Pulling Back the Leaves | 10.20.20
This week on “Growing Forward” we are truly pulling back the leaves, exploring more about the cannabis plant itself. Have you ever wondered how the plant works? Do you know what terpenes are? You will after listening to this episode! We’ll also discuss other important issues, what goes into growing cannabis, and what it means for one of New Mexico’s most precious resources: water. (Note: Interviews for Growing Forward were all conducted via Zoom as a part of our COVID-safe practices. Originally our plan was to do interviews in person, but in order to maintain social distancing and to keep everyone involved safe and healthy, we decided to use the technology available to us.)
Episode Music:
Podington Bear – “Good Times”
Blue Dot Sessions – “Doghouse”
Blue Dot Sessions – “Building the Sled”
Blue Dot Sessions – “Pastel De Nata”
Blue Dot Sessions – “Roundpine”
Blue Dot Sessions – “Low Light Switch”
Christian Bjoerklund – “Hallon”
Growing Forward Logo Created By:
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“Growing Forward” is a collaboration between New Mexico Political Report and New Mexico PBS, and is funded through a grant from The New Mexico Local News Fund.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
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Andy Lyman: I’m Andy Lyman, with New Mexico Political Report.
Megan Kamerick: And I’m Megan Kamerick with New Mexico PBS, and this is Growing Forward, a podcast about cannabis in New Mexico. This week, we’ll be looking at the plant itself.
Wylie Atherton: Discerning cannabis is an art form that’s been relegated to small, cloistered groups of people who really, really loved the plant, really loved consuming it, picking all the elements apart…
Andy Lyman: We’ll also talk about what this plant means for *water* in New Mexico.
Ryan Stoa: What I try to encourage legislatures to do, at a baseline minimum, is to at least think about this issue and think about water and, you know, more broadly speaking, environmental impacts when issuing their legalization laws and their rules and regulations around cannabis.
Megan Kamerick: And, we’ll have a conversation about the complexities of how the plant actually works.
Rachael Speegle: the more whole our food is, the more nutritional value we get out of it. And, the more whole our cannabis is, the more benefit and the more we’re able to find the right balance for our patients.
Andy Lyman: Megan, which is hotter, red or green chile?
Megan Kamerick: Oh, good question… Not an easy one to answer. It can depend on who grows it, where it was grown and how someone cooks with it, right? There are a lot of issues at play, and everyone has their own opinions on the matter.
Andy Lyman: New Mexicans know there are so many factors to chile and that’s the same kind of answer Wylie Atherton would give if someone were to ask him what kind of cannabis is better.
Wylie Atherton: Cannabis has had a major impact in my life from a very young age. I became chronically ill in my mid-teens and high school, and it made a large impact on my ability to function in life. And, I found that cannabis was the number one effective treatment for my chronic nausea. And as it turns out, later down the line, depression, anxiety, some of the things that I wasn’t as cognizant of. So, in 2009, I became the first minor to be enrolled in the program here in New Mexico and shortly thereafter moved to Oregon to pursue a career in cannabis. Right around the time that I started gaining momentum and looking at my future as an adult, we elected Susana Martinez, who ran on the platform of actually dissolving the medical program as it existed, which she didn’t have the power to do. And I knew that, but the writing was kind of on the wall and I knew I wanted to go somewhere where I could kind of be fostered and grow the skills that I was looking for.
Andy Lyman: So, Wylie headed north to Oregon, where he would start his career in growing cannabis. He recently moved home to New Mexico and technically he’s the general manager for Seven Point Farms, which is a medical cannabis producer. But, Wylie jokingly refers to himself as “the perpetual interim head grower.”
Wylie Atherton: The talent pool for growers is limited. A lot of those people are tied up in their own projects in more established states out on the west coast, really all over the place. So, instead of trying to find the talent locally, where we weren’t really comfortable with what we were coming across, we just decided to pour our resources into fostering my evolution as a grower into kind of a full-fledged operator.
Megan Kamerick: Wylie is really, kind of a cannabis sommelier.
Andy Lyman: Most definitely. I met Wylie about a year ago while reporting on the state’s medical cannabis program and he’s like a living cannabis encyclopedia.
Wylie Atherton: Discerning cannabis is an art form that’s been relegated to small, cloistered groups of people who really, really loved the plant, really loved consuming it and picking all the elements apart. Like most of cannabis, that’s coming out of the closet and out of the shadows and into a place where they can kind of expand and be shared. I like to think of two points on the spectrum – flavor and aroma. And, discerning flavor and aroma is something that exists in any world where there’s a connoisseur, whether it’s food or wine or beer or coffee, people are picking that apart and creating a language for describing it and sharing it with each other. I would add that cannabis adds an element and a dimension of complexity that isn’t present with those other disciplines because it is something that interfaces with our central nervous system and our consciousness. The term a friend of mine coined, and I like to use in these discussions, is “the psychological nose.” That’s how you detect what’s existing on that spectrum beyond flavor and aroma, which are their own complexities. What is it that is happening when you interface with it and you plug it into your nervous system? And how does that play out for you?
Megan Kamerick: Some people might know the terms Sativa and Indica. Those are the two standard different types of cannabis. But Wylie says the plant is so much more nuanced than that.
Wylie Atherton: The gray market times, where we just didn’t have language tools whatsoever to describe what was happening when we use cannabis, and so Sativa and Indica, in that sense, that terminology tends to, for the consumer, just mean is it uplifting? Sativa. Or is it relaxing? Indica. The actual nature of cannabis is way, way more complex than that, but as a baseline for people who had no language about it, you know, my parents generation and people who were smoking in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, going from no language to talk about this to some language was a move in the right direction.
Megan Kamerick: That move, he says, includes paying attention to certain profiles and terpenes in the plant.
Wylie Atherton: Terpenes, in just a sentence, are the aromatic and the flavor compounds that are present in cannabis. Many, many, many plants utilize terpenes in their growth, whether it’s to signal each other, signal pests to go away, signal beneficials or pollinators to come to them, terpenes are, they’re highly volatile organic compounds. They’re used by plants and animals alike to do some pretty interesting signaling and communication. As it relates to the user and connoisseur of cannabis, they bring the flavor and they bring the smell. It’s pretty typical nowadays, now that terpenes are becoming more of a buzz word, and a talked about thing in dispensaries and in the cannabis community at large, for budtenders to kind of have a baseline understanding of the main players that you can expect to see in the highest concentration and the highest frequency in cannabis that’s served and smoked by the general population. When we’re thinking about those, we’re thinking about limonene, which is present in lemons and limes, pinene, which is what gives pines their piney smell. Myrcene, which is present in both hops and mangoes. Beta caryophyllene, which is present in black pepper and on and on. You know, there’s a spate of kind of the usual suspects and then what I like to call the hipster terpene’s or the things that you bring up to really turn your, turn your budtender on his head and make sure that he’s doing his research when he goes home. But, each of those individually has their own spectrum of effects, and then once you start putting them together and playing with different ratios, then you’re really diving into a hyper-complex vision of what’s actually happening when you light your bowl or when you take your hit off of your vaporizer or your pen.
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Andy Lyman: Is your head spinning yet?
Megan Kamerick: To put it mildly. I really had no idea there were so many layers to this plant.
Andy Lyman: Yeah, Wylie says the human body is just as complicated as plants are and that sometimes it can be difficult to relay those complexities to patients.
Wylie Atherton: And, that’s the bane of my existence, is how we honor the complexity and honor the nuance while also not alienating people who are coming to this thing by just dumping a bunch of science and information on them, when they really just needed to come in and get something to help them with a good night’s sleep.
Megan Kamerick: Paying attention to those intricacies is the top mission for Rachael Speegle, the CEO of the Verdes Foundation, one of the state’s largest dispensaries.
Rachael Speegle: And so, it’s a balance between the cannabinoid therapy, which is the THC and CBD and those big words that we all know. And then on the other side, there’s the terpene profile, which are more of the flavonoids and aromatics of the plant. And then there’s a lot in between, and we just don’t quite know what it is yet. And that plant essence, the closer it stays to nature, the less extracted it is, just like our food. The more whole our food is, the more nutritional value we get out of it. And the more whole our cannabis is, the more benefit and the more we’re able to find the right balance for our patients.
Megan Kamerick: All of this can be really confusing, but Wylie has a pretty good analogy.
Wylie Atherton: Think of cannabinoids as the engine or the horsepower and terpenes as the driver. So, if you have… say you’re smoking a cannabis extract like distillate that has, upwards of 80 percent THC, but there’s no terpene present, you’re just going to get a ton of energy, a ton of horsepower and no direction. You take that same distillate and that same high THC product and you introduce, myrcene and caryophyllene, you’re generally, for most people, going to get a relaxing, mellow effect to it.
Andy Lyman: Earlier I compared the complexities of cannabis to chile. And just like farmers of chile, or any crop for that matter, cannabis growers may use pesticides and herbicides.
Megan Kamerick: So, it’s probably no surprise that just like some consumers of fruits and vegetables, cannabis consumers want to know what kinds of things were used on the plant.
Andy Lyman: We’ll get into testing and labeling in another episode, but first let’s hear from someone who’s taking a more natural approach to treating cannabis.
Jeffrey Holland: The cannabis that was growing in other areas of the world, you know, a hundred years ago, probably had an immensely more robust immune system to fight against things like this. But because we’ve bred so many genetic traits out of cannabis to protect itself, we brought it indoors, we’ve really babied it a lot, we’ve weakened its immune system in a lot of ways. And so, it becomes more susceptible to all kinds of things.
Megan Kamerick: That’s Jeffrey Holland, and one of those things that cannabis is susceptible to is something called powdery mildew. Holland, with his business partner, Dr. Siv Watkins, started 11 Biomics.
Andy Lyman: Watkins came up with a way to help boost a plant’s immune system as an alternative to fighting powdery mildew with sprays and chemicals. Dr. Watkins was unable to speak with us, but Holland explains how the process works.
Jeffrey Holland: What my partner has been able to do is go into the microbiome of the plant, harvest microbial agents that, in conjunction with each other, create, like, an anti-powdery mildew army, for lack of a better phrase. And what we can do is, we can grow them up in the lab. We can apply them to a plant in its infancy and use it as a prophylactic. And how that works is you put it on there. And when powdery mildew starts to proliferate, these microbial agents are triggered and they go and they feed on powdery mildew. That’s all they do. So, they eat all the powdery mildew and all the powdery mildew is gone, they basically go back down to baseline level so they don’t affect the terpene profile. They don’t affect microbial. They don’t affect anything as far as the growth of the health of the plant. And so, it can be used ideally, if, in the perfect world, you use them as a prophylactic on all your clones and seedlings as they grow.
Andy Lyman: Holland, who has a background in substance abuse treatment, says the company started as a brainstorm session between him and Watkins.
Jeffrey Holland: A really good friend of mine, Dr. Siobhan Watkins and I were talking. I had already been involved in the cannabis industry for a little while, and we just talked about how we could help people in rural areas dealing with substance use disorder, mental health issues, because there’s so few resources. And, we had met at a local restaurant. And I just said, “you know, if we could use your brain to come up with something organic and natural to cure one of the handful of things that cannabis growers deal with on a regular basis and in terms of pests and things that negatively affect crops,” I said “we could use that money to then pump back into the community to help these populations.” And she said, “what would you choose as the thing to directly help?” And I said, “well, powdery mildew is pretty prolific among cannabis growers across the country.” She took that back to her Frankenstein laboratory. And she’s a pretty brilliant person. And within six months, she said, “hey, I think I’m on to something.” And so, we ran with it. Last year, we were invited to a biotech incubator and business accelerator called “indie bio” in Silicon Valley. They gave us two hundred fifty thousand dollars and lab space and a crash course in how to attract venture capitalists and run a business and whatnot. Fast forward to where we are now, we are working with 40-thousand plant grow in southern California who are utilizing what we found so far as part of their integrated pest management program.
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Megan Kamerick: Another crucial part of growing anything is also one of the most crucial issues in New Mexico… Water.
Andy Lyman (from interview): We’re speaking with Ryan Stoa, who is a visiting professor at the southern university law center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Stoa is also the author of the 2018 book “craft weed: family farming and the future of the marijuana industry.” Thanks for joining us today.
Ryan Stoa: Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Megan Kamerick: What do you see as a viable solution to promoting cultivation while also using water responsibly, especially in the west where so much of the land is arid?
Ryan Stoa: Well, the good news is that cannabis, as a crop and as a plant, can be grown in relatively large quantities on relatively small amount of land. A few years ago, I started seeing a lot of media publications about how much water cannabis requires. And, I think a lot of those initial reports were pretty rudimentary in terms of the research that was substantiating that claim. And yes, cannabis, especially marijuana plants, are a crop. They need water. They tend to grow very well in sunny summer locations, which means they often need large amounts of water. But relative to other crops, you can get a large yield on a small plot of land. And so, I think there is a promising role for cannabis producers, even in the west. And when I think about this question, I really think about it in terms of, when we think about cannabis production, we need to keep in mind that there are really two very different modes of production. One is indoor cultivation, which tends to take place in these large indoor warehouse type structures, often in industrially-zoned locations or around urban areas. And the other is outdoor cultivation, which of course takes place in rural or agricultural regions. And the mode of production has very different implications for water use and for water resources allocations. Indoor cultivation, if you’re talking about a warehouse in an urban area, you’re probably tapping into the municipal water supply, so that, you’re not as concerned there about making a withdrawal from a water course, from a river or a stream, for example. Whereas outdoor cultivation, that is more of a concern. Now, you’re dealing with, in New Mexico, the prior appropriation doctrine or system of water allocation, which can be a little bit more complex.
Megan Kamerick: Do we have of an industry standard of how much water is required to cultivate cannabis, because we haven’t really been able to nail that down and I’m guessing it also depends on whether it’s indoor cultivation or outdoor and where it is…
Ryan Stoa: Yeah, absolutely. You’re picking up on a lot of the complexity that takes place in the cannabis agriculture industry. One of the major complexities that I think people understand about cannabis is that, it’s easy for us to talk about it with this one big, catch-all term: cannabis or marijuana. But, really look underneath the surface and we’re talking about hundreds, if not thousands of different strains of cannabis. Each one of those strains has different growing needs and ideal growing conditions. So, it’s not just that the water consumption needs are different between indoor and outdoor. It’s also very different in terms of which strain you’re growing. It depends on your style of agriculture or cultivation. It depends on the time of the year, when in the season you are, when you’re trying to harvest. So, there are so many different variables that go into how much water any one particular plant requires. I think it’s really difficult to sort of nail down and say, “x” amount of gallons per day or per week. I have seen some estimates, but I can tell you that a lot of those estimates are really rough and don’t take into consideration how many different variables go into cultivating cannabis and its many different forms. What I try to encourage legislatures to do at a baseline minimum is to at least think about this issue and think about water and more broadly speaking, environmental impacts when issuing their legalization laws and the rules and regulations around cannabis. A lot of states, government officials are always happy to think about taxation or public health, retail sales, maybe distribution, those types of issues. But, often the agricultural side of the industry gets ignored and people kind of forget this is a plant. This is a crop, which means this is an agricultural process. At least addressing the fact that this is agriculture and requires some attention as such, I think is a good first start.
Andy Lyman: I remember during legislative debates a few years back, proponents of legalizing hemp touted the plant as drought resistant and therefore a perfect candidate for a potential cash crop in New Mexico. Stoa says this was probably an oversimplification.
Ryan Stoa: Just like there are strains of psychoactive cannabis, there are strains of non-psychoactive hemp as well. One of the, sort of, challenges facing the hemp industry is to figure out where each strain of hemp grows best in the united states. And part of that process is thinking about soil composition, the atmosphere, temperature and water availability. But certainly, there are some hemp strains and more broadly speaking, cannabis strains in general, that are more drought resistant and show a lot of promise in that regard. I think we’re still so new in this industry that we’re still figuring out, you know, which strains work best in each region. 20 years down the line, we might be amazed at how drought resistant a hemp strain is in a particular region. Right now, I think we’re still learning. So, there is promise in that area, but until we have a more sophisticated understanding of hemp strains and where they grow best, it’s still, I would say, a developing issue.
Megan Kamerick: Which brings us back to Wylie Atherton. He agrees it all depends what strain you’re growing, what you’re growing it for and how you’re growing it. He says one of the reasons he chose to work for Seven Point Farms is because they use desert friendly techniques like drip irrigation and mulch that helps retain water.
Wylie Atherton: those are all really, really important aspects to make sure that you’re not sending more water through than you need to. On the way other end of that spectrum, you have forms of production that are basically flushing water through their medium all-day long. Some of them are recycled, some of them are not. But at the end of the day, they use a tremendous amount of water compared to a sustainable or a conscientious model of production that’s keeping an eye on how much water they’re sending through. And so, to me, in the desert that’s a really, really big deal. It’s always been a big deal, but the stakes are going to get even higher as we jump into a market that just explodes in the volume of production. You know, I don’t think we’re going to see it in statute from the get go, just based on looking at the landscape. But, I’m hoping that in short order we can see some protections on water usage so that we’re not irresponsibly using this super precious resource.
Megan Kamerick: Stoa says cannabis could prove to be a life saver to local economies crippled by the pandemic…just as long as the state and local governments put sensible regulations in place.
Ryan Stoa: Looking across the national landscape, it’s really challenging for rural counties to promote rural development. And here’s an industry that is one of the fastest growing in the world and in the country, and if thoughtfully regulated, can really provide some pretty enormous economic benefits, particularly for rural areas. I think that’ll be something that the local governments continue to look at.
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Megan Kamerick: Growing Forward is a collaboration between New Mexico PBS and New Mexico Political Report, thanks to the New Mexico Local News Fund.
Andy Lyman: Bryce Dix is the Producer and Editor of Growing Forward. Kevin McDonald is Executive Producer at New Mexico PBS and Matthew Reichbach is editor at New Mexico Political Report.
Megan Kamerick: Don’t forget to check-in with us next week when we go back to school… To address another key issue with cannabis… Educating users, growers and distributors.
Senator Jacob Candelaria: And I do think we could do a lot better as a state in making sure that those frontline workers are equipped with the knowledge and information that they need to provide that guidance to patients.