Posted on 06/07/2014 10:23:57 PM PDT by steve86
Inside a windowless Sodo warehouse teeming with 1,143 pot plants, one of the state’s pioneering marijuana producers waited anxiously to “snap the lights.”
To growers, that means putting the leafy stalks on a 12-hour cycle under the lights. The suddenly shorter “days” signal to the plants that fall is coming — in early June.
“That’s when we play Mother Nature,” said Steve Elliott, an owner of one of Washington’s first licensed pot growers, AuricAG. “It puts the plants into hyper-drive.”
To propagate the species, the all-female plants then start to flower, secreting resins, sticky with pot’s psychoactive chemicals, to attract pollen. But not a speck of pollen should be around if Elliott and team have done their job. Desperate, the plants get more sticky, more pungent and more valuable. Their fastest-growing strain should be ready for harvest five weeks after flowering begins.
As the cycle is repeated in coming weeks, AuricAG’s owners will confront crucial questions. Can they deliver to the state’s first recreational pot stores a crop that meets purity standards, makes a decent profit and brands them as mature entrepreneurs who view pot more like good wine than hippie lettuce?
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
The team includes Greenshields, 48; Elliott, 45; Sewell, 44; and Mark Arnold, 50, a friend of Elliott’s and former Boeing inspector, who works as assistant grower.
In daily tasks, the approach is more collective. All tend to wear soccer jerseys, shorts and sweatpants to work. “Titles get left at the door when we walk in,” Sewell said.
But they’ve slid into roles since the official birth of their company on April 16, when they became the 16th grower licensed in the state. “We had about 30 to 60 seconds of real joy and high-fiving,” Greenshields said about the day they passed their state inspection. “Then I looked at everybody and said, ‘Now the real work begins.’ ”
Theirs was but one of the 2,800 applications for state growing licenses. They applied for a license that allows them to farm up to 7,000 square feet, a mid-sized operation in the state system. They hope to produce at least 1,000 pounds of pot a year to start, a small fraction of the 80 metric tons the state eventually expects to be legally produced.
All start-ups are full of hard work.
Are they paying less than $15 per hour?
That would be wage theft.
Dude, starting up a pot facility is a lot more trouble than you’d think. I wonder what the license fee was.
Next week:
Startup pot operators shot by Mexican cartel members.
No, the cartels will be undercutting the state pot on price and variety and not by just a little.
They really don’t view the state-taxed and regulated product as much in the way of business competition.
Bingo.
ping !!!
Stress eh? I wonder what they could do to mellow out?
I’ve been saying since the 1960s that legalization would bring an expensive, highly-taxed, inferior product, and do little or nothing to eliminate the black market.
marijuana smoking leads to Liberal voting tendancies.
avoid this trap at all costs .
The lefty brain sure is confusing...
Give up the bud dude.
A spin off industry, armored car delivery, not of cash, but buds.
The next spin off will be sales of illict Twinkies
avoid this trap at all costs ."
Uh huh......Swing and a miss.
Forcing your medical choices on others at the end of a gun leads to FASCISM!
Call it the Green Rush. There will be lots of newly minted millionaires in the next decade. Capitalism always wins.
Indeed. Without the voting history of liberal 60s-era hippie dopeheads and their cultural ilk, there never would have been a Clinton or an Obama presidency, turning the country into the filthy sewer that it has become.
For this, I’ll despise the hippie dopehead filth until the day I die. Despise their very guts.
Well, ya know, it's kinda like this, man.
We were tryin' ta grow stuff and we were gettin' stressed cuz we didn't have enough to sell. So we rolled up a few doobs ta mellow out 'til we realized we smoked it all an' didn't have enough ta sell, man!
So we like, had ta grow some more, man, an' we were gettin' stressed out cua we didn't have enough to sell. So we rolled up a few doobs ta mellow out.......
So like, ya got any Cheetos, man?
Well, do ya, man?"
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