Marijuana goes mainstream

Legalized marijuana is going the way of all agricultural commodities in the United States, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. A really interesting analysis by 538 reveals that the price of pot has dropped for grower and dope fiend alike, and with big money at stake — $6.7 billion this past year and $20 billion the dream for 2021 — big money is very interested. The market, according to 538:

increasingly favors big businesses with deep pockets. As legal weed keeps expanding, pot prices are likely to continue to decline, making the odds of running a profitable small pot farm even longer.

There’s a lot more detail in 538’s piece, all of which I found fascinating. In so many respects, marijuana is a mirror of food. Capital makes it possible to produce the stuff for less (not counting externalities), so that even within limits on the size of pot farms, bigger operations dominate.

From January through September of this year [i.e. 2017], the 10 largest farms in Washington [state] harvested 16.79 percent of all the dry weight weed grown in the state, which is more than the share produced by the 500 smallest farms combined (13.12 percent).

Then there’s the diversification of the product itself. Not so long ago there was basically dried marijuana flowers, which when Washington state legalized the market in mid-2014 made up almost 95% of sales. Now buyers face a paralysing choice of different products, from the stuff you put in e-cigarettes to a wide range of sweets and snacks — with bud currently less than 55% of the market.

The manufacturers of marijuana goodies need expensive equipment to extract the good stuff and then make things from it, adding to the expense of the operation. It’s an inevitable echo of overstuffed supermarket aisles that feature more food-like products than you can possibly imagine utterly dominating a small area dedicated to ingredients from which one can make food.

Pot manufacturers are both adding value and trying to create products that can be distinguished from one another and thus, perhaps, command a price premium. There’s concentration in this sector too. More than 1000 companies are licensed to produce cannabis edibles, but the top five accounted for just over half of the Washington state market and the top 20 for more than 90%.

All this could easily have been foreseen, and was, by people who have studied the development of the food industry. One concomitant that they have not noted, yet, is the loss of biodiversity. Underground plant breeding, sometimes literally, fuelled the modern marijuana industry with a rainbow cornucopia of exotically named varieties, each touting specific traits of interest to consumers in addition to the enhanced productivity that growers want. And as long as the market was supplied by small growers, that diversity was readily available and often regionally distinct. With the concentration now happening in the industry, how long before there are only a handful of different strains, offering just a few different highs?

And once that has happened, how long before the small growers show up at farmers markets, touting their heritage, organic, sustainable varieties of pot? Except, of course, that most modern pot varieties are F1 hybrids designed to produce only female plants, often grown hydroponically. Is that acceptable?

Happy New Year

Cross posted from the mothership.

Nibbles: Seed biz, declining agricultural biodiversity, fad economics

  • Puerto Rico is the location for R&D of “up to 85 percent of the commercial corn, soybean and other hybrid seeds grown in the US”. Nope, I did not know that either.
  • “According to Bioversity International, an international research and policy organization, just three crops — rice, wheat and maize — provide more than half of plant-derived calories consumed worldwide,” says online magazine. Excellent, we now have a reliable source.
  • Marc Bellemare spills the beans on fad foods quinoa and avocado

Our friends the seed dispersers

Botany One has been running an entertaining little series from Nigel Chaffey on how plants get about, as seeds and as the gametes that produce seeds. In the third and final part, we get to plants that could reasonably be considered of interest here, to whit cacao and useful forest trees. It turns out that chimpanzees in West Africa are not above nicking a few pods from cacao trees and spreading the seeds an average of 407 m from the plantations. I like the ideas that this illuminates the thorny question of who “owns” a crop.

Sticking with West African trees, it seems that gorilla and chimpanzee dung offers “a cost effective and non-invasive way to restore native forested habitats”. Of course, if the gorillas and chimpanzees are themselves threatened and don’t travel widely, that’s not going to help forests further afield. Chaffey suggests collecting their dung and distributing these auto-fertilising, self-selecting seed packages directly over the area to be reforested.

I wonder what the forest genetic resources people would make of that?

Feeding another 825 million people is easy

A paper just published in Nature Geoscience has terrific news for anyone worried about the sustainability of agriculture. ((Davis, K. F., M. C. Rulli, A. Seveso, and P. D’Odorico. (2017). Increased food production and reduced water use through optimized crop distribution. Nature Geoscience. Published online:
06 November 2017 doi: 10.1038/s41561-017-0004-5 Behind a paywall, natch, but I’m sure you can find a copy if you’re suffiently motivated.)) It should be possible to grow 10% more calories and 19% more protein while simultaneously using 14% less rainwater and 12% less irrigation water. And that, the authors say “would feed an additional 825 million people”.

Kyle Frankel Davis and colleagues reach this happy conclusion by modelling the effect of shifting crops around to where they yield the most, taking into account things like how much water is available and which crops do best under those circumstances. Globally, you do it by increasing groundnuts, roots, soybeans, sorghum and tubers at the expense of millets, rice, sugar crops and wheat, but the details depend on where you are. In western Russia, for example, you cut down on the millets, sugar beet and sunflowers and plant rainfed sorghum, soybeans, tubers and wheat. In the Nile Delta, groundnuts, maize and sorghum replace sugar beet and wheat. In other places the substitutions involve more crops.

Their detailed look at the outputs of the models offers some important observations. For water, 42 countries, many of which currently don’t have enough for their farms, would save at least 20% of their water needs. And 63 countries that currently depend on imports for a lot of their food would see their production of protein and calories increase by at least 20%, boosting food security.

There’s bad news too: in Australia’s Murray-Darling basin, northern India and the US midwest, no choice of crops offers sustainable water use.

Optimistic optimisation

This approach is not entirely new. In 2006 Christoph Müller and his colleagues did a similar kind of optimisation exercise under which crops were allocated to the areas in which they would be most productive, ignoring trade barriers, transportation costs and subsidies. ((Müller, C., A. Bondeau, H. Lotze-Campen, W. Cramer, and W. Lucht (2006), Comparative impact of climatic and nonclimatic factors on global terrestrial carbon and water cycles, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 20, GB4015, doi:10.1029/2006GB002742.)) That model found that you could grow all the food humanity needs on just 2 million km2, whereas you need 35 million km2 if you try and grow as much food as possible locally. ((Strangely, Davis et al. don’t cite Müller et al, but I’m sure that’s just an oversight.))

The Davis et al. study is somewhat more realistic, constraining the shifts so that there’s no loss of crop diversity, expansion of croplands or impact on nutrient and feed availability. They also say that there would not be much impact on rural livelihoods.

Both papers are making important points about the contribution of agriculture to global water and carbon cycles, although I guess the take-home is that the way agriculture is organised now is really, really inefficient. That’s clearly true.

But still …

I see no prospect of any shift to the kind of global distribution that either paper imagines.

What are people on the 33 million km2 supposed to do instead of growing food? Hang around waiting for a shipment? Which they buy with what?

And given how wedded people are to their “traditional” crops, even if those crops have been around less than a couple of hundred years, I can’t imagine them shifting just because it would be more sustainable.

Davis et al. say:

Of course, there are probably cultural barriers and dietary preferences that may limit the application of this strategy in certain ways — considerations that may be better accommodated in future analyses by constraining the production quantities of each crop.

It probably needs world peace too.