The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Part 2: Grow Operations
By Alissa Johnson
Last week, in Part I of “Turning a new leaf,” the Crested Butte News examined the opportunities and challenges that come with running a retail marijuana store in the Gunnison Valley. In the second part of the series, we examine how grow operations help some retail stores reduce the expense of acquiring marijuana and control the quality of their products.
Tucked into a back corner of Riverland, SOMA Cannabis houses a grow operation in a nondescript warehouse. There is little fanfare on the outside of the building—not even a noticeable sign—and just inside, there’s no obvious indicator that marijuana is under cultivation.
Exposed framing on some of the walls and a desk with a computer give little hint to the nature of the business, and there’s surprisingly little odor, given the distinctive aroma of marijuana flowers. It isn’t until you step inside the brightly lit vegetive room on the second floor, blue-tinted UV lenses shielding your eyes, that the operation is unmistakable.
Seven plants that look like bonsai trees sit on a low rack in one corner of the roughly 10×12 room, their stalks thick at the base and their bright, green leaves carefully groomed. They are the mother plants, or “mothers,” as Riverland grow manager Will Browne calls them, the sources of every plant in the facility.
On shelves by the door, cuttings from the mothers sit in special trays. Growth hormone has been applied to the bases of their stems, and within two weeks they will sprout roots. Throughout the rest of the room, which is bathed in 24-hour light, rows of flowerless marijuana plants are labeled with names like Bubba Kush, Blue Dream, Golden Goat and Biodiesel. Each plant grows in a six-inch box of growing substrate called rock wool, and the constant light keeps them from flowering.
After about a month, these plants will be transferred into a flowering room, where 12-hour cycles of light and dark will encourage them to flower. After about eight weeks, they’ll be ready for harvest, and after drying, trimming and testing, nearly every bud will end up in SOMA’s stores in Crested Butte and Gunnison.
“We work with about 10 different varieties. We have seven mothers currently and just brought in 10 new strains as well. We’re always updating our strains and trying to stay ahead of the curve and give the consumers what they want,” Browne said.
Before SOMA opened in the Gunnison Valley, the company owned one, small grow operation in Boulder. Adding the 3,600-square-foot (sf) facility in Riverland and another 40,000-sf facility in Pueblo has made it possible for the company to supply its own stores and sell marijuana wholesale, expanding its niche in the market and controlling the quality of the product.
As strategies go, SOMA isn’t the only store in the Gunnison Valley to incorporate a grow operation into its business model. The Cannabis Cabin in Gunnison built its grow operation before launching the store, and it’s a key part of providing quality marijuana at a reasonable price.
The Cannabis Cabin is something of a family operation. Mikey Costello, born and raised in Gunnison, manages the retail store, while his brother and his brother’s girlfriend oversee the grow operation. Their dad was heavily involved in encouraging the city of Gunnison to allow retail marijuana and weighing in during the development of regulations.
According to Costello, getting the grow operation up and running was no easy task. They built the cultivation center from the ground up rather than modifying an existing warehouse, and when it came time to grow, “We had a series of challenges actually getting the plants going and getting a successful harvest.”
Eventually, Costello’s older brother took over operations from the grow manager they had hired. He focused on growing a moderate selection of quality strains rather than trying to grow a wide variety of product. The approach worked, and now the cultivation center supplies about 50 percent of the store’s marijuana—it helps Costello keep prices low at the store, and the family’s ultimate goal is to supply all of the store’s bud.
“We don’t have 50 strains and the biggest selection of product, but providing a reasonable selection of high-quality products at reasonable prices gives people a reason to come into the store,” Costello said. “Having the grow, which allows us to have reasonable prices, has been our biggest competitive advantage in the market.”
As Costello sees it, many people living in the valley full time don’t have a lot of disposable income. They seek out the best product at the best price, and by providing that, he’s seen his business grow.
“Once our local client base grew, it was word of mouth that brought people in, and in this town and valley, that’s the most powerful form of advertising you can get,” he said.
Chuck Reynolds, owner and retail manager of SOMA, also sees financial sense in having grows and retail stores. “It’s far less expensive to grow our own marijuana than to buy at the wholesale level,” he said.
Yet having a grow operation is also key to quality control. For a period of time before the Pueblo facility opened, Reynolds had to purchase wholesale marijuana to meet the needs of his stores. He found that wholesalers were quick to promise incredible marijuana, but the product didn’t always meet those expectations. The state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division has started to find problems, too.
“The state has been going around conducting some of its own tests, and they’ve found grows that are cheating on the pesticide level, using banned pesticides or herbicides,” Reynolds said.
According to Browne, the state is working with the Department of Agriculture to develop a list of acceptable products for use on plants that will be smoked or consumed, but for now it’s a moving target. “Every week or so, we’ll get a bulletin about a substance that has been added to the acceptable list and a substance taken off,” he said.
Browne also said that “organic” is a “loose” term in the industry. While the Food and Drug Administration has defined standards for organic food products, it has not done so for marijuana.
At the Riverland facility, Browne and his team use only foliar pesticides and fungicides that have been approved by the Organic Materials Review Institute. They make all of their own nutrients, derive salts from natural sources, and prefer to grow plants in rock wool because it’s an all-natural product that’s clean and biodegradable.
“It’s the same every time. There are not going to be pests in the product, and we’re not bringing anything from the outside in,” Browne said.
To maintain consistency between batches, the same products are applied to the plants on the same day of each growing cycle. And because they use cuttings to grow plants, there are no male plants in the facility.
“The advantage to clones versus seeds is that we know we produce only female plants… There are no males in the entire facility. Accidental pollination can cause seeding in the final product, which can degrade the THC,” Browne said.
Of course, these days not every store has its own grow operation. When the retail market started, all retail stores were attached to grow operations, and the state mandated that 70 percent of the marijuana produced be sold through the attached stores. Starting in late 2014, however, the rules changed, and retail stores can now buy all of their products at wholesale.
URBA in Crested Butte is an example of one of those stores. It was formerly known as Boomtown, which had a grow operation associated with it. Manager Caroline Murphy says they sold the grow operation shortly before opening URBA. Yet even without the grow attached to the store, she too works hard to offer quality products at competitive prices.
“What allows me to keep a competitive edge in the industry is directly influenced by the relationships I have built within the state. It’s beneficial to me to create these relationships, which allows me to get the best price and newest products in a consistently fluctuating industry,” she said.
Still, there’s no denying that grow operations are an important part of the industry as the demand for marijuana grows. According to data from the Marijuana Enforcement Division, the amount of marijuana sold in Colorado grew from 38,600 pounds in 2014 to 106,932 pounds in 2015—an increase of 177 percent. And as of August 2016, there were 440 retail stores in Colorado and 583 retail cultivations.
At the Riverland facility, Browne says they produce 20 to 30 pounds of marijuana per month, harvesting roughly every 12 days. After cutting, drying and trimming, the final bud is packaged and a sample from each batch is tested for potency and microbial screening by an independent testing facility. The trim gets sent to the extraction facility next door to be turned into concentrate and sold at SOMA or wholesale.
It’s not a large facility—there are five growing rooms in addition to the vegetive room and the drying room, and to go from one part of the facility to the other, it’s necessary to go outside or climb through a low, open window between the two. But it’s clearly a professional operation, as are the others mentioned in this article, and one that has created careers for locals.
As Costello said about his family-run business at The Cannabis Cabin, “It’s cool that the marijuana industry has allowed other brand new businesses to be created in a matter of five or six years. I don’t see any other business where we could have, in year and a half, created this. I don’t see how we could have done this in another industry and been anywhere near as successful as we have been.”
Next week we’ll start to look at the community impacts of the marijuana industry, including the regulation process from a government and state perspective, and the taxes and funding it’s raising for communities.
