Sun-grown cannabis, living soil, and the growers building a regenerative future while federal money flows everywhere but their fields
This past June, President Trump signed an executive order expanding a pilot program the USDA had already funded, routed through conservation programs like EQIP and the Conservation Stewardship Program, which pays farmers for building soil health. Across row crops and rangeland, regenerative agriculture has moved from a fringe idea to the fastest-growing banner in farming.
Almost none of that money will reach a marijuana farm.
Because the plant remains federally illegal, state-licensed cannabis growers cannot draw federal conservation dollars, cannot be certified USDA organic, and do not appear anywhere in the executive order’s plans. Hemp is the exception that proves the problem: since the 2018 Farm Bill, hemp producers have been eligible for USDA organic certification and for the same conservation programs the order expands. Same plant, same soil, same practices. What decides whether a farm can access federal help is a THC threshold.
The crop with arguably the most to gain from a soil-first turn is the one Washington still won’t name.
So the work is happening without Washington, carried by third-party certifiers and the small farms that seek them out.
The order came wrapped in the language of the Make America Healthy Again campaign, and it landed in the middle of something that is genuinely growing worldwide. Jacob Policzer, chair of the board at the cannabis certifier Sun & Earth and director of science and strategy at The Cannabis Conservancy in Denver, keeps an eye on the broader numbers. “It does seem to be growing about 15% annually,” he says. “One of the things I saw that was really inspiring, and kind of what we’re seeing on the ground as well, is something like 86% of young farmers entering agriculture are practicing regenerative farming, and that’s really where we’re seeing a lot more optimism and growth in this.”
Making the Change Visible
Sun & Earth exists to translate what happens in a field into something a shopper can recognize on a shelf. “As a whole, we make regenerative farming visible to the consumer through our certification,” Policzer says. “Certification is a way that goes along the supply chain, and ultimately is a label, a seal of approval, so to speak, that the consumer can recognize and understand that this product has been grown using these practices.”
I was curious about the mechanics, so Policzer walked me through it: “The farms will reach out to us, either through phone calls or on our website, then they fill out an application, a farm plan, essentially detailing all of their practices, their soil inputs. That’ll get reviewed, we’ll ask questions, and then if all that looks good, they get introduced to an inspector who schedules the inspection, goes on site, spends two to three hours, and does an entire walkthrough of the farm.”
Sun & Earth grades on two tiers, and the top tier turns on what a farm does with its own dirt. “We have gold standards as well as green standards,” Policzer says. “So we kind of poke at what we feel is extremely important as far as regenerative agriculture, when it comes to on-farm soil fertility. We do a calculation on how much NPK the farm used, how much they generated on site, how much they purchased offsite, really encouraging on-site composting, local resource use, all of that.” Two conditions are non-negotiable. “For our regenerative certification, it has to be sun-grown in native soil. Living soil and native soil are like the two biggest factors.”
Policzer draws the line between conventional and regenerative farming as a question of debt. “When you’re farming conventionally, especially in monocrop, you’re really borrowing from the soil,” he says. “You’re using the nutrients, the microbial activity, all of that, and that’s ultimately leading to needing an increase in what usually is a synthetic nutrient, which every year we’re seeing becoming increasingly more expensive, and you have to add more and more. What we’re seeing with regenerative is that you’re giving back to nature. You’re increasing the biomass, the soil structure, and a lot of retention, so ideally you’re reducing your need for off-farm inputs.”
That is an ecological argument, but in a warming climate, it is fast becoming a matter of necessity. “For regenerative practices, they’re seeing an 80 to 90% crop survival rate using 70 to 80% of the water requirements versus conventional,” Policzer says. “So ideally it’s boosting the resiliency of the farmers, which then translates into improving the conditions in rural economies, which, especially in the United States, are mostly impoverished or economically disadvantaged.”
But the standard doesn’t stop at the soil line. Certifiers like Sun & Earth also watch for ethical cultivation practices, particularly worker rights. “Making sure the farms are paid fair wages or a living wage, having the resources to have good housing, ideally healthcare, education, all that, that’s where our small farms really struggle,” Policzer says.
And unlike USDA Organic, a costly certification better suited to corporate-scale operations, Sun & Earth targets small farmers and manufacturers. “Our typical certified farm is a small family farm, usually a mom-and-pop kind of operation,” Policzer says. “In California they’re usually legacy growers who have entered the market, stalwarts of the community and in the cannabis culture, who have been doing this for 20-plus years. They’re honoring this legacy.”
Two Ways of Joining the Change
The two words most often used for the work these sustainable farmers do, regenerative agriculture and agroecology, are not exactly interchangeable.
Agroecology is the older and more demanding of the two. It emerged as a discipline in the 1940s, and its original and still predominant practitioners are Indigenous peoples and peasant smallholders. It applies the science of ecology to farming, designing fields that mimic natural ecosystems, favoring intercropping, traditional seeds, and biological pest control over purchased inputs, but it refuses to stop at the fence line. Agroecology treats a farm as a social and political system as much as a biological one, and it comes bundled with claims about land tenure, seed sovereignty, fair markets, and who gets to make a living from the ground. In a way, it is more a set of principles linking ethics, human labor, and nature.
Regenerative agriculture is younger, looser, and easier to adopt. There is no fixed definition, but in practice, it names a family of soil-first practices, cover cropping, no-till, rotational grazing, composting, and keeping living roots in the ground year-round, all aimed at rebuilding organic matter, water retention, and biological life underground. Its great strength is that it is measurable: soil carbon, water infiltration, and microbial activity can be tracked and compared season over season.
But what gets regenerated, or recovered, in regenerative farming? Three things, mainly. The first is the soil, the literal rebuilding of a living medium that a century of extraction has degraded, treating the ground as an asset to compound rather than a mine to empty. The health of the soil is measured in the life working below ground, life that, instead of being fought off, is promoted, analyzed, and balanced. The second is the human intellect that the work demands. Industrial farming outsourced and protocolized thinking, getting farmers to apply a pre-established, input-dependent formula: use the recommended rate, spray on schedule, repeat. Regenerative farming puts the knowledge back in the farmer’s hands because you cannot manage a living system with chemicals alone. Technical teams and workers need to spend far more time on the ground, analyzing and searching for dynamic solutions to the ever-changing landscape of seasonal crops. They need to learn how to better read their own fields. It is a full-time job that requires proximity. That is why regenerative farming also promotes a third kind of recovery, the repopulation of the farmland. It is the link between a person and the particular piece of earth they tend, and behind it, the far older understanding that agriculture was a cultural and ecological craft long before it was an industrial process.
Recovering the soil, recovering the intellect, recovering the tie to nature.
The Right Way to Do Things
Sunset Lake is one of four Vermont farms Sun & Earth has certified. It sits near Lake Champlain on land that used to be dairy pasture, grows entirely outdoors, and came to cannabis through the family that has run the dairy for generations. Rev Baker, who handles the farm’s marketing, has a degree in philosophy and worked for 16 years in craft beer and fine wine. “I had to dry out and stop drinking, and so I actually used cannabis to quit drinking and transitioned into this industry,” he says.
The owner of the farm, Baker’s boss, grew up around the cows, and sees the new crop as a way to keep the next generation on the land. “He views what we do here as a way to get young Vermonters excited about farming again,” Baker says, “because it’s really hard to say, ‘Hey, there’s this tech company that has all these cool bells and whistles,’ or you can ride a tractor around and harvest corn. But growing cannabis and growing hemp, it’s kind of fun and exciting. So it’s a way to get some people excited about agriculture.”
Baker himself came up a city kid, but eventually answered the siren call of nature. “For us, regenerative agriculture is: we want to leave the soil and the farm better than when we started,” he says. Here is what that looks like in practice.
They compost manure from the family dairy with spent grain from a brewery down the road and work the result into the field as fertilizer, so organic matter and biology return to the soil instead of being trucked off as waste. The field itself is kept on a multi-year crop rotation, with sections pulled out of cannabis each season and rested. During those fallow periods, the resting ground is planted with cover crops, a mix of grasses and legumes sown not to be harvested for sale but to feed the soil, a practice sometimes called green manure. The legumes matter for a specific reason: in partnership with rhizobia bacteria in their root nodules, they perform biological nitrogen fixation, pulling nitrogen out of the air and depositing it in the soil in a form plants can use, which cuts the need for purchased synthetic fertilizer. The grasses, meanwhile, keep living roots in the ground year-round, feeding the microbes that build soil structure. When the cover crop is cut, it is hayed and sent back to the dairy as feed. Waste from one operation becomes an input for the next, a principle of circularity, and the fertility stays local: the circular economy as a literal circle of fields, animals, and a brewery inside a few square miles.
The Vermont soil they are building this into is not easy ground. It is sandy and quick-draining, which guards against root rot but holds neither water nor nutrients well, over a base with a fair amount of clay. Cover cropping does double duty here, because tilling the residue back in before planting adds carbon to a soil that would otherwise stay thin. At transplant, the farm also practices mycorrhizal inoculation, dosing the young roots with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi have partnered with plant roots for more than 400 million years. The plant feeds them sugars from photosynthesis; in return, their thread-like hyphae extend the effective root system many times over, scavenging phosphorus, nitrogen, and water the plant could never reach on its own, and ferrying them back. They also buffer the plant against drought and secrete glomalin, a sticky glycoprotein that glues soil particles into stable aggregates, the crumb structure that lets the ground hold both water and air. A conventional program of soluble fertilizer and fungicide tends to make this partnership redundant and then kill it off. A regenerative one is largely the discipline of keeping it alive.
Everything here is grown outdoors in native soil, with no indoor capacity at all.
Pest and disease control follow the same logic, under the umbrella term integrated pest management, or IPM, and at Sunset Lake it leans entirely on biological control. The farm’s main insect threat is the European corn borer, which tunnels into the open stalks of corn, hemp, and cannabis alike. Against it, they release Trichogramma, a parasitoid wasp so small it is nearly invisible, which lays its eggs inside the borer’s eggs so the pest is destroyed before it can hatch. For soft-bodied pests like aphids and spider mites they rely on predatory insects, such as the green lacewing larvae, which they release, and native ladybugs, which they recruit and keep on-site through companion planting, seeding red clover between the rows as an insectary strip that feeds the beetles between aphid meals. Disease is handled by cultural controls first, wide plant spacing and canopy pruning to move air through the crop and cut the humidity that fungal pathogens need. Where that is not enough, they use a foliar spray of potassium bicarbonate to shift the pH of the leaf surface against fungal growth, and microbial slurries that colonize the plant and outcompete pathogens like Botrytis for space, a strategy called competitive exclusion. Nothing on the field is trying to sterilize it; the whole system is built to tip the ecology in the crop’s favor.
Ancient Plant, Young Movement
“Stoicism in the true sense, not ‘broicism’ like it gets done on TikTok, but real stoicism, is about this: if you ignore reality and don’t understand how things work, it’s going to come back to bite you,” Baker says. “So if you farm in a way that you’re just focused on getting the most value per square inch, you’re going to destroy the soil, and then your business is going to collapse, and then the earth is going to collapse. If you understand how the ecosystem works naturally and how you can interact with that, you can still get a valuable product out of it without destroying it. That’s really the core of sustainability.”
“Otherwise you’re left holding a handful of sand.”
Rev Baker, Sunset Lake
Cannabis was a soil-and-sun plant for thousands of years before it was anything else. The windowless warehouse is a recent child of prohibition, and no state-licensed cannabis producer can touch the federal machinery now expanding for everyone else.
“Because of the federal legalization issues, we can’t get federal funding. We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so we’re really limited to private organizations, institutional funding, private investors, and then state funding,” Policzer says of his organization.
The economics are punishing without help, and they are pushing growers out. “We have a decent portion of farms that are surrendering their licenses or deferring their cultivation or shrinking their sizes while they get off-farm jobs, just because the economics are really difficult,” Policzer says. “If you’re looking at $250, $350, $400 a pound, that’s barely break even.”
Certification itself can compound the problem when it prices out the people it should serve. “If the pricing is so high, you exclude these small farmers from participating, and then you create a system where only people who can pay become certified,” Baker warns. “The goal should be to include as many farms as possible.”
The larger fix is the freedom to move product at all. “Farmgate is something that would really revolutionize the cannabis industry from our perspective,” Policzer says, referring to the right of a farm to sell directly to visitors on site, the way a vineyard does.
It would also help make the conversation about quality standards more transparent. “A lot of consumers still think that, because of the regulations around it, cannabis is already organic and that it’s all there, when in fact it’s not,” Policzer says.
The executive order Trump signed in June will pay corn and soybean growers to do a gentler version of what Sunset Lake already does with brewery grain and dairy manure. But the farms doing this work in cannabis are asking for far less than a check. They want to be allowed to sell what they grow, across a state line, or off the back porch, the way a vineyard does. And they want the rest of us to see that a legal cannabis market built on windowless rooms and grid electricity, drawn up under prohibition, is a choice rather than a necessity.
The plant grew in soil under the sun for millennia before it grew under lights. Give the growers the freedom to put it back there, and the most wasteful corner of the industry will shrink on its own. In the long run, the alternative is a handful of sand.
