Hundreds of marijuana farms may have been lost.
Mike Ray got the call one afternoon in mid-September, while he was in San Francisco working at Bloom Farms, the medical marijuana company he founded. The Butte Fire, which has been burning in Calaveras County northeast of the Bay Area for over a week, was moving toward his family’s 300-acre farm. The operation, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, had been Ray’s home as a teenager and had a 99-plant marijuana grow that was the main source of his company’s high-cannabidiol (CBD) cannabis oil. There had been close calls with wildfires in the area, but the blazes had always changed directions before reaching the farm.
This one, however, didn’t look like it was going to shift.
Ray, 36, drove to San Andreas, the Calaveras county seat, where he met his parents and brother, who’d been evacuated from the farm. Trucks and horse trailers clogged the streets and ash fell from the sky like snowflakes.
