The industrial world of pot on display in Maple Ridge
The slender green shoots of Tantalus Labs’ first medical marijuana crop are just beginning to sprout to a recognizable form in the bright, airy confines of the company’s Maple Ridge greenhouse at a fortuitous time.
Vancouver-headquartered Tantalus is set to become the first industrial-scale cannabis greenhouse with Canadians expecting a multibillion-dollar market for legal, recreational weed to open up by next Canada Day.
The company’s spic and span state-of-the-art greenhouse at the bottom of a sun-drenched slope in the Fraser Valley opens up an interesting discussion about how to supply a potentially booming trade.
Tantalus received its Health Canada licence at the end of May, and is banking on earning green credibility for environmentally sustainable crops.
“For Tantalus Labs, that sustainable option is a core differentiator for us,” said Dan Sutton, co-founder and managing director of the five-year-old firm.
The greenhouse facility is a technologically controlled environment in which everything from the temperature and humidity to water flow, nutrient consumption and soil pH — 30 parameters in all — are measured and controlled to avoid the use of pesticides and other chemicals.
A slogan stencilled onto a wide roll-up door inside the main greenhouse reads: “Futureweed.”
“For us, we’re trying to demonstrate that greenhouses can cultivate excellent quality, consistently pesticide-free, consistently quality-assured, mould-free, chemicalfree, heavy-metal-free cannabis,” Sutton said, “and that we can do it repeatedly over time.”
Tantalus has spent millions building the 50,000-square-foot greenhouse and 25,000-squarefoot production building, with plans to build a second 50,000-square-foot greenhouse.
“I think that it’s an economic inevitability that the majority, the gross majority, of cannabis in a competitive marketplace for recreational or medicinal cannabis will be cultivated in greenhouses,” Sutton said. “The economics are just too staggering.”
Sutton refers to its product as “sun-grown,” and plans to use 90 per cent less electricity than a typical indoor growing operation under lights and produce cannabis at one-third to one-quarter the cost.
Tantalus was incorporated in 2012 before Colorado and Washington state legalized marijuana and supplying a recreational market in Canada wasn’t even on the firm’s horizon, said Sutton, who started his business career in clean energy.
“I saw it as an opportunity to write a textbook,” Sutton said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s push to legalize recreational pot coincides with Tantalus’ plans to begin commercial medicinal sales sometime next summer.
Canada’s market for recreational cannabis could be worth $13 billion to $23 billion per year with demand for product swelling to as much as 600,000 kilograms in just a few years, even under a low-end estimate, according to a 2016 study by the accounting firm Deloitte.
In 2016, on the legal side of medical marijuana, some 40 producers grew about 31,000 kilograms of cannabis, according to a report from PI Financial analyst Jason Zandberg. Federal legislation calls for a division of responsibilities between the feds and provinces to enact legalization, with the federal government responsible for registering, licensing and regulating producers for the recreational market, similar to the regime for medical producers.
That licensing regime has sparked criticism from marijuana activists who contend it favours the bigger, already-established producers, which will shut out grassroots producers who have long produced marijuana illegally in defiance of prohibition.
However, even advisers to the federal government’s legalization initiative contemplated allowing former illegal growers to come out of the shadows and offer their expertise to the market.
“We talk about artisanal and craft producers — we want a diversity of producers,” said Anne McLellan, a lawyer, former federal cabinet minister and chairwoman of the Task Force on Cannabis Legalization and Regulation.
“There’s an awful lot of expertise that’s outside the legal system right now and you wouldn’t want to lose all that,” McLellan said in an interview earlier this year.
And to generate enough cannabis to cut into the unregulated black market, Sutton said, will require a lot of producers.
“I think there are a host of excellent cannabis producers from diverse regions across the province,” Sutton said, “and effective regulation will endorse the most sophisticated of those producers.”
The best growers won’t just be the ones that produce top-quality cannabis, Sutton said, but those that can also meet the needs of a regulatory system when it comes to quality assurance, security and transparency.
Tantalus isn’t the only medicinal grower to latch onto a greenhouse model for production. In June, Vancouver-headquartered medicinal producer Emerald Health Therapeutics announced it had struck a $20-million joint venture with B.C.-based greenhouse giant Village Farms that would instantly dwarf Tantalus.
Village Farms committed an initial 1.1 million square feet — some 10 hectares — of greenhouse space to cannabis production, subject to the venture obtaining a licence under the existing medicinal licensing regime, and potentially under the recreational regime.
I think that it’s an economic inevitability that the majority, the gross majority, of cannabis … will be cultivated in greenhouses.