DENVER — North Carolina wants to know if marijuana could one day replace tobacco as a cash crop.
Louisiana is wondering how pot holds up in high humidity.
Washington state has questions about water supplies for weed.
Colorado agriculture officials had answers for them all as they briefed officials from about a dozen states — some that have legalized weed, others that joked their states will legalize pot “when hell freezes over” — on the basics of marijuana farming and regulating a crop that the federal government still considers illegal.
The Colorado Department of Agriculture is also working on the world’s first government-produced manual on how to grow marijuana. There is no shortage of how-to books catering to pot growers both in and out of the black market, but Colorado’s forthcoming guidebook aims to apply established agronomy practices to the production of marijuana.
“When you start with no knowledge at all, it’s rough,” said Mitch Yergert, head of Colorado’s Division of Plant Industry, an agency within the Agriculture Department that regulates marijuana production.
Yergert conceded that Colorado agriculture officials ignored marijuana entirely for more than a dozen years, from the time voters in the state approved medical pot in 2000 until recreational pot shops started opening in 2014.
“Nobody in our agency ever grew marijuana, so how are we supposed to develop best practices?” Yergert said.
But marijuana’s commercial popularity, coupled with increasing concern over pesticides and unsafe growing conditions, forced the Agriculture Department to stop considering marijuana a running joke and start seeing it as a commercial crop in need of regulation. Colorado sold about a billion dollars’ worth of marijuana last year, making it a cash crop, the same as many others.
