Something fishy
Fish feces is key ingredient to marijuana for Michigan grower
LANSING, Mich. — From fish poop to marijuana, the circle of life bubbles and pumps through pipes and pools within the walls of a cold-looking industrial warehouse in Lansing.
Thumb Genetics is a licensed marijuana grow operating unlike most you’ll find in the state — or nation. A mostly family business, it grows marijuana using aquaponics, an ancient agricultural technique first implemented the Mayan and Aztec farmers in Mexico nearly a thousand years ago.
“I can guarantee you’ve never been in a grow like this,” said Lloyd Owens, 65, the company director who owns a portion of the business and operates it with his son, Jack Owens. “This is the most insane grow you … have ever been in.”
Aquaponics is a method commonly used to grow more-forgiving vegetables, like lettuce, but rare in the world of marijuana, Lloyd Owens said.
The efficiency aquaponics provides makes economic sense. There’s much less waste. The need for expensive fertilizer and customized, nutrient-rich dirt is made obsolete. Water in the 10,000-gallon system is reused, but the up-front costs are so high and science so complex that most investors shy away from aquaponics, the Owens said, instead using more tried-and-true but wasteful, dirt-based growing methods.
“Basically, it’s about $80 worth of fish food per month, versus tens of thousands of dollars in chemicals each month,” said Lloyd Owens. “The other thing is: All these other grows, they waste all this water.
“We’ve eliminated all the media, because our media is reusable; we’ve eliminated all the fertilizer, and the fact that we don’t have to transplant and that, we’ve minimized our employees … we’ve had the same water in those tanks for about a year and a half.”
Aquaponics uses the symbiotic relationships between bacteria and animal waste to produce nutrient-rich water that’s absorbed by dangling roots of thirsty plants.
In the case of Thumb Genetics, thousands of blue Nile Tilapia of varying ages swim in dark water within 4-foottall blue tubs. The larger elders have safety nets hung above their pools to thwart the occasional suicidal leaps to the concrete below.
“We’ve had a few kamikazes,” Lloyd Owens said.
The fish eat. They digest. The nutrients in their fecal matter leaches to water that’s filtered through a series of white PVC pipes into various pools caked with slimy bacteria and algae, with a pit stop in a 1,200-gallon water tank filled with red wiggler worms that further refine the H2O in the muck that collects at the bottom before the cleansed, reinvigorated water is pumped to grow rooms and eagerly slurped by hundreds of growing plants beneath bright lights.
“You’re never draining,” said Jack Owens. “You’re recirculating your water, and the plants are constantly feeding and grabbing whatever nutrients that it wants in that water.”
A couple years ago, Lloyd Owens took a road trip, drove to Pennsylvania and picked up some buckets with hundreds tiny “fry” fish from a breeder. They’re not little anymore.
“We have four tanks, about 1,600 fish in total,” Lloyd Owens said.
Each tank is about 1,200 gallons, and the fish are divided, depending on their size and age.
The breed is chosen, in part, because they won’t reproduce, so long as the water temperature is maintained below 82 degrees, but they do get too old to serve their purpose: pooping frequently.
“We have different life cycles right now,” Jack Owens said as he points to a tank with larger fish that approach 1.5 pounds. “We can probably keep these for another six months, but they’re definitely getting to the size where they don’t poop as frequent as the smaller ones.”
Once they get to be about 2 years old, their digestion isn’t conducive to the aquaponics system that’s constantly converting and recycling. The fish relieve themselves in higher volumes, but do so less frequently.
They all started small, as “fingerlings,” the Owens said. So far, they’ve avoided any serious disease. Other than losing a few to death falls on the floor, larger tilapia eating their smaller brethren or the lusting males chasing the females to the point of fatal exhaustion, the schools have remained mostly healthy.
The business hasn’t had to turnover any of the fish stock, but when it does, the Owens hope to one day be able to donate fish to the needy for meals.
“When we’re at full scale, we’re predicting about 20,000 meals a year we’ll be able to give away to the homeless,” Lloyd Owens said. “We’re not in the fish business. I’m not going to get a license to sell fish.”
In the meantime, as the company grows, retired fish will likely he harvested and shared with employees.
Lloyd Owens knocks on his plastic, prosthetic right leg hidden beneath a pair of blue jeans. He stepped in a hole while jogging, “snapped it in half,” he said, contributing to its eventual amputation when he was 35. A series of other ailments led him to marijuana to find relief from pain.
He walks with a slight limp and leans against the cinder-block walls to take the weight off his prosthetic leg whenever the opportunity arises.
Jack Owens turned to marijuana after suffering a “real bad” concussion while playing goalkeeper for the Davenport University soccer team in Grand Rapids in 2008, the same year Michigan voters legalized medical marijuana.
Farming is in their blood. Lloyd Owens grew up on one in rural Madison County, Ill. His first job was working at a nursery. Coincidentally, the nursery used aquaponics.
“It was my first paying job,” Lloyd Owens said as he walked past pools of recently fed fish in his marijuana grow. “I was 15 years old, and it turned out to be a pretty big deal.”
He studied biology at Southern Illinois University and after his amputation returned to college, obtaining a degree in prosthetics from Northwestern University. That career path led the family to transplant in Michigan, where Lloyd Owens worked in the prosthetic industry for two decades.
With the arrival of medical marijuana, the Owens became caregivers, which allowed them to grow marijuana on a small scale. Even then, they began flirting with the idea of aquaponics, but the size of the grow operation didn’t make it economically feasible.
In 2017, they decided to upgrade and applied for a medical growing license. They finally started operations in August 2020 after building out the former Walmart distribution warehouse the business currently resides in.
There were originally more than 30 investors among the Owens’ family and friends.
“It’s been an adventure getting here, for us,” Lloyd Owens said. “There’s a big group, but not a real cashflush group, just a bunch of average citizens that pooled our money together to do this.”
The 43,500-square-foot warehouse, just under an acre, is nestled among a series of other grow businesses in connected industrial warehouses.
Lloyd Owens opens a metal door leading to the concrete loading dock used for deliveries. The cold rushes in. He leads the way up steel-grated stairs and opens a rooftop door and points across the neighboring building. It’s also a licensed grow operation, one that uses dirt.
See all those air conditioners, he says. There are dozens of them. He draws attention back to his side of the roof. It’s bare.
“This grow next to us is exactly the same size as ours,” he said. “And this is the air-conditioning requirements for that grow, and his power bill is like $40,000$50,000 a month. Mine has yet to hit $8,500.”
Lloyd Owens said his facility uses three air conditioners. It’s thve nature of a water-based grow system. The water helps cool. If a grow gets too warm, microbes are attracted, marijuana can become contaminated and overrun by pests.
When asked why, if Thumb Genetics’ aquaponic system is so much more efficient, others aren’t copying their style, Lloyd Owens said it’s about up-front cost and expertise.
“Up-front costs are three to four times as great,” he said. “So this comparable grow could probably be done for like $1 million, million and a quarter. This cost like $4 million.”
Jack Owens said it’s know-how, too. “There’s not enough scientists,” he said. “It’s very hard to keep the plants living in the same water for that long. You can do lettuce in 30 days, but when you do marijuana it’s in there a lot longer.”
The Owens’ envision massive expansion in the coming years. Aquaponics, more than traditional methods, is about the long game. Once the up-front higher expenses are paid for, the system cost efficiencies should allow the company to thrive.
“As the price of marijuana drops, you better lower your cost of operation, and this is the lowest cost of operation there is for any marijuana out there,” Lloyd Owens said.
The aquaponics method allows Thumb Genetics to shave about a week of the grow cycle, which becomes significant on a large scale.
Another trait of Thumb Genetics marijuana that they believe will set it apart in years to come is that it’s organic. Other growers uses pesticides or methods that don’t qualify as organic.
“It’s going to be legal on a federal level,” Lloyd Owens said. “It’s only a matter of time, and cleaner marijuana will have more value to the larger players getting into it.”
Currently, Thumb Genetics is operating about three grow rooms with 250 plants each that produce about 8 ounces of marijuana each every eight to 12 weeks, depending on the strain.
They have dozens of strains they’ve created as caregivers and continue to breed as the new business expands. Their main customer is Edgewood Wellness, a medically licensed dispensary in Lansing.
“He’s probably going to have to retire soon, because he’s getting old,” Jack Owens says of his father. “So the plan is to take this model and copy it across the state in new buildings and then venture out to all the other states as well.”
Before crossing state lines, there’s still a lot of room for expansion in their current building. As they walk the largely empty warehouse, Jack Owens points to beams and walls, explaining the vision. They’re planning ten new grow rooms, which would expand their 3,500-plant-allotted grow operation to nearly 6,000 plants.
In one of the grow rooms, three employees wearing hygienic scrubs and booties on their feet tend to plants.
Lloyd Owen points to a woman enveloped in the greenery.
“See that girl down there, that’s my daughter,” he said. “My wife is at a seminar with the accountant right now. “It’s a real family affair.” Distributed by The Associated Press.