Wednesday, February 13, 2019

CBD Gold Rush Warning

Mark Wisnovsky

Ghost Towns Happen.  


A CBD Gold Rush is underway in Southern Oregon. It may come to grief.


"There are lots of people telling folks to plant, plant, plant. These are people who want growers to flood the market. They are buyers of CBD, not growers. Growing is easy. Selling is extraordinarily difficult. If you don't have connections in the marketplace for selling, don't bother growing."
         Mark Wisnovsky, Southern Oregon winemaker and CBD entrepreneur



Mark Wisnovsky knows his way around the business of creating farm products for sale. The family vineyard, Valley View Winery, is the pioneer commercial winery in Southern Oregon. Wisnovsky operates the serious business of growing grapes, processing them into wine, then selling that wine into the local and international marketplace. Wisnovsky is an early adopter. He planted hemp for production of CBD, to be sold as medicine. 

Display at the Cannabis Expo in Southern Oregon
Reminder: CBD is a non-psychoactive portion of a cannabis plant. It is regulated by the  Department of Agriculture of the state and federal governments. It is a legal farm crop, like wheat and grapes.

The CBD marketplace is red hot. Farmers are getting offers to buy or lease their land for CBD production. Growers of traditional get-you-high cannabis are transitioning to CBD and expanding their acreage. It might be the beginning of something sustainable, but the market for CBD is new and volatile. There is not yet an orderly market of buyers and sellers. 

Enormous new quantities of CBD are being grown. Prices might collapse--or not. One won't know until the crop is grown and growers have $3,000-5,000 an acre in sunk costs.

The market for CBD laden flower buds is made by people who extract the CBD for re-sale. Presumably the end user market is world wide and gigantic. CBD is showing up as an additive to cosmetics, foods, over the counter medicines, pet food, vitamins, water, and more. Barneys in New York and Beverly Hills now sells a variety of CBD products. Investment websites have headlines "Top CBD Stocks to buy today!" Cannabis stocks trade on the New York Stock Exchange. 

Possibly everything grown can be sold, and at a profit. Or not.
CBD cigarettes at Expo

CBD is a "challenging marketplace." Wisnovsky says, with "irresponsible" people who "want overproduction, and are looking out for their own interests, not the growers' interests. The extractors want the product as cheap as possible, so of course they want everyone to grow."

And growers of CBD are easy to victimize. "There are unethical people who want to sell you poor quality seeds. You can have tens of thousands of dollars into a crop and be growing something you cannot sell." Seeds are sold as "feminized," i.e. bud-growing female plants. (Male plants are worse than worthless because they cause female plants to grow seeds.) Feminization might not prove true. 

Worse, the seeds are sold as having ultra-low THC level genetics, which is what makes the flowers legal as medicine. That, too, might not prove true. Fields are tested late in the season and certified as CBD compliant, i.e. no meaningful THC. A field that tests too high is a total loss.

Even perfect, high quality CBD flower may sit in a warehouse, unsellable. "From this point forward, if you don't have a contract with a buyer and a down payment in hand, then don't bother growing. I would say the same thing for grapes, but people don't get a down payment for grapes."

CBD in legal transition. Wisnovsky has been a long-time active member--indeed board member--of the Medford-Jackson County Chamber of Commerce, but he expresses disappointment on the reluctance of old guard local business and political leaders to protect this industry from one other hazard: seizure of the product by rogue jurisdictions. 

"Idaho has positioned itself to be one of the most backward states in the country when it comes to CBD. They have been seizing CBD produced in a legal hemp state to another legal hemp state. Shouldn't this be part of interstate commerce of a product now federally legal?"

Display at Expo. Get in on the quick money.
Wisnovsky says this is precisely the kind of new industry that would profit from forward-looking business and political leadership, using political muscle to look out for local interests. "Where is the Chamber of Commerce on this? Where are our political and business leaders? If Idaho said they didn't want products with gluten being sold in their state, and they seized shipments of wheat going from eastern Oregon to Colorado to be made into breakfast cereal, wouldn't our leaders rise up to complain? Of course they would."

Booms happen. Busts happen. Enthusiasm for the internet brought technology stocks to sky-high prices in 1999, and another 20% higher in two months of 2000. Then those stocks fell 85%. Housing prices and mortgage loans were a sure thing in 2006 and 2007, then disintegrated in 2008-2010. 

CBD is giving off price signals that encourage people to grow CBD in quantity, and acreage is expanding rapidly in Southern Oregon. It may work out great. Or not.






8 comments:

Rick Millward said...

Hemp can also be processed to make other goods including fabric and a form of biodegradable plastic. The medicinal qualities are still under study. A quick look showed up this article from a somewhat disreputable institution:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/cannabidiol-cbd-what-we-know-and-what-we-dont-2018082414476

It's kind of amazing that pharmaceutical companies haven't coopted CBD but I suspect it's due to fear of liability should we discover that long term use has negative side effects. My guess is that in due time hemp jeans will be all the rage.

Emly Mia said...
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