These stigmatizing views of Hmong-American cultivators affect all cannabis growers. Anti-cannabis pressure creates a precarious state of impermanence — a season’s crop might be destroyed, infrastructure confiscated and investments of limited resources lost at any moment, disallowing longer-term investments. The impermanence makes noncompliance and deleterious environmental and health effects more likely, thereby perpetuating perceptions of cannabis cultivators as nuisances and dangers. As enforcement makes private land cultivation more risky, cultivators move “back up the hill,” namely onto ecologically sensitive public lands, thus substantiating characterizations of cannabis growers as criminal polluters. These stigmas even spread to county residents who do not grow cannabis themselves but if perceived to assist cannabis cultivation can face social sanctions. Meanwhile, well-resourced cultivators have an advantage over small-scale producers. They can protect their crops from visibility and complaints by concealing them on large plots of land or inside physical infrastructures ; and for white growers there is the anonymity of not being marked as ethnically different and therefore subject to heightened scrutiny. Greater access to capital, land and racial privileges insulates some from visibility and criminalization, resulting in uneven development and disparities in California’s expanding cannabis industry. Additionally, jurisdictions like the Siskiyou municipalities of Mt. Shasta and Weed are welcoming regulated cannabis commerce, thus capitalizing on its expulsion from the rest of Siskiyou and benefiting entrepreneurs with social capital and network access to successfully navigate complex public regulatory systems.After a century of cannabis’s criminal exclusion in California, grow table state voters have elected to integrate cannabis farmers into civil regulation.
An important facet of evolving cannabis regulations is local determination. As one interviewee pointed out, a 1-acre farm might be permitted in rural San Joaquin County but would not make sense in downtown San Diego. Yet, when cannabis cultivation is disqualified from consideration as agriculture by localities, as it has been in Siskiyou County, it can be substantively recriminalized and placed beyond the regulatory reach of civil institutions. Prohibitionist strategies that blur lines between civil and criminal enforcement lead to penetrating forms of visibility and vulnerability that produce inequity and disparity. The result, as this case illustrates, can be a narrow, exclusive definition of agriculture that affirms dominant notions of land use and community. The definition of cannabis cultivation as agriculture by the CDFA creates an opportunity for service providers and regulators — including agricultural institutions, public health departments and environmental agencies — to craft programs and policies that openly address the negative impacts of production. Owley advises that “if we treat cultivation of marijuana the same as we treat cultivation of other agricultural crops, we gain stricter regulation of the growing process, including limits on pesticide usage, water pollution, wetland conversion, air pollution, and local land-use laws.” Presently, however, many agencies are being enlisted in locally crafted criminalizing efforts, thus limiting their ability to work cooperatively with cultivators and address issues through customary civil abatement processes. Though unregulated cannabis cultivation can pose threats to public health, safety and welfare, police enforcement is only one of many possible ways to address it. Siskiyou’s cannabis cultivators experience familiar agricultural challenges around access to land, water and credit. These challenges are amplified without technical assistance or institutional support. If recognized statewide as farmers, these cultivators would be better positioned to access agricultural training and support services, thus addressing ecological and social concerns around cannabis production.
Additionally, new cannabis cultivators might be considered “beginning” farmers according to the CDFA, and minority farmers, including Hmong-Americans, who experience poverty at twice the national rate , would be considered “socially disadvantaged” under the California Farmer Equity Act of 2017 . Farmers with these designations would, in fact, be prioritized for technical assistance and support from farm service providers — if, that is, they were recognized as farmers. Uniformly treating cannabis cultivation as agriculture would also help enable the collection of accurate and robust data by researchers. This information base is necessary if agricultural institutions are to take an assistive and educational orientation toward cannabis farmers. Continued enforcement tactics that amplify distrust, frustration and confusion will further hinder data collection , leaving little basis to understand basic dynamics of complex, interdisciplinary systems like agriculture . In a criminalized situation, it is inevitable that information is metered and brokered by community leaders in ways that inhibit full understanding of cannabis cultivation. We suggest, for all these reasons, that a decisive break with enforcement-led, prohibitionist trajectories is needed and that agricultural institutions lead civil policy development and support farmers who cultivate cannabis. Agricultural service providers could play a leadership role in addressing the pressing needs of farmers — both those impacted by and engaging in cannabis cultivation. Yet, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension advisors, for instance, consistently report that they are currently prohibited from engaging with cannabis issues . Additionally, many county-based agricultural commissions, Siskiyou County’s included, feel that cannabis is not an agricultural enterprise and therefore do not see its cultivators as their clientele. Without leadership from agricultural institutions and agencies, the expanding cannabis cultivation industry is left to develop unevenly across the state — with wealthy private interests capitalizing in some locales while vulnerable and unregulated growers may retreat, to avoid criminalization, into ecologically sensitive areas.
UC ANR and CDFA have an opportunity to fulfill their missions and facilitate, for a burgeoning farming population, greater parity in farmer rights, capacities and resource access. Identifying the factors limiting imperiled wildlife populations requires an understanding of all influences affecting population growth and persistence. The geographic range of the fisher, , a medium-sized mesocarnivore that inhabits northern North America, has contracted significantly over the past century. Several factors potentially explain this contraction, including trapping and habitat alteration associated with fire management and logging throughout the early 1900s . Recent conservation efforts, such as reintroductions and forest restoration to improve habitat, have helped to increase the fisher’s range from a range-wide low of 43% back to 68% of its historical range. However, recent expansions were concentrated primarily in the central and eastern portions of the fisher’s range. Fisher populations in the Pacific states currently occupy only 21% of their historic distribution in this region and have not expanded, even in some regions with ample available suitable habitat and limited forest fragmentation. Fishers were extirpated from the state of Washington and northern and central Oregon prior to reintroductions to these regions from northern and eastern populations. Isolation and failure of population expansion in this portion of their range has prompted the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to deem these populations in these Pacific states a West Coast Distinct Population Segment and propose them for listing under the US Endangered Species Act as a threatened species. In 2015, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife listed the southern Sierra Nevada population of fishers, vertical rack but not the northern California population, threatened under the California Endangered Species Act. California contains two genetically and geographically distinct native populations of fishers within this DPS. The northern California population inhabits the coastal and southern Cascade mountain ranges and is the larger of two California populations. The southern Sierra Nevada population is considerably smaller, thought to contain approximately 300 individuals with fewer than 120 breeding females. The USFWS considers five potential limiting factors as merits for listing: 1) destruction or modification of the habitat or species’ range; 2) overutilization for commercial, recreational, scientific or educational purposes; 3) disease or predation; 4) the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms; or 5) other natural or manmade factors affecting its continued existence. Investigation into the frequencies of different causes of mortality can lend information to several of these concerns, most specifically factors 2, 3, and 5. Though several studies on western fisher populations have included descriptions of isolated cases of mortality for fisher, a systematic, large-scale investigation into cause-specific mortality as determined through full necropsies has not been conducted, specifically within the West Coast DPS . Since 2004, several long-term studies of the California fisher populations have been initiated investigating demographics, habitat utilization, and mortality, and we took the opportunity to investigate fisher mortality across projects for a more comprehensive examination throughout California.
Fishers were collected through three long-term projects in California , including one on the northern California population and two in the southern Sierra Nevada: the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project , and the USFS Kings River Fisher Project . The HVRFP project area was located in northwestern California on the Hoopa Reservation and adjacent private lands and federal United States Forest Service public lands. The HVRFP personnel monitored fishers from the ground using telemetry approximately 1–2 times per week . Both southern Sierra Nevada fisher projects were conducted on the Sierra National Forest in the northern and central portions of this population’s range. Fishers from the SNAMP project were located 3–6 times per week via aerial telemetry , while the KRFP personnel located each fisher via ground telemetry 2–3 times per week . In all projects, fishers were captured in box traps modified with plywood cubby boxes to minimize environmental stressors. Each fisher was fitted with a VHF radio-collar and monitored via radio-telemetry. Radio-collars were equipped with activity or mortality sensor. Inactivity on two consecutive location attempts separated by more than 24 hours or a single mortality signal from telemetry collars prompted attempts to recover carcasses as soon as was practical. When a fisher carcass was recovered, project biologists identified and recorded a suspected cause of mortality. Field based mortality determinations were constructed from evidence found at the immediate mortality site and the condition of the carcass . Recovered fisher carcasses were stored in a -20°C freezer until further analysis. Fishers were subject to a complete necropsy performed by a board-certified veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife at the University of California, Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital or the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System on the UCD campus. Additionally, any uncollared fishers that were collected opportunistically from the field within or near project areas were necropsied. For each fisher carcass, age was determined by pulp-cavity closure or enumeration of cementum annuli of an upper premolar. Fishers were classified as kits if they were altricial and dependent on mothers-milk for nourishment , juveniles if weaned and <12 months of age, sub-adults when between 12–24 months of age, and adults when 24 months of age. Ancillary diagnostic testing was performed based on gross and histologic findings and consisted of molecular diagnostic tests to confirm a viral etiology, toxicological screening of selected Thissues, forensic genetic tests of swabbed ante-mortem bite wounds to identify species of predators, and serology to determine exposure to three carnivore pathogens: canine distemper virus , canine parvovirus-2 , and Toxoplasma gondii. Serological assessment and titer cutoffs were performed via indirect fluorescent-antibody assays on uncoagulated blood collected by sterile cardiac puncture. For both CDV and T. gondii, detection of both antibody isotype IgG, which persists for extended periods, and the short-duration antibody isotype IgM was used, while only detection of isotype IgG was used for CPV . Isotype IgM was utilized for selected pathogen assays since recent or acute infections from these pathogens may predispose individuals to certain causes of mortality. Predation was considered the cause of mortality if ante-mortem hemorrhage was observed and associated with bite, claw or talon wounds. In addition, we followed up visible field signs of predation for which ante-mortem hemorrhaging could not be determined with forensic DNA testing of Thissue around putative bite wounds or tooth marks. Mortalities were classified as “natural disease” if they exhibited clinically significant infectious or non-infectious factors that were considered by the pathologist to represent the primary cause of death. Mortalities were classified as “poisoning” if an individual had acute clinically significant signs of toxicosis associated with toxicant exposure . Fishers that died directly from anthropogenic factors were classified as “human-caused.” Vehicular strike was considered to be the cause of death when carcasses were recovered on or near roads combined with evidence of blunt trauma. If a fisher carcass had insufficient Thissues for a necropsy, severe autolysis or a lack of forensic evidence, its cause of death was classified as unknown.StaThistical analyses were performed using R studio version 0.98.507 and the “mlogit” packag. A kappa staThistic for test agreement was calculated to assess the strength of test agreement between field biologist-suspected cause of death and necropsy-confirmed cause of death .