Cannabis Agriculture
Planning For Pot

NRU
Oct. 18, 2017
Dominik Matusik

Cannabis growing operations are increasingly expanding into agricultural land. While farmers and industry leaders are saying there is no reason cannabis cannot be treated as an agricultural use, councillors in Hamilton have raised concerns.

Under Hamilton’s official plan policies, medical cannabis can be grown in industrial brownfield sites and, on a small scale not exceeding 2,000 m2, in areas zoned agricultural. In response to applications for operations in agricultural areas exceeding the size permitted by the zoning by-law, ward 12 councillor Lloyd Ferguson questioned how cannabis fits into the city’s land use planning framework. Ferguson wants staff not to consider any applications for cannabis operations that deviate from the zoning by-law until a framework is developed.

Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance executive director Janet Horner told NRU that most farmers would consider cannabis an agricultural use and, while there may be some reluctance by people to accept cannabis greenhouses, it doesn’t fundamentally make a difference whether a greenhouse is growing cannabis or food crops.

“It is different than what we think of farming to be,” she says. “I think farmers in general would say growing is growing. And whether it’s in a building or it’s outside, there are certain production skills that are required that are the same whether you’re growing roses or whether you’re growing pot. So I believe in general, most municipalities would consider marijuana production as an agricultural use.”

The Green Organic Dutchman vice chair Ian Wilms told NRU that limiting cannabis production to industrial areas would be a mistake.

“If you want to ever expand your operation, you have to have the ability to grow,” he says. “That’s why you’ll see a lot of the new [licenced producers] that have come through are only in rural areas. Because that allows them to expand their operations eventually. If you’re in an industrial park downtown, you can’t expand at all...We’re growing a very sophisticated, organic plant here. We can’t have contaminants or pollution or any of those things around. Obviously that greatly affects the plant. We’re growing an organic plant for medicine, to be consumed. So that’s a big factor for us.”

The Green Organic Dutchman is seeking to build a new greenhouse on a site in Hamilton, which is zoned agricultural but is in excess of the size permitted by the zoning by-law. Wilms says that the future of the industry is in agricultural areas rather than in industrial parks. “If you look at 13 of the largest licenced producers under Health Canada now, almost all of us are using greenhouses to grow... We have to grow in greenhouses because one of the biggest costs you have when you’re growing is the power consumption of these things. And for these [growers] that are retrofitting an old building, your power is massive. And I can tell you, in a few years, if we fast-forward this industry, those that are going to survive are going to have a really low power rate and will be using renewable resources... That’s the environment to grow this in, not in an indoor facility downtown.”

Horner says that it has not yet been definitively determined whether marijuana will be considered an agricultural or industrial use, and it is up to individual municipalities to make that call. However, she says that cannabis production will likely be considered a “value-added” activity in the greenbelt. This would limit the amount of land that can be used for indoor growing.

“If the planning people are doing their job, then they’re not going to be gobbling up acres and acres of land unless it’s zoned rural. In which case they can. But if it’s zoned agricultural, there’s only a certain percentage that they’re going to be able to use in a building format on that footprint,” she says.

“I think we all have anxiety about where this whole marijuana thing is going to go,” Horner adds. “And while this bunker style is something fairly foreign to us, we do know that people are growing all kinds of things indoors, in industrial spaces, in containers, all kinds of ways farming didn’t necessarily look like in the past... part of it is the whole security piece too. Do we want these things to be safe? Sometimes that level of security looks different than what we anticipate a farm looking like, but inside the growing is all the same.”

Wilms says that Hamilton is well-positioned to be the “cannabis capital of the world,” but not if more regulatory hurdles are thrown at the industry.

“Anything that’s going to hold us up at this point, you’re dead in the industry now,” he says. “This is a race with other jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions are jumping on board... You can’t be slowed down right now. Because our competitors will kill us. And we’ll have lost the millions of dollars that we’ve invested in the Hamilton area and all the jobs that go along with it. The by-laws are there. We’ve been told we can grow in this area. We’re doing it. To change it now that we’ve gone this far, that would be disastrous for the city.”

Hamilton council voted to defer Ferguson’s motion for a month.