September 2020 was a month Mason Walker would prefer to forget. The CEO of Oregon-based East Fork Cultivars began to see wildfire smoke spread across the sky above his team’s cannabis crops, causing him and his staff to cough, wheeze and begin to brainstorm ideas on how to get respirators in their hands as soon as they could.
“Right when we had our flowering and ripening period, the air quality was awful due to the Slater Fire burning nearby,” says Walker, adding how his plants were under a cloud of smoke for at least 15 days.
East Fork staff wore respirators daily, and some even slept with their masks on. In his home, Walker installed several high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters and worked hard to seal up any wall cracks “to make it as airtight as possible because we were all dealing with bad sleep and a lot of fatigue,” he says.
Their 33-acre property was at risk when the Slater Fire began to encroach on the Northern California and Southern Oregon border, but thankfully, no actual plants burned. The thing is, East Fork had to deal with an ugly side effect: the infiltration of smoke tainting the quality of several varietals.
Some customers complained and returned cannabis “that smelled like a BBQ pit,” while others didn’t notice any major issues with their purchases. Walker says the surge of sales during the following year, when the industry experienced a COVID-related boom, ensured East Fork could sell what was left of a yield that was down by 30% due to the smoke clouding the sky and giving his plants only a few daylight hours.
“If it weren’t for the COVID surge, we’d likely go out of business,” Walker says.
East Fork’s challenge in the face of wildfire smoke damage is indicative of a worrying trend facing cannabis businesses: As climate change induces more unpredictable and extreme weather—from floods to wildfires to droughts—cannabis farms are at risk of poor yields, lower cannabinoid content, and sales slumps reaching billions of dollars.
A 2023 study revealed the extent of revenue collapses. Analyzing California cannabis operations between 2018 and 2021, researchers from UC Berkeley found that “exposure to wildfire smoke was a stronger predictor of reported impacts than proximity to wildfire.”
They estimated that the 2021 economic impact from wildfire smoke was $1.44 billion.
California wildfire smoke impacts have been reverberating across cannabis farms for years. In 2020, Indus—a vertical operator that merged with Lowell Farms—disclosed in a regulatory filing that its greenhouse operations on the central California coast were significantly affected by the fires and quarterly revenue could shrink by up to $4.5 million because of lower harvest yields caused by “plant stress.”
Fires across the U.S. are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change, Christopher Dillis, co-author of the UC Berkeley study, tells Cannabis Business Times. “It’s less about farms being hurt by the fires themselves thanby the plumes of smoke that can travel for miles,” he says.
He shares how the fragility of a plant such as cannabis, especially during the flowering stage, makes it even more susceptible to externalities such as wildfire smoke. “Some of the yield losses we saw in cannabis exceeded the entire annual value of some other crop losses put together,” Dillis says.
Wildfire smoke isn’t the only weather system with the potential to bruise cannabis output and quality. Droughts may not just hurt yields but also cannabinoid production: A 2024 study found that “intense drought stresses reduced inflorescence yield and CBD yield,” a trend that may only continue as temperatures rise.
Yale researchers wrote how the “more drought dovetails with trends of increasing temperature, decreasing precipitation, and with computer model projections, the more confident scientists are in pointing to climate change.”
On the flip side of droughts is heavy rain, which can also wreak havoc on cannabis crops. Extreme weather can push nitrates from fertilizers into groundwater, and many cannabis crops rely on groundwater hydration, from California to Vermont. But such a high amount of nitrates doesn’t just lower yields; it also decreases the percentage of cannabinoids such as THC.
RELATED: 8 Tips for Protecting Outdoor Cannabis Crops Against Heavy Rain During Harvest Season
Another wrinkle in the spillover effect from climate change is water shortage, which has been known to hurt California cultivators more so than other states. A 2020 report found that in California, “climate variability either facilitates or limits water access in cycles of 10–15 years—rendering cultivators with larger water rights vulnerable to periods of drought.”
That situation is worsened by illegal grow-ops still raking in revenue in the state, says Kenneth Morrow, an author and owner of cannabis consulting firm Trichome Technologies.
“If water is being diverted upstream to illegal grows, then legal grows will encounter water shortages, and it’s not like they can divert from ponds or streams or any other water system that belongs to the natural environment or California citizens,” he says.
The unique challenge cannabis growers face is how cultivators can’t shift operations to another patch of land if a drought or heavy rain begins to spread across their site consistently, Walker says. “Because it’s such a highly regulated crop, we can’t just move to lease a piece of land 20 miles down the road, away from drought conditions. We can’t move our farm inexpensively due to the specific property needs required by the state and how we have to install fences, cameras and follow so many security protocols for our cannabis crops,” he says.
Then there’s the hurdle of government assistance, Walker says. Loans from the Farm Service Agency are only available to hemp, not cannabis, growers, and Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP) funds don’t extend to cannabis farmers. “It’s hard to make a buck already in cannabis, as we’re operating on razor-thin profit margins, and not having government programs help fund what we face, well, that’s just another challenge we have to take on,” Mason says.
East Fork has found a silver lining, though, amid the pain wrought by climate change. When Walker realized how some varietals fared better than others when wildfire smoke loomed over his team’s crops, he partnered with a testing lab to find out why.
“It was great to learn about how some types of cannabis with more plant sugar were getting damaged more,” he says, “and we also realized that varieties with high terpene counts were more susceptible to wildfire smoke.” He pauses. “Yeah, we learned a lot about cannabis flower science that week.”
David Silverberg is a freelance journalist in Toronto who writes about cannabis and the cannabis industry.
As global temperatures rise, temperamental weather systems are damaging crops with wildfire smoke and drought, leading cannabis cultivators to face several complex challenges. Read More
