NEW ARTICLE: Why Comply? Farmer Motivations and Barriers in Cannabis Agriculture
This article is the culmination of 2 years of research with Hekia Bodwitch. We set out originally to discover why it is that some people are entering compliance and others aren’t. Were there particular characteristics that typified people who applied for licenses? How about those who didn’t? Was the issue that people didn’t like regulations and were resisting them? Or were people interested in getting licenses but barred by various factors? What were those factors? Were there appreciable differences between people that applied and those who didn’t? To answer these questions, we consulted other studies on compliance, particularly among agriculturalists, and came up with a number of possible reasons that people were or weren't motivated. Then, we crafted a survey using Qualitrix, which we tried out on a few groups of willing farmers. We refined the survey and then sent it out live, working our cultivator networks. We got back over 700 responses, about half of which completed the whole survey. It gave us one of the first glimpses into farmer behavior, calculations, and experiences singe legalization began. It is likely the largest survey done to date of cannabis cultivators in the US and certainly the largest survey of unregulated farmers. We hope its results can be helpful to policy makers, industry and political advocates, and the public as they consider the multiple crises in and because of agriculture.