Pot growing goes pro
An exclusive look inside a modern commercial marijuana grow facility: How ‘ganjapreneurs’ use technology to cultivate cutting-edge cannabis
The masonry and metal building off Jefferson Boulevard could be any sort of facility for light assembly or fabricating – the exterior offers few clues. The first hint of what happens here comes in the lobby, where a faint whiff hangs in the air that is both sweetly pungent and vaguely skunky. It might look like you’ve just walked into the dry cleaners or a health clinic, but no – your nose isn’t playing tricks on you – it’s the unmistakable scent of marijuana.
Welcome to Mammoth Inc., a state-licensed facility for growing medical marijuana on a commercial scale.
Just don’t call it a pot farm.
Within Mammoth’s nondescript walls, Founder and CEO Spencer Blier oversees a sophisticated, hydroponic system of selective plant culture that’s equal parts science, craft and for-profit business. Pot-farming is far too simplistic a term to describe the endeavors of Blier and his tiny staff – they’re like high-tech Johnny Appleseeds, using facilities that look more like a research lab than a field row as they strive to isolate specific psychoactive properties – from speedy to sleepy – in known strains of cannabis.
“I think this is the future of growing,” says Blier, proudly cradling the leaf of a plant that’s just a few weeks old. “Look at how green it is. It doesn’t get any greener than that.”
Mammoth is one of 28 facilities that have been licensed by the Department of Business Regulation to cultivate medical marijuana for state-licensed dispensaries, or “compassion centers.”
No community has been more welcoming of the cultivation businesses than Warwick, which hosts more than a third of all those licensed by the DBR since January 2017.
Some communities, including Woonsocket, have been more leery about allowing commercial-scale production of marijuana to take root within their borders. Gerry Beyer, the manager of the cavernous Nyanza Mill in Woonsocket, has been pleading with city officials to lift a ban
“Look at how green it is. It doesn’t get any greener than that.”
on indoor cultivation of cannabis in place since last September. After months of political wrangling, the City Council abruptly shifted gears recently and now appears poised to open the doors to state-licensed cultivators like Mammoth, appointing a sub-committee on Monday to develop local regulations.
“The city of Warwick was very pro-marijuana,” says Blier. “I felt very supported by the city.”
Mammoth Inc. now represents a $1.5 million investment in real estate and cultivation equipment, a venture he financed with help from his father and a small group of private lenders, some of whom have an equity stake in the business. Including himself, Blier operates with three full-time employees and two part-time trimmers who sort leaf from the most chemically potent part of mature marijuana plants – the buds.
Early on, Blier made a rather pricey decision to grow marijuana hydroponically – in water, that is – instead of soil. He’s among a minority of growers who do so, but in the long run it will result in a cleaner, more efficient growing operation, Blier says.
He set up the system with the help of Jordan Leighty, a plumber who used his experience with pipes, pumps and filtration as a springboard for designing hydroponic growing rooms that are nearly fully automated. Leighty isn’t an employee of Mammoth, but he visits as the sole proprietor of Hydroponic Consultants, just to make sure all the equipment is running properly.
Brand recognition
Mammoth is designed to divide cannabis culture into specialized areas for each phase of the growing process. There are more than a dozen different strains of marijuana growing in the facility at any given time, but most of the product that’s wholesaled to the compassion centers starts out as clones – tiny cuttings from mature plants that are exposed to a hormone to force them to root.
The only plants in potted soil at Mammoth – and there are just a few of them – are the “mothers.” The clones are snipped from the mothers, which are the result of a painstaking process of selective cultivation. The mothers are known strains of marijuana with wild-sounding names like “Scooby Snacks,” “Captain’s Cake” and “GG4,” short for “Gorilla Glue 4.” Officially, the latter is for colloquial use only, since the manufacturers of Gorilla Glue – the adhesive – are pursuing trademark infringement litigation against anyone who uses it commercially.
The mothers are also the only plants that are started from seeds – still a very critical part of the operation. The compassion centers market specific strains according to the psychoactive effects they provide. For example, “relaxed,” “happy,” and “creative” are a few of the descriptives associated with Scooby Snacks.
There are vendors who sell seeds – Blier finds them on Instagram – but that’s just the beginning of a rigorous process of developing plants whose effects live up to the billing. To find one that does, it’s necessary to sow many seeds from the same strain, and have them tested at a research laboratory – not just for potency – but nuances of taste, including hints of fruit, smoke or other qualities.
Blier realizes he’s sounding a lot like a wine sommelier or a craft brewer when he’s talking about cannabis, but that’s the whole point.
“That’s where I think this business is going,” he said. “It’s going to be a like a craft – it’s going to be ‘micro’ and it’s going to be ‘local.’”
The Bloom Room
FOR THE AGRITOURIST, perhaps the most illuminating part of Mammoth Inc. is what they call the “Bloom Room,” where plants are grown to maturity after passing through the clone and preliminary “veg” stages of development. It’s the most technologically complex part of the endeavor, situated in a roughly 3,000-square-foot room using a smörgåsbord of automated devices to artificially create the ideal growing conditions for cannabis.
The scent of uncut, growing marijuana hangs heavy in the air of the Bloom Room, where 96 plants in various stages of growth are carefully arranged on the floor in perfect, even rows. Each plant rests in a 13-gallon plastic container filled with what may be the cleanest water in state, piped in through a network of tubes that links all the containers. Before the water gets to the Bloom Room, it passes through a “reverse osmosis” filter in another part of the building. Even treated tap water contains trace impurities, but the pharmaceutical-quality filter removes close to 100 percent of them, according to Leighty.
Marijuana is supposed to be a medicine, he says, and the reverse osmosis system is there in case the regulators ever get picky enough to impose the most exacting quality control standards.
Plants don’t sit entirely in water – they get some support from a bed of artificial rocks made from recycled glass. The growing medium – the water, that is – is constantly aerated, since plants need oxygen to grow. Overhead, the faux sunshine comes from 48, 1,000-watt sodium vapor lights – a component of this plant lab that drives Mammoth’s $6,000 a month electricity bill.
Industrial-size dehumidifiers keep the moisture level in the Bloom Room cannabis-friendly. Even the temperature of the water the plants grow in is artificially controlled for optimum growth. Meanwhile, the astringent, spicy stench of weed is constantly sucked into a ceiling-mounted network of large carbon filters.
None of the air in the room is vented outside, but recirculated into the filters. They apparently do their job, since it’s impossible to catch even a hint of odor just inches from the front door.
Feeding is the only manual part of the operation. Liquid fertilizer is poured into the growing medium by hand. Another device indicates when the plants need to be fed, showing the uptake of nutrients on a gauge that measures concentrations of nutrient in the medium in parts per million.
It takes about 11 weeks for plants to grow from clones to bushy, bud-laden adults. The job mostly comes to fruition in the Bloom Room, which can crank out about 24 mature plants a week when the growth cycle is in full swing. The yield is anywhere from 12 to 24 pounds, depending on the variety of plant.
‘Ganjapreneurs’
Blier won’t say how much he’s paid by the compassion centers for product, but the rule of thumb is that the wholesale price is $1,400 to $2,200 per pound.
Mature plants are harvested, but not immediately ready for packaging. Like tobacco, marijuana must be cured in order to obtain all of the plant’s flavor potential for smoking. Mammoth has a special, low-humidity curing room for that part of the process. Aging isn’t an exact science, says Leighty, but generally speaking the slower the product is cured, the better it is.
After the curing, Mammoth separates the buds from everything else, called “trim,” a job that calls for two half-time employees. It sounds like tedious, low-skill work, but one of Blier’s trimmers is Zoe Papay, 24, who has a degree in plant science from the University of Rhode Island. Another is Cameron Hoegen, 21, a New Jersey native who is about to finish up a program from his home state’s Salem Community College in laboratory glass-blowing.
Using little more than pruning scissors, the trimmers clean away all the comparatively less-potent trim from the plant. But it’s not wasted.
The trim is processed into the only other product Mammoth makes for the compassion centers. Known as rosin, it’s the resinous liquid contained inside the leafy components of cannabis, which is extracted using a press that squishes the leaves under heat and tremendously high pressure.
About two ounces of trim will yield up to 10 grams of rosin, which may have a consistency as goopy as molasses or crystalline as glass. Made for smoking, often in a vaping device, rosin wholesales for about $30 a gram. By weight, it contains about five times the concentration of THC – the “high”-inducing component of marijuana – as the bud.
Bud is packaged in one-pound bags that are stored under tight security – an important feature of Mammoth’s operation, according to Blier.
“We have a crazy security system,” he says. “It was one of our biggest bills. We paid about $150,000 just for the security system.”
Part of a growing breed of businessmen sometimes called “ganjapreneurs,” Blier was finishing up a degree in film at the University of Rhode Island when a friend proposed they start growing medical marijuana for a woman suffering from tick-borne Lyme disease. In 2010, he became a patient caregiver – the first state-sanctioned class of marijuana cultivators. With an initial investment of $3,000, the startup began in his bedroom, using growing “tents.”
Blier, who had already earned undergraduate degrees in psychology and business before he put his chips on a career in marijuana, says he still doesn’t take home a salary from Mammoth Inc., though he pays the staff and his lenders regularly. He lives on money he earns as a private consultant to other growers.
The main problem, he says, is that the state has licensed more commercial cultivators than it needs to supply the only dispensaries, Thomas C. Slater Compassion Center in Providence; Greenleaf in Portsmouth; and Summit Medical in Warwick. Those compassion centers also grow some of their own cannabis.
“We’ve been lucky, we’re doing better than a lot out there, but there’s a bottleneck in the market,” he says.
The problem would be alleviated if the General Assembly approves Gov. Gina Raimondo’s plan to quintuple the number of compassion centers in the state. Another thing that would help is if the state, like neighboring Massachusetts, legalizes recreational marijuana, or, as Blier puts it, “goes rec.” With Bay State retail stores for recreational marijuana coming soon, Blier believes it’s just a matter of time before the Ocean State follows suit.
Were he allowed to sell his products at retail, Blier says “the numbers would all make sense.”
In the meantime, Blier is doing something he’s passionate about. He likens it to being a gourmet chef.
“It’s like you’re the cook,” he says. “Other people who appreciate food, they get to share that through your work.”
“That’s where I think this business is going,” he said. “It’s going to be a like a craft.” “We have a crazy security system,” he says. “It was one of our biggest bills.”