HUCKLEBERRY HILL FARMS | FOUNDER JOHNNY CASALI
the ACTION issue
INCARCERATION TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP
52
Johnny Casali was 24 years old in 1992 when federal agents came calling at the door of his multi-generational farmhouse in California’s legendary Humboldt County. It was a fateful day that would lead to nearly a decade of federal incarceration for simply cultivating plants in the style and tradition handed down by his parents. Now, nearly 30 years later, Casali holds a position of respect among the legal cultivators in the Humboldt Cannabis community. His path has not been easy, and his story, while unique in its details, rings with a familiarity that reverberates through an industry still shaking off the shackles of a failed Drug War.
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F A M I LY L E G A C Y
“From the age of 10, I was following my mother around, watching her, learning from her how to cultivate Cannabis, and vegetables and fruit trees,” Casali said of his mom, Marlene Bandoni. “I really just fell in love with participating with my mother, and learning her techniques, learning what made her a master grower, per se, in the Emerald Triangle community’s mind.” For Casali’s family, Cannabis was one of a number of crops and income streams that included fishing, crabbing and mainstream agriculture. “We were really just living off the land, and supplementing our income with small bits of marijuana,” Casali said. The budding cultivator’s interest grew along with him, and by the time he was a teenager, his mother struggled with whether it was OK to let her son begin to grow on his own. At age 15, she decided to allow him to grow 10 plants, as long as he agreed to hand over the Cannabis to her and put the money either into a college fund, or a wise investment. “You couldn’t buy a motorcycle, you couldn’t go on vacation,” he said. His first solo grow yielded about 12 pounds.
mAY 2021
“I ended up being able to make enough money where I put a down payment on 11 acres of property on the Eel River,” he said. His parents co-signed. “That was my first experience with making money from Cannabis, and really, from that point, it was just on.”
plant count in order to maintain harvest volumes. Being twenty-something, carefree, wave-riding Cannabis growers, they didn’t realize that the increase in plant count also increased their chance of attracting the wrong kind of attention. F AT E C O M E S K N O C K I N G
Early one morning in 1992, Casali heard a noise on the farm that didn’t sound quite right. After a couple of years of college, Casali’s par“I heard somebody driving up the driveway really ents bought a commercial fishing boat, and handed fast, and I just thought it was maybe one of my the farm over to Johnny, who cultivated Cannabis friends who wanted to go surfing, or this or that, but with his best friend, Todd Wick. we had a rule that you just don’t drive fast on the This was in the late 1980s, and with the Reafarm,” he said. “So I came running out the door, gan-era War on Drugs in full force, enforcement but instead of meeting one of my grew far more intense in the friends, this time I met a guy in camTriangle. “Since I learned ouflage with a 9mm to my head, “You would see convoys along everything from my and there were 30 federal agents.” the roadways, you would see helimom, I thought it was so They gave him the option to leave copters overhead,” he said. “You important to just honor the property, but he chose to stay could no longer grow out in the her, and to share her while they searched the farm, conopen if you wanted to make it.” story with people. So fiscating, among other things, seed They had to start cultivating every strain that I grow packs and 13 pairs of trimming underneath the tree canopy, with here today is bred with scissors. They gave him a yellow such low per-plant yields that they a strain that she used to ticket, and they left. His lawyer, Ron had to significantly increase their SEA CHANGE
grow 45 years ago,” -Johnny Casali
