The Best Weed in the World is in L.A.

by The Real Dirt | May 18, 2020 | 420, cannabis business, cannabis culture, cannabis industry, growing, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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Brian Weiss has always been an advocate for cannabis and has had a secure connection in the cannabis industry for over 20 years.

Brian grew up in a well-known entertainment family and has been focused on marketing & business development within the cannabis, entertainment, and digital media sectors.

Brian launched L.A. Cannabis News in 2017, an MVP of C.N. Media. They offer news, events, jobs, education, resources, and advertising to our fast-growing online audience and in-person following.

In today’s segment, Brian talks about what’s happening in the cannabis industry at present, future predictions and social and cultural changes during the Coronavirus and the pot market.

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Some Topics We Discussed Include

1:47 – L.A. has the best weed
4:08 – Price of weed in L.A.
8:14 – Starting L.A. Cannabis News
18:11 – Homegrown ganja: Future of the cannabis industry
24:26 – Learning something new
29:35 – A trip to Florida
32:52 – Cannabis predictions after the present pandemic condition
58:14 – All things made in China

People Mentioned / Resources

Connect with Brian Weiss

Connect with Chip Baker

Transcript

Chip Baker: Good morning, this is Chip with The Real Dirt. In today’s dirt, I have Brian Weiss, say hello, Brian.

Brian Weiss: Hello, Chip, hello world.

Chip Baker: Hello. You know Brian is the brother of one of my really good friends and you know… he’s been in the cannabis industry for a while. Brian runs L.A. Cannabis News, which is an information source for all things cannabis in L.A Southern California. But right now, Brian is stuck. I shouldn’t say stuck. He is on sabbatical in Florida. How you doing, Brian?

Brian Weiss: I’m well Chip, thank you so much for having me today. I really appreciate it.

Chip Baker: Oh, man, I’m glad we could put it together. You know, I left California a number of years ago but it’s always a warm place in my heart. We still own property there and whatnot. And that’s something that people don’t understand or realize is that if you want the best weed in the world, you go to L.A. to get it. I don’t care who you are, where you’re at. you do not have the best weed in the world. They got it in L.A., though, right? it’s true. Why do you think that is man?

L.A. has the Best Weed

Brian Weiss: Well, I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. And I think the San Fernando Valley actually has the best weed of Los Angeles. Why? Don’t know, but it just seems that they’ve perfected it maybe the fact that normally you know, people think of Humboldt County and a lot of that gets flown, you know… flown or driven down to L.A. and mass distributed and so and then other people have gotten the idea you know… wow there’s such good flower from up north. I think we could produce that same flower down here. And many growers have figured out how to and have successfully.

Chip Baker: Yeah, just like all things there’s like a flash that goes on in L.A. you know, and cannabis is the same way and I feel that it’s probably one of the most informed consumer markets in the world even like in L.A. you could have the random stoner can go into any dispensary and say, Oh, no, man, that’s Hells Angels O.G., not Fire O.G. and I want Cookies O.G. This isn’t Cookie, this is Gelato, you know? It just–

Brian Weiss: I’ve actually got to the drive too, I have that same feeling from being someone a little bit older when I go into dispensaries and I have that Pre 98 Bubba, like this isn’t Pre 98 Bubba.

Chip Baker: Those are just letters and words; this isn’t. Yeah, no doubt. You know the other thing about Southern California is man it has brought the highest prices for cannabis historically. And because of that, like you know… people like you know, try to like bring their highest quality product to the marketplace, not just anything will sell there, right. So, you get this upper echelon curated cannabis in L.A. that might be produced anywhere in California, it might be [inaudible] Southern California, covered East way up North in San Francisco bay comes to L.A. for a reason because it’s the best, and people want the best.

Brian Weiss: Absolutely.

Price of Weed in L.A.

Chip Baker: Hey, what’s the average prices for weed?

Brian Weiss: So it’s funny you say that, I found that you know there are dispensaries in L.A. on the legal side. And it seems that most of them are charging between $25 to $90 an eight. And then you have black market side where they keep it average between you know, $35-$50 an eight.

Chip Baker: Now when you say black market explain to the listeners what’s going on in Southern California with the dispensaries.

Brian Weiss: So there are hundreds if not thousands of dispensaries in L.A. Only about 100 or so are actually legal. But when you know we had Proposition 215 there was no really regulation on who is legal who is not. Everybody claim they were legal. Every year, it seemed like they came out with another law that said that these excuse me, these dispensaries need to shut down. But they just kept going. And when you know, cannabis finally became legal, you know, there were those that can survive and pay the taxes and there were those that couldn’t survive, but actually well, could still survive but not charged to taxes. And, you know, so the black market side is actually, for me, I feel that a lot of these illicit I don’t like to say black market, I like to actually illicit market, dispenceries are–

Chip Baker: I’m a private market guy.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, private market guy.

Chip Baker: No taxes…

Brian Weiss: Yeah, no taxes. They also have, to me, I feel like they also have the better product. I really do. I feel like they have a lot better product–

Chip Baker: They’re open to far more growers that way. You know–

Brian Weiss: That’s true.

Chip Baker: Right, I mean, for instance, in in Humboldt County, you know, seven years ago, the government said there were 13,000 grows up there, right? Yeah, totally. And, now there’s like a few hundred legal ones. You know, that didn’t even touch the number of growers that are there.

Brian Weiss: Yeah. Totally. I also see that in many cases, at least that it seems like, I mean, even to begin with a better product side, it’s like when I go to a legal dispensary, a lot of the problem I have, at least when I go there is that you look at something in the jar that you can’t touch and you can barely smell. And when you purchase it, and you get home and you open it a lot of the time for me without naming, you know, company names. There’s a dry boveda pack in there. And the product is probably at least six months old. And you know, and you think about it, you start tracing and it’s like okay, well this product came from a grower and then it went to some warehouse somewhere, then it went to some distribution center. And it sat on their shelves for a little while and then by the time it actually gets to the dispensary, it’s not what the brands promotes. And with at least going with the black market side of the listed or the private market side, you get to go in, you get to touch it, you get to feel it, you know… you got to know that you’re getting a good product on the spot.

Chip Baker: Yeah, many people have said that legal weed has decreased the quality of cannabis, right. The mechanization of it the like, man, those boveda packs and the plastic on air-sealed bottles and just like breaking buds down into like, 10th of a gram to sell it, like just all ruins it. It just ruins it all.

Brian Weiss: I totally agree with with that statement. I yeah….just totally agree.

Chip Baker: So, let’s talk about L.A. Cannabis News.

Brian Weiss: What do you want to know?

Chip Baker: Tell me what it is. Tell me your story. Tell me how to start this.

Starting L.A. Cannabis News

Brian Weiss: Yeah, so I was looking for about two years ago. I was looking for something to potentially invest in the cannabis industry as cannabis became legal in California. And I found myself searching dozens of sites through Google, you know, I would type in cannabis news, Los Angeles cannabis news, Los Angeles marijuana news. And I would find, you know, dozens of different sources that carried different articles, great articles, but I couldn’t find one source.

So, I moved my search from finding something to invest in, you know, with my research of these all these articles too… Wow, Is there any local cannabis news? And when I found out that there is no local cannabis news in LA., I was like, Oh my god, how is this possible? There’s so much going on here besides just legalization. Still, you have social equity, and you have the illicit side of it, and you know, the regulations and the taxes and, you know, education and science and medical stuff. And so I was like someone needs to be covering this. And after finding out and figuring out that there was no local coverage for Southern California or Los Angeles, I then started searching. Wow, is there local coverage or any of this in other states. At the time, there is only the cannabis in Denver, which quickly went out of business. And I found that all of a sudden there was no local cannabis news other than, you know, local newspapers in Humboldt County or patch.com that had their local coverage, but not anything–

Chip Baker: [inaudible]

Brian Weiss: Yeah, there you go. Actually, that one too. But there wasn’t, and I just didn’t, I felt like there was a need. And so I started L.A. Cannabis News. I went on godaddy.com, and lacannabisnews.com was available for $1.99 like I’m on this something. A year and a half later now, we’ve got about 30 plus thousand people on our site a month, about 50,000 email subscribers, which is awesome. And it’s great because, with L.A. Cannabis News, it was almost like RMVP, you know, we’re able to test our assumptions and see that the market wanted and needed a local cannabis news source. So that’s basically how we started.

Chip Baker: So in I mean, this is an online publication– How often, you have an official publication date or publication timeline, or just do it every day or is an odd running blog like what how does it work?

Brian Weiss: Yeah, so every day we aggregate about 10 to 15 stories that mostly cover Southern California some stories do cover other parts of the country just because it’s important in the cannabis industry, even if you’re just in Los Angeles. No it also is happening around the country or even around the world. So most of the time, we do aggregate our stories. Most of it is not original content.

However, we do have stories here and there that we want to cover. And we do have writers for that. And every year, which we just put out at the beginning of March, we do a top 50. Well, not every year, we’ve only been in business for two years. But we did it last year. And we did it this year, we put out a product issue, covering brands that are not covered in other magazines. What I mean by that other magazines have a pay to play just like the videos, and you got to pay them money if you want to be in their magazine. And I saw that all these other magazines, mostly culture, lifestyle magazines, in the cannabis industry, cover the same brands, you know, If you look at their top 10, this is their top 10 that, it was the same brands every single time. And I was like, well what about all these other brands, there are so many other great brands out there, and so we did the research, and you know, this year, we came up with 53 brands, and we put out a digital product issue. We didn’t review the brands, because, in all honesty, half of them were good, and half of them weren’t. And but we put out, you know, the description about the brand, we gave them, their social media links their website, where to find these products. And, you know, the nice little picture of the brand.

It’s great because these smaller brands, they can’t afford to be in these bigger magazines. So for us, it was a, it’s good outreach for these smaller brands that say, hey, look, we’ve got some press now. And yeah, so we put out this digital issue, but we mainly stick to daily postings, about 10 to 15 articles a day. Oh, and we also have about 100 events on our site at any given time throughout Los Angeles and California that you know, people can look for.

Chip Baker: Oh, did you rank these products 1 to 50?

Brian Weiss: No, we just put them in alphabetical order.

Chip Baker: Okay. Hey, what were some of your favorite products?

Brian Weiss: To be honest, I’m a huge fan of Three C Farms, they’re out of Los Angeles. They actually own also the coast to coast dispensary in L.A. they just put out a quality product for, from the prices that I’ve seen in their dispensary at a good price. I like Golden Seed. They’re a little on the higher side pricing wise, but exactly what is a Golden State excuse me Golden State. I like their products, and then I like some of the edible companies that we used like plus products. I like their edibles a lot of Kanha, which is owned by I think Sunderstorm. They make fantastic gummies, and then on the vape side, I’m a big Moxie 710 fan. I think they do nice products that seem like they taste pretty good I’m not a big vapor, but from the products that I tried, I like theirs the most.

Chip Baker: Yeah, we’re ABX absolute.

Brian Weiss: Oh, yeah, we have them as well in there. Huh? Yeah. They’re lucky because they’re in the number– They’re the letter A., So they appeared pretty quick.

Chip Baker: Well, they’re pretty big. I mean, I’m surprised they’re not. They weren’t in like, the category of normal. I mean of the elite cannabis people that can advertise to play, pay to play.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, it seems that you know, as I explore ways of us making revenue, that the bigger cannabis brands that are crazy outlandish that just have millions upon millions of dollars to spend on don’t pay to play. It seems like the smarter brands, even if they’re bigger. They know that it’s that there’s no reason for them to pay to play because they’re a fantastic brand. And they can [inaudible], and they’d rather get the better bang for their buck.

Chip Baker: Oh, man. It’s a great marketing lesson that we should put out there. I’ve gone to dozens of trade shows up half for 20 years, all cannabis oriented. And there’s this new misnomer that if you’re a new person, you need to come in and spend like shit to the money at the tradeshow to get noticed. You know, and if you watch the bigger companies like the actual bigger companies, not the ones that seem big, they’re not spending that much money, right?

They’ve got some personnel, they’ve got maybe larger than normal. But they had the biggest people in the tradeshow industry, the biggest revenue producers. They spend like mid-tier. And now you’re like top-tier, right? And the top-tier spenders are often people who aren’t that big but wants you to think they’re big, right? They just happen to have the $20,000 or $30,000 to sponsor the banner and you know, the lanyards, the water cup, and the big booth, all the swag and you know, it makes them feel, it kind of makes him feel good but man, you know, the thing about the trade shows is the vendors the customer there.

Brian Weiss: Yeah. Also, I see that a lot of these bigger companies it’s, you’re not as the customers are walking around the booth to booth, you know, their potential clients. There’s one guy or one girl that represents the company, and then they have promotional people that have no idea what they’re talking about.

Chip Baker: Yeah, totally.

Brian Weiss: It’s like if you’re going to spend that kind of money, you should bring out people that are going to help you get business as opposed to just someone to take a picture with.

Chip Baker: Well, there’s not so much TNA is there used to be in our industry, I mean, it came over pretty hard when the trade shows when it first started 10 or 15 years ago, that there was the scantily clad female or male there and they were like, you know, trying to draw people in. And there’s still some of that, but in the hydro weed industry it’s mostly gone to the authentic reps or the people who own the companies and you know… I should say there’s a lot of that going on right.

Brian Weiss: I was just gonna say that I think the conference does that are more B2B have you know have the right reps there. Their conferences that are you know more B2C facing they have that scantily clad right there which is understandable to a degree.

Chip Baker: You’re right and interesting about cannabis is now, it’s so much of it’s B2B, and it used to– you know… I own Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC, we’re one of the largest hydroponic shops in the country. And you know, people have called me a home grow shop in the past and yeah, man. We help home growers all over the world, blow out their closets, and their basements. And you know, smoke good weed, but mostly it’s a business to business transaction we have. Most of our customers are in business for cannabis.

Homegrown Ganja: Future of the Cannabis Industry

Brian Weiss: Do you see– let me ask you a question. So as you just mentioned, you help you know, Clients blow out their closets in their basements, do you see– and I sort of see this in my personal opinions and views as the industry grows and goes forward and goes backward, and then goes ahead again that maybe home grow or home growers will become a thing of the future more and more people will start growing at home as suppose to–

Chip Baker: No, it’s happening now. Oh, it’s happening now, Brian. Check out what’s happening, man. So like in all these states that have passed some sort of medical marijuana or even thought about it like Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, dude, there are people all over that state. They’ve grown a little bit of weed now because of it, solely because the perceptions change. People’s morals have changed, hemp and CBD have helped a lot here.

People’s morals have changed, hemp and CBD have helped a lot. – Chip BakerCLICK TO TWEET

But for instance, when Oklahoma went medical last year, they got 200,000 people that signed up on this registry to have recommendations from doctors to buy medical dispensaries. 200,000 dude the same time Missouri has similar things going on Michigan’s having similar. You couldn’t buy a grow tent in the country last year for six months. I mean, not on time, you could order it. But like in 110 lights even up until recently you couldn’t get a 110 light because all the commercial people used to 240-277 right. So the home growers use the 110s.

So man home productions up here in Oklahoma, man home productions huge, organics huge, you know people feel like organic is how weed should be grown, and people have essentially perceptions of it, which is great. You’ll love it. In Oklahoma so many people are talking about organic, it’s like Humboldt in the 90s you know, in organic, it ain’t shit, you know–

Brian Weiss: Yeah, totally. That’s awesome. I’m glad to hear that’s happening. I am a huge advocate of that moving forward in the future.

Chip Baker: Oh, grow your own man. And the thing about growing your own is it get you this pride from doing it. And it doesn’t matter if someone else grows better weed than you do or the dispensary grows different looking weed, like for us I never trim my own personal weed here don’t have some here is [inaudible]. I just like when I go to smoke it I just pulled the leaves off, you know it didn’t look like the stuff in the dispensary right. But it’s there’s just this like, man this complete joy when you get to like plan a small seed or buy a clone, grow it and flower it. And then you have something that you can produce and that you like, Oh, I agree this I put my love and energy into it.

The thing about growing your own is, it gets you this pride from doing it. – Chip BakerCLICK TO TWEET

Brian Weiss: That’s a lot of learning experience.

Chip Baker: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You learn about the weed. You know, learn about yourself. I’ve said this over and over again. I’m not sure who’s cultivating who, am I cultivating the plant or they cultivating me?

Brian Weiss: [inaudible]

Chip Baker: Man, I find so many analogies in it. Like, you know, every time something’s going on with the plant, I find the same things going on in my business or personal life too.

Brian Weiss: It’s cool. It’s a great synergy to have.

Chip Baker: Yeah, man. So hey, man, I think this is a perfect time for us to take a break. Let’s take a break for one second. This is Chip with The Real Dirt, I’m speaking to Brian Weiss. We’ll be right back.

Hey, guys, this is Chip from The Real Dirt. I’m sporting my corona hairdo. Yeah, that’s right. We’re all gonna have big hair after this. Hey, and I just want to let you guys know man that Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC we are still open and providing services to growers. Now we’re doing a little bit different right now you have to call in your order, you have to email your order, but you can still come and pick it up at the shop. It’s a we’ll call type of situation, and in some places we can absolutely deliver. So if you need some product, it doesn’t matter if you need one litre a hundred, one bag of soil, or a pallet a soil or a truckload of soil, man give us a call. We have huge stock right now, we always carry huge inventory of everything. Especially this time of year, it’s time to get started on that garden earlier. So call us up at Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC, you can look us up online, cultivatecolorado.com, cultivateokc.com, talk to anyone of our awesome people there and they can help you through.

All right, thanks for joining us again here. We’re back after a commercial break with The Real Dirt. Yeah, you like my commercial style, Brian?

Brian Weiss: I do. I like your commercial style, it is very personable.

Chip Baker: Very personal, you know, When I first started this, Hollis Carter, he asked me, he gave me the idea. He said, Hey, Chip, do you think you can talk about weed for an hour? Yeah, like how many days do you want me to talk non stop, you know… But yeah, we talk to the customers all the time, it gives me like this, I mean, I’m talking to people all the time about weed, it’s not just like, someone’s random conversation you are too. I mean, it’s in the industry. It’s what we do. We love it. We live it. We talk about it all the time.

Brian Weiss: Absolutely. Some people talk about it more than others. But I agree.

Learning Something New

Chip Baker: Yeah, well, years ago, my wife said to me, there has to be some other conversation. You have to talk about something else different. And I was like, Wow, you’re right. I do. And so I started picking up some like hobbies, right. And this was like 15 years ago, and every couple years, I’ll pick up a new hobby, or try to teach myself something that I have absolutely no idea about, right. It challenges everything I do it gives me this mental toughness because I’m like, you know, forced to learn about it. I’ve forced myself and it’s out of my comfort zone. I try to pick stuff that’s hard and difficult. You know, my most recent one was guitar a couple years ago I picked up guitar–

Brian Weiss: I think my brother did too recently.

Chip Baker: Yeah, we trade guitar licks back and forth. Aaron’s actually, you know, pretty good guitar player. He’s–

Brian Weiss: He played it when he was younger.

Chip Baker: He’s got all that number stuff going on inside his head, you know what I’m saying? He count better than us.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, for sure.

Chip Baker: Yeah, but uh, yeah, you got any hobbies, Brian, you do anything other than weed?

Brian Weiss: Well, we were traveling, you know, for a little while, which I really enjoy doing. I’ve been getting into some cooking stuff lately. As soon as I actually get back in California–

Chip Baker: I bet the whole world has–

Brian Weiss: That’s actually what triggered by cooking was that this whole special time that we’re in right now. But ideally, we actually when I get back to California in September actually, I would like to get into some type of woodworking. I’ve never been a woodworking person, but I have some friends recently that basically have houses now and they have a garage, and they actually have kids and they’re like, how do I get out of the house and get away from my kids and get away from my wife in a sense and they go to their garage and they have their hobbies and not that I want to, I love my fiance, and I’m gonna love any child I have, but I want to create some type of fun hobby that completely different like you were saying that you know nothing about that you challenge yourself with and whether it is something that you know, is, I guess, good looking or not good looking. At least it’s your own challenge and it’s within yourself and so for me I’d like to get into some sort of woodworking. When I want to make it, I have no idea.

Chip Baker: I’ve been watching people make spoons on YouTube carve [inaudible]. And very relaxing to me right just to watch them. So like several Russian guys that do it and it’s in a different language and so it’s like, you know, I just get to zone out with [inaudible]. They’re like carving their spoon but like it’s very meditative right, spoon carving, doesn’t require too much equipment or space or anything really. But you know, I’m getting into construction again right now. It’s something I’ve always done. My whole life but of, the past like several years have had other people do it but yeah, with the whole Rona thing we’ve been pre-Rona, I was collecting my tools again and starting to put some stuff together, but yeah wood– building stuff with wood, building stuff with metal, it’s very joyful.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, it’s funny I watched a lot of these home shows which I would never watch when I was younger but I love them now and you know, they show these a lot of people using these shipping containers to create pools and to create homes with and I was like, that’d be sort of cool idea I want to have a– I’ve been researching, not that I know anything about any of this stuff but you know, I’ve been researching, like, how much is a shipping container? Where can I have it delivered to? You know, and it’s like, wow, these things are so cheap. So yeah, there’s a lot of fun things out there. I think a lot of– you know most people should, no matter how rich or how poor you are, that you should always have a another activity that makes you feel good. Gives you a break from life.

No matter how rich or how poor you are, you should always have another activity that makes you feel good. – Brian WeissCLICK TO TWEET

Chip Baker: Yeah, absolutely. Other than just smoking weed.

Brian Weiss: Absolutely. Well you can also smoke weed while you’re doing it.

Chip Baker: While you do it, that’s the beauty of it. That’s totally the beauty of it all. So Brian back to your traveling quest you’re you’re kind of not in Florida under your own design really. You were you’re kind of I shouldn’t say force, but decided you were going to like stay in, go to Florida. Tell us what’s going on?

A Trip to Florida

Brian Weiss: Yeah, so my fiance actually was my girlfriend at the time. But now my fiance, and I wanted to go on a six and a half months journey before we settle down. And we left at the beginning of March. We’re set out to do 13 European countries plus Morocco and Israel. And during our first country, which is Portugal. We got about almost three weeks in Portugal. When this whole Coronavirus thing started, and about, I guess 19 days now ago, we got a message from the U.S. Embassy saying, look, you can either stay in Portugal for potentially the next two years, or you can get on one of the last flights coming back to the United States. And you know, you got to figure out your own situation. So we got on a flight it was actually the second to last flight leaving Portugal and we didn’t really want to go back to L.A. but we didn’t want to go to New York, and we wanted to be somewhere warm. Because that was part of our traveling plans was to you know, do some European places that were warm. Yeah, in the summer. So we chose Florida which is actually not the greatest timing of choosing Florida because when we got here, they’re having spring break.

Chip Baker: Oh, perfect, perfect.

Brian Weiss: You know, and they talked about this whole virus is caused by but a lot of these people that were in Florida on spring break, are not doing any social distancing and we landed are like, Oh my god, what did we just come in to?

Chip Baker: I mean spring break for teenagers and college age students has nothing to do with distance other than the distance to travel to go to spring break.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, exactly. We first landed in Miami, and we were in a hotel for two nights, then the hotels got all shut down. And now we were smart. And we moved a little north. We’re in Fort Lauderdale now, and we got an Airbnb and not an apartment, we got a house so that we could be, you know, isolated from other people. My biggest fear was someone in the building catching it, and then we being stuck in an apartment for, who knows how long. It’s nice that we’re in a house now.

Chip Baker: So let me back up for a second. So you got an email from the U.S. government that said you might be stuck in Portugal for two years if you didn’t leave?

Brian Weiss: Yeah, we’re actually smart because I don’t know why, but I registered on the state department’s website, what countries we’re traveling to. So if there was a, you know, a disaster or some type of emergency, they know that we’re there. And they can help facilitate, you know, as U.S. citizens for us to potentially get back to the United States. And so we probably wouldn’t have gotten that message if I didn’t register but because I registered they sent a message from the embassy saying that the embassy is now closed, and Lisbon, and these are your options. Now it’s up to you to make your own decisions, but we’re just giving you the options.

Chip Baker: Wow, man, that’s incredible, man. So your six month month voyage was interrupted. And you still work daily on the cannabis news–

Brian Weiss: Yeah, right. Use my internet connection.

Cannabis Predictions after the Present Pandemic Condition

Chip Baker: You know, we’re gonna have to have a conversation after you get back to L.A., but we’re going to talk about it right now. So man, the cannabis industry was just like on on kind of a roll right before all this, like it was at– I would say it definitely had a peak and I say this because a bunch of several big companies were falling out and small companies too, and that’s what happened when you get a peek right one of the things. So we hit we’ve just had a peek in, you know the cannabis industry in the country as well as as California specifically and then the Rona hit, now things are changing. What do you think is gonna change?

Brian Weiss: I think the way that will, possibly the way that people consume you know, there’s different studies–

Chip Baker: The social aspect of it?

Brian Weiss: Well, the social aspect, I guess you will feel the pass that joint to each other anymore. That’s definitely not a thing, unless you’re within a family–

Chip Baker: We went rasta a couple of years ago and we try to smoke our own joint. Because man, I would just, I can’t getting sick because you know, I want to smoke everybody out. And so like now man, I just like oh, hey, here’s a joint for you. Oh, here’s one for me. Like I can never smoke this like I take two minutes to take it home. It’s cool.

Brian Weiss: I’ve actually always enjoyed I’ve been for the past, I can’t even remember how many years. I’ve only been smoking joints. And I’ve been smoking them by myself. I really don’t like sharing my joints. I like the first hit and I like the last hit. Yeah, all the hits in between.

Chip Baker: Me too Even me and my wife smoke separate joints. You know we go dog walk in the morning both have our own tooter, right. So social aspect that’s gonna change, what else is gonna change?

Brian Weiss: I think the way people are getting it you know, I think that more people will start growing at home. The people aren’t growing at home I think delivery is going to become a bigger business. You know, as much as I don’t want to say it, hopefully one day when it becomes federally legal, I think there’ll be an Amazon or Grubhub type of a company that they’ll start delivering, you know, your alcohol your food and your weed with the same package we’ll see how that actually works out and stuff. But I see that delivery right now is you know, becoming a more of a essential way of getting your products.

Chip Baker: Yeah, California is unique in that manner is that they can get delivery, and a few other states do it. In Colorado we just legalized it up there, and doors is just starting to in Oklahoma, I think it’s gonna be legal but they’re like, just hadn’t quite figured it out, right.

Brian Weiss: Yeah in Florida, where we are in area it’s a medical state. I believe they just started delivery with the Coronavirus to make it easier for patients and as much as I’m not a Florida fan at all. Because I’m not well, my own political view, I’m more of a democrat and this is a very Trump state here where we are. But I have to say the way that they distribute medical here is good, they don’t charge taxes. It’s looked at as a as a pharmacy, which I think is how it should be for medical and other states.

Chip Baker: Yeah, charge the taxes on the recreational use of adult use.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, absolutely. I think that medical patients should be able to, you know, they’re already going through hell to begin with why tax them money that they potentially don’t have to save their own lives for you know, smoking weed as opposed to taking Vicodin or whatever it is other pills that they would take instead of the weed.

Chip Baker: Yes, I agree with you there, man. There’s a you know, medical is an excuse to make weed legal in many places. Totally fine with that. But hey, man, I tell you what people also need weed medicinally, too. And we got to figure out how to service both sides of that.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And I think every state seems like they’re doing something different, unfortunately, nobody seems to really know what they’re doing. You know, I think maybe in the next two or three years, there’ll be a lot of good examples of some states and bad examples of others. And, you know, maybe there’ll be something more across the board, you know, for every state, that’s the same in a sense, and makes better sense. Say, you know, one of my sort of fears now is that, you know, in California, excuse me, California, it’s, you know, deemed essential during these times, you know, all recreational and medical are open. But then I also see that some of these recreational places are not, paying attention to their customers, they’re not paying attention to their employees in the sense that, you know, there’s no safety. There’s lines out the door, some companies are still having events at their dispensary. No that’s not promoting, you know a safe environment.

Chip Baker: Oh man, you gotta stop and quit, you know, in Oklahoma at our dispensary there Baker’s Medical we just decided to shut the door. We did this for a couple of reasons but mostly it’s because our big businesses commercial sales of clones and flower. And we wanted to make sure that we could keep continuing to do that. So we just schedule appointments to sell wholesale and then we just don’t let the random public come in. We also have like a security area, waiting area. So we schedule people to come in we put all their product out there and then they show up we let him at the door buzz them in– Hey there’s your thousand clones in the corner. And we talked to them to the window. They count out the money. Put it in the box, so we don’t have to touch it. We take the envelope, spray it off with alcohol. Yeah, take it to the bank and make them count it.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, that’s funny. You know what you just said something that I think for a lot of owners need to be doing. And I see– it seems like that you know, more of your clientele and who your clients are than most other dispensaries that are just, you know, the randoms coming in the door. And that’s one of the sort of my, my feelings at least in my own opinion that I feel that dispensary owners especially on the medical side or even on a higher production side should know their clients. They should know who their real customers are, so that they can properly help them.

Chip Baker: We’re on a bus stop, and we’re in a working class neighborhood. A lot of our clientele comes from just the bus stop right. And we realized, like, man Oh, well, public transportation. There’s absolutely no social distancing there, right. Like, there’s just, it’s just going to be difficult to keep a safe environment by having the public come in. Now, man, I don’t know if it’d be any different if it was just a neighborhood shop and only neighborhood people came in. But, you know, an awful lot of our traffic is the public transportation and, man, it’s just, that’s just a hard one. You know… When I see people crammed in subways in New York, I’m like, What the fuck? In New York, only three miles long. Should you just walk?

Brian Weiss: Yeah, totally. Right.

Chip Baker: Yeah, right, right. I mean, I don’t that’s probably a misstatement, but yeah, I know. It’s small. It’s small.

Brian Weiss: A lot of people are lazy though, too.

Chip Baker: Well, that’s worldwide. Well, hey, I tell you this man, you know that our current like, environment, you know it throughout Denver people and Colorado and New York and L.A., you hear the authorities saying, okay, you can only work out once a day. Guys like people, I mean, I gotta go do something, but it’ll work out again. I think we’re dizzy had a resurgence in health after this for sure.

Hey, back back to our cannabis predictions. You know, you said how people consume. And you know, if it were a year ago, people would have said, Oh, well, vaping I’m going to vape because that’s cleaner, right. Well, we had a vaping crisis or scam, right. Whether it was really created, right, whatever, but a handful of people died on illegal vapes. Illegal ones. And but it affected the whole industry as a whole. But now people’s perceptions of vapes are a little bit different, so before it was like smoking was bad. Now it’s vapes are bad. I think edible consumption is going to go up considerably now.

Before, it was like smoking was bad, now vapes are bad. I think edible consumption is going to go up considerably now. – Chip BakerCLICK TO TWEET

Brian Weiss: Oh, it’s gonna grow hugely. I was someone who never, never really liked edibles just because you’re never sure what you’re eating. But now that they’ve really figured out how to you know microdose in the right come up with the proper dosages for edibles. And you don’t know sometimes what you’re smoking. So it’s like, you know, from someone who smokes all the time and you get this new type of flower and you think, Oh, yeah, man, I can handle anything and then you smoke this huge jointed. You’re just, you know, totally having a panic attack like I recently had, then–

Chip Baker: This is your first joint back from Europe or something?

Brian Weiss: Yeah, I haven’t smoked in 30 days that– I thought [inaudible] I thought I had to Coronavirus all of a sudden and I felt my chest caving in and I was shaking I almost called 911 and I had to call my brother and my sister, my mom like, I thought it was it. I thought it was like literally having my last–

Chip Baker: Yeah, I was like wait, wait a second. Did you smoke some weed?

Brian Weiss: That’s what actually I was, I talked to his wife Rachel, and she’s like, you’re having a panic attack. You did [inaudible]

Chip Baker: You smoke some weed, right?

Brian Weiss: Yeah. Think of something nice and a happy place. You know, you’ll be fine and within like ten minutes I was totally fine. But during that time period, the quarter I received in the mail I flushed down the toilet.

Chip Baker: [inaudible] contaminated

Brian Weiss: Definitely, and I know better, but at that time I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Chip Baker: But you believed edibles, my experience with edibles is your tolerance raises on them. But like then you go back to smoking weed and you don’t have weed, a smoking tolerance is that how it works?

Brian Weiss: You know, I don’t know, because I’ve never really experienced this before it was sort of a first time, but I–

Chip Baker: I’m always eating edibles and smoking weed, eating more.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, I feel like, that was my biggest mistake was probably, you know, not smoking. I had a vape pen with me when I was traveling, but I don’t know vape pens just don’t really do it for me so much.

Chip Baker: You gotta have the good ones, dude. Man, talking about ABX Absolute Xtracts. They’ve got one I can’t remember what it’s called. But man, that thing is so good. It’s like, distillate rosin mixed or something. That’s just like taking the dab. That’s great product.

Brian Weiss: But those pens go very quickly.

Chip Baker: Oh yeah– When your grandma’s house or the customs office, you can be like, oh, hey, customs agent.

Brian Weiss: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s the greatest thing about, one of the greatest things I think about those is the, you know, being discreet, being able for that mom and pop that you don’t want to continue smoking around there, you know, having kids but not wanting the kids to smell it or be influenced by it. You know, that’s one of the greatest things for vaping, the discrete part.

Chip Baker: Yeah, absolutely. The safety part of it is people usually don’t share– I shouldn’t, usually don’t, but like, often people have their own vapes. And they hit it, they put it back in their pocket.

Brian Weiss: Absolutely. And there’s not also, any there’s no, if you’re, like you just in a public type of space, you know, wherever you are, you don’t have to pull out a bag, and roll a joint and find a piece of paper to put it on or whatever, however, you know you do your thing or if you’re packing a bowl and you know having a dumpster pull out and worrying about, you know, the amount of smoke that comes from either smoking a joint or [inaudible] vaping is very, you know, minimal smoke that comes out and it seems like it disappears very quickly. You know, it’s–

Chip Baker: It smells all the same or– yeah–

Brian Weiss: And, actually, I think it’s also cool that there’s a company which, one of the companies we also featured in our magazine, Philter Labs, which I believe is out of Colorado, possibly. They created a patented filter, basically, where you could take a hit, either whether it’s a bong, a pipe or joint or even a vape, and blow into it. And literally no smoke comes out the other side. Zero smoke you could take the hugest hit in the world and somehow or another this little tiny thing captivates all of it. And what it does with it, I feel like no clue. It makes very friendly to pretty much smoke anywhere, which I’m a big fan of–

Chip Baker: Yeah, I’ve seen similar types of stuff in the past, smoke buddies and you know, seeing the dryer sheet paper towel roll.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, I was gonna say you know, you take the toilet paper, roll stuff in a little bit, put the dry, maybe spray some cologne on it blow in one side comes out the other side smelling like coll water cologne. Which is not a great smell. But when you’re in a hotel room, it saves you from that $250 fine.

Chip Baker: Wise words, wise words. So consumptions gonna change. People are going to, it’s going to consumptions going up. Yeah, I believe, right.

Brian Weiss: I believe.

Chip Baker: And I’ll say this because of the Colorado demographics right now. 50% of the sales are normally associated with tourism. There is zero tourism in Colorado right now but the sales aren’t so bad because what do unemployed people do? They smoke more weed. What stressed out people do, they smoke more weed.

Brian Weiss: Yeah. I was surprised I was in Colorado like when you’re asking me earlier about, you know, prices of cannabis in California and Los Angeles when you know, so we were recently at this canopy boulder program and in Boulder and I tried out a couple of dispensaries in Boulder. It was like $12 eight, for like really good shit. And I couldn’t figure out why it was so much cheaper in Colorado, what more so I couldn’t figure out how they made any money. But it was really really good and I was really surprised actually by you know, how good the product was there not to go off of subject line– but [inaudible] Colorado.

Chip Baker: Colorado has some really cheap cannabis for sure. Colarado and Oregon both have the cheapest best cannabis. I’ll say that Yeah , man crazy, crazy market up there. I mean, people sell $500 pounds indoor weed there and they also sell $1200 pounds. For my perspective, I think, since the markets gotten a little bit harder Colorado weeds gotten better or at least it’s separated. It used to all be like [inaudible] in the middle okay. Now it’s some of it’s starting to stretch and get better than at all goods. You can go into random dispensaries now, and you couldn’t use to do this before but you can go into random dispensaries now and the weed smells good. And it doesn’t– and it’s dried right. But it that used to not be the case, you’d have to search out the dispensary to go that had great weed. Even though every dispensary owner out there thinks they got the best weed.

Brian Weiss: Totally–

Chip Baker: I know we don’t have the best weed at our dispensary, but you know, that we’re providing a service right? this is what we got–

Brian Weiss: Sometimes people prefer, the you know, either lower quality or what have you because– I mean I sometimes I smoke, you know, some of amazing quality and nothing happens to me. Then I’ll drag something that has, you know, less quality and I’ll get ripped. I get, I’ll get totally get ripped.

Chip Baker: That’s the plants there, man. That’s the plants there. You know, I guess what I just you know that harvest and dry period is so crucial and to give in that full flavor taste. Right and the smell, the aroma like it’s just, it’s so crucial. It’s getting better in Colorado, in my opinion, right.

Brian Weiss: I think it’ll get better everywhere, in time. I sort of you know, I have this thing I always say, that I sort of see that. Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. But I sort of see the cannabis industry a little bit like the beer industry, in the sense that you have these bigger companies, you know, you got your Bud lights and your Coronas and these bigger companies that will always be there. But you know, after a while and you being also from you know, living in Colorado, all of a sudden you have microbrews and microbrews end up having a way better quality.

And I see that in the cannabis industry I see these bigger companies that people will love and you know, whether they have good quality or not. And over the next few years, a lot of these mom and pop shops that are sort of being pushed out of the industry, I think; personally, they’re going to come back into the industry, as like this microbrew type of a company surviving, they’re going to end up surviving way harder, or way better even than these bigger companies. And you’re going to have like these Fat Tire companies, you know, for beer in a sense that for anyone who doesn’t drink beer, Fat Tire is a fantastic beer company. And so you’ll have these type of companies that I think will end up thriving a lot harder later on, but like any business, you got to weed out the good ones and the bad ones and right now in the industry, I think that as states come online, and some states, you know, either go backward or forwards that’s sort of what’s happening in my head, at least in my opinion.

Chip Baker: No, you’re absolutely right. And we see I mean, you know, we hear this term too big to fail. But that does not mean if you’re a big guy, you’re too big to fail, you have to be really, really, really, really, really, really big to not fail. And a lot of the big people are failing. I mean, this week alone in California, we had three big big people say they were gonna fail. You know, we’ve we’ve had numerous Canadian operations fail. You know, I’ve seen cash flow from all those Canadian operations now and all the U.S. operations and they suck. And people are bailing out dude, just shut down left and right, but the small guys, the medium sized guys, they’re actually holding their own–

Brian Weiss: Some of the ones that decide to go public, you know, in thoughts that, you know, they’re gonna be these huge companies. A lot of them failed in that in that regard. And then you have CEOs that started buying private planes and buses and very expensive cars. And they drained a lot of their company’s wealth as well and you know, just became too big, too quick for all the wrong reasons.

Chip Baker: Yeah, well, you know, dope dollar spend a hundred to one. You just think it’s gonna come in like no tomorrow and man fuck dude, like fights farming. Basically, it’s farming and it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, everyone’s, no one in the cannabis industry is shielded from that quote-unquote, farming activity. If you’re an extraction maker, and it’s bad outdoor season, then you’re not going to have enough extractable material. The extractable materials can be expensive. If you’re same way with your any type of ancillary company, right, if you’re selling equipment to growers, and you know the farming sucks, like if your equipment seller in the farming sucks, usually sell more equipment, and when the farming is great, you sell less equipment.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, that’s funny, I see that now as well as in the– for my side being in, you know, an ancillary but being in the media of this industry, it’s like we Oh, and when we started, there was no B2B or not no, but very limited B2B media sources in the industry. You know, when I was growing up, I would read High Times, and I would be so excited to see like this really cool bud, with some guy wearing a bandana, you know, in the magazine, and that was exciting. But now I look, you know, coming forward, you know, now, that was a lot of cool stuff, because it’s illegal thing. So it’s really fun to read High Times.

Now, they’ve been pivoting left and right, and other culture and lifestyle magazines have also been pivoting, left and Right. And High Times just announced this past week that they’re shutting down, dope magazine, culture magazine, and they’re even halting their own publication to get into the dispensary worlds. And so there’s a lot of pivoting even in this industry and for us it was, you know, we’re happy that we’re still surviving, and we’re happy that we’re actually a B2B because I see that, at least in the cannabis media site that consumers are consumers, they’re not interested in reading cannabis magazines, but business people, however, in the industry, it seems that they want to know what’s happening. They want to know what’s legal in their backyard, can I grow? Can I sell it? Where can I open this? Where can I open that? How can I invest in this? How can I invest in that? And so for us, at least we’ve seen thankfully, a growing trend at least towards the business to business side of the cannabis media.

Chip Baker: Every single aspect that a normal business needs, the cannabis business needs, and people when they think cannabis, they solely believe of grown weed or smoke it. That’s it and, man, you need everything that any other normal business needs. From accounting to H.R., to like a recycling program, and a garbage program, and like a hiring program, and a firing program. I mean, you need it all, right. And there are so many services out there that people could transfer what they’re doing currently and move into the cannabis industry.

Brian Weiss: Yeah. I it’s funny you say that cuz I talked to people in normal insurance, they’ve been selling health insurance their entire lives. And now they’re getting into cannabis. I have a friend who’s a real estate person. He’s been always doing real estate, you know, personal houses, people’s homes and stuff, now he’s getting into cannabis real estate. I know somebody else that does skincare products. And now he’s getting into white labeling CBD products, you know, and he’s just a packager. He’s not actually making the he’s just packaging. But like yeah, like you said, there’s all aspects of the industry require all aspects of other industries.

Chip Baker: Oh, it’s all just starting man. It’s all just starting. Well, man, you know we should have another episode in like a year. Okay? It’s like April 9th now, so April 9th 2020. So April 9th 2021. We’re gonna do another episode.

Brian Weiss: I’ll be at my fancy pool then.

Chip Baker: Yeah, we’re gonna see like how these predictions that we just made came true, right. Okay. Let’s just recount what these predictions are. One is the social aspect of cannabis sales and consumption is going to change somehow.

The social aspect of cannabis sales and consumption is going to change somehow. – Chip BakerCLICK TO TWEET

Brian Weiss: Yeah, right.

Chip Baker: The big players are falling out and they’re going to continue to fall out. Which means like the smaller people from the mom and pops to just the grassroots organizations, they’re going to take over that market share.

Brian Weiss: Absolutely.

Chip Baker: Do we have a fourth prediction?

All Things Made in China

Brian Weiss: I do actually. Another prediction is that I think that in the vape market, a lot of the products, not the vape. It’s not the you know, the distillate or the live resin, not those products themselves, but the actual hardware– [inaudible] well, that in the hardware right now is all pretty much made in China. And I see a lot of that product, the manufacturing of the vape pens, the batteries, all that stuff, possibly switching hopefully, over more into being made in the United States. I don’t know how long [inaudible] is going to be able to buy products from China.

Will those products still are able to be shipped into the country from what I understand already, a lot of vape companies right now are having major problems because they rely on hardware from China that they’re not getting right now. And they’re going to have to start, you know, worrying about how do we get these products? How do we get this hardware in the future? So I see a lot of overseas manufacturing of different types of products within the industry being done here in the United States. And that’ll also go back to you know, in the sense of other industries, you know, basically, you know, maybe you have like a G.M. type of plant that’s starting to make cannabis, you know, [inaudible] lighting, no extraction products–

Chip Baker: All the bulbs are made in China, right. All the lights, all the like components in China. All the electronics are made in China, right. Like some of that’s gonna change your absolutely correct–

Brian Weiss: And you’re gonna have Baker lighting soon.

Chip Baker: I’ve done that one. Lighting is a difficult one man. I’ve actually I’ve put quite a bit of effort into it. But you know, we’ve had some– On the lighting, for instance, that’s one of the hardest things because China really does make it all. So like, I’m not sure like how that’s gonna be able to change, you know, but like plastic bottles, or polymer or —

Brian Weiss: That’s like a polymer– I think maybe you know as hemp becomes more universal, you know, there’s so many things that you can do with hemp. And there are so many smart people out there that are already trying to do things with hemp, that I think they’re going to realize that there’s a lot more that you can do with the plants. And hopefully that crosses into manufacturing. And people realize that maybe that you know, I don’t know much about hemp, but I from what everything that I read about seems that everything that you can use with normal material, you can also pretty much do with hemp. So I think that there’ll be a big change in the hemp market. I think there will be more used on many different industries, not just in the cannabis industry, but you know the car making industry you know, Ford made a car out of textiles.

Chip Baker: Honestly that textiles left this country 25 years ago and went to China and other places, China, like will it come back? I’m not sure but like hemp can help, like supply hemp cotton. I mean, we– you know, cotton was why this country was really founded really. [inaudible]produce textile–

Brian Weiss: And you know, people are building homes with hemp now. They’re doing everything so I really, I see that [inaudible] I see that becoming and it’s actually supposedly, the articles and the videos that I’ve seen is it’s a lot stronger than wood–

Chip Baker: So man, I’m building a hemp house. That’s the future. Okay. Ask me about the hemp house January, I mean, April 9th 2021.

Brian Weiss: It’s weird saying that sometimes I feel like I’m in Total Recall–

Chip Baker: It is. Well, Brian, Hey, thanks for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it. I’m glad we got the chat and I’m excited about what’s going on in California. I look forward to hearing more about it in the coming months and years.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, my Chip. Thank you so much for having me on. And I really enjoyed chatting with you. And, you know, during this crazy time, right now, it’s nice to have a good laugh and to talk about the industry and and talk about futures and it’s, you know, obstacles. But, you know, like you said, it’s a strong industry and it’s on the ground floor still. Most states are still trying to, you know, get there and I think after this virus clears out and hopefully this president that there’ll be opportunities for federal legalization and with federal legalization, it’s going to get the commercials and all these three letter agencies will lift their bands and there’ll be a flourishing market. So thank you.

Chip Baker: It’s all just starting Brian, it’s all just starting right the next 20 years of cannabis, ganja, hemp, we’re gonna be incredible. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, me too. Thank you.

Chip Baker: Great. Thanks again. Hey, it’s been The Real Dirt with Chip Baker. If you liked this episode of other or others, download them on The Real Dirt podcast on iTunes. You can also check us out on Spotify and if you want you can go to my website therealdirt.com. You can look at all the episodes we’ve got a great blog, you should join our Facebook group. Join us on Instagram, The Real Dirt podcast love you guys have a great afternoon!

Well, it’s a great episode with Brian Weiss from L.A. Cannabis News. And yeah, we have made some pretty good predictions. So talk about the Rona, we talked about what’s going to happen here in the future. It’s exciting man, you know, with every, during every real revolution, there are fortunes made and lost. And I’m not trying to sound like an asshole because this isn’t a revolution, but it is going to be a social and cultural revolution with what’s going on with the Coronavirus, and we’re going to change our attitudes on personal space social distancing. And for the good and the better. But there will be an opportunity. There always this opportunity and change, and regardless of what happens, things will change, and we’re just going to have to flow with it.

We can be the salmon in swim upstream, and sometimes I enjoy that. But for the most part, like, you know, what’s going on internationally with the Coronavirus is absolutely going to change the way we feel about cannabis, the way we consume cannabis, and our social interactions involved with it all. So, you know, it’s going to be interesting to see it all happen and see it all unfold. I mean, for instance, it Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC, we have set up a “We’ll call” scenario so people can just call us and email us and we’ll get their order together. And then when they show up at the shop, they just call and say, Hey, I’m here, I’m here with my order. We’ve got it outside. We make a little exchange, and you know; hopefully, it’s on the credit card. And you know, you don’t have to count out any money or anything, but we can do that too. Delivery is a huge part of what we’ve already done in Colorado and Oklahoma. Of course, that’s all commercial. And often, you have to have a loading dock or forklift, but not all the time. And so the delivery, it’s stepped up as well.

The reality of it all is it’s probably better for people not to go to the store, and just call up and have people deliver it, or we’ll call scenario. So I bet we’re going to learn a lot from this. I’m not sure if my employees, the people we work with, how difficult it’s made it on them, but you know, there’s a learning curve. So if you’ve had any, like instances or something where you haven’t been able to get what you want and like, manage stressful times, like just take a deep breath, be like okay bro, and just try to re-approach it a little bit. But yeah, those are the that’s what’s going on with us. That’s how we’re actively changing.

I’d be interested in hearing from you on how the Coronavirus has changed, how you’ve been interacting with your cannabis business. So send me an email. Send me a private message, post on Instagram, or something. Because I am interested, we’re in a house changing for everybody. Hey, listen, in these boring times when you’re sitting at home, and you’re smoking weed, because everybody’s consuming twice as much right now, and you want something to do. Download one of the previous episodes of The Real Dirt podcast. You can get it on iTunes on Spotify. You can also go to my website, The Real Dirt podcast, therealdirt.com, and you can see all our past episodes everything. Man, if you’re interested in any cannabis products or clones or genetics, you can check out our medical dispensary in OKC bakersmedical.com. If you’re a commercial grower, we supply commercial cuttings there. And you know, like I said if you need any grow gear cultivatecolorado.com, cultivateokc.com and it all starts with the dirt, so get you some growers soil. That’s right, our proprietary coco peat perlite blend we make specifically in a sophisticated state of the indoor art facility that’s all ours where we only make this one product for you, growerssoil.com. Hey, love you guys. I look forward to making another episode for you. It’s coming here in just a few days. So check us out therealdirt.com, The Real Dirt podcast, subscribe on iTunes. Love you, real dirt.

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From Red Bull to CBD: Reinventing Energy Supplements

by Travis C | May 7, 2020 | 420, cannabis business, cannabis industry, Cannabis Law & Compliance, Cannabis science, Hemp, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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John Zolikoff came out of the motorcycle and action sports world. He worked for 15 years at Harley-Davidson and Austrian sports motorcycle maker KTM.

During that time, John worked closely with Red Bull back in early 2000 when energy drinks were entering the market.

After experiencing the health benefits of CBD several years ago, and on a mission to find healthy energy that he could take any time, anywhere, John started ZOHKO in 2018. He pulled together scientists and doctors to create ZOHKO Energy, which is on the cusp of creating a new energy category.

ZOHKO Energy combines CBD with eight power-packed ingredients to boost energy, mood, motivation, and focus, all while the adaptogens strengthen immunity and help fight stress.

Here’s an exciting episode about branding and developing a company with a CBD expert. Remarkable insights await from John Zolikoff on how ZOHKO developed their brand, used unique marketing strategies, how they target their market and sell their products.

Download The Episode Companion For This Episode

Some Topics We Discussed Include

4:53 – Transitioning from motorcycle and sports world to CBD
8:24 – A light bulb moment on CBD
13:31 – Pushing through the CBD industry
18:05 – Branding ZOHKO energy
21:42 – Your brand is your avatar
33:52 – Sales channels
35:32 – Keeping the CBD business rolling
38:05 – Where to find them

People Mentioned / Resources

Connect with John Zolikoff

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Transcript

Chip Baker: Hey, this Chip of The Real Dirt. In today’s dirt, I want to talk about branding and developing a company. To talk to my good buddy John Zolikoff about his company, ZOHKO. Now it’s a CBD energy supplement company but the reason I wanted to have John on so he could talk to people about how they develop their brand, their branding strategy, how they develop their customers, how they sell the product, just all the like little things that it takes to bring a product to market.

Now many people cannabis or hemp farmers, all they’re interested in is you know, growing lots of ganja which I’m totally fine with that. But many people realize they need to have some sort of added value product or they need something more than they can grow or they can produce, and so a branded or a formulated product is the perfect way to do it. You know, if you’re interested in hemp, you’re in Interested in CBD, if you’re interested in ganja, this is going to be a great great great episode. And we literally like you know you can use this format and develop your company kind of based behind it develop your brand, kind of behind it. So sit back and enjoy this next episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker and John Zolikoff

Hey, this is Chip from The Real Dirt, and on today’s dirt, I have my good buddy John Zolikoff come to you live from Sarasota, Florida. Say hello, John.

John Zolikoff: Hey, everyone. Hey Chip. Great to be here.

Chip Baker: Oh, man, the birds are chirping in the background. I hear you a little puppies going on. Just looks and sounds like an incredible place to be right now. What’s going on in Florida, man?

John Zolikoff: Well, it’s a it’s a good place to to be isolating for sure. So we’re close to the beach as you can see. Got great setup here so we’re hunkered down, good place for ZOHKO headquarters to be trying to support everyone and you know, Sarasota is where– So as you mentioned, we’ve got eight puppies right now.

Chip Baker: Oh, yeah, we can’t. I can’t really hear them. I hear the birds. They sound great. They’re very pleasant, John.

John Zolikoff: Yes. So we’re surrounded by nature. So that’s we’re enjoying this is how we’re gonna heal ourselves, right?

Chip Baker: Oh, man treat is just looks and sounds incredible. I’m also in a self isolating format, as you can see grooming myself so well.

John Zolikoff: I shave for you today!

Chip Baker: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s great. What do you mean I think I shaved?

John Zolikoff: My Sunday best–

Chip Baker: My Saturday sweatshirt on, even though it’s Monday right now.

John Zolikoff: And that’s how we met. Was that baby bathwater–

Chip Baker: Yeah, baby bathwater on a Saturday or a day that felt like it anyway.

John Zolikoff: Yeah, exactly.

Chip Baker: Yeah. So John, the reason you know I have you on The Real Dirt is John, you’re one of the founders or the founder of ZOHKO, which is a CBD and energy supplement company. John, you’ve started several other businesses in the past, and you know this is a new venture for you and so many people are thinking about getting involved in a CBD or cannabis business or already have some sort of CBD or cannabis business and you took a slightly different approach to starting your business then then maybe many other people. And you spoke about it at all and how you kind of got involved with it but as the brand you want it to develop this brand. Because in previous businesses you didn’t necessarily own you know, own what you were doing. It was someone else’s brain. So, again, I’m glad we can chat with you about a day. Hey man, how did you kind of come up with this idea of to start a CBD energy supplement?

Transitioning from Motorcycle and Sports World to CBD

John Zolikoff: Well, so as you said, I, you know, going back I came out of the action sports world so I was in motorcycles I was with Harley Davidson and then KTM sport motorcycles, and KTM has a relationship back between the founders in Austria with Red Bull. So back in like the late night 1990s and early 2000s when Red Bull was just coming into the market. We were doing crazy partnerships with them, you know, with like all that extreme sports and you know skydiving and motorcycle races. So I was in kind of in that group and saw like, I mean Red Bull created the category right before that there were no energy drinks and so then all sudden. I was also kind of in that extreme world of, you know, riding motorcycles and jumping out of airplanes and you know, so we want to [inaudible] Back in the day now I’m just the old guy with all the puppies and kids and grandkids. I saw what all that energy and what energy drinks and you know that how much people would pay for that energy and then also seeing the brand.

Chip Baker: So you learn from some of the major brands and a completely kind of different arena though it’s not healthcare or it’s I mean it’s a much more consumer oriented product than a healthcare product. No I’m talking to my ass.

John Zolikoff: Oh no for sure. So I come in straight out of university actually even my, my thesis, I did it on Harley Davidson. So I had a motorcycle. I bought a Harley when I was in college. I ran a business back then a bartending agency.

Chip Baker: So you were a fan.

John Zolikoff: So I was uh, yeah, so and I talked them into sponsoring my thesis and so that was what I love to do. But then about 13-14 years ago, I met my wife, as women will do they, they change you and she’s from Brazil, but she’s also a vegetarian and very much into sustainability. And so it was and then also I started my family and so it was this shift in my life I swore when I met my wife that I would never give up eating meat. And that took about a year to become a vegetarian because she was a really good cook. But more and more, I’ve become healthier with my life and the benefits I feel great.

So with the energy drinks that we’re doing all the time in the motorcycle world it wasn’t hard to figure out that those are bad for you with all the chemicals and sugar but [inaudible] were much. Still, then you get into than I was into coffee and that’s how I kind of raise my kid was just drinking coffee all day to keep up with my– he’s 12-year-old years old now. But I was always looking for this natural energy and something I can feel good because otherwise, you feel like you’re always like stealing from the future, your future longevity for your industry today, right?

I was always looking for this natural energy and something I can feel good because otherwise, you feel like you’re always stealing from the future, your future longevity for your industry today. – John Zolikoff

Chip Baker: So you are you already looking at an energy type of supplement or you’ve been thinking about it for years and the CBD just it was the lightbulb moment?

A Light Bulb Moment on CBD

John Zolikoff: Yeah for the CBD for me was you know I’ve been into hemp and cannabis for years and but I had this chronic pain in my shoulders that came like out of nowhere. And and it hurt a lot just to raise a you know, higher than shoulder height. And we went through the traditional medical tests, MRIs and x rays and cortisone shots which you can’t do multiple times, but none of it helped. And then finally the doctors like I don’t understand it, can’t figure it out. And you just have to live with it. Maybe cut back on this or whatever. I tried to–

Chip Baker: But you didn’t cut back in the weed?

John Zolikoff: No, I didn’t [inaudible]. But just smoking the weed didn’t stop–

Chip Baker: Didn’t do it. No, it doesn’t. And that’s the thing is CBD is anti-inflammatory–

John Zolikoff: That was the medicine. And so a friend recommended it. And it was, I think it’s called ACDC. And, you know, within a day it cut the pain in half. And by the end of the week, like it was down to 10% of what it was before. So that was powerful for me personally. So then the —

Chip Baker: A major believer–

John Zolikoff: Exactly. And knowing as the market became more legal, at least enough that I wanted to look into it. And so then I sought out how could I find like the experts and the best– and then I found you, so but, you know, so that was like the next step [inaudible]

Chip Baker: Here’s how John found us as we were in the corner, smoking weed in a circle. So those large smoke cloud coming up between us and John recognize the smoke signal. And, Hey, man, what are you guys doing?

John Zolikoff: That’s exactly how it happened. And I think we played that out a few different times. But then we’re also you know, at that event, there were a number of really knowledgeable and experts in the new market in hemp, CBD and cannabis. I remember some really good advice that you gave, and some of it was, I was like, Okay, well, California is opening up. I would love to have my own.

Chip Baker: You want, you thought you wanted to grow it?

John Zolikoff: I wanted to do a farm. Yeah, exactly. And so you start calling me farmer John, I think was and somehow–

Chip Baker: Farmer John Oh, I said, Oh, John over there. He wants to be a farmer, farmer John.

John Zolikoff: And somehow I just didn’t, you know, I couldn’t see like, you know, I haven’t grown up in the field, right? I don’t have that kind of expertise. So something there– And I remember you also saying that they look at, there’s an opportunity now, but as soon as the big companies come in, it’s going to get, you know, the prices will just get gutted, like, soy and everything else, right. So, that made a lot of sense. And then you said that, the real places to focus on CBD, which is legal, and across the country and to, and to create a brand, you know, to– So, I mean I think two years later here, maybe from that discussion, but it was appreciated, is great advice. And–

Chip Baker: Hey, man, this is a perfect time for us to stop for a break here. We’ll come back and we’re going to talk about like, your next step, you had the idea, and how did you want to do it differently than you had before? All right, here’s The Real Dirt. We’ll be back in a moment.

Hey, this is Chip, I hope you’re enjoying this episode of The Real Dirt. I just wanted to have a little public service announcement out there in these trying times. I just want to encourage everyone to have a little bit more tolerance with people around them, with their family, with their friends, and the people they interact in the world. You know, it’s gotten to be an incredibly small world lately, and we all realize that we’re in it together. So the next time that you feel a little stressed or you see somebody else stress, just take, just take a second. Relax, and if you can, roll up the largest join that you can. And then enjoy another episode of The Real Dirt. Thanks again, we’ll get back into it. Right now.

All right, and we’re back with John Zolikoff. We’re talking about how John has started a CBD energy supplement company. So John, you had this idea and, you know, kind of– Take me to the steps of like, what kind of happened? What was the next thing that happened? You had the idea, and you decided you wanted to make some CBD products.

Pushing through the CBD Industry

John Zolikoff: Yeah. So for sure CBD. So we partnered early on with obviously we were starting with CBD and we searched out the best sources for that. Being able to go all the way back and trace the genetics and make sure that we’re getting full spectrum. So we got all the cannabinoids and so that was the foundation. But then also, for me, it was important I wanted to create supplements that people could really feel like from the beginning and so, the idea from the beginning was also to come up with engineered or formulated products with intentional benefits so, energy was the obvious one and the starting point.

We searched out a group that is like the best in formulating performance supplements. And so, it was a little bit, I think, a different approach than most people. So product development was key. We wanted to include energy ingredients, but also adaptogens, which even now is, even more, I think timely with adaptogens are great at boosting your immunity and fighting stress and in fatigue. So, that was important. So coming up with the right formula was key, then sourcing the full-spectrum CBD then finding even the manufacturer. Our formula is unique it’s a like a liquid, so it’s like a maybe see here it’s got oil in there, so it’s MCT oil plus the CBD, but then it’s got seven other ingredients so there’s Caffeine, Dynamine, which is a Kucha tea leaf extract and gives a nice even energy that just kind of tapers off at the end versus kind of that nervous energy with a crash that a lot you’ll get from energy drinks.

Chip Baker: Oh, hold on. Let me get some coffee.

John Zolikoff: Well, we got you got ZOHKO on the way. I know guys like it but yeah, exactly. So instead of that big, you know rush and kind of, you know jittery effect. This is a nice even the combination of the caffeine and the Dynamine and the hemp just really works nicely. Then so we’ve got lots of B vitamins and Rhodiola which like the Russian astronauts and cosmonauts and athletes have been using forever. Through Ginsengs, Spirulina, MCT Oil and it’s a vegetarian capsule. There are certain things that are really important for me I wanted this to be something that I was going to take. I mean I basically since I got my first samples a year and almost a year and a half ago, I’ve more or less given up coffee. I like the taste but this is just so much easier and I know that I’m getting all these other health ingredients on top of it but for example, vegetarian capsules were important to me being a vegetarian.

So that was a big thing. I designed it for what I was looking for. Making sure people– a lot of people talk about their CBD, that they’re that it makes them tired or drowsy and they can’t take it during the day with [inaudible] You can get your 25 milligrams of CBD in each capsule, and you can go to work and be focused and, you know, the Dynamine–

Chip Baker: I usually take two. Just saying.

John Zolikoff: And that’s why each one has 100 milligrams of caffeine and all these other ingredients, but they’re, it’s the right amount that you can stack it. So that’s the official recommendation is not to exceed 400 milligrams of caffeine of the day. So we say don’t take more than four. But the Dynamine is really a neat ingredient. It’s new on the market, and they promote it. They say, EMF, I think it’s EMMF. So energy, mood, motivation and focus, which right now, like especially we’re all working at home. So how do you keep your head straight while, you got kids and puppies running around? Or if you’re trying to focus and create your new thing, right, it’s great for that. So that’s on the products side and we’re really happy. I mean, you’ve had it people really like it–

Branding ZOHKO Energy

Chip Baker: So you wanted to formulate the product, right? You didn’t want to do a white label product, you wanted something specific for you, you want to stand out. So you got a formulator you had the idea, right? You wanted something different. And how did you approach the brand side? How did you develop because many people don’t even know what a brand is. I guess that’s all up for debate. It’s more than just a logo. How did you approach the next phase?

John Zolikoff: Yeah. So this is what we ended up with, which is so ZOHKO energy, CBD plus energy. I have launched as you mentioned, I’ve started a lot of different companies and I’ve done kind of the branding and always just on my own right. Then just kind of didn’t take a disciplined approach to it, and go through a process and so knowing that the market was going to be so competitive, knowing that looking at the market and really, not to offend anyone, but if you look at the CBD market, there’s just like it all like–

Chip Baker: Charlatans and homespun bullshit and people just want to get rich quick, I’ll say it

John Zolikoff: Yeah, there you go. But no one really looking at it from like a consumer products perspective, right? Like how to really connect with people and like it’s always it’s CBD, the CBD this CBD that, hemp the you know, it’s just like, and even our first idea was like Blue River Hemp. Right? That was that would have been [inaudible] the process that would have been the first that would have been in and then we would have just been competing with every other hemp company to try and be the most trusted or the most whatever. So, we worked with branding for the people, a great group that so we invested first before everything in the brand and that process that we went through, forced us to identify our customers. So it was we came up with three or four avatars, but all around kind of active outdoor adventure type people. And then, you know, you relate to them a little bit differently, like I’m Gen X, I’m 49 right? So I kind of grew up in all this action, extreme sports stuff. But now like I mean–

We invested first before everything in the brand, and that process that we went through forced us to identify our customers. – John Zolikoff

Chip Baker: Now you’re beat up.

John Zolikoff: I’m beat up and I need yeah, lubricate–

Chip Baker: My elbow, my arm, my shoulders–

John Zolikoff: Exactly. But this now gives me– This gives me energy, and it gives my body like the lubrication to go out and charge and do things than I used to, or not at the same level. It is so focusing on who was our target demographic. And for me, it was just kind of like looking. I’m just going to kind of do almost like the Red Bull in a healthy energy, right? And what’s great is like, so you get a bottle of this, it’s 30 servings, right? That’s like 30 energy drinks in your pocket, or 30 double shot, you know, Starbucks double shots like that.

Chip Baker: That’s a month supply.

John Zolikoff: Exactly. And so for me, like, I would always go to like these trade shows or even when I traveled, I’d go buy those little Starbucks double shot four packs. Yeah, totally. I would put those in my– every everywhere I went, I put those in my luggage because that was my best way to just get my caffeine and my energy to go and now I have this solution.

Your Brand is Your Avatar

Chip Baker: Yeah. So you mentioned avatars early, you’ve had a couple of different avatars. Let’s explain to people what that means.

John Zolikoff: So that’s where you sit down and you describe the psychographics and the personality, the activities how people [inaudible]

Chip Baker: Of your perceived customer even.

John Zolikoff: Yep. The media they consume, the places they go just how– so that you can speak specifically to them. What we’re finding is the formula. I mean, there’s so many people that want natural, convenient energy. And so our avatar was actually kind of this young like originally like 18 to 30 year old.

Chip Baker: He’s made one avatar.

John Zolikoff: The first one is that one avatar, so it was pretty, it was a younger one than what we’re finding it to be but so and we called him Travis like Travis Pastrana, if you know action sports, he’s like the original, extreme sports guy. And so you as a group we built out this whole page that describes everything about Travis.

Chip Baker: Who Travis’s what he looks like, what he drives, what he what he does?

John Zolikoff: Yep, we now have like four different avatars. So there’s Travis and you come up with names so that people can relate to a little bit better but so now there’s four. So that was the avatar part then you also wanted to come up with the Archetypes. It’s also like the personality of the company like are you like a National Geographic? Are you like the most trusted you know are you like IBM and so there’s this whole through the process. They give examples of other the personalities of other types of companies. And you pick you decide what you want your– So for me, what was really amazing for this was like, we spent a lot of money invested but it was so refreshing to be able to just like dream up who I really wanted my customer to be, right i mean like this.

Chip Baker: So the importance is this is like if you know what your customer is and what they look like your potential customer what they look like and then you start to imagine what they’re going to be attracted to the colors that they’re going to buy the colors that they’re using, the language the copy the content, the sales letters, all of that comes from this avatar. Alright, how do you speak to Travis? Right? How do you lore Travis to come over the ZOHKO–

John Zolikoff: Yeah. And then you start to build off of that. So the archetypes I mentioned. So ours is you know, kind of fun loving and there’s like adjuster, adventure adjuster, there’s two but so that’s part of the process, but then also, we had to come up with a name right? So like Blue River Hemp and then there was someone had you know, I mentioned earlier that like the CBD, as you get older, kind of lubricate. It helps with all your joints and everything just feels better. So one idea was, you know, Life Loob, which sounds a little bit too looby. But there was this whole process of trying to name storm and then come up with a–

Chip Baker: That’s for a different avatar.

John Zolikoff: Yeah, so Life Loob didn’t make it. So, ZOHKO, it’s funny I have been called ZOHKO. My last name is Zolikoff so not exactly ZOHKO. For 20 years I’ve been using ZOCO, which is kind of short for Zolikoff company for different projects and consulting. My good friend and my son’s godfather who is the director of motorsports for Red Bull, and he’s an investor in ZOHKO, when I was sending them, I think an invoice for something and had that Zoco name on it as he was involved in this name storming process or this naming process and he goes, he goes, Hey, man, and for me, it’s kind of like seemed a bit egotistical, you know, like I just haven’t. I’m not put my name on things kind of, but I love the name. I just love the sound of it.

Chip Baker: Yeah, that was a great name.

John Zolikoff: And so he encouraged that, and so then we had to figure out so ZOCO but then you have to get the domain name right so there’s this whole process and so it shifted to the ZOHKO.

Chip Baker: And that’s the other thing about making up, then the the spelling of it is you got the .com and we can see that and tons of stuff these days. It’s hard to get the .com so if you spell your own word–

John Zolikoff: I mean, ZOCCO was like out of the box– [inaudible]

Chip Baker: [inaudible] Percent. Yeah, of course.

John Zolikoff: When we got ZOHKO–

Chip Baker: I bought The Real Dirt.

John Zolikoff: Yeah, you are The Real Dirt.

Chip Baker: Yeah, totally.

John Zolikoff: That was kind of how those [inaudible]

Chip Baker: I just found out that some of my haters call me The Real Dirtbag, but I believe it’s just because you know, that dude’s a jackass and like, you can’t– probably know who you are.

John Zolikoff: He’s probably more into tea bagging. Anyway–

Chip Baker: Definitely, he’s definitely a Tea bagger, which Hey, man, if you’re in a tea bagging, and I’m not gonna, like, you know, like down you for that, that’s your own sport, whatever you want.

John Zolikoff: That’s also a different avatar.

Chip Baker: Right? It’s a different avatar. I’m not going to judge you over your tea bagging but like, you can’t be an asshole about it when you do it. Right. Totally inappropriate John, let’s get back to branding. So the thing I love about the avatar is now you get to take that avatar to every person that you do business with. So your website guy, your label guy, your packaging guy, you get to go take him Travis avatar be like, Hey, this is our customer.

John Zolikoff: Yeah, so it’s even more than that. So the avatar definition was part of building the brand platform and that’s the whole process. So that’s not only so we we created the avatar– so we were working through a whole process over the course of about six weeks. And it was laid out step by step.

The avatar definition was part of building the brand platform, and that’s the whole process. – John Zolikoff

The avatar was part of it as the name storming and then like one of the main guys, design guys, they came up with a storyboard, after you know, was another step of the process where you know, they came up with images that would help us like narrow zero in on on the logo and things like that. Out of nowhere, the dude came up with a techno zebra so there’s this really cool storyboard that’s got this the zebra with like headphones on and sunglasses and, and somehow that evolved into what we have and but it’s interesting. So Zolikoff is my last name, I always when I spell my name, it’s Z as in zebra, right? Because B and Z and all these other so like It’s just–

Chip Baker: I might spell an axe occasionally but–

John Zolikoff: Yeah, so this is you know it looks really nice on swag I made it. It stands out it doesn’t say hempright it doesn’t say CBD it’s something that people are can really relate to we have a lot that we can do. You know they were very–

Chip Baker: You’re not pigeoned into like a one product, you can do whatever you want and add CBD to it instead of just being pigeon holed into a CBD company.

John Zolikoff: Exactly. CBD is an ingredient, right.

Chip Baker: CBD is a main ingredient.

John Zolikoff: It’s not a whole product or a whole experience. And then the group took you know, as we work through the process, the first thing was to get our labeling because we needed to you know, we had product. We had about dozen different things all you know on parallel timelines–

Chip Baker: You developed your brand story, you developed your avatar, you developed your labeling, your bottling your packaging, like how long did it take in order for you to actually get sellable product. How many months did it take?

John Zolikoff: So we really launched ZOHKO on an island in Croatia, in June of 2018. We had product we had the energy capsules by the end of December.

Chip Baker: June, six months. Okay.

John Zolikoff: And I would say that’s a pretty condensed I mean, I was pushing–

Chip Baker: That’s great. It’s hard for me to get a product in the market and within three or four months like that, I’m struggling to get in through it in four months [inaudible]

John Zolikoff: And for me, it was all new, right? Like, I have I have an engineering like a general engineering degree. So I I’m used to doing projects and business development developers but you know, just the labeling right every step it was like you have to learn a new a whole new set of notes right but you do that all the time–

Chip Baker: Oh man, you know, I mean once you get through a couple products, it’s not the same but it’s definitely something you have to think about in food and supplements those are absolutely different fertilizers but yeah, it’s just you know, huge you know, just rules you have to follow when you put the packaging together. So man–

John Zolikoff: [inaudible] fine with them, you know, we set up warehousing right. So you had to you know, with CBD only so much– fulfillment Yep, exactly.

Chip Baker: So, you contracted out your manufacturing. Well you have your formula, you’ve got your package, you contract out the manufacturing, they put it in your package, and then they send it someplace else to fulfill it.

John Zolikoff: Yes, yeah, exactly. So we have a third party warehouse that we work with ship offers. They’re a great partner in Colorado. But not everyone’s– it’s becoming more easier and open more free now, but not everyone wants to deal with CBD right. So, that was part of part of the step. So fulfillment, right and then selling right so then, you know, website is the most obvious but then and I’ve set up a lot of websites and web shops, and never even really thought us extra time about the processing, processing and banking, as we know is such an issue with CBD, cannabis and hemp. But the last [inaudible] has– I’ve we’ve gone through three or four processors already and not for any good reason they just like decide to shut down. Our first one came in I think it was US Bank decided they were gonna just go into CBD market after and then after four or five months and they were great they’re super low price and funded in a day but then yeah they pulled out and I heard that like it affected like 4500 accounts are something crazy.

Chip Baker: Wow yeah

John Zolikoff: This was like an April last year and like everyone you know, trying to find it at the same time. So I come more from like traditional sales and marketing kind of brick and mortar or motorcycles, bicycles–

Sales Channels

Chip Baker: So your sales channels mostly ecommerce or do you distribute to retail locations?

John Zolikoff: So we were doing some retail. Our retail strategy is similar to our demographic right our avatar, so we’re going on after outdoor retailers independent retailers. So fishing, you know [inaudible] all the CBD companies are not right now–

Chip Baker: Sale boarding shop, paragliding shop–

John Zolikoff: Yeah, and that’s where the energy products gonna come in we were actually a 30 count bottle is a big, big commitment to make so we’re actually coming out with three packs and special packaging for that channel and the response has been really, really good so far. So that’s going to be rolling out I don’t want to get too much into– I’m really happy with the packaging. I’ll show you the next time. You’re gonna love them. So that’s the retail is like this, you know, outdoor, you know? So we got e commerce, we’ve got outdoor retailers and then the third that we want to go with these three packs. We think that there really is a mass market for healthy convenient energy. And so that’s where–

Chip Baker: Like 711 market?

John Zolikoff: That convenience store is going head to head with five-hour energy.

Keeping the CBD Business Rolling

Chip Baker: All right, I think I think so too, man. John, long, long the way you wanted to quit I’m sure. Along the way you’re like– man, what kept you going to bring this product fulfillment?

John Zolikoff: The response from the customers is fantastic. Well, I love the product. Everyone around me loves the product. It’s something in the past, my most recent business before was children’s bikes, which was a lot of fun. And it really changed a lot of little kids lives and that was so this evolution from kind of like burning petrol gas for recreation to this more sustainable and healthy to where I really want to help people and CBD you know so we have an expanding line we’re going to have a bomb you know, topical coming out as well. We have plans for more functional blends after the energy but I think energy really is our flagship it’s where we’re hanging our hat but I think this whole that people can make more memories they can do more with their kids they can do you know, they can get their relief and their CBD and still be have energy to get through the day. So that gets me I like I’m organic, you know, vegetarian. I want to be natural and how I treat things. And I just think this is what the world needs more of. And so adaptogens and CBD–

Chip Baker: So you said you had a heart for it man. Did you ever have a down moment? Did you ever have a moment where you didn’t think you’re gonna do this?

John Zolikoff: Yeah, for sure. So the last year has been frustrating because it’s been learning ecommerce, and we’re trying to learn it and build it and fly it and prepare and all that at the same time. And, we are lean, you know, we have a lot of people helping on the project, but I don’t have you know, I’m working, you know, from a home office. So there are a lot of times that you can– yeah, so I guess, just believing and as anyone that brings a product, I mean, you have to have the belief, like it’s already exists right. You just have to know that it’s the right thing and just keep going.

You just have to know that it’s the right thing and just keep going. -John Zolikoff

Where to Find Them

Chip Baker: That’s awesome advice for any business owner. Thank you, man. Hey, John, how do people get in touch with? Get in touch with you? How do people order the product? Are you on Facebook, Instagram?

John Zolikoff: Yep, so zohko.com, and we are on Instagram and Facebook – Zohkoholics. Just search on ZOHKO, you’ll find it.

Chip Baker: Okay.

John Zolikoff: So yeah and the idea was just to help people live their lives more fully, and give them energy to be able to get out and enjoy and now it’s I think it’s a it’s what our bodies need to help you know, CBD helps your body–

Chip Baker: It’s what the body craves.

John Zolikoff: Exactly. I mean it gives it what it’s need to fight whatever is out there, it is what it occurs. Yeah.

Chip Baker: Awesome, John. Well, hey, thanks for joining me today, man. I really enjoyed hearing the birds and talking to you about branding and developing a new product line and new company.

John Zolikoff: Yeah. Well, we’re happy to support you guys. So anytime you need energy anytime the dogs over there need some and yeah, we’ll keep you updated as we get out there. Appreciate the time, always great seeing you. I missed your smiling face.

Chip Baker: Now, man. Well, here it is.

John Zolikoff: It’s beautiful.

Chip Baker: Cool, bro. Thanks again. Hey, this has been another great episode of The Real Dirt. If you enjoyed this episode, please download others at The Real Dirt podcast on iTunes. You can also download them on therealdirt.com That’s right. That’s our own website. We have a blog, links to our Facebook page, The Real Dirt podcast as well as our Instagram page, The Real Dirt podcast, please participate. Please tell us how you like this episode, please tell us about the episodes that you’re interested in. And once again, thank you for lending me your time. It’s The Real Dirt!

All right, well, I hope you enjoyed that episode, man. You know, John’s internet reception broke up a little bit. He’s down in Florida, but I loved hearing the birds chirping background and then there at the end the dogs you know so much about the podcast for me, is an audio escape when I listen to it and when I make these things that it is a little bit of escape for me. In these times we all need a little bit of escape and whether it’s a rolling up a large hemp joint or a large ganja joint or a small bong hit, or listening to The Real Dirt like and right now it’s about a great time to do it. So if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Real Dirt podcast on iTunes. That way, you can catch up to all of our latest released episodes, and you can hear the 70 episodes behind. Also, join us on Facebook and Instagram The Real Dirt podcast and man look for all the special offers and whatnot we got coming in the future. As always, I appreciated your time. I know you’ve got lots more stuff you could do today. But instead, you chose to at least spend a little bit of time with me. So thanks again. You’ve been listening to The Real Dirt with Chip Baker.

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The Evolution of the International Cannabis Industry

by Travis C | Dec 17, 2019 | cannabis business, cannabis culture, cannabis industry, growing, Season 3, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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Grower on Grower with Little Hill Cultivators Pt 2

by Travis C | Nov 5, 2019 | cannabis business, cannabis culture, cannabis industry, growing, Season 3, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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This is a continuation of Grower on Grower with Chip and Jeff of Little Hill Cultivators. Full transcript is below.

Chip:
Thank you for joining me again, here with The Real Dirt, with Chip Baker. On today’s episode we have a Part 2, with Jeff from Little Hill Farms, in Trinity County, California. You can follow Jeff on Instagram and you can download this episode, and others, at iTunes, Spotify, and just right off our website, therealdirt.com.

Chip:
In this episode, we continue our conversation with Jeff. If you didn’t hear the first part, go back and get the first part first. You can listen to the second part and it totally makes sense. We just kind of babble and talk about weed. But, it’s a really great, great episode. We talk about the economy, and the business of California and Oklahoma, maybe some predictions that we have. We talk about drip irrigation. This second part of El Jefe in Oklahoma, it’s going to be great. So sit back, fire one up, and enjoy this episode of The Real Dirt.

Chip:
We’re back, Real Dirt had to take a small, little break there. You know, the dogs bark out on the cannabis field and you’ve got to go at least hear what they have to say. You’ve got several dogs out there huh?

Jeff:
Yeah. I have one main dog, my main dog Sammy, a German Shepherd.

Chip:
Sammy, don’t fuck with Sammy.

Jeff:
She’s always on the lookout. German Shepherds are great watchdogs, because they want to watch, and they have a loud bark. When they’re charging you barking, it’s intimidating, even if they’re the biggest sweetheart ever.

Chip:
She’s not though.

Jeff:
She’s a sweetheart to people. If you’re on four legs though, she’s not a sweetheart.

Chip:
Don’t tell the-

Jeff:
Oh yeah, no, she’s a killer.

Chip:
Yeah, tell them she’s a killer.

Jeff:
Yeah, she’s a killer.

Chip:
She’s a sweetheart to Jeff.

Jeff:
But yeah, they post up in the window. If they’re in the house, they’re going to post up in the window and look outside.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
Wait for a squirrel or a burglar to run by.

Chip:
So we were talking about Oregon, and the collapse of the Oregon market. I think it’s similar to what’s going on here with Oklahoma. So, let’s keep chatting about that. Everybody moved into Oregon.

Jeff:
Everybody moved to Oregon, got legalised-

Chip:
California growers, growers from all over the country.

Jeff:
Cheaper land-

Chip:
Cheap land, beautiful place to be.

Jeff:
Good, good, good climate in southern Oregon.

Chip:
Good soil, great climate.

Jeff:
Yeah. And, they blew it out when they legalised. People were counting on that crop to pay some bills, especially with the massive expansion. And it collapsed the market, the price was just about cut in half.

Chip:
Man, I heard as little as $100 on trim pounds. And I also heard $190 trims, light depth pounds.

Jeff:
Yeah. I never heard quite that low, but damn, that’s … You’re losing money at that rate.

Chip:
Actually, the people that were making these $190 pounds, they … Large commercial nursery, one of the largest in the country. And, they had a $90 production rate a pound.

Jeff:
Wow.

Chip:
So to them they were like, “Ah fuck, we usually make 12%.” Right?

Jeff:
Well hey, that’s capturing the economy of scale.

Chip:
Yeah, that captures the economy of scale. But you know what? They actually have converted up, as so many Oregon growers converted.

Jeff:
So, that’s actually contributed as well, because of the pollen increase.

Chip:
Well in many ways it’s contributed, because many people quit growing-

Jeff:
They quit growing ganj.

Chip:
… ganj, went into hemp.

Jeff:
Growing tonnes of hemp.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Poor selections of seeds.

Jeff:
Yeah, well.

Chip:
And, dubious genetic sales people.

Jeff:
Oh, yeah.

Chip:
Right? There’s several examples of lawsuits going on right now from Oregon.

Jeff:
That’s created a lot of upset folks-

Chip:
Lots of upset folks.

Jeff:
… in southern Oregon.

Chip:
Yeah, totally.

Jeff:
That’s also contributed to the lower amounts of pounds circulating the ecosystem.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. Everybody switched … So many people switched to hemp, especially the smoke-able hemp idea.

Jeff:
Right.

Chip:
Which has yet develop. It will develop, but so many people switched to that. You know, you’re going from something that’s $50. I mean, I saw $13 pounds. Someone wanted to buy $13 pounds of hemp the other day. Right? People think they’re going to get $700 for smoke-able hemp. You know, you can’t just take extractable quality hemp and say it’s smoke-able, just because you want $700 for it.

Jeff:
Right.

Chip:
So similarities between Oregon and the Oklahoma market, is the low regulations. Right? No checkups, you can do pretty much whatever you want. Here’s a loose list of rules. Nobody ever comes up to check your shit out. It’s what happened in Oregon right?

Jeff:
Pretty much.

Chip:
They only had 900 licences when the market collapsed, 900 cultivation licences were when the market collapsed, for 3 million people in the state of Oregon. Right?

Jeff:
They thought they were going to blow it out, cash in real quick.

Chip:
There’s thousands here man.

Jeff:
Then they collapsed the market.

Chip:
There’s thousands and thousands of cultivators here. Most of those people are small, and don’t have the historic knowledge. But out of the thousands, even if there’s 1%-

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
… that got their shit together, they could grow the whole market.

Jeff:
They could.

Chip:
Right, right? I actually don’t think now, Oklahoma is a place to be, if you’re coming in or want to set up a new cultivation. I really don’t think Oklahoma is the place to come. I mean, people can do stuff and make money everywhere. But if you’re not already here, or on your way here … I don’t know man, all the prices have changed properties. Right? All the regulations now are harder. I mean, it’s still in its early days but it’s going to bust, 100% for the cultivator, at some point in the next three years.

Jeff:
That seems like it’s only inevitable.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
You ride these waves, you’ve got to be in front of it.

Chip:
Yeah, totally, totally. Meanwhile, people are going to actually totally crush it until that happens.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
And the people that got it together, it doesn’t matter if they sell $500 pounds or $200 pounds, they’re still making profit.

Jeff:
Right. What that collapse will be, it’ll send the herd. If that happened, that’s why the price went back up. In California’s different forces thinned the herd a little bit, lowered supply.

Chip:
Right.

Jeff:
And price is back up to very nice levels, maybe 2015, 2016 levels, maybe even higher for some people.

Chip:
Yeah, I know man. I hear people selling $3000 pounds at Indoor there in California.

Jeff:
Yeah, for the primo, that’s pretty sweet. Now we’re talking 2010 levels.

Chip:
Yeah, totally.

Jeff:
Man, 2010.

Chip:
Yeah man, 2010, that’s about when got your start.

Jeff:
I was growing, maybe, eight prior to that.

Chip:
Right, right.

Jeff:
Starting the big leagues maybe.

Chip:
Man, let’s talk about your first garden Jeff.

Jeff:
600 Watt light.

Chip:
If you were in modern day Oklahoma, you could … For $2500, $3000, have a commercial licence and start out just this way.

Jeff:
My first garden, they didn’t have grow tents back then, but that’s basically what I built out of 2x4s and plastic.

Chip:
Plastic, yeah.

Jeff:
Got a carbon filter.

Chip:
Did you have to make that?

Jeff:
No, they were available.

Chip:
They were available at that point.

Jeff:
O2, six inch fan, cooling the 600 watt light, air cooled. Popped a bunch of Sweet Tooth #3 seeds-

Chip:
You got from Canada, Mark Emery?

Jeff:
I got from … No, no, England.

Chip:
England, okay.

Jeff:
It’d hold 9 or 10 ounces, pretty happy with that.

Chip:
Oh yeah? One light?

Jeff:
Off of 5 plants, off of 600.

Chip:
You thought you were the man.

Jeff:
It was a good plant, I found out. I realise now, is I grew the right strain. That thing, nothing was stopping it.

Chip:
No, totally, great, great grower, great grower.

Jeff:
A good plant, I’m surprised it hasn’t come back yet. Maybe I’ll bring it back, I’ve got some seeds somewhere.

Chip:
Oh yeah, I don’t remember it being that great.

Jeff:
Man, I had one pheno … Because I grew a lot of them over the years-

Chip:
Good grade, but the quality-

Jeff:
Oh, it was pretty frosty, fruity smelling, good density.

Chip:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you need to break that back out.

Jeff:
Yeah, I think it would play. It yielded really, really well.

Chip:
So, you just planted out some seeds, kind of random seeds.

Jeff:
I mean, I kind of researched it, but-

Chip:
All right, this is exactly what’s going on in Oklahoma right now.

Jeff:
… what I wanted to grow.

Chip:
Right.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
200,000 medical licences have been issued. Did you have a medical licence back then?

Jeff:
No.

Chip:
No. I was right on the cusp of all that.

Jeff:
But, I got one shortly after that, but it was still two or three years down the road. I actually decided it was worth it.

Chip:
Right, and you got 10 ounces.

Jeff:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chip:
Smoked it all, I’m sure.

Jeff:
Yep.

Chip:
Yeah. I think you smoked me out on some of it. No, we probably didn’t even know each other then.

Jeff:
We didn’t know each other.

Chip:
Right. So, that was your first grow.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
Did you immediately have this idea that you wanted to do it for a living?

Jeff:
No, I never thought I would go full time pot grower. I always … I was in school, I was doing that. But I was definitely into it, bare minimum on a hobby level. I mean, that’s really what I learned to do in college. So as time moves on, you move into a … You decide, “Okay, I’m going to … My friend’s got this house for rent, I’m going to go rent this house out-

Chip:
Grow in the back bedroom and the garage.

Jeff:
… yeah. Either pull it off on that first crop, this one was in the basement. Pull off that first basement crop or go broke. I pulled it off and I said, “Okay, that worked.”

Chip:
The margins were so high then-

Jeff:
Oh, you could afford-

Chip:
What was weed selling for back in 2004?

Jeff:
$4000 a pound-

Chip:
Yeah, right.

Jeff:
… to my friends.

Chip:
You could … That’s a modern day 3 pound a light price.

Jeff:
Right. So yeah, and I wasn’t getting a pound a light. But you could afford that learning curve.

Chip:
At $4000, yeah, totally.

Jeff:
Yeah, at $4000, you could afford to make some mistakes. The market wasn’t so saturated, that if you had some lower quality stuff, you couldn’t sell it. The market wasn’t saturated at all, so if you had weed, even in California, even in northern California, you could sell it.

Chip:
Yeah, yeah, no matter what it was, no matter what seed.

Jeff:
Strains, nobody knew that.

Chip:
Right. See, that’s exactly what’s going on in Oklahoma right now.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
You can grow whatever you want, pretty much. Lots of indoor auto flowers. Right? And I’m not sure if people are selling weed, but you know. My wife’s dispensary baker’s medical. She’s buying top notch weed for re-sale, indoor weed, it’s not auto flower.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
That shit is great. Right? It’s some of the best weed in the world, even.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
You sold some of it.

Jeff:
Yeah, if you’re a skilled grower you can grow indoor anywhere.

Chip:
Yeah, totally. Our vendors come from other places and actually say they think their cannabis, ganja, is improved because of the humidity. They were going to really dry, dry locations. And they think that the quality is improved because of the increased humidity.

Jeff:
I bet it has.

Chip:
Right? Going from 20% to 40% is a big deal.

Jeff:
Yeah, you can change the morphology of the plant too. It will grow a little different, you might find, “Oh, I like those broad leaves. I’m getting better growth rates.”

Chip:
At what point back then … Like, looking back on it, was there a point where it wouldn’t have worked out, if the price structure was different?

Jeff:
I mean, I hit the ground running, because I had done a lot of research. I pretty much had my first grow all planned out.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
I knew how the plant worked, I knew potential pitfalls, I had a good, let’s say, recipe I was following.

Chip:
So, it wasn’t a wing and a prayer.

Jeff:
No, I had put quite a bit of work into it.

Chip:
So, you got your recipe from the grow store I bet, or from a buddy.

Jeff:
I got it from online.

Chip:
Online? Okay.

Jeff:
It was a real simple, organic soil mix.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
And a couple of additives, that are pretty low MPK, but helped the soil out a lot, like plant ferments. And, it was kind of hard to overfeed, hard to underfeed, I didn’t really have to worry too much about that. I just gave the plants water, kind of learned about that. And, just growing a really vigorous strain that was a producer. Growing from seed also, I didn’t have any pest problems. So, it kind of all came together on that first grow.

Chip:
And you took clones.

Jeff:
I didn’t take clones off that first crop, but I did, I planted more seed and I took clones off of that crop.

Chip:
Did you make seeds on the first run?

Jeff:
No.

Chip:
No. What you’re saying is, if it had been $2500 a pound, or $2000 a pound, you still think you would have gone forward with it?

Jeff:
I still would have been okay, just because it was successful. You know, there’s so much more access to things now. One nice … I just kind of lucked out. I came into it at a good time. Really, at the end of the good time, because even the bay area got saturated with every rookie indoor grower trying to sell some weed.

Chip:
Totally.

Jeff:
It hurt the general quality of weed.

Chip:
It did go down. I mean, when weed was scarce-

Jeff:
The price.

Chip:
… you got both super shitty weed. But that ended up being in a marketplace, where it was either you could get it or you couldn’t get it.

Jeff:
Right.

Chip:
And then you got the fucking best ganja.

Jeff:
Definitely. Things are relative. And, some batches you’d get were better than others. But, it was just at the beginning of the name game, and people knew what Trainwreck was-

Chip:
Urkle, Urkle.

Jeff:
Urkle wasn’t quite there yet-

Chip:
But it was the next one, yeah.

Jeff:
… but it was coming. That was the big next one, was the Urkle. The Granddaddy, The Grape Ape, those purples became huge in the bay.

Chip:
Right.

Jeff:
That’s what everybody wanted, and boy, by that time that’s what I was growing.

Chip:
Right. What was that first purple strain?

Jeff:
Urkle.

Chip:
Urkle.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
Urkleen. Yeah, wow, difficult grower, Urkle.

Jeff:
Yeah, I didn’t yield too much, quality was outstanding though.

Chip:
If there’s any Urkle growers out there, tell us the best way to grow Urkle.

Jeff:
There’s a couple of tricks.

Chip:
Okay.

Jeff:
I’ll tell a couple.

Chip:
Okay, okay. Everybody sit back, put your rolling papers down, and pick up your pen and paper.

Jeff:
If you’re growing a really, really squat [inaudible 00:15:01]-

Chip:
Like Bubba or Urkle.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
Something that doesn’t stretch out your flowers.

Jeff:
Something that’s not going to stretch, you’ve got to veg it. You’ve got to keep humidity up.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
As you veg it, keep humidity up through the stretch, to get those branches to stretch out. The leaves are going to get huge, because it’s so humid. We’re talking 70%-80%.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
De-leaf all those giant fan leaves, because you’re going to get no light penetration. Prune up everything underneath, because it’s just going to be larf, those strands larf out real bad.

Chip:
And they have this inner leaf too. That’s the leaf that’s close to the stem, off the branches. That’s the real bottoms.

Jeff:
Right.

Chip:
Of Urkle or Bubba.

Jeff:
So, do all those things, keep your humidity up. Cut your humidity at week 3, after stretch, and don’t overfeed. Let the leaves go from dark green to light green. Not super light, but you don’t want that dark, dark green colour, or your nugs aren’t going to swell.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
You’re going to end up with these little, small, sort of grape nuglets. It’s not going to burn right, it’s not going to taste good. But if you let that go from dark green to a nice rich emerald green, by backing off on your nutrients, you’ll find that the buds swell. And you end up with these big golf ball, rock hard nugs, and that’s where you’re going to get your weight from. And, it’s going to smoke better, because you didn’t overfeed it the whole time. It’s going to be really tasty. You’ll have become a more skilled grower, because of learning those small manipulations.

Chip:
What’s the perfect canopy density for Urkle?

Jeff:
For Urkle, I’d day 9 under a 600 was always good. Of course, I would top, which would make the plant wider, but it would even out your canopy.

Chip:
And, you’re flowering these when they’re 16 inches, 18 inches tall?

Jeff:
You know, 18 inches, after you’ve topped, let the rest of those tops reach the canopy. Strip off everything that’s not there, 18 inches, they might finish at 24 inches. But, you’ve got 6-9 culls a plant, 9 plants a light.

Chip:
Are you still pulling off the bottom third of the branches and leaves in this scenario?

Jeff:
After you top, if you just take the very tip and give it maybe another 2 more weeks of veg, you’ll notice … Well, a lot of the side branches will reach the top of the canopy. If that branch isn’t reaching the top of the canopy, cut it, because it’s never going to.

Chip:
Good point. And you mean top of the canopy by like an inch or two from the rest of the plant.

Jeff:
Yeah. If you’re looking at the plant from the very top down, if you can’t see the growth tip, cut it. Because it’s not at the top, and it’s not going to be seeing the light.

Chip:
Right.

Jeff:
And then, you know, trim up those branches to get rid of any other side branches off those. You should have a few nodes, 4 or 5 nodes on each top. Then flip it, and-

Chip:
Flip it.

Jeff:
… you’ll end up a half ounce, maybe quarter ounce, just depending on how you’re doing things per cola. That’ll add up.

Chip:
There you go. Not a particularly heavy yielding strain. You know, I like the other technique of it though. Right? The one plant per square foot in a 3-5 gallon pot. Grow it until it’s 18 inches, 24 inches. Bottom off, I mean pull off the bottom 1/3 and flower it. Right?

Jeff:
Cut down on veg time a little bit.

Chip:
Barely little, you just end up with more plant. The density of your garden increases, and those little nuggets on the Urkle, you get that same perfect nugget over and over again. It’s also, in my experience, easier to make them purple, you had more purple when it was like that.

Jeff:
Interesting.

Chip:
Because-

Jeff:
Yeah, we didn’t even talk about that.

Chip:
We didn’t even talk about the purpleen.

Jeff:
That’s a thing too.

Chip:
Yeah, totally.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
Like these Purple Punches here, outside they’ve been brown, not purple, because it’s so hot. Right? Indoors, they start to turn up purple as soon as you start to flush them, if you’re growing them hydro.

Jeff:
Yeah. I’ve never grown the strains, I know it’s popular but-

Chip:
Oh, I thought, I never heard this.

Jeff:
I’m just aware that it’s been really popular, a beautiful plant, beautiful bud.

Chip:
It’s great weed, it’s tasty. People call it Purple No Punch, and that’s true, even though it has really high THC levels. It is known not to get people super [inaudible 00:20:09] if you smoke it all the time. Or, if you’re just a super chiefer.

Jeff:
Yeah, we were just talking about that. It’s got the purple terps-

Chip:
You’d love this weed.

Jeff:
I would, because it’s tasty.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
And it’s got the stretch from OG, which everybody’s always just wanted a purple plant that stretches. So, you don’t have to veg it for six months, just to get it to size, which has been the yield killer on those purple plants, you’ve got to veg them forever.

Chip:
Totally.

Jeff:
They got the terps, they got the plant structure. Even the THC is higher than what a Granddaddy will put out, but it just doesn’t pack that punch you’d think an OG would.

Chip:
Absolutely. It is not as strong as you want it to be, for sure.

Jeff:
It’s all those terp plants.

Chip:
I’ve been looking for that purple OG for years man.

Jeff:
Me too.

Chip:
I’ve been looking for it, we both are. We planted a few different company seeds, and a few of our friend’s seeds.

Jeff:
Yeah?

Chip:
Still haven’t found the purple OG. If you’ve got that OG that’s purple-

Jeff:
I think I saw it at Emerald Cup one year. Some Oregon grower showed me a jar. I should have just asked him for a cut, I just figured he as going to say no, but I should have at least tried. But, he had it man, he had some purple nugs with the OG, sort of gas nose on the back end, but purple up front.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
The nugs looked proper, smelled proper. I asked him about the plant structure. If you’re out there, Oregon grower who was at Emerald Cup, maybe three years ago-

Chip:
If you have that purple weed, contact Jeff.

Jeff:
Contact Little Hill Cultivators, see if we can’t work something out, if you’re in the California regulated industry, that is.

Chip:
Yeah, absolutely. Hey man, lots of regulatory people listen to this show. Definitely listen to my … Some Maryland regulators, some Oklahoma regulators, some Colorado, some California, some Oregon, some Washington. All these people have reached out to me. They listen to what we have to say. They find that this show and others like it really allows them to hear and understand what’s going on in the cannabis grower’s thought pattern or business. They reach out, they’ve reached out to us man.

Jeff:
Well if that’s the case, lend me a few-

Chip:
Oh, okay, here’s the mic.

Jeff:
… I’ve got a few gripes.

Chip:
Here’s the mic. Hey now, here’s what I want to say before you start griping. I know you guys are all working incredibly hard, in a really difficult environment, but we’ve got some problems.

Jeff:
Yeah. I know you guys have been overworked, in a lot of cases. But just the way the regs go, as a cultivator, I can’t bring my crop to market. I’m in a remote location. I have to get a separate transport licence, which I’ve done, so I can transport my product to market. You know, that’s fine, but some of the regulations for this self-transport only licence are the same as if you’re a full on distribution. You know, the most expensive thing that I have to pay for this transport licence, which doesn’t bring any revenue. The cultivation does, but the transport licence is just transporting, I’m not running a separate business.

Chip:
You’re just hauling your weed to market.

Jeff:
I need to find liability insurance, which I don’t need for cultivation, but I’m required to have for transport, of a million dollars. It’s really difficult, and it’s really expensive to find a carrier.

Chip:
[inaudible 00:23:37]?

Jeff:
I mean, the licence is a $200 licence. But I’m going to end up spending $5-$10 grand on insurance every year, for a $200 licence. For us little old 10,000 square foot mixed light cultivators. I think that’s a bit excessive. There’s certainly some other ones-

Chip:
Do you think this is a regulation money grab?

Jeff:
Well it’s not a money grab, because a licence is a $200. Fine, that’s the cheapest licence there is in the whole structure. But to require me to have the same insurance as a full-on distribution … They’ve made some other sort of concessions, where I don’t need … Literally, my premises is a woodshed with a filing cabinet. Nobody needs to go in there besides me, there’s no product stored there, so I don’t need security, I don’t need cameras. I mean, we’re talking about a filing cabinet here.

Jeff:
So in that sense, that was a good worth, realising that’s a bit excessive to protect a filing cabinet. But on the flip side, the insurance is not easy to get, plus it’s incredibly expensive, that I don’t feel I need. Who knows? Maybe it’s good business sense to do it. But at this point I’m just-

Chip:
Well, you do need liability insurance. But hey man, that people want to charge you … And you got it for $5000 a year?

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
Well, you got a good deal on it. Because, many people pay $12,000, $18,000.

Jeff:
Wow.

Chip:
Right? You got a good deal on it. It is hard to get, it is expensive. People are taking advantage of the cannabis regulatory market, for sure.

Jeff:
Sure. Yeah, I had to go through a few companies to figure that out. Definitely some of them were definitely looking to cash in real quick. If I have more than one licence on the same property, cultivation licence on the same property-

Chip:
This is all California mind you.

Jeff:
… yeah. I can’t have one immature plant area and distribute plants to all those licences, to those separate gardens, or however. I have to have a separate nursery licence, which because of my county’s wisdom, I have realised I’m not zoned for. Because, they associate nurseries with retail nurseries, traffic showing up, people coming to buy plants. A retail business. They’ve deemed my cultivation as inappropriate. Now … Which forces me to either put up a silly wire fence all throughout my immature plant area, to keep the spaces different. So I grow X amount of plants for each licence, they’re in their own licenced area.

Jeff:
It’s just stupid. If the licences are on the same premises, or the same property, you should be able to … Under one entity, you should be able to grow your immature plant area, your nursery veg area-

Chip:
Dude, you’re talking immature plants, no buds, hardly any THC.

Jeff:
Yeah. Hardly yeah, not a measurable amount anyway.

Chip:
Right. The economy of them is small.

Jeff:
Right. So yeah, there’s-

Chip:
Little money in it.

Jeff:
… just let us … There’s no money in it.

Chip:
There’s no money in it.

Jeff:
My other choice is to buy from a nursery, and buy specific plants for each licence type.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
But then that costs me more money. You know?

Chip:
Right.

Jeff:
Or, I put these silly fences up, dividing up my greenhouse immature plant area. Put these silly fences up, that’s just over-regulation.

Chip:
That’s over-regulation.

Jeff:
You know, they could all be grown, tracked, through one licence, and then distributed through these other licence types. They’re all owned, they’re all the same people, the plants are flowering out right next to each other. I think that’s a bit silly, especially if you’re being forced to have a nursery licence, which is another whole headache. On top of that, you don’t even intend to sell plants. Again, you’re intending to run it as a separate business, it’s simply for me. You know?

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
You know, there should be some type of separate way around this, so that I can just grow plants for myself and distribute them to different licence types, through different licences on the property. For example, if I have two 10,000 square foots in a 10,000 square foot mixed light, or just the way the property is divided up. A lot of people end up with multiple licences sometimes.

Jeff:
I think that’s my main thing right now. If I was more prepared, I could have come with a list. But, I say looking into what regulations are not necessary, or their intended purpose, it’s not achieving their intended purpose. It’s important to look at. They have been receptive toward some things. Big reason why a bunch of farmers in Trinity just started their own trade organisation, to start having a louder voice.

Chip:
What’s that organisation?

Jeff:
The Trinity County Agriculture Alliance. We just started, I’m a founding member-

Chip:
TCAA?

Jeff:
TCAA. Yeah, that’s why we finally got together. It’s been really hard to group together Trinity farmers, just because we’re spread out a lot. A lot of folks are real opinionated, but we all agree that this is the best for everybody. You know, so far so good. It’s really neat to be at the start of something. Hopefully, that will have an impact on … Not just Trinity regulations, but state regulations.

Chip:
Yeah. That’s great man, we’ve got to work together. We’ve got to get together and have our voices heard. The people that I often see that are speaking for the cannabis community, they don’t really know what they’re talking about. Many of the people are uneducated, they’re not actual farmers, farmers are busy farming. So, they just repeat some of the words they hear farmers say, and they might have the best heart in the world, but they don’t realise, “Oh.”

Chip:
Here in Oklahoma for instance, “Oh well, once a plant is over 18 inches tall we’re just going to call that a seedling.” Right? They don’t know any better, that’s not exactly what that means, or that’s not the terminology. But now legally, here in Oklahoma, when a clone is over 8 inches tall it’s now called a seedling.

Jeff:
Interesting.

Chip:
Totally.

Jeff:
You know, definitions are going to be different in every jurisdiction, and fighting for what that definition is.

Chip:
Yeah.

Jeff:
A mature plant, an immature plant was a big one in California.

Chip:
Yeah, totally, totally.

Jeff:
They wanted to call a certain height mature, and that just doesn’t work if you’re growing from seed, because it hasn’t declared it’s sex yet.

Chip:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff:
A lot of issues that maybe they didn’t realise, but it seems like people were screaming at them, “You can’t do that! You’re going to put my business plan out, based on something that’s not a real thing!” I mean, there’s a lot of different ways that people want to grow and when you start over-regulating, you start limiting how a farmer sees fit to do his job and that really sucks.

Chip:
It’s hard to SOP. All these people that, “I SOP, I SOP.” It’s hard to SOP.

Jeff:
There’s no right way to do it, sometimes-

Chip:
Especially indoor gardens. You can do it that way, but an outdoor greenhouse like that-

Jeff:
Yeah, it seems like the system borrowed from Colorado.

Chip:
… it’s hard.

Jeff:
It was built on indoor principles, and indoor generalities. And then, you try to apply that to a guy like me out in the hills, it just doesn’t apply. Especially the big plant growers, they want to grow big plants and they should be able to do whatever they want, or however they’ve crafted their skills. That’s big plants for a lot of people. It just makes harvest, and track, and trace a real pain in the ass.

Chip:
Yeah. I’m not a big plant fan.

Jeff:
I like to walk amongst them.

Chip:
I like to walk amongst them.

Jeff:
It’s been a few years since I grew big plants.

Chip:
I’d like to have one or two here or there.

Jeff:
But without plant limits, I see the wisdom in having more plants, for sure.

Chip:
Yeah, totally, totally. It’s ego though. Since I was a little kid, “I want to grow a big plant.”

Jeff:
Hey man-

Chip:
You’ve heard that, and everybody said it.

Jeff:
I still want to grow a big plant.

Chip:
Yeah. All you have to do is do it once or twice though and you’re like, “God damn!” I mean, we had a 10,000 square foot harvest outside, short, late season plants, everything was 2 or 3 foot tall. Really high density, great yielding technique for bumper crop or late season ganja. It took us less than 12 hours to harvest it all.

Jeff:
Wow.

Chip:
I mean, we’ve had small, 40 pound, greenhouses that have taken 5 or 6 days, because there were these big plants all roped up. You know. You start at the front plant and start working your way back. It’s just labour intensive to do it that way.

Jeff:
It is. It’s intensive for resources as well, water, nutrients.

Chip:
Oh yeah, those big plants just suck it up.

Jeff:
They suck the water up.

Chip:
They suck it up, suck the nutrients up, suck the water up.

Jeff:
Yeah. But-

Chip:
What’s the ideal size plant for you? You were kind of talking about his earlier.

Jeff:
I don’t know. I’d say 4 ounces to maybe 6 ounces.

Chip:
Yeah, I love those.

Jeff:
For me.

Chip:
And you’re talking greenhouses, outdoors?

Jeff:
I’m talking in greenhouses. Indoor would be different, it would be much smaller. It would be probably 2-4 ounces.

Chip:
I like 2 ounce plants indoors. I like 1/4 and 1/2 pound plants in greenhouses, light dep, early season and late season. And then, just 1-2 pound full season plants, that you’d plant in June and pull at the end of the year.

Jeff:
Yeah, 1 pounders and 2 pounders are pretty easy to deal with.

Chip:
Yeah. Small, but the bud quality is great.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
You don’t have to dump a tonne of nutrient or water it to make it big enough to … You know, you don’t get these huge, honker nuggets that harbour mould. Right? They look cool on the surface when you get them, that big 4 foot nugget just isn’t as high a quality.

Jeff:
Nope.

Chip:
Right? As the smaller nugget. You know, you just have to give it all that Nitrogen to make it grow like that man.

Jeff:
Still, it’s nice to walk in an orchard, but for efficiency-

Chip:
Oh yeah, no doubt man. Nice smelling trees, I get it. The ease of it, I get it. The people who got that shit down, they’ll argue and swear by it. There’s people that got it down, for sure.

Chip:
Did you hear my latest episode of The Real Dirt with Chef Anna, with the pot?

Jeff:
I haven’t finished it yet.

Chip:
Okay. Yeah, big audio file.

Jeff:
He’s growing them indoor though.

Chip:
He’s growing them indoor. What do you think about growing autos indoor.

Jeff:
Growing autos indoor seems like a complete waste of time to me.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Why is that?

Jeff:
Because you can make plants flower whenever you want indoors. You don’t need them to automatically flower.

Chip:
Right. Many people grow them because they think it’s easier.

Jeff:
Okay.

Chip:
You still have to wait 90 days.

Jeff:
You still have to wait 90 days. I mean, you could grow a seedling and flip it immediately.

Chip:
I’m going to give you a couple things my customers tell me. “But you don’t have to have a timer, with auto flowers indoors.”

Jeff:
Well then, you’re just wasting money.

Chip:
How’s that?

Jeff:
Because you’ve got your lights on all day.

Chip:
Oh yeah, that’s right. That costs twice as much to flower it, if you’re running your lights for 24 hours instead of 12. What about, “I don’t have to worry about light leaks.”

Jeff:
Why not? I’m sure auto flowers can [inaudible 00:35:53] too.

Chip:
No, no. I think that is a legitimate thing that people say, they can build rooms without having to worry about cross-contamination of light.

Jeff:
Okay. Yeah, well …

Chip:
It’s not that hard to build a light die room.

Jeff:
It’s not that hard to plug up light leaks.

Chip:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Jeff:
A little duct tape here and there.

Chip:
Well, “It’s just so easy. I don’t have to worry about knowing how to grow it, it just grows itself.”

Jeff:
Same could be said about regular light cycle genetics.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). You can grow it under 18-24 hours light until it’s 18 inches tall, and then turn to 12 hours light.

Jeff:
Pretty simple.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). “This auto flower, it’s really great weed.”

Jeff:
I wouldn’t say it’s really great weed, I’d say it’s pretty good.

Chip:
It’s pretty good.

Jeff:
It’s suitable.

Chip:
It’s suitable.

Jeff:
It’s good enough. The good ones are good enough to sell as flower.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
They have potency, they have good looks.

Chip:
“The yield inside is incredible.”

Jeff:
No it’s not. That would be my reply to that.

Chip:
No it’s not. Because yield does equal time and cost.

Jeff:
Sure.

Chip:
Right, right. “I can flower this in just 90 days.”

Jeff:
You can flower pretty much any clone in 60.

Chip:
Yeah, totally. One of my favourite things to say is, “You’re just 90 days away from your biggest crop ever.”

Jeff:
It’s true.

Chip:
It’s so true. And, you are just 90 days away from your biggest crop ever. If you have any problems growing the biggest crop ever, just get in touch with us at Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC. Look at us online, we have everything you need. And if we don’t have it in one of our locations, we’ve got it in another location, and we’ll send it right to you.

Jeff:
Good plug.

Chip:
Yeah. Well, you shop with Cultivate Colorado.

Jeff:
I have used them, for my very minimal hydrostore needs.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
Flood tables, I just bought some lights.

Chip:
Good plastic stuff.

Jeff:
I couldn’t find any used lights. I just missed one guy selling his … Basically got in his room and was selling all his lights for cheap. And then as soon as I buy the lights new, I see another person selling 50 lights of exactly what I needed, for cheap. I had to pay full price.

Chip:
End up paying for new lights, wow. I’m a proponent for buying new lights. I like to buy new cars too. Buy that shit new, use it up, throw it away, start over again.

Jeff:
Man, I could have … I don’t mind the savings on that, it’s-

Chip:
And what kind of lights are you running?

Jeff:
What did we get? Gavita’s 600-800.

Chip:
Oh, the flexes.

Jeff:
The flexes.

Chip:
Oh, that is my all time favourite light right there.

Jeff:
I got a little bit lower ceiling height in my one greenhouse. I could go full 1000s, and they come with a hood that will spread the light out more.

Chip:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeff:
So, we’re going to put that reflector … I shouldn’t say hood, it’s more of just a reflector nowadays. But, that was my first purchase of double ended lights since 2019. In this greenhouse grower, it didn’t have any double ended lights, all this time. I always thought it was pretty funny.

Chip:
Yeah. You’ll buy an LED one day.

Jeff:
I’m sure it’ll come eventually. Hopefully when the price comes down, if not sooner. I’ve replaced by T5 bulbs with LED T5 bulbs, which is definitely a winner over those damn florecents.

Chip:
Yeah, but man, $1,700 for a light that covers the same area as that $650 Flex, I can’t do it yet man. I mean, I don’t see the quality difference. I don’t see the power … There’s no power difference, there’s no heat difference.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
Right? You know, I don’t see why you would want to pay … And I sell this type of stuff.

Jeff:
Right.

Chip:
I don’t see why you’d want to pay $1,700 for that. Right?

Jeff:
Yeah. I mean, 5 years from now it’s going to be half the price, with all the technology.

Chip:
I hope 5 years from now it’s $400. But man, they’ve really artificially kept the price of lights high. The price of lights today are more expensive than they were 10 years ago. You know?

Jeff:
Yeah.

Chip:
Right, yeah, totally. We used to have $100 light packages.

Jeff:
Magnetic ballasts, were not that expensive.

Chip:
Magnetic ballasts, screw in bulbs, right. Cheap reflectors.

Jeff:
Even the price on digitals came down, it was pretty affordable.

Chip:
Yeah man, I think we still sell $110 digital ballasts right now.

Jeff:
Wow.

Chip:
Right? At cultivatecolorado.com, cultivateokc.com. You like my little plugs don’t you?

Jeff:
Put in there, it’s your show.

Chip:
It’s my shit dude. I know, I used to feel guilty about it, but I’m like, “No, come shop with me man.” And really do, please, come shop with us. We need your business, we rely on your business, we want to continue to be in the industry. The way we do it is with new customers.

Jeff:
They have knowledgeable staff, I’ll say. As a customer, I can talk to … When I’m not talking to Chip, I’ll talk to his guy, Jacob, I believe. He knows what he’s talking about, so I can ask him a question and get some real information. He’s not just going to try and up-sell me. He’s going to try and give me what the right thing is. Or maybe, make me aware of some technology or new thing I haven’t seen yet, because I’m not-

Chip:
Yeah. He talked me into these drippers, as a matter of fact. Because, they’re the ones we sell the most of. You have to think about that, “Oh, what’s everybody buying? Okay, I’ll use these too.”

Chip:
It’s been an excellent, excellent episode here, chatting with you. I feel like we’ve covered such a range of topics. But, we didn’t quite get it all, we might have to have … This might even be a Part 2 or Part 3-

Jeff:
Let’s do it.

Chip:
… type of podcast here. So yeah, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it man. Thanks for your input on my drip system, and not calling me out for using synthetic nutrients.

Jeff:
Hey man, I don’t judge. Do how you see fit. As long as the ganja’s good at the end of the day. My ideology, I don’t hold other people to that ideology.

Chip:
Yeah, I know, agreed man. There’s just a time and place for it all.

Jeff:
Just grow good weed.

Chip:
Just grow good weed, there it is.

Chip:
Thank you for joining me on that Part 2 of the El Jefe podcast. El Jefe, Jeff from Little Hill Cultivators in Trinity County, California. He always has a lot to say. I’m sure him and his crew are sitting back listening to this right now. Thanks for coming out and talking ganja with me, it was a great visit we had a couple weeks ago. I always like to see my friends from other states and other cannabis markets, and hear what they’ve got to say. You know, they give me a few pointers here and there, on what they think I should be doing differently.

Chip:
So, always a great exchange of information. Thank you for lending your time and listening to this episode. Next week’s episode is going to be incredible. So, I want you to go to iTunes right now, subscribe, download all the episodes you haven’t heard, and engage with us on Instagram. Shoot me a DM, shoot me a private message on Facebook, The Real Dirt Podcast. We’d love to talk to you, we’re doing this because of you. We want to spread the knowledge of cannabis, hemp, medical cannabis, and adult use cannabis to the world. This is such a great, great, great way to do it.

Chip:
So thanks again for joining us, and see you next time on The Real Dirt.

Grower to Grower with Little Hill Cultivators

by Travis C | Oct 29, 2019 | 420, cannabis business, cannabis culture, cannabis industry, growing, Season 3, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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The Real Dirt is known for interviewing some pretty great cannabis growers. But this episode isn’t really an interview.

Jeff from Little Hill Cultivators has been an almost regular guest on The Real Dirt, and one of our most reliable sources of insight into the current California cannabis industry. As a long time medical cultivator, Jeff transitioned into the recreational industry as well after legalization in California.

With any new legal cannabis industry there is bound to be some red tape, but California just about takes the cake, and wraps it up in red tape. Comparatively, Oklahoma has just about none.

Barriers to entry for cannabis growers

We can all agree that there needs to be some barriers to entry for cannabis growers in a legal industry. But each state varies on how many barriers they set up.

Oklahoma legalized medical cannabis in 2018, with sales taking off without a hitch in 2019, faster and with more growth than any other state. This is because they had almost no barriers to entry, and even made it easier for out of state cannabis growers to come in and get started.

Up until the end of August 2019, any potential cannabis entrepreneur could move to Oklahoma, live there for 30 days, get residency and pursue state licensing. Now (post August) anybody trying to enter the Oklahoma medical cannabis industry from out of state must live in-state for two years before getting residency.

California on the other hand restricted anybody from getting a recreational cannabis license that didn’t already have a medical cannabis license and operation. On top of that, the application fees were insanely high, with additional charges for obtaining the license after approval.

Talking grower to grower

Talking about growing cannabis with somebody who just started or even has been doing it for a few years is nothing like two veteran Northern California cannabis growers getting together. There’s no beating around the bush, just Chip and Jeff talking about each others’ grows, what they each do differently and why.

We all know some growers that think they got the best set up, grow the best ganja and won’t hear a word that says otherwise. It takes years of learning, seeing other grows and assessing your own problems that you can really sit down and talk, grower to grower.

And this episode is just part one.

Stay tuned for part two

In part two of Grower on Grower with Little Hill Cultivators, Chip and Jeff continue their conversation about California’s strict regulations, Oklahoma’s growing industry, drip irrigation, industry predictions and more.

Follow us on Instagram (@therealdirtpodcast) and Facebook (@therealdirt) to stay updated on the next episode’s release and get fun cannabis content in the meantime.

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The Future of Cannabis Trimmers with Cullen Raichart

by Travis C | Oct 22, 2019 | 420, cannabis business, cannabis culture, cannabis industry, Cannabis science, Season 3, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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The industry is expanding, and so is your grow. Sometimes you can’t hand trim it all.

It’s sort of a badge of honor to be worn in the cannabis community when you only trim your cannabis by hand. It shows you care enough about how your buds turn out that you are willing to take the extra time to go through each bud by hand to ensure quality.

Of course you can trim poorly and still get bud that doesn’t look great, but in most cases hand trimming produces the best looking final product.

But with more and more commercial grow operations popping up across the country, there is a growing need for commercial harvest solutions. And when a dozen sets of hands for trimming starts to add up, a machine cannabis trimmer becomes more enticing.

Machine Cannabis Trimmers

A big reason people tend to avoid machine cannabis trimmers is because they are just that, a machine. How can a machine have the same soft, gentle touch of human hands? How can they ensure the buds aren’t getting sliced to pieces from the metal blades in the trimmer?

Science.

The fact is, machine trimmers have come a long way since their inception, and you can now get a machine trimmed bud that looks just like a hand trimmed bud without damaging it or knocking off trichomes. And speaking of the inception of machine trimmers, Cullen Raichart is responsible for just that.

Cullen founded GreenBroz Inc, the first company to produce dry flower machine trimmers for the commercial cannabis market. What is so unique about GreenBroz is how they have designed their trimmers to be so gentle that they literally put their money where their mouth is to prove it.

Compared to other trimmers that tumble the buds around and beat them up to get the leaves off, GreenBroz’s design gently circulates the buds as they are lightly brushed to remove the dried crisp leaves from the service without harming the rest of the bud.

The Future of Automated Harvest Solutions

This week’s episode of The Real Dirt is a deep dive into the story of GreenBroz and Cullen, and where the future of harvest solutions is headed. As the industry continues to grow and expand, so does the acreage that cannabis takes up. More plants means more hands, or in some cases, just one machine cannabis trimmer.

Automation is a natural result of capitalism, and ignoring it won’t make it go away, as much as we would love to keep hand trimming forever. But that doesn’t mean a machine trimmer can’t be an extremely cost effective and impactful in your grow. It’s just your decision to make.

Roll some fo your freshly trimmed buds up and listen to this week’s episode of The Real Dirt right here (top of page) or on your favorite platform.

Brian Weiss has always been an advocate for cannabis and has had a secure connection in the cannabis industry for over 20 years.

Some Topics We Discussed Include

People Mentioned / Resources

Connect with Brian Weiss

Connect with Chip Baker

Transcript

L.A. has the Best Weed

Price of Weed in L.A.

Starting L.A. Cannabis News

Homegrown Ganja: Future of the Cannabis Industry

Learning Something New

A Trip to Florida

Cannabis Predictions after the Present Pandemic Condition

All Things Made in China

Subscribe & Review

John Zolikoff came out of the motorcycle and action sports world. He worked for 15 years at Harley-Davidson and Austrian sports motorcycle maker KTM.

Some Topics We Discussed Include

People Mentioned / Resources

Connect with John Zolikoff

Phone – (866) 964-5678

Connect with Chip Baker

Transcript

Transitioning from Motorcycle and Sports World to CBD

A Light Bulb Moment on CBD

Pushing through the CBD Industry

Branding ZOHKO Energy

Your Brand is Your Avatar

Sales Channels

Keeping the CBD Business Rolling

Where to Find Them

Subscribe & Review

This is a continuation of Grower on Grower with Chip and Jeff of Little Hill Cultivators. Full transcript is below.

The Real Dirt is known for interviewing some pretty great cannabis growers. But this episode isn’t really an interview.

Barriers to entry for cannabis growers

Talking grower to grower

Stay tuned for part two

The industry is expanding, and so is your grow. Sometimes you can’t hand trim it all.

Machine Cannabis Trimmers

The Future of Automated Harvest Solutions