Anonymous contributor
Looking at the economy through a cannabis lens is an opportunity most economists should examine. We can see the impact of capitalism on small businesses rapidly, from inception, like cancer attacks a cell under a microscope. Anyone can see this is not sustainable, and the trends in cannabis are the same as other commodities, only more rapid. We can use this time of economic downturn to reflect and observe patterns and emerging opportunities in Agriculture.
We wanted to check in with someone who had a breadth of experience in the labor sector. We are grateful for the insights from the workforce; these are the folks battling real issues and witnessing truths that are woven into the challenges many companies face today. If you are struggling, talk to your employees, they already know.
You have been in the industry for some time now, how much of that career is in Rec? What patterns start to emerge when you are integrated in a wide range of budding industry operations? Are you optimistic about gaining more support and unionizing the cannabis workforce?
Even if it’s not unionizing per se, organizing labor, and making sure people feel supported and not afraid to go to work and like they can support themselves by doing this work. Job security is a huge issue in this wacky Rec market.
I’ve worked in Oregon cannabis since 2004. I was working in medical and traditional market grows and it was always a side hustle with friends, it was more fun than business for me. Like everybody you’re doing it so you can smoke for free and like maybe get a little extra cash on the side. It wasn’t a big hustle and I always had one or two you know “real jobs” too. When Rec hit it seemed like a good opportunity to take a dive and switch that. I started working Rec the second year we went legal in Oregon. I’ve worked many positions, all entry level stuff, crew management, trimming, harvesting, lots of gardening. I worked in edibles labs, then also on large scale industrial hemp farms. The largest project was 250 acres under pivot irrigation in the high desert.
I was doing hemp at the same time as I was doing Rec and it was really interesting to see how differently those plants are treated by the eyes of the government. Even though it’s the same fucking plant. The contents of the plants are different, but sweet corn and feed corn are different too, those aren’t treated differently. That’s what really brought the inequity to my eyes, it’s the same plant. They look the same next to each other, they smell the same, they’re very similar, there’s just a few little differences. Those differences mean you can pay people differently, treat them differently for touching them and working with them. When I was working with industrial hemp, it was covered under agriculture laws, so no overtime. Your rights are different. Then I would come back to the West side of the state and work Rec for a couple of days. The fact that it’s still a plant here, treated totally differently, I’m treated differently, I’m not an AG worker anymore, I’m a regular employee who gets regular state treatment, and gets overtime if I work over 40 hours, that’s really a big discrepancy.
I worked for Green Force for a couple of years. They are a temp agency for specifically Rec weed in West/Northwestern Oregon. They were the first of their kind and it was a really interesting project to be a part of, to see it treated like an old school office temp setup meets migrant working agencies. That was very much who was working behind the scenes of all Rec cannabis in Northern Oregon for the first few years of legalization. That’s who was trimming all of your weed, packaging and making all your edibles. It was the gateway to the labor force and companies that were brand new, smaller companies especially, couldn’t afford full time employees or even part time employees; having employees is expensive when you get into payroll taxes and all that kind of stuff. Hiring out this third party that took care of all that for you is very useful and helps a lot of people enter the cannabis world that otherwise had no entry point.
What’s really interesting about your particular experience and when you entered the market was that you actually participated in building a lot of these companies at the very inception or just at that point of everything launching into the market. What kinds of projects were you involved with?
I worked a lot of first rooms, built out rooms for people. I have a running list somewhere, but my list of legal properties that I’ve worked on is about 40 right now. There are thousands of licenses in the state of Oregon at this point, so it’s just a tiny little drop. Still, I’ve seen 40 different ways to do the same things. It’s a great way to remember that there’s more than one right way to do things, there’s more than one wrong way to do things too.
You are process oriented in the way that you think. What have you seen at the beginning and were able to forecast a result in this in the future? Are you seeing any of those kinds of predictions coming true or noticing any patterns that you saw earlier that got us to where a lot of smaller operations are really taking nose dives.
A lot of the patterns are modeled after mainstream American capitalism as far as how these companies were built and grown. There were also factors like how the state decided to regulate who got to play and what the entry fee was. It became the game of scaling and how do you scale up and still make a good product, be efficient, take care of people… but the number one thing always becomes, how do we keep our investors and how do we get more investors. When that becomes the priority, then everything else becomes kind of back burner and weird decisions get made. All of a sudden, you’ve got five greenhouses of the same strain, it’s also the same strain that you grew last year. So now you’ve got 400 pounds of two years of the same Dogwalker cross and it’s not going anywhere, but the people making the decisions are people in an office in another state maybe or another town and they don’t even know what the grow looks like. They’re numbers people, so they’re making these random decisions and the people that actually handle the cannabis and work with the cannabis and enjoy the cannabis aren’t.
The growers are not making decisions for the plant and for the industry anymore, it’s people in offices making very strange choices and that’s who can afford to keep playing in the game. A lot of the small operators are running themselves into the ground as the pound price fluctuates so greatly. When the pound price is fluctuating more than $1000 in a year and we’re experiencing 25% inflation in that same year, how do you pay somebody a living wage? You don’t. You have to get rid of people. Then eventually you’re closing rooms and you’re turning your lights off. There’s a lot of that going around right now and I think it’s another wave that’s all the results of scaling, and not everybody’s going to make it. It sucks because a lot of really talented people aren’t going to make it because it’s too much too soon in an oversaturated market.
We have a completely oversaturated market that is expected to be carried on the shoulders of the home consumer and that doesn’t quite work. One thing that I’d like to see here in Oregon is agriculture, cannabis, and hospitality partner up to dissolve the OLCC and really come up with a unionized, regulated component to align cannabis cultivation more with agriculture and cannabis distribution aligned with hospitality, and if you’re going to be administering consumables to the public, you should be aligned with community standards and regulations. What are the barriers to partnerships like these in cannabis?
We are at a point where who’s governing cannabis should be reexamined, in this state anyway. Maybe they’re waiting until federalization magically one day. It should be fully a third-party organization. There should be an Oregon Cannabis Institute or Oregon Cannabis Cops, whatever they want to call themselves, but would make more sense to be under the watchful eyes of ODA, who’s already overseeing hemp. They’re doing a good job, have them govern it instead because it needs to be treated like an agricultural product. I’ve worked with ODA at Rec farms, but it’s only in that they come to look at your scales, because that’s who regulates weights and measures in the state of Oregon. So, you already have a relationship with them because of that and it’s usually pretty good. They come by once a year, maybe twice, depending on your situation. They test all your scales, get them calibrated and all that good stuff, slap a new sticker on it to make sure everybody’s on the same page. If you have questions, they’re always really nice and helpful, but they don’t step foot in your garden.
It’s so weird, I worked at a farm where we also had a lab that made extracts and gummies, and things like that. The ODA came to look at the products because that’s under their jurisdiction, but they would not come into the garden where plants were, where agriculture was taking place, they never stepped foot into those places. When I worked industrial hemp, that’s fully governed by the ODA, so we saw them a couple times over the course of the season, and they were fantastic to work with. They’re really helpful and knowledgeable. I only met supportive people and they understand how much money Ag brings to Oregon, hemp could be very lucrative and wouldn’t it be fantastic.
Flax and linen were abundant here, Oregon was such a textile and apparel hub. I’d love to see that infrastructure become revived with hemp. There is a new technology that just launched, natural fiber welding, and we could be making everything with hemp now from Oregon, in Oregon and have the capacity to support something global. Is this an opportunity on the horizon?
We so do! We have towns that are set up to do this. I think it is just getting that conversation out there and getting people to move it forward. I think so many people got hosed in the 2019 hemp season and took a huge hit. A lot of people converted their hayfields or other fields to hemp or leased them out. There were some really bad land stewards, that was devastating, and people still haven’t recovered from that. I know a lot of farmers feel very ashamed, like they got taken for a ride, they got swindled, and will never want to work with those people again. Then there’s other farmers that are giving it a chance you know and they’re going to try again. Then COVID hit and getting the labor to get that going was pretty impossible. As far as I know, that’s still kind of not going so great, there’s some farms doing great but there’s less small-scale projects than there were three or four years ago. Hopefully we can get that back off the ground again yeah, that would make sense.
What about having an alternative to grow food, most of the Rec farms are greenhouses. They are fucking amazing technical greenhouses, surely, they can grow more than just weed. When there are $50 specialty pineapples at the supermarket and a food crisis, and I see a bunch of failing greenhouses right now. Could this be an opportunity?
Driving around the valley, driving around Southern and different parts of Eastern Oregon, there’s so much empty greenhouse space or just field space. A lot of great greenhouse space, that’s perfectly viable, is sitting empty already or is going to be sitting empty in the next couple of years. There’s no reason for that, especially when we have a food crisis happening. We have these big empty spaces that are super fertile. How about we plant some food in them, then sell it in your town? Oh, what a concept!
I met some folks in Nevada who work for a bigger cannabis company down there. Part of their whole business plan from the get-go was to grow food as well as cannabis. That works on so many levels, growing food which people need in addition to medicine. That’s a great way to divert your runoff from either a sewer system or septic or wherever people are dumping it. They’re not supposed to be dumping it, and it’s a great way to divert that and recapture those nutrients. It’s also a great way to connect with your community and show that growers are not just the druggies down the street, they also grow some dank zucchinis. Her company actually sells at their farmers market and in that town and it’s this great community connection!
I worked with one local company that was trying to do something similar. We were trying to. I was working in this garden, and we wanted to divert our runoff into a vegetable garden. The county gets excited about it because you’re not dumping so much really rich, strong runoff and you save money because you’re not dumping so much liquid and your sewer. This is where you know this whole concept starts to get derailed.
Agriculture means people, in this particular case. We were talking about making this garden and having the runoff feed it. When you have a garden, someone has to take care of that; someone has to build out the garden, that’s a job. That’s another job, not a side project, not something you do between projects, or between leafing and transplant that day. It’s a full-time job or a couple of full-time jobs. That realization of the number of bodies it takes to do things properly, or at all was prohibitive. It’s really hard to make that happen, laborers cost a lot of money and when the pound price is fluctuating so wildly, it is unpredictable.
The price of flower dropped so much that growers can’t afford to keep the lights on next month and to pay for labor. A lot of times people will try to keep the lights on and maybe cut back on labor, but then you have overgrown rooms, overgrown greenhouses, and then you’ve got 3000 pounds of moldy flower. You’ve got to try to find a way to unload it, and then you’ve got a moldy greenhouse to clean out. I saw that happen to some friends this year and that’s been really tough. Everyone gets so backed up and they’re trying to over produce, still, because that’s what’s going to please the investors. The target numbers are based on you growing this many pounds, but there’s no one to take care of those plants, and there’s no one buying that much.
Everybody is just shutting down, but again it’s not treated like agriculture. There’s no subsidizing, there’s no sense of security for those farmers or laborers when the pound price fluctuates so greatly. It’s a tricky little spot, but I think that if this guy with 567 empty greenhouses could grow some vegetables in there this winter instead, he could at least afford to feed his family.
Because it’s tied up with OLCC and not the ODA this becomes a much trickier situation, that now is a licensed space. The way that we’re set up in Oregon, you can’t legally grow vegetables, for sale, in that room or in that building. It would have to get decommissioned as a cannabis grow. You can’t grow anything outside of cannabis in your licensed space. So, the way that we were doing our runoff garden was technically in an adjacent lot. It was not in the building; it was outside, and it still had to be regulated by the county. We couldn’t grow those vegetables inside that building, even though we had plenty of lights and space for it at that time. We were not allowed to do that because it’s a weed grow, and you can’t grow anything else in there. That’s a really tricky loophole that’s presented by the OLCC because they’re not in agriculture. They’re not looking at the big picture here, at how Ag works. For example, if one type of hay goes up in price and alfalfa goes down, you know a farmer can switch their crop from year to year. You don’t have to, but you should, we’re supposed to rotate crops and fields. It’s a big part of sustainable agriculture and you’re not allowed to do that in cannabis.
I know that was the most asinine thing I’ve ever seen about regulated cannabis, so much waste is created, and regulations are counterintuitive to how you actually garden. The way it is set up, this is how you hide it like an underground grow. The way we are regulating it, we’re treating it like drugs not a plant.
One of my big gripes for the Oregon handling of cannabis growing versus say hops and grapes, which are also Vice Lord plants. We produce a tremendous number of hops and grains. Let’s say grandma and whatever neighbors and friends you want can come out of the vineyard, run through the vineyard. You can do whatever you want, and children, family can come, and you can use their little, tiny hands to pick grapes at harvest time. Anyone can go work at a vineyard, age wise. You do not need any special license to grow hops, we grow a tremendous amount of hops to make beer, another intoxicant, but kids can work there, you don’t need a license to ride that tractor. Is that baby on a tractor doing a handstand while riding that machine? I’ve seen it.
Those things can be family run and anyone can go help work on the farm. It’s all Ag wages and labor laws, so anyone can go and help, and it can be this like holistic family experience. Hemp gets treated that way too. That’s one of my favorite things about working on the hemp farms. There are a bunch of families working there. The kids were running the tractors, and that was adorable and scary, but they were really good at it! There are all these little kids that work out there, and any teens would come by in the evening hours after school. They could come work for a couple hours and it was really great because all ages could work it, no special license was needed. I guess in my mind it sounds kind of romantic, but that’s how a farm works. Family and community come in and do their shifts or show up for the skill that they know is needed.
We had a couple families that were multiple generations working in the fields. They could come after a day job, they could come work for a couple of hours, get their hands in the dirt, and feel good about it; it was very therapeutic for a lot of people.
It’s not allowed to be treated that way with cannabis. It’s separation instead of integration for cannabis with the rest of Oregon agriculture. It’s going to be more economically sustainable if the price of the pound is down, you can grow weed in one room but peppers or greens in two or three rooms. I know somebody that had a hemp farm who grows microgreens now and helps make ends meet. He could do that because it was a hemp farm and not a Rec farm. I know some folks, right now they’re hunkering down, eating beans and rice for a year, and going to hustle. They unplugged all the lights and don’t use the grow, which is a bummer, because they could be growing food for the family and neighbors’ family over winter when nothing else grows. You can still grow greens and you know all the tomatoes and Peppers and so many cool things inside. So, instead of making money and contributing to the tax base, they just plan to lay low.
A lot of people are having to quit weed right now because it’s not sustainable. They built brands, they built really beloved brands, but to pay a worker well and just have a couple of rooms going, that’s a scaling issue. It’s very competitive. I think optically small operators exist right now, kind of playing song and dance and putting up appearances. I don’t know who’s really doing well. I just thought of a few, and then realized, no they had to close a room or open their back door, or they just fired three people, or they’re selling out. They’re trying to liquidate their supply and they’re keeping their Instagram on, but they haven’t grown in six months, and nobody knows.
People spread themselves too thin, they invested too much in vertical models that blew up in a lot of people’s faces. Going vertical means owning each operating cost from seed to sale. You’re just growing for your own shop because nobody else wants to buy your product. They figure you’re selling the best of your stuff to yourself, selling your B’s or trim to everybody else. Now you’re backed up against the wall with however many pounds of your product that you struggle to sell out of two or three shops.
People are banking on interstate trade and in the mindset of, everyone’s going to want Oregon cannabis, and it’s just going to be totally worth it. I just am not convinced myself. I think it’ll help a little but it’s not the golden ticket. We’re still going to have backyards, and there’s so many states. If people get to grow their own weed for cheap in Iowa, they’re not going to import. The novelty will wear off eventually. It’s not a sustainable strategy at whatever pound price they’re expecting. The projections that people are following is kind of magical thinking; projections based on the COVID outbreak year where everybody just got really high. That’s when people took on a lot of investors yeah, they tricked a lot of investors with COVID numbers and now the emperor wears no clothes. Now we’re here and people aren’t spending so much.
Interstate also brings up the question of regulation. You have been integrated with OLCC in a couple separate capacities, alcohol sales and cannabis cultivation. What is your general experience with regulators like OLCC?
I honestly don’t like how they operate; there’s a lot of cronyism on the Board side of it. It’s family run in a weird way that nothing state level is in Oregon. The family running the largest liquor distribution also runs the State Board for liquor control; it seems like a mega conflict of interest. I am flabbergasted on a daily basis that it’s allowed and so openly just the way it is. It has been for centuries, and I don’t understand it. They pretend to give the people a little bit of voice in it by sending out notices to have meetings and things like that. Physically, the operation is driven to support the beer and wine industry; it is very lucrative. The OLCC just sees cannabis as a cash cow, but they’re not really concerned with how it functions.
They are making rules and collecting fines, none of it to support the growth of the cannabis industry. I’ve never heard of any wine or beer makers getting their pints counted. Just thinking about how many beers that were poured, no one’s counting. The OLCC is not counting how many pints you’re brewing or how many pints you’re pouring. They’re not nickel and diming the counting process. Meanwhile, working in cannabis, getting pounds ready for the store, you have to be so precise in all those measurements. Same thing during harvest. Owners and managers are so paranoid about being off by a gram or an ounce. Understandably, because it can add up really fast over time and then the OLCC suddenly is asking where this one pound is.
We had an incident where there was a pound and a half discrepancy and it turns out somebody miscounted the bag, and we all knew that. It was really easy to figure it out, but it turned into this huge scandal internally and externally. Within our company it was a bigger deal than it was with the OLCC. But it was because of that fear of the OLCC and what would happen if you were off by a pound and a half; you can get fined X amount of dollars. They were so worried that it became a witch hunt. They were convinced that someone stole this weed. This took a manager 12- or 14-hours watching video and playing Murder She Wrote until they realized what happened and watched the counting process. Meanwhile in a restaurant, grocery store, or a bar a case of beer or pints could go missing and it was no big deal. That’s the equivalent of that, and it’s really bizarre to compare. No one’s coming to find you because you broke a beer or didn’t write it down on a sheet somewhere.
I’ve worked in trim rooms where you weigh the floor sweepings at the end of the day. The thing is, if you’re a big enough producer, an ounce of shake at the end of harvest counts, there is a pound on the floor. In beer, we just brewed and poured off a pitcher to try it. I haven’t worked in the dispensary. That’s one of the things I’ve not done in this industry, but I know it gets really crazy as far as weighing product out. I’ve prepackaged for a dispensary and that was bizarre because like you get a pound and have to break it down in stingy packets. I know people love deli style, I’m one of them, because someone is going to throw you that extra half gram or gram.
Do you see any writing on the wall for the next year or so in this space? Honestly, anything optimistic, because we are all feeling the impact of the economic downturn. I know you were talking about renewing your cannabis handler’s card. That shows you have a little bit of hope.
Cautiously optimistic moving forward. We’re in a bit of a downturn and I’m in a spot where my license to have the privilege of working with marijuana, as they call it, is expiring. It is time for me to pay the piper for the next five years and I am currently unemployed and after being laid off from my Rec farm. I’m conflicted over whether or not to renew because I don’t feel a huge drawback there right now. It needs a little time to cool off, but I am going to renew my license because I have enough faith. More than anything, I miss touching plants every day. I would love to do industrial hemp again, which I wouldn’t need a license for.
We’re just going to see a big downturn right now and a lot of really good farms struggle and a lot of really awesome farms close. It’s really important to vote with your dollars and participate in the retail side of cannabis. There’s still this cool kids stoner thing where people like to flex about how they don’t buy stuff at stores. They love to talk about how they’re getting homegrown, growing their own, or their buddy makes this hash, and they are above the retail experience. Here’s the thing, I love that shit too. I love making my own shit, I love homegrown, I love growing, but it’s so important to continue to spend some money in the Rec market to support my own industry.
When I worked in bars and restaurants, where did we spend all of our money? At other bars and restaurants. We supported each other, and you still got the hook up, and you still dropped like 500 bucks. Get all the trade samples, homegrown from the backyard, but it’s still really important to support your own industry. So go to the store and buy some good-looking flowers or treat yourself to a nice extract. Show that you support the industry even if you can only afford to buy an eighth a month of really good weed. Pick a dispensary that tells you very openly where the weed is from.
There are so many stores I’ve been into where I have to ask who the farm is and they don’t know. Go somewhere where at least the name of the farm is on the jar or somewhere that I can see like on the menu or online menu. Purple Punch is grown on every farm in the state, so the farming practice makes a difference. I know I’m not alone with that and it’s the way that you educate consumers. It’s brand building. You go to the store and see what beer you buy or what cereal you buy, and you have a brand that you like.
The way dispensaries sell weed is not always really conditioned to supporting brands. It’s about moving product that’s still like prohibition style, like you’re trying to hide it. As a consumer try to educate yourself, find a couple of favorite farms and seek out their weed. It becomes a scavenger hunt, like cool where can I get so and so’s weed, it’s so good, and support that farm, keep their lights on, keep their employees fed. Be willing to pay a little more for a product and maybe consume less in order to support the good in the industry and care about where your weed comes from. Care about who’s growing your stuff.