Because cannabis is illegal on a federal level these agencies aren’t able to prescribe safe growing standards the way they would for any other agricultural product being grown in the US. This puts the burden on state regulatory agencies to develop their own agricultural standards for cannabis—but until a few months ago these standards didn’t exist anywhere. In most states with legal pot, they still don’t. [...]
This lack of oversight and knowledge about what was going in their bud understandably made consumers nervous and cannabis cultivators took notice. In 2004, one California grower reached out to Chris van Hook, a veteran of the USDA-certified organics industry, to find out what it would take to get their buds registered as a USDA organic agricultural product to assuage consumer fears about tainted bud.
When van Hook reached out to the Department of Agriculture on the issue, he was told that it was impossible to certify cannabis as organic since it was a federally illegal substance. Moreover, if any of the cannabis cultivators so much as labeled their product as ‘organic,’ they would be in violation of federal law which gives a monopoly to the USDA on organic certification.
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