"Food is like a moral curtain": Food Crops and California’s Cannabis Farming Sector

Keywords: cannabis, illicit economies, agricultural geography, agrarian political economy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 1

Abstract

The historically illegal status of cannabis configured its production as a deviant activity outside the traditional material-discursive bounds of “agriculture.” Regulatory and rhetorical boundary-making in policy, popular discourse, and scholarly literature predominantly reinforced the idea that cannabis producers, production practices, and geographies were both separate and categorically different from other agricultural activities, such as food production. As cannabis legally transitions from an illicit drug to a highly regulated agricultural commodity, questions remain about the interconnections between cannabis agriculture and other forms of agricultural production. This paper describes how food crop cultivation has come to matter to actors in California’s emerging legal cannabis farming sector. In-depth interviews with farmers who cultivate both cannabis and food in California’s North Coast Basin reveal that food crops play many roles across domains. Beyond conferring agroecological and economic benefits, the cultivation of food crops helped cultivators situate themselves as “farmers” not “just [drug] growers.” Further, dual food-cannabis cultivation played a role in configuring cannabis as “just another crop,” a status leveraged both to a) make cannabis and its cultivators legible to consumers, and b) to lobby policy makers to reduce their regulatory burden. Food crop cultivation also figured prominently in farmers’ social media and public appearances where cannabis-food cultivation was positioned as more ecologically friendly, legitimate, moral, and worthy of regulatory protection than “conventional” monocrop and indoor cannabis. These discourses are part of an emerging trend of differentiation in California’s cannabis farming sector which may further marginalize farmers of color, especially those cultivating indoor cannabis.