‘Worst year on record’ for cannabis harvests amid widespread California wildfires

Homes are seen burnt to the groud after a fire tore through the Journey's End mobile home park on Mendocino Anvenue in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Monday, Oct. 9, 2017. Homes are seen burnt to the groud after a fire tore through the Journey's End mobile home park on Mendocino Anvenue in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Monday, Oct. 9, 2017. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Image 1 of / 87 Caption Close ‘Worst year on record’ for cannabis harvests amid widespread California wildfires 1 / 87 Back to Gallery

California marijuana growers north of San Francisco faced another day of wildfire threats as well as likely hundreds of millions of dollars in crop damage and loss.

Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, said the fires in Sonoma and Mendocino counties have caused “the worst year on record for California’s growers.”

Several dozen CGA members have lost their entire farms in the blazes burning near Santa Rosa, further north in Redwood Valley and beyond. “This is going to leave a deep scar,” Allen said.

“I had one conversation today where the family was in tears, saying, ‘We don’t know how we're going to make it to January, let alone next planting season,’” Allen said.

The fires have hit pot commerce epicenters of Sonoma and Mendocino counties and cut across the industry, torching some the largest, most prestigious operators in the state’s $21 billion cannabis economy, said Ben Bradley, operations director at the California Cannabis Industry Association. Bradley reported dozens of CCIA members have lost crops and homes.

According to county surveys, the number of cannabis gardens in Sonoma County might be anywhere from 3,000 to 9,000. Revenues from cannabis are unknown but likely total in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

“We have a lot of people who have lost their farms in the last 36 hours, and their homes,” said Tawnie Logan, chair of the Sonoma County Growers Alliance on Tuesday.

Logan said that unlike wineries, cannabis farmers generally cannot obtain crop or fire insurance. Those that do find insurance pay exorbitant rates for skimpy coverage. She said she knows of a $2 million crop in a Santa Rosa greenhouse that was reduced to ash Sunday night.

“There’s no way for them to recover the millions in anticipated revenue they just lost,” she said. “It's gone. It's ashes.”

Many farms also have all-cash savings on-site, because of banking limitations on cannabis commerce, said Josh Drayton, communications director for the CCIA. “I know we definitely have multiple members that have lost their homes and have lost their savings.”

Photo: John Blanchard Napa Valley wildfires

Leading San Francisco dispensary SPARC was preparing to harvest its outdoor crop Tuesday. Early Monday morning, SPARC’s farm in Glen Ellen sustained major damage from the Nuns Fire, director Erich Pearson said. “The whole thing was on fire,” he said.

Wednesday he said, “There’s no fuel left. You see a stump burning and there’s nothing around it, so we leave it,” he said.

A noted cannabis breeder and seed seller who goes by the name of ‘Subcool’ reported Tuesday losing his home, seedstock and source plants used to make cuttings, called “mothers”. Award-winning extract-maker Matt Rize also reported losing his Sonoma County ranch in blazes there.

Another farm, Sonoma County Cannabis Company, sustained major losses, according to multiple reports. “There are no words right now to describe the loss, the heart break and the trauma that our beloved home and community is going through,” the company posted to its Instagram account. “We are trying to save what we can.”

Major Santa Rosa cannabis manufacturer CannaCraft closed its 110-employee business Monday but reopened Tuesday with a skeleton crew working amid “awful” air quality, said spokesperson Kial Long. All employees are accounted for, but losses have been felt company-wide.

“We have no employees that were not impacted in some way or another,” Long said. “A lot of family, a lot of friends and a few employees did lose their homes.”

CannaCraft plans to give away $40,000-worth of medicine to affected patients, donate a portion of sales proceeds to benefit Red Cross relief efforts in the area, and is turning its Santa Rosa facility into an evacuation center for the weekend.

Although many operators are still in danger, relief efforts have begun across the state. Chief among them, the California Growers Association is coordinating donations to Mendocino County relief.

The timing of wildfire season could not be worse for cannabis, because the delicate, fragrant flower buds bloom in the middle of fire season. Farmers had been cutting for the last couple weeks, but “there was a lot of stuff that's still heavy on the bush and our 8-12 weeks strains just getting ready to be harvested —that is tremendous loss,” Logan said.

“Especially when it’s ripe — I can tell you from personal experience, wildfire definitely will make your cannabis have a smoky flavor to it; just like wine,” Kristin Nevedal, executive director of the International Cannabis Farmers Association, based in the Humboldt County town of Garberville, said in a September interview.

“We’ve got about 30 percent of our farm still sitting out there —just covered. It’s going to be tough. All of our product is covered in ash and soot and billows of smoke,” Logan said.

Farmers across the state reported harvesting the last of their crops in a panic. Some were attempting to move the freshly cut flowers out of smoke-choked regions. Fine, white ash from the fires continued to blanket the wider Bay Area Thursday, and air quality had been impacted as far as Santa Cruz.

Beyond picking up the smell of the fires, smoke-exposed crops are more susceptible to disease, leading to unhealthy levels of mold, mildew and fungus.

Nevedal said farmers won’t know the extent of smoke damage until after the harvest season, which runs through October.

California is America’s leading domestic producer of cannabis — growing an estimated 13 million pounds per year. Four out of five of those pounds of pot is shipped out of state, researchers estimate. Much of that pot is grown outdoors, and is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall.

Northern California harbors the world’s largest concentration of cannabis farms in the remote forested mountainsides of Trinity, Humboldt and Mendocino counties. Further south in Sonoma County, where the Tubbs Fire is burning, many commercial medical and soon-to-be-recreational as well as personal cannabis farms also exist, along with ancillary businesses.

Allen said Sonoma County’s location makes it a magnet for cannabis commerce. An acre of cannabis is worth an estimated $1.7 million.

“It’s located right there between three counties where so much of our product comes from, and its proximity to the Bay Area makes it a huge marketplace, with a lot of processing and manufacturing; just a huge industrial leader in general.”

Santa Rosa has emerged as the epicenter of the modern legal pot economy in California, said Logan, and the devastation there would be analogous to the effects on the technology industry if a fire swept through Silicon Valley.

“What would we do if we had that loss? We’re just praying right now that rains come and that the winds don’t pick up and change direction,” she said.

Officials reported the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa had burned 34,270 acres was 10 percent contained Thursday.

The fires came not only at the worst time of the year, but in the toughest year in decades, because the entire cannabis industry is in the process of seeking local and state licensing under legalization Proposition 64, Logan said. Many companies had spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars leasing warehouse space in Santa Rosa in order to get a license. Now, those warehouses are gone and pot companies don’t have insurance to cover the sunk costs, Logan said.

“Folks are out their entire life savings over the last few years to get to this point,” said Allen. “There’s no crop insurance, there’s no FEMA aid coming to our growers. It's a pretty extreme situation out here.”

Small farmers with little savings stand to lose the most in these blazes, Drayton said.

“These are the people who have been out here for decades —the pioneers who have fought the federal government and the state government to get cannabis recognized as an agricultural product. And now, as we venture into what could possibly be the best financial situation for these operators — the adult-use market — they are being totally cut out and all based on this destruction.”

North of Sonoma County, the Redwood Complex Fire has burned 32,100 acres and firefighters had five percent containment Thursday morning.

The cannabis-rich Redwood Valley, two hours north of San Francisco, has been choked with smoke since Sunday night, communications were down and three were confirmed dead. Further loss of lives, homes, and livelihoods are expected, and residents are tense because the situation can change at any time, said Amanda Reiman, a Redwood Valley resident who is the outreach coordinator for cannabis company Flow Kana.

The area's rugged, mountainous terrain makes communications difficult on a good day. Many communities are located in isolated watersheds off the grid, and the fire compounded the difficulty of backwoods living, Reiman said. For example, some homes get their water from wells hooked up to pumps that run on solar power, but smoke has blotted out the sun for three days.

Redwood Valley cannabis farms are often co-located at farmers' homes and the hills are dotted with small farms run by mostly older folks who have not checked in, or cannot return to evacuation zones.

“So many people have their livelihoods where they live. Here, people lost everything — homes and livelihoods — in one fell swoop,” said Reiman.

“They're really the strongholds of some of the mom-and-pop and craft growers and those whole entire neighborhoods have been impacted. Imagine losing your home and every neighbor losing their home and farm. It’s a pretty stark reality,” Allen said.

Kristin Nevedal, director of the International Cannabis Farmers Association, based further north in Garberville (Humboldt County), said she expects crop and home loss in Redwood Valley to be severe.

“There is not lot of information coming out of Mendocino right now,” Nevedal said. “I think a lot of us know that the damage is unimaginable. I think it's going to take a while for the damage to truly be assessed. In some cases it's — unfortunately — rebuilding entire communities.

David Downs is the San Francisco Chronicle’s cannabis editor writer. Email: ddowns@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @davidrdowns