There are such things a aviation weather reports for pilots, nautical weather reports for sailors and so on, so why not a special weather product tailored to the pot industry? The KMUD daily weather reports already include the exact length, down to the minute, of daylight—an important factor in when pot goes into flower. Special mold, wind and rain alerts could be issued, along with regular data on daylength, temperatures, humidity and so on.
That would require some drastic changes in federal marijuana policy, given that NOAA is federally-funded. In the meantime, you don’t have to be a shaman or clairvoyant to read about the rain predicted for this weekend. Blame global warming or chem trails or a HAARP conspiracy or chalk it up to “shit happens,” but it looks like we’re in for another crop-thrashing early rain. Most pot on the Northcoast is nearing harvest, with buds swelling in the warm fall days. Early strains have already been cut, dried and trimmed, while the later-finishing varieties are two to six weeks out. For those, there is enough water-retaining bud on most plants to over-tax branches. We had a similar situation last August. At that time, flower clusters were much less developed, but the rain still shattered unsupported plants.
Well-prepared growers have their plants well-staked or caged or netted already, but many will be scrambling to tie things up before Saturday night’s predicted rain. It doesn’t matter if it is only a couple tenths-of-an-inch; the bud will hold the water in its tight flower-cluster structure until the branches give way. It doesn’t help that the rain is predicted for the middle of the night. If it were daytime, growers might go out and hand-shake buds during the day, only staking any that threatened to snap.
Add to this the threat of Botrytis mold and powdery mildew from all the extra moisture and it’s going to be another stressful harvest for some people. I like to mention these problems to counter the notion that pot growers don’t have to work, don’t have any risk of crop loss and thereby are somehow greedy and lazy. No one will deny that it is the highest-paying agricultural work you’ll ever do, but it’s also easy to lose an entire year’s work and investment virtually overnight to mold, ripoffs, “hermaphrodism,” bag mold or law enforcement confiscation if you’re operating in the black market and get busted. Unlike soybean or apple farmers, there is no crop insurance for weed.
Yet.