Ohio’s first medical pot crop sprouting

Grow Ohio expects first products to hit dispensaries in 2019.

Along a wide meander of the Muskingum River southwest of Zanesville where the ruins of an abandoned strip mine scar the landscape, some of the state’s most valuable and sought-after crops have sprouted.

Behind a high chain-link fence, past layers of armed security and always within sight of surveillance cameras, dozens of thin green shoots, each a few inches long and topped by a spray of darkgreen leaves, are growing in plastic domes that look like big rotisserie-chicken containers.

These precious things are some of first legal cannabis plants ever grown in Ohio.

“We are growing marijuana,” said Caroline Henry, vice president of compliance and communications for Grow Ohio, which owns the Muskingum County facility. “Right now they are tiny little babies.”

Those seedlings, and the new market they represent, contain so much promise that Jeff Sidwell, the owner of the property and a partner in Grow Ohio, and his fellow investors poured $20 million into Grow Ohio’s facility. Sidwell, a soft-spoken businessman who also owns an aggregate company just down Route 22 from Grow Ohio, had no experience with the cannabis industry. His partners didn’t, either. They saw a once-in-alifetime chance to get in on the ground floor of a burgeoning industry, and they gave it their best shot, he said.

Grow Ohio scored second out of 109 applicants for Ohio’s bigger, level-1 growing licenses. Getting a license was “like catching lightning in a bottle,” Sidwell said.

The cultivation facility is nothing like your college roommate’s closet or the grow tents in your cousin’s basement.

The soon-to-be dozens of employees at Grow Ohio will wear full-body Tyvek suits in the stark interior of the building, which features white walls and a lot of stainless steel.

Grow Ohio split its facility into quadrants so cannabis can be grown at different phases, in slightly different ways and using different strains. The system helps maintain a consistent supply year-round while protecting plants from disease, system failures and other problems that can be contained to a single quad.

The state awarded 13 level-1 licenses (up to 25,000 square feet) and 13 level-2 licenses (up to 3,000 square feet), but just 10 of the licensees received the green light to start growing. The state’s first level-1 grower was Buckeye Relief, near Cleveland, which hopes to harvest its first plants in December.

A few small growers plan to have initial harvests next month, according to Mark Hamlin, a senior policy adviser for the commerce department.

“It is important to manage expectations,” Hamlin said during a Thursday hearing of the Ohio Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee. “You’ll see a handful of batches by the end of the year, very small amounts of product that will serve patients numbering in the hundreds, not the thousands.”

Cannabis plants require four to five months to mature, so Grow Ohio sees its first products reaching dispensaries early next year.