Marijuana greenhouse teams up with Niagara College
More plants, workers to tend them to take root in facilities as Niagara-on-the-Lake operation triples in size
IT’S A FAR-CRY from a typical greenhouse.
Visitors entering the Niagara-on-the-Lake operation wear hairnets, lab coats and take other precautions to keep the facility as sterile as possible — making it look more like a pharmaceutical production company than an agricultural business.
But that’s precisely what the 5,500 marijuana plants growing at Tweed Farms greenhouse are.
“It’s ultimately a medicine that can be consumer in a number of different ways,” said Mark Zekulin, president of greenhouse operator Canopy Growth Corp.
“They’re essentially pharmaceutical procedures applied to a plant. It’s a very unique system,” he said.
And there are soon to be far more of those plants taking root within the greenhouse, as well as workers tending to them.
The company is a few months away from completing a project to almost triple the size of the NOTL facility, already the largest in North America. It will grow to 90,000 square metres from about 31,500 sq. m. The expansion, to be complete in July, will also add about 100 more workers at the facility that now employs 80.
Although finding workers with industry-specific knowledge to fill job vacancies hasn’t been easy for the emerging industry, a new partnership with Niagara College could help change that.
The company teamed up with Niagara College
president Dan Patterson, Tuesday, to announce a memorandum of understanding with the college, which in September will welcome its first group of 24 students to enrol in its new commercial cannabis production postgraduate program.
The agreement will give students from the college’s cannabis program, as well as its horticultural technician, greenhouse technician and business programs opportunities for work placements at the NOTL facility, as well opportunities for research projects that could benefit both the college and the company. Patterson said the students will be involved in most aspects of the greenhouse operation, while also developing an understanding the regulatory environment cannabis growing operations fall under.
Zekulin said the MOU with the college will help “us get people into our facilities.”
“Look around, there’s a huge labour need in this plant and this process is different from any other sector,” he said. “To have a program that is dedicated to training those people … and then to have people here with handson participation, that’s great for us to make sure we have the best people in this facility.”
Zekulin said he, too, knew nothing about cultivating cannabis, when he was a teamed up with partners to start Canopy Growth Corp.
“I’m not an old school pot grower or anything like that,” Zekulin said with a laugh.
He said he was a practising lawyer “looking for a something different” when he heard about opportunities associated with medical marijuana.
“I thought, my god, they’re opening an entire competitive marketplace for cannabis,” Zekulin said. “There are tons of rules and it’s hard to get a licence, but at the end of the day we’re competing on price, on quality, on brand, on customer care, and it was just a great opportunity.”
Lord Mayor Pat Darte welcomes the greenhouse expansion, hoping it spurs more growth in the area.
“Our economic development committee wants to bring more industry here, so with this and Niagara College, now other industries will be looking to come here. Not necessarily cannabis, but (industries) surrounding them,” he said.
“Now 180 people, they all have to buy groceries and gas and they’ll all go to convenience stores. It’s the whole roll off of the economic impact. Once they’re here, more businesses will show up
“They’re not low paying jobs,” he said. “The average is $25 to $30 per hour.”