Southern Oregon medical marijuana growers fear industrial hemp could ruin their crops

File this one under 'irony'.

[link to www.oregonlive.com]

Southern Oregon marijuana growers want to ban industrial hemp production from the region out of fear that hemp may pollinate their crops and render them worthless.

Some outdoor marijuana growers want industrial hemp cultivation to be limited to eastern Oregon - far from their lucrative marijuana crops. At the very least, they don't want hemp in Josephine, Jackson and Douglas counties.

Compared to Oregon's marijuana legalization movement, the effort to launch an industrial hemp industry in Oregon has been an understated one propelled by a small but passionate group of advocates. When one of them, Edgar Winters, of Eagle Point, got a permit this month to grow industrial hemp on 25 acres in the heart of the state's outdoor marijuana growing region, his neighbors were alarmed.

Allowing industrial hemp in an area known for churning out high-grade marijuana could undermine the industry, growers argue.

"You don't come into the middle of cannabis growing country and try to put up a hemp farm unless you don't know about it, unless you really don't know how far hemp pollen can travel," said Casey Branham, a Jackson County medical marijuana grower who supports industrial hemp but wants it grown elsewhere in the state.

"It basically makes the medicine worthless," he said.