Do Wildfire Smoke and Ash Affect Cannabis Plants?
While the Western U.S. is no stranger to wildfire, 2020 has been a particularly difficult — and deadly — fire season. Our farm along the Oregon-California border has been on an active edge of the Slater Fire for more than two weeks. It’s been a harrowing experience, one we’re grateful to come away from with our team and farm safe from destruction.
It's natural that many folks are curious, or have quality concerns, regarding our hemp and cannabis being so close to wildfires this year.
In terms of the actual crop and flower, consumers and patients don’t need to be too concerned. We have a number of efforts underway to mitigate any potential impacts on the flower and ensure quality. Here's the general outline.
Smoke
Luckily for all of us, cannabis doesn't contain much sugar, the key component in wine grapes that causes them to experience the notorious vintage ruiner known as "smoke taint". Sugars in wine grapes chemically trap some of the compounds found in smoke.
We've grown cannabis at a commercial scale for five years, three of which fell during very smoky seasons. We've never experienced "smoke taint" in our resulting flower, whether it be in trimmed flower, concentrates, or extracts. And with Oregon’s robust required testing protocols, we test all of our flower and concentrates more stringently, and for more compounds, than just about any other consumer product that humans put in their bodies.
With that said, we will be partnering with select state-licensed laboratories to do extended testing this year to see if we can find even the smallest amount of potential impact.
Ash
With wildfires so close, ash fell onto our farm for over a week in mid-September. We're experimenting with a number of mitigation strategies including physically blowing the ash off with air and rinsing less mature flowers with water. We'll do our best to remove ash while plants are still in the field, and we'll have more opportunity to remove additional particulate matter post-harvest, including using more physical tactics including vacuum. To helps sort and grade our dried flower, we use a machine that contains a significant amount of suction, which should be able to remove most residual ash that remains following our field mitigation efforts.
We've also begun discussions with a handful of testing laboratories that are able to test for specific compounds found in ash to assess if our mitigation efforts are effective. We should note that we have had ash fall in past years and were able to successfully mitigate its impact on our finished flower. Additionally, a fun fact is that the relatively high pH of ash can potentially act as a pest and pathogen deterrent. Silver linings!
Overall Flower Safety
Rest assured, cannabis harvested in Oregon in 2020, whether it be adult-use cannabis or low-THC hemp cannabis, is going to be markedly safer than vegetables or any other crop. This is because we're subject to state testing requirements somewhere in the ballpark of 50 times more stringent than other crops. We'll be conducting as much research we can to identify any potential negative impacts from the widespread wildfires. We haven't before experienced a significantly lower yield due to prolonged smoky conditions, and we're not seeing that this year (but we will be watching for it carefully).
As we work to assure flower quality, we hope to share our findings with other cultivators affected by wildfires. If you come across any useful tips we'd love to hear them. Let us know if you have any more questions, and we look forward to sharing more as we work to bring in the year's bounty.
