Greenhouses in California’s Salinas Valley are selling for millions of dollars because marijuana has come to Monterey County, said the Los Angeles Times. The land rush “was touched off by efforts to ban the crop from the canyons and forests of the Big Sur area and sequester it inside existing greenhouses, where it can more easily be monitored and, perhaps more importantly, taxed.”
A marijuana business tax is on the ballot today in five cities along U.S. 101, which cuts the Salinas Valley lengthwise and connects it with San Francisco to the north and Southern California in the other direction. “The greenhouses of Salinas Valley offer a Goldilocks ‘just right’ climate for marijuana, capturing the daily maritime breezes through ceiling vents to moderate the heat from the the valley’s long, sunny growing season. Cannabis growers say they can turn over four or five crops per year with very little energy cost,” says the Los Angeles Times.
Greenhouse prices have doubled in the past couple of years and land under glass sells for at least four times the price of prime agricultural land. The properties are available, often empty, because the cut-flower industry is in a slump due to imports from South America. There is some irony in the boom, says the newspaper, because the United States lowered its duties on cut flowers “in part to offer Andean farmers an alternative crop to coca and marijuana.”