California’s commercial cannabis laws, as established through the Medicinal and Adult Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act (MAUCRSA), have always contained the acutely problematic provisions of so-called local control as well as the express exclusion of cannabis from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) exemptions endowed to all other agricultural crops. This has created an unworkable dynamic for California’s legal cannabis mixed light and outdoor cultivators who are uniquely vulnerable to baseless claims of excessive water use. Such claims are routinely deployed as a trojan horse by those ideologically opposed to cannabis legalization in order to prevent the permitting of specific projects, as well as to obstruct the effectuation of necessary local ordinances.
In order to really understand the speciousness of these arguments, it is important to evaluate the water use of other agricultural activities in California. As a baseline fact, agricultural activities are the primary consumer of water resources in California, accounting for approximately 80% of all water used for businesses and homes in the state. Since the scale of consumption is so vast, common units like gallons and liters don’t suffice to measure water use. Instead, agricultural water use is often measured in acre feet.
An acre foot is the amount of water required to cover one acre of land up to one foot. This is equivalent to 43,560 cubic feet or 325,851 gallons of water; or roughly half an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Cannabis cultivation, like almost all other agricultural activities, consumes water. However, cannabis actually uses a relatively small amount of California’s water when compared to the average water consumed to grow an acre of California’s other major agricultural crops.
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