Why operating in California is a different type of challenge
California’s kind of special.[…]If you said you’re number four in Florida, that kind of means you’re last. In California, it means you’re better than 1,600 other brands nipping at your heels every day trying to kick you off the shelves. I sometimes say [that] California lives in the future. Our consumers are some of the most educated out there.
[It’s been] 27 years since medical cannabis happened, and I think sometimes people think I’m arrogant about California. [It’s] not that at all. It’s just [that] if you had someone who had been practicing football for 27 years and someone [who] had been practicing football for two years, who would you expect to be better? This is what we do out here.
This is where the culture comes from and the genetics and the people and the operators. And so, all [of] it’s super competitive. We think competition breeds excellence, and we’re happy to be out here doing what we’re doing.
On interstate commerce and the dormant clause
The dormant commerce clause ensures a farmer that the entire nation is his market, right?
So, what they’re saying is you can’t say, “I don’t want California cannabis,” right? That’s unconstitutional. Think about what happens, in the national market, when a tariff happens. Is it ever just one way? No. It’s a tariff war. So, if Florida says, “Hey, we don’t want California weed because we have weed growers,” what are the odds that California is going to say, “We don’t want Florida oranges because we’ve got orange growers”? So, those things are all equivalent.
Graham Farrar, President at Glass House Brands
Applying Big Agricultural technologies to cannabis
Agriculture is doing things well, and we are some of the first ones to apply it to cannabis. Our ebb and flood floors? We have a bay there. We harvest about 28,000 plants a week, which means we need to veg and replant 28,000 plants. So, if you think about that, there’s kind of three ways you could do that.
You could irrigate it from the top, but that’s bad for pathogens and inconsistent and high labor. You could put emitters in it, but 28,000 times in and 28,000 times out? That is a ton of resources. Or you can use an ebb and flood floor, which is basically a two-inch-deep swimming pool. So, what we do is we flood this floor up, and the plants absorb all the water they need from the bottom—totally consistent, zero labor.
It’s automated, and then, when they’re done, we’re done. They drain the water back off. We capture the water and the fertilizer—both expensive and valuable commodities, both for business and for the environment. We clean it and then we put it on the bay next to it.
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