Madera County, CA Cannabis Regulations: Buffer Zones (2026)

040(A) sets the standards a qualified patient, identification-card holder, or primary caregiver must follow to grow medical marijuana for personal use inside a private residence, attached garage, or accessory building on detached single-family residential property. 050(B), which ties recreational growing, currently limited by state law to six plants per residence, to the identical personal-use standards. Item 11 draws the buffer: the cultivation area "shall not occur within one thousand feet of an institutional use, such as, but not limited to, a church, school, or other public building," language broad enough to cover other public facilities the zoning administrator treats the same way.

That distance sits alongside a stack of other conditions: a single designated grow area capped at 100 square feet of canopy and 10 feet in height regardless of how many qualified patients live in the home, cultivation lighting capped at 1,200 watts, a ban on gas-based extraction methods like CO2 or butane, no exterior evidence of cultivation visible from a public right-of-way, and a ventilation and filtration system that keeps odor from reaching beyond the residence or, for detached single-family homes, the property line. Growing in a garage or accessory building adds security requirements: the structure must be locked, fully enclosed, alarmed, and built with a fire-rated wall assembly.

Collective or cooperative cultivation is prohibited outright under subsection (B). None of this applies inside the cities of Madera or Chowchilla, which sit outside the county's unincorporated zoning jurisdiction and regulate cannabis under their own codes.