Outdoor grows were shut out of the county’s first round of cannabis rules. Now they’re coming into the legal fold.

Californians voted to make recreational marijuana use legal more than two years ago, but some of the state’s most iconic cultivation zones in the Santa Lucia Mountains have been shut out of the ensuing boom.

A new Monterey County program is set to finally permit veteran cannabis farmers in Big Sur, Cachagua and Carmel Valley to grow the crop outdoors in taxed and regulated plots.

“We went from having to hide in the woods to growing in our backyards,” says Ondine Gorton, a Big Sur weed farmer, recalling the years lawful cultivation under California’s medical marijuana statutes. “Then, we had to stop.”

That’s because after Prop. 64 passed in 2016 allowing recreational cannabis, the county granted licenses to greenhouse growers, who tended to come from outside the county, buying vacant flower-growing facilities in the Salinas area.

In July, the Board of Supervisors delivered Gorton and her fellow mountain growers a “huge win,” as Gorton puts it, when they ordered the development of an outdoor grow program.

Some nine months later, county staff presented the draft of a proposed cannabis ordinance on April 11 to the board’s Cannabis Standing Committee, comprised of supervisors Chris Lopez and Luis Alejo.

The committee meeting drew some 30 members of the public. Those who spoke advocated for certain amendments to the ordinance and some used the opportunity to push for additional rural public safety measures. With the board generally supporting the idea and no irreconcilable opposition from the public, there is pressure to get the program finalized and approved by July while state environmental review exemptions are still applicable. That leaves only a few months for the draft ordinance to be reviewed by the Agricultural Advisory Committee, the California Coastal Commission, and the County Planning Commission.

Defined as a “pilot program” lasting five years, the ordinance spells out its official purpose: to gather information for future outdoor cultivation permitting. The topic of weed has morphed so completely over the past several years that it is being comfortably discussed in measured bureaucratese in county conference rooms by officials in suits.

But the eligibility requirements of the program reveal that while cannabis may be an enticing avenue for economic development, it is still also a traditional way of life intrinsic to parts of the county.

The program will begin in Big Sur and then expand inland to Carmel Valley and Cachagua. The only plots eligible are those with historical cannabis cultivation, which would mean no new development. In other words, the county wants to create a legal path to market for the community that gave the world the storied strain of “Big Sur Holy Weed.”

“These are the generations of growers,” says Gorton, who is a longstanding member of the Big Sur Farmers Association but is now organizing a new group called Santa Lucia Farmers. “Most of us want to stay where we are and raise our families. “If people can’t grow here they will sell the land.”

Farmers at Cannabis Committee meeting said the eligibility requirements were so strict as to exclude many of traditional growing families. The minimum lot size allowed in the program is 10 acres; farmers wanted that limit revised down. Another concern pertained to the required setback of the eligible lots from structures. The draft language calls for 1,000 feet of space between growing areas and residential or civic buildings. The dramatic topography of the Santa Lucia Mountains, they said, makes 1,000-foot setbacks difficult to achieve in some places.

“I own five acres with the infrastructure to support a small farm and I did for 15 years.” Katy Newman of Big Sur told the committee. “I would like to participate in this pilot program. As it stands now, I will be left out.”