Numlock Sunday: Jodi Helmer on how to grow marijuana responsibly
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.
This week, I spoke to Jodi Helmer who a few weeks ago wrote The Environmental Downside of Marijuana Cultivation. Here's what I wrote about it:
With pot becoming legal, we now need to turn to the agricultural impact of the cash crop. A marijuana plant requires 22 liters of water per day during growing season, and now that marijuana is legal we can estimate that to grow all that legal marijuana it takes something on the order of 3 billion liters per square kilometer of greenhouse-grown plants. Some of these are “trespass grows,” when an illegal farmer grows weed on a clear-cut part of tribal lands or national forests, and an estimated 14,000 such grows exist in Humboldt County, California alone.
I loved this because it was a brilliant story about the consequences of a vice …