Have you had ice wine? The sweet dessert wine is made from grapes frozen on the vine, requiring a large labor force to harvest the entire crop within hours after the first morning of adequately cold temperature.
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Many American farmers were handed seeds of opportunity in October, when the United States Department of Agriculture released its much-anticipated regulations for farming hemp. The new federal rules came nearly a year after Congress legalized hemp farming, and almost half a decade after the Colorado Department of Agriculture established its own program for farming hemp. And this state’s rules don’t exactly line up with the ones just announced by the feds.
Colorado is on the short list of states whose farmers will soon be eligible for federal crop insurance.
“My whole life lately seems to be about hemp,” says Lily Morgan. And for good reason: The founder of Colorado-based skin care company Lily Farm Fresh Skin Care has owned and operated eighty acres of farmland to supply her own production in Keenesburg, Colorado, for over thirty years, Now nearly 90 percent of it is devoted to hemp.
Well, that didn’t take long: Less than a week after Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed a bill that expanded marijuana business investment opportunities for publicly traded companies, venture capitalists and private equity firms, one of the state’s largest pot corporations announced plans to scoop up two commercial marijuana operations, including the largest legal outdoor cultivation in North America.
The moment the hemp industry has been waiting for finally happened: President Donald Trump just signed the 2018 Farm Bill, legalizing industrial hemp in the United States.
Hemp, marijuana’s non-psychoactive counterpart, can be turned into a large variety of products. And in 2016, Colorado farmers produced half of the hemp grown in the United States. Even after more states started growing the crop in 2017, Colorado still planted over three times more of it than any other state in the country, with North Dakota and Kentucky following next, according to the Colorado Department of Agriculture.
There’s a reason most cannabis cultivations in Colorado are in warehouses: People are scared. Afraid of the elements, pests and the unknowns of farming under the sun, most growers prefer to stay inside, taking control of their environments and nurturing their delicate crops with extreme care. Even if growers wanted to venture outdoors, many local governments in densely populated areas, like the City of Denver’s, ban outdoor operations. Travel up to the mountains, however, and you’ll find a tougher breed of both plant and grower.
Aurora’s Mayflower Farms is one of the largest grow operations in the state, and it’s getting even bigger. In November, Mayflower will add an extraction lab for concentrates as well as a kitchen at its facility; in the new year, it will open its own retail store.
In February 2015, the new cannabis company took over an old Mayflower Moving warehouse (hence the name) and started overhauling the place; it had plants in the ground eleven months later, says CEO Bruce Douglass. It currently has five rooms totaling about 3,000 square feet devoted to growing flower, and has gone through eight harvests since January. Each harvest garners about 100 pounds of product. Today Mayflower has 3,600 plants in its facility, but come November it will up that to 6,000.
The state’s growing regions can be dangerous.
Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Download WeedWeek’s free 2016 election guide here.
Two women were arrested for detaining four brothers on a California pot farm and forcing them to work for six months. In Colorado, 14 Chinese nationals were arrested at an illegal grow. Authorities are investigating whether they were “labor trafficked.”
In SFWeekly, I recommended that the industry adopt an abuse-free product certification to curtail worker exploitation.