RII is honored to support The Emerald Cup’s Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award. Entries for this award were invited to test drive The Cannabis PowerScore, a tool that can be used to help measure a farm’s energy efficiency. Be sure to check out this year’s winners at the 2017 Emerald Cup!
Time & Location
December 09, 2017
Location is TBD
About The Event
The way we grow plants can have the power to help or hurt our environment. Sadly, the direction taken by modern agriculture has been devastating for the planet, destroying our topsoil, diverting and poisoning our water, while growing toxic and nutrient poor food that leads a host of health issues. The societal and environmental costs of bad agricultural practices are staggering and terrifying. Cannabis can be cultivated in ways that are high-impact, resource-excessive, and harmful to people, water and the land. However, with the right practices, cannabis can also be grown in a way that can help heal the environment.
The Emerald Cup is excited to continue forging the path for a new paradigm in cannabis competition. Last year we introduced the Regenerative Cannabis Farm Award to honor those farms that are cultivating in a way that promotes environmental health while growing safe, pure, high quality medicine.
The Award is designed to be a catalyst of positive competition filled with information sharing, land stewardship, ethical marketing, watershed consciousness and love of nature, living soil and biodiversity. We want the cannabis industry to be excited about and influenced by permaculture, natural farming and biodynamic principles. The cost decrease, the quality increase and the potential for positive marketing that can be gained from regenerative agriculture techniques can serve as a positive guide for industry to forge a more harmonious relationship between nature and economics.
The goal of the award is to educate people about what regenerative cultivation techniques are and how they can be adopted to help us grow the highest quality, pure medicine that truly expresses the terroir of farm. Regenerative farming is cultivating in a way that has a healing effect on the environment through developing closed-loop systems. Examples of regenerative practices are proper land management and stewardship, rainwater catchment, groundwater recharge, living soil building, cover cropping, mulching, composting, polyculture, companion planting, and promoting and preserving native biodiversity and wildlife habitat. Regenerative practices go beyond sustainability in that they heal, improve, and remediate. On the other hand, sustainable practices are ways to reduce negative impacts to the point of treading the waters of “do no harm”. Organic farming on its own is not necessarily regenerative or sustainable. Quite often there are huge environmental impacts associated with organic products and nutrients. Many organic amendments are unsustainably mined and transported. Other organic products for pest control might seem safe and environmentally friendly, but in reality are detrimental to native diversity, especially our incredibly important pollinating insects like bees. It is time for us to take responsibility for our impacts and educate ourselves to the practices that both heal the earth and grow the highest-quality cannabis.
At this moment in human history, we stand at a crossroads: down one path is the potential future of remediation and environmental health, down the other is our current course of finite resource extraction and environmental destruction. We are also standing at the crossroads of an open and legal world for canna-business. It is our hope that the way we grow, produce, manufacture and do business in this new world of legal cannabis can be a guiding light to the rest of the business world.
If your farm operates with these principles of environmental and community ethics at its heart, please review the guidelines for qualification and complete the application. Last year we honored three farms that exemplify the concept of a regenerative cannabis farm. We included a link telling the farm stories of last years winners so you can have a living example of what we consider to be regenerative cultivation practices. We feel the need to point out that very few farms live up to the standards created for this competition. It is our hope that these difficult standards are viewed not as an impossible bar, but a goal for improvement for years to come.
Whether you enter or not, come Join us at the Emerald Cup to become a part of the Regenerative Cannabis Movement. We will be featuring talks, workshops and panel discussions on regenerative farming practices and the power of living soil based cultivation. We will be joined by an all star team of farmers, scientists and earth stewards with the goal of empowering people with the knowledge and techniques needed for the journey down the path of regenerative cultivation.
The future, as was the past, is Regenerative
