Bastian: From KRWC in Santa Barbara, I’m Jonathan Bastian, and this is the 805: Stories from the
Central Coast . This week: For years, dirt biking and ATV enthusiasts have flocked to the Oceano
dunes near San Luis Obispo, to ride along the beach. But following a number of accidents and deaths,
the coastal commission is considering restricting access. Then, we head to a local museum, to hear a
celebrated jazz musician interpret paintings in unique musical improvisations.
But first, we begin this week with a story about generational farming that goes back hundreds of
years. Booms and busts, controversy, and the emergence of a crop we’ve been talking about a lot
lately: cannabis. Before we get to what some have caked “the green rush” in California, we’ll start
with another popular green plant: avocados. On a recent afternoon, I drive out to Carpinteria to meet
Ed van Wingerden. He runs Everbloom, which has both greenhouses and orchards, like the one we
visit. Just as we begin walking around the acres of avocados, he checks in with one of his workers.
[Spanish dialogue between van Wingerden and a worker]
Bastian: What were you guys chatting about?
Van Wingerden Senior: He has chicken manure, andbecause we are 100% organic, so we cannot use
conventional fertilizers.
Bastian: Van Wingerden planted these avocados in the early 2000’s. But his family history of farming
goes back a long, long ways.
Van Wingerden Senior: Yeah, so we go back to about the mid 1700’s from Holland. I come from a
little town called Nalvec. And so, we’ve stayed in the same place for hundreds of years. And it was
always farming. It from open-field farming, wheat farming, orchard farming, and then finally, some of
the first greenhouses, I suppose.
Bastian: His father, looking for a better opportunity and climate, came to California in the 1960’s and
built some of the first greenhouses in the region. Initially, they planted flowers, especially Gerber
daisies. The market in the US, he says, was wide open. And for decades, business was really good. So
they expanded; built more greenhouses. But that changed dramatically, right around the great
recession of 2009. A series of economic events pummeled the industry. The US growing market
collapsed, and cut flower production shifted to places like Canada. To diversity, Ed van Wingerden
branched out and grew avocados. He says Carpinteria is the ideal place to grow them.
Van Wingerden Senior: Carpinteria is like Camelot for avocado trees. I mean, it truly is. It has the
perfect temperature, we are cooler, for example, than San Diego, which means we can hold up fruit
much longer. And we’ll pick, off of this ranch, which is 34 acres; we’ll pick about 600 to 800
thousands pounds a year.
Bastian: But as successful as the avocados have been, it still left Ed Van Wingerden with a giant
financial problem: all of those greenhouses. The family was trying to support a dying industry. The
money was drying up, fast. Thankfully, another crop was emerging at just the right time, and it grew
perfectly in greenhouses. Yes, cannabis. Growing pot wasn’t something that Van Wingerden had
thought about, or even particularly liked.
Van Wingerden Senior: Deep down, we come from a really conservative family. And so I never did
marijuana. I never did it in college, it didn’t really appeal to me. So no, it was not at all interesting for
me to do this. We had several different people approach us, and for quite a while, I said “Son, we can
just stay the course. Let’s just get really efficient, let’s get into robotics, let’s see if we can get our cut
flower production going in such a way that we can just stay the course and grow cut flowers.” But it
was just not sustainable. So, yeah, we had no choice. And fortunately, the right partners came into
town – this is close to 5 years ago – and that is when we made the switch.
Bastian: To learn more about the switch, we checked out some of these greenhouses. Anyone who
drives the 101 has probably seen where these greenhouses are located in Carpinteria. They go on,
literally for miles. The Van Wingerden family owns a number of them. They grow cannabis on about
10 acres. This is where I meet Ed Van Wingerden’s son, Ivan. He’s in his early 30’s, and the youngest
generation of this long line of farmers. He walks us through a greenhouse filled with thousands of
cannabis plants. About a dozen workers are busy trimming a small section of them.
[sounds of clipping]
Bastian: I joke with him that it looks like a sea of green.
Van Wingerden Junior: So you’re familiar with that industry term?
Bastian: No.
Van Wingerden Junior: Oh, that’s so funny. So, it’s a growing style that is basically lots of smaller
plants. And the industry term is “sea of green.” And, it’s an appropriate name.
Bastian: As simple as it might seem to grow these crops, Van Wingerden says it’s pretty high tech.
Van Wingerden Junior: It’s all, a very fancy Dutch climate control computers, of course, we’re
monitoring it daily. We have two people that all they do is check the climate control computer and
the growing area. It’s all very involved. We process a lot of data, just checking time periods and
settings, just making sure that the hardware is actually doing what the software says it’s doing.
Bastian: They also have a clone room, where they isolate the exact strains that they’ll eventually bring
to market. We then step outside and look at another piece of technology. It’s become representative
of a troubling issue in the community, which is odor.
Van Wingerden Junior: So what this is, is a vapor-phased odor control system. We have a 6-inch
perforated pipe that goes around the entire perimeter of the greenhouse; the entire growing space.
And what is does is, every 10 feet, we drill a hole, and we create a curtain of this vapor around the
greenhouse. And while vapor sounds mysterious, it really is quite simple. All this is, it’s from a
company called OMI, and it is water, food grade surfactant; and you mix the water and essential oils.
So it’s a proprietary blend of essential oils, which is all plant-derived. It is quite expensive. This system
runs us about $55,000 to install, and it’s over $20,000 a year to run it. It’s a significant item on our
balance sheet to keep it running. But it’s worth it, because it’s so effective. So we have this thing
running 24/ 7.
Bastian: And from what I can tell walking around the facility, it is effective. There is little to any odor.
This is particularly important, because the greenhouse is located within blocks of Carpinteria High
School. And there have been complaints that the stench of cannabis is infiltrating classrooms. I ask
Ivan if the complaints about the smell have been warranted, or not.
Van Wingerden Junior: Well, I think odor as a nuisance, I wouldn’t say that those concerns are
overblown, because there are times where it smells like cannabis in town. There’s no denying that.
Right now, not every grower in Carpinteria has odor control. Our Carp growers, the Cannabis
Association of Responsible Producers (CARP), we’re a member of that in Carpinteria. And it’s high on
our list of priorities, because even though we might have effective odor control, if someone down the
road doesn’t, we still seem to get the finger pointed at us, because we’re closer to more sensitive
receptors. While we’re outside of that setback, we are the closest person to be blamed. So we’re very
motivated to get everybody with odor control. Recently, the County Board of Supervisors had a
ruling on that to try to speed up the process, which we’re very much in agreement and grateful for.
As a farmer, it seems strange to ask regulators to regulate more, but in this case, especially with most
things regarding cannabis, we need to have the regulation, and we need to have the rules set in stone
and enforced.
Bastian: While Ivan acknowledges that odor has been a problem, he does not agree with another
related critique.
Van Wingerden Junior: Some people have said that there’s health effects associated with the odors
from cannabis, or from the vapor phase systems, but those are completely safe. The FDA does not
regulate and biogenic VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) or terpenes because they don’t have to.
They’re all safe. So cannabis, like a tomato plant or a pine tree, emits terpenes. So there isn’t any
scientific reason why cannabis would be toxic, while a pine tree wouldn’t.
Bastian: Beyond odor, there’s one more controversial issue surrounding cannabis. And the Van
Wingerdens have an interesting perspective on this. Remember all those avocado trees we visited a
few minutes ago? Well, here they come again. Earlier this summer, a number of avocado growers got
a strange call from the companies which spray their crops with pesticides via helicopters. These
companies said they could not continue spraying for fear that the pesticides would drift onto
neighboring cannabis grow sites. Cannabis, by the way, needs to be completely pesticide free in order
to sell. So, to avoid any potential legal trouble, the companies simply stopped spraying. This, as you
can imagine, cast a rather unflattering light on the cannabis industry, which was viewed as disrupting
older, more traditional crops in the area. But Ed Van Wingerden sees it differently, primarily because
he grows avocados organically, and doesn’t rely on helicopters to spray.
Van Wingerden Senior: This is where I have a little bit of trouble with standard avocado growers,
where it’s kind of like, “guys, get off the couch, and maybe get on your tractor, and spray with a hose,
which is what we do. And together, I’ve got close to 60 acres, and we do everything by hand, so to
speak. I mean, it’s not by hand hand; we still have driven a tractor with a hose on it. And we have 2
hoses coming off it, and we spray certified organic materials like aphid soaps and things like that. So,
it is extremely doable, and as I mentioned before, this ranch can generate anywhere from 300 to
500,000 dollars more a year because it’s certified organic. That pays for all my labor. So, financially
speaking, it makes total sense to get away from the old conventional styles of spraying nasty
chemicals, and just going organic.
Bastian: While these questions of pesticide-spraying and odor control slowly work themselves out in
the courts, and in county governance, the Van Wingerdens find themselves in a very different place
than where they were 10 years ago. Instead of being part of a dying farm industry, they’re part of a
new, thriving one. They now employ around 250 people locally, way more than they did before. Still,
when they reflect on where they’ve come since this transition to cannabis, it’s strange. Here again is
Ivan:
Van Wingerden Junior: Yeah, I mean my grandfather, my dad’s dad, when he met Ronald Reagan – I
don’t know if this is true, but I heard he didn’t wash his hand for a week. He was just so enamored
with that president. But we look at this as just like any other plant. Honestly, cannabis has helped so
many people. It is a medicine. For years we grew it medicinally, and there was a lot of wonderful
feedback we got. That differentiation; that was a really important factor in not feeling like we were
participating in something illicit or wrong.
Bastian: His father Ed, thinking about how far they’ve come, feels similarly, if not a bit more surprised.
Van Wingerden Senior: When I was planting it, like I said, about 5 years ago, I was next to my son,
and my foreman in the greenhouse. And I said to my son, “who would’ve thought? Who would’ve
known?”
Bastian: For KCRW in Santa Barbara, I’m Jonathan Bastien.