Post-Wildfire Flower Purity Results
The purity and safety of East Fork’s flower is of utmost importance to us. After surviving the widespread wildfires in our region and bringing in our 2020 harvest, we undertook additional testing on our flower to determine whether the smoke and ash had created any potential health hazards.
The results (below) offered us reassurance that our patients and customers need not have concerns about contamination in our flower.
Flower Purity
Contamination from heavy metals after a fire is an environmental and consumer health concern. While most environments contain some trace levels of these elements, the EPA sets exposure limits for drinking water and soil.
When it comes to cannabis flower, the limits of permissible daily exposure (PDE) for heavy metals are loosely defined. Oregon does not currently require heavy metal testing for cannabis products, although that could change in the future.
However, many states are adopting regulations as presented in the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia’s 2004 manuscript Cannabis Inflorescence. These limits are:
Inorganic Arsenic: 2 parts per million (ppm)
Cadmium: 0.82 ppm
Lead: 1.2 ppm
Methyl Mercury: 0.4 ppm
California chose to enact even stricter limits than these, and requires that all flower sold in the state must be pre-tested for heavy metals. Any cannabis flower or product that hits a limit (Action Level) is rejected and not able to be sold or consumed. For inhalable cannabis and products, the California limits are even stricter than for edible products.
Our results were safely below the California Action Levels for Inhalable Products:
Heavy Metal CA Action Level Our Result
Cadmium 0.2 0.0126 (6.3% of CA limit)
Lead 0.5 0.115 (23% of CA limit)
Arsenic 0.2 0.0670 (33% of CA limit)
Mercury 0.1 0.00789 (7.89% of CA limit)
And of course, the Oregon’s regulations requires strict pesticide tests for all cannabis products, which we have continued to pass with flying colors. So we can rest assured that our flower didn’t get contaminated with those chemicals through wildfire conditions, either.
The lack of any unusual toxins aligns with the fact that the Slater Fire, the fire that affected our region, was a true forest fire that burned mostly just trees -- unlike other areas in Oregon that were near to urban fires that blazed through houses, cars, and other manufactured items.
Flower Quality
So we’ve covered purity -- the objective measurements that assure us that the flower is safe to consume -- but what about quality, the subjective sensory experience of consuming flower?
The media has raised the possibility of “smoke taint” in the 2020 outdoor cannabis crop. This effect is a notorious wine vintage ruiner, in which wine grapes chemically trap some of the compounds found in smoke, spoiling the taste of the fruit.
Luckily for all of us, cannabis doesn't contain much sugar — the key component in wine grapes that causes them to experience "smoke taint". As Amanda Day explains in Oregon Leaf’s Harvest Issue, “even though smoke phenols could potentially find their way into buds, it is unlikely to have as devastating an outcome, thanks to fewer available sugar molecule binding sites” (p. 16).
At East Fork, we’ve grown cannabis at a commercial scale for five years, three of which fell during very smoky seasons. We've before never experienced "smoke taint" in our resulting crop, whether it be in trimmed flower, concentrates, or extracts.
In addition to quantitative testing, our team puts our flower through extensive qualitative testing, consuming the flower and documenting its smell, taste, and effects. The experienced crew of cannabis connoisseurs on the farm have sampled our 2020 cultivars, and didn't detect any smoky smell or taste.
However, given the widespread impacts of the wildfires this year, some commenters in the cannabis community have raised the possibility of a lingering “campfire smell” to Oregon’s 2020 outdoor harvest.
This perception places a difficult Catch-22 on outdoor farmers who consciously choose to cultivate their cannabis under the sun and in the soil, as it was meant to grow. Climate change has been a key factor in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the Western United States. And indoor cannabis production has a massive carbon footprint, consuming enormous amounts of electricity to power lights, heaters, air conditioners, and dehumidifiers.
Regenerative farmers who use agricultural practices that help fix carbon and other nutrients back into the native soil are actively combating climate change, while many indoor growers use practices that contribute to it.
The concept of terroir includes the complete set of local conditions in which a particular a food or wine is produced, including regional and local climate, soil-type, topography, and weather conditions. As our global climate and regional microclimates continue to change, wildfires are likely to become more frequent and severe — a persistent characteristic.
In wine, the conditions of a year are embraced as part of the natural artistic expression of a plant. Might we take the same approach with cannabis? If painstakingly produced regenerative flower passes purity tests and is not harmful, might we learn to embrace the sum total of the terroir it carries?
More importantly — do we turn our backs on regenerative sungrown farmers who are doing everything right, and instead support growers who are contributing to the problem, because of a perception that their flower might smell a little bit better before being smoked anyway?
Simply put, for outdoor farms who survived the 2020 fire season, making it through won’t matter if folks don’t buy our products. With COVID-19 affecting all of our businesses and lives, we need your support more than ever.
Vote regenerative with your dollar. Support sungrown organic cannabis.
