View attachment 650559 I finally took 5 days off and am vacationing at the Oregon Coast and am relaxing so thought I would give a little update on W.O.W. Weed and our progress.
The legalized system here is still a mixed bag. We are doing reasonably well, selling between $50,000 - $80,000 per month of bud, mostly in grams still. We charge retailers $3.95 a gram for our hand trimmed slow cured bud and sell everything we grow. We work with about 15 different retailers and could not take on many if any more just because we are a small company with only a few employees and that is about the limit of what we can manage in the way of growing, trimming and packaging per month with the help we do have. This outdoor harvest we brought in about 600 lbs and finished with about 48 strains that we brought to market. We still use no pesticides whatsoever and did some random pesticide, heavy metal and mycotoxin testing of our outdoor crop just to make sure we had no surprises in the soil that we buy or from any neighboring industry and we were told by the lab "
that we were one of 2 farms in the state that tested so clean" so that was great validation for what we do. Our indoor is just as clean but we do use predatory mites in our indoor grow and still they work very well for us allowing us to grow with no sprays of any kind. We sold about 50,000 clones last spring to other growers so the genetics we are running have been distributed all across the state.
We have tried to bring skilled growers into our operation and each time it has been a very very negative experience:-/ We have tried 4 different medical growers that were just clueless when it came to growing on this scale and to a person they were disrespectful and convinced that theirs was the ONLY way to grow weed. I don't think we ever want to hire another person that has even ever grown a plant before and that is quite unfortunate in my mind. I really thought we could find someone that has growing skills that would be an asset and help us do even better but each one that we have tried has just been a huge problem for us and we could not part ways soon enough:-(
The growers organization, the Cannabis Farmers Council, that I founded is getting more and more organized and we have submitted a marketing order for a Cannabis Commission with the Dept. of Agriculture. They are reviewing it now and when it meets with their approval it goes to the growers in WA state for a vote. It will give cannabis farming a foundation as agriculture with the rights to farm, the full weight and support of the Dept. of Ag and the Attorney Generals Office and nearly every cent that is raised by the commission from farmers will go to research for best practices for growing on the commercial scale and education and outreach to the public about cannabis cultivation.
Our layout of our indoor operation has been upgraded as has our lighting and we are working on improved HVAC for our flowering rooms but we are doing pretty good with our indoor as well seeing a return of right at 1.75 lbs per light of trimmed bud and some trim that we utilize for kief production.
I am just about ready to sell the company or at a minimum my share of the company mainly because I am 60 years old and tired of working 7 days a week to keep this place running at least somewhat smoothly. I still love the plant.....nothing will be changing that in my lifetime.....but I am tired and someone else with more energy than I can keep working with this to make W.O.W. Weed even better no doubt. I also want to spend more time with my new and only grandchild and since no one under the age of 21 can be on the premises I need to be off the premises to visit with him and I am just ready to move on past this and get my life back. That is not to say that this has not been quite the adventure. That it certainly has, but I think it is time to leave the "heavy lifting" to the next generation of growers because I am ready to pass off the baton and move on.
It will be intriguing to see what the incoming administration does with legalization. Hopefully they will leave it to the states to decide for themselves what to do and we will not loose the momentum and gains we have seen in legalization to date. It remains to be seen however and I know I am not the only one watching closely to see how this goes.
Here are a couple of photos of our outdoor garden this year:
View attachment 650557 View attachment 650557
View attachment 650560
View attachment 650559
Our packaging of a few of our strains
View attachment 650557
View attachment 650558
If anyone is going to go the legal route and I can help with anything from planning to licensing just reach out and I will help in any way I can!