On Oct. 31, the Sheriff\u2019s Office in Kern County, California, a stretch of mostly unincorporated farmland in the state\u2019s mostly conservative heartland, laid claim to one of the biggest marijuana busts in recorded history, if not the very biggest.<\/p>\n
A few days before,\u00a0as the Bakersfield Californian first reported<\/a>, sheriff\u2019s deputies working with state Fish and Wildlife and the FBI visited several plots of what was supposed to be industrial hemp grown on 459 acres near the city of Arvin, a small part of 7,000 acres of hemp under cultivation in Kern County.<\/p>\n Hemp is bigger business than ever in America thanks to the\u00a0CBD craze<\/a>, but has also caused regular confusion among law enforcement and the general public. You will remember that industrial hemp and dispensary-grade cannabis are both\u00a0cannabis sativa<\/em>. Under U.S. law, hemp becomes \u201cmarijuana\u201d if it tests at 0.3% or more of THC and anyone wishing to grow industrial hemp legally must regularly test their crop and cut it all down if tests come back \u201chot\u201d with too much THC.<\/p>\n In this case, the hemp near Arvin \u2014 more than 10 million plants\u2019 worth, according to the sheriff\u2019s office \u2014 had tested as high as 7% THC, as the Californian reported.<\/p>\n \u201cPreliminary testing showed the levels of THC in these fields were well over the legal limit for industrial hemp production and were in fact cannabis,\u201d the Kern County Sheriff\u2019s Office wrote in a Facebook post.<\/p>\n Before deputies \u201cseized and eradicated\u201d the offending plants, they had an \u201cestimated value of over $1 billion on the black market,\u201d the office claimed.<\/p>\n The Kern County Sheriff\u2019s Office did not respond to inquiries from Cannabis Now and has not offered any updates in the case since the Oct. 31 Facebook post.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear if any arrests were made nor if anyone is being investigated for attempting to grow a massive amount of smokable, THC-rich cannabis under the protections of the Farm Bill.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also not clear how authorities arrived at the \u201c$1 billion\u201d estimate, beyond assuming each of the 10 million plants was worth $100 each on some underground market.<\/p>\n What is clear, according to hemp experts and publicly available information reviewed by Cannabis Now, is that the KSCO either has no idea what it\u2019s talking about or is full of it.<\/p>\n Either way, nobody in Kern County busted $1 billion worth of weed.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m extremely skeptical this is marijuana,\u201d said Lawrence Serbin, former chair of the California state Industrial Hemp Advisory Board and principal of Hemp Traders, which the\u00a0Orange County Register said<\/a>\u00a0could be the \u201ccountry\u2019s largest importer of hemp products.\u201d<\/p>\n Helpfully, Kern County posted aerial photos of the bust. The plants are packed tightly together, with limited room to grow. They don\u2019t look like the bushy plants grown from flower in greenhouses or hoophouses on Emerald Triangle hilltops: They look like, well, ditchweed.<\/p>\n \u201cThat looks like hemp,\u201d Serbin told Cannabis Now. \u201cThe way it\u2019s being grown, so close together, it looks like it\u2019s being grown for fiber.\u201d<\/p>\n Hemp like that is lucky to have 5% or less of THC \u2014 nothing anyone but the most desperate would consider smoking. True, these days, \u201chemp\u201d is appearing in smoke shops and corner stores with presentation and packaging like the THC cannabis in dispensaries, but at least in photos, this hemp doesn\u2019t look like that kind of hemp, either, Serbin said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis does not look like smokable hemp,\u201d he added. \u201cThis looks like an industrial hemp field to me.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s entirely possible the sheriffs did cut down 10 million plants. You can grow a lot more hemp than that on 459 acres: According to researchers at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, if you\u2019re growing hemp for fiber production, optimal density is about 300,000 plants per acre. If you\u2019re growing something other than rope, the density is 150,000 plants per acre.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s the problem \u2014 that\u2019s hemp grown for fuel or fiber, not to be extracted into CBD oil. If someone wanted to hide underground-market cannabis in the hemp field, they could do that, but it wouldn\u2019t fetch the same kind of prices cannabis grown under controlled conditions would.<\/p>\n And $1\u00a0billion<\/em>? There\u2019s just no way.<\/p>\n According to Serbin, you can milk about 1.6 ounces of CBD oil per pound of hemp flower. And if you grow 1 plant per square meter, you can get about a pound of flower per plant, he added. And CBD hemp is fetching a high price these days: \u201c$20 to $60 a pound, with a high concentration of CBD in it,\u201d Serbin said.<\/p>\n Assuming the highest possible yield and the highest possible value, 10 million plants on 459 acres might yield you $100 million worth or so of CBD oil, but even that figure, based on the most generous assumptions, is far less than the cops\u2019 claim.<\/p>\n If Kern County overestimated the bust willfully, it\u2019s just doing what cops have always done. \u201cI\u2019ve noticed law enforcement does have a tendency to overstate the value of any bust as it makes them look good,\u201d Serbin said.<\/p>\n But in the hemp era, cops have also proven overzealous to a fault in pursuing hemp crops, using the excuse \u201cwe thought it was weed\u201d if anything goes sideways. Shipments of hemp sent across the country have been seized and the drivers arrested because cops were convinced the hemp was marijuana.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not good for a variety of reasons. With the legalization of THC-rich cannabis favored by a majority of Americans, using police resources to cut down stands of rope is not going to be popular. Doing that diverts cops from pursuing other crimes such as violent crimes against people. And it also discourages investors and entrepreneurs from jumping into legal hemp cultivation. You\u2019re forced to wonder if that\u2019s partially the point.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0do you think the sheriff\u2019s flubbed on the numbers?<\/p>\n The post Cops Claim a \u2018$1 Billion\u2019 Cannabis Bust<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
On Oct. 31, the Sheriff\u2019s Office in Kern County, California, a stretch of mostly unincorporated farmland in the state\u2019s mostly conservative heartland, laid claim to one of the biggest marijuana busts in recorded history, if not the very biggest. A few days before,\u00a0as the Bakersfield Californian first reported, sheriff\u2019s deputiesContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,12822,50,296,90,289,420,6693],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39445"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39446,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39445\/revisions\/39446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: Cops Claim a \u2018 Billion\u2019 Cannabis Bust<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"