LIVERMORE — Eight marijuana farms soon may sprout up to become part of the pastoral scene of cattle ranches, crop fields and vineyards in the Livermore-Sunol area, but not everyone in the valley is mellow about their pending arrival.
Selected farmers already obtained business licenses from the county earlier this year and now await conditional use permits, which must be accompanied by environmental impact reviews. Then the state must sign off before the farms can start building their greenhouses and grow, as allowed by Proposition 64 — a 2016 voter-approved ballot measure that legalized personal use and cultivation of recreational marijuana.
To some valley residents, the pot farms spell trouble. They’ve complained about the odors those farms could emit and worried about the crime they could draw. To assuage some of those fears, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is working with the applicants to come up with a security plan, Rodrigo Orduno, a deputy planning director for the county, said in an interview.
Brenda Morris, who owns Morris Ranching, wrote a letter to the Alameda County Planning Commission in February urging it to reject pot farming permits.
“My family lives and depends on our ranch, and we are concerned about the severe negative impacts the investors in the cultivation sites will impose on our neighborhood,” Morris wrote.
She said cultivation farms “do not belong in neighborhoods” and would “put families at risk of increased criminal activity.”
Neighbors such as Cindy Gallagher also wrote to the commission sharing similar concerns about the “millions of dollars” worth of crops that could lure “low-life criminals.”
But Chuk Campos, founder of the Oasis in Livermore near Morris Ranching and one of the eight farmers applying for a cultivation conditional use permit, said there’s no need to worry. For one thing he said, his farm will have guards on duty 24/7.
And all the farms will have to grow their marijuana in enclosed greenhouses. Campos said his 92-acre property will include only half an acre of marijuana inside a greenhouse in a secured acre.
The smell will be confined inside “so that it doesn’t mix with the smell of all the nearby cow poop,” Campos added with a chuckle.
The environmental review process, which will begin once each individual farmer files an application with the county, could take up to six months, Orduno said. It will assess the farms’ water irrigation systems, potential traffic and odor issues, as well as plans for the greenhouses themselves.
None of which would have been necessary if the farmers were growing something like lettuce, Campos said.
“People are concerned, I think, just because it’s something new, and there’s a lot of quasi-criminal stuff tied to the past. I get that,” he said. “But this is not anything like that. It’s farming.”
Campos, an entrepreneur, bought the property six years ago to grow locally sustainable agriculture. Since then, he’s gotten a local farmer to grow wheat and has cattle on the property as well.
He said he wants to grow marijuana because it’s “high-value” agriculture and there’s a big demand for it.
Besides the eight pending farm permits, the county has indicated it will allow two medical marijuana cultivation businesses in an unincorporated area near Hayward — Garden of Eden and We Are Hemp — apply to grow recreational pot as well, if they wish.
Other counties have approved ordinances allowing marijuana farms, including San Mateo, Monterey, San Luis Obispo and Calaveras. So far, Calaveras County has received 743 applications for commercial cultivation and approved 250, according to that county.
In 2017, Alameda County updated its medical marijuana ordinance to allow cultivation, retail and delivery of marijuana in unincorporated areas.
The county planning commission and board of supervisors ultimately must approve the farm permits.