Q&A with Master Gardener Ed Rosenthal Posted 2 months, 23 days, 3 hours, 23 minutes ago by Anna Helhoski   |   Comment

Ed Rosenthal: I had always been interested in gardening and when I first came across marijuana, a lot of it was from Mexico or Columbia. I naturally decided to try to grow it here. That was in the late 1960s.

Ed Rosenthal: They should avoid people who think they don’t need to learn more about what they’re doing. That’s the biggest mistake growers make- they develop a certain technique or a certain efficiency or knowledge and then they stop trying to learn. They don’t continue their education and things are always changing so that they get stuck into something that becomes more and more antique.

Ed Rosenthal: What I’m working on now is automating marijuana cultivation. It started off with fluorescents and people use all different kinds of lighting now, but what I think that my interest now is taking a lot of this technology and automating it. I differentiate it from what I’m looking at as a farming technique; it’s differentiated from market gardening. With marketing gardening you can get good yields, it’s a question of how much labor is used to produce a given quantity of produce.

Ed Rosenthal: I’ve been widely quoted on this, a blog I wrote about this and I believe California will actually become a marijuana importing state this year. The reason for that is the drought and I think that especially the key outdoor growing areas have been widely hit by the drought - the Emerald Triangle, Oregon, Washington – the whole West Coast. You may not see that directly affecting high quality bud, but you know a good proportion of all the manufactured things - the ingestibles, the concentrates - they’re made from this outdoor material that doesn’t quite make for high quality smoking, so I think there’s going to be a general price rise. I think it might be up to 50 to 100 percent. Another reason for that will be when marijuana becomes legal in California, people will say, oh it wasn’t? But the reality and what that brings up is a reality that more and more people don’t feel constrained about using it, so there’s going to be increased demand and lowered supply. A lot of farmers are going to start to grow and think they’ll do okay, then in August the water is going to give out.

Ed Rosenthal: Well, aside from the environmental climate, with legalization and as it becomes more legal and with the drought there’s going to be less tolerance of law breaking. What I mean by law breaking is environmental law breaking. Up in Homboldt and Mendocino a lot of farming people have built greenhouses that aren’t licensed and many are pulling water out of streams and tearing down trees in order to do their gardens. If you look on GoogleMaps you’ll see it - some of the damage is as bad as if the place was being logged. As it becomes legal for farmers that will be able to grow in traditional farming areas, such as the Central Valley, there will be more and more pressure on farmers doing things illegally or operating in a gray area. I don’t think people are going to tolerate the environmental damage that they were tolerating when it was illegal.

Ed Rosenthal: I had a problem with one of the initiatives that was filed - it was the third initiative filed [with the California Office of the Attorney General] - and I was afraid it would get funded so I filed my initiative so there would be another choice. What happened was, neither of them got funded and I was fine with that.

The initiative that I did not like had police and criminal justice involvement and it called for a very small number of plants and other things that would have basically made marijuana [growing] more difficult. It would have been more like the Washington model than the Colorado model and some Washington people were involved with that. As for the integrations in my bill, the first one was that there wasn’t a designated plant amount for personal use, instead it was an area, so you’d be able to grow an area of 100 square feet outdoors or indoors using 2600 watts and that’s pretty standard for personal use and 100 square feet would give you about three pounds. As a matter of fact some of the growers in Humboldt and Mendocino didn’t like it because you could put one of their trees in the 10 x 10 area. The other things that it does is anyone who sells marijuana has to have a business license and all of the sales and everything would have to be done the way normal business is done. It called for a six percent gross sales tax at each stage and the reason why six percent is this – in Washington it’s 25 percent tax so there’s a big incentive for people to drop out of the legal system and go into the black market. With a six percent gross receipts tax, you can be legal, so there’s an incentive to sign in, rather than to drop out. I mean, if it was 25 percent you’d say, “I don’t know,” but you can do six percent. Then it’s cumulative, you have a three six percent taxes – sales, receipt and cities could have their own sales tax. So what I tried to do is give incentive for everybody to get along and to drop in.

Here’s the thing, let’s say there was just a retail sales tax, then a producing county like Menodcino wouldn’t get any of the take, but with that six percent gross receipts tax, counties would get a portion of that. If you inhibited cultivation or production or sales so there was less of that going on in your county then you wouldn’t get it because it wouldn’t be in your county. So it gave counties an incentive to sign in.

I had everything run by the [Department of Alcohol Business Control], but I’m not wedded to that. Some people think it should be its own organization, rather than regulated like alcohol. The criminal justice system and the cops and all that would only come in the same way they come in with alcohol. If a cop comes and says I want to see your garden, you can say get your foot out of my garden or I’ll call the cops on you.

Also, the other thing is there would be easy access into the market or to drop out, it’s not like for production and sales and growing there would be no unlimited number of licenses. The only thing is there would be some restrictions on retail and the other thing is the county could restrict retail recreational sales, but not retail medical sales. Here’s how the county can do it: the council passes an ordinance and then it goes to a referendum and only after a referendum would anything be closed. If they pass the ordinance it doesn’t going into effect until after the voters take it up. That’s real home rule left to individuals. It’s because so many people vote for it and then the city councils do something different because they’re in the hands of the cops. The cops are going to stop interfering with society. Part of the reason why police hate legalization so much is it’s the first time they are giving up authority. They’ve only been used to taking authority - more and more authority - so this is saying get back and get out of people lives.

The initiative did serve its purpose in stopping an initiative that would have really hurt the community in going forward. You don’t often hear of an activist stopping an initiative.

Ed Rosenthal: A common question used to be, how do I tell a male from a female? That was the question that during the first years that would be really common and now a typical question is what kind of light is best because there are so many choices of lights and different hydro systems as well. It’s much more sophisticated now.

Ed Rosenthal: A couple of things: one is that marijuana is a green plant and it’s not some magic bean. It’s not a dragon or a magic bean, it’s a regular green plant so it has to be treated the way you treat other plants. It needs a lot of fertilizer and nutrients to grow well. The second thing is to believe your eyes. What you see is the truth no matter what the label says, no matter what plants are supposed to be doing, no matter what they could be doing or should be doing, your eyes are telling you what’s happening.

So if a plant doesn’t look healthy - if you actually look at the plant and not just as a whole piece, but just examine the plant and the leaves - then you don’t’ need an expert to tell you whether that plant is healthy or not. Then you might need an expert or some advice or a book or something like that to find out exactly what is wrong with it, but he first thing is believe your eyes. If a plant looks sick, it’s sick, it’s not a stage of growth - sickness is not a stage of growth.

Ed Rosenthal: I’m going to go into the five factors that affect plant growth and then I’m going to go and show some of those different methods of plant management. Basically, as I said, most of the gardens that I’ve seen in the U.S. are exactly that, they’re gardens, they’re not farms. I’m not talking about its size, I’m talking about how it’s taken care of: if it’s all hand work that’s gardening if you use equipment to substitute for human labor, that’s farming.