What's new
  • Please note members who been with us for more than 10 years have been upgraded to "Veteran" status and will receive exclusive benefits. If you wish to find out more about this or support IcMag and get same benefits, check this thread here.
  • Important notice: ICMag's T.O.U. has been updated. Please review it here. For your convenience, it is also available in the main forum menu, under 'Quick Links"!

Tour of a 502 Grow: Legal Recreational Cannabis

GOT_BUD?

Weed is a gateway to gardening
ICMag Donor
Veteran
There's several grow 'companies' leasing a chunk of land a local farmer provides. The growers work together to buy fertilizer, clones, hoses, drying equipment, etc. During the grow period a couple guys can turn the water on/off, operate the light deprivation hoop houses, manage the guard cameras, so everyone doesn't have to be there 24/7. I'm thinking at harvest time they probably use the same crews. The local migrant labor finishes it's hop and apple harvest a couple weeks earlier so they're happy for the work.
I noticed there were several parcels that were empty. I forgot to ask him about it. Maybe people between harvests still plenty of time to plug more clones. Or failures.
The tax question is a good one I forgot to ask. I'll see if I can get an answer. I'm thinking the buyer pays the 'sales tax' and the grower has to pay an excise tax? On the total amount he ends up selling? So half of the $.40 could go to the state? $100 a lb is fucking nuts. I'm guessing in California you need to plan on growing well over a 1000 pounds to stay afloat let alone make a profit. Especially if growers are low balling to drive the less wealthy ones out of business.
One problem they were having, the tiers work according to canopy space. They have a smaller tier so less canopy space. They had filled their canopy space plus some. They were worried about the inspectors charging a fee (fine I guess?) for going over the set limits. The way he said it makes me think canopy space is taxed.
I googled Washington state 502 producers for information and found a lot of data posted by the state. Check it out lots of interesting stuff about how much money everyone is making or not making.
Besides the statistics the state also had a spot producers, processors, and retailers could do business. Depressing seeing all the low offers the trip out there was kind of like a punch in the gut. I've held out hope that at some point I'd be able to retire out of town to a nice acreage with good water, lots of fruit trees, with a 502 license. Grow the best and make enough to live comfortably.
Looks more and more like a pipe dream. My friend said something that really pissed me off. He was making fun of a 502 fuckup guy, saying he was still doing business the old fashioned way people used to do it in the industry. I'm thinking to myself yeah that's how you do business, a handshake is good enough. Now you've got to have a lawyer write up a contract, cover your ass because everyone is out for themselves. It looks like something I don't want any part of.
When they were starting it there was talk of setting price limits. A grower would get at least $2 a gram, processor $4, something like that. With numbers like that you could run a little farm and get by.
People think pot should be the same price as other commodities, it's not realistic. To grow reasonably decent pot requires quite a bit of time and $.

This thread makes me both incredibly happy and incredibly sad.

Happy because of the fields of ganja being grown legally.

Sad because of how it's being run and the attitude of the guy running it.

Your dream is my dream. And because of what I see happening, I can see now that I need to stay where I'm at and wait for it to become legal here. When the wave hits, I plan on being on top of it, ready to go the day I can legally grow. If you aren't on that wave when it hits, you'll miss it and forever be behind. Like you are discovering.

Everything for me hinges on what happens in November. If we oust our current guv'na and the "Blue Wave" turns things around in our state, I figure it'll be 2 to 2 1/2 years until we have legal grows operating. It'll be tight, but I can make that happen.

If the guv'na stays, it'll be 4-5 years before he bends to the will of the people or there is a veto proof majority in the house and senate.

There's already a semi decent proposal in the system for legal growing. I think the tiers are a little on the ridiculous side though;

plant numbers per year - 0-1800, 1801-3600, 3601- 7200, 7201- 10,200, 10,200 and up.

They need to change those number considerably if they want smaller guys to be able to make it. I for one would probably never grow more than 500 in year. Probably closer to 300 a year.
 

green404

Member
I'd say any dummy could grow 1000 mediocre at best plants,

And turn a profit at $200lb ?

It is a whole new game. It is legal now which means their is no money for legal risk. Back in the day people made incredibly high profits for a few plants because they risked going to prison. 70k a year x 4 years on a basement grow, then..? 4 years in prison $10k in legal fines =s about .25 an hour. Wasn't many players in that game.

Now, it is the same game as growing tomatoes, orchids, x-mas trees, Competition Competition. Anyone can grow an x-mas tree but can they do it and make a living ?

Quality is always impressive, nothing is overly impressive about quantity that's why you don't see cartel buds on the cover of high times

The article is about commercial weed for concentrates. That's like saying Ford fiats are not as nice a Lamborghinis.

Their is still markets for quality but it is competitive and getting more competitive by the year.

I live with in 30min of hundreds of dispensaries. Many commercial grows are cranking out good top shelf stuff. For a while many newer "entrepreneurs" where setting up grows and cranking out trash. Trash doesn't sell in a competitive market. Now grows are hiring experienced growers and consultants, they are getting the top strains and dialing stuff in right.

Everyone with a grow tent keeps saying "dispensary pot sucks.." at the end of the day hundreds of thousands are buying and consuming commercial weed while the guy with a plant in the basement("the best pot in the world..") cannot even trade his stuff for a bicycle on Craigslist. Hobby vs Business.
 

Lester Beans

Frequent Flyer
Veteran
30% thc ... yeah and I'm a Chinese jet pilot.

The numbers on that weed are higher for chemicals and pesticides than they are for anything else. Like I said nice hay farm. I would not smoke that crap.

It's like the dollar menu of farms.
 

WarrenB

New member
Yeah those tier 1 growers are some greedy motherfuckers.
A couple other things I didn't cover. He said all the weighing and bagging is automated now. Too much of an expense to pay someone to sit there weighing and sealing the packets. To be profitable you have to buy a machine that does it.
He also says freeze drying is becoming the big thing. They're realizing they can save time and money. He says it's a decent product, gets you stoned and tastes all right. A bit crumbly but not to the point it ruins the pot.
It amazes me how quickly everyone has switched to buying from the Rec stores. I imagined there'd be vestiges of the black and medical markets but every stoner I know buys from the stores. Even if the store is more expensive people like the convenience and 'selection'.
It's so strange to me. It turns out to be just another commodity like Gatorade and bubblegum. The people who think it's somehow special, there's a spiritual connection between the plant and the consumer are fooling themselves. Most people don't see the weed they smoke as any different then a six pack of Budweiser.
tier 1 is the small growers, tier 3 are the largest of the farms.
 

WarrenB

New member
Yeah those tier 1 growers are some greedy motherfuckers.
A couple other things I didn't cover. He said all the weighing and bagging is automated now. Too much of an expense to pay someone to sit there weighing and sealing the packets. To be profitable you have to buy a machine that does it.
He also says freeze drying is becoming the big thing. They're realizing they can save time and money. He says it's a decent product, gets you stoned and tastes all right. A bit crumbly but not to the point it ruins the pot.
It amazes me how quickly everyone has switched to buying from the Rec stores. I imagined there'd be vestiges of the black and medical markets but every stoner I know buys from the stores. Even if the store is more expensive people like the convenience and 'selection'.
It's so strange to me. It turns out to be just another commodity like Gatorade and bubblegum. The people who think it's somehow special, there's a spiritual connection between the plant and the consumer are fooling themselves. Most people don't see the weed they smoke as any different then a six pack of Budweiser.
Also freeze drying is definitely not a big thing on the recreational cannabis market in WA. Unless you are referring to material used for concentrates, I have only seen a couple companies with "smokable" bud that has been freeze dried. I should also note that I have only seen these as samples from the vendor trying to get the shop I was with to buy their product (which we didn't). I have never actually seen any of these companies products on shelves of the stores that I've been in, which is pretty much every shop on the western side of the state.

On the east side you will see a lot of these outdoor "stright to oil" farms but over on the west side of the state you find tons of indoor boutique farms.
 

ronbo51

Member
Veteran
As much as this thread is disheartening to the pioneers who thought that growing pot was their inheritance, and had earned them the right to be the ones to reap some reward for the work and risk invested, it is better to face the truth and move on. Just grow your few perfect plants in solitude and maybe share some with family and friends. The horse and buggy days are gone.

I spent the last two days making almost 40 litres of cbd liquid for our stores. We buy crystaline as well as oil and have different strengths, flavors, recipes, oral ,vape. Lots of products, skews' that go in our stores. We've been doing this for 4 years in a very unfriendly state, that recently legalized hemp growing.

In the last few weeks we have had maybe 5 different sales crews roll through pitching their CBD products. The legal grows for hemp are coming online right now. Guys who did deps and autos are looking to dump products that they all think are worth more than they will ever get. The price of a kilo of isolate went from 65K down to 15K and is going way lower. I know a guy who has a 20 acre allotment and has backers and product coming in. All the business plans are based on numbers that will never be.

In the end the only product is a mason jar filled with concentrate. How much is that worth? Who will pay for it? What will they do with it? We are making candies, gummies. We talk about it all the time, when it goes legal in our state, which has a bill chugging through, what we will do. A bottle of sativa, a bottle of indica. Make % blends. Vape products galore. Natural terps, bottled terps, use our already proven flavors as a base.

!6 store locations, a full on juice lab meeting all FDA and DHEC requirements, full automation in bottling, labeling, bulk pricing, management in place, skilled positions filled.

It's not what I thought it would be. It's not necessarily the way I wanted it done. But it is what it is and it's not up to me to fight it.

I still smoke my own organic though
 
Top