Mendocino County’s latest crop report covers activity in 2020. It was released last week, more than a year after the end of 2020. There’s a significant lag in assembling these things because of the in-built delays in collecting the data and then calculating the numbers and producing the report.
After reading that 2020 report and noticing what was in it and what was not in it, we recalled a Board Directive from late 2019 which directed that future crop reports include cannabis information.
According to the minutes of the October 22, 2019 Supervisors meeting:
“Item 5-l) Discussion And Possible Action Including Acceptance Of The 2018 Mendocino County Crop Report. Board Directive: General Consensus Of The Board that future Crop reports shall include cannabis information.”
But there are no orders or directives from the Board from that 2019 meeting listed on the latest Board Directives list which goes back to September of 2019. According to Senate Bill 657 which was enacted as Business & Professions Code Section 2609.5 in September of 2019:
”A county agricultural commissioner may report to the secretary on the condition, acreage, production, and value of cannabis produced in the commissioner’s county under a cultivation license issued pursuant to this division. The cannabis data may be submitted in a separate report that is similar to those reports required for agricultural products pursuant to Section 2279 of the Food and Agricultural Code. This section does not require the department to publish this report.
(b) Data on cannabis production that is included in a report pursuant to this section may be organized by categories including, but not limited to, the following:
(1) State cultivator license type, as set forth in Chapter 5 (commencing with Section 26050), and regulations adopted pursuant to that chapter.
(2) Local license, permit, or other authorization type, as described in Section 26200.
(3) Price tier, including for different strains of cannabis, different production methods, or different parts of a plant, such as flowers or leaves.”
Note that these three categories of information are to be included as a minimum — “including but not limited to…”
By “cannabis information” which “may be submitted in a separate report” the obvious intent of the Board’s directive was that the “information” to be included is now part of Business & Professions Code Section 2609.5.
I checked both subsequent crop reports (for 2019 and 2020) but I saw no reference to cannabis or to a separate cannabis report.
So we sent a note to the Ag Commissioner’s office asking:
Did your office comply with the Board consensus that ‘future Crop reports shall include cannabis information’?
If so, I hereby request a copy of that cannabis information.
If not, I request that you either explain why no such report was prepared, or comply with the board’s consensus and directive for all crop reports issued since the date of the Board’s order (October 22, 2019). (To see the data year over year.) And provide a date when the information will be submitted.
Thank you,
Mark Scaramella/AVA-Boonville
895-3016
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Assistant Ag Commissioner Aaron Hult replied:
“The Board finally found a slot for us on March 9th. I presented a Cannabis report addendum but I never received formal input about what I presented and it wasn't attached to the schedule.
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AVA: “I went back and reviewed that video. Mr. Donnelly [Ag Commissioner] told the Board that he was unable to get cannabis info and something about an MOU with the state Bureau of Cannabis Control. Are you saying now that there was a cannabis addendum for 2019? Do you have a cannabis addendum for the 2020 report also?
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Hult: Oh, I'm sorry. When I was searching for the crop report on the BOS agenda, I was looking at the March 9, 2021 agenda [last year]. So to answer your initial question, no, there wasn't ever a finalized or published Cannabis report for 2019. I did have some rough figures that I calculated, but I didn't receive much guidance on how to follow up with those. And since it was already so far after the fact already, we didn't see the point in spending any more time trying to get more blood out of those turnips. That data would have been partial no matter what sources we would be able to contact, so we focused energy on making the 2020 Cannabis report the best it could be. We still didn't have an MOU with the State for data sharing, so the information we were able to gather from surveys and polls was only slightly better in 2021. We haven't been given a date yet this year to present the 2020 Crop Report and Cannabis addendum, but there is a chance it could be on January 25 or February 1. Sorry for the confusion.
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Dear Mr. Hult,
I understand. The entire pot situation is confusing. So it's no surprise that attempting to quantify it is confusing.
I remember years ago talking to Commissioner Dave Bengston about it and he liked to wave the BOS minute order he had from the late 70s when he was pointedly ordered NOT to include any pot info.
Have you given any thought to turning the question over to Cannabis Program Director Ms. Nevedal? Is the Tax Collector's info useful? (It should be.) Anyway, do you have any release-able info, partial as it may be? Or should I wait until the 1/25 or 2/1 meetings?
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Hult: Yesterday I heard that our Crop Report presentation will most likely be on the Feb. 9 BOS meeting.
About the possible sources for cannabis, yes I have been in contact with Ms. Nevedal, and she is in a better situation this year to help out with some info if and when requested. Their new online portal system should help facilitate that process. The Tax Collector was having similar software issues as they were moving into a new accounting system. They did provide me some tax info for the 2019 year, but it wasn't an entire year’s worth of data, so I had to extrapolate some figures to come up with a rough estimate of crop production. Hopefully some time this year, in time to be useful, the State/Bureau of Cannabis Control should have an Memorandum of Understanding in place to be able to share pertinent cannabis info with the counties. If we don't hear anything from the State in the next month or so, our office is ready to send out a mail and email survey to cannabis permit holders for 2021 crop data. Even that will be more substantial than the input we had to compile the 2020 figures.
I am familiar with the 1979 crop report with the cannabis figures. I have one of the few remaining blasphemous copies of the report in the files in my office. Suffice it to say, we have come a long way. There is now legislation in place that allows counties to submit cannabis reports, though they can be provided as an addendum. I believe that we will be posting the cannabis report on our website once it is reviewed and OK'ed by the BOS.
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AVA: I believe I cited what you refer to as state legislation that is now in place as Bus. & Prof. Code § 2609.5 (enacted in 2019) I interpret the BOS directive as the info is to be included (or attached to) the regular crop report and is only to include legal/permitted cannabis.
I can see where there could be problems when the data formats the state expects is not necessarily what you have. Maybe that's why an MOU is necessary.
The reason this seems important to me is that we keep hearing about a near collapse of the local legal cannabis industry — anecdotal reports of entire hoop houses full of mature bud being abandoned in Covelo -- and the associated drop in county revenues. So it would be interesting to see some numbers. PS. I noticed in the last two crop reports that grapes seem to be way down in value as well.
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Hult: I noticed in your recent AVA posting about the decline in grape harvest value that you included some info from the growers whose crops were down for 2021. They would know best about what the figures were like for 2021. So when they say everything was down 20-40%, I believe them. Contributing factors for those tonnage decreases are probably due to weather and drought factors, and less so about market fluctuations. 2016 was quite a bumper crop for white wines after a pretty bad 2015. Then in 2018 it was an incredible year statewide for red grapes. With so much wine on the open market, demand in 2019 was expected to be pretty low anyways, but with the fires, some wineries used smoke taint as an excuse to reject crops. One such winery being Constellation Brands. I know one local grower who left well over a 100 tons [of grapes] unpicked because Constellation rejected him. There were many more in the same boat too. It looks like Constellation is selling off their assets in the wine industry and transitioning into cannabis. They even closed the Underwood Winery in Ukiah, one of the longest running wineries in the county.
For the Crop Report on wine grapes, we get all of our figures from the State wide report from NASS, and that report is posted in April every year. All the other crops, we send out a survey, which we did in mid December. Those surveys are still trickling in. It was my goal last year to have the crop report done by the end of July, but that didn't happen for various reasons. And by the time I had it all completed in mid November there weren't any slots left on BOS schedule, hence another year 15 months after the fact. I'm setting the goal again for end of July again, if not sooner.
I think with the BOS directive to complete a cannabis report, that we won't have an issue with the State. Monterey County was the first one last year to actually put cannabis in their crop report and I didn't hear any flak about that. And yes, the black market for cannabis seems to really be booming right now, at the same time that the legal market is staggering. We are hearing that average price per pound being paid in the legal market is between $400-600, with some even lower. So many people in the legal game now, with high up front costs and pricy, high interest rate loans just can't make it with value so low. So as many predicted, the bigger players have deeper pockets and can withstand the storm and will probably buy up smaller businesses more and more.
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AVA: Yes, Constellation is one of several well-financed names I've heard that are getting into the cannabis business. Sheriff Kendall told me the other day that he thinks Oklahoma's recent legalization is producing lots of black market pot for the east coast markets at pretty low prices, some of which were formerly filled by Mendo black market cannabis. I heard that Flo-Canna is cutting back too.
Your reference to smaller operations being bought up by the bigger ones is familiar, commonly known as a “shake-out.” I am personally aware of similar shakeouts in previous Mendo ag operations such as timber (which started in the 30s), apples, dairy, and grapes (to a lesser extent).
I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the March crop report presentation.
Thanks, again.
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