Farming during a drought

The spring rains didn't come. The fields were bone dry and dusty in April.

Cannabis is a particularly good crop in a drought year. 

The Western U.S. is experiencing a drought, and my area of SW Oregon is included.

Medford is in the west edge of the bright red area just north of the California border. The river marked in blue that crosses the Oregon-California border is the Klamath River, going west and south from the darkest beet-red drought area to the Pacific Ocean. That Klamath area about 80 to 120 miles to the east of Medford and it normally enjoys ample irrigation for vast fields of alfalfa, which is primarily used as cattle feed. 

I am not happy they are suffering, but I don't feel sorry for Klamath farmers. They are competitors. Normally they have an advantage selling alfalfa here, which makes my alfalfa worth less. They have an advantage most years. This year is our turn. Our drought is bad, but less bad than theirs. Maybe local farmers can make some money this year.

Here is what my alfalfa looks like, about two weeks after the first "haircut." Alfalfa grows vigorously and we give it about four cuttings a year. It is cut near the ground, allowed to dry, then put into rows to dry some more, and then picked up and concentrated into bales. Dry bales store well. This field is growing back after its first cutting. This field is not irrigated. We have the water to irrigate it but the water table is high here and alfalfa has deep roots. 

Below is my small cantaloupe field. In my youth I grew cantaloupes with my younger brother David on a field typically one acre in size. We would grow about 14,000 pounds of melons on an acre, and sell them for about 18 cents a pound to local fresh produce stands and locally-owned high-volume supermarkets. At that price we would gross about $2,500, minus expenses of $300, for a net of $2,200, which we split evenly to be banked in our college funds. Harvard tuition was $1,800 my freshman year, growing to $2,000 my senior year. My $1,000+ from the crop, plus another $1,000 from fighting forest fires, netted me over $2,000 for the summer, more than a year's tuition. Tuition now is $50,000, an amount far out of reach for an 18-year-old to earn and save in a summer. Melon prices to the farmer are still what they were 50 years ago, about 18 cents/pound. 

My melons are irrigated with overhead "Rainbird" type sprinklers, the ones that go "chi-chi-chi-chi-chi" as the brass hammer hits a large stream of water going out one port, with a smaller tail of water going out the back. Melons have shallow roots and need irrigation. Foods that readers would consider "healthy"--fresh fruits and vegetables--take a lot of water.

Melon farming is labor intensive. Melons need to be kept free of weeds, since they are poor competitors, and the spread-out vines mean they cannot be weeded mechanically past their first weeks. There is hand hoeing. Vine ripe melons are picked by hand, with the entire field picked daily, harvesting the ones that came ripe over the prior 24 hours. Any one melon is worth about 60 cents to the farmer at the loading dock of a market. The problem is that in practice one picks up one, then another, then another and puts them into bins one carries to the edge of the field to load in the back of a truck to be hauled to a wash-stand. Then more handling. This means one is dealing with weights growing to 30, 40, 50 pounds multiple times during the hour it takes to pick a field. At age 70 I decided the backaches simply were not worth it to try to sell for money. The melons shipped in from factory farms in Mexico, Arizona, and California are not terrible. They are "good enough." They look good on the grocery shelves. Shoppers don't know any better than to eat bland melons, so factory-farm melons set the market price. Melons are too inexpensive.

Cannabis still has value and can be farmed profitably, both as a medical marijuana garden and as open-field-grown "hemp," i.e. cannabis for CBD. Both crops are legal and highly regulated in Oregon. Cannabis is grown with drip lines, not overhead or flood irrigation, and therefore it uses a fraction of the water that would be used by melons, alfalfa, or the pear orchards that are up-ditch from me.  The water that feeds the ditches I use for irrigation is the run-off water from upstream pear orchard irrigators. That runoff isn't "wasted." It is what I use. After I use it, it goes into the water table and becomes, once again, part of the Rogue River.

People who object to cannabis being grown near them often cite water scarcity as a reason to object. Every farm location and water situation is different, but my own observation is that the various cannabis crops are the lowest water users of any crop that might be grown because cannabis growers want to keep the flowers and buds dry. They irrigate directly onto the roots with drip lines.

Below is a photograph of the diminished ditch the cannabis growers on my farm use, and photos of their "Lay Flat" irrigation lines and drip tape feeders. The large white cube tanks are where organic fertilizers are mixed with water to go into those feed lines.

Cannabis requires hand labor. The plants are numbered to stay in line with regulatory limits, and therefore each plant is coddled, with wire supports for the branches, with amended and deeply tilled soil, with careful weeding by hand to avoid disturbing the shallow roots. 

Open field cultivation of hemp for CBD is with drip lines under black plastic.

Last night we had lightning, hail, and a torrential downpour, which battered my melon plants and the cannabis plants, but they will survive. Thunder squalls are hit and miss. My home in Medford, ten miles from the farm, had no rain. The farm got well-needed water, but it came so fast it was standing in the field.

Using water to irrigate crops is a good thing to do, even in a drought. Vine ripe melons are healthy and delicious, and cannabis brings money into the area. The alternative to profitable farming is neglect, and land that is now farmland would return to star thistle, blackberries, or the scrub oak savannah that is the natural vegetation in this Mediterranean climate zone. Using water in southern Oregon to grow cannabis is an efficient use of water compared with alternative crops. It keeps farmland in production and it brings money into the area.

Tomorrow, a look at cannabis and its effect on the labor market.