Thor Benson / Cannabis News Box Contributor

Wildfires have destroyed entire neighborhoods in Northern California, and it’s been reported that some fires are burning up the state’s cannabis farms. With California preparing for social use sales to start in January, this presents a big problem for the industry.

Thousands of farms are at risk because of the fires, and it’s unclear how many will be ruined while firefighters work to extinguish the flames. Jason Spatafora, a cannabis industry investor and owner of marijuanastocks.com, told Cannabis News Box that there could be a shortage of cannabis because of the fires. He pointed out that even farms that aren’t directly affected by the fire could have soil issues from the ash in the air.

“If big industrial facilities got hit or even the smaller mom and pop grows you can see a lot of license holders bringing on partners, because they usually don’t have the type of cash on hand needed to rebuild,” Spatafora said. “So we could see a 2.0 wave of investment into the area which will also mean a boom for construction companies and labor forces.”

Prices for cannabis may go up in the state due to the possible shortage. Some grows may not recover, so the effects could be relatively long term. Spatafora likened the issue to what has happened to wineries in the past when large amounts of vines have been damaged.

“Parallel to weed, this weekend I bought thousands of dollars of Napa and Sonoma wine, because some wineries got hit but this fire will for sure impact 2018 grapes,” Spatafora said. “We saw something similar to this in France with Bordeaux wines where there was some sort of sickness or crop failure and prices shot up. My feeling is [you] can draw the same conclusion for weed.”

There’s a massive number of cannabis farms in California, so the fire won’t affect all of them, but we’ll have to wait and see how many are impacted and what the state will do to help farmers recover. Unfortunately, it seems many farmers who have invested thousands or millions into cannabis growing could face financial ruin.