bud rot which can be devastating. … I would say you need to time your flowers finishing based on the humidity/rainfall conditions of your location during certain seasons. Another suggestion if humidity and rain might be issues is to grow strains/varieties that have a more open flower structure … so less dense and more space between branches, etc to let air flow better. Insects will also be a big deal outdoors. Cannabis attracts LOTS of different insects, so having a robust IPM [integrated pest management] regimen will be key as well.”

Casie Berkhouse, who teaches ecology at Lackawanna University in Pennsylvania, another school with a cannabis program, concurs: “Cannabis can be grown in most climates. It is a plant that prefers a warm, sunny spot with moisture-controlled soil,” she said. “I think Virginia is a fine place to grow cannabis.”

So, it turns out that Steve Earle and Molly Tuttle and whoever was planting up on Bull Mountain were right. There are also cannabis connoisseurs who insist that outdoor plants — sun-grown is the term — produce a better product. The sunlight produces better terpenes, a certain set of compounds with the formula (C5H8)n for n ≥ 2. In layman’s terms, some believe outdoor weed will give you a better high.

Now, here are some of the reasons why Virginia farmers might not be adding a cash crop. Our Lake Superior expert has already mentioned two: bugs and weather. Farming has always been a chancey proposition; you’re at the mercy of the elements. If you’re growing cannabis indoors, you don’t have to worry about either. You can produce a more consistent harvest, and you can produce it year-round. Indoor growing also checks off the security box. Conventional farmers don’t have to worry about someone stealing the corn crop; cannabis farmers do have to worry about weed thieves. There are also political concerns: Medical marijuana companies have already invested in indoor-growing facilities because that’s all that was available under the law; many also hope to now get into the recreational marijuana sector and understandably don’t want to see their investments in fancy greenhouses undercut by some dirt farmer.

Some states that have legalized recreational cannabis have explicitly banned outdoor cultivation, Illinois being the biggest. Many Western states, where cannabis was first legalized, allow outdoor grows, but results vary. “Due to Nevada’s climate, roughly 99% of all cannabis is grown indoors,” that state’s Cannabis Control Board says. In cooler Washington state, 42% of all cannabis is grown outdoors and 25% is grown indoors, while 32% involves a mix — seedlings started in greenhouses, then translated outside, according to Samantha Guter of the Washington State Liquor & Cannabis Board. Colorado had no figures on how much cannabis was grown which way. This might be the more useful statistic: A 2021 study by the University of Vermont Law School found that only 11% of cannabis companies surveyed nationwide grow their product exclusively outside, and that the trend toward indoor grows was, um, growing.

Here’s why all that matters to rural Virginia: If there’s any cannabis grown outdoors, it’s going to be in rural areas. If all or even most cannabis is grown indoors, then those indoor cultivation facilities are likely to be in or near metro areas — closer to the market and a bigger labor pool. If you’re looking at cannabis purely from a jobs standpoint, then rural legislators need to make sure there’s some way to guarantee some of those jobs come their way. This requires Republicans to do something they don’t like to do — intervene in the marketplace to dictate where licenses go. If a future cannabis marketplace is left to its own devices, that marketplace is likely to choose indoor growing — and indoor growing in metro areas.

Steve Earle and Molly Tuttle never wrote songs about that.