Page 12 - Sonoma County Gazette 12-2019

Here’s a question for all SC Gazette readers who evacuated their homes during the recent Kincade fire:
Why?
Cannabis Appellations
By Ron Ferraro
Elyon Cannabis is a small, family-oriented team of local growers and
business owners who combined their growing skills and decades of experience to offer cannabis consumers access to some of California’s most meticulously cultivated Sonoma County cannabis. That’s why Elyon is
proud to be the leading cannabis distributor of Sonoma
Why were you evacuated? What was behind Sheriff Essick’s evacuation order? Clearly he was nervous, but nervousness in itself hardly qualifies as sufficient justification for evacuating 180,000 people. There must be a deeper explanation. Cal Fire is said to have a fire risk model, but what is it? I find no descriptions online.
County grown cannabis, taking Sonoma’s cannabis to markets all over California.
Perhaps it involves the highly mathematical technique of cellular automata. OK, but in that case, did Sheriff Essick access it? And what are the model’s limits? Does it apply only to forests and chaparral?
We found that in the new legal adult-use cannabis market, luxurious, high-quality cannabis quickly became too costly for most cannabis consumers to enjoy. With the belief that everyone deserves to consume cannabis from the “top shelf”, we want to be the brand that invites everyone to experience high-quality, organic, sun-grown cannabis.
Or, rather than the Cal Fire model, did the sheriff base his order on empirical data garnered from the history of fire spreads in the western United States? If so, why are there no police reports or newspaper descriptions of that empirical model? In a Press Democrat interview on Oct. 27, Sheriff Essick worried that the Kincade fire might sweep through the Russian River corridor. Nothing wrong with a vivid imagination, but we need to know, as accurately as possible, the real-life probability of that particular occurrence.
At Elyon Cannabis, we pair decades of
growing experience and talent with optimal growing conditions to showcase what is
possible when you put extra care into your cannabis. Our focus is to build local careers as
we partner with Sonoma County growers and to team with the industry as a whole to make Sonoma County cannabis a powerful and lasting brand.
And how would a fire in the Russian River corridor threaten Santa Rosa? And what are we to make of the absence of secondary fire outbreaks in Santa Rosa during the Kincade fire? If the threat was serious enough to warrant evacuating an entire population of 180,000, would we not expect to see at least one or two secondary outbreaks in Santa Rosa?
The small cannabis farmers have taken the
hardest hits with our newly regulated industry, and many are still in the
The most useful fire prediction model would deal with all these thorny questions and more. Before ordering an evacuation, risks of fire-related losses should be weighed against projected losses due to evacuation. Evacuations impact local businesses. The health of the old and infirm is at risk. Low- and even moderate-income families who are already struggling with the extreme cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area now must consider the probability of future evacuations as they decide whether or not to relocate. What are the projected losses in population, and what might be the economic consequences?
process of getting their permits to cultivate. We at Elyon will continue to work directly with local farmers to help them through the regulatory process and to partner to help build and manage their farming operations.
Development of a proper fire risk model would cost millions or even tens of millions of dollars. But the combined $11.8 billion loss to the Tubbs and Kincade fires would seem to justify the much smaller cost of learning how to assess fire risks.
As a diverse industry, we recently came together to discuss cannabis appellations development in Sonoma County. Elyon Cannabis was honored to host this event, along with an all-star panel of industry experts, government agency leaders, and Sonoma’s cannabis farmers. The event was sold out, despite the fire evacuations that took place less than a week prior. Many of Sonoma’s cannabis cultivators know the importance of designing appellations to showcase their unique microclimate and soil structure, and were eager to push this dialogue forward.
A public interest group, Evacuation Why, to give us a start in dealing
with issues of fire risk assessment in West Sonoma County. The first order
of business is to get all the cards on the table. At least some of the questions that I’ve posed have answers, if we can just get government representatives to speak. Interested citizens can email me at rdh@evacuationwhy.org or write to me at 465 Stony Point Road, Box 105, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. Please be sure to include your name and contact info.
Appellations are a legally defined and protected geographical
--Ronald Hennessey
area that identifies where something, like champagne, is made. The sparkling alcoholic beverage champagne, for example, only comes from the Champagne region of France. This provides useful information to the consumer by certifying the place-of-origin information for that specific product, allowing them to enjoy the unique characteristics that different appellations can produce in the same cultivated strain. In the case of cannabis, the same
strain grown in a foggy coastal area versus a dryer inland area will produce different results. Articulating these differences to the sophisticated consumer will help promote Sonoma County cannabis and keep our county economically ahead of the curve.
12 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 12/19
That is why we need to come together as business owners, interest groups, and concerned citizens to make sure the Sonoma County cannabis brand is promoted the way it should be. There is even more urgency to act quickly with the passage of SB 185 by Senator Mike McGuire allowing appellations to be formed by January 1, 2021. The importance of collective action to prepare for a successful future was understood by all who attended the appellations forum. We have a year to prepare to declare these appellations, and that is why we have committed to participating in quarterly meetings that will take place in anticipation of the rollout of the appellations declarations in 2021. We invite any and all interested to not only attend these meetings but to actively participate in developing what will ultimately become a boon to the overall economy of Sonoma County.
CANNABIS cont’d on page 13