The violations had nothing to do with cannabis. Neither did nearly half the drone flights Sonoma County made in 2024, according to an ACLU lawsuit alleging around 700 warrantless flights over private property since 2019. The county has stopped flying while it negotiates a settlement.

A Northern California county has paused a controversial drone surveillance program targeting small-time cannabis growers after an enforcement campaign that left dozens of people facing foreclosure, eviction and six-figure fines.

Sonoma County was sued on behalf of residents by the American Civil Liberties Union last year and accused of an unconstitutional “runaway spying operation” in which officials flew drones low over properties in search of unpermitted cannabis grows. But nearly half the 2024 drone flights had nothing to do with cannabis, according to the lawsuit.

“Like anything, I can sit and feel sorry for myself or I can take action,” says Keni Meyer, whose home was foreclosed after officials alleged minor building code violations unrelated to cannabis. She is now living in a trailer park. “I’ll never stop fighting the good fight,” she adds.

What the Lawsuit Alleges

• About 700 warrantless drone flights over private property since 2019.
• Roughly 5,600 aerial photographs collected, some taken from as low as 50 feet.
• Nearly half of the 2024 flights had nothing to do with cannabis.
• 863 cannabis cultivation sites shut down over the same period, according to internal county documents cited in the filing.

Figures as alleged in the ACLU’s complaint against Sonoma County. The county says it does not comment on pending litigation.

Over several years, however, a slew of cannabis farms were cited for alleged minor code violations that were often difficult or impossible to resolve before penalties rapidly escalated into six-figure fines, sending them out of business.

“The objective really was just to destroy cannabis cultivators in Sonoma County and they were successful,” claims former cannabis farmer Elias Stravenitis, who ran Nor Cal Pharms before it was forced to shut down. “They didn’t like the fact it was legalized. They hired narc detectives and people who were diametrically opposed to the legalization of cannabis.”

He spent $250,000 building a cannabis nursery that employed 20 people behind his home, but says the county ultimately refused to grant him a license on spurious grounds. He is still fighting a million-dollar fine that could see him lose his property. The plot where a modern cannabis farm once sat is now overgrown, after he was required to dismantle the operation.

Even completely licensed operators were swept up by the enforcement campaign. Cannabis farmer Jeremy Freitas says he became trapped between conflicting state and county regulations over cultivation methods, eventually accumulating about $83,000 in fines while trying to bring his farm into compliance. He says the financial pressure pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy and contributed to the breakdown of his marriage.

“I think it’s pay-to-play. I served my country for things like this not to happen.”

Jeremy Freitas, cannabis farmer and air force veteran

The 43-page complaint, filed in Sonoma County Superior Court on behalf of three longtime residents, alleged officials secretly carried out around 700 warrantless drone flights over private property since 2019, collecting roughly 5,600 aerial photographs. According to the ACLU, the drones sometimes flew as low as 50 feet and captured high-resolution images of backyards, hot tubs, children’s play areas and other areas where residents reasonably expected privacy.

Internal county documents cited in the lawsuit say authorities shut down 863 cannabis cultivation sites over the same period. Campaigners estimate legal cannabis acreage fell from around 50 acres after legalization to roughly 10 acres today, leaving a far more concentrated industry dominated by larger operators.

A Sonoma County spokesperson said it is not presently conducting warrantless drone flights to inspect properties for county code violations, while officials negotiate a potential settlement with the ACLU. “We do not generally comment on pending litigation, and we cannot legally discuss settlement negotiations,” they said.

Three senior Permit Sonoma officials, including the department’s director and the former narcotics detective who helped oversee the drone program, have since left their posts amid mounting legal scrutiny.

“The War on Drugs has long been a primary means for the government to push forward the surveillance state and abuses of power against citizens and businesses that can then be extended to all citizens,” says David Bienenstock, the author of How to Smoke Pot (Properly). “First they came for the weed growers…”

Although the county has halted the warrantless drone flights while settlement negotiations continue, the cultivators’ battle for justice, and the financial fallout for many of those caught up in the enforcement campaign, is far from over.

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Growers used to react to their plants. Now they are learning to guide them. Crop steering is the framework behind that shift, and it is quietly changing how serious cultivators think about every irrigation, every feed, and every degree of climate.

Something has changed in the way experienced growers talk about their gardens. A decade ago, the conversation in most rooms was reactive. A plant looked hungry, so you fed it. The leaves clawed, so you backed off. The garden set the terms, and the grower answered. Walk through a modern commercial facility today, or read the threads where the sharpest home growers trade notes, and the language has flipped. People talk about drybacks and osmotic gradients. They talk about pushing a plant toward one behavior or another on purpose. They talk less about fixing problems and more about setting direction.

That shift has a name, and it has become one of the biggest conversations in cultivation: crop steering.

The interesting part is not that growers discovered a new product or a magic input. It is that they started thinking differently about the ones they already had. Water, light, climate, and nutrition stopped being maintenance chores and started being levers. Understanding how those levers work together is the whole game, and it is worth breaking down what steering actually means before anyone reaches for a controller or a bottle.

What Crop Steering Actually Means

Crop steering is the practice of deliberately influencing how a plant grows by shaping the conditions around it. Instead of treating irrigation, climate, light, and feeding as separate tasks, a grower who steers treats them as a connected set of controls. Adjust them one way and the plant leans toward lush, leafy expansion. Adjust them the other way and it shifts toward tighter, more compact reproductive growth. A plant is always responding to its environment. Steering is simply the decision to shape that environment intentionally rather than by accident.

The concept is old. As CANNA’s own horticulturists point out, people have been manipulating the growing environment to encourage certain plant behaviors for thousands of years. Greenhouse tomato and pepper growers were nudging plants between growth modes long before the technique had a fashionable name, often by something as simple as reducing water frequency to trigger a heavier fruit set.

What is new is the precision. Substrate sensors that read moisture in real time, controllers that hold climate to the degree, and irrigation systems that deliver measured shots on a schedule have turned what used to be gut feel into something closer to a repeatable process. The plant physiology has not changed. The grower’s ability to read it and respond to it has.

Two Directions: Vegetative and Generative

At its core, steering moves a plant between two channels: vegetative and generative.

Vegetative steering is the low-stress direction. It encourages long, lush growth and cell expansion: leaves, stems, and roots during a plant’s early development, and heavier bulking of flowers and fruit later on. Growers push a plant this way by keeping humidity higher, temperatures warm, and the electrical conductivity, or EC, in the substrate on the lower side. Keeping the root zone moist for longer, which is to say running a shorter dryback, reinforces the same signal. 

The aim is to keep the plant comfortable so that it puts its energy into building.

Generative steering is the higher-stress direction. It reduces cell expansion, which tends to shorten a plant and shrink leaf size. In theory, those controlled stress responses can bring out desirable qualities such as tighter flower stacking and more concentrated flavor, though it is worth being honest that the full extent of those benefits is still under discussion among growers and researchers. Cultivators encourage this direction by lowering humidity, raising light intensity, and increasing the EC in the root zone. Late in flowering, a generative push can help ripen a crop and sharpen its finish.

The skill is in the balance. A plant held too long in either channel falls out of balance, and when it does, both yield and quality tend to suffer. Good steering is not about picking a side. It is about knowing which direction the plant needs at each stage and moving it there on purpose.

The Root Zone Does Most of the Talking

Plenty of steering happens in the air, but a surprising amount of it happens in the substrate. The root zone is where a lot of the real signaling takes place, and two variables do most of the work: moisture and EC.

Start with the dryback, the dry-down that happens between irrigations. Many growers track it as volumetric water content, the volume of water relative to the volume of medium. Others keep it simple and go by weight, lifting a container and watering again when it feels about half as heavy as it did right after saturation. That rough method has earned a name of its own, the 50 percent rule, and it captures the basic logic.

A shorter dryback keeps a plant vegetative, while a longer dryback nudges it generative by letting the root zone briefly tighten up.

EC is the other half of the equation, and it works through a mechanism worth understanding rather than memorizing. Root hair cells are built to pull water in through osmosis because they hold a high concentration of solutes. When the EC of the surrounding root zone is low, there is a large gradient between the medium and the root, and water moves in easily. That is a vegetative, low-stress condition. When the EC climbs, that gradient narrows, water moves into the roots more slowly, and the plant experiences a mild stress that reads as a generative signal. Growers raise root-zone EC either by feeding at a higher rate or by extending drybacks so nutrients concentrate in the medium.

This is the logic behind a targeted bloom additive like CANNA’s PK 13/14, which the company suggests using only for a short seven-to-ten-day window during the generative period. Applied at the right moment, it is one practical way to raise root-zone EC precisely when a flowering plant is ready for that push, rather than leaving it running for weeks and hoping for the best. The application also provides additional phosphorus and potassium, meeting peak flowering demands. It is an input that works as part of a steering strategy, applied when the plant is ready, rather than as a default add-on. 

Here is where a lot of well-meaning growers get tripped up. They read that higher EC steers generative, or that a longer dryback firms up flower, and they chase that one number in isolation. Steering does not work that way, because the plant does not read its inputs one at a time.

CANNA frames it as a toolbox, and the framing is useful. Light, climate, irrigation, nutrition, and the root zone are not separate systems. They are one system, and they either reinforce each other or fight each other. The same osmotic pull that moves water from the root zone into the roots runs all the way up the plant: water is drawn from roots to leaves and then transpired out into the air, which means the humidity in the room is part of the same equation as the EC in the substrate. Growers track this relationship as vapor pressure deficit, or VPD, and it is a reminder that a change in the air changes what is happening at the root.

The practical takeaway is that mixed signals produce mixed results. A grower who drops the humidity to steer generative but keeps flooding the substrate with short drybacks is telling the plant two different things at once. The reward goes to the grower who understands how the variables interact and moves them together, in the same direction, at the same time. That coordination is the difference between maintaining a garden and steering it.

Why Precision Beats Bigger

It would be easy to sell crop steering as a yield hack, a trick for growing heavier. That is not really what the best cultivators are after, and it undersells what the technique is for.

Serious growers, and commercial operations especially, are chasing something less flashy than a record harvest: repeatability. They want a crop that finishes the same way this run as it did last run, and the run before that. Consistency, predictability, and reliable quality are worth more to a professional than an occasional lucky yield, because a business cannot be built on luck. Steering is attractive because it turns outcomes that once felt unpredictable into decisions a grower can actually make.

That is why the conversation fits so neatly into a larger shift already underway across cultivation. Recent reporting on the so-called No-Veg technique out of the Netherlands describes growers challenging one of the oldest habits in the book, the long vegetative phase, on the strength of hard data rather than tradition, and moving, as one writer put it, from art to science. 

Other coverage of microbiome sculpting makes a parallel case: for years the garden was treated like a chemistry set where you dialed in numbers and hoped, and now it is understood as a living system a grower can intentionally shape. Crop steering is the same story told through irrigation and climate. Across all of it, intuition is giving way to intention.

Where CANNA Fits the Picture

None of this replaces the fundamentals. Steering does not overrule genetics, it does not substitute for good nutrition, and it will never outrun a grower’s experience. What it offers is another framework for understanding how every decision, from the timing of an irrigation to the humidity in the room to the EC at the root, adds up to a finished plant.

That framework happens to sit squarely on ground CANNA has been working for more than three decades. Since its first nutrient line launched in 1993, the company has built its research around the relationship between plant nutrition, root-zone management, and the growing environment, developing substrate-specific programs for coco, hydro, soil, and organic systems and manufacturing and testing everything in-house in the Netherlands. 

Those are the exact variables crop steering asks a grower to command. The techniques getting so much attention now are, in many ways, the applied version of questions a company like CANNA has spent years studying. For growers, that is the encouraging part. Crop steering can sound like the exclusive property of high-tech commercial rooms bristling with sensors, but the principles underneath it are available to anyone willing to pay attention to their plants and their substrate. Steer with intention, watch how the plant answers, and adjust. The tools have always been in the toolbox. The conversation is now about how to use them.

Interested in evaluating CANNA in your licensed facility? You may qualify for an exclusive High Times X CANNA product trial. Apply Now. 

Photos courtesy of CANNA

Sponsored Content Disclosure: This article was published as part of a paid commercial arrangement with CANNA USA. Product information and cultivation guidance are provided for informational purposes and do not guarantee specific results. Cultivation outcomes vary based on genetics, environment, substrate, equipment, irrigation, nutrition, and grower practices.

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New York has expanded access to Cannabis Showcase Events, giving licensed microbusinesses more ways to participate in temporary markets and reach consumers beyond traditional dispensaries. The change creates new opportunities for small operators, although events remain tightly regulated and growers still face the broader challenges of cost, competition, and compliance.

Buying vegetables, artisanal cheese, and weed at the same market isn’t exactly what most people picture when they think of New York’s regulated cannabis industry. But the state has just taken another step in that direction.

Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law on August 6th that expands opportunities for small weed producers to participate in so-called Cannabis Showcase Events, temporary events that can be held at farmers’ markets, public markets, and other designated spaces. The goal is quite specific: to open new sales channels for small operators that don’t always have the budget, distribution network, or reach of larger companies.

“This new law gives licensed microbusinesses and dispensaries a real chance to succeed in New York’s legal cannabis market,” Hochul said when announcing the measure. According to the governor, enabling these spaces levels the playing field for small entrepreneurs and, at the same time, expands access to regulated products.

What Changes for Small Cannabis Producers in New York?

The issue may seem technical, but it has practical consequences. Microbusinesses occupy a unique place within the New York model because they can integrate different parts of the cannabis supply chain on a small scale. The problem was that their participation in Showcase Events was restricted: they could sell their own products, but not fully exercise all the activities covered by their licenses.

The new legislation, S.10113/A.11217, removes this limitation and allows these businesses to participate in Cannabis Showcase Events as cultivators, processors, and retailers, according to the authorizations included in their licenses.

And why does this matter? Because producing cannabis and finding a place to sell it are two very different problems.

Senator Michelle Hinchey, one of the bill’s sponsors, put it this way: many microbusinesses are small farms without large marketing budgets or easy access to retail. A growers’ showcase offers them something much more basic, but also valuable: putting their products directly in front of consumers.

In addition to selling, these events can serve to introduce a brand, explain how its products are produced, build brand awareness, and develop relationships with buyers who might otherwise never meet the producer through a traditional dispensary.

It’s Not Exactly an ‘Anything-Goes’ Cannabis Fair

However, talking about cannabis showcase events can make them sound much more informal than they actually are.

Cannabis Showcase Events are subject to an extensive set of requirements imposed by the state’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM). Participation is subject to several requirements, including written approval from the municipality, a prior application to the OCM, age verification to prevent entry by—or sales to—anyone under 21, and security plans and incident reports. Required minimum distances from schools, places of worship, and certain youth facilities must also be maintained.

Furthermore, on-site cannabis use and the distribution of free samples or promotional products are prohibited. Another important distinction is that, under Showcase Event rules, sales are conducted by the licensed retailer holding the event permit. Growers and processors may display their products, but cannot sell them directly to the public or distribute samples.

Events can last up to 14 consecutive days, and a single location cannot host them for more than 45 days per calendar year. If an event is held within a farmers’ market or public market, written authorization from the relevant authorities is also required.

In other words, New York is bringing cannabis closer to the farmers-market model, but without removing it from the regulatory framework governing the rest of the industry.

A Growing, Increasingly Competitive Market

This measure comes as New York’s legal cannabis market has already reached considerable scale. In March, on the fifth anniversary of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, the government reported that cumulative legal sales had reached $3.3 billion.

By then, the state had 610 licensed retail dispensaries and 2,161 adult-use cannabis licenses issued throughout the supply chain. Of those, 56% had been granted to applicants enrolled in the state’s Social and Economic Equity Program.

But granting a license is only part of the equation. Then comes the harder part: making the business work. For a small farm, participating in a farmers’ market doesn’t solve the cost pressures, competition, or other challenges of operating within a highly regulated industry. But it does create another platform to sell products, build recognition, and connect directly with consumers who may eventually choose them.

In a market that already moves billions of dollars, securing a place to showcase what you produce is another way to compete.

Cover photo created with AI.

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