It’s been nine months since recreational pot has been legal for adults to buy in California, but there’s also a lot of new red tape and enforcement.

Sonoma County’s permit office says that it’s shut down more than 600 unpermitted grow sites since January.

KRON4 obtained pictures of what the enforcement agents are finding.

In the pictures, you can see one of the pot farms that had been caught operating without a permit.

Sonoma County officials say there had been estimates of 6,000 grow sites in the county when they first started working towards issuing permits two years ago. So, the 600-plus that have been shut down since January represents only about 10 percent of what could be out there.

“We have a lot more to go,” County Permit Office Director Tennis Wick said.

Wick says most the operations they’ve shut down have not even attempted to get right with the law. Others tried and failed.

Their agency is complaint-driven, directed by neighbors who can smell the crops.

Wick says some of these operations aren’t just skirting red tape.

They are tampering with the environment.

“I was at a site yesterday in a watershed that hosts the coho salmon and water was being siphoned directly out of the stream in order to support the grout,” Wicks said.

But a grower on the Sonoma County Cannabis Advisory Council says this is a sad situation, saying that the county has made it impossible for some established mom-and-pop growers to get on the path to legitimacy because their land isn’t located in the proper zoning area or their farms are too small to be permitted.

Another said the permit process is painfully slow and knows other pot farmers who’s had to drop out because their funds have dried up.

The county has issued fines totaling nearly $450,000 to unpermitted growers.

They are asking growers still under the radar to apply for a permit and get legit.

WHAT OTHERS ARE CLICKING ON: 

>>MORE STORIES