Cannabis farms expanding in Valley

The landscape of commercial cannabis operations in Sonoma County took a step toward simplicity late Sunday night, with the release of a preliminary draft of a new Sonoma County Commercial Cannabis Cultivation ordinance.

The new ordinance, intended to manage cultivation in agricultural and resource areas of the county, opens the door to approval of such applications though the Agricultural Commissioner, rather than “discretionary” review through Permit Sonoma.

The Jan. 31 release of that draft came five days after the Board of Supervisors approved permits for Erich Pearson’s commercial grow site and processing facility at 101 Trinity Road — where he has been growing cannabis since 2017, under terms of the Penalty Relief program that allowed some who had been growing cannabis without a permit to continue in business, without penalty, while the county workshopped its own regulations and procedures for the newly legal crop.

Pearson’s application came up for board approval in the “original jurisdiction” protocol, which gave supervisors authority to pick 19 permits for fast-tracked review. When the permits were chosen, in December 2019, 1st District Supervisor Susan Gorin singled out four such permits, three of them managed by Pearson. The fourth was Glentucky Farms, operated by Mike Benziger, which was certified last month.

Pearson’s facilities, located on the historic Gordenker Turkey Farm on Trinity Road, are limited by current county ordinance to 1 acre, though there are two other 1-acre plots on the same 28-acre ranch property which by separate applications are poised to adjoin the 101 Trinity Road facility.

The effect would be a combined 3-acre indoor and outdoor cultivation and processing facility across from the Sylvia Lane neighborhood. At the Jan. 26 Board of Supervisors meeting, there were a couple of objections during the public comment period from those neighbors over the Achilles heel of cannabis cultivation: the odor.

“It will be overwhelming,” said one neighbor, Joe Carbonaro. He said he felt the project had been “slid under our noses” while residents were rebuilding their houses from the 2017 fires, and asked that the supervisors “hit the pause button” on approval.

Pearson commented at the meeting that he was doing everything that could be done to minimize the aroma, including mandated air filters in the cultivation and drying buildings, but acknowledged that the smell was an unavoidable by-product of cannabis cultivation.

Draft ordinance eases the path

The county’s draft ordinance just released takes significant steps toward putting cannabis cultivation in the hands of the county Agricultural Commissioner, at least in agricultural and resource zoning districts in the unincorporated areas of the county. It follows the recommendation of the Board of Supervisors’ ad hoc committee of James Gore and Lynda Hopkins to “consider a General Plan amendment that will treat cannabis cultivation similarly to other agricultural uses.”

“There’s no plant in Sonoma County that requires a discretionary permit except cannabis,” Pearson told the Index-Tribune following the approval.

Pearson told the board that the total cost of the application process since 2017 totaled over $1.25 million, including $325,000 in county taxes and $130,000 in fees. “It’s a lot of money to get here,” he said.

“We appreciate the ad hoc’s work to revise and fix these regulations but we have a lot of work to do to make projects like this equitable and affordable for people other than those who are well financed folks who have been in the industry for a very long time, like ourselves.”

Pearson also co-owns the dispensary company known as Sparc which has four dispensaries currently in operation, two of them in Sonoma County, Sebastopol and Santa Rosa. Another is permitted to open by mid-year as the first, and currently only, recognized dispensary in the City of Sonoma, though the City Council recently asked city staff to prepare a process of allowing a second dispensary to open following another application round.

‘Processing’ key to growth

But a key attribute of Pearson’s 101 Trinity Road application is the processing facility, listed as a 20,000-square-foot building in addition to the 1-acre cultivation license. Pearson likened the processing facility to a crush pad, where independent wine grape farmers bring their harvest to be destemmed, crushed and prepared for use. Many cannabis permits already awarded or in process are solely grow sites, without on-site processing.

The draft ordinance defines “processing” much as does the standing ordinance, that is, “all activities associated with the drying, curing, grading, trimming, rolling, storing, packaging, and labeling of cannabis or non-manufactured cannabis products.” The ordinance also allows up to nine such “centralized cannabis processing facilities (which) shall be permitted in Agricultural Zones within the unincorporated county at any one time, and shall be allowed to process cannabis grown onsite and within the local area. All other processing is limited to on-site cultivation use only.”

The nearest similarly robust operation that Pearson was aware of is the Flow Cannabis Institute in Hopland, which has taken over the sites of the original Fetzer Winery and more recently the Solar Living Institute, to create a “85,000-industrial-square-foot…centralized location for independent cannabis farmers to test, trim, process, package, manufacture and distribute farm products cost effectively, and at massive scale.”

Mike Benziger, the former winemaker who has shifted his focus to cannabis gardening, was given a permit by the supervisors under the same original jurisdiction protocol last year, a five-year conditional use permit to farm 50 marijuana plants outdoors. Benziger told the Index-Tribune that last year “the weather and other conditions for us produced the best marijuana we have ever grown.”

Benziger said that “Sonoma Valley is becoming the home to a few high-end farms that one day I hope will create excitement in the tourism business and will continue to cement the Valley's image as an exceptional and interesting agricultural area.”

Mount Veeder appellation?

That excitement for the Valley’s cannabis potential is shared by other Sonoma Valley farmers moving into cannabis cultivation, including Korbin Ming. His family’s Lunar Ridge Farms is in the midst of the application process to add a 1-acre cannabis farm to their 19-acre vineyard, on Cavedale Road up the hill from Trinity.

“We started a pre-application process in 2017, and once we got our heads around the project submitted a formal application in early 2020,” said Ming.” I don’t think we had any expectation of how long it would take, just wanted to do things right.”

He emphasized that he and his sisters — the second generation of the family of Mitchell and Jenny Ming at 4800 Cavedale Road — were primarily interested in cannabis as a farming opportunity, “like other agriculture.”

“The only thing I have experience with is grapes themselves,” said Ming. “This is the first time we’re entering into this space, so there are unknowns.”

Ming said they would only be growing the plants, and not involving themselves in processing, packaging or marketing.

Next door to Lunar Ridge is a 49-plus acre ranch owned since the early 1970s by Karen Gardner, who escaped busy Berkeley to find a quieter, more rural life on Mount Veeder. Now her son, Doug Gardner, has become actively interested in cannabis cultivation, which he entered into when he found that the plant, particularly high-CBD content cannabis, was of great help in combating his severe epilepsy.

He became an active supporter of medicinal cannabis, and is now an officer with the Sonoma Valley Cannabis Enthusiasts, an advocacy group organized to promote the area’s cannabis production. The SVCE hopes to one day establish at least one Sonoma Valley certified cannabis “appellation,” like those American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) that recognize the terroir and specific characteristics of a grape-growing region, such as, coincidentally, the Mount Veeder AVA in neighboring Napa County.

Gardner, 38, first applied in 2018 for a 1,200-plant commercial grow on the property, and it was finally approved on Jan. 29 of this year. It was awarded a conditional permit, pending final inspection from Permit Sonoma, without a public hearing because there were no objections filed to his application.

Despite his interest in CBD-dominant cannabis, Gardner plans to grow “all kinds of cannabis.”

“We’re really trying to figure out what is best for our terroir, our micro-climate in this region,” Gardner said. He also hopes to work with Korbin Ming on researching the appropriate strains to plant in their area. “There’s so much more to cannabis than just how sticky it is,” said Gardner.

With his permit just one inspection away from finalization — which he compared to “getting the Golden Ticket to the Willie Wonka factory” — he hopes to raise a crop for 2021.

“It’s been a very long process, it’s been over four years to get to this point,” he said. “Now more people are trying to get a dispensary, and now it will be easier. Hopefully everyone appreciates the things we’ve gone through.”

Email Christian at christian.kalln@sonomanews.com.