Corporate Indoor Farm: "Doing it Right."

Grand Opening. Ribbon Cutting. Page One News. Local business leaders single out a company. 

"The best thing to do is encourage those who are doing it right."

   Chamber of Commerce President and CEO as quoted in Mail Tribune

    

print edition

The Mail Tribune celebrated a milestone Wednesday when they put onto Page One a laudatory story about a cannabis company. 

Finally, the right kind of people were entering the cannabis business.

 There have long been local farmers, processors, and merchants working in the cannabis and hemp industry in Southern Oregon. They are growing in the soil, water, and climate of this region, an area with an international reputation for high quality, considered the "Napa of cannabis." Both varieties of the plant are grown here, the THC variety that has psychoactive effects, and the CBD medicinal type, without those effects.

The headline and story report that the Chamber of Medford/Jackson County president and CEO Brad Hicks recognized a new company doing business the way it should be done, citing it as an example to others and encouragement to those "doing it right."

The newspaper article noted that the business establishment of Southern Oregon had "struggled" with whether or not to support an industry that had "become a significant economic engine for the region." 

They had not. It was noticed.

Heretofore, the industry in Southern Oregon has been dominated by local individual entrepreneurs working as farmers, processors, workers, and landowners. The industry brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the region, elevating wages and farm prices, enabling new enterprises in irrigation, fertilizers, and soil amendments; in construction; in farm equipment sales and service. Because the businesses were locally owned and operated, the profits were recycled back into the community.

Merchants noticed the extra business. Customers noticed huge displays of new items to service the industry. Young people could pay their bills.

The business community and Chamber had embraced the wine industry, dominated by local landowners with vineyards and wineries. Local mattered. The entrepreneurs in the cannabis and hemp industry were also local people operating small businesses, but they did not fit the Chamber mold, did not know the right people, weren't Chamber members, and didn't support the Chamber PAC and its political agenda. 

But finally, the right sort arrived. The ribbon cutting event got the full court press establishment imprimatur, with the Chamber, a county commissioner, a state representative, and media. 

The focus of attention was a Canadian corporation, Canopy Growth, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CGC. They entered a partnership with a New York based chain of growers and dispensaries, and would be growing cannabis indoors in a "state of the art" facility in a building near the local airport. 

They would not be using local soils, land, water, or climate, but they did locate an empty building to take over. Everything would be done indoors.

Typically, Chambers of Commerce lean toward locally owned and operated businesses. After all, that way profits are recycled back into the community as business shop here, bank here, and profits are reinvested here. Some owners become civic leaders. Some of those business owners do particularly well and, being rooted in the community, become local benefactors. Out of town corporate box stores are understood to be different. They disrupt, and can hollow out the local business community. They do business, but business decisions are made elsewhere, and the best incomes and profits leave. 

From Chamber website

The ribbon cutting was for a factory in a box, one that replaces the local soil, sun, climate and terroir that brands local pears, wines, and cannabis. They will "farm" with artificial lights and soil. There will be seals and filters to isolate the facility from the outside. 

No need for local farmers with expertise in local land, no need for involvement with local irrigation districts or the general agricultural economy, no link to what is unique to the community. Insofar as the business is successful it will be disruptive and extractive, competition to local growers, sending its profits out of the country.

The facility found a warm welcome. Local leaders had found their comfort zone--out of town corporate ownership, and Chamber members of the kind that will fit in. 

Cause for celebration.