Between benchmarks that encompass cultivation and personnel management, Southern Oregon hemp and cannabis grower and breeder East Fork Cultivars prioritizes environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG), says co-owner and CEO Mason Walker.
“We’re a very human-centric organization—pretty small—25 employees, independently owned,” Walker says of the governance piece, or “G,” in the common ESG acronym. “We've long really valued having what we think is a fairly empowering governance structure—high starting wage, living wage, health benefits, fairly autonomous positions where people can really structure their day and be empowered, and a lot of community engagements, as well ….”
When it comes to sustainable growing and environmental preservation at East Fork, Walker shares that it extends from outdoors on the 33-acre farm, where hemp and cannabis plants grow to maturity, to the business’ indoor nursery and drying, curing and storage spaces, and its tent breeding area.
Walker says of the drying, curing and storage space: “We’ve invested pretty heavily in spray-foam insulation in these large metal barns that we have, and we have highly efficient, mini-split heating and cooling elements in those climate-controlled spaces. One nice thing is that in addition to reducing our energy use, it also makes a tighter control in climate, so it improves quality of our flower, as well. So, it's both a boost in quality at the same time as the lowered energy use.”
Below, read some of the ways East Fork team sources and amends its soil, saves on power, avoids nutrient runoff that could harm nearby salmon and more.
Editor’s note: Mason Walker will speak at Cannabis Conference at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. PT on Tuesday, Aug. 23 on the panel, “Innovative And Regenerative Growing Techniques,” alongside Aster Farms CEO Julia Jacobson. In the session, growers will discuss alternative cultivation methods that they employ to differentiate their operations competitively and help preserve the planet. Visit www.CannabisConference.com for more information and to register.
Patrick Williams: From a high level, what are some of the regenerative growing techniques that you use at East Fork Cultivars?
Mason Walker: One thing that I find really useful is to frame ‘regenerative’—what that word really, explicitly means. I find that really helpful for our internal discussions but also when I’m having this kind of conversation for a story or something. So, at East Fork, we define regenerative practices in two ways. One is just resource use reduction, so reducing our use of water, pesticides, fertilizer, energy—limiting the use at the top. And then the second one that’s actually truly more synonymous with regeneration is creating value beyond our own local use.
The promise, or the vision, of regenerative agriculture is that you are using fewer resources and actually generating new resources that can benefit yourself in future seasons, or benefit natural habitats or other creatures, or benefit communities—benefit your local community or the global community. I feel like the word 'regenerative' is thrown around a lot, and I think that's not often being used to describe what it actually means. So, I thought that was just a good place to start.
So, at East Fork, we spend, I’d say, more time focusing on the first category of just resource reduction. It's less sexy than creating new stuff. ... But I think that the first step in regenerative ag is resource reduction. It's the lowest-hanging fruit, if you will.
To that end, you can look at different categories. Water use is an easy one. We use cover crops, and living mulch is another big thing that we've been working on developing—that just limits our water use by reducing evaporation. We've only used drip irrigation. We grow about 10 acres of sun-grown cannabis each year, full season, one growing season. It's still a human-scale—it’s a family-sized farm. We mostly use drip irrigation, and then to aid that so we have even lower water use, we use a lot of living mulch, which means we have other plants living underneath our cannabis plants that protect from erosion but also reduce water use ….
Another category on resource use would be fertilizers. We still bring in some offsite amendments each season. It's mostly due to mineral imbalance on our farm. So, we can't have a truly closed-loop farm because we lack enough calcium for that. We do truck in a good amount of dry amendments each spring, spread those out with our tractors. But for fertilizers—for other building blocks for our plants—we do generate a fair amount of that food onsite, mostly using Korean Natural Farming practices. So, KNF, Korean Natural Farming, is a whole philosophy of regenerative ag. And we don't practice every piece of it, but a lot of the fertilizer and pest management pieces we carry out at scale on our farm. So, one of those is using other plants that are native on our farm, whether it be wood waste or woody biomass or blackberry brambles that we pull out or past years’ cannabis stalks and stems and things. We ferment those using indigenous microorganisms and make ferments that we apply in different periods throughout the season as fertilizer ..., and also, we make versions of those pesticides that we can apply through foliar sprays or also drip drench. …
Energy use: We don't use very much energy. We use electric vehicles—golf carts—that are our utility vehicles around our farm and LED lights for all of our indoor nursery spaces—pretty basic stuff there. We don't have any onsite electricity generation yet, but we probably will get something at some point. But … we've invested a lot in insulation in our climate-controlled spaces as being a better bang for our buck than, say, getting big a solar array. So, we hope to get that solar array at some point, but we've been focusing on the efficiency first.
PW: One thing you had talked a little bit about is cover cropping. Could you talk about some of those methods there, and why's it important to you to keep vegetation in the ground?
MW: Yeah, cover cropping is essential for farming, in general, for any sort of sustainable farming, and certainly for intensive row-cropping. We're growing a vigorous annual every year in the same place. If you do that without a lot of planning, it's like strip-mining. You're basically just sucking all the resources out of your ground. It's very energy-intensive, very unsustainable.
So, cover cropping is an essential tool to regenerate … nutrients [for] soil health—so, when you're growing that high-demand row crop each year, you're doing some of the work in place instead of bringing in a lot of offsite resources. One of the big things is nitrogen-fixing. We plant in the offseason. Some of our cover crop blend actually captures nitrogen from the air. And we'll store it in its plant bodies, and then we'll green compost that straight into the soil so you're actually … pulling nutrients from the air. Also, different cover crops will break down macronutrients into more bioavailable forms for our cash crop when we're growing that, so [we are] tapping into the resources that are already there in the ground—minerals, in particular.
And then reducing erosion is a huge one. [With] bare soil, especially in a rainy season, you're going to get a ton of runoff. And runoff is really bad for a lot of reasons. You lose nutrients, so you begin to bring more in from offsite. Also, when you have a lot of sediment running into riverways, it's really bad for fish and other species because it deoxygenates water. We are in salmon spawning grounds. It would be very irresponsible for us to allow erosion of our soils into the streams—it would basically make it so that the salmon couldn't spawn there—so, a really big deal. So, a cover crop helps prevent that erosion.
PW: Are you using pretty much the same growing methods across the board for your hemp crop versus your state-legal, higher-THC cannabis?
MW: There are two big differences. We grow about 10 acres. One acre is the adult-use crop, and then about nine acres is the hemp crop. It’s all floral cannabis, and we're growing vigorous, full-season annuals in the ground, in the native soil, so a very similar thing going on. The biggest difference is that in that one acre for the adult use, it is a higher-value acre for us, so we do grow a lot of clonal plants. Clonal plants need support because they don't have a deep taproot that seed plants would have. So, we have sort of a permanent trellising system. We have to grow in the same exact place every year on that one adult-use acre, and there is additional labor and additional management needed to be able to grow that crop in literally the same exact place every year and to reduce pest problems, to build nutrients. Whereas with our hemp crop, we can swap rows, we can change plant spacing more easily, and we don't have that trellising and regulatory framework that locks us in. And then the other big reason that they're a little bit different is that [although] it's the same farm—we're in an old riverbed—our adult-use acre is in a very different soil type. Even if you look at the GIS data from our local USDA office, you can see distinctly where this old riverbed was, and because of that, we just have different minerality in the soils. We have to amend them a little bit differently and treat them a little bit differently.
PW: What do you hope attendees bring back to their business from this session at Cannabis Conference?
MW: I'm most hopeful that the session will demystify regenerative ag. I think that … because it's a new buzzword, it can be a little intimidating. I think it's easy for people to [think] folks that are really working on regenerative agriculture are holier than thou, and maybe it's like a little club—it's like a puritanical thing. I’m much more into the practical, pragmatic demystification of good stewardship and really stripping away the touchy-feely stuff, not that that's really bad, but I think it can be intimidating for people if they want to get more engaged with regenerative agriculture. They’re like, “Ah, but I [don’t] touch the land and [am not] singing to the bees” …. I think my main goal is to demystify and make really pragmatic, clear steps that people can take for using cultivation of cannabis to lower resource use and generate new value in their communities and for themselves.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for style, length and clarity.
