Portland Harborside Health Center

3/23/2016

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Recently, the Ganjapreneur team got to tour the newest Harborside Health Center cannabis dispensary, located in Portland, OR.

The original Harborside opened in 2006 in Oakland, California and has played a significant role in establishing standards for dispensaries and consultative care. The Oakland location was the first in the nation to support education for seniors, veterans and families with severely ill children; first in the country to offer CBD-rich medicine; and the first to treat children with Dravet syndrome. The dispensaries, led by cannabis thought leader and activist Steve DeAngelo, raise the bar for quality cannabis medicine and customer service in every city they open in.

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The dispensary in Portland is cheerfully painted, welcoming and has plenty of free parking. The waiting room is warm and the greeting staff are quick to smile and ask how they can be of service. A second door leads to the dispensary itself which is immediately invigorating.

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So often dispensaries are dreary affairs that feel claustrophobic and instill a feeling of distrust. Not so at Harborside. The high ceiling, elegant lighting and soothing furniture caused us to stop a moment to just soak it all in. This is clearly a destination dispensary built to make the statement that their meds are reliable and well-considered.

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As your eyes scan the room, their array of clones pop out bright green under fluorescent lights, giving the whole room a pleasant glow. One of the coolest aspects of this dispensary is the long glass topped table displaying all of the flowers that are no longer in stock.

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Not only is it simply delightful to view all of the strains gone by, but it is visually arresting to become aware of the sheer variety of medicine that has come through these doors. Always bringing in the best medical growers have to offer and the recent coolest strains too, the display case reminds you why Harborside is a world leader.

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The case showing what was available on the day we visited was packed with excellent expressions of some of our favorite strains and many that we were not familiar with. The nice, tight and colorful nugs looked like they had fallen out of a magazine even though it was simply their daily stock.

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Everything was lab tested as well to ensure potency for accurate dosing. The budtender on duty was exceptionally knowledgeable in both botany and health care and provided excellent feedback for us. They also carried an array of edibles, tinctures and concentrates in really well-designed packages, increasing confidence in the products.

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The dispensary manager Chris Helton came over to say hello and answer questions — what a sweetheart. Chris’s calm and warm demeanor made everyone feel welcome. He even put our conversation on hold to walk over and make sure newly arriving patients and customers were feeling welcome and served as well. Chris let us know about their positive relationship with the neighboring community and the free community pea patch out behind the dispensary. He has worked hard to make sure that Harborside would be a good neighbor to the existing shops who were a bit concerned about having a dispensary in the neighborhood. Now, everything has come together and the locals see the new dispensary as a welcome addition.

We have become fans of the Portland Harborside cannabis dispensary and look forward to our return visit soon. If you would like to learn more about founder Steve DeAngelo’s vision for compassionate care, you can listen to Steve’s appearance on the Ganjapreneur podcast.

Visit the Harborside Health Center:

5816 NE Portland Hwy
Portland, OR 97218
11am-9pm daily
(503) 912-4372
http://www.harborsidehealthcenter.com/Portland/

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Nixon Official Admits Drug War Was a Hoax

3/23/2016

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A 1994 quote from a former Nixon aide makes it crystal clear that the administration’s reason for criminalizing drug use was purely to throw into disarray Black communities and the anti-war movement.

John Ehrlichman was serving as President Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor when Nixon announced the roll-out of the War on Drugs. In seeking a massive expansion of federal drug agencies, the Nixon administration cited the pernicious impacts of drugs on social welfare.

The drug war has had ruinous economic and social consequences for the United States, Mexico, and Latin American countries, consequences which are especially pronounced for racial minorities.

Reporter Dan Baum spoke with Ehrlichman in 1994 while doing research for a book on drug prohibition. Ehrlichman, who served 18 months in prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, was frank about the Nixon administration’s motives in inaugurating the drug war. Baum writes in Harper’s cover story this April:

‘You want to know what this was really all about?’ he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. ‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’

Criminalizing drug use had nothing to do with ensuring social welfare. The racist and paranoid Nixon administration wanted desperately to dismantle two populations: the Black community and the anti-war movement. The easiest way to do so was to criminalize behaviors common to them both.

Baum didn’t include this quote in his 1996 book, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, which contains no authorial interviews, but he did put it in the Harper’s cover story, “Legalize It All,” which puts forward a case for drug legalization.

The fact that the drug war was fabricated with malicious intent might not surprise everyone. We hope, though, that the news will sway prohibitionists to adopt a more rational stance.

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New Jersey Panel Considers Expanding List of MMJ Qualifying Conditions

3/23/2016

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The health commissioner of New Jersey has put in place a panel that will decide whether various ailments should be included in the list of qualifying conditions for medical cannabis in the state, Philly.com reports.

Patients and advocates have been working for nearly four years to get more ailments added to the list of conditions, arguing that the list is severely restrictive and penalizes sick citizens who have no other viable recourse to obtain effective treatment.

Currently, the list of qualifying conditions for medical cannabis in New Jersey includes multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, HIV, AIDS, cancer associated with severe or chronic pain, glaucoma, Crohn’s disease, and terminal illnesses. Patients can purchase up to two ounces of cannabis each month with a recommendation from a qualified physician.

Patient advocates hope to see chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other conditions added to that list.

Governor Chris Christie has repeatedly stated that he is opposed to any legislation that would expand the medical cannabis program, which he fears is a ploy to move toward legalizing recreational marijuana.

Ken Wolski, who heads the Coalition for Medical Marijuana New Jersey, said that although he is glad the panel has been formed, he doesn’t expect much to come of it, noting that the panel members lack the requisite expertise in medical cannabis.

Only one of the five doctors on the panel, Cheryl A. Kennedy, is among those who recommend medical cannabis to patients. Only 450 doctors in New Jersey currently participate in the medical cannabis program.

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Colin Bell: From Academic to Entrepreneur

3/23/2016

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Colin Bell, PhD. is the co-founder, co-inventor, and chief growth officer of Growcentia, a manufacturer of organic soil supplements designed to minimize environmental impact. In his previous career as a research scientist at Colorado State University, Colin focused on understanding plant microbial interactions and produced many peer-reviewed publications on microbial mediated processes to enhance plant growth. With Growcentia, he has taken his scientific knowledge and applied it to business, solving real problems faced by farmers who want to grow better crops via sustainable methods.

Colin recently joined our host Shango Los for a conversation about the transition from academic to entrepreneur, how he manages work/life balance, how he fosters teamwork and camaraderie among coworkers in a start-up environment, and more.

Listen to the episode using the media player below, or scroll down for the full transcript!

Subscribe to the Ganjapreneur podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud or Google Play.

 

Listen to the podcast:

 

Read the full transcript:

Shango Los: Hi there and welcome to the Ganjapreneur.com podcast. I am your host Shango Los. The Ganjapreneur.com podcast gives us an opportunity to speak directly to entrepreneurs, cannabis growers, product developers, and cannabis medicine researchers all focused on making the most of cannabis normalization. As your host, I do my best to bring you original cannabis industry ideas that will ignite your own entrepreneurial spark, and give you actionable information to improve your business strategy and improve your health and the health of cannabis patients everywhere.

Today my guest is Colin Bell. PhD, co-founder, co-inventor, and chief growth officer for Growcentia. Colin received his PhD in 2009 in soil microbial ecology. His academic research was focused on understanding plant microbial interactions, and soil microbial biogeochemical cycling. As a research scientist at Colorado State University, his many peer reviewed publications were centered on elucidating microbial mediated processes that enhance plant growth.

Colin left his academic position at CSU in March of 2015 to launch his startup company Growcentia. Their first product, MAMMOTH P, is a beneficial bacteria bloom stimulant that targets phosphorus cycling to maximize both quality and yield in cannabis plants. Today we’re going to talk about making a leap from academic to entrepreneur. Thanks for being on the show, Colin.

Colin Bell: Thanks Shango, how’s it going?

Shango Los: It’s going really great. I’m excited to have you on the show because a lot of people are doing one thing, and they really in their heart wish they were doing something else, specifically being an entrepreneur. I’m excited to talk about the travel that you’ve taken, so that maybe it inspires some others. Let’s get started by really cementing you in the academic world. What were you doing at CSU, and kind of steep us in that a little bit.

Colin Bell: Great. I’ll start, like you said, I received my PhD in soil microbial ecology in 2009 after doing a couple post docs with on the USDA and the Forest Service in Fort Collins, Colorado. I achieved my third post doc at Colorado State University working with my team Matt Wallenstein and Rich Conant, who are also co-founders with Growcentia.

After a couple of years I got promoted to research scientist 1, where the whole time and my whole academic career and my graduate career also was focused on understanding plant microbe interactions, and understanding nutrient cycle. Like we said, to kind of understand how plants and microbes have evolved together and how microbes might benefit plants, in light of climate change or anything else, to help promote their growth and their success. We just did that. That was kind of my dream, to be an academic research scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology lab at Colorado State University. We were very successful there for years.

One day, kind of how it came about is, we decided that all the publications that our team had been pushing out, which was many, many, we questioned the impact we were making in academia. We always felt that our research would really help agriculture in general, and improve agriculture sustainability, and our technology ultimately, or our knowledge and our publications that we provide to the scientific community would translate to improved management practices for more sustainable, natural ways for plants to grow, to improve yield to feed the globe, the growing population, the world. Thinking that one day, out of all the papers and all the grants that we wrote. We have this broader impact statement that all the grants require.

We talk about how our research is going to impact agriculture and farmers and help farmers grow better. We kind of came to the realization that farmers probably weren’t reading our publications. As a matter of fact, it validated that. We decided that to be hiring a pack of scientists, we should start focusing more on applied problems to try and get our technology in the hands and in the forum that farmers could use in this lifetime. That’s when we switched the lab, flipped the lab, started thinking about problems, and thinking about applying our knowledge into making something that could be applied into agriculture practices. Reshape the labs, started thinking about it from the perspective of a soil microbial ecologist and what microbes do well, and how to produce that and scale that. You know what microbes do do well, is cycle nutrients and provide nutrients to plants among other things. That’s why plants and microbes have evolved together basically since the beginning of time.

Shango Los: Before we get too much into talking about the product itself, I want to talk about the lab a little bit. You’re talking about being within academia at that point. I’m sure that there’s a fine line between you are doing the research under the auspices of the school, but then there’s a certain point where suddenly you are actually becoming a business, which is, I don’t know, not usually the role of what the school is looking for. They’re often going for pure research. I could be wrong, maybe schools now are actually trying to roll out these products. How did you skirt that line between running your lab as a research lab versus coming up with the preparations to put a product onto the market.

Colin Bell: That’s a great question. Honestly, the truth is even a decade ago universities were focused on basic research. That’s kind of the structure. The infrastructure, truly, is still like that, but there’s a great push and a much improved emphasis on actually launching technology from the lab into the marketplace. I think it was helpful. Most universities now have tech transfer departments that focus specifically on helping researchers understand how to bridge that gap between the scientific lab and the marketplace.

I think there’s definitely a lot of work to do and a lot of progress to be made, but there has been a lot of progress made certainly in the last decade. How we did that really is working with our tech transfer department at Colorado State University and going through some rigorous incubators, business incubators. For example, the NSF I-Corps accepted us as a team. The NSF I-Corps program is a brilliant program developed by the national government, the NSF, to help researchers understand specifically how to identify the value of the technology that they’re developing potentially in the lab, and what it takes to launch that into a marketplace.

That was a rigorous training based on lean start-up methodologies of Steve Blank and some others, where we basically treated this exercise like an experiment. We had these hypothesis of value, and we had these hypothesis of customer segments. The way we validated that is we hypothesized there was particular value for whatever product. Our particular product was enhancing nutrient uptake to plants that ultimately enhance yield. We had that early stage, and we were very naive going into this, assuming that farmers would buy this type of product. The exercise is if you think you have a value and you think, you hypothesize, you have a customer segment, what you should do now is go talk to a hundred of those customer segment archetypes, farmers in this case, to validate if you’re right or not.

Shango Los: It sounds like you’re actually making almost your own focus group. You’re making your hypothesis, and I love hearing basic marketing repeated to me in lab speak. I’m enjoying this a lot. But also you would then go out and talk to your hundred subjects, and then you would be building up your own data base specific to your own product.

Colin Bell: That’s exactly right. What we’re trying to do is validate the value propositions that we think our product would bring to market. Through that process it was just invaluable, because we realized very quickly where we were wrong. We realized very quickly what the value was, with any particular agriculture market segment, that our product would need to meet to be a successful product to launch into the marketplace.

For example, if you talk to producers in the larger agro space, such as corn farmers and wheat farmers, et cetera, no matter what you think your product does to enhance the environment, et. We were kind of thinking about our product from an ecological standpoint also. It’s a natural microbial additive that improves nutrient use, but also it would allow us to potentially minimize inputs, which are sometimes caustic to the environment, such as excessive fertilizer, etc. We didn’t emphasize yield as a value proposition early on in our discovery. What we realized is that was the only thing almost that mattered to be able to successfully launch our product into the marketplace. That was the key value proposition for most agriculture market segments.

Shango Los: I would think that that is actually probably one of the reasons that you’ve had so much success early on. We’ll talk more about the success of the product in a minute. But specifically the fact that many entrepreneurs will come up with the idea, they’ll be passionate about it, and then they’ll go to the market with what their hunch is, but because you came at it as an academic scientist you’re like, “Well, I wouldn’t go to the market before I test my hypothesis,” and so you created your own study by going out and talking to these hundred farmers, which gave you all this new focus group information which becomes your new evidence. I would think that if most entrepreneurs would do that in their own way, we’d see a lot less failing companies.

Colin Bell: That’s exactly right. It’s called the lean start-up approach, and that’s exactly what I think you should do. I think you nailed it. Most startups fail because they haven’t rigorously validated the value and/or the customer segments that need that value, what we look for as pain points. What can that customer not live without? If your product can fill that pain point, you know you definitely have a successful product, but you have to validate it.

Shango Los: Thanks Colin. We’re going to take a short break and be right back. You are listening to the Ganjapreneur.com podcast.

Welcome back, you are listening to the Ganjapreneur.com podcast. I’m your host Shango Los, and our guest this week is Colin Bell of Growcentia. Colin, before the break we were talking about your background in academia and how deeply you were involved as a research scientist, and how the research that you were doing was going to help farmers, but you weren’t sure how the farmers were going to find out about it. You shifted your research into going past just developing what the farmers could do, and figuring out how to get your research into the hands of farmers by way of a product possibly. That brings us to where we are now.

The first product that Growcentia has put out is the Mammoth P. Can you tell us what is unique about this product that caused you in academia to go, “Wait a minute, this is something new and this could actually do good”?

Colin Bell: Sure. We are really excited about MAMMOTH P early on, and still. We are really excited that the technology because it’s so unique. The way we were thinking about developing a new microbial biostimulant product to enhance plant growth was just something that no other company, or any other lab for that matter, has come up with. What we wanted to do was target functionality at the microbial community level.

We wanted to work with microbial communities because we know in nature microbial species just don’t persist. They have to persist and function as a community. What we also want to do was train functionality for specific nutrient cycling. That way, we thought over time we could actually prescribe different microbial inoculants to treat certain deficiencies of nutrients, such as phosphorus or nitrogen. Our first product, MAMMOTH P, is a microbial community that specifically targets phosphorus, which means it liberates phosphorus as it’s bound in soylent substrates, which happens naturally almost immediately once phosphorus is added into soil, potting mix. It even chemically transforms into plant unavailable forms in hydroponic systems. We were able to train, using our proprietary microbial trait selection platform, to train microbial communities to increase their ability to cycle phosphorus by up to 30 times greater than any natural communities that we’ve found in nature.

Shango Los: To put it in my own terms, what it sounds like is phosphorus is going to be naturally occurring in the soil, but there are challenges for uptake for the plant. What you have done is you’ve put together a community of specially chosen microbes that when you introduce them to the soil, they do the job of unhinging the phosphorus from wherever they’re tied down, to become more bioavailable for your plant so your plant is able to thrive with more phosphorus, because it’s so much easier for it to get it out of the buffet in the soil. Is that a good way to put it?

Colin Bell: Yeah, I think that’s very well said. Nice job there. That’s exactly what it is. We find that the plants are able to take up a lot more phosphorus with our additive which enhances the plants ability to improve their bloom or yield, no matter what that plant might be. In the case of cannabis, it actually translocates phosphorus and micronutrients to higher levels than the plant could without our inoculum enhancing bloom growth and the density and the quality of the flower.

Shango Los: I have a feeling that your answer to this next question’s going to be over your head, but I’m dying to hear the answer anyway. I would love to hear you contrast how phosphorus is normally taken from the plant, what that process is like, compared to when you use your microbial communities. Kind of illustrates for us the difference, the value proposition, of why the microbial works so much better.

Colin Bell: In processing, now we identified this problem actually in natural agriculture soils, which is a prolific problem across the country. When farmers add phosphorus fertilizer to soils, up to 70% becomes almost immediately unavailable to plants because phosphorus binds, it’s chemically sticky, to minerals and carbon substrates alike. Phosphorus will immediately transform, once it hits a substrate, into plant unavailable forms. It’s a really unique and interesting ecological problem, because farmers really need, of all crops, really need plants that take up as much phosphorus as possible. Across all crops, phosphorus is in high demand, especially during the yield or flower cycles of the plant.

Over time, the phosphorus will continue to build up —let’s just talk about agro ecosystems right now — for up to two decades, where the exchange sites will keep on getting stuck with these phosphates, which is a plant available form of phosphorus, until over time the soil saturates and then flushes through the environment and creates huge ecological problems like algal blooms that we see quite often, polluting water ways, etc.

What this microbial community does is we’ve improved their capabilities to solubilize, which means exchange, those phosphorus molecules that were bound to the soil back into the solution in the plant available form phosphate PO4, which allows the plant to take up as much phosphorus as possible, mining those phosphates as they’re bound to soils and substrates alike. This happens even in hydroponic systems, and prolifically in cocoa, and peat, and soil systems as well.

Shango Los: Great. I followed that. I want to change gears for a second here. Now that we understand the importance of the product and why you were so excited to make the jump from academia to the entrepreneurial side, tell us a little bit about how you chose to then actually form the company. I’m holding a bottle of your product in my hand, and it is gorgeous. The design is great, the copywriting is great. Whoever laid out your branded colors. It’s an incredible, branded experience which you really don’t see all that much in the cannabis industry, or maybe we are just now starting to. You must have put some work into building the idea of the company around the product that you were feeling jazzed about.

Colin Bell: That’s right. I think what I have to emphasize for sure is nothing happens alone. We have a wonderful team helping us in every area of our business. Not only do I have wonderful and brilliant co-founders, but we hired a CEO that flew all the way from Chicago to be with us here in Fort Collins, Colorado, that’s grown many start-ups from the very beginning to multi-hundred million dollar companies. We have a great team on the ground, in all our packaging production. We talk about branding and marketing, we have consultants here, local in Fort Collins, Colorado, to help us with our social media. Another one Push IQ Chris Richardson, that helps us with our branding.

We also have a great list of external advisors, including the CEO of New Belgium and a former employee of theirs, Greg Owsley, which actually branded the New Belgium Fat Tire brand from their early days, which helped them be a very successful global company. Really, I didn’t do anything by myself. I surrounded myself and our ideas. We all want to be the dumbest person in the room. If we’re that, then we can really bring talent around the table to help us come up with these great ideas.

What we want to do for this is own our culture. We’re a scientific, highly technical company. The three co-founders including myself are PhD soil microbiologists. My other two co-founders are still faculty at Colorado State University. We wanted to be distinguished in every way we possibly could. We felt that clean brand, the white label with the mammoth, which is super iconic, really stood out and really kind of illustrated who we were as a company.

Shango Los: It is a good thing to surround ourselves with the people who are smarter than us when we’re building a company. The group that you have pulled together is pretty extraordinary though. I’m curious, were these people that were already in your network, because you are naturally a networker as an academic, or is it just that all of these people are smart enough to live in Fort Collins, Colorado, or is this something that people were attracted into your sphere of influence because of the incubator?

Colin Bell: I think a little bit of everything. We didn’t have these people in our lives before we started Growcentia, but what we do do is reach out to a lot of people. We present people with good opportunities. I think people see a good thing, the good thing that we’ve done with Growcentia, and that’s basically create a really interesting product in a very, very interesting market. We have some really compelling values. Not only do we have a wonderful product, but we have a wonderful platform that allows us to create a family of products.

Not only are we in this wonderful, very exciting market, which is projected to do just amazing things, we’re at the very base of something, that we think we can grow with the cannabis market as it grows. That’s very exciting. Our product is very well positioned to bring value into other markets too. That kind of started also with our investors M34. We were able, after three incubators, to bring on an early seed investment which allowed us to launch the company. That’s when I left the university, in March of 2015, to start the company.

Like I said, when you have a great story- I mean, my son and I found an old transmission shop here in Fort Collins, Colorado. We cleaned it out, we painted it, we mopped the floors 30 times, and turned it into our bio-production facility. Before that, I was working out of my one car garage that I quickly scaled out of after my first shipment of bottles came, and two pallets got dropped in my driveway and blocked the cars from coming in. It was really lean start-up, I think, really compelling our team. Obviously, very compelling. We’re all a driven group that wants to have a lot of fun and do great things.

Shango Los: Right on. We’re going to take another short break and be right back. You are listening to the ganjapreneur.com podcast.

Welcome back. You are listening to the Ganjapreneur.com podcast. I’m your host Shango Los, and our guest this week us Colin Bell of Growcentia. In the last segment, we were talking about specifically Growcentia’s first product, MAMMOTH P, and why it is unique, and more importantly why it caused Colin to decide to leave academia to become an entrepreneur and back it up. One of the things I really enjoyed when we were talking about bringing your product to market, Colin, was the interesting way you used lean to go out into the field and make sure your customers wanted your product before you went to the trouble of bringing the product to market.

When I was hearing that, it also made me wonder how you, as a research scientist, approached life work balance, because just like many entrepreneurs who go to market with a product that they haven’t actually market tested yet, they’re going really on passionate intuition and luck. You didn’t go that way, you wanted data, hard data, before you took your product to market. How do you handle work life balance, right? I’ve a feeling that you might have schematics drawn up to help you do that.

Colin Bell: Such a great question. It’s such an incredible challenge, especially for myself. I think for most of us in academia, we’re such a driven team and driven individuals. I think getting your PhD, going through that process, kind of weeds out the people that aren’t just kind of really obsessively driven to push, push, push. Saying that, what I realized, especially after I left the lab and left academia and started this start-up, was there’s never enough hours in the day. If you don’t take time for yourself no one else will, and that’s really unsustainable. I’ve made it a goal, and it’s really a professional goal, that we write out every year, or every quarter, if we’re not accomplishing it, to make sure not only we’re accomplishing our benchmarks and our goals professionally and internally with Growcentia, but that we have a whole list of personal goals and needs that we meet on a regular basis also.

For me personally, and my whole team, especially the co-founders, we love to ride our bikes. I personally like to run. We try to stay fit. Fort Collins is a nice environment to do that for sure. That’s what I really do, I incorporate — I’m kind of a boring guy. I work a lot and I work out a lot, and I try and have some downtime. I’m trying to balance all those things, but I need friends, I need family, I need fitness. I definitely need success in every area of my life, and that’s in all my relationships, especially with work. Ultimately, if I’m happy, I’ve succeeded. All these things in my life make me happy, and fulfill me, and so that’s what I do. I could just keep on doing that.

Shango Los: A couple shows ago, we had on Tom Burns, he’s a business philosopher who started as a yogi and is now in the cannabis business, and he says, “First, you feel good, and then you do good.” There’s a lot of that in what you just said. I also think it helps with working all the extra hours that you almost always have to do with a start-up, since fitness is one of your key things. So many entrepreneurs, they get busy, suddenly they’re not eating properly, and they’re not getting their exercise. Not only are they pushing their bodies harder with more stress and more awake time, but then they’re also not feeding the body what it needs. I would think that having a fitness regimen that you actually share with your co-workers, so you’re being supported in it, that’s probably a really great secret to success.

Colin Bell: I think so. I mean, I feel the success whenever we can do that. Actually, we have daily squat jumps and push ups and pull ups as a team in the lab, or we’ll have ten people or fifteen people in the back of the production facility, “Okay,” we’ll yell, “All right, it’s time!” We have monthly goals where we up that. We’re all jumping around, doing our squat jumps and push ups. But you know what? We all enjoy it, and it just makes us feel better, gets the blood flowing, and a sense of camaraderie and progress.

Shango Los: Oh man, this interview’s going to get you so many job inquiries it’s ridiculous, it sounds like a great place to work.

Colin Bell: Sure.

Shango Los: I want to hit one more thing. We’re almost out of time here, but one of the things that I don’t know anything about, like for example, I wasn’t too deep when you talked about your university having a tech transfer department, that’s pretty cool. That’s a new thing since I left school. What happens with the income? Since you came up with the ideas at the school in the research lab do they get a part of it, or is it they like to have the reputation of spinning off new technologies and businesses? How does that work?

Colin Bell: That’s kind of a big conversation, but in brief, and it in most universities …

Shango Los: Yeah, can you do it in 90 seconds?

Colin Bell: Yeah, yeah. Universities, if you go look at technology at the university, university actually owns that technology. As a research scientist that developed a technology that launched into the marketplace, I had to license the technology, and we did successfully, from the university. The university gets part ownership in that technology for sure. We went ahead and patented that technology so we could protect it in the marketplace, and we launched it. Colorado State University is a true partner with us in this process, being the owner of the technology. Future technology, as you launch your company and you’re in the private sector, you’re going to develop more technology which you would probably own as a company. That’s the path that most people follow whenever they actually launch a company and they’re at one point separated from the university autonomously, if you will.

Shango Los: Right on. Well, for being a really big topic you actually distilled that business model really simply, so thank you for that. That’s really interesting. That’s also all the time that we’ve got today. Colin, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experience. I’m sure that you have inspired a lot of people to consider making that job.

Colin Bell: It was a pleasure, it was really fun to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Shango Los: You can find out more about Colin Bell and MAMMOTH P at their website, mammothmicrobes.com, M-A-M-M-O-T-H-M-I-C-R-O-B-E-S.com. You can find more episodes of the Ganjapreneur Podcast in the podcast section at Ganjapreneur.com, and in the Apple iTunes Store. On the Ganjapreneur.com website, you will find the latest cannabis news, product reviews, and cannabis jobs updated daily, along with transcriptions of this podcast. You can also download the Ganjapreneur.com app in iTunes and Google Play. You can also find this show on the iHeartRadio network app, bringing Ganjapreneur to 60 million mobile devices. Do you have a company that wants to reach our national audience of cannabis enthusiasts? Email grow@ganjapreneur.com to find out how. Thanks to Brasco for producing our show. I’m your host, Shango Los.

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New CDC Guidelines Urge Doctors to Stop Drug Testing Patients for Cannabis

3/23/2016

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have recommended via a new set of opioid-prescription guidelines that doctors stop urine testing their patients for THC, the psychoactive compound specific to cannabis.

According to the guidelines:

“Clinicians should not test for substances for which results would not affect patient management or for which implications for patient management are unclear. For example, experts noted that there might be uncertainty about the clinical implications of a positive urine drug test for tetrahyrdocannabinol (THC).”

The guidelines also urge doctors not to drop patients if they test positive for THC, which — according to the Pain News Network — is one reason that many marijuana users have been discharged from their physicians’ care.

“Clinicians should not dismiss patients from care based on a urine drug test result because this could constitute patient abandonment and could have adverse consequences for patient safety, potentially including the patient obtaining opioids from alternative sources and the clinician missing opportunities to facilitate treatment for substance use disorder.”

It’s always nice when federal establishments recognize the banality of marijuana prohibition and all of its unfortunate baggage, but it’s official changes like these that ultimately will umbrella cannabis treatment into mainstream medical practices.

Studies have shown that the rate of overdoses involving prescription drugs is significantly reduced in states with medical marijuana laws. However, with nearly 50,000 overdose victims in 2014, prescription opioids have never posed more of a threat to U.S. citizens than now.

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Richard Branson Investigates Benefits of Colorado Cannabis Taxes

3/22/2016

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English business magnate and corporate mogul Richard Branson requested a tour of a non-disclosed substance abuse facility in Colorado last week, so that he could witness first-hand how Colorado is spending some of its cannabis-derived taxes, Ricardo Baca reports for The Cannabist.

Branson was in Colorado last week to celebrate the launch of his Virgin America airline’s services in Denver. Before leaving the land of legal marijuana, however, the self-made billionaire decided check in with some of the state’s top pot officials and industry professionals.

“There was never a blanket statement of why he was there, but we do know that Mr. Branson is interested in drug reform policy that prioritizes treatment over criminal penalties,” Robert Thompson, public information officer for the Colorado Department of Human Services, told The Cannabist.

“He wanted to learn about how things are going in Colorado with the legalization of marijuana, how things were going with collecting taxes and distributing taxes, and looking at the programs that benefit from marijuana tax dollars, including the one he toured,” Thompson said.

Branson has long been a vocal advocate for international drug policy reform, and serves on the Honorary Board for the Drug Policy Alliance.

In a blog post from 2015, he wrote that “Drugs should be treated as a health issue … so that the millions who continue to be harmed by current policies can be helped instead.”

In a 2012 op-ed for CNN, he wrote, “Rather than continuing on the disastrous path of the war on drugs, we need to look at what works and what doesn’t in terms of real evidence and data.”

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Ohio Lawmaker to Introduce Medical Cannabis Legislation

3/22/2016

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Ohio Sen. Kenny Yuko (D-Richmond Heights) will introduce legislation in the next few weeks that could establish a legal system for medical cannabis access in Ohio, he announced this week in an interview with Cleveland.com.

There are currently few details revealed about Sen. Yuko’s bill, but it has been specified that individuals with certain medical conditions — including severe epilepsy and post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) — would be allowed to use medical cannabis if issued a recommendation from a doctor who “has a history of treating the patient.”

“It’s a piece of legislation that most people who are reading it are finding palatable and are supportive of it,” said Sen. Yuko.

Ohio has recently become a hotbed for talks of cannabis reform, and following last year’s failure of a controversial recreational legalization push by the advocacy group ResponsibleOhio, the group teamed up with the Marijuana Policy Project on a medical cannabis initiative that is expected to appear on the ballot this November.

Approval ratings are generally very high for medical cannabis among Ohio voters — even Republicans in the legislature have announced hesitant support for reforming the state’s marijuana laws.

According to Sen. Yuko, his proposal would ideally be approved and pushed through by the time the legislative session ends in June, or else lawmakers wouldn’t be able to address the subject again before voters take control of the process come November.

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Kentucky Hemp Farmers Expanding Operations, Tennessee Farmers Shying Away

3/22/2016

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Farmers in Kentucky and Tennessee are seeing vastly different results in their respective industrial hemp markets.

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture has authorized 4,500 acres of hemp production this year – the third year testing its viability as a cash crop in the state, according to an Associated Press report. Last year the pilot program saw 900 acres of hemp grown after just 33 total acres in 2014.

“Hemp is a bridge from Kentucky’s past to our future,” Ryan Quarles, Agriculture Department commissioner, said in the report. “The Kentucky Department of Agriculture and our partners are committed to building upon the solid foundation of research for a Kentucky hemp industry that will create jobs and new marketing opportunities.”

Meanwhile, in border-state Tennessee, just 25 farmers have signed up to produce hemp, down from the 50 who signed up last year, the AP reported. The low enrollment is likely due to low, or nonexistent, profits by farmers who took a shot on the crop during the first year of the pilot program.

Chuck Mason, a Cook County farmer, said the crop turned out to be a bust after his hemp seeds were more than a month late following customs delays and he was “just not willing” to take another chance on the crop. Mason said he will return to growing hay.

Tennessee charges $254 for a permit to grow hemp, and one farmer, Wayne Smith of Washington County, said he was offered $7 for his 10-pound seed yield.

“I’m going to use the harvested seed to make oil and maybe sell it as a novelty item,” he said.

Farmers in Tennessee have until April 1 to apply for a permit.

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SCOTUS Dismisses Lawsuit Filed Against Colorado Cannabis Legalization

3/21/2016

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The Supreme Court of the United States voted 6-2 on Monday to dismiss a lawsuit that was filed against Colorado by two of its neighboring states for its recently-reformed marijuana laws.

If the justices had chosen to accept the case, the ensuing litigation may have lead to a drawn-out legal battle that could have spanned years.

“This was a meritless lawsuit, and the court made the right decision,” wrote Mason Tvert in a written statement for the Marijuana Policy Project.

“States have every right to regulate the cultivation and sale of marijuana, just as Nebraska and Oklahoma have the right to maintain their failed prohibition policies. Colorado has done more to control marijuana than just about any other state in the nation. It will continue to set an example for other states that are considering similar laws in legislatures and at the ballot box.”

Oklahoma and Nebraska could bring their lawsuit to a federal district court if they wish to continue pursuing the case, but they haven’t announced yet one way or another what their exact intentions are.

Doug Peterson, Attorney General of Nebraska, said that he was disappointed in the court’s ruling and that his office will be “working with its partners in Oklahoma and other states to determine the best next steps toward vindicating the rule of law.”

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New York Assembly Budget Proposal Would Expand State’s MMJ Program

3/21/2016

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Under the New York State Assembly’s budget proposal, the state’s medical marijuana program would be expanded, according to an Albany Business Review report.

If enacted, the program could see more registered organizations, more doctors and a doubling of the number of dispensaries an organization is allowed, from four to eight. 

New York’s medical marijuana program is off to a “slower start” than advocates anticipated, which has, according to Assemblyman Richard Gottfreid (D), impaired access options for registered patients.

“As predicted, the law that we enacted and the regulations implemented were made so restrictive by the executive branch that the program is barely off the ground and many patients in need are not being served,” Gottfried said.

Since the program’s January launch, 482 physicians have completed the course allowing them to recommend cannabis, while 1,934 patients have been certified to use the drug as a treatment option, according to March 18 numbers from the state Health Department.

While increasing the number of dispensaries is imperative for the program’s success, and patient access, Vireo Health CEO Ari Hoffnung says allowing more operators isn’t what is needed to combat the slow start.  

“We don’t believe that the most effective way to improve patient access would be increasing the number of registered organizations,” he said in the report. “The way to do that, in our mind, is to make it easier for patients to find doctors and allow for delivery to patients.”

Gottfried and other program supporters are pushing for additions to the list of approved conditions. Under the law, those changes can only be approved by the Health Department.

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New Orleans City Council Moves Forward With Cannabis Decriminalization

3/21/2016

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The New Orleans City Council voted unanimously Thursday in approval of an ordinance that lets police give citations for the possession of small amounts of cannabis, rather than being forced to arrest offenders.

Ordinance #31, 148 — which, if approved by Mayor Mitch Landrieu, will become Sec. 54-505 of the NOLA Code — was brought to the legislative table by city councilwoman Susan Guidry.

The ordinance expands upon a 2010 law sponsored by councilwoman Guidry that lets police officers in New Orleans issue a court summons for cannabis possession for first-time offenders.

Guidry had initially pushed for allowing first-time offenders caught in possession of up to 14 grams to be let off with a verbal warning, and second-time offenders given a written warning. A third-time offender would be issued a $50 ticket, and a fourth-timer would be given a $100 ticket.

NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison questioned the legality of requiring police officers to keep a record of such verbal warnings, as well as the capacity of the policy department to maintain such records.

Guidry’s new ordinance now heads to Mayor Landrieu, whose office has indicated that he is will sign it into law. The ordinance will take effect 90 days after being signed.

“Public safety is our top priority right now, we are hiring and training a larger, more professional police force that will give us the tools required to reduce violent crime, reduce response times and provide our residents and visitors with the security we all deserve. The ordinance will become law,” a statement from the Mayor’s office reads.

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Oregon Earns $3.48 Million in January Cannabis Sales Tax

3/18/2016

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Oregon has earned $3.48 million in recreational cannabis sales tax from the month of January, Noelle Crombie reports for The Oregonian.

This number far exceeded expectations. In fact, the state made more money during January than state economists had projected for the entire year.

In total, Oregon dispensaries sold over $14 million worth of recreational pot during the month of January.

“It’s something that probably says there is a high level of compliance and that consumers are choosing to go to the legal establishment and more and more of them are leaving what we term as a gray or black market,” said Mazen Malik, a senior economist for Oregon’s Legislative Revenue Office.

Because the official market has yet to launch, there remain many unknowns for the Oregon recreational cannabis market — including how much the upcoming regulations will cost the state. Tax income may fluctuate, Malik warned.

As of March 4, the Oregon Department of Revenue had received taxes from 253 of the state’s 309 dispensaries that have registered as temporary recreational retailers. Some of these dispensaries during that time may have only been selling medical cannabis, however, which is not taxed in Oregon.

The first 40 percent of Oregon’s recreational cannabis taxes (after the costs of taxation, collection, and regulation have been covered) will go into the Common School Fund. 20 percent will go to mental health, alcoholism and drug services. The Oregon State Police will receive 15 percent, while city and county law enforcement agencies will each receive 10 percent. The final 5 percent will go into the Oregon Health Authority’s efforts to combat drug and alcohol abuse.

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New Jersey Medical Cannabis Prices Are Nation’s Highest, Report Shows

3/18/2016

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Patients enrolled in New Jersey’s medical cannabis program are paying about 37 percent more per ounce than their counterparts in states with similar programs, according to a state Health Department report.

The five dispensaries in the state charge an average of $489 per ounce, while the average price at dispensaries in Arizona, New Mexico, Vermont, Maine and Rhode Island is $311 per ounce. The study took into consideration that those five states also have a 10 percent lower cost of living than New Jersey.

The report noted that the Drug Enforcement Agency found that the price of “hydroponic black market marijuana” in the state is around $400 to $450 per ounce.

Taking into consideration that Alternative Treatment Centers are held to rigorous cultivation and production standards in the state – cultivation, packaging and dispensing occur in “sanitary environments” and cannabis is grown without pesticides – the report concluded that “no ATCs are charging excessive prices for medical marijuana.”

“New Jersey medicinal marijuana is regulated and tested, patients are afforded protection under the Act and are able to change ATC affiliation at any time at no cost,” the report said. “ATCs are required to pay federal corporate tax at a rate of 34 percent.”

The 34 percent corporate tax equates to $166.26 per ounce sold at the $489 rate.

In an interview with Philly.com, Michael Nelson, general manager of Compassionate Sciences in Bellmawr, objects to the report’s accuracy. He says it fails to take into consideration monthly discounts and reduced prices for low-income patients, whose final price is closer to $300.

Donna Leusner, spokesperson for the Department of Health, said in the report that in addition to the discounts granted by some dispensaries to certain customers, about 48 percent of program participants receive a discount on their registration fee, cutting it from $200 to $20.         

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Rhode Island Governor Open to Cannabis Legalization Referendum

3/17/2016

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Gov. Gina Raimondo is open to the idea of putting the legalization question to Rhode Island voters, she told the Providence Journal on Tuesday.

“I could see Rhode Island eventually getting there,” she said. “But I’m not in a rush because there are issues of safety, how do you regulate it, how do you keep it out of the hands of kids, especially the edibles. I think there probably are some economic advantages to being first, but I’d rather get it right.”

According to Rhode Island state law, in order for the legalization issue to appear before voters at all, the state legislature must be willing to issue a referendum to consult the public — there is not a voter initiative process that advocates can rely on. In other words, the first steps of reform can only come from state lawmakers.

Gov. Raimondo has reportedly been in talks with Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper about the aftereffects of legalization to determine whether or not such a course would be good for Rhode Island.

“I could see the logic in saying it’s the kind of thing that people ought to have a say in … It doesn’t say I’m committed to it, but I’m open to it,” she said.

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Pennsylvania Legislature Passes Medical Cannabis and Industrial Hemp Bills

3/17/2016

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Cannabis and its non-psychoactive cousin scored victories in the Pennsylvania legislature yesterday as the House and Senate passed medical marijuana and industrial hemp bills, respectively.

The medical marijuana plan covers patients with 17 chronic conditions, such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease, AIDS and post-traumatic stress disorder. It does not allow for the plant to be smoked, opting instead for the drug to be ingested via pill, oil or liquid, similar to programs in New York and Minnesota. The proposal, which passed 149-43, would permit the state to license up 25 cultivators and 50 dispensaries with three locations each.

“Today we have the opportunity of offering hope to the parents of these children, to the patients, offering the hope of letting them, along with their doctors, decide how to best treat the conditions they’re dealing with on a daily basis,” Rep. Jim Cox (R) said in the Associated Press report.  

Gov. Tom Wolf (D) thanked the legislature in a blog post and continued advocating for a medical marijuana program in the state.

“Soon, we will finally provide the essential help needed by those suffering from seizures, cancer, and other illnesses,” he wrote. “It is long past time to provide this important medical relief to patients and families across the commonwealth, and I thank the quick action by the Pennsylvania House to bring us a huge step closer to legalizing medical marijuana.”

The bill’s next stop is the Senate, where similar legislation was passed 40-7 last May.

Meanwhile, the industrial hemp bill passed by the Senate would authorize higher education institutions in the state to conduct hemp cultivation research pilot programs.

Passing 49-0, Senate Bill 50 builds on a 2014 move by Congress to relax federal restrictions on hemp cultivation as part of the omnibus federal Farm Bill, according to The Daily Chronic.  

Sen. Judy Schwank (D), the bill’s sponsor, said while she didn’t expect hemp to be used commercially for “many years,” the proposal “opens the possibilities for future generations of farmers.”

“Hemp would allow Pennsylvania to be on the same playing field with states that have already passed some form of hemp legislation,” Schwank said in a press release. “The soil and climate here in PA is perfect for growing hemp and hemp got its start in PA. We have townships such as Hempfield Township in Lancaster that were named after the crop and its viability in the area.

The bill has not had a ‘nay’ vote yet, passing through the Senate Agriculture & Rural Affairs Committee 11-0 last October.

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Canadian Activist Pledges to Give Away One Million Seeds for Cannabis ‘Victory Gardens’

3/17/2016

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Renowned Canadian marijuana activist Dana Larsen has pledged to give away more than million pot seeds to help Canadian medical cannabis patients everywhere plant and grow their own “victory gardens” this spring.

Larsen was a founding member of the BC Marijuana Party, the Canadian Marijuana Party, and founded the Vancouver Dispensary Society. He also founded Sensible BC — the largest grassroots cannabis reform organization in Canada. Additionally, Larsen worked as editor at Cannabis Culture Magazine for ten years, and is a co-founder of the Vancouver Seed Bank.

In a landmark court ruling out of British Columbia last month, Canadian medical marijuana patients won the right to homegrown cannabis. The ruling, issued by Federal Judge Michael Phelan, found that Health Canada’s current framework for a medical marijuana industry is unconstitutional and that Canadian patients’ right to grow their own medicine should be restored.

According to his new website, OvergrowCanada.com, Larsen has one million high-CBD cannabis seeds and 100,000 high-THC cannabis seeds that he is willing to give away. The seeds will be delivered in packages of 10 or 100 to Canadian patients who sign up via the website.

“Grow them on your balcony or your windowsill, grow them in your front yard or the back, but let us finally bring our plants out of the closet and into the fresh air where they belong,” Larsen wrote in his impassioned call for action.

“It doesn’t matter if you plan on using the buds. It doesn’t matter if the plants are female or male. It doesn’t matter if they grow 10 feet tall, or just 10 inches. ‎ All that matters is that Canadians join together, to plant these seeds and claim our right to grow….”

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Review: Lyons Carry Cases

3/16/2016

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Lyons Carry Cases is a Seattle-based company dedicated to providing locally-manufactured, high quality pouches designed specifically for your pipe, pot, and vaporizer — and any other bit of paraphernalia that might be kicking around your pockets.

The fabric seems sturdy, and each Lyons case is clearly built to survive the regular wear and tear of everyday use.

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A medium-sized Lyons Carry Case. Large-sized case is pictured above.

Each pouch is designed to be opened and closed with ease using magnetic strips, so there’s no fuss messing with unnecessary zippers or buttons, and there is even gel padding worked into the pouch’s structure to help ensure the safety of your pipe, vaporizer, and any other fragile possessions.

It’s a neat niche product, but one that could also easily be used for carrying other important parts of your life, such as your cell phone, keys, or cash.

Currently, the Lyons Carry Case is offered in three sizes: small, medium and large. Visit the company website — www.lyons.land — to read more about their unique pipe pouch offerings, or to purchase your own!

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National Poll: Americans Want Cannabis Rescheduled and Legalized

3/16/2016

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Yet another poll is suggesting what most people already know: U.S. citizens are ready to end the prohibition of marijuana.

Washington D.C. consulting firm Morning Consult released poll results last week that indicate 52 percent of registered American voters support the full recreational legalization of cannabis. Only 43 percent said they were opposed, and 5 percent were unsure.

The results come with a margin of error of +/- 2 percent.

83 percent of respondents agreed that cannabis has no place as a top priority controlled substance, believing that the plant should at the very least be rescheduled — or removed from the Controlled Substances Act entirely.

Unsurprisingly, cannabis reform was most popular among younger voters (63 percent of 18-29 year olds and 60 percent of 30-45 year olds) and Democrats (61 percent). Meanwhile, Republicans (37 percent) and older individuals (35 percent of voters aged 65 and higher) were the most likely to oppose the legalization of marijuana.

This poll echoes the same sentiments of nearly every recent national poll that has broached the subject, and is a clear sign that cannabis reform has gone mainstream in the past several years. With multiple legalization efforts underway for this coming election season, the U.S. appears poised to soon move beyond the tipping point of full-on federal reform.

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Lawmaker Scores Second Chance for Georgia Medical Cannabis Bill

3/16/2016

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A bit of fast legislative footwork on the part of Georgia Rep. Allen Peake has breathed new life into a bill that would expand the list of qualifying conditions for medical cannabis in the state.

Peake, a Republican from Macon, had sponsored a bill that would put autism, HIV or AIDS, and post-traumatic stress disorder on the list of conditions that give immunity for the possession of medical cannabis. The bill passed the Georgia House 152 to 8 last month, but it stalled in the Senate.

State Sen. Renee Unterman, who chairs the Health and Human Services committee, said the committee wouldn’t have time to hold a hearing on the bill before next week, when lawmakers convene in the Senate.

Rep. Peake was able to trash another bill that had already been approved by the Health and Human Services committee and replace it with another version of his own bill. The move allows the bill to be sent back to House for a floor vote and then directly to the Senate for approval without going to Unterman’s committee for approval.

“We live to fight another day,” said Rep. Peake. “This gives more citizens who have debilitating illness an option. The question becomes: ‘Why wouldn’t we do this?’”

It remains to be seen whether the bill will get voted on in the final 40 days of the legislative session, but Peake’s move at least gives the bill a fighting chance.

Rep. Peake had initially tried to pass legislation that would have let state-approved cannabis producers operate in the state, but push-back in the House and from Gov. Nathan Deal made the bill unviable.

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Montana Activists File Petition Delaying Medical Cannabis Restrictions

3/16/2016

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Cannabis advocates in Montana have filed a petition that delays implementing a controversial ruling issued last month, in which the Montana Supreme Court upheld a 2011 provision that limits caregivers to providing for a maximum of three patients, essentially gutting the state’s medical marijuana industry.

Advocates filed a petition on Friday asking the court for a transition period through the next legislative session, which would end in April 2017, The Associated Press report. The petition also calls on the court to do away with the three-patient limit entirely.

Some Montana law enforcement officials, however, are already clamoring to see dispensaries close their doors. Attorney General Stuart Segrest wrote in a response to the petition that the State Department of Justice opposes any delay to the dispensary shutdowns, and they oppose lifting the three-patient restrictions.

Reversely, Montana health officials seem to be siding with patients, arguing that it will take months for the Department of Public Health & Human Services to carry out the regulatory changes, and that a lengthy transition period would be ideal.

As of February, there are 13,594 patients registered with the Montana medical marijuana program, and there are 476 providers — twenty-six of whom have a customer base of more than 100 patients each.

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Ata Gonzalez: Betting Everything on a Cannabis Start-Up

3/16/2016

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Ata Gonzalez is the founder of GFarmaLabs, a cannabis processor and infused product manufacturer based in California which has developed several hit products including Liquid Gold chocolate, which won the 2014 Cannabis Cup Best Edible award. We recently connected with Ata to learn about how he started his company from scratch and grew it into the massive success that it is, what he thinks the future of legal cannabis looks like, and what advice he has to offer to people who are considering starting a cannabis business of their own. Check out the full Q&A below!

 

Ganjapreneur: What was your career prior to entering the cannabis industry?

Ata Gonzalez: I have always been an entrepreneur. Around the year 2000 I became a student of the real estate investment world and I was hooked. I bought, fixed, sold and did new constructions throughout South Florida. I found my niche in low income neighborhoods. Whether building new constructions, or fixing and flipping older properties, I fell in love with investing in low income neighborhoods and beautifying them.

I was really good at finding and negotiating great deals. I ended my real estate investment days when I was just beginning to get the swing of the commercial side of the game. I also owned a small shopping center and fell in love with the difference between renting out a house vs. leasing a commercial property, the responsibility of everything falls on the tenant except the roof and walls of the building.

When 2007 came I felt the end of the boom was near. My partner and I sat and mapped out our exit strategy, cutting the fat from our portfolio and staying lean. We executed our plan to perfection and now that we had sold most of our portfolio we had money to do whatever we felt would be next. As any great chess player, I never looked at today, my eye was always on the horizon. Unfortunately, not everything good lasts forever…

All I knew was that I had a good lifestyle and all that cost money to maintain. The bills kept coming month in, and month out yet no income from anywhere. My partner and I decided to go into the music industry. We produced salsa music events and hip hop music. By 2009, I was hitting rock bottom, millions had been spent in the music industry with some minor success but no really substantial income coming in, yet the bills kept piling up. The Great Recession hit me hard, and homelessness wasn’t too far off in my mind if I didn’t turn things around. At the time that I located and finally rented a farm in Northern California, I literally took out my last seven thousand dollars for the deposit which was forty-five hundred dollars. I was left with twenty-five hundred dollars to my name and a pregnant wife with my second child. No pressure!

When did you first see cannabis as a career opportunity?

I went to pick up my wife’s best friend from the airport, she had been in LA for a modeling shoot. She gets in the car and says, “You have to go to LA, there’s a lot of weed out there! There are stores everywhere that sell it for medical purposes.” I couldn’t sleep that night! I knew I was spiraling down faster than a Mig after being shot down by enemy fire and I felt helpless. I was ready to go anywhere to make sure that I was able to provide food for my family. It wasn’t even about luxuries at the time, they meant so little after you have always been successful and had everything and now you see yourself like never ever before.

I spent much of 2009 getting to know California, from San Diego to San Francisco, and Mendocino to Humboldt county. I became part of a collective in NorCal who would be responsible for teaching me the basics in cannabis, before registering to attend Oaksterdam in 2010 to learn the particulars of cultivation, processing, growth, and farming in a more proper scholastic atmosphere. That experience is what really gave me my start, and as a result of my exploration, I had a chance to really see how huge this booming cannabis industry was going to be nationally. Once I finished my studies, I set out to get the ball rolling on establishing my own presence within the space.

When you were first starting out, how did you fund your initial investment in equipment and products?

As I mentioned above, after giving the deposit of forty-five hundred dollars to rent the seven acre farm, I had twenty-five hundred dollars to my name. I have been trained to never say we “can’t” do something, a person that is determined and never gives up will always find a way to…find the way. The farm itself was an entirely self-funded bootstrapping effort (and a bit of a gamble at the same time). When I called an electrician to wire up the barn, he assessed the property and suggested I start planting outside instead. Given the time of year (and learning that I was allowed to do so), that marked the first precursor seeds to be sowed in pursuit of the G FarmaLabs vision.

Given the relatively inexpensive nature of an outdoor grow – just needed ninety-nine clones and water (obviously there were most logistical components, but that’s the gist of it) – the approach made it feasible to seek out the help friends and family to ask for a small investment. My mother was the first to come through, offering up an additional $10,000 to help kickstart the outdoor grow. We finished planting the initial round of plants by mid-July of that year.

It was a rough road – after bringing my wife and child out to join me, we were forced to sleep on a mattress on the floor, using cardboard boxes as nightstands, and ate ham and cheese sandwiches daily until the harvest was ready in mid October. To put the pressure on even more, my wife had given birth to our second-born the month before.

This was just the beginning. Every dime made went back into the business to buy more equipment, rent other properties, build-out other cultivation sites as our Collective became bigger and bigger. By 2012, we were tired of just being farmers and we began investing into the retail dispensary side of things. By 2013, we created the Liquid Gold brand of product and went from simply operating G Farms and G Farmacy to G FarmaLabs. In 2016 after restructuring the company for future sustainable growth, we became G FarmaBrands. This parent company oversees all the different entities under its umbrella.

Back to 2013, after enough experience and studying industry trends to predict the market, we felt the right move was to go into producing a brand of vape oils, chocolates and pre-rolled cannabis. My wife’s family – specifically her grandfather, was a master tobacco blender – I used the concept to blend our line of twelve different proprietary blends of G Stiks, different blends of Liquid Gold Vape oil, etc…

While there were already companies that specialized in each of the product lines I mentioned above individually, we were the first to offer up a ‘one-stop’ solution, uniting everything under one banner. Today G FarmaLabs offers its accounts nearly 100 SKU’s. Till this day we continue leading the way in America in cannabis product infusion. We have edibles, drinkables, oils and pre-rolls… As well as our digital marketing arm who does not touch the leaf, www.GFarma.TV and GFarma.NEWS.

How long did it take until your business was fully self-supporting?

It’s still tough to grow because of the lack of financial institution-based support (due to federal prohibition), so depending on loans is essentially out of the question. All our growth and sustainability had to be organic. We have been entirely self-sufficient financially since we cropped the first harvest in 2010. That was the turning point, really when we saw how we needed to strategize for steady growth in the most independent way possible.

What was one of the largest obstacles you faced while growing the company?

THE single biggest obstacle to growth we’ve ever faced (and our still facing – thankfully to a lesser degree in California given recent legislation) has to be regulations. It’s extremely difficult to navigate the constantly changing legal national landscape. Since 2010, I have seen horror stories. Maintaining and keeping a brand in market, in the midst of all that is incredibly difficult and the leader must be filled with strategies. It’s so much easier when done as a team. Essentially, because of all the ‘grey-area’ in reference to federal vs state laws, causes setbacks resulting in slower growth but through our own strategies we continue growing at a sustainable pace.

I consult the G FarmaBrands C-Suite on my vision of the future and on the strategic moves I feel we should make. My advice at the moment is not to get caught up in all the press releases from other companies that are growing at lightning speed from state to state and country to country. It’s all nonsense and not sustainable, believe me. Slow and steady will always create a strong foundation and we will be here for the long run, not just for a press release but to win the race!

Where do you see your company in 5 years?

We are working on a ten year plan at G FarmaBrands. With the industry being so nascent, the sky is the limit–five years doesn’t seem like it is too much time. I can tell you that California and Washington will be well underway at that point. I wonder what other territories we will expand G FarmaBrands to next. We have not licensed any territory yet to outsiders and the next future territories will hopefully continue to be those fully controlled by G FarmaBrands.

At what point did you incorporate CO2 extraction into your business model?

As soon as we decided to create a brand in 2013, we began looking for the right equipment for extraction process. Because we were rookies at the time to extraction, and weren’t as well versed in the right machinery, we ended up buying the wrong equipment, an EmoTek butane close looped system, rather than a Co2 extractor. During the training was when we realized the huge mistake we had made. We have never used this machine to this day, even though it’s the Cadillac of closed loop butane extractors.

To remedy the situation, I did some research online, ordered our first Co2, 20 Liter, and brought in one of our existing collective members that had the correct scientific/operational drive to gain an expertise in the use and functionality of the machine, as well as figure out and understand the processes involved in our CO2 extraction methods – it was an excellent recommendation of an employee by our Chief Operating Officer. Today Luigi is G FarmaBrands Chief Technology Officer.

How much of your business is currently in extraction?

I would say that approximately 75% is extraction for oil, which is either used for vape oil or for the infusion of nearly one hundred different product offerings.

Extraction Q’s: What role do you think extraction will play in the future of the cannabis industry?
I believe extractions will continue to be the future of the cannabis industry. Science will become more and more involved to come out with different forms to cure certain ailments. Cannabinoids will be understood much more through science in the future.

What do you think would be the best approach for California to legalize recreational cannabis?

This is a bit of a tough question since I’m not really a policy expert, but from the entrepreneurial point of view, I think the path we’ve currently been set on is the best one to yield the results we need. Before Gov. Brown’s recent trio of bills, California’s entire MMJ market was the wild west, so to speak. Zero regulation and pretty much an open door for DEA raiding parties. Now that the medical component has been revamped, it’ll open the floodgates for voters and government officials to understand that this sort of stability on the medical front can be sustained recreationally – not to mention the huge influx of additional tax revenue a recreational market the size of CA can bring in for both, the local cities as well as the state.

Thing is, it’ll take money, the right sort of lobbying efforts, and a huge turnout by voters young and old alike. Thankfully, perceptions throughout the entire spectrum are changing, and I think we’ll see that when the vote comes up later this year. The best approach really is to remain steadfast in terms of regulation – tobacco and alcohol thrive because of it – and implementing the correct guidelines (age restrictions, QA testing, packaging warnings, advertising stipulations, etc) will allow cannabis the same shot. It’s time!

Do you think now that other states have legalized recreational cannabis, that voters in California will be more likely to support it?

I would hope that it does go recreational but you never know… We will continue to operate under our current guidelines and the future California regulations that were announced and if recreational comes, great! If not, we didn’t get our hopes up. I believe marijuana will become recreational in every state, eventually…

What advice would you give to an aspiring ganjapreneur?

I’ll refer to an example of something that was told to me when I was (ironically) in high school detention one time. My principal used to make me write one phrase over and over as punishment, and it was something that I never forgot: “Young Gentleman, Never Give Up, Never Give Up, Never Give Up,” which was one of Winston Churchill’s famous lines. I’ve taken that philosophy with me into the business world, as well as within my own home; we raise our kids with this same formula. You can’t say ‘NO’ and you can never give up!

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Tad Hussey: Wild-Crafted Probiotic Nutrients

3/16/2016

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Tad Hussey is the manager of Keep it Simple Organics, an organic soil provider, edible nursery, and hydroponics shop based in Washington State. He also manages the website LogicalGardener.org, and recently gave a presentation about the benefits of organic soil at CannaCon. Tad joins our host Shango Los this week for a discussion about using wild ingredients to craft custom probiotics and compost teas to use for growing cannabis, including why it is beneficial to plants, what some of his favorite ingredients to use are, and more.

Listen to the podcast below or scroll down for the full transcript!

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Shango Los: Hi there, and welcome to the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast. I am your host, Shango Los. The Ganjapreneur.com Podcast gives us an opportunity to speak directly to entrepreneurs, cannabis growers, product developers, and cannabis medicine researchers while focused on making the most of cannabis normalization. As your host, I do my best to bring you original cannabis industry ideas that’ll ignite your own entrepreneurial spark, and give you actionable information to improve your business strategy, and improve your health, and the health of cannabis patients everywhere.

Today, my guest is Tad Hussey of Keep It Simple Organics. Founded by Tad’s father, Leon Hussey, Keep It Simple is an edible nursery, production green house, outdoor preschool, organic hydro shop, and feed store in Washington state. Tad is an educator and sought after speaker on probiotic growing. Today we are going to talk to him about all-natural and wild crafted inputs for cannabis. Thanks for being on the show, Tad.

Tad Hussey: Thanks for having me.

Shango Los: Tad, cannabis enthusiasts are becoming more educated about pesticides and they’re constantly looking for better ways to avoid them. Growers are sharing information and best practices online in places like the Probiotic Farmer’s Alliance group on Facebook and other places. What inspired your dad to establish your family farm as a place for growing organically and educating folks?

Tad Hussey: Growing up, organics was something that was always important to our family in general, so we’ve always treated the property as such, especially because it is a seven acre property that has a salmon spawning stream on it. It was especially important that we did not use any chemicals or pesticides that might pollute the waters or endanger the wildlife that we had in our neighboring area. It’s something that’s always been a high priority to our family in general.

Shango Los: We’re not going to be taking anything away from pre-bottled organic solutions today, but today we’re going to talk about stuff that is wild crafted because I was very happy to hear your CannaCon presentation two weeks ago. You kind of went down this list of things that I could wild craft myself, and make into teas, and other things that would replace a lot of these bottles, and it ends up being less expensive, and more natural, and in many cases, way more effective. Let’s start with a couple of those that you’re particularly a fan of. What is one of your favorite, easy to use, wild crafted solutions that cannabis farmers can involve in their garden?

Tad Hussey: I think starting with the life of the plant originally we could look at willow as a great option. Anything in the Salix family you can make willow water out of and that’s going to contain IBA and salicylic acid. IBA is what you find it’s in most of the propagation water solutions or liquid mediums that you find online, like Dip’N’Grow, and things like that. Salicylic acid is another great one that comes in there, it’s a component of it, and it contains very similar components to Aspirin, and will help with antiseptic and antibiotic properties. You can literally go out, find a willow tree, one inch twigs off of new growth where the bark is still grooming and has not turned brown, and soak that for several days or boil it. Then you can take that water and essentially root your cuttings by watering your plant with it instead of using any of the propagation liquids that are available on the market.

Shango Los: I see, so that would replace something like a Clonex or something like that.

Tad Hussey: Exactly. Exact same chemical components, just you’re getting them naturally.

Shango Los: The soaking option is pretty easy to understand. You just cut it, and throw it in a bucket, and let it soak, probably with a bubbler, but I had never heard of boiling before. How long would you boil it for and in just water, right?

Tad Hussey: Yeah, typically with everything we’re talking about today in regards to these wild plant extracts, you have two options. You can either boil the material for 20 minutes to an hour to extract it or you can let it soak over a period of several days. It will be a lot stronger if you let it soak and take the time to do that, but it may be stinkier or you may not have that time, so the boiling is an option.

Shango Los: I would think, too, that boiling would probably destroy some potential vital components, so if you’ve got the time, probably soaking’s going to be slower, but probably better.

Tad Hussey: I haven’t seen any good research to show what enzymes and such may be destroyed by boiling. People are obviously still doing it, which suggests that it can still be effective, but I do agree that going with the longer process would probably be much better in the long term.

Shango Los: After you’ve soaked the willow in the bucket and you’ve got this awesome willow water, do I need to reduce the water? I’m just trying to figure about the strength of the water. If I’ve packed my bucket with willow and then covered it with water, can I assume that the ratio’s going to be correct, or do I need to vape off any of the water or anything like that to make it the proper strength?

Tad Hussey: That’s a great question. If you go online and start researching it, you’ll see a ton of different recommendations, so basically, I don’t think anyone’s really dialed in the exact rates. I would recommend experimenting with it a little bit and kind of figuring out what works for you. In general with the other plant extracts that we’re talking about, you’re typically anywhere from 20-50:1 in regards to the amount of water that you’re adding, but with the willow water, I think that’s less of an issue.

Shango Los: Willow’s a great replacement that’s all natural. What’s another good one that you like to recommend?

Tad Hussey: Probably my next favorite would be Comfrey. Now, many people are familiar with Comfrey and they see it as this aggressive plant that will take over your yard if you plant it. Fortunately, there is a variety called Bocking 14 that’s out of Russia that is sterile. It’s something that we use around our farm all the time. We use it, actually, as a weed barrier around our garden as a way of keeping weed seeds from flying in because it’s such a great grower and it produces so much biomass. We also use it as a natural mulch. Many farmers will plant it in a guild around a fruit tree, for example, because one plant can produce four to five pounds of biomass in a season and you’ll cut it down twice.

All those nutrients, because it’s a dynamic accumulator, meaning it has a really good tap root and it pulls nutrients out of the soil into the leaf surface, or the biomass. You can then cut that all down and lay it down around the plant as a way of giving it additional fertilizer or you can make a tea out of it. It’s very rich in calcium, a ton of other nutrients. You can add it to your compost and there was even a study out of Russia that found that it suppressed powdery mildew when sprayed on the leaves of wheat seedlings, so it has some pesticidal properties, too, possibly.

Shango Los: Would I prepare this the same way we described with the willow, where I’m going to soak it for a few days with a bubbler in a bucket to be able to extract the goodies?

Tad Hussey: For this, you would want to take it and stuff, because you’ll have a lot of leaves if you have it, you can stuff it into a bucket, and fill the bucket about half way full with the leaves, and let it sit for a week or so. It will have an odor. Then at the end of the week you can strain out the water and then apply it at 15:1. One other thing I’d like to add about Comfrey is the NPK on it is 1.55 on average, so it’s a lot higher in potassium, so you just need to be aware of that when you’re using it.

Shango Los: We’re going to do a couple more of these after the break, but we’ve got about two minutes left, so let’s try to sneak in another one before the break. What’s another good one that you like to recommend? Willow and Comfrey both sound like great solutions.

Tad Hussey: Sure, Borage is very similar to Comfrey and might be easier for people to source locally. One thing about Borage to be aware of is it does self-sew, meaning if you let it go to seed it will start to take over your yard. One nice thing about it though is it’s very easy to pull as a weed. It comes right out of the ground. It is also a dynamic accumulator and it has these beautiful purple flower petals that are also edible, so when I grow it in my yard I like to add the flower petals to salads and such to give them color. They don’t really have a lot of flavor.

Shango Los: I would think that since we are being a little … Not so much with the willow tree, but these last two, they’ve been species-specific, so you’d either have to be a really good wildcrafter to be able to ID it in the wild and kind of hope that they’re indigenous to where ever you live, but this sounds like this might be something where you actually want to buy seeds that are specific to the Latin name so you’re making sure that you’re using the right thing. Do you recommend starting from seed and buying them that way so you know what you’re working with?

Tad Hussey: They’re fairly easy to identify. I definitely recommend getting your hands on the Comfrey and getting the Bocking 14 so that you do have a sterile variety, because otherwise Comfrey will take over your yard and spread quite rapidly, but the nice thing about the sterile variety is that it’s very easy to propagate, so for us, we started with one root cutting three or four years ago, and we now have hundreds of plants and start plants for other people because you literally need a half inch to an inch of a root in order to start a new plant. Once you’ve planted the plant somewhere, it’s there for life. Any time you try and dig it out, you’ll miss a little bit of the roots and a new plant will pop up, so you have to really commit to where you want to keep that, but once you have it there, it’s really easy to share with friends, propagate, and get more.

Shango Los: Well, we’re going to take a short break and be right back. You are listening to the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast.

Welcome back. You are listening to the Ganjapreneur.com Podcast. I am you host Shango Los. Our guest this week is Tad Hussey of Keep It Simple Organics. Tad, before the break we were talking about wildcrafted options for your cannabis garden so that you don’t have to buy bottled nutrients and you could also have some fun wild crafting out in nature. I want to hit a couple more of them. Before the break we talked about willow, Comfrey, and Borage. What’s another one that you really like to tell people about to help them save money and help their plants?

Tad Hussey: There’s two that really go together here in the northwest, and that would be stinging nettles and horsetail or Equisetum. They’re both very easy to find here in the Seattle area and they’re both quite high in silica. Silica is an important element because it’s been found to help with heat stress specifically, thicker stalks and cellular walls, which is really important for cannabis growers so that we’re not breaking stalks as the plants develop larger buds.

It’s also great because it helps mitigate plant toxicity for micro-nutrients, so if you have a little too much molybdenum, or iron, or any of these micro-nutrients, what it will do is the silica helps spread that evenly through the leaf surface so you have less damage to the plant. This is one of the best natural sources of silica, so both of these can be made up the exact same way as we talked about with the Comfrey and the Borage.

One other thing I wanted to mention, when you’re making these teas, what you can do is add a couple drops at the end of the brew if you’re planning on doing a foliar application, this will act as a surfactant. You can use either Dawn or I prefer Doctor Bronner’s. It’s just a really clean neutral soap that doesn’t have any additives, but either would work great for that.

Shango Los: Would you kind of break that out for me? You said using the soap as a surfactant. For those of us, including me, who don’t really know how that works, could you break that out?

Tad Hussey: Sure, so many of the bottled nutrients that you buy that are designed to be sprayed in a foliar manner have a surfactant added. That just essentially helps it stick to the leaves in simplistic terms. By adding something like that, it just gives you a better surface coverage and allows the nutrients to stay on the leaf surface where you want them. In addition to that, another thing you could use is Yucca, that’s another really popular surfactant and then lastly Aloe is another one you can source.

Shango Los: You would just either take the aloe or the yucca and just cut it up into pieces and throw it in the bucket for the last day of the brew?

Tad Hussey: I haven’t experimented with that. Typically for those I’ve purchased them as powders. They’re very affordable online and so I’ll just add a little bit of that in, or as a liquid. I haven’t tried adding them into the brew, but I assume it would work in a similar fashion.

Shango Los: What’s another one? I think that this is right along the lines that we want to talk about. I’ve heard alfalfa before. Is alfalfa a good one?

Tad Hussey: Alfalfa is great. Most people are not growing alfalfa, but the wonderful thing about it is you can usually find it really affordably at a feed store near your garden center. For example, we have organic alfalfa meal in our feed store. I think a 40 pound bag is under $25. The great thing about alfalfa is it’s a wonderful microbial food. It’s great food source for bacteria and fungi. In addition to that, it’s got a small amount of fast-released nitrogen, and it’s a great additive into compost piles, as well as you can make a tea our of it, or mix it into your soil mix when you’re initially mixing your soil. The other added benefit of alfalfa is it contains triacontanol, which is a plant growth hormone that’s beneficial for your plants as well. That’s why you typically hear it associated with rose growers, for example. They always like to add it in when they’re planting their roses.

Shango Los: Since I’ve been thinking about this in the cannabis realm, I didn’t really think about these solutions being used for ornamentals. I bet you these teas would be really great for both my ornamentals and my food garden as well.

Tad Hussey: Yeah, a lot of the people that are doing these things are not cannabis growers. I think it’s unfortunate that that is the case. I’m hoping to see more and more over time, but there are definitely some wonderful permaculture cannabis growers that are using all of these teas, and all these different plants, and essentially growing for pennies. They’re producing great quality herb. I don’t think they’re sacrificing anything in that regard.

Shango Los: Let’s talk a little bit about mycorrhizal fungus. We know that mycorrhizal fungus acts like the freeways for the nutrients and transports them up to the plant. Would you explain how that works and how using these teas can help create an environment that’s good for mycorrhizal fungus?

Tad Hussey: I’d say the best advantage to using these teas or just organic nutrients in general is you’re not risking killing off any mycorrhizal infection or association that you may have established when you first planted the plant. In regards to mycorrhizal fungus, what we’re looking for is endomikoriza, and specifically in this case, glomus intraradices or glomus mosseae. In order to compare products, you want to look at the spore counts on these. My personal favorite right now as of this show would be a product called Mykos. It’s made by RTI and it contains 80 spores per cc, which is the highest one I’ve found for the price. Now, I think there’s slightly better ones on the market, but you’re going to pay exponentially more. Personally, I just use a little bit more Mykos when I go to plant than I would of one of these other products.

In regards to how it works, mycorrhizal fungus is one of the primary ways the plant receives phosphorus in the natural system. It has a lot of benefit for the plant. It’s a one time application directly to the root zone and then you can forget about it. I like to take my rooted clones, sprinkle the mycorrhizal fungus into the hole, right where it’s going to come in direct contact with the root, and then I forget about it. I don’t worry about it for the life of the plant. When I reuse my soil for my next cycle, I’m more confident that there’s going to be active hyphae in there ready to reinfect the new plant, so I have faster infection rates for my next crop.

Shango Los: There’s a lot of interest suddenly in no-till planting because the idea is that all the nutrients and the mycelium in the soil, you don’t want to interrupt and break up those expressways. Is this the same with mycorrhizal fungus? I know that a lot of people take their pot, and they pitch the soil out into a pile, and then they pull from that pile again, but then other folks just go ahead and replant right into that pot without disturbing the soil at all. As far as keeping potent mycorrhizal fungus, is that a good idea to keep that alive as well?

Tad Hussey: I think it’s a good practice. Our philosophy is when you harvest your plant, for example, it’s not a closed system. You’re pulling out organic matter and you’re pulling out nutrients when you take out that crop. That has to be replaced over time. When you go to harvest your plant, for example, you can literally grab the stock, pull out the plant, and whatever roots come out is great. You’ll shake off the soil and you won’t dig around any further in the soil looking for more roots or to pull out more plant matter. You take your plant away and harvest it, and then you’ll add in back into that soil a bunch of different nutrients and organic amendments.

With our company, we have a product called our Nutrient Pack that we’ve done a bunch of research, and soil testing, and figured out how much to add it back into our soils so that we can optimize that rate, but there’s many ways you can do this and there’s plenty of recipes, but by having all those nutrients back in the soil, you’re essentially putting the plant in charge, allowing it to select for what minerals and nutrients it wants at different stages of its life cycle. We heavily amend the soil, we add in a little bit more worm castings and compost to replace the organic matter, and over time we may add aeration in the form of perlite and pumice, and then we replant.

We just lightly dig into the first couple inches of the soil because that area of the soil is designed in nature and from a biological perspective, to be disturbed naturally, so you’re not damaging these pathways further down in the root zone. Those nutrients will make their way down over time. We’re literally bringing our next crop into our flowering rooms 24-36 hours later, so there’s no downtime waiting for the soil to recook or heat up again because we don’t have to add as many nutrients for our second cycle or our third cycle down the road.

Shango Los: I can imagine that it’s kind of like setting up a buffet of all these great nutrients for the plant and so that when you transplant it into the container, it’s all like, “Oh, man. This is like everything I could possibly need and it’s all right here.” I can imagine how that would make some killer trees. We need to take another short break. We’ll be right back. You are listening to the ganjapreneur.com podcast.

Welcome back. You are listening to the ganjapreneur.com podcast. I am your host Shango Los and our guest this week is Tad Hussey of Keep It Simple Organics. During the break, Tad and I were talking about compost teas versus extract teas, and he went over my head real fast. Tad, let’s bring that conversation here onto the show. What is the difference between the extracted teas we’ve been talking about on this show so far and aerated compost teas, which I thought were the same thing, but obviously now I’m learning they’re not.

Tad Hussey: Sure, Shango. Basically for people who want to do more research about these things that we talked about today, I would suggest putting in the name of the plant that we discussed, for example you could put in nettle teas for plants, and you’ll get a bunch of information that way, or alfalfa, or comfrey, or borage. That would be a good way to research those. They’re typically called FPE or fermented plant extracts. These teas are all designed to add specific nutrients, enzymes, and those sorts of plant benefits, whereas when we’re looking at aerated compost teas, what we’re looking to do there is add beneficial micro-organisms. These are things like bacteria, archaea, fungi, protozoa, flagellates, and amoeba. Those are all the things that we’re growing in the brewer when we’re making aerated compost teas.

There’s a huge difference here. With these nutrient teas, we’re trying to add nutrients to the soil for the beneficial micro-organisms to break down and make plants available. When we’re making aerated compost teas, we’re actually looking to increase the number of micro-organisms and diversity that we have in the soil itself to speed up and make more efficient this nutrient cycling process. That’s the biggest difference between the two.

Shango Los: I know compost teas could probably be its own show, but in this last section, it was as simple as taking compost out of my composter, putting it in a bucket with some water and a bubbler, and that will breed the micro-organisms. Is it that simple?

Tad Hussey: Yes and no. It’s a tough question because there’s a lot of research that goes into this as well, including the fact that you can do lab testing, and direct microscopy, and all these other ways of measuring the quantity and quality of your compost teas. Now, in terms of making compost teas, for example, you want to maintain six parts per million of oxygen through the entire brew cycle, so there’s a balance there between getting enough oxygen into the brew and not adding too many food sources for the amount of biology that you add with the compost. It can get very complicated.

To just simplify things, the simple answer is yes, you can do it with an air stone and a bucket, but the quality of your tea will not be quite as high as, say if you have a brewer with an air lift or a diffuser and actually have some research to support the system that you’re using. If people are interested in compost teas, I would suggest checking out a website by a friend of mine, Tim Wilson. It’s microbeorganics.com. He’s a wonderful researcher and his information is really solid. Another great compost tea resource would be logicalgardener.org. That’s just a free forum with science-based horticultural information that’s run by Tim and I, and has a great write up on exactly what compost teas are.

Shango Los: Great, that’s a great start for folks. I want to end off since we’re talking about using compost and we’re also talking about wild crafting some of this stuff, what’s the likelihood of introducing contaminants into the garden by bringing things out of the wild? Say, for example, e. coli?

Tad Hussey: That’s a good question. I personally don’t think that there’s a lot of issue there. If you have a lot of aerobic micro-organisms and you have healthy soil, there really isn’t a lot of chance for something like e. coli, which is a facultative anaerobic, to really get a hold. Realistically, if you’re talking about things that are not manure based, like we’re talking about all these plants with Borage, and Comfrey, and horsetail, you’re not really bringing in a lot of e. coli into your system, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

Shango Los: Good because we certainly wouldn’t want to be poisoning our own gardens. Tad, thank you so much for being on the show. This has been a really interesting topic. Everybody wants to avoid expensive pesticides and because of their health harms. This is not only a fun project to do and something that you can involve your kids in, but also it’s going to save a lot of coins, so thanks for coming and sharing your experience.

Tad Hussey: Thanks for having me.

Shango Los: You can find out more about Tad Hussey and Keep It Simple Organics on their website at kisogranics.com. You can also view Tad’s entire presentation at CannaCon Seattle two weeks ago in the videos section of the Ganjapreneur.com website. You can find more episodes of the Ganjapreneur Podcast in the podcast section at Ganjapreneur.com and in the Apple iTunes store.

On the Ganjapreneur.com website you will find the latest cannabis news, product reviews, and cannabis jobs updated daily along with transcriptions of this podcast. You can also download the Ganjapreneur.com App in iTunes and Google Play. You can also find this show on the iHeartRadio Network App, bringing Ganjapreneur to 60 million mobile devices.

Do you have a company that wants to reach our national audience of cannabis enthusiasts? Email grow@ganjapreneur.com to find out how. Thanks to Brasco for producing our show. I am your host, Shango Los.

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Hemp Bill Vetoed in Washington State Over Budget Fight

3/15/2016

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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) vetoed 27 bills at the end of the legislature’s 60-day session last week, including one authorizing the state Agriculture Department to permit selected farmers to grow hemp for research purposes.

The Seattle Times reported the vetoes were the governor’s effort to get lawmakers to compromise on a budget and plans for K-12 education funding.

“I have remained willing to do any meeting, any time with legislators,” Inslee said in the report. “…You bet I’d like to help them, but fundamentally they have to, themselves, step up to the plate and make the hard compromises that are necessary to get a budget.”

The hemp bill (ESSB 6206) would have allowed for some farmers to become licensed to grow the plant in order for Washington State University to study the “feasibility and desirability” for industrial hemp in the state. The bill easily passed both legislative bodies – 48-1 in the Senate and 97-0 in the House – and could be reintroduced, and voted on, during the 30-day special session ordered by Inslee in order for the legislature to come to a budget agreement.

State Rep. Cary Condotta (R) took to Facebook to condemn the move, calling it “a childish fit of rage.”

“[The] governor has vetoed a number of really good bills including our hemp bill which was three years in the making,” Condotta wrote early last Friday morning. “I would hope that democrats and republicans (sic) alike would immediately start a re call (sic) campaign for this idiot who has never had any business holding this office to start with.”

Inslee did sign some bills at the end of the session with the “common thread” of health, public safety and law enforcement.      

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A scattered stack of $100 bills in USD.

U.S. Cannabis Industry Could Grow to $44 Billion by 2020

3/15/2016

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The cannabis industry in the United States could grow to be a $44 billion industry by 2020 according to current legalization and economic trends.

Data released in the 2016 Marijuana Business Factbook, published by Marijuana Business Daily, indicate that the yearly economic impact of the U.S. cannabis industry will grow from $14 billion-$17 billion this year to between $24 billion and $44 billion in 2020.

The publication’s projections reflect the compounded effects of legalization throughout the nation. As the industry becomes more and more palatable to communities around the nation, it creates a ripple effect of job growth, tax revenue, and legalization.

The estimates garnered from the data aim to reflect the broadest possible impact of the cannabis industry’s growth. The data is based on current recreational sales and prices. For every dollar spent on retail cannabis, three dollars in economic benefit is created.

According to the report, 2016 will see retail cannabis sales reach between $3.5 billion and $4.3 billion — that would be a growth of between 17% and 26% from last year. Furthermore, total sales of recreational cannabis could overtake medical sales as soon as 2018.

Overall, the future for the cannabis industry is bright, and this fall could prove big for the legalization movement. California, Nevada, and Massachusetts are among those states that could legalize recreational marijuana in November, and voters in Florida and Ohio have the chance to legalize medical cannabis as well.

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