Season 4 Archives - The Real Dirt with Chip Baker

How to Ruin Your Weed with a Paper Bag

by Travis C | Nov 10, 2020 | cannabis business, cannabis culture, Cannabis science, Hemp, Hempisodes, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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oregon cannabis, colorado cannabis and oklahoma cannabis

People have some whacky ways for curing cannabis, but a paper bag ain’t the way to do it!

When it comes to cannabis, there’s a lot that Chip Baker and Justin Jones can agree on. But when it comes to curing your cannabis in a brown paper bag, the two are at odds.

To Chip, it’s a figment of the past that’s best left there, and age old drying technique before the days of plastic bags and bins. For Justin, it’s a quick and easy way to finish out the drying process that works for him.

The paper bag dry method

Before the days of turkey bags and metal storage bins it was common for growers to dry their flower in brown paper bags. They keep light out and they’re discreet, but that’s about it. The problem with paper bags is that they absorb moisture.

If your flower is sitting in a paper bag, over time the bag will suck the moisture out of your plants. Left too long, your flowers will dry out too much and the bag can instill a strange flavor. But Justin has a technique that he insists works just fine.

Justin puts his flower in a brown paper bag that is extremely dry, so there is no moisture already present. Then with a dehumidifier or fan nearby he can keep the paper bag dry as it absorbs moisture from the plant. After 12 hours doing this process, Justin insists that his flower comes out perfectly dry.

Those days are gone

In Chip’s mind the days of needing to use a brown paper bag are gone. With the advent of Turkey Bags, plastic bins with liners and plain old traditional hang-drying in commercial facilities, not only have brown paper bags become unnecessary, they have become irrelevant.

Legalization has given cultivators access to better technology for harvesting, drying and curing their cannabis to the point where using brown paper bags or cardboard boxes is a figment of the past.

This week’s episode

This week on The Real Dirt, Justin Jones returns to talk about why he likes the paper bag method, how the cannabis industry has evolved and matured in Oregon, how it compares to Colorado and Oklahoma and more!

Roll up a nice hemp/cannabis blend and puff away while you enjoy another great episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker!

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Transcript

Chip: Once again, you have reached The Real Dirt podcast. Thank you for joining me today. On today’s real dirt, I once again have my good buddy Justin Jones. We just got so much stuff to talk about. And honestly, conversations with Justin was really how I developed the idea of The Real Dirt podcast, because I have such interesting conversations with my friends within the industry. Now I wanted to share those with you, and today we have Justin on the line again. Justin, are you there?

Justin: Hey how you doing, Chip?

Chip: Oh man, doing good, bro. Feeling good. What’s going on over there on the West Coast?

Justin: I’m just transferring some sherbadough here from a ziplock bag into a brown paper grocery bag. And I just want to know, how many guys out there and gals how many people, cannabis growers, know anything about the old brown paper grocery bag?

Chip: Oh, I’m moaning, dude. I am moaning over here. I can’t believe you’re telling me you’re putting your fine buds into a paper bag. Oh my god.

Justin: Man.

Chip: What, why are you ruining your weed? Why are you doing this?

Justin: No, man. No, no, no, this is a good thing. This is what you want, it’s good for it.

Chip: It’s good for your weed to taste like cardboard?

Justin: I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s what it does.

Chip: Man, you put your wet weed in a – or dry weed – in a brown paper bag, and it sucks up all of that moisture that’s inside that paper bag before it releases any outs.

Justin: But you got to have a dry paper bag. You can’t start with a moist bag, bud.

Chip: Oh okay, so you’re telling me it’s all in technique?

Justin: Yeah.

Chip: Well, let me hear it. Let me hear your technique on how you don’t ruin your weed by putting it into a paper bag.

Justin: Well, I don’t put it in there for that long. And you got to know whether you’re rolling the top down all the way, or if you’re just kind of crumpling it up a little bit at the top, or whether you’re leaving it just open.

Chip: Okay. Alright, alright. You’re gonna have to start at the beginning. Start at the beginning. Tell me what you’re doing again.

Justin: It’s something that the old school probably guys that are older than us smoked, it’s a way that you can –

Chip: Before they had plastic bags, all they had –

Justin: Before all those plastic bags, you had paper bags, because you could use the paper bag to just kind of shift that lot in a slow way when you’re at the end of your dry and cure, and you’ve done your hang. And now you’re doing your seal and burp, and you just got to get that last little, make it perfect. You could use the brown paper bag, you know? And you got to look at other industries too. I mean, the people store seeds in paper bags, people store other thing, because it does have a little bit of a –

Chip: Breeze.

Justin: If you have any takes, breeding with the moisture. And so you know yeah, you don’t want to push your, a wet cell paper bag moisture into your bud, but I would say it’s a way to kind of temper it, right at the end a little bit. If you need to, you don’t always need to.

Chip: Man, I have seen so many people ruin weed by putting it in a cardboard box or in a paper bag.

Justin: Well, why do they put it in there for?

Chip: The same, they’re trying to do the same thing you’re doing. Hey, they got their weed almost dry, and they cut them down and put them in a paper bag to like, finish them out, right? Or cure them in a box. And I believe a lot of this came from early 2000s Cannabis Cup, where that’s what Arion of Greenhouse said that they did, is they cured their weed for months in a cardboard box, right?

Justin: Would you think there’s actually a certain taste or flavor that gets put in there?

Chip: Absolutely. Oh absolutely. It is – alright, so here’s the thing. And you kind of said it earlier about you have to have a dry paper bag, right? Well, it is a little more than that. If you have a dry paper bag, if you’re in Colorado, if you’re in California, if you’re in the desert –

Justin: Oh yeah, wait a minute, hold on.

Chip: You’ve got a dry paper bag.

Justin: I got a dry paper bag in a small closet that’s got a dehume pounding on the other side of the closet too. So –

Chip: You got a dry paper bag?

Justin: Or I’ll blow a fan, right? If you point a fan right at the side of the paper bag, what you’re trying to do is get some movement, but not too much. And get a little bit of that wet in there, but not too much.

Chip: You’re trying to control the dry, so that it doesn’t dry so fast, because you don’t need, you don’t have the best drying room.

Justin: Right.

Chip: That’s where the paper bag really started as and became, is if you didn’t have enough or the best dry room, you’d hang your plants. And so they, because they won’t at some point in many – unless you have a proper dry room, they’ll never dry.

Justin: Right.

Chip: Right? On the coast of California, Oregon, Washington throughout the southeast, you can hang weed up in your house, and it will never dry in your closet.

Justin: Here in Oregon, I struggle with that. And you know, coming from Colorado where you have a hard time not over drying, here you just I mean, most of the time here, your relative humidity is 50 to 60%, which is kind of where you want your stored, finished dry material to kind of, I don’t know.

Chip: End up.

Justin: Right. Right, right yeah. And so it just is like, you’re fighting the moisture, the over moisture and those sort of things all the time on the west coast, for sure. Especially coming into this time of the year here, where it’s gonna rain three or four days a week, and you’re just always gonna have that moisture in the air.

Chip: So yeah, I mean home growers and commercial growers would take their buds down, put them in paper bags, and it would allow them to control the dry rate. They’d increase the heat, or the moisture would be sucked out of the paper bag until they, it would help them dry.

Justin: It’s easier, it makes, it gives them a wider landing pad on not fucking it up, right? And so instead of being like, “Oh, if I miss the wind,” if you’re not doing that, you may be, you missed your perfect window by a couple of hours. Maybe this gives you a day of a window to get back to it, to get it fueled up.

Chip: So here’s the folly, is because you’re in these wet areas, those cardboard bags and the cardboard boxes, they’re sucking out moisture.

Justin: Oh yeah, you can feel it.

Chip: Right, yeah, they suck up moisture. So one, you got to get those dry, you have to get all the moisture out of them to dry. So you have to put, get a dehumidifier or heater, right? That’s going to dry out these boxes and get all that moisture out of there, right? Because if they leave the moisture in there, and then put your weed in there, as your weed dries, it’ll suck the moisture out of the bag.

Justin: You’re going the wrong direction, you have to have – yeah. The box of the bag’s got to be drier than your cannabis and you can only leave it in there for a certain amount of time. And you should, if it’s doing its job, the bag or the box should be super brittle dry. And then you put your material in there, and let’s say after 12 hours, you come back. You should be able to feel the difference in the paper, and then get it out of there.

Chip: So you’re not going in the wrong direction.

Justin: It’s the technique.

Chip: Now your bud’s gonna suck it back up. I’ve used the paper bags like, so, so many times. I’ve had, years and years ago.

Justin: Well, it’s about, it’s all about reusing, you know? We try to recycle and recycling is good. But reusing is even better than recycling. And at the end of the day, I think cannabis guys are great at reusing those thin metal hangers from the dry cleaner? The dry cleaner hangers, you know? Those are real popular for hanging new branches, right? And so, there’s a way to, ‘cause those hangers suck. You get them from the dry cleaner, and then you don’t really use them to hang your shirts back up later, right? So they get kind of built up, so those are good. And then the brown paper bags, got to have them.

Chip: I’m definitely not a brown paper bags fan. I do, however, like to take the brown paper bag, fold the top over one time, maybe one inch or two inch fold and then insert a turkey bag. And then hold the turkey bag up, right? And as you’re going through your cannabis you can just put it right inside to a standing up bag, you know?

Justin: I like that.

Chip: Yeah, totally.

Justin: So, it’s a stand, it’s a turkey bag stand.

Chip: It’s a turkey bag stand.

Justin: Turkey or goose bags?

Chip: All depends on what you’re doing, man. Here in Oklahoma, we sell cannabis out by the gram. Meaning, that we sell it to an extractor by the volume. So we’ll have a volume and it’ll be like, 4,382 grams, right? That’s not quite 10 pounds, but we just, we’ll bag them up in a goose bag like that.

Justin: In those large goose bags. Yeah.

Chip: And just get as much as we can, specifically with trim. When we do that with trim, right? And we try to get at least a thousand grams in one container. But it’s going to the extractor, they don’t care. They check it into their system by the gram as well.

Justin: You’re not trying to sell some of the, a perfect one pound?

Chip: I’m absolutely not. And, we try to go in 500 and 1,000 increments, just to make all the math easy.

Justin: Less brain damage.

Chip: Yeah, exactly, less brain damage. And I would use a larger container and I’ve been told, and I am we’re going to start the stock these bin containers, the bin bags. So they have a large turkey bag style that goes into the thirty gallon Rubbermaid bin now.

Justin: Nice.

Chip: Right? Yeah, totally. So I think we’re going to push towards that, and try to even get more cannabis in, right? Into one bag. Because man, it’s one bag, one label. Here in Oklahoma, 10 pounds is a batch. We’re not –

Justin: You guys got rules in Oklahoma now for that stuff?

Chip: Yeah dude, there’s all kinds of rules here. Yeah, Oklahoma is really –

Justin: Yeah, we knew it was coming. It was wild west there at the beginning.

Chip: Oh, at the very beginning, it was like, you can show up and in 30 days be doing whatever the fuck you want. And that changed, that changed to you can just show up in 30 days, apply for whatever you want. And then that changed to you can show up in 30 days, apply for whatever you want, and then depending on your local municipality, it might take one day to four months for you to get into any type of business, or get in to have a building plan passed or anything like that. And now, we’ve just –

Justin: Now you’ve got residency, two years?

Chip: Two years residency here. If you’re interested in coming to Oklahoma, you can only be an investor for 25% now. If outside residents of the state of Oklahoma, they have a 25% stake max for two years. And then, there’s a lawsuit I hear that they’re trying to lift that. Who knows if that’s going to maintain other states it has maintained?

Justin: We have a chain in Colorado, we spent years fixing those laws. Because they were very restrictive, and once all the money inside of Colorado ran out as far as investment money and that sort of thing, then you had to be like, “I gotta go outside of the state.” So I first started that you could get a, you could get an out, you could get a loan. And the loan could be guaranteed, like a convertible into ownership is that. So you get a loan from a guy from another state that says that could turn into ownership if that person moved to Colorado, lived there for two years, became a resident, then they could like, convert. So that you could do a loan that was convertible, if these other things happened. And then after that –

Chip: That’s a convertible loan.

Justin: Right. And then after that, it became you could just have out of state ownership. And then now it’s, in Colorado, the public, pub coast are circling and making moves, because now you can have 49% ownership can be a publicly traded company. So, it was always that they wanted to be able to just go, background check, deep, deep dive on every single owner. So having a publicly traded company that could have thousands or tens of thousands of stockholders, right? Didn’t work. So now, so they fixed a lot of that. And so now, you’re seeng companies in Colorado start to go public, or go that direction. So Colorado’s now available for the multistate operator, the MSO. But we were really talking about Oklahoma moving forward and the regulations, and so you guys are now using the Franwell Metrc tracking system?

Chip: That is not in place yet, but it will be.

Justin: They’d said they’re going, so they’ve contracted.

Chip: Mhm, they’ve contracted. They say it’s going to be six months before they get it in place, who knows?

Justin: Sure.

Chip: Right?

Justin: Yeah, well, that’s good. And what I like about that, and be it what it is, Metrc really is tracking probably 90% of the legal cannabis, and as we move forward towards a national legalization effort, having one company that’s kind of got most of that in line, it should be good down the road. That we hopefully in the next decade start to integrate the entire country into –

Chip: Yeah, well Metrc’s –

Justin: Legalize cannabis.

Chip: Metrc definitely steps it up. It’s costly to scale Metrc, it’s difficult to scale it. So maybe some of the people who were, got tons and tons of square feet, and lots of plant numbers, they may change their operations.

Justin: There’s new companies coming in that are going to make it, they’re going to take and give you a user interface for your company that really works for you. And then behind the scenes, it plugs everything in the Metrc the way it’s supposed to. And so, Metrc is very clumsy, and it’s very designed towards the applications that the states want to use it for, for tracking the inventory, for tracking taxes, and these sorts of things. And yeah, there’s things that they thought were, would be great for the license ease on the user end, but they’re still real clumsy, and that hasn’t been their focus. So there’s some definitely some other companies that can overlay, and they’re trying. Nobody’s really knocked it out of the park yet, but I think that’s coming.

Chip: It is coming. And it is easier, you can print your own tags now. The technology’s changing. It also makes monitoring, enforcement and regulation, the local government here easier, right? And it will drive more of that, because now they can go into a field that is all RFID, they can immediately get all the data of all the plants in it, you know? They can immediately like, follow that all the way from seed to sale in your operation that will make people tighten up their operations, their business models, account for everything. I mean, I tell you, I hope they haven’t made all the rules, because I hope they don’t make us weigh that shit, wet, dry, stem weight, bud weight. I hope we could skip all that. I know you got, I know Colorado has, I mean it is, that’s not just a Colorado thing.

Justin: No, it really, tracking the waste, tracking all that plant material is kind of the foundations of the early legalization, and it really hasn’t changed. And it’s really if you look at other industries, people are doing that on multiple levels. So, you just, when you’re trimming a plant down, just stick it all in this bin, the leaves go in that bin, the bud goes that way, weight it wet, we weigh it, we weigh it wet before we weigh it dry after you get all those markers all the way through.

Chip: Yeah, I mean, in all of my business, we monitor all of our waste, right? Our waste stream really does say a bunch about what you’re doing in business. And for instance, at Growers Coco, my soil manufacturing plant, we monitor all of the coco dust that’s wasted, we calculate all of the inputs into what all the outputs are, we’re always looking at our trash stream, our plastic, our wood stream going outside the business. Because the fact of the matter is, if you have a lot of bags that are torn in production, that shows up in your trash. And that means that there’s something wrong with your machine, or my employees, or the material where the bags are getting ripped and used inappropriately, right? Are not used inappropriately, thrown away. And each one of those bags cost us 40 cents, or something like that.

Justin: Well, it adds up. Yeah.

Chip: Oh, it adds up, man. And then you, also on the waste stream, you get to calculate how many pallets of material that you’ve gone through. So it is important in that business, that manufacturing business to track it for sure.

Justin: Well, that’s really what we’re doing with cannabis now that you can see the flow. It’s all manufacturing, you know? It’s agriculturally based, growing, processing, packaging, manufacturing, all the way down to get those consumer items.

Chip: Now, at some point though, it’s over regulated, right? It’s something I mean, from in my view, cannabis is harmless, right? Until you turn it into an extract. And at that point, it becomes like, I’ll call it dangerous, right? Because if anyone consumed or a child consumed a chunk of extract, a gram of extract, they would be fucked up, right? And they’re not going to die, but it would definitely be a, considered a poisoning, an overdose, right? They’re not going to die, but like, you know –

Justin: Yeah, you don’t want to do that to your kids.

Chip: You don’t want to do that to your kid, or to yourself, or to anybody. And like that’s to me where it becomes dangerous, and it should be regulated in some way.

Justin: Well, that’s why the regulations, well and that’s why you’ll see 10 milligram doses of edibles and not a hundred milligrams.

Chip: Yeah, I don’t believe here in Oklahoma there’s a limit, currently.

Justin: There will be, there will. It’s five here in Oregon, 10 to 5 milligrams a serving, 50 in a bottle or a pack max. In Colorado, it’s 10 per serving, 100 in a pack, you know? One item is 100 milligrams, 10 pieces of whatever edible, or however that looks. Your Dixie Elixirs you talked about in one of our previous chats, they’ll have measuring guides on the model, or even sometimes they’ll come with a little cap, like your [inaudible 21:01] bottle has your little one ounce measure cap. Yeah, that’s how [inaudible 21:05]. So the tracking’s overly done, but that’s because we’re still operating under these, the guys that the feds aren’t going to do anything to you, if you’re operating legally in your state. And so I think that the tracking system is there, because it’s been there since day one of Colorado rack, the tracking systems are what’s helping protect the industry from the feds saying, “Hey, we’re going to take these guys out.” So, as legalization happens nationally, maybe some of these, some of these things will become less burdensome. That’s not happening anytime in the future. So you just have to get used to it, you just have to spend the money on that end of the business, and compliance, and inventory tracking and do it right.

Chip: Yeah, man. And it is exciting to see it blossom here in Oklahoma, it’s a great place to be. The people are just incredibly nice for sure. It’s inexpensive to relatively speaking, to California or to Colorado, to set up an operation. But the real reason we’re here is the opportunity to help other cannabis farmers to cultivate OKC. And through our research at our cannabis farm, really figure out how cannabis grows best in Oklahoma, indoor or outdoor, greenhouse, the best type of products to use, how the season works, like, it’s really just this huge R&D effort on our part.

Justin: That’s what sets you guys aside from some of the other companies out there that are selling nutrients, or equipment, or dirt, or whatever, is that you guys are actually practicing, and have been the whole time. You’re in it, you’re in the same side of things so –

Chip: We want to get better, we want to help other people do it better. We want to overgrow the current stigma of cannabis, and that’s what we’re doing at Cultivate OKC, Bakers Medical, Growers Coco, at our farm here in Oklahoma. I mean, man, this place has been, this was a really great spot. I mean, Oregon was in a similar manner years ago, and Oregon had a boom and bust. I mean –

Justin: It’s all balanced out here now.

Chip: Oklahoma is going to do a similar thing. Hey, give me the timeline, because Oklahoma will boom and bust due to the open regulations. And then the regulations and just the market environment, it’ll make it change.

Justin: Yes, eventually.

Chip: Right, eventually.

Justin: And how fast it happens. Here in Oregon, they’ve had to remove us to marijuana [inaudible 23:56] –

Chip: Was it medical and then rec? How did it fold out there?

Justin: Right. So medical has been around forever. Obviously, there was a great private market scene going back, 40, 50 years now. But medical converted into recreational and here in Oregon, they actually did away with the medical marijuana system from a commercial standpoint. So when all of the medical marijuana stores were forced to convert to recreational marijuana, and give up their medical marijuana licenses, and just sell recreational marijuana. And so, that’s what you see now. There’s still a few handful of just medical only stores here in Oregon, but it’s only really in areas that are banning the recreational sales. So at the end of the day, if you have a medical card which you can still have your medical card in Oregon, and you can still grow your own, and if you have a medical card, you can grow a few more plants that just with your recreational growing rights. But at the end of the day, you can go to the recreational marijuana store with your medical card, and then you pay no taxes, and you can get a higher amount. So instead of one ounce of flower, you can get four ounces of flower at one trip. And instead of four grams of hash, you can get whatever, whatever it is. So they haven’t totally screwed over the medical side. But at the end of the day, people jumped in and it was wide open. And it was really easy to get a license in [inaudible 25:28] Oregon, and that would have 2015, going into ’16. And then, that’s when the conversion started happening here with Measure 21 and the, it Measure 21 which was the legalization of recreational here. And then they really were able to find out how much cannabis these guys can grow in Oregon and it became a huge overproduction, especially of outdoor. You could get an outdoor rec grow going for pretty cheap out on a farm down in Southern Oregon, and these guys just grew way too much. And that first year –

Chip: Best climate in the world. Best climate in the world.

Justin: And I think it was 2000, it was fall of ’16 that was going in as there were still a conversion going on, but it was it was going in and I believe that it was like the best growing year ever. It was in the 80s and dry all the way until Halloween. And so it was just a major harvest. So anyways, a lot of guys were only able to get 100 bucks a pound. That’s kind of what it came to for outdoor, and people just started really not doing well. So I think that people started dropping out and then with the hemp thing, in ’19, a lot of cannabis guys grew hemp, smokable hemp instead of ganja, and that cut it down even more on the licensed growers here in Oregon. And now, it’s bounced back out. And if you’re growing indoor, and you’ve got some really good indoor hydroponics type of bud, you can get up to 2500 a pound now wholesale, selling to the stores. I think it’s more in the 17 to 2, and maybe 22. And then maybe there’s a few of the really good name brand grows up here that are that are really great that are getting more, a little bit more with that 2500 premium.

Chip: I mean, two years, it’s been.

Justin: It’s just now been turning hemp. I’d say five years, four to four years.

Chip: So it took four to five years of like, flooded, like, what was the lowest price that cannabis, that quality cannabis got to? Tell me that.

Justin: Five to six hundred.

Chip: What about that greenhouse cannabis? That major production, the major –

Justin: Less than 100, less than 100. ‘Cause we had to start specking out a tier two outdoor grow in Oregon, which is 40,000 square feet of canopy. So that’s an acre of canopy. And basically, if you looked at what it costs you to grow, and for your licenses, and obviously it’s pretty cheap, because you’re just using the sun, natural stuff there. So you’re not like, paying for electricity like you would an indoor thing. These guys were lucky to get 100 bucks a pound and basically pull off 1000 pounds. So you get 1000 pounds of, you could revenue about 100,000 on an acre.

Chip: Grown it like that, it’s fairly inexpensive putting it into a grow, right?

Justin: Yeah but I mean, it’s just $100,000 is not a lot of revenue. And especially –

Chip: If for just the costing, agree.

Justin: Costing, harvesting, it all has to come down at the same time. So you can’t necessarily just one man that. It just doesn’t work. It didn’t work. Now that’s changed. It came back up. Yeah. Well, and they were just trying to call them those oil fields. And nobody really was buying that material for a smokable sort of thing –

Chip: Oh man, all of our R&D, that’s what we’ve done with it for sure, man. It’s like –

Justin: It’s just going to the extractors.

Chip: It’s going to extractors. “Oh, I don’t like that strain. Oh, that didn’t work out. Oh, that takes too long. Oh, that one’s a little sick. Oh,” you know?

Justin: It’s different if you’re a vertically integrated company. And so if you have an indoor and an outdoor grow in Southern Oregon, and you have an extractor, and you have a store or two, then it’s fine. Grow the outdoor, because you’re just going to shove that through your extraction mine, and take it to your store, and you’ll eventually get retail for it, right? So, but there were too many independent growers that weren’t vertical also. So all the guys in Oregon that started out vertical and went with the grow in a store, that sort of thing, they’ve all have done well the entire time.

Chip: Yeah, right. Absolutely. Oh, man, you know, it’s business dude. Those same years in the hydro industry were a lean eight years for us. And I would say, it was about three years. ‘Cause it hit, well one, Oregon and California ruled the cannabis industry, regardless if you’re independent in your state, like their numbers and their volume like, really has a lot to do with what’s going on the rest of the country. I so

Justin: Oh yeah.

Chip: But in Colorado, it kind of hit peak about the same time, right? But it was more affected in some way, and we seem to like, the flood happened there a season before, and slow up a season before it did out there, too. The numbers started coming up a little bit earlier on, it was a solid three years though, in Colorado.

Justin: Yeah, for sure. Well, it just took longer. It took longer. Yeah.

Chip: Right.

Justin: And it’s a different curve but no, it’s definitely –

Chip: [inaudible 31:00].

Justin: You brought up the outdoor. You bought an outdoor, we’re talking production, we’re talking where, who produces for what, so what’s up with all these fires, and what’s going on –

Chip: Oh man, everybody [inaudible 31:13].

Justin: How’s that going to affect the industry?

Chip: Dude, I’m telling you all the ganja from, I’m not saying all, but a shitload of the ganja producing region in the country just got burned.

Justin: Even if it didn’t actually get burned down, did it – I just read an article about all the grapes in Sonoma and Napa are going to be unusable this year, because they smell like fire. And so they’re, even if the farm didn’t get burnt on, there was so much smoke for such a large amount of time, it’s still happening.

Chip: Yeah, fires aren’t new over there. We lived over there for almost 20 years. And yes, some of it is so smoky that it will not sell and then, people have developed an ability to like, get that smoke out in some way, too. I’m not exactly sure how it’s done. But maybe just with the natural aging process, the smoke goes away. I’m not sure if you can extract it with that smoky flavor. I do know that, I mean, I personally know three different people who’ve lost most of their gardens, or all their gardens, right?

Justin: Yeah.

Chip: And it is, as far as my listeners and people that I follow on Facebook and Instagram, multiple farmers have lost their gardens and their infrastructure, and it might not come back next year.

Justin: Right.

Chip: Right. So I mean, this is like, last I checked, I’m not sure if you’re in front of the computer, but this is the August complex, right? It’s what they’re calling it now. And they had several different fires that merged together in August. And it was 100,000 acres, right? Like, that is such a huge area, man. I mean, it spans like, from Santa Rosa all the way up to Hayfork and beyond.

Justin: I just was looking at a map yesterday and it’s a huge part of the region there for sure.

Chip: It’s a huge part, and that’s not the only fire, that’s just the biggest one. There are other fires throughout California, Southern California. And those coastal regions are where the cannabis is produced, a lot of the hill cannabis, so to speak. Now what this won’t affect are the people that are in, I mean for next year anyway, it won’t affect for all those people in the valleys, and in the “ag land.” A lot of those people were pushed out of the forest area, even though man I mean, fire does not care where you are. And the wind starts to blow, and it moves as fast as the wind blows. And I’ve literally watched it travel what looked like 10 miles to me in the matter of moments.

Justin: ‘Cause that’s what we just had in Oregon here. And it did affect a lot of the, a bunch of marijuana guys, and hemp guys.

Chip: Southern Oregon’s huge, had a huge fire too.

Justin: Huge fire, but the one we had up here by Portland was big too, and it caused some problems. And same sort of thing you’re just saying, we had a big windstorm, which normally doesn’t happen until like November, December once it’s rainy. It happened starting the day after Labor Day, and basically there was already a fire going, and it wasn’t that big and then we got these like, hundred mile an hour winds up in the mountains coming down into the valley. And it moved, the one fire moved 20 miles to 12 hours.

Chip: Wow.

Justin: Yeah. So –

Chip: Man, that was just big.

Justin: I’m concerned about that even just the size of some hemp fields and they look fine, but you just, I didn’t get, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It was so smoky here, and the air quality was like, as bad as it can get, you don’t even want to be outside. So, what did that do to the outdoor cannabis plants, hemp or whatever the, you know. We know them to be a sponge, we know them to be bioremediators of some level. So is the, are those plants going to be infected, or toxic, or have heavy metals, or some other thing from being smoked out for about seven or eight days here in Oregon? So even if you weren’t close to the fire and didn’t get hit that way, you lost sunlight production really because there was this weird sepia filter going on for the last eight days. And all the plants just stopped growing. Yeah, all the plants just sort of stopped growing, everything, like, everything stopped growing.

Chip: [inaudible 36:10] max CO2.

Justin: Yeah. So, it’ll be interesting to see what that just did to these plants. And maybe they got cleaned up. Because that went away and the weather’s been good. And they’ve had some good, maybe they were able to well still –

Chip: Well if there’s enough time, if there’s enough time before harvest, the plants outgrow it.

Justin: Sure.

Chip: Right? And, and but if you’re harvesting right at –

Justin: It’s different if it got rained out on you. Right.

Chip: If you’re harvesting right at the smoke, right? Like, if the fire is at your house, if you’re under that sepia layer we’re talking about, and it is the harvest season, you’re going to be the most affected, unfortunately. And maybe you’ve got some technique or something that we’d love to hear about here on The Real Dirt, let us know. Man, that’s just is hard. When it’s just smoke, and you’re harvesting your weed.

Justin: Yeah.

Chip: Oh, I’ve been there, man.

Justin: You guys didn’t have any fire problems in Oklahoma right?

Chip: Fire season comes like fall and winter for us. That’s the dry season.

Justin: Yeah.

Chip: That’s because – but last year, there was some fires and fires happened here. They put up fire warnings, do not burn warnings. It’s windy, lots of grassland, it’s dry. The trees are small, comparatively.

Justin: Definitely sounds like there’ll be a shortage of, there’s gonna be some sort of shortage for the suppliers.

Chip: It is going to affect the demand. And it was already, demand was already up. So, demand is not going anywhere. It’s going to keep going up, just prediction. And supply, man, we just lost a huge chunk of the supply. And I mean, I’ll tell you, Oklahoma didn’t have the best outdoor growing year this year. If you were trying to pull before October, it was rough. It was humid and rainy throughout the state. Colorado, they had that early freeze this year.

Justin: Oh, yeah.

Chip: So their outdoor, their outdoor, like, it was diminished by that. Sure, some people have survived and a chunk of people lost out over that. On the East Coast, it was also a little bit more humid and wet, more hurricanes came through this year than any year before. So I think the overall outdoor production for 2020 is gonna be low. Combined with COVID, with all the new farms not being able to get the supplies, the materials, the people, the employees out to the garden, this is a really great year to be involved in cannabis. I predict that the price will initially dip as outdoor, what is comes into place, and everybody floods the market. And then between December and January, most of that will have run through the marketplace. And then the price will increase. Currently here in Oklahoma, there’s indoor weed between $3 and $3600.

Justin: Yep.

Chip: Right? Wholesale. This is of a similar nature in California. In Colorado, it’s cheaper, but 2800 bucks, $2600, that’s all going to go up next year, right? The wholesale price of weed is gonna go up. Fortunately for you listeners and consumers out there, generally the end user price doesn’t go up terrible. No, you guys are gonna, you guys are going to continue to pay $10 to $20 a gram, $40 to $60 and eight, right? And that’s been going on since 1996.

Justin: Yes, it has. Well, that’s good. Yeah, the consumer price is, well, and they might go up a little bit. Or you might see the higher end cannabis become a little bit more expensive, and maybe the quality of the lower priced stuff is not quite the same, right? You see a little gap, a bigger gap there.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely, man. It’s a good year to be in it. I’m glad I am. Things are good. We’ve had a better year than ever at my grow stores and with Growers Coco fiber. More people than ever are growing cannabis.

Justin: When’s Oklahoma going recreational?

Chip: Oklahoma.

Justin: Yeah, when’s that going out?

Chip: I just said some Chip’s predictions, okay, here’s the other, here’s more of Chip’s predictions. I think sometime next year, it’ll be introduced into legislation. I think it’ll be a legislative movement here. If it’s 2021, and they’re just gonna push it over to recreational 2022. Maybe –

Justin: Right. No vote, no public vote?

Chip: No.

Justin: Just go to dispute the laws downtown, and get it, and then pass it?

Chip: Yeah, I think that’s what gonna happen.

Justin: We’re gonna see more of that as the country goes that way, it doesn’t necessarily gonna have to go to a big statewide vote. And in which, if they feel like everybody is good with it, and you trust your local congressperson and representatives to do, then it works.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe it moves to 2023, if it has to be a voter sponsored initiative here, that might occur. But as far as yeah, recreate or adult use I would prefer to call it, I’m [inaudible 41:46] for 2022. 2022! Yeah, I mean, who knows? Who knows what’s gonna happen with the economy and the recession and, and everything. It’s incredible how like, because we’ve kept all of our spending and whatnot, internal, and everybody’s just like, sitting at home, and buying stuff online, and saving money, and not doing stuff. And it’s, our economy ain’t so bad right now. I mean, the stock market’s holding its own, banking hasn’t crashed, people are still buying houses. I mean, I know there’s a bunch of people out there hurting right now, and I’m sorry to hear it if you are, man. I know it. But like, it’s weird that to me, that just a little bit of stay at home, a little bit of government sponsored cash, has really kept this country floating, man. I don’t even know what’s going on.

Justin: Yeah, well, people definitely are smoking more cannabis.

Chip: Absolutely. ‘Cause unemployed people smoke more weed. That is a 100% a fact. Every time I’ve been unemployed, I’ve smoked more weed. How about you?

Justin: Yeah. Oh, for sure. I think that it’s also, if you’re stuck at home, and you’re dealing with this pandemic and everything, it’s a smarter choice. If you’re bored, and you’re not going out. I mean, the thing about alcohol and how social it is, is that maybe you go out two or three times a week, and maybe it’s a happy hour with some work colleagues, or you’re meeting some friends over here, and have a couple beers.

Chip: You might say, fuck it.

Justin: Well, people don’t necessarily feel the same about just sitting at home every day chugging three, four beers, bored by yourself. So we’re, because it just the social aspect. So but, sitting at home and packing a bowl, I think it’s more tangible in the situation, in the current situation, right?

Chip: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. And Netflix is like, I mean, weed and Netflix has been the number one way people have billed their time this past six months.

Justin: That I mean, I gotta admit, I got my kids the Nintendo Switch, and I found some games that I enjoy on there that are kind of fun. I didn’t see myself playing Super Mario Brothers at my age, but hey, it’s something you can catch a buzz, sit there and do that for 20 or 30 minutes. I mean, I don’t, I’m not promoting gaming as a full time job or anything, but you got to find some different home enjoyment. And people have been putting time and effort into their home gardens, and hopefully people have been, grew some extra, grew some cannabis plants at home if it’s legal in your state, just because you spent less time running around town and doing stuff away from the home front this year, and I think next year will be similar so.

Chip: Absolutely. I think people are going to stay at home more. I think that people are going to grow their own at home more. I think that throughout the country now, it’s legal to grow your own, and accepted to grow your own even if it might not be legal where you are. That people are going to sit home, man. They’re going to grow some weed, the amount of weed that enters the marketplace isn’t going to be, isn’t going to meet the demand. We’re not gonna have an oversaturation. I could be wrong, but that’s my prediction. There’s gonna be a lot of first time weed growers this year because of this, right?

Justin: Well, it’s been good catching up here.

Chip: Yeah man.

Justin: Some different topics, and jumping around a little bit but –

Chip: Once again –

Justin: Hopefully, you can turn this into a good a good podcast.

Chip: How we’re just throwing it all out there these days, Justin.

Justin: I know. Hey, you know –

Chip: [inaudible 45:47] The Real Dirt is we just throw it out.

Justin: We need to do an episode, we did it years ago where we were, we just prank called a bunch of people and did like, a 10 minute check-ins.

Chip: We should prank, we should do Justin, Chip and Justin prank call. Okay, we’ll schedule that one up next up.

Justin: Yeah, let’s do that again. That was fun, just check in with a bunch of people. But otherwise, it’s harvest time here in Oregon. The hemp plants are coming down, we’re here, we’ve had decent weather after all that smoke. But we got a rainy weekend going on now, and then a little bit more dryness coming, and so people are scrambling. I got a call the other day, and somebody needed help harvesting 50 acres of hemp so, it’s going down. And we’ll see, we’ll know here in the next six weeks how it all ends, I suppose.

Chip: Well thanks for the call again, Justin. Thanks for joining us on The Real Dirt.

Justin: Always a pleasure.

Chip: And thank you for listening. This has been The Real Dirt podcast with Chip Baker and Justin Jones. If you enjoyed this episode, you can download others at iTunes and Spotify. We’re The Real Dirt podcast. Please, please, please subscribe. Hey man, thanks for joining me. You guys have a great rest of your day. Later.

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The Dirty Truth about Cannabis Marketing

by Travis C | Nov 3, 2020 | cannabis business, cannabis industry, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes

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how to be successful in cannabis marketing

Anybody that owns a cannabis business knows that advertising is no easy task.

The Real Dirt is no stranger to adversity when it comes to cannabis marketing. We’ve been shut down, shadowbanned, disabled, you name it.

And anyone else who works in cannabis marketing, owns their own cannabis business or even just likes following cannabis creators on Instagram has probably noticed the issue too. And that’s part of the reason that Olivia Solero started Cannabis Stack.

A Platform for Cannabis Professionals

Cannabis Stack was created to be a home for people in the cannabis industry to connect without the worries of Instagram and Facebook shutting them down. While it may not be the behemoth of social media that Instagram and Facebook have become, it’s a start.

The reality is that advertising any cannabis business or product is basically forbidden on these platforms. And when organic reach has decreased over 60% since 2014, it’s easy to see what the intentions are; money.

When they can’t make money off of you, what’s the point in giving you free exposure, especially when you work in an industry that is still illegal on the federal level? That’s the mindset of Instagram and Facebook.

What’s the solution?

In this episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker, Olivia talks with Chip about her experience with being a cannabis business with “cannabis” in their name and the problems it has caused them all the way down to getting a logo made.

The two also talk about why cannabis businesses struggle with marketing and social media platforms so often, what could be the cause behind it and why cannabis is constantly fighting an uphill battle.

Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit

The best way for cannabis entrepreneurs and marketers to be successful in the cannabis industry is through group collaboration and sharing of ideas. If we are all dealing with the same problems, then by working together we can solve them.

The Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit is a free online conference featuring some of the most prominent and successful cannabis marketers in the industry, including Chip Baker!

Roll it up and get into the dirty business of cannabis marketing!

Learn more about Cannabis Stack

Get your FREE ticket to the Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit

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Transcript

Chip: Hey, this is Chip with The Real Dirt. Today’s dirt, I have Olivia Solero. How’s it going, Olivia?

Olivia: It’s going great. How you doing, Chip?

Chip: Oh, doing good. I am proud to have Olivia on the show today, because we’re going to be talking about one of the hardest problems, the biggest problems of cannabis professionals. No, it’s not growing weed. No, it’s not extracting weed. No, it’s not packaging weed. It’s not selling weed. It’s marketing and branding cannabis. Olivia has started an online cannabis community, Cannabis Stack. And it’s here to help cannabis professionals connect. Tell us a little bit about this, Olivia.

Olivia: Yeah we started – my partner, AJ and I – started Cannabis Stack so we can create an online community to inspire, educate and connect cannabis professionals and help them achieve success in you know, the cannabis industry. So our goal –

Chip: So, is this like a Facebook group, or..?

Olivia: I would say it’s like a social network, but it’s more like a member community for professionals that we host on our website, where individuals can connect, and they can talk about best practices and resources, and hold each other accountable, and all the great things that communities offer.

Chip: Oh, yeah, well, that means that you’re not bound by any of those nasty guidelines of Facebook, because it’s your own website.

Olivia: Oh, yeah. And you know, it’s great to do it on Facebook or somewhere else. But like, you know, you have those guidelines you know, that are really troublesome for this industry.

Chip: And that’s why we are talking today. What made you realize this was going on, Olivia? When did you have this like, idea that you should start a community, or focus on these type of business problems with cannabis?

Olivia: So both my partner and I, my business partner and I, AJ, we both come from a marketing background. And we’ve each had agencies and done a lot of work. I used to run a networking series for startups in a community that I lived in, a smaller community that didn’t have that kind of space. And, you know, I’ve always been interested in cannabis, I had done some like, early investing in some dispensaries in California back in the day. We also do a lot of other content sites, so we thought a content site around the cannabis space and like, more professionals reaching professionals like, not another kind of culture site, or how to grow site, which is really cool, but that just wasn’t where our interest was. It was like, creating content in the community around the space and kind of looked around and thought, you know, this is needed. This is a good opportunity. And I’m motivated by the content and industry. So we started this back in, with some fits and you know, stutters back in 2016.

Chip: Right. You were on the forefront of adult use in the country. That’s right when I was changing everywhere. I mean, since then, it’s gone on to over 30 states, cannabis regulation for either medical use or adult use is now common practice. And the common practices of marketing, we’re not kind of, we’re not allowed to do those things.

Olivia: No.

Chip: I’m like, I just mentioned Facebook a second ago. Many people, that’s the first thing they think of is, “Hey, let’s start with Facebook, Instagram ads, Google ads,” but we can’t do that.

Olivia: Nope, cannot do that. You know actually, when we first started out, we went looking for someone to build out a website, do us a logo. We had freelancers and businesses refusing to work with us, because of the subject matter. I mean, you know, like no one [inaudible 04:04] wanted, I know, wouldn’t want to design us a logo. Not that they weren’t down for what we were doing, but their company either didn’t want to be affiliated with it, or they they lived in a country where –

Chip: On moral grounds.

Olivia: Exactly.

Chip: This is all on moral grounds, because in our country anyway and many others, you can say whatever you want.

Olivia: Right.

Chip: Right? But not necessarily with cannabis. They really restrict our use. We have to tiptoe around stuff all the time. You know, we can’t ever imply we’re selling anything in the cannabis industry.

Olivia: You and I had like, a discussion about this. And I thought it was really interesting, because one of the things that we did when we chose the name was because we were thinking about SEO, and thinking about owning the space and our name has killed us. But the word cannabis in our domain is just, it’s been painful at times, because there’s been to your point, we would have been able to maybe tiptoe around and work around some things, but not with that domain, not with that company name.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I have the same problem with my company, Cultivate Colorado. You know, I own several hydroponic stores, Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate Denver, Cultivate OKC in the past, Cultivate California, and it has caused so many problems. Even though it’s a garden store, and I don’t touch the plant and we don’t sell cannabis in any form, hemp, or medical marijuana, or adult use at Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate Denver, Cultivate OKC, I still get categorized like we are a cannabis business. We just got kicked out of our Instagram account as a matter of fact, for Cultivate Denver. Yeah, 37,000 followers are now left without posts from Cultivate Denver today.

Olivia: I’m so worried, we have an Instagram account. We don’t have your presence, you know, and that and part of the reason why we haven’t invested time in that in the past, even though we use it for other projects extensively, is for that fear. We’re, “Oh, do we want to invest in that, and then get caught out?” You know, all of a sudden, it’s they’re [inaudible 6:21].

Chip: But you know, it’s something that you have to do, though. You have to have and Instagram account. And we weren’t even trying to get 37,000 followers, honestly. Yeah, we were just totally using organic growth. I mean, we were you know, posting multiple times a day and, you know, enjoying ourselves with it. But we weren’t necessarily trying to grow our Instagram account, because of how hard it is.

Olivia: Yep.

Chip: Right? But once it got to 37,000 you’re like, “Yeah, man. We got quite a bit of followers.”

Olivia: Can I ask you a question, Chip? Do you think that’s why you were shut down, because like, you got, you stick your heart, you stuck your head above the ground and got so many followers?

Chip: No, I think what happened, well, who knows?

Olivia: Right.

Chip: Well, I’ve talked to some insiders, and they say more than likely, and other friends and business people who’ve been kicked out of Instagram or Facebook or other social media things. And, and they thought that like, I probably just had somebody, you know, like, complain and say that I was selling weed. And they get enough complaints like that, and you just can’t appeal it anymore. We’ve been kicked out a couple of times. And even though we have strict policy, man, you know, there’s no mention of cannabis sales or cannabis in any of our Cultivate Colorado stuff, right? And I mean, you know, really, really work hard not to pierce that veil, and don’t, and haven’t. So I don’t know if it got broke any necessarily like, community rules, kicked us out, said no appeal.

Olivia: Wow.

Chip: So, yeah, totally.

Olivia: That’s frustrating. You know, the other frustrating thing too, is like you put a really good post up, whether it’s on Facebook or Instagram, and you want to boost it. You’re like, “Hey,” and you know, and you can’t. We can’t. It’s just, you know, it’s possible sometimes. But you know, we’ve had to basically not mention things and send people elsewhere.

Chip: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It’s common like that. And you know, my Real Dirt Instagram presence, it’s 17,500 people. But we believe that we’re under some type of shadow ban. And I say that because about every 90 days, we’ll have a huge influx of followers for a couple, three days or a week. And then it just stops. And we don’t get any movement at all, one person, no people.

Olivia: Interesting.

Chip: So I am sure that they’re not showing our posts. So we’ve actually gone from posting six posts a day, I know, I was aggressive. And to now, we post one post is we use, you know, a calendar system to post it. Before it was live interaction, someone actually posted off their phone or their computer, and then talked to everybody immediately afterwards. But yeah, we had to stop all that because we were just wasting all these resources and just, you know, getting nothing out of it. Nobody was hearing this great content I felt we were producing.

Olivia: You know, and it’s so frustrating especially, I don’t want to get like into politics. But if you talk about people’s fear and like, all these fake accounts that are getting created and influencing elections. And whether you believe that or you don’t, or whose side you wanted, it doesn’t matter. It’s like, is this really that important? Just to you know, I mean, we’re talking about, we’re talking –

Chip: We’re talking about weed, man.

Olivia: We’re talking about weed is right. And we’re talking a plant that’s not you know, has so many benefits. But you know, more than just like fun and getting high, obviously, you know like –

Chip: Yeah. Right, right. I don’t know why they do it. Hey, you know what, let’s just give a shoutout here. If you’re Mark Zuckerberg or anyone, an upper of Facebook and Instagram, I would love to talk to me about this in an open format where I wouldn’t like, you know, be mean, or berate you at all. Just drop us a line here at The Real Dirt or check us out on our Instagram feed. Come on Martin, let’s have a conversation about it. I know you smoke out.

Olivia: I hope someone contacts you.

Chip: That would be great if they did, I’m gonna call you up. “Olivia, you’ll never guess what happened!”

Olivia: I’ll be like, “When is it gonna air?” It could be like, “I’ve got a couple questions, I’ve gotta ask that first -“

Chip: Yeah, totally. Totally. I’d love that to happen. But I have talked to some, I have talked to numerous Instagram and Facebook and Google, Amazon employees. And, you know, I feel like I have a, you know, understanding of what’s going on over there. They get the word from the top, a lot of stuff is just algorithm associated. If you’re already a paying customer, if you already have an ad on an account, if you’re already doing really good, you know, revenue with Facebook or Instagram, you can often get through it, because you have an ad account person that can you know, override anything. But if you don’t have that, nobody’s picking up the phone, you’re not gonna talk to anybody at Facebook or you know, nobody that means anything.

Olivia: That’s for sure. And then you just get caught up in some kind of like, appeal system where it’s just, you’ve got to fill out forms and do other stuff. I know you and I, you had mentioned them to me. And I you know, I knew about the Jungle Boys. I don’t understand. I’m a marketer and I don’t always understand why, you know, they’ve got pictures of like, blood on their like, Instagram pages, all kinds of humor and all these products and now, you know, how did they not get shut down? [inaudible 12:11]

Chip: You know, I get it. No, I get it. How are they successful at it? And you know, we look at those guys all the time. And I think it’s several things. I think like I just said, they were probably in, the people that are running their social media site. I love the Jungle Boys marketing what they’re doing, by the way. They’re you know, you can hate on them all you want guys, but like, from a marketing and sales perspective, thumbs up, you guys did great.

Olivia: They’re awesome.

Chip: They’ve done a great job, man. They’ve done a really great job. Regardless if you’re gonna hate on these guys or not like, they’re doing a good job there. It’s hard to be second place in their first place. Right? But I have not talked to these guys. I don’t know, I’m talking out of my ass, but here’s what I think. I think that they probably come from a marketing or Instagram or social media background. They already had connections at Instagram and Facebook, or they were working with an agency that did have with those people. And I think that’s how they’re able to do some of the stuff they’re doing. And then man, other things, they’re just, they follow all the rules, because they have been kicked out over time. But for instance, you know, one of the rules that we don’t break at The Real Dirt is no weed smoking. And in the past, you may have seen me smoking weed or someone else, but we don’t do that anymore. Because you know, Instagram, Facebook don’t like it. No implications of anything is for sale, ever. Like even, you know, like, “Oh, I bought this first at so and so.” You know, you can’t even say that type of thing. You know, I picked it up, you can’t imply it ,you can’t do any of that stuff is just, you know, “This weed from this person.” It’s hard to comment on it, you really have to separate the human portion of it. So you’ll see a lot of their stuff. And now that I said this, you’ll see it as they’ll have pictures in the background of the products that they’re promoting. And they may or may not like, hashtag or talk about those products in their comments. However, I think their comments you can, that’s one of the most impressive thing about the Jungle Boys posts, is how many comments they’ll get, right? And they absolutely have people working with them to make these comments, to generate this dialogue. And they’re doing great. I mean, it’s I wouldn’t say that it’s completely organic. But they definitely have arranged it to drive the point home they want. But mostly, I think it’s like, who you know. And just I think they just know somebody.

Olivia: You know, I think that that makes more sense than anything else I can figure out. I mean, like you had discussed. It matters with having a relationship with these big, you know, these big publishers, you know, who are really providing the content, you know, to have a one on one relationship with them is key.

Chip: Yeah, most people don’t understand about Facebook, Google ads, YouTube ads, like none of this stuff that’s product related or that’s website related is viral in an organic manner at all. And even a lot of the viral stuff isn’t organic. And what I mean by that is, it is paid for advertising and traffic. And you think, why would anyone want to get 5 million views of them twerking? Why? Well, it’s ego, right? And you know, if you know how to market your, market it and but the advertising. You know, you can buy the views, you can you know, on any normal product go and do that, but cannabis people can’t. And it’s common practice in every single industry on social media.

Olivia: It’s ego, but it’s also there’s huge money involved in captivating an audience to monetize that audience.

Chip: Oh well that’s is if you can kind of see, you know, like, there’s this guy out of Tinder, I forget his name, but it’s actually his dog’s Instagram site. And it has like him, his dog going everywhere with him, his dog doing stuff, and, you know, he gets a Toyota sponsorship. And now, the dog is in front of every picture or lots of pictures to tell you he was involved. Right?

Olivia: Give to the dog.

Chip: Give to the dog. Yeah and I mean, I’m unsure but I’m positive that there was a good beneficial relationship between Toyota, the dog and the dog’s owner.

Olivia: Yeah.

Chip: I mean, I love weed. I love cannabis. But on those really hard days, like, you know, earlier this week, when we got kicked out of Facebook or Instagram, you know, I think about it, what it would be like if I was involved with another product that I didn’t have these restrictions and how I would approach it.

Olivia: I come from a pharmaceutical marketing background, I worked in-house for a year and I worked on the agency side with pharma as clients. And even though their regulatory process is quite complex on how you can advertise and things that you can say, and even the use of logos on a pen have an [inaudible 17:33]. But I’m just amazed sometimes. I have those moments like you do where like, “Why is, why can’t I do the things I could do in this market? Or with this product? Why is cannabis so restrictive? Why am I not, you know, am I an outlier? Or do I live in like, areas or communicate with people that view it the way I view it?” Because I don’t see the big deal? I just don’t.

Chip: Well, there are other industries that have our problems, with banking with advertising. I mean, you know, firearms, alcohol, erectile dysfunction, sex toys. All of these things have similar, pawnshops. They all have similar problems that we have.

Olivia: This is true. I don’t, I wouldn’t like I wouldn’t, maybe again, I’m going to go back to I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve grown up in big cities here in the States. I don’t know. Or I don’t know why it’s that big of, I don’t know why it’s that big of a deal. Who are we protecting at this point? Alright now, I sound paranoid. But that’s not what I mean.

Chip: No, no, you know, hey, I mean, who knows? But I tell you this, it always seems to come down – when I’m talking to people about it, whether it’s banks or magazines or lenders or car dealerships, because it comes up all the time.

Olivia: Right.

Chip: Right? When I’m talking to them about it, the same thing comes up over and over again. It’s federally illegal, they’re scared about the banking.

Olivia: Yep.

Chip: Right? There’s these money laundering terms that people are scared of, and they should be, but they’re really just uninformed. It seems to boil down to that more than anything else, is people are scared of the banking associated with it being federally illegal. Now doctors and dentists and people that have federal IDs, they’ll say something like that, that they’re scared for the federal government, because of their federally issued captain’s ID, or pilot certificate, or pesticide applicators certificate. You know, people will bring this up, “Well, it’s federally illegal.” And I think they’re just putting that stuff on it. I mean, I think those are their own pressures. They’re making it up, the federal government doesn’t have anything to do with, you know, what I do if I’m hiring you to come over and do something for me.

Olivia: Right, right. Well, you know, it’s –

Chip: Where’s the regulation there?

Olivia: I don’t know. And, you know, I actually, it’s funny. I had opened up a bank account for a business that has nothing to do with Cannabis Stack. Nothing is, it’s completely separate, completely separate entity. And the bank, I brought in my like, you know, all my paperwork, and I opened up the account. And within a month, they shut me down. Because somehow, they found, they associated, I never gave him this email address. They associated my email address with Cannabis Stack domain with that account, and they just shut me down.

Chip: Yeah. Well, you know, the banks use the social media as much as anybody else now to sniff you out. And I’ve gone through this numerous occasions, you know, calling us up and, and kicking us out because someone posted on one of our sites about weed. And, you know, we’re like, “Well, we didn’t post that. Somebody else did it.” They’re like, “I don’t care. That means you’re about weed.” You know? Yeah. And they’ve literally looked me up, I mean, I don’t hide from weed, you can look me up. So you know, I’ve literally been looked up, Chase gives, you know, every six months or a year, they have a review of people to make sure they’re not cannabis people that, you know, they’re not, you know, putting illegal assets, you know, or untaxed assets into the banking system. So it’s hard to hide, because we’re all talking about marketing ourselves, or our businesses through social media. And the banks have access all the social media, or anyone has access to the social media, you know. And they can and will use it against you if they, appropriate for them.

Olivia: Oh, 100%. I mean, the days of privacy are over. You need to behave as if everybody is watching, and will always have that invasion –

Chip: Everybody is watching. That’s how we sell stuff. And that’s how we brand. And that’s how we market. And you have a webinar is that cannabis slack is putting out Cannabis Marketing Masters summit that’s going to help people solve all of these products. Now, I know one of your speakers happens to be the illustrious Chip Baker of The Real Dirt podcast.

Olivia: Yeah.

Chip: But tell me about the Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit.

Olivia: Okay, so yeah, the Cannabis Marketing Masters summit is happening November 13 and 14th. And what we’re gonna do is carry it over two days, really meant to serve as a resource for marketing in the cannabis industry and help like, entrepreneurs and other professionals be able to like, grow their business through a number of different styles and sessions. So we have a combination of like, techniques and tools for like, SEO and paid advertising, email marketing like, sales and traffic funnels. We also have more inspirational brand stories in regards to like, customer journeys and things along those lines and value like, driven brands.

Chip: Tell me who you’re gonna have speak at the Marketing Summit. Let’s talk about how it’s gonna work and who should join, who should show up.

Olivia: This is all really great points.

Chip: This is free, right? The Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit is free.

Olivia: The Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit is free. You can register at Cannabis Stack, that’s what two s’s in the middle, or with one s in the middle, or with a hyphen if you like it. So that’s cannabisstack.com/cannabis-summit. And you’d be able to sign up there.

Chip: Alright, so everybody stop what you’re doing. Just stop what you’re doing. I’m gonna do it real slow. So go to your computer, your phone. Olivia, what are they gonna look up?

Olivia: You’re gonna look at cannabisstack.com/cannabis-summit.

Chip: Alright, and then you’re just going to apply to join right there.

Olivia: Right there.

Chip: Right there.

Olivia: You’re going to see a list of the speakers, the dates and the time of the event, November 13th and 14th. You’re going to, all you’re going to need to do is give us like, your name, and email, the company, if you wouldn’t mind. And then you’re going to hit ‘Submit,’ and we’re going to send you a link so you can join the summit, 100% free.

Chip: And I know we’ve been talking about it, and I’ve been excited. You know, I invited you on this podcast because I thought this was a really good idea that you had not really wanted to help promote it. And yeah, I’m gonna be involved on it. But what I really liked about it is you were giving it away. And you’re trying to just help people expand their business, and do better business.

Olivia: Definitely. We have Amy Larson from Simplifya.

Chip: Yeah. Oh yeah, Simplifya. Yep, from Vicente Sederburg. See, I know several Simplifya people.

Olivia: That’s awesome.

Chip: Jordan Wellington, great guy. I’ve had him on the show a couple of times.

Olivia: But you may also know that Amy currently serves as the chair for NCIS, you know, the marketing and advertising committee.

Chip: Oh, okay. That’s how I recognize her name as well. Sure.

Olivia: Yeah. She’s going to be speaking to strategic plan, like as to like the foundation of like, what your marketing should be in, for any marketing program, but specifically for cannabis marketing. So, we’re excited to hear what she’s gonna present. Then we have Tyler Horvath. He’s like, the king of SEO, right? He’s the CEO of Marijuana SEO. And he’s gonna give us some like, the three pillars of a successful SEO strategy.

Chip: Man, I’m really looking forward to this one.

Olivia: Then we have Brian Chaplin of Medicine Box. And Brian’s going to be speaking to the importance of like, mission driven and value based cannabis brand.

Chip: And Medicine Box, they’re a vending machine?

Olivia: No, they do like, a box delivery system for whole plant natural wellness products in like, a subscription box model.

Chip: Oh okay, okay, great.

Olivia: Then we have Beth Aiden from Nissan Co, which is a public relations, marketing and PR firm. So they’re going to be speaking to the right public positioning for your cannabis business with public relations. So they’re going to kind of break down like, a successful public relations strategy, and what they can afford, specifically to the industry. Then we have Antonio Javiniar from WebJoint. You know WebJoint? They’re like the –

Chip: No, but you could pass me one anytime.

Olivia: Only if I could right now. They’re gonna, also they’re gonna be speaking to content, but like content that converts and marketing on a limited budget. So –

Chip: I’m so excited about all this stuff. You know, these are some great talks, I need these as much as anybody else for sure.

Olivia: Yeah, they do their inventory, WebJoint’s like an inventory management software provider for like, cannabis delivery services. So which is kind of cool. And we have Travis Crane from a little company called Cultivate.

Chip: Oh yeah. Oh man, he’s a master in social media marketing, that’s for sure. Organic driven social media marketing. This guy knows what he’s doing.

Olivia: For sure. And he’s got a really interesting story about how he kind of got into the space. So his session is going to be about navigating the waters of advertising, and kind of touched upon some of the things that you and I chatted about earlier. Then we have Andrew Watson from Happy Cabbage Analytics. So this is really cool, because they do some really amazing things with hyper targeted marketing. Because they have, they do like an integrated like, data insights. I’m not doing them justice, and Andrew could explain this much better than I. But they have a marketing platform that integrates with a POS system, so it can help retailers and brands to better engage with their customers. It’s really slick stuff, super interesting. We also have Gianna Guard from Happy Cabbage also. And she’s going to be talking about that whole infrastructure from closing the loop, from marketing to sales, which is, you know, I think –

Chip: That’s a hard step. That’s a hard, hard step.

Olivia: It sure is. And you know, we talked earlier about like, just advertising in general. Like, maybe you’ve got a brand and you want to reach the consumers and that’s difficult. Now trying to figure out how you want to reach other businesses in the space. That’s tricky. Super, super tricky. We also have Colton Griffin, he’s the CEO of Flourish Software. So they have a whole supply chain management and seed to sale tracking software, for the industry. So again, Colton is going to be, we’re going to focus a little bit more on sales and marketing. And he’s going to speak to leveraging technology and automation to make your sales and marketing system, let’s say more efficient. So that’s kind of cool.

Chip: Yeah, like automated emails, automated text messages, collecting people’s emails, addresses, scanning IDs and getting their info. But that’s, all that type of stuff is one of the most useful things in the cannabis industry right now. If you’re not doing it, you got to get on it.

Olivia: Indeed. And then we have Kevin Green and Tyrone Russell from the Cleveland School of Cannabis. Did you know that they are –

Chip: I don’t know about the Cleveland School of Cannabis.

Olivia: They are the only state approved career school for cannabis education east of Colorado. They have a whole curriculum, you got to check them out, Cleveland School of Cannabis.

Chip: I do. Calling them up.

Olivia: That’s our lineup. Over the course of two days, we’re going to be hearing from these people and they’re going to dive in deep. And then while the sessions are running, people will be able to jump on the Facebook page that we’re going to be holding the sessions on, and ask questions.

Chip: How do we get to it again, the Cannabis Marketing Summit?

Olivia: So if you if you go to the cannabisstack.com homepage, you’ll see an ad right there for the Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit. It’ll be right there.

Chip: And can you look it up on Facebook and Instagram as well?

Olivia: Yeah, you sure can. We have all that. If you do a search for Cannabis Stack on either Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, you’ll find us. Sharing is caring.

Chip: Sharing is caring. The saddest thing to me about COVID is whether you believe it’s a pandemic, plantdemic, whatever. The cultural aspect of sharing joints and weed is going to be different forever. You know, I still have employees and friends that, you know, they get still hop around the joint circle. But most people I know, have now decided not to do that. You know, I went [inaudible 31:45] a long time ago because I’m such a head that I need to smoke a joint all by myself.

Olivia: Okay. Some can call you greedy, but some could say, you know –

Chip: Hey, I’m gonna roll you a joint just as big as mine, though.

Olivia: Alright.

Chip: Right? So it’s fine. But just the cultural and social aspect of cannabis is such a big part of it.

Olivia: Oh, for sure. I mean –

Chip: Sharing is caring, that phraseology that you just mentioned is something that’s, you know, I’ve really like, embraced over the years. And I’ve tried to like, give people as much weed and smoke as many people out as I can.

Olivia: So you know, to that, it’s funny that you said that last night, because that part has stopped and just all social interactions for me have like kind of, you know, have slowed down, you know, to the trickle. So I was with some people I didn’t know very well and some of them wanted to get high, but they had the greatest solution. They had a bag of individually wrapped tips and like, one big bong, like hookah bong that had one bowl and everybody like you know, everybody had their own hose.

Chip: They had their own hose. Hoser, a whole new meaning to the name hoser.

Olivia: Everyone had their own they had their own hose with their own like, brand new like, shield tip. It was awesome.

Chip: Are you guys gonna give those out as part of the Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit as a promotional item?

Olivia: I would love to but –

Chip: CMMS.

Olivia: I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.

Chip: A CMMS branded hookah tube.

Olivia: Well I was, you know, I don’t think I could give away, ’cause I gotta tell you what the head was, it was Scooby Doo. It was shaped as a big dog, the Scooby Doo head.

Chip: The Scooby Doo head.

Olivia: Yeah, I don’t know how I gonna be able to top that with the Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit giveaway.

Chip: Well, I am excited about it. You know, we’re gonna participate. The Real Dirt’s gonna participate. If you’re interested in how we do it. because people ask me all the time. It’s like, “Chip, how do you put out so much content? How do you do it? How is it authentic? How, how, how?” And we’re going to tell you how. Travis is going to tell you how to do it. I’m going to tell you how we do it. And it’s a lot easier than you think, honestly. With a little organization and prepared thought, you too can put out authentic cannabis content. I’m not saying that we’re doing the best of it. But I’ll tell you man, if you listen to this channel, if you listen to The Real Dirt podcasts, you must like some of it. So join us please at Cannabis Stack Cannabis Marketing Masters Summit.

Olivia: Yep, that’s November 13 and 14th.

Chip: November 13th and 14th November. And it is going to be on Facebook. You join through the Cannabis Stack online community. And yeah, while you’re there, check out their online community. Maybe it’s something you want to be a part of. I know it’s definitely helped me connect with other people, other people in the cannabis community. I look forward to connecting to, with more people there. Olivia, if you had, like, some advice that you could give anybody going into the cannabis business, because you’re in the cannabis space, you’re not just servicing people in the cannabis space. Looking back on it all, is there some golden nugget that you could give somebody right now?

Olivia: Go find your tribe. Go find your community. And go find the right people that are doing the things that you want to do. And, you know, network and speaking to like, creating authentic content, network authentically. Just don’t promote, you know. You know, like, the cannabis industry is a perfect space for community. Because it you know, because we’re a little bit segmented, based on some of these challenges that we face in the industry. So like, this circumstance offers us a common goal to rally around, and like, we can bring people together, right?

Chip: Yeah, totally.

Olivia: And this commonality brings people together. And we’re, we as humans are known to be more willing to collaborate more, we’re more effective in numbers. And we’re more innovative in our thoughts when we do this together. So you know –

Chip: Oh, yeah, community, man. That’s how we do. That’s how we’ve always done it. That’s how we came out of the woods, so to speak, is we gathered a community, you know, we all work together to survive and to thrive.

Olivia: Yeah. And I think like, you know, they’ll let your like, guard down a little bit, and you got to share and you know, you can’t be worried about taking something that you think is yours, right? There we go again, sharing, right?

Chip: Yeah, yeah.

Olivia: I mean, it’s community. That would be my one thing.

Chip: Yeah. It’s great. It’s great. Well, hey, hey, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And if anyone wants to get in touch with you, Olivia, how do they get in touch with you?

Olivia: They can reach me through the website, or they can email me directly. I’m happy to accept if someone needs to reach out olivia@cannabisstack.com. That’s cannabisstack.com.

Chip: Thanks for joining us. I look forward to the conference on November 13th to 14th. Thank you once again for joining us, Real Dirt listeners. I know you have other things you can do with your time, but you chose it today to spend with me and Olivia. Thank you once again. And hey, just want to encourage all of you guys to visit Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate Garden Supply. Check out Growers Potting Soil. You have any questions about cannabis, just talk to us on Instagram, on Facebook. Once again, man, thanks again for joining us. I love all of you and fire one up for me. It’s The Real Dirt.

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The Science of Breeding Triploid Cannabis

by The Real Dirt | Oct 27, 2020 | cannabis business, cannabis culture, Cannabis science, growing, Hemp, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes, Weed talk

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Justin Jones has been in the cannabis industry since the very beginning.

He opened the first ever recreational cannabis dispensary in Colorado, Dank Dispensary in Denver. Justin has been a leader in the legal cannabis industry for close to a decade, and now he’s taking over the hemp industry too.

It’s not so simple for most to transition from traditional cannabis cultivation to hemp cultivation. When you know the science of the plant and how to cultivate it to get the results you want, you can create some incredible strains and genetics.

The evolving science of cannabis and hemp cultivation

Justin made his transition from cannabis to hemp when the Farm Bill passed in 2018, making hemp legal at the federal level. This legalization has given farmers and researchers the resources they need to study hemp more thoroughly without government intervention.

Through his research Justin has been able to develop triploid hemp plants, or sterile male plants put simply. Traditionally hemp and cannabis are diploid plants which means that a male can pollinate a female and produce seeds.

But diploid and triploids are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to science of cannabis cultivation.

Plant science, patents and more

In this episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker, Justin and Chip get into the real dirt of cannabis science and how changing techniques are producing stronger, better cannabis and hemp strains and what that means for the future of the industry.

Roll it up, spark it up and check out this episode of The Real Dirt Podcast!

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Transcript

Chip: Hey, this is The Real Dirt podcast. I’m here with Justin Jones today, Real Dirt, Sunday morning dirt. How you doing, Justin?

Justin: I’m good. I’m good, Chip. Just got the sun peeking out here coming up, gonna have a nice rainy day here in Oregon. It helped tamp out some of these fires that we’ve had, to help wrap up the end of the harvest here, end of the year.

Chip: Yeah, man, we’ve hit the dry season down here in Oklahoma. The fall and winter are drier, that’s when we have our fire seasons. It’s almost perfect for harvesting cannabis, because it just starts to get dry around first of October. So if you’re lucky enough to be harvesting in October, November, December, those are really good months for you down here.

Justin: We call those fine finishing days.

Chip: Fine, there’s fine finishing days. And if you’re finishing in the next 10 days here in Oklahoma, which many people are, wow man, you’re gonna do really well.

Justin: That’s good. I just was talking to some friends up in western Colorado and they were finishing everything over there and pulling it down out in the Paonia areas. Good value for grown cannabis there in Colorado, maybe the only real value for growing out there in Colorado.

Chip: We’ve had a couple opportunities to move down to Paonia. I wish I could have more time to explore that during our time in Colorado. You know, Paonia was the first like, namebrand weed I would ever, I ever heard of.

Justin: They had a purple or something back in the day.

Chip: Oh, yeah, yeah. Paonia Purple. Peabuds, peabuds.

Justin: That was the pea bud, yeah. And they lost it, nobody’s got it. Some people claim they still, but no one’s seen it for a long time.

Chip: Yeah, you know, that’s what happens with a lot of the famous strains. That’s why like, I call bullshit on anybody wanting to harvest I mean, hold on to their strains. Few people have the overall impact to make a strain happen. And the only way that it happens is through volume of buds produced. And few people can drive that demand, you know what I mean?

Justin: I totally do. And you know, as far as that goes, Matt Deckel, good friend of ours told me about this a while back. Years ago, we started doing that. And so you know, our favorite strains, we don’t just keep them and try to hoard them. We kind of to pair them, let other people enjoy them, and then also backup your cuts. So if you get a bad bug infestation, and you got to [inaudible 2:33] some stuff, or somebody kills your plants, or you know, there’s lots of things can happen. And this way you can start over, and go get your, go get your favorite strains back in your library. So got to back that up.

Chip: Of course, you got to hold on to them. I guess my real, my question is or point is, do you have a strain that’s been a popular, long standing strain in your shop?

Justin: For sure. We definitely do.

Chip: What is it? What is it?

Justin: I would say we’ve got a Chemdog, we had a Chem before that we’ve had for 10 years. It always sells, everybody loves it. We’ve got one of the old school, old school Sour Diesel strains –

Chip: Is that the original, because –

Justin: Yeah, the original for sure.

Chip: Here’s my point, is you’ve got Chemdog and Sour D. And people come there and buy it at Dayton, Colorado. Do you think they would be as possible if there weren’t millions of other pounds of Chemdog and Sour D being grown in the past 20 years?

Justin: I think that that’s, plays a major role. And I think that strains because where we’ve come from and where we still are in most places, but where we’re coming from and moving towards with legalization, people at least now know that they’re getting something that’s repeatable. And so you know, back in the day it gets, and that’s where Chemdog came from, right? Somebody bought an ounce of weed at a Grateful Dead concert. There was 10 seeds in the bag. It was the best pot they ever smoked, they had the seeds, they started planting them, right? And so, they don’t really know what that cannabis was. You have no idea you know, you’d sell whatever they said on the street when you bought it and –

Chip: It was kind [inaudible 4:16] back then. Back then it was –

Justin: KD, yeah. It was just KD, it was just nine Mexican bud. And you know, at the end of the day, now we have, can enjoy the fact that you can say this is Chemdog Four. And then, you can grow it. You can grow it the same way every time and put it out there. And so people that like it that can go and buy it, and get the same thing. And if they’re, you know I, it was really dawned on me about 10 years ago when I started my medical marijuana company in Denver. I had a patient with Crohn’s, really bad Crohn’s. And he told me one time, “The worst thing about Crohn’s is that I’ll find some cannabis that works and it literally will cure my Crohn’s, but I have no idea what it is. I bought it on the street. I don’t know what strain it is.” They could, it could be the name they said or not. And he said, “It’s almost worse for me to find the bag that like, cures my Crohn’s, because I know I’m going to run out and I can’t go get the same stuff again.” For us back then, the Durbin poison that we grew, and we still grow, it was a cure for him. And all of a sudden this guy’s like, “Well, I can get the same thing every month, cures my Crohn’s, and now I’m not so stressed out about finding the right medical cannabis.”

Chip: Man, and Chemdog’s not the easiest one to grow either. To make it consistent and look great, it’s not easy.

Justin: Not necessarily. I think it’s easier than some of the other gassy strains that we’ve seen come out of the skunk lines. But where did the Skunk No. 1 go? That’s what I want to know.

Chip: Oh man, you know, you can still get it. I mean, I bought some seeds several years ago from Sensi Seeds, it’s still, you can get it. It’s still there. I mean, the European Skunk one is.

Justin: Well, the real answer to that question is that it’s everywhere, because it was used in pretty much all the background breeding going on for the last 30 years. So, if you look at the data on strains, pretty much everything that’s got any gas to it’s coming out of Skunk somewhere.

Chip: Yeah, you know, I’ve grown these perfect Diesel buds in the past and I’ve also grown a fair amount of Skunk 1 and Super Skunk. And the Diesel really does have a Super Skunk look, that’s for sure.

Justin: We’re in the world of hybrids now, you know? So, it’s, you never know.

Chip: Well, they’re all hybrids, man. You know, it’s a big conversation we’ve been having about indica, and sativa, and hybrids and we just call it all hybrids now. We’re never going to convince people that cannabis sativa is just hemp and that cannabis with THC in it is indica. Oh, I shouldn’t say never. It’s going to take a few years before people like, start talking, stop talking about cannabis in terms of indica and sativa.

Justin: Well, and as we get some more science involved, I think that’ll help, where the hemp industry is seeing some help from real science, or university science. I just tested a bunch of new hybrids that we’re working on in the hemp side of things. You know, I’m able to take those cannabis samples right over to Oregon State University, drop the leaf samples off, get the test that I need to get done. And you know, that was not available before, you know, a year and a half ago, and really a year ago. And so, it’s still mostly unavailable to marijuana growers, but it’s coming, you know? And as we move along with legalization, I think that we’ll be able to get the science and the real agricultural science guys, those that’ll become something we can use in the cannabis and the marijuana side of cannabis as we are now starting to in the hemp. But that also says, “Hey, what’s going to happen to these marijuana genetics over the next few years if that kind of science becomes more available? And what are we going to see, are the strains going to get better?” Right now there’s a bunch of hemp breeding going on where you’re taking and making triploid hemp plants, and the vigor and the production on these plants is 20 to 40% more than their same diploid siblings. And so what’s that mean, when you kind of start changing the science on the breeding? And using modern techniques, and really not even the modern techniques, just using the traditional plant breeding techniques?

Chip: Yeah, I mean –

Justin: To get better plants?

Chip: Diploid, it’s been around for a minute. I mean, people have talked about this for a bit, diploid, triploid. Why don’t you explain that? You’ve been doing a little bit of this with hemp?

Justin: Right, right.

Chip: I’ve heard, it’s read about the amount of time. David Clark’s book, Marijuana Botany, I think. It was written in the 70s. So it’s not new science.

Justin: No, no, this is not new. And you know, this is not also not necessarily considered GMO either. And that’s another conversation that now we’ve had to have in the hemp industry. Is your hybrid GMO? And is the techniques that we use to feminize seeds in the hemp industry a GMO process or not? And so that’s, and there’s another whole, a whole section of talking.

Chip: Do you have, is there a thirty second disclaimer you have for GMO?

Justin: Well, I mean, GMO doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. And you know, there’s obviously people or companies that have used GMO in what I’d like to say a Dr. Evil and I’ll put my pinky in the corner by mouth. You know, if you use GMO to spray poison on plants that won’t kill them and it’ll kill the weeds, then you know, that’s maybe kind of Dr. Evil-ish. But GMO, the GMO process has also done some amazing things for us like anybody that you know that’s a type two diabetic that’s got an insulin dependent thing going on, GMO’s the reason those guys can live a fairly normal life. That’s where they’ve found those, that medicine. So anyways, back to the cannabis side of things on the hemp, you know, what we’re seeing is, you know, lots of different breeding techniques. And so all of a sudden, we can get a triploid and what are the triploids? So your standard cannabis plant is diploid, diploid, diploid, I don’t know, I’m not a scientist, I’m a stoner. So you have a diploid patch. What you do to make a triploid, which the reason we’re trying to make triploids is because they are a sterile plant that will not get the seed, so they are not able to be impregnated by pollen and create a seed. And on the same side of things, you’re also hoping that the pollen that would be produced from those plants might not work to inspect another plant to create –

Chip: Sterile, sterile male?

Justin: Yes. And so, and even if you get a, even if you get a hermaphrodite –

Chip: They do this with other crops, right? Like,

Justin: Well, this is revolutionary for hops. One of the big reasons that the beer industry has gotten just insane in the last 30 years, just because they came up with the seed was hops. I think it was in the Willamette hops from here in Oregon, where the, it was the first variety of seedless. And what that allowed the farmer to do is push the crop out and harvest it when it’s truly ready, and at its full potential. But in hops to do that, you’re risking it going to seed and if your hops go to seed, you get like, a dime on the dollar, okay? So the seedless hops allowed the hops farmer to get bigger production, bigger, you know, more hops per acre and better hops, without accidentally screwing it up and blending. So –

Chip: And this started in the 50’s, 60’s, do you know?

Justin: No, I think the first seedless hops that came out of Oregon State and it was, I think it was more like closer to the 80, early 80’s. So the seedless hops was something that came out of Oregon State and Oregon State developed that original Willamette, I believe, the Willamette hops. And they made that available through the public as you know, the fact that Oregon State’s a land grant university. And so that allowed other hops breeders to go and start breeding projects to seedless. Anyways, what you do here with hemp is, we’re going for this triploid so that we don’t have seeds in the crop. And that way, you can grow whatever you want on your plot of land. And I can be right across the street and I can still grow some [inaudible 12:55] essential oil cannabis for CBD or CBG production, these sort of things. And so, you know, as the industry matures, that’s going to become something that we want to see. And even if you’re in the Midwest, where there’s a lot of rogue hemp, and rogue male cannabis plants, you could still grow seedless oil crop, right? Right. But it takes a long time and you know, you can’t skirt the fact that it just takes a certain amount of days to grow plants out, and then cross breed them, and then grow them back out, and test them, and check them, and regrow, test them and test them and you know, all these things. So, I’ve been working on that now.

Chip: And the flowers there is, they do have, or reported to, reportedly to be larger and more vigorous triploid cannabis, right? Correct?

Justin: Yes, the plants we’re seeing, even if we just look at them from early stage, bigger, it’s just unbelievable. Then I’m hearing 30 to 40% more production, save your buds, less flowers, less leaves, more this, and your ratio of a usable commodity off of a plant versus you know, on a triploid looks like you’re gonna have a lot more sellable weed.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely.

Justin: And you have no seeds in there, so you know, nobody wants to process seeds, because it does something weird to the oil. And then they have to go through it and remediate that. So basically, you know, as a farmer, you’re trying to produce the best material for the person that wants to buy it. And so, in the past, we’ve kind of been like, “Any material produced is fine, because there’s not enough.” Now, we’re getting to like, “Who’s going to produce the best material? What farmers are going to grow it, and then get it into the right form?” And if you don’t have to deal with seeds, and if you’ve got 30% more flower mass over your stems, all these things are exactly what we need the plants to do. But we’re also going to hopefully start seeing this creep into the marijuana side of things. And as I think as some of the genetics, cannabis genetics hemp guys are looking at, how can we start to look at this over at the marijuana side also? So that when we do get a lab, when we can go get on a flow spectrometer machines and test the ploidy level of a plant, and see if it’s a diploid or a tetraploid, or a triploid. You know, we’re gonna see this enter over into the marijuana thing. And maybe some of these old genetics that start to delve out over time from clonal, from over cloning and just being, you know, in that world, we can revive some of these things. And then, you know, again, you know, is it GMO, isn’t it GMO? I mean, you know, truthfully, if you’re not using marker assisted breeding, you know, I’m looking at it that way, you’re still using it, you’re still using your brain, and your eyes, and your nose to –

Chip: Map. Map.

Justin: Yeah, to select strains or select –

Chip: And that’s traditional breeding, right?

Justin: Right, right.

Chip: Hey, man, this summer, we grew a bunch of autoflowers, you know. This is my first like, big autoflower year. We planted out cumulatively about 20,000 autoflower seeds this year, all different types, all bunch of different vendors. And man, I’ll tell you, we got some product from Mephisto Genetics, Three Bears, OG, and they don’t pay me to say any of this, guys [inaudible 16:28]. But we all, everyone who saw this plant were like, “Wow, that’s like genetically modified weed? Like, what the fuck is that?” Because, you know, one, like in 65 days, it’s done. But there’s literally no leaf on these flowers. It’s the perfect cannabis for extraction. It was all bred with traditional techniques. And I mean, 20 years ago, I saw a big bud that looked very similar, right? These huge buds with just a little bit of leaf on them, you know? And that was bred traditionally, as well. That was straight [inaudible 17:06] seed’s product and now they’re Skunk product. But you don’t have to have genetically modified, or use genetically modified technology to breed superior cannabis. You can use science, our current observations with plants, math, additional techniques, all of these things have worked for hundreds of years.

Justin: And even the work that we’ve been doing in the last year, you can really, you don’t necessarily need the university level agricultural science lab, but it makes things faster and better. And here’s the example. When you’re looking for tetraploids, and you’re doing a pheno hunt, but you’re looking for a tetraploid, not a diploid, you look at the size of the stomata, and the shape of the stomata on the leaf. So if you use a nice microscope, like a $200 microscope these days, and these are all, all these microscopes plugged right into your computer, and you can go in and capture your screenshots and look at things.

Chip: Oh sick, man, we just got one. Like, I was gonna get one for the clone nursery, so anybody can look at any of the clones or any of the weed, make sure there’s no mold or mildew or PM or any bug, or anything. It’s right there on the counter, $200.

Justin: Great, yeah, look at it. And so what we’re doing, is we’re actually taking and looking at the size, and measuring the size and the shape of the stomata to see, and that can tell us what the ploidy is on it, okay? So when you’re hunting for a tetraploid, you’re looking for a different, a less round stomata, and also the size of stomata is bigger. And so –

Chip: Like how, that’s two, three times bigger, you know, how much bigger?

Justin: From what we were working on, the microscope that we had was measuring in pixels. And I don’t even know what, we don’t even give a shit what that prize is. Because what we are doing to say, “Okay, this is a, this has this stomata is 70 pixels. This is 80. This one’s 100. This one’s 110, this one’s 60.” And what we’re looking at, first of all, we’re looking at stomatas that don’t have a perfectly round shape, first of all. That’s a first indicator that it could be a tetraploid. The problem is most of it falls in the 70 to 90 zone, okay? And so you know, you start to, so what we would do is we would use the microscope to get a bunch of the work done, and to measure and know. And then we would send all those samples to the lab and find out, yeah, that is not a tetraploid. That is maybe a tetraploid. That is a tetraploid. And then you know, then you get that data back and you start to say, “Okay, I can probably guarantee anything above these 90 pixels is a tetraploid.” But when you’re breeding and you don’t, you know, and you can’t get back the time that it takes. You want to know for sure. So you don’t waste six months on something that turns out, you’re wrong. And so, you get your tetraploid stock and then you start breeding with those plants. And I guess in layman’s terms, they have six sets of DNA. That’s why is it tetraploid, and then a diploid has two. And so, when you hybrid the two, six divided by two becomes three and that’s your triploid. And then those because of the three sets, DNA cannot make babies. Collect the donkey and the horse, make a mule, right? But then a mule can never replicate, the mules are optional.

Chip: Oh, the mule cannabis, Justin Jones, we’re talking about genetics, random other thing, but mostly –

Justin: Yeah, well, I finally got that –

Chip: It’s all about the ganja.

Justin: I finally got that ganja rolled up here for the Sunday morning smokedown but –

Chip: Oh, what are you smoking? What are you smoking on?

Justin: Sherbadough from Archive.

Chip: Sherbadough, that’s Sherbert and Do-Si-Do, right?

Justin: Yeah, you know, the boys are like, “I’d love to hit that, hit everything with the Do-Si-Do.”

Chip: Oh, yeah. I just planted out a huge pheno selection of Archive Do-Si-Do crosses, Fletcher over there’s got always running some R&D. And he had a new Do-Si-Do male or a new Do-Si-Do donor he was using for his feminized line. And these guys, Sherbert Do-Si crossed with Do-Si-Do. Diesel, OG Face Off, T-1000, Tangie, Lemon G, Skittles all crossed with the, that new Do-Si-Do donor. So we’re excited about it, they look great.

Justin: That’s good. I’m sitting here, I’ve got, I’m talking about you know, breeding and hybrids. I’ve got a Gorilla Glue 4 here from Archive that I grew. And then I also have a Duct Tape, which is Gorilla Glue 4 divided by the Do-Si-Do. And so to see like just the pure Gorilla Glue 4, and then right next to it, you know, it’s sister, or, you know, half sister, whatever, whatever with the Do-Si-Do. They’re very similar, but yet very different on the terpene profile. That Do-Si-Do gives everything just a little something I don’t know, that’s more magical. It’s different, it’s better.

Chip: It’s bigger. It’s bigger, for sure. It is better. And yeah, I’m really excited about it, man. You know, we’ve planted out of 2,500 of those seeds, and I’m going to have an incredible Do-Si-Do out of it all. I’ll be able to pick the Do-Si-Do. And I’m looking for the hybrids too but, man, it’s exciting just to see it all. That’s for sure. Right now I like the Do-Si-Do Face Off and the Do-Si-Do SFP backcrosses the best. If you think about it, those are almost all just like BX backcrosses, because the Face Off is in the Do-Si-Do. And then cross it back to the Face Off and cross it back to the SFP.

Justin: Well I’ll tell you what. The marijuana breeders right now need to get hip, start trying to work on protecting their IP if they have it. Because that’s going to be the next thing once we get some sort of federal legalization, and guys want to become the next Sierra Nevada of marijuana or the next Two Buck Chuck or whatever. People are going to start going to war over their genetics and I’ve even had conversations with some guys in California that already want to start working on a Mendocino hamlet. And you know, Humboldt hamlet –

Chip: Yeah, the Appalachian, the Appalachian is definitely starting to grow in ideology. Yeah, you know, Calculator right now, famous MAC line. He is upset that clone dealers are dealing his MAC 1 strain. He claims just recently on his Instagram channel that he’s going after some major clone producers in California for selling his MAC 1. I don’t believe he really has any legs to stand on currently, because there’s not going to be a court that’s going to enforce it. And you know, also just because like he claims to own a plant, doesn’t mean he owns anything, right?

Justin: No and it’s going to come down to the processes too. And so, there’s a popular hemp breeder here in Oregon and they’ve already got that patents filed on a bunch of things. And one of their patent pendings is on crossing autoflower genetics into full term photo plants. And so, if that patent gets issued, anybody into choosing that process will have to pay them some money. Maybe, right? I mean, everything has to be, try to be enforced. But at the end of the day, they’re saying that they own the rights to cross a ruderalis with a, you know, cannabis sativa or whatever, and get that early hybrid.

Chip: Yeah, this is Phylos. Phylos –

Justin: No, no, it’s not that one. Were filed that is Oregon CBD.

Chip: Oregon CBD. But Phylos, they have a couple similar, similar thing going on, right?

Justin: Phylos has been collecting data on the different strains of cannabis and trying to relate them to each other to say, “Okay, you have a -“

Chip: Oh, okay. So Phylos was not involved with the autoflower?

Justin: Well, where they could become involved in is to who has the real, true, earliest version of a strain? And so there’s a, you know, let’s just say Jack Herer, okay it’s famous person and also a strain.

Chip: Yep.

Justin: If somebody wants to say, look, in order for you to say that that’s Jack Herer, it’s gotta A, be this, 123. This terpene profile stand, it’s got to be grown in Mendo or in this Hamlet, right? So they’ve done that with wine, obviously. If you grow your grapes in Washington, you can’t call it champagne. You gotta call it spark, white, sparkling, because it didn’t come from France. You’re gonna see that play out. Part of what Phylos is trying to do is they try to find those oldest, earliest grandparent genetics, or who’s got the oldest clone that’s not, you know, whatever. We’ll see. We’ll see how, but there’s already people trying to patent. And I don’t think anybody’s trying to patent Sour Diesel, I think.

Chip: Well, cause if you can patent cannabis sativa strains, you can patent hemp.

Justin: They’re trying to patent the processes to feminize. So if you spray a certain type of silver on your plants, then to get a feminized pollen, and then you’re using that in your breeding, that that would be infringement on their IP. So again –

Chip: Yeah, the plant’s gotta stand up in court and somebody has to enforce them and sure.

Justin: Well sure, but I’m just saying that you know, hemp has become you know, fully legal before marijuana. It’s you’re seeing it already, the –

Chip: Oh, there’s already a patent with hemp. There’s a hemp, or hemp people have already received patents for hemp, right?

Justin: I believe so. I would say probably yes, but –

Chip: Charles Webb. Those guys, they got a patent. They were the first people to get a patent.

Justin: Probably.

Chip: Yeah, totally. I’m sure others have by now. It’s a little weird thing to do, but yeah, go file for a patent if you think you got special shit. Then go sue everybody who uses your special shit without your permission. I guess that would do it, right? Mostly, I don’t really have special shit, though. It’s just normal weed that’s hype.

Justin: Well, it comes down to this. The best advice I could give any of these breeders and I’m not a breeder, we’re messing around with some stuff for fun. And maybe it turns out to be something, you know –

Chip: We’re messing around with stuff for fun. How many seeds you got in your seed vault right now? Can you count?

Justin: I don’t know. A couple hundred, 300. You know, at the end of the day though, what I you know, the people that have been breeding in the marijuana side of things, you know, whether you’re the guys that wear the funny sunglasses and the fake mustaches at the Emerald cup, or not, because you’re trying to not necessarily be above you know, or be out in the public eye. You’ve gotta start getting into the science and you gotta team up with somebody with some sort of trust. Well, if you don’t go the bioscience routes, you’ll wake up and realize that the guys that did go that route, and jump you, and go five years ahead of you in a short amount of time. You can be scared of that, and I’ve seen them be scared of going that direction because of you know, just that Dr. Evil science side of things. But boy, a lot of knowledge out there that’s never been applied to cannabis from you know, from our modern world of agriculture. So yeah, find some science buddies if you’re out there breeding and, you know, try to figure out how to do all these things. Because even just getting your genetics into a tissue culture lab, you know, and having them clean them up and do all these things, that can take like up to a year.

Chip: Yeah, no shit. Right.

Justin: And so you can’t you know, if you wait too long, and then say, “Hey, we really do need to take this clone that we’ve been using forever and get it cleaned.” It takes a while. So in California, I think there’s a lot of bioscience companies and people are starting to jump in on the marijuana side of things. But until it’s federally legal, you really won’t get the doors opened all the way. But those who have already started something will be ahead.

Chip: Well, it’s been another fine episode with Justin Jones. Thanks for joining us, Justin.

Justin: Yeah, thank you, Chip. Great talking to you. We got off on some tangents there with the genetics and other things, but that was fun. And we’ll circle back and produce more sense of that some other day.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. If you’re like this episode, or interested in others, please download it at the iTunes. We are The Real Dirt podcast. Also look us up on Spotify, and you can check us out therealdirt.com Hey, remember, if you’re ever looking for soil or soilless growing mediums, check out growerscoco.com, ask for them in your local store. And if you’re cruising online one day interested in buying some hydroponic or indoor supplies, look at cultivatecolorado.com. This has been The Real Dirt. Love y’all.

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Cancer, Cannabis and Cultivation [ Jim Gerencser Pt. 2 ]

by The Real Dirt | Oct 13, 2020 | cannabis business, cannabis industry, Cannabis science, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes, Weed talk

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It’s all too common for someone to enter the cannabis industry for personal or medical reasons. Jim Gerencser is one of them.

Jim’s son Eric has had a rough battle with cancer throughout his entire life. From the time he was 8 until he was 18, Eric underwent regular brain scans to determine if the tumor in his brain would end up being fatal. After beating that cancer, another was found in his abdomen, and it was even more serious.

But because they recognized Eric’s condition early, it was easier for doctors to find and eradicate the cancer before it grew to a dangerous level. This victory inspired Jim to create E.R.I.C., also known as Early Recognition Is Critical.

The E.R.I.C. Program aims to educate people about the early recognition signs of various cancers so it can be fought before it spreads. And now Eric himself is a teacher to young students about how to take care of themselves. But cannabis was a major factor.

Eric was on 9 drugs during his Chemotherapy treatments. With the help of legal cannabis oil, Eric was able to cut out 5 of those medications, down to 4 with the help of cannabis. That’s what inspired Jim to enter the cannabis industry.

Jim meets Chip

When Jim needed an expert to help him plan out what he wanted to achieve in the legal cannabis industry, Chip was the first name to come up among his friend and business circles. Once they connected, the rest was history.

If you don’t get the vibe from their conversations, Jim and Chip have become great friends that are working together to change how cannabis consulting works.

In Part 2 of their conversation, Jim and Chip talk about Eric and how E.R.I.C. got its start, how they started working together, the importance of R&D in cannabis cultivation plus some more in depth cannabis talk!

Learn more about Early Recognition Is Critical (E.R.I.C.)

Learn more about Greener Consulting Group

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Transcript

Chip: And we’re back, Jim.

Jim: Yeah. I love Cultivate.

Chip: Oh man, I got a great crew. Like, if there’s anything that I’m proud of, it is my crew and how they work together, and work with other people, right? I have worked on that and we have cultivated that.

Jim: No pun intended.

Chip: Yeah, I am most proud about that. I’m impressed with my whole crew, man. I’ve got maybe 30 people, not a bad apple among them. Any one of the people would sit down and chat with any of you about cannabis, or sports, or whatever you found common in your life. And they’re not arrogant or ego driven just you know, all really good, good people that support cannabis.

Jim: So the way Chip proposes we’re added as Ganja U in Oklahoma and it’s summer solstice –

Chip: That’s our nickname. That’s our nickname for our cannabis farm out here, Ganja U, because we just keep learning.

Jim: So we’re out there, and we’re out there on the summer solstice and Chip’s whole crew from Cultivate Oklahoma shows up. So, Chip is an amazing, he’s not like a boss. He doesn’t boss people around. He’ll jump in there and do it first. And he’s a leader. So it’s been fun watching how you manage people. Chip. You’re totally a remote kind of guy, but you’re a hands-on person. But you can manage it remote, because you have a good team in place already. So yeah, give Cultivate a call. I’ve met half the crew, looking forward to meet the other half. I highly agree with what he says, he said that it’s a hell of a team. Call him up, man. So especially if you do it yourself, if you want to put together a little package which I’ve done in the past, a lot of times you got to go to three or four different stores. Cultivate will take care of it for you right there. So yeah, good stuff. Hey, the reason I’m into this is like I said –

Chip: Yeah, let’s talk about ERIC. Let’s talk about ERIC.

Jim: ERIC is a cancer prevention charity. I started it back in 2012. And Eric had gone through two brain tumors. One of them was a reoccurrence from a misdiagnosis. We brought him to the doctor when he was eight years old six times, and the doctor basically did everything but get him a CAT scan, calling it sinusitis. And I was bringing him to a buddy of mine, he’s a chiropractor, awesome, Ultimate Frisbee friend. His name is Dr. Scott, big shout out to him. But Dr. Scott was adjusting Eric just to help him feel better. And he said, “Why don’t you go get a CAT scan?” So CAT scan. Thirty minutes later, we’re sitting in the office, Eric’s got a big tumor in his head. It’s almost a golf ball size, because it was misdiagnosed for so long. So long story short, everything was good with that. Ten years later, he got full clearance on his brain tumor. Finally, from the time he was 8 to the time he was 18, he had to have annual scans that would basically be like a death scan. It was like, “Is it coming back or not?” Because we had already seen it come back. So when he was 18, he had full clearance. A month later, he had some weird, something going on with his abdomen, he couldn’t pee, went to the doctor. The poor kid had another type of cancer happening. And so at the age of 18, he goes in and starts chemotherapy. And at that time, I had a friend whose mom was going through Stage IV Non-Hodgkins lymphoma and Eric’s type of cancer he had this time was Non-Hodgkins Stage II. And ended up, her mom passed away the second day of Eric’s chemo. So we were blown away. We were fucked up, and we had no idea what we were gonna do. And we just knew we needed to support Eric, we need to take care of this. My friend’s name is Cassandra. And we needed to take care of Cassandra and Cassandra’s family and ended up starting a charity. And we didn’t know what we wanted to call it. But we knew one thing we wanted to do, was we wanted to make sure that we could introduce cancer symptoms earlier to people, because her mom had Stage IV, Eric had Stage II. Eric was still alive, her mom was not. So, we started coming up with names and I came up with “Early” and “Critical,” and my cousin came up with “Recognition Is.” So we came up with Early Recognition Is Critical based off E-R-I-C. So here we are, eight years later, 2020, ERIC has been teaching kids cancer symptom education. The hardest thing to do is go into schools anymore. So I am taking ERIC out of the youth space, and moving it into the adult space. And I’m going to be focusing on using fully extracted cannabis oil to fight cancer. So this is the official coming out party and I want to thank Chip for allowing me to do it.

Chip: Yeah, man. Let’s fight cancer.

Jim: Let’s do it.

Chip: Hey, ’cause and one of my best friends named Greg, he’s says, “Fuck cancer!”

Jim: Fuck cancer!

Chip: Right, Greg? Greg Davidson.

Jim: Say it out loud.

Chip: Fuck cancer! Alright, one, two three.

Both: Fuck cancer!

Chip: Fuck cancer.

Jim: Yeah, say it again and keep saying it. And don’t be afraid to say the word cancer, because the way to beat it is to add “fuck” to it. Fuck cancer. So, right now we’re officially fighting cancer with cannabis. And if you have any questions call me direct. Hit me up on Facebook. I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Greener Consulting. You can find me, G-E-R-E-N-C-S-E-R. There’s not many of us around. So yeah, thanks, Chip. It feels good. I’ve had it in the closet for eight years. I’ve been wanting to merge the two forces together. I’ve been doing survivor stories for both sides of it. I’m just out doing survivor stories. So if you’re a survivor, hit us up. Go to our website, early recognition is critical. Tell us your story. Tell us if cannabis helps you save your life, or if it helps make skin cancer go away like it did me. I had a basal cell carcinoma on my arm. I went to a dispensary in Santa Cruz. I also own a professional Ultimate Frisbee team called the Dallas Roughnecks, and we’re big supporters of cannabis curing cancer, to be honest. And I had a spot on my arm and I used fully extracted cannabis oil, they refer to it as FECO oil. This FECO oil dissolved that cancer within two weeks, with no side effects whatsoever, and there’s absolutely no sign of it. So man, I am pumped about this, as you can tell. I’m ready to talk about it. We’re gonna fuck up some cancer. And we’re gonna – it all started right here on The Real Dirt. So there we go.

Chip: So in the past, let’s talk about this early recognition portion of ERIC, and why that’s so important.

Jim: So you know that the key to beating cancer is recognizing it early. I hear that all the time, but nobody really pushes it. If you have Stage IV, what that means is that the cancer has metastasized across your body. And it means that it’s moved from where it originally came in, which would be either your lymph nodes, or some of your more sensitive infected parts of your body, and then it starts spreading. And as it spreads, and if it gets up into your chest, that’s basically Stage IV. And it’s kind of what they used to refer to as a death sentence. Stage I means that they found it exactly where it started, and it’s contained in one specific area where they have multiple different ways to be able to treat it. Like you can do chemo, they can do radiation, they can do surgery. Eric’s Burkitt’s lymphoma, we did surgery, and then they also did chemo. So he went through a surgery, they did the biopsy, and then they also did chemotherapy. But Eric did cannabis the whole time he was doing this, and it allowed him to be able to continue eating. And when Eric came home from the hospital, this is really important. He was given nine prescriptions. And after he used cannabis oil, he was able to eliminate five of those. So a lot of the medicines are all these different –

Jim: Wow man, five out of nine.

Jim: Five, gone, off the list, do not need them anymore. They were basically drugs that were gonna make you feel not nauseated. And then you had to have, you have another pill that would make you feel not nauseated from the pill that makes you feel not nauseated. So that’s just a bunch of crap. And that’s what Health Camp Buddy’s all about. And so recognizing cancer symptoms early, we recognize it because Cassandra’s mom had Stage IV, Eric had Stage II, he’s still alive today. So I just did the math. And I started realizing that we could use Ultimate Frisbee as a way to teach people to speak up. I think “speak up” is our best message. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night. And I was like, “Speak up, tell someone.” And my friend was like, “What the hell’s going on?” I was like, “It’s all about speaking up. You can recognize it early. But if you don’t tell anybody, it’s nothing’s happening. You have to recognize it. And you also have to speak up.” Ultimate Frisbee is a great sport that I have been part of since I was 19. And part of Ultimate that’s cool is you call your own fouls, all the way up to the pro level, they have reps in the pros, but all the way up till that point, you call your own fouls. So you have to speak up. So we use these Ultimate Frisbee clinics, we would go into the schools, and we would work with 5 to 600 kids in one day, which is fun as hell but also tough as hell. And teach them to speak up if something’s wrong with your body. We simplified it down to giving them some really basic symptoms. Eric’s symptoms were headache and vomiting. You can have a headache, and headaches aren’t normal by the way. If you have a headache, something’s wrong. Go to get it checked out, and don’t just accept it as a headache. But then he had vomiting too, which was nausea and actually vomiting. And what was happening was his brain tumor was causing his blood fluid to not be able to drain, and the only way he could get it out was to throw it up. And it was vile basically coming out, and it’s not normal. So that is a cancer symptom. And also not being able to pee. Come on, you should be able to pee. You should be able to go to the number two, you should be able to use the bathroom without it hurting, without it being uncomfortable. So if it’s not, speak up. So that’s my ERIC speech. And like I said, early recognition is critical. That org, I’m really proud of it. It does save lives. I’ve had multiple people call me up saying that they’ve gone to the doctor because of what we’re doing. And they caught their cancer at Stage I. End of story. It works.

Chip: Yeah, that’s dramatic, man. That is absolutely dramatic.

Jim: So yeah, we’re, we’re loving it. And it’s cool. It’s really cool to be able to combine cannabis with it, because I know that that’s where I think I could do the best, do the most damage, save the most lives without pills. It’s kind of a concept I wanted to start, plants over pills. If you ever listened to an article on a commercial for like, anything but Viagra, they tell you all these symptoms. Yeah, you could take this pill for high cholesterol, but you might commit suicide and you’re definitely gonna probably have diarrhea, and you probably won’t sleep at night, and you’re not going to be hungry anymore. But good for you, you don’t have high cholesterol. But there’s other ways to do it. One way is to eat healthy. I’m probably not a great example of that. But –

Chip: We all struggle with that one, that’s for sure. No matter, the most healthy of us still have their issues.

Jim: You’ve helped me out a lot there, Chip. You being a vegetarian definitely has made me aware of it.

Chip: Man, and yet now you got the vegetarian chili going.

Jim: How about that? Yeah.

Chip: Yeah, let’s talk about your vegetarian chili recipe.

Jim: You got to taste it man. So I start off with, I sauté garlic, onions, celery, carrots and bell peppers. And then I put it in a crock pot and add a bunch of beans, and a bunch of tomato sauce, and tomatoes, and a lot of spices, a lot of curcumin, and oleander, and a lot of parsley and paprika in there. And a lot of chili, I love chili pepper. And then I cook it for about three or four hours. And then I take about a quarter of it and I’d mix it up in my little bullet to get the consistency right. But I add a lot of bell peppers. I love jalapenos, basically throw anything I’ve got in the kitchen that’s a vegetable. I’ve had broccoli, I’ve had asparagus. It’s amazing, man. I make it every week. My daughter and wife hate beans, but they love the chili. Little do they know it’s like, 70% beans. So it’s all presentation I guess, right?

Chip: Yeah, totally. Totally, all presentation.

Jim: So what’s your recipe? Give us a recipe.

Chip: Man well, okay, so my cheater recipe is with cans, right? I’ll just say the cheater recipe. Okay, so one can of chopped tomatoes, right? One small thing of tomato paste, two cans of beans of assorted – I like the chili beans that, I get the organic chili beans from our local store, can’t remember what brand it is. But they’ve got a couple of different types of beans in it. Onion, garlic, paprika, chili powder. Here’s where I got a little non-traditional for some people, or maybe so but like man, I put some powdered onion powder in it as well, right? Just like, gives it this boost of flavor. Even though we sauté actual onions. Then I take some oil, I sauté the onions and the garlic all together. Man sometimes I’ll put in like, a vegetarian sausage or impossible burger or something like that. We’ve got some like, mushroom type of burgers too. We’ll like, chop that up a little bit at that point.

Jim: Is it possible that your favorite protein is that [inaudible 13:57]?

Chip: No, no, no, I’m a cheap vegan, Jim, right? And I’m a vegan at heart, because I’m lactose intolerant. But I still like, love cheese pizza, I had it for dinner last night. Yeah. Right. And I’ll eat the cheap shit too, I’m not you know.

Jim: If you’re hungry, you gotta eat.

Chip: I’ll eat it all but like, I eat cheese pizza and I’m lactose intolerant. So like, I have to eat some lactose enzymes and, then I love butter, because I’m from the south and everything’s double butter, double sugar. But I eat fish man, I’m a fisherman. Now that I’m in Oklahoma, we buy fish. When I lived in California, I tried to catch most of my fish. We’ll eat fish like, four times, five times a week.

Jim: What’s your favorite fish?

Chip: You know, I have a few favorite fishes and favorite dish, favorite fish recipes. Black cod, which is a deep water cod. Its texture is just incredible. I think that’s what one of my favorite fish, right? If you get true Blackwater cod –

Jim: Did you use to get that up in Northern California?

Chip: Yeah, yeah, it comes out of Alaska.

Jim: Oh hell yeah.

Chip: And you can get it, you get it all over.

Jim: Do some people call that ling cod?

Chip: Ling cod’s different. And ling cod, they are cod, but you also catch them higher in like, 100 feet of water, 200 feet of water. Where like, the black cod they’re deep. And so the pressure of the water changes the consistency, their consistency, right? Different fish, man. Great, great fish. If you’re ever in Denver, there is great, great sushi in Denver. And I know it’s totally environmentally inappropriate, but farm raised Croatian tuna, the Toro on this stuff is so good. And you can get it in a couple of restaurants in our area. Izakayaden is the one we go to. Otherwise mostly-

Jim: You’re a big sushi guy though.

Chip: I eat sushi for sure. But in Oklahoma, I haven’t really found the sushi spot.

Jim: Yeah, there’s not one.

Chip: I hear there is, actually. But I haven’t gone there yet. I mean, because most of the sushi is flown in overnight. So it’s all about your connection wherever you are. I love shrimp and lobster and crab, Dungeness crab and crab cakes.

Jim: Stonecrab claws.

Chip: Yeah, I’ll eat all of that. I mean, in the north coast up in Trinidad Westhaven like, we could fish for a lot of that stuff. Like the Dungeness crab, a great fishery for that up there. Tuna, cod, salmon. I mean, you go out and catch rockfish, and ling cod limit any single time you want to go out during the fishing season, you’ll probably limit.

Jim: What are we going to get to pass a joint again, man.

Chip: Oh, well, I mean, I quit that a while ago. I don’t, and with the people you hang out with? I don’t know if I can smoke joints with you anymore.

Jim: Oh.

Chip: Jim is frequently trying to pass anybody who will look at him in the eyes a joint.

Jim: That’s a bad habit.

Chip: Compliment, compliment. No, it’s a compliment. I know. Well, I mean, I haven’t really spoke about COVID too terribly much on our podcast. I’ll say plandemic pandemic, it’s a storm in the horizon, and I’m trying to avoid it. I’m also a private pilot, and you see a thunderstorm, you avoid it. And there are limits that you should get to it close to it, there’s a reasonable limit for your plane size. 30 miles, I believe is what they say. That’s what I’m trying to do is just stay healthy, stay away. I’m not sure what all the facts are. I don’t think anyone knows what all the facts are. It just is such a new problem. Every day, people guess something different about it. Now, I just have had to turn my ears off a little bit. When we go into any store in Oklahoma, we mask up like everybody else, pretty much. There’s usually one or two people that don’t. And hey, whether regardless of what you believe, plandemic, pandemic, like I said. I mask up, man. I go in the store. I respect the other people around me, because I don’t want to cause them fear or harm. And it doesn’t have anything to do with being a sheep. It’s all about just respect for your neighbors, respect for your fellow humans, respect for the scenario and situation. right? Like, no conspiracy theory. It’s just, man, it’s just kind of how it is. You got to like, deal with it.

Chip: Yeah, I think it’ll teach us all a lot of like, barriers and the space between each other in general, you know? It’s just like ,respect the boundaries, man. Everybody should have boundary, right? And everybody’s is different. So –

Jim: Have you flown yet?

Jim: You know, I haven’t, man. And that’s amazing, right? I’m a flyer and I have not, I just had a grandkid. He was born March 22nd. Can you believe this? Snoop Dogg for a grandpa? His initials are OG. I don’t think that was intentional. Knowing my son and daughter in law I’m pretty positive, that wasn’t intentional. And I only tried to pull the OG just enough to get the people that know what’s up. But yeah, but I’m proud.

Chip: You are very Snoop Dogg. Do you listen to hip-hop?

Jim: I don’t.

Chip: Do you rap at all? You don’t listen to any, no Snoop Dogg for you?

Jim: No Snoop Dogg, man.

Chip: It’s alright. We’re gonna get you to a Snoop Dogg playlist.

Jim: You saw I have a record player. And I’ve got some rock and roll. I’m a Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin freak. I saw Led Zeppelin in 1977 in Fort Worth, Texas.

Chip: God. Wow.

Jim: It was awesome. Holy shit.

Chip: What size venue was that?

Jim: It was like, maybe 17,000. Something like that. Yeah, it was awesome. And my brother stood in line and got in like multiple fights throughout the night, and got tickets. And somehow, my buddy and I got front row, first balcony, center. It was amazing. But I had smoked way too much weed. I think I smoked, I know we rolled like, 90 joints. I actually –

Chip: What were you smoking? What were you smoking, do you remember that?

Jim: Probably, it was good Mexican weed back then. II was always –

Chip: You were in Texas.

Jim: I was in Texas, but I had connections. One of my best friends was a grower even back then. And he ended up growing, going to college at Texas A&M. And then he got a job at Teledyne, it was one of the [inaudible 21:16] out in California. And his job was to go check on the oil rig. So the first thing he did is start big farms by every oil rig. So he was growing killer weed in Southern California back in I think, ’81. So we were smoking Mexican weed, but we smoked 90 joints, man. And I ended up getting in trouble at football because like, I ended up having to quit football, because of the penalty that they put on me. Texas football. I missed one day of practice. Yeah. Now, granted, we did get caught –

Chip: You gave up your football career to go to Led Zeppelin. Hey man, you had your priorities straight, bro. That was the smartest decision you ever made. If you have not done that, that would have shaped your life forever, and you wouldn’t have been who you are.

Jim: I would have been three –

Chip: You chose, oh, dude, you chose an experience that, you have told this experience 1000 a million times. It’s probably one of the most important things that’s ever happened to you.

Jim: Yeah. It’s something that many people have done.

Chip: That’s life, right? That’s how it turns, man.

Jim: That’s what it’s about. It’s not about how much money you have in the bank, it’s how many stories and memories that you have. My lifestyle’s kind of based on time rich, we’re actually doing a movie. It’s called The Ultimate Charity. And it’s all about ERIC, and how we got so many eyes on ERIC so quick. And we started the ultimate frisbee team and they ended up winning the championship in 2016. And we went all over the world. I mean, ERIC’s actually right now in Colombia, Venezuela, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, Italy. It’s all over the world, man. I’ve done an amazing job of blowing it up and not really even knowing it. And I think it’s just organic. I just kind of got out of the way, and started something really cool and run with it. So good stuff, Chip. This has been awesome, man.

Chip: No, no, no, man. It’s great, dude. I’m glad we’ve been talking about this for a minute. And I want to do some other podcasts with you, too. Here’s the three podcasts, you guys. Here’s what me and Jim are going to do in the future. We’ve been talking about this for a minute, because we both really love business, and I analyze my business, and other people’s business, and help my friends with their businesses all the time. And we’re gonna analyze some sort of cannabis business on a podcast here soon, right? Yeah, totally, totally. And man, I started when I was young, Jim started when he was young. I’ve been doing this like, I’m 47 right now, Jim’s 65. Like we’ve been doing this ever –

Jim: 60.

Chip: 60. Hey, I was trying to give you more experience, bro. Not call you older. So you still can’t get the discount, then

Jim: Oh, no people are discounted at 55 now, man.

Chip: Oh, okay, good. Let’s go to Ryan’s and get some food.

Jim: That’s terrific. Hey Chip, that’s a freaking great idea.

Chip: It’s a great idea, though, isn’t it? Yes, I should do that. Because we just both love to do that. That’s such a fun thing for us to do. People will learn about it. We’ll go over a whole PL, BL, we’ll just pick a cannabis business.

Jim: Yeah. And if you want us to do your business, why don’t you send it in? We’ll start a little application process.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. That’s what we’ll do. If you have a cannabusiness with a PL BL, it doesn’t even have to be a current one. It could be last year’s. We need this. We need you to be sure of your numbers. We need, you’d have three years of these numbers. And you’d be willing to get on podcast with us and talk about it. And I mean, it’s simple. We’ve been in business for three years and been running some sort of financial management software. We use QuickBooks but whatever we’ll generate a PL and a BL for three years straight, so we can actually see what the business has been doing, and generate some good conversation. It’ll be fun. I really love to do this. I know businesspeople like, “Oh, PL, BL. No.”

Jim: They don’t get it, we can talk –

Chip: They don’t get it dude.

Jim: We’ve done so much that a lot of people would love to hear. I used to do all my own taxes. I wouldn’t do them, I wouldn’t have my account layout five different scenarios of different cash flows, and different ways to spend money on some things. And we can all talk about a lot of fun things, and honestly, we could bring some specialists on. I’ve got a guy that’s a tax guy. Or we could bring in a, you know, specifically based off of what kind of company it is. Yeah, I love it.

Chip: That sounds fun, man. We’ll do that. It’ll be a Greener Group Excess episode, we’ll start doing that.

Jim: Did you just think of that?

Chip: It just came off. We’ve been talking about similar stuff. But like, I mean, we talk about it all the time. I mean, I deal with PL BL all the time. It’s how I run all of my businesses. And if you’re not running a profit and loss statement, or a balance and ledger statement on a monthly basis reconciling them, then you’re really missing out on understanding how your business works and being able to see where you can go with cash flow, where you can go with tax –

Jim: How to anticipate things yeah, how to save money on tax. I’m a specialist at that. I understand cash flow. I understand cash basis versus accrual basis. I’ve converted, I think Jeff and I both have just recently converted from cash to accrual. That’s a big thing. It happens only if you hit a certain revenue amount, the IRS requires you to do it. Been there, done that. I survived, so we do it. I’ve started businesses left and right. Chip has had great exits. Hey, let’s schedule that in. I’d look forward to-

Chip: Yeah, man. We’ll have to schedule that in. Hey, let’s find somebody though. Hey, we’re reaching out. Any type of cannabis business, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. From if you’re a class one or class three, if you’re a dispensary or an attorney, if you’re an ancillary company selling products to the cannabis industry, or if you’re in the cannabis industry extraction to hemp, anybody’s peel. But you have to have three years’ worth of reconcile, balance, ledgers, and profit, and loss statements.

Jim: Hey, it’d be awesome if you have like an idea of where you wanted to go too. Like, what we’re trying to help you with? Are you wanting to scale? Or you want to sell? Are you wanting to make more profit? Are you wanting to like, give us some ideas? And basically, we’ll suggest for you, but come up with an idea. Bring your company to the table. We’ll come up with the name of this probably next time we talk and smoke one.

Chip: This is great. This is great, dude. I’m loving it. We might we got a whole ‘nother like, this is literally like, both of our like, I shouldn’t say hobbies, but we get excited about it.

Jim: It is. I know [inaudible 28:21]. Do we not have anything else better to do than this?

Chip: Yes. Like, I’m gonna find the 1%, I’m gonna find 1%. That’s often my motto is like, stack up the 1%, man and get 1% profit coming out of it.

Jim: I’m always better helping other people than helping myself. I hate to say that. I don’t know what you call that. But it is what it is.

Chip: Yeah, I’m similar.

Jim: I think it’s called just giving. You know, when you’re a giver, you want to help other people, it’s almost a codependency. You want to help other people more than you want to help yourself. Even on the airplane, they tell you if we’re going down, put your own mask on first, that way you can help more people. It’s a good point.

Chip: It is a good point.

Jim: But we’ve already done that, Chip. I think we both have our mask on already, you know what I mean? We’re very comfortable with each other and we’ve never brought up money. It’s never been like, it’s not like, we have to make money or we’re, I’m broke I need I’ve got – because money is one of those things. If you have too much or too little, you’re in trouble. There’s somewhere in between there that you’re comfortable. And I think both of us are comfortable. I think we’re comfortable in our skin. And a lot of times skin is green. It’s how much passion.

Chip: Hey man, I spend all my money on weed and I always have, and I’ll probably always will. Any of my friends out there listening to me know what I mean about that. I’m either gonna invest it all into more businesses that are weed associated, hire more employees and I do whatever I want, but like I also work 10 hours a day.

Jim: So Chip I used to always say back in the day it’s like, all my friends would say, “Why do you have weed?” I was like, “I always buy enough so I don’t run out.” And I always referenced, I could always turn weed into money, but I cannot always turn money into weed.

Chip: Money into weed. That is very freak brother quote right there. Hey, let’s talk about weed, Jim. You were smoking some Humboldt, what do you mean by that? Is it indoor? It’s indoor?

Jim: Yeah, indoor. I’m a big fan of indoor. Honestly, I got some fresh outdoor but in this greenhouse, but I guess I’ve learned from Chip, greenhouse weed is outdoor. I’m just not a fan of –

Chip: Even though they might call it indoor.

Jim: They might, yeah. That’s the thing about the industry is we’re all outlaws and some people don’t care that much. So some people just make shit up and yes, but other people are really concerned about it. The genetics is really, so I’m a big fan of indoor. I like the flavor. I do a maintenance process. I smoke a lot of just, a couple hits here, a couple of hit there throughout the day, all day. And it allows me to relax. I don’t have to do any ADHD pills. I use cannabis to manage that. It’s called self-medication. And I’m a big, I have my medical cannabis card in California. So I’m legal. So if anybody’s wondering, I believe that this medical cannabis deal is a beautiful thing. I think there’s, how many states are legal right now, Chip? 33 or…?

Chip: I mean, there’s more legal than not right now.

Jim: We should celebration of like, a special little song. [inaudible 31:40] a cannabis song.

Chip: Smoking weed makes me feel fine. Legalize another state.

Jim: You gotta put an auto button for sure. Give your host a stop button too.

Chip: Like a hook.

Jim: What are you smoking, man? What are you smoking?

Chip: I’m smoking right now, I’m fixing to roll up some Kush 19. It’s from our light depth here in Oklahoma.

Jim: Hey, so one of our customers, we were meeting them, they hadn’t bought the business yet. I was looking at investing in it. We all took a break and we all rolled joints up. But Chip made a comment. Remember that you made a comment that, “Hey, this weed is from a buddy of mine.” Right? And the investor said, he told me off record, “I will never invest in somebody that doesn’t smoke their own – ”

Chip: Smoke their own weed.

Jim: It was a really funny statement. So that’s kind of what we’re dealing with here, this guy –

Chip: They’re nice people. They just didn’t understand what was going on.

Jim: They did not get it.

Chip: Like hey, Chip’s looking for the best weed in the world. He’s not ever gonna buy any of that shit. I was coming to see Jim, so I looked for the best weed I could find. And because man, I don’t have it all the time. And even though I’m smoking our own cultivated weed right now, in the other room I also have some variety of weed from [inaudible 33:26] Genetics, a local Oklahoma company. Man, I love their Grandpa’s Breath and their [inaudible 33:28], big up the jive. If you’re in Oklahoma, look for them at your local dispensary or come to Bakers Medical and ask for it there. They have great weed.

Chip: I smoked it. I’ve smoked it for sure. Yeah, I just smoked a couple hits of that outdoor. The thing about indoor, it seems like the whole joint, you can taste the flavor of it. I guess is that’s the terpenes that you’re tasting or what is it?

Chip: Oh, Jim. Man, you just got to get good outdoor, dude. It is the full flavor, like that really good, greenhouse, organic grown outdoor. That’s the flavor all the way down? Oh my god dude, it’s just so good, right?

Jim: Prove it.

Chip: Hey, I’ll tell you what, I got terpene tests that say that my outdoor here and my greenhouse does prove it. And it is higher than terpene test from indoors of the same strains, right? So we actually do have that proof. Man, the extract –

Jim: What causes that? Does the heat bring up, do you think the heat causes, creates a –

Chip: Man, especially in the greenhouse, it’s in this natural environment that’s still protected, right? And part of the terpenes and the secondary compounds are to like, fly off the plant and either act as an attractant, or repel pests, or be a memory to an animal that eats it. Right? It’s like, “Oh, don’t go near that funny smell and skunk weed, because we got high as fuck last time, we’ve had to eat the seeds out of it.” Right, that’s the initial purpose of it all. But then like, we’ve like, “Oh, I like the myrcene, I like the limonene, and breed that in there. And select for that. And that’s what we, as humans have done to increase it. So in a greenhouse, they’re contained, and they don’t blow off so much, but they still get the natural sun. But then you use a UV resistant plastic on top of it, that that pulls out a bunch of the UV. And that whole accumulation of things, I believe makes greenhouse weed have the highest terpene. I mean, I’m not the only person saying it. I’m pretty sure it’s already been proven. Now, you cannot, you can get the worst terpene profile out of bad greenhouse operations, or bad genetics, right? ‘Cause that happens too.

Jim: Okay, well I have to be more openminded. I’ll see –

Chip: Hey, man, I’m not claiming to have great weed right now. And, we’ve been growing our outdoor for extraction. We’ve just pulled some, light depth is pretty good. But I’m just gonna say it’s pretty good. I got a high opinion of it all. And man, it was real rough here this year. It was wet, it was humid. At almost every harvest period we had throughout the summer, because we had multiple ones, whether it was auto flowers light depths, traditionally powered outdoor, it’s just been so wet, man. And –

Jim: What you’re doing is people don’t, and a lot of people probably understand, that is much R&D that you do.

Chip: Oh, it’s all R&D. Oh, yeah, totally. It’s all R&D. And that’s the beauty of Oklahoma is that we man, I mean, we’ve grown so many different weeds. Five or six different techniques, greenhouse, outdoor, clones of seeds, light depth, late season planting. I mean, we’ve planted 20,000 seeds this past year, kill off a bunch of seeds, threw a bunch of stuff away, extracted it all. And the point was, we’re looking for genetics that thrive here in Oklahoma, under several conditions. Light depth, early planting, light planting, full season, indoor, and that’s kind of part of it all. It’s just like, I am absolutely a shotgun approach guy to it, and just plant out shit ton as much as you can in Oklahoma. I’ve never been able to plant out this much. So we planted out more than we could control. Man, we’ve seen some great, great, great, great returns out of it. We’ve had some plants that didn’t survive at all. We had some auto flowers that didn’t work out at all. We had some auto flowers that worked out great. We’ve planted every single month, March, April, May, June, July, August, September. And it really, really learned a lot about what’s going on here.

Jim: Bring up a couple of like, a couple of the obstacles that you did and how you pivoted, maybe an example of how –

Chip: Well man, I’ll tell you that the biggest obstacle we had this year was material supply early in the season. COVID had hit in March, everything was fucking crazy. Looking back and oh it was just nuts, man. We’re gonna be feeling that PTSD for years. But couldn’t get materials, couldn’t get supplies. Everybody was weeks out of stuff. And so we had planned on putting 40,000 square feet of hoop, right? We got to 19,000 and I just couldn’t put up anymore. We had been delayed because of, and we had started in February putting this stuff up. We had a hard time getting employees, man. We had a hard time getting farmworkers. We had about 12 different people come out and the heat just crushed them. Because man, if you’re not used to working outside, the heat here in Oklahoma will crush you, right? Hands fucking down. And we’re even like, cautious about it all. But still, it’s a hard job, man.

Jim: It’s farming.

Chip: Yeah, it’s farming. We’re at the ranch. We’re not convenient to any of the big cities. We noticed this man, that many people wanted to come out and work, but they had childcare issues, right? Because their kids couldn’t go to school or couldn’t be under the assistance with their grandparents or whatever it normally had been. And we lost, a bunch of people just couldn’t hang with driving an hour or an hour and a half, and like, having to deal with their kids, right? The kids were I don’t know, just kid stuff, dude. Like, “Oh, babysitter didn’t work out. I’m not feeling good. Oh, you know, this, that, the other.” And because everybody’s kids are home, the normal daycare wasn’t working. We had a problem getting employees here. And I had planned on having six employees for 40,000 square feet of hoop, and 20,000 ish, well, 50,000 square feet of outdoor, that was my plan. That’s what we were prepared for. But we could only get two workers trained and kind of up to speed before like, the season started. And at that point, I decided I wasn’t going to build any more greenhouses. We weren’t going to plan all the outdoor, and we went with just I think, 60,000 square feet, 20,000 square feet of outdoor, and then 19,000 square feet of greenhouse. And then we had another 20,000 square feet of shade out. So we just kind of left all that be. And three people, it was still too much for three people to handle. And that’s three people plus Jessica and me, my wife and me, when we could, when we weren’t working our other jobs, or doing podcasts. So labor was really a big, big problem for us this year. And it threw off my plan. And of course looking back on it, I should have done it differently. But I’ve always been able to get employees and get people to work. And usually, they stay for a long time. And it was just, it’s just been difficult this year, man. That’s been the biggest problem for me this year, was employees at the farm.

Jim: Labor. Labor is tough right now, man. We’re dealing with that big time with our companies. Nobody wants to work. The government gave out. It’s really weird because in March –

Chip: Well, it’s more complicated than nobody wants to work, that childcare issues that they deal.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Chip: Like, I’ve literally had employees, because we’re an essential business. We never stopped working Cultivate Colorado, Growers Coco never stopped working. And we’ve had some employees that have had to quit to take care of the kids.

Jim: That’s sad. But it’s not it’s not the worst thing for the kids. The parents can deal with it. But I’ve heard there’s a lot of parents that aren’t dealing with it very well. I mean, I used to do those clinics at these schools. And what they actually did more than I’ve ever done is drink margaritas afterwards. It’s like, holy shit. That’s, it’s hard to be, teaching kids all day every day. And like, we didn’t have to go. We were like, grandparents. We didn’t have to go back the next day. And it was still not easy. But if you got kids, certain kids, I’m sure you don’t get along with everybody. And if you got to go back to the same environment every day, oh my god. More power to the teachers. They don’t make enough money.

Chip: Oh, teachers. That’s the hardest job, man, that one. More power to you, man. It’s changing, this whole thing’s changing education, that’s for sure

Jim: It’s got to be better. We got to get better at – you know what the cool thing about is, Chip? I think we can now we can spread our wings a little better and get the best teachers, and give them the best platform to teach more kids.

Chip: Yeah. Oh, yeah, man.

Jim: That’s what it all is. It’s like fucking, it’s opening up that opportunity. It’s like a, it’s a beautiful thing, really. Sad, but true. We should take advantage of it, because now Zoom, and dude. You called Zoom, I bought Zoom.

Chip: I should have, oh man. That was a good call, wasn’t it?

Jim: Chip, I sold most of mine and kept just 10 shares, but I’ve made so much money on that. And I had 50 shares based off of what you said, I bought it the day you said it. I said, “Wow, that’s it.” And that’s every day, people should have business partners like us. They could brainstorm for 10, 30 minutes, whatever it is, and little shit like that comes up. And so yeah, the idea, I can’t wait for the next podcast, dude. Let’s schedule it. If you got a company that you’re interested in reviewing, be the first company. We could go, we don’t have to name your company. We can keep it generic, neutral. We can [inaudible 44:33]

Chip: Well, you know, there is the thing is people are scared to talk about their numbers, often, right? You can be anonymous. Like, I was thinking about just pulling up one of my businesses from like, five years ago or something. I could probably feel comfortable talking about stuff from way back then.

Jim: We would definitely do it anonymous. I mean, there’s no reason to, and we can even keep the owner’s name –

Chip: Unless you didn’t care. Unless you didn’t care.

Jim: Yeah, maybe you just sold your business and it doesn’t matter. Or there’s something like you’re getting ready to sell it, and you want some help. We’re going to give you free help. I’m going to include my CFO, his name is John Beasley. I call them John 420. Have him help us out, let him evaluate it. And 420 John and I’ve got, we got Erin.

Chip: For all those who love the weed, roll it up and smoke it now.

Jim: This has been really good chip. I hope we can –

Chip: It’s been great man. Thanks for coming on. I know we kind of just started babbling here as soon as we started smoking weed. This Kush 19 is great, man. Oh, it’s a novel kush, it’s 707 Kush seeds that we planted in 2019, sussed it out. This is really great, great kush variant for Oklahoma.

Jim: What’s your dispensary called?

Chip: Bakers Medical. It’s actually my wife’s dispensary. Yep, yep. Wife dispensary, Baker’s medical. She’s there every day, we sell clones.

Jim: And healthcare insurance.

Chip: And yeah, if you want a health care camp shirt, go to Baker’s Medical. This Kush 19 wow, it’s coming soon. This tastes good. It’s not great, though, man. It’s just good.

Jim: Oh it’s just okay?

Chip: It’s just good. I’m not, no, no, no, no, no, it’s good. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good. It might be okay weed, but it’s okay.

Jim: Better than okay?

Chip: No, it is not okay okay. Okay okay? Okay no, okay okay.

Jim: That’s okay good.

Chip: No, this is good. This is okay, good. This is good okay. This is good okay. There we go. Okay okay, good okay, great okay.

Jim: And that’s how it is. Already scheduled for the day.

Chip: Yeah. And man hey, I do have some great okay, dude. This Durbin Thai Highflyer. It’s a strain we grew 15, 20 years ago maybe? We got a cross that in this other seed 99 from Brothers Grimm seeds. Super up. Oh, awesome, awesome, awesome high. “Sativa” high. This Apollo 11 also from him, super, super, got really buzzy, electric weed, man. I know you’re more of the medical medicinal side, but I really love that buzzy electric high man.

Jim: I need to try that more In the morning.

Chip: Yeah, totally. Well, it’s been great having you Jim. Thanks a lot for joining us on The Real Dirt. Give me your contacts, how do people get in contact with you or want to hear more about your story?

Jim: Best way to contact me is jim@timerichcbd.com

Chip: There we go. And you’ve got some LinkedIn?

Jim: LinkedIn, Jim Gerencser. Facebook, private message me. Google Jim Gerencser, you’ll find me.

Chip: You can check his bio out at greenerconsultinggroup.com.

Jim: You’ll get Chip and I right now. At this stage, you get Chip and I, and all the introductory calls. So we’re excited to be talking to everybody. Have a good 420. Good deal, Chip. Awesome job.

Chip: Yeah. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode would like to listen to others, download The Real Dirt podcast on iTunes or Spotify. Hey, just subscribe. That’s the best thing that can happen to you and the best thing that can happen to us. But the more that people that listen, the bigger our network grows and the better this whole community gets. So once again, I really enjoyed this episode. I really enjoyed talking to you guys. And if you all do something for me this week, man is give a brother or sister a call randomly if you haven’t talked to them in a while. Give ’em a call. And just tell ’em that you love ’em and you wish you could burn a fat one with them. Thanks, this has been the real joing. Real joint. This is the real joint. This has been The Real Dirt. Thanks again.

Jim: See y’all later. Have a great day. See ya, Chip.

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The Real Dirt on Cannabis Consultants [ PT. 1 ]

by The Real Dirt | Oct 6, 2020 | cannabis business, cannabis industry, Cannabis science, Hemp, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes, Weed talk

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Got a grow problem? There’s a consultant for that!

At least that’s what it seems like these days.

The cannabis industry is inundated with consultants. From solving a pest problem to something as simple as picking out the proper nutrients for your first grow, people will hire a consultant for just about anything. It’s got a little bit to do with laziness and money, but more so a lack of knowledge about the plant.

When a new commercial cannabis operator is handed a bunch of money by investors and told to be successful, that’s a lot of stress thrown onto a person’s shoulders. Especially if that person is inexperienced or has only grown on a smaller scale, they will need help.

But just like any other industry, the cannabis industry has no shortage of snake oil salesman. These people call themselves “consultants”, but they usually just have one little trick or “bro-science” technique that worked a handful of times with their friends, so now they think they have the knowledge to tell others how to fix their problems.

A New Type of Cannabis Consulting

As the cannabis industry grows and the consulting market becomes more saturated, it has become easier to pick out the fake consultants and find the real experts. But the problem still remains; most of these experts only excel in one area. Whether its pest management, cultivation techniques, extraction technology, banking or security, it’s extremely rare to find a consultant with experience in all of the above.

That’s why Chip and his good friend and business partner Jim Gerencser came up with Greener Consulting Group, a firm of cannabis consultants with dedicated areas of expertise. Traditionally, a consultant operates alone in a contractor capacity. But Greener Group has evolved the cannabis consultant, and turned it into a team that can solve any problem in-house.

Greener Group aims to remove the hassle of searching the web and asking associates for consultant recommendations for every individual problem. No matter what the issue is, one or more of the consultants from Greener Consulting Group has the skills and industry experience to solve it, guaranteed.

In Part One of this two-part episode, Chip and Jim dive into the real dirt of cannabis consulting and how dirty the industry really gets. Plus, hear about which states are doing regulation right and which got it completely wrong, and what the future holds for medical and legal cannabis states in the aftermath of COVID and plenty of classic ganja talk between a couple stoners.

Roll up another one, sit back or get back in the grow, and enjoy this episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker!

Connect with Greener Consulting Group

Greener Group Facebook

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Get great deals on grow gear:

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Transcript

Chip: Today on The Real Dirt, I have my good friend and partner. I mean, I’ve known you all this time and I can’t even pronounce your name correctly. Jim Gerencser.

Jim: My first name is Jim. My last name is Hungarian. It’s Gerencser, the cs is a letter in Hungary. I learned that last year when I went to Budapest.

Chip: Oh, that’s why I can’t pronounce it.

Jim: That’s why you can’t pronounce it. Yeah, you only have 26 letters in your alphabet. They got like, 41 or something like that. But I’m glad to be her.

Chip: I mean, thanks dude. Thanks for joining me. I’m glad we got you on. Me and Jim have been, we got a bunch of projects the past year or so. We met through a group called Baby Bathwater. It’s a networking, marketing group, entrepreneur group. And we didn’t even meet there though. Did we?

Jim: We didn’t even meet there.

Chip: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: I basically was on the island in Croatia, this private island for a week with all these, 150 people. I’ve met one of them before. And I probably became best friends with 30 of them. And I took over Chip’s job on the island.

Chip: And with the Baby Bathwater. I’m usually –

Jim: The cannabis –

Chip: I roll it up. Yeah, I’m the cannabis guy. I roll it up.

Jim: Yeah, they don’t have to hide that does that in Baby Bathwater. They outsource it to Chip. When Chip wasn’t there, it was a break in the supply chain. And, I started two days before I got there trying to create the supply chain. So they probably figured I was the best guy to keep it rolling. Honestly, I’m pretty good at that.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. So the story I hear is after this event, it’s basically like a five-day crash course in advanced entrepreneurism and marketing, mixed with five days of long nights. It’s a pretty incredible place. But after the fact, a couple of days after it came, people called me up and he’s like, “Oh, man, you’ve got to meet Jim. Oh, you got to meet Jim.” Two different people like, sent us friend emails, right? You know, “Chip, meet Jim. Jim meet Chip.”

Jim: That’s the cool thing about the group. Yeah, they kind of mix and match you a little bit and then try to find either like-minded, or opposite-minded people that seem to get along. And honestly, they nailed this one.

Chip: Oh dude, me and Jim get along so well. You’re kind of like an evil older brother.

Jim: Yeah, I’m an evil older brother, but also with the cousin side to it. You know like, you got your cousin that you believe in 100%, because you have to, right? I mean, you’re in there. You’re messing with your parents and your parents are, came from the same family, you know? So it’s not like, you can trick them. Like, you can trick fuck everybody else. So yeah, you learn a lot from cousins. And I only had one brother. I didn’t have any younger brothers. So I think Chip and I have a love hate relationship in terms of we love a lot of things together. And we don’t hate anything, really. I mean, that’s the neatest part about us. We’re not haters.

Chip: Oh, yeah man. Not haters at all.

Jim: We don’t spend lot of time even going there. And anybody that has any of that in them doesn’t seem like they are allowed in what we’re doing. So it’s that simple, which is pretty awesome.

Chip : Well, yeah, hate’s a kind of a natural thing people have. I’ve really have had to work it, work with it. Coming from the south, Southerners are typically like, haters of things, right? That’s not Southern.

Jim: That’s sort of default.

Chip: Right?

Jim: Yeah.

Chip: Yeah, that’s their default for good or for bad. It creates a lot of interesting cultural things, that’s good for it. I generally try not to prejudge or, hate, I’ve had to work on it. I’ve had to work on it.

Jim: I think Chip, that’s a good point. I believe that this entrepreneur group that we met through is a group that works on stuff, and you see that. And when I was there, one of the shows I went to, I think it was a marketing guy that runs all the advertising for Peloton. He started off the conversation with, “Who here is an entrepreneur?” Everybody raised their hand, so it was kind of humbling in the fact that, you brought that many entrepreneurs together. And we were all there to learn more. It was like, yeah, we’re entrepreneurs, but we’re thriving, we thrive for more information. And we’re all there together, not competing. We all could probably be in the same industry, because everybody’s fighting for the almighty dollar, in one way or another. But yeah, well that’s what I liked about it most. And afterwards when I sought out my cannabis, because I’m a medical cannabis guy, I’ve seen cannabis work for curing cancer and fighting cancer and making cancer cells commit suicide. So, my whole goal in this cannabis space was to meet somebody that I think can help me get to that space faster.

Chip: So Jim calls me, to the listeners of the podcast, I’m a very friendly person, but I’m very busy. And I have a lot of different projects. And I don’t really take meetings with people I don’t know. I communicate with people over the phone, or try to email back and forth with people in tool, like there’s a reason to me, and this is all pre-COVID, too. So it was back to my old MO of like, “Hey, would love to chat with you. Let’s get on the phone.” Right? Like, “What do you want?” on an email. And Jim wouldn’t be straight with me. He was like, “Well, I’d rather just come and see. You know, so I keep blowing Jim off. And then one day, he just showed up, right? Just like that. He’s like, “I’m coming tomorrow. I’ll be there at noon.”

Jim: I’m “the shorter the notice, the better” kind of guy.

Chip: Yeah, right. Yeah. He’s like a bill collector. You’re like a bill collector.

Jim: You don’t tell him you’re coming. Yeah.

Chip: Right. So Jim shows up, we meet, we hit it off immediately. Jim smoked more weed than I do. He immediately had some great, great weed. We smoked like, 10 joints in my store, before it was a store, I just rented the facility, my grow store, Cultivate. I just rented the facility. It was empty warehouse and we smoked it out, dreamed of what to be, huh Jim?

Jim: Yeah, I was looking for, I don’t know what I was looking for, Chip. I was looking for somebody like you. I didn’t –

Chip: You wanted to get into the cannabis industry.

Jim: I did. I wanted to be –

Chip: You’re a successful businessperson. And you wanted to get in the cannabis industry and didn’t quite know how, but love weed.

Jim: That’s it. That’s it, I saw all the things happening. I’ve got a bunch of my friends that are either retired or getting ready to retire. Half of them have never smoked a joint in their life, but they know that I have partaken my whole life. So they were reaching out to me like, “What do we do? Who do we invest in? How do we get into the space?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Let me find out.” So I started digging into it and honestly felt like I’ve gone through like a four-year education class in the last 12 months with Chip, because Chip is one of those guys that actually knows business, which I immediately realized that. I was like, “This guy is actually a business guy. And he’s in the cannabis space.” Because what I had experienced on a small scale was that you’re either one of the other. Like, most engineers don’t sell, you know what I mean? And that’s kind of what I consider like oil and water. You’re either an engineer, or you’re a salesperson, no way in hell you’re both. To actually make a certain person that can talk to both people, because they call it a liaison, because they can’t even talk to each other, they’re so far apart. So that’s what I really wanted to do in this space, is learn as much as I possibly could. There’s so much to learn about it, and what I ran into was a [inaudible 8:02]. Chip introduced me to so much crap I don’t even care about, but I was interested in it. I wanted to learn as much as I can and not that I’m a huge education freak, but this space intrigues me. So here we are a year later, we’ve run multiple different deals together. I’ve invested in some of his businesses, he’s given me some direction on some other businesses to invest in or not to invest in, which is probably the most important thing, what not to invest in. You got to –

Chip: Yeah, when to say no.

Jim: When to say no, you got to love what you’re doing, and I did love it. And like I said, now I’ve run the course of a year of investing, finding out that yeah, everybody in the space is cool, but I’m not sure I love everybody in the space. I don’t hate anybody, but I’m not sure I love everybody.

Chip: Well, many people just, they’re on a wing and a prayer, or they have like this idea, or this thing they want to do, and it might not have anything to do with the business of cannabis actually making a profit, which can be cool, man, right? Like those guys that are doing RSO for a penny a gram. Man, coolest thing possible right? But it’s a nonprofit business in the truest sense.

Jim: It really is. They don’t even let you expense your labor. What the hell, man? I mean, what kind of business, it’s just such a federal, this is a federal fucking. it’s literally at the point, it sets a epitome of getting fucked.

Chip: Right, right. And Jim, speaking of the taxes, the 280 East Tax System. And basically, we in the cannabis industry get taxed at gross profit instead of net profit. And you guys can all go look that up, but it’s basically profit before expenses as gross profit. And cannabis industry generally can’t take off. Expenses only cost a good soul.

Jim: Which is ridiculous. So everyone is forced to kind of you know, still remain outlaws, right? I mean, we’ve talked about that from the beginning, Chip, we’re guaranteed outlaws. I mean, we were forced into it. We’re at different levels, but we’re definitely considered, you definitely would look at stuff out of the dictionary, and you would see pictures of us as an outlaw. Sure, no doubt.

Chip: Not criminals.

Jim: Not criminal.

Chip: But outside the law.

Jim: We’re forced to be outside the law.

Chip: Yeah, forced. Forced, not even like by choice. It’s like, oh, man, we can’t have normal banking. And since then, like Jim said, we’ve set up several cannabis businesses together and joined some other businesses. I previously had a hemp seed distribution company, that was more of just like a brokerage. We’ve taken that and we’re turned it into certified seeds. And we’ll launch that later on this year. It’ll be an online marketplace for certified hemp seeds.

Jim: The one stop shop.

Chip: One stop shop, multiple vendors. We’re not making any of the seeds. They’re all from the highest and most reputable vendors in the country associated with this.

Jim: Yeah so we started, we spent our time going through it, sure we have the best vendors instead of trying to grow the best seed.

Chip: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve gotten a bank account for that and how long did that take?

Jim: It took six months.

Chip: It took six months to get a bank account.

Jim: For hemp seeds, hemp seeds. And by the way, they’re legal. Interesting thing. And that’s what, this brought us to our most recent venture, right, Chip? I mean –

Chip: Oh, yeah, yeah, Greener Group.

Jim: Greener Group, yeah.

Chip: Greener Group.

Jim: Something I think that we’re both more excited about than anything else that we’ve got going. I mean, in terms of our deals, Chip has a lot of stuff going on, and so do I individually. But together, Greener Group is our baby. We’re nurturing it to a point, we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with, what space but we’re kind of dialing it in.

Chip: Just totally hit the ground running, that’s for sure, man. So you can check it out at greenerconsultinggroup.com. It’s a new website, you might have to like, look for it a little bit. You can find us on LinkedIn, on well, Facebook’s already kicked us out, but Instagram. What I realized was for years, people have been asking me for consulting, and I’ve done it sparingly over time. A big part of it was because I’ve just got so many other businesses, it’s hard to like, dedicate the time to somebody when they need to solve a cultivation problem. So over the years, we developed a lot of technical consultation that was just free of service at Cultivate Colorado, and it still remains true, right? If you want to light design or dehumidifier design, you just tell us the square footage and we’ll tell you immediately how many lights or dehumidifiers you need. I’ve shied away from all the other consultation, but what I realized was Jim had this really great business in the automotive industry. And one of the things that I really consider one of my assets, I look at what everybody’s doing, and I try to bring in great stuff from it. And Jim has this great business that he operates nationally. And I thought to myself, “Man, this is a great way to do this with cannabis as well.” Jim, tell me about Nationwide.

Jim: Yes, so what we do is we manage vendors across the country for recalls before they get to the dealer. So auto manufacturer –

Chip: Automobile recalls.

Jim: Automobile recalls. So a car that normally gets sold at a dealer has a recall, you go back to the dealer, they fix it. What we do is we manage these projects for the cars that have not been sold to the dealers, and they’re normally by the thousands. We go out there and bring whatever crews necessary. So they might need engines replaced, or they might need a light bulb replaced. So you don’t have the same people doing it. So I don’t hire these people until I need them. And when Chip was telling me he’s got this database of consultants that do from seed to sale, I was like, “Why don’t we just incorporate that into what we’re doing at Nationwide, and manage these vendors on an as needed basis?”

Chip: Yeah, Jim started like, listening to my phone calls basically. I was, you know, are hearing me complain about or talk or about like, my life or schedule, and he realized this, right? He was like, “Wow, man, your network is incredible.” I mean, I think you were the first person to really bring it up, Jimmy.

Jim: Yeah, well, everybody else has took it for granted. Because Chip, they don’t want to tell you anything, because they wanted you to keep giving them free information for the rest of their life. And that’s my biggest challenge is to get you to quit, we don’t want to quit giving free information, but we got to draw the line somewhere, right? It’s a bit, people take advantage of it. And well –

Chip: I definitely agree with that. But I’ll also say that by my unconditional giving, it’s brought me my network that I have.

Jim: I agree.

Chip: And what you have made me understand is there is a way that we can make business out of this information, and I’ll still be able to unconditionally give. Because like this podcast, we unconditionally give to people, right? Like yeah, I do this podcast to lead gen for all my other businesses and tell you about cultivatecolorado.com, and tell you about cultivateokc.com, and tell you about growerscoco.com, all my potting soil, and now Growers, and now Greener Group, too. We’re telling you about Greener Group but really like, I started this podcast because I wanted good information to go out to people about ganja, hemp, medical marijuana. I don’t use the laws, destroy the misconceptions and myths. And that’s all unconditional, mind conditional giving on the spot.

Jim: It’s a show of your unconditional love for the for the cannabis plant. I’s simple as getting people educated. I didn’t know that cannabis was both hemp and marijuana. It’s a very simple thing, but I’ve been around it my whole life, didn’t know that. Basically starting with that, it makes you realize that all these things, hemp is legal. It’s the same plant as cannabis as marijuana, or high THC cannabis is what they refer to it as, and low THC cannabis is hemp. One’s legal, one’s not, what the hell, man? So I want to talk a little bit about my project I’ve got going right now that we’re working through your grow in Oklahoma.

Chip: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s talk about The Health Camp and Eric and all of that.

Jim: Yeah, The Health Camp is one of the big projects that I’ve got going right now. It’s an app that’s going all out. One of the programs I’m working with currently, it’s called Cannabis Oil Success Stories. And it’s 175,000 people on a Facebook private group that share these stories about how cannabis has helped them fight cancer. And I’ve been looking at this page for a year and a half or two years. And when I met Chip, my intention was to make the best oil and share it with everybody. But then I realized that there’s a lot of good oils out there, and that I could probably be better spent using my passion to create a place to have everybody share their information. And then we can go through, and aggregate the data, and be able to find out the best way to use what product on what cancer for what type of person, and be able to get that information to the general public. Right now, it’s kind of hidden. It’s there, but it’s hidden. So I’m creating an app called Health Camp Buddy. Health Camp has THC in it. And it starts with the word Health, heal. Heal is a really big part of our world. And we’re creating this app, it’s a social media type of crowdsourcing platform that allows people that have used cannabis successfully, to be able to enter their information and we’ll aggregate it into a result that will be able to give a person that’s dealing with cancer the information easily generated for them. So they can either have access to the oil, and know what kind of oil to get, what oils work best for what type of cancers, certain body types work better with different types of FECO oils. We’re talking about fully extracted cannabis oil is what I’m focusing on. There’s a lot of other things that you can put with it, but I think my reason I’m on earth is to be able to focus on the FECO oil itself. So I’m going to be giving this app together, we’ve actually got phase one done. I expect it to be completely finished within the next month. I’m excited as hell about it. I think it’s going to save lives. It’s all ties to this charity that I run, it’s called Early Recognition is Critical. I want to talk to about my son, I could talk about Eric forever. He’s an awesome kid. He’s a three time cancer survivor since he was age eight. And anybody that has kids can relate to the fact of being a parent and being a caretaker of an eight year old son that’s very athletic and loving, and dealing with this kind of shit. So I’ve been dealing with it my whole life. I’m trying to give back. I believe cancer fights cancer, naturally. I don’t think that chemo is the, if it takes chemo, do chemo but also use cannabis. That’s my –

Chip: Oh, absolutely, man. Absolutely,

Jim: So it’s been awesome. Chip’s got a lot of experience with a lot of people. I’m using his network. We’re growing some marijuana in Oklahoma specifically to be able to be made into the best FECO oil, and different types of strains because each strain is different. I mean, you want indica for cancer, if you’re fighting cancer you don’t use CBD. You might use CBG, you might use CBA, but you need THC. And you need high THC indica, which is a very sedative cannabis compared to the sativa, which is a little more of a head high. It’s more medicinal, yeah kicks your ass. When you’re sick, you need to rest. So yeah, that’s what I got going on. And with the help of what Chip’s got going on, we’re working together to, we give back. It’s one thing that I love about Chip is the first day we talked about the Eric Charity and Chip wanted to, I could see in his eyes, he was a giver. And I learned at a late age that you giving back feels really good. I was selfish I guess, growing up. I’m a unique individual, I actually got divorced 12 years ago, and I’m back with my ex-wife so I don’t give up easy. So beware.

Chip: Alright, let’s not turn this into tilling the ball now. Come on, this is The Real Dirt podcast about cannabis, mostly.

Jim: Let’s do it. Alright, I’ll smoke it.

Chip: What are you smoking on today, Jim?

Jim: Some Humboldt. The same.

Chip: Oh, okay. Yeah, I got you. I’m on the porch this morning, this is a Friday morning porch session. And we got a tractor driving by.

Jim: Chip’s got the best porch, on the best thousand foot view in Oklahoma.

Chip: We’re a thousand foot high here in Oklahoma.

Jim: The weed is just okay, basically. So

Chip: t’s okay, kush okay. Yeah, Oklahoma has been a really great place for growing ganja. I mean, it has its set of circumstantial issues. But every place does, and yeah, Northern California has the best climate, when the climates right there to any place in the world probably. South Africa aand here also has similar type of climate. Maybe Argentina.

Jim: Is that the same longitude, latitude? I mean –

Chip: It is, except those on the southern hemisphere. And but it’s similar coastal mountain type environment. Lots of indicator species, and wine, and grapes. And that’s kind of how I relate it, but hey, look. In Northern California in Oregon, the West Coast man, forest fires, dude.

Jim: Oh my god.

Chip: Right? Like, devastating the smoke. And like, sometimes it’s okay, but other times, it’s just totally ruined. And even if you don’t get burned out, it can be difficult there too. And last year here in Oklahoma, it was just hot, dry and windy. And this year, it hasn’t been as hot. But it’s definitely been more humid and with less wind. It’s definitely has its challenges, and we have been challenged, you know what I mean? We keep pushing the envelope, and COVID, and the employment shortage, all that caused us problems. I mean, I’ve been doing this my whole life. There’s no sure homeruns.

Jim: That’s why if anybody needs any help in Oklahoma specifically or Colorado or California, Chip’s the guy. He’s already been there, done that. He’ll wear a suit coat, I think. I probably won’t.

Chip: A suit coat. Man, I look fresh and clean. Jim, however, he’s gonna come right off the frisbee golf course, and pull off his visor, right? And go into the board meeting.

Jim: You may be right. Maybe that would be [inaudible 23:41]. But yeah, so we got a killer deal work –

Chip: Hey, Greener Group, man I mean, yeah. Yeah, let’s talk about Greener Group.

Jim: Let’s talk about Greener Group, yeah.

Chip: So what we’ve done is we have compiled a large group of experts in the field of cannabis that are already working as consultants in the cannabis space. And here’s what we realized, is even the best of the people, they started out just being best in their fields, right? And they know how to grow cannabis and scale it, or they know how to do financial assessments of cannabis businesses, or they know how to operate cannabis businesses. And they kind of just got like, through opportunity. They got moved in the consultant space, which is more of an entrepreneurial space, right? But in their heart, they’re tradesmen and experts in their exact field. And they have a hard time running business, because business is hard to run. So what we’ve done is we’ve aligned these guys, right? Right now, we’ve got 12 people that are official lead consultants for us. But I mean, the network is endless. If you call us in any state, pretty much I’ve got someone close to you that we can work with. We’ve built this network of consultants now. You call us up, we have a conversation about what your problems are, what your goals are, what you want to solve, whether you’re buying a cannabis business, or you’re building a cannabis business.

Jim: Or you want to invest in a cannabis business,

Chip: You want to invest in a cannabis business. I mean, we’ve talked to all of those types of people. We’ve talked to government agents, we’ve talked to investment groups,

Jim: Money laundering specialists.

Chip: Money, yeah, I hate that term. So deceiving, but it’s bank relationship specialist, we’ll just go ahead and explain that right now, so we don’t get off topic. Which is, hey man, if you are a bank, and you want to open a business to cannabis people, you have to do it in a certain way. So you bring on someone to help you do that. And our guy is one of the leaders in doing this. So you call us up, we chat with you about what your goals are, your problems are, we’ve got this list of consultants. We pull out our consultants, send them on the task, and they’re usually I mean, it’s usually accomplished, like, quickly. We’ve got a couple of projects that seem to last a little long, but like, they’ve almost, that’s the beauty of our network, right, Jim? Is we solve some problems immediately.

Jim: We’ve already seen them all.

Chip: Famous story about Picasso is – I don’t know if it’s real or not, maybe it’s not Picasso, but I think it is. A lady walked up and was like, “Oh, hey, Picasso, could you sign this paper, sign this napkin?” And so he does a little doodle, signs it and says, “That’ll be $30,000.” Like, “Wait a minute. That only took you 15 seconds.” He was like, “No that took me 30 years.” It’s just kind of an example of how it works with us, too. It’s like, we’ve already heard all the problems, right? Just like our call yesterday with a bug problem the guy had, like, we immediately know how to solve that. But many other consultants or groups of people, they want to hook you in for a year-long contract, and we just want to solve your problem, walk away, right? And that’s really been our success is that like in just a matter of a day or two, we can solve most people’s problems.

Jim: The thing about this project with Chip and I is that we already have our livelihood covered. So we’re not desperate for like, paying overhead with –

Chip: Business, right?

Jim: It’s not a hobby, but it’s like a passion for us. I like to claim we bring the culture. I’m not sure Chip’s a big lover of that, because he’s been in, he’s been that guy for so long. And I haven’t been, so it’s kind of fresh to me. But I believe it’s important to bring that. I mean, Chip and his group have helped me make smart decisions on investments going forward. I highly recommend, if you’re 60 years old, and you want to invest in cannabis call Greener Group. I mean, we’ll go over stuff with you that you never have thought about. We can look at your books, we have a CFO that works for us, that works for multiple cannabis companies across the board. We’ve got people that –

Chip: Right, we can in one hour decide, like tell you literally if some investment opportunity is is full of shit, or worth investigating. And we’ve done that a couple of different times, it’s really amazing. Because we have so much experience in the cannabis industry, we can immediately look at operational costs and expenses, and tell if it’s real or not.

Jim: You can’t hide from our group because we have, we’re not one dimensional. We’re multi-dimensional. We’re like full spectrum. We’re full spectrum consultants. It is not us our way or the highway, when you call us and talk to us, you’ll realize that right away. We’ve got a great team together. One of the good things we do with our consultants is we support their back end too. We take that loosely, we support their business side of it that the stuff that they’re not good at. It’s like a doctor, a doctor doesn’t –

Chip: All the reports –

Jim: All the crap that they don’t get.

Chip: All the office support like, it’s really turned the consulting industry into a more professional organization. Because in the past and hey man, no offense to you consultants, you guys know what’s going on. You guys are growers or extractors or businesspeople, and you all need better back end offices. If you got a great back end then yeah, you’re gonna do great.

Jim: It all starts with that, and we’re getting better at it. We’re gonna have all of our guys with an app that can really communicate well with the customer. Like I said, we’re not looking at a full-time gig. We’re in and out. We’re in to fix your problem, get out. We’re problem solvers.

Chip: Yeah. And you know, our consultants also, they’re independent consultants. And so if you’re a cannabis consultant from hemp to extraction, from genetics to banking, IT, whatever, right? Give us an email, man. We want to increase our network and we might have some business for you. And you’re an independent contractor, we’re just helping you guys too, man. Sure, it’s business and I enjoy business, and this is a good, good business to be in. We saw there was a problem in the industry on both the consultant side and on the consumer side.

Jim: And like I said, I’m pushing that investment side guys. Anybody that wants to invest in the cannabis?

Chip: Yeah, absolutely.

Jim: Give us a call. We’ll go through the pros and cons with you. We’re gonna think of stuff that you’ll never think of, I promise you that. Because we have people coming to us on a regular, we’re still learning every day. And what we do is we learn every day, and then we share it with you. It’s a fun business to be part of, being part of Chip’s network has been amazing. All you gotta do is call Greener Group and you’re part of it, man. So it’s that easy. If you have –

Chip: It has been fun though, man. We’ve talked to like, we just launched this business a couple of months ago. We’ve talked to like, so many cool people about projects they’re doing. And working with so many cool people right now on projects, man without naming names or specific locations, like what’s the favorite call that we’ve been on?

Jim: I like the one that came from Tennessee, and they overgrew hemp. Because it was one of the first ones that we had. And these guys were like, “Man, we really don’t know what to do. We basically have thousands of pounds of hemp. We don’t know how to get rid of it. We don’t even know where to start. We don’t know what to do now, because we got so screwed this year. What do we do next year?” They were just completely at end, at wit’s end, you know?

Chip: They were real typical of what was going on in the hemp industry this year for sure.

Jim: Yeah, supply and demand. And –

Chip: I mean, they’re smart people, they were in the agricultural industry. They already had like, success doing other stuff. They’ve already got like, products on the shelves in the oil, ag space, like not cannabis-related at all, or hemp-related at all. They were successful businesspeople and had problems.

Jim: Which is very common. They thought, “Oh, it’ll just be like growing strawberries.” It’s not.

Chip: Yeah, we just grow it and somebody will buy it. And strawberries aren’t like that either, man. And nothing is. It has to have that sales channel.

Jim: I think personally from a business side, that’s the first channel that you should create before you grow anything.

Chip: Oh, yeah. Hey, you know, I mean, one of the things that we do a lot of is branding and marketing. And it just naturally do all of our businesses. And the thing that both of us realized is, you can have the best brand, the best design, the best content, the best advertising, the best product placement of any of your competitors. But the only thing that’s going to drive your brand is sales, right? You have to sell. And honestly, that’s the first channel you should work on, instead of the last. People who try to get work on the opposite side, right? They work on the brand first and –

Jim: The easy stuff. Yeah, they work on the easy stuff. And one thing we’re finding out at Greener is that marketing is tough. Like I said, we got kicked off Facebook. I mean, both Chip and Travis, Travis is one of our partners. And they were like, “It’s not if we’re gonna get kicked off, but how long?” And it’s like, “We got to work around this crap.” There’s constant contact won’t let you send out cannabis stuff.

Chip: Cannabis emails, right.

Jim: So at Greener, we’re figuring this out. We have our own CRM, and we’ll work with you if you need help with anything like that. If you’re starting a dispensary, if you’re getting ready to think about doing a grow, call us first. Let’s talk about a supply chain before you grow them. Yeah, don’t call us after.

Chip: I just realized we were starting to sound like an infomercial, which is totally cool, ’cause it’s my podcast and I can do whatever what I want.

Jim: Yeah, exactly.

Chip: But no, it’s exciting. It’s so exciting to talk to all of these different people. Man, I think my favorite conversation was also a hemp comp. I’ve had two conversations that were my favorite, I think. The cannabis farm on the west coast that wanted to relocate to another state. It was just, it’s difficult with the environment, the fires, the remoteness, the taxes, the state and local taxes over in California are just ridiculous. And they wanted to move, and I really liked this conversation, because they were cannabis, successful cannabis people. They’ve been doing it for a moment. And they realized like, they needed a little help and reached out to us. They were interested in other states that they can move and operate in, because previously California for many, many years was the only place to operate. And now, it’s just not the case. So I really liked that conversation. And man, I also liked that hemp technologies conversation we’ve had. These guys are trying to develop some hemp technologies, and were really approaching in a different manner. And that was really inspiring, because the hemp textile industry is just growing so much, growing so quick.

Jim: It is, and we’ve got a great by the way, we’ve got a excellent connection with textiles, and hemp.

Chip: Yeah, absolutely man. Engineers…

Jim: Hey, we also have the ability to, we’re a specialist at building any kind of app or website in the cannabis space. So let us know, we’ve got all that covered.

Chip: I know it sounds like a one, not a one stop shop. But like, literally, through all of my years of business, I’ve had to do all this stuff for my businesses. And mostly I set up with my own employees or networks of people that now understand cannabis. And so I’m basically opening up my network. Jim has got a huge IT section and programming section to his business right? Like, we can pretty much design or modify any software, build any app or website through in-house means, that’s what you’re saying, Jim, right?

Jim: Yep, yep. We got the capacity, we’ve got people that, the team that’s building Health Camp Buddy. And what they do is, like I said, we can put you on a CRM that you don’t have any restrictions whatsoever. So yeah, give us a call. I’m a marketing, branding guy, I love talking about that. Chip and I dream shit up every morning, I kind of look forward to those calls, because it fires me up. It’s like, it’s better than exercise, that’s for damn sure. It does, it puts us on the same page. And it’s like, we don’t have to, I’ve never had a partner with, I gotta say, Chip, I got it. And he’s like, he hangs up. We don’t waste each other’s time at all. And if you’re going to get a partner, find somebody like that.

Chip: I couldn’t say enough about how much I’ve learned in the past year and a half that we’ve been working together. And I know you said you’ve learned but man, I’ve learned just as much. So that is the beauty of a good working partner relationship, is that you learn from each other. And me and Jim have both have poor partners in the past, and we’ve had exits from businesses that worked out or didn’t work out. And we’ve had a significant amount of experience of working with people. And having an active partner in your relationship, versus an investor is a completely different scenario. We should do a whole podcast about that. How to partner, how just specifically how to partner with people.

Jim: How to get along. It’s a hard thing, man. Get along, I’d start by get a bong, right?

Chip: Get a bong, yeah.

Jim: Yeah. I mean, I totally believe that you’ve got to have something in common with somebody and Chip and I, we found out our common denominator immediately. And we’ve never broken off of that. I mean, we’ve stuck with it, we stayed in course, we pivot left and right. But it always comes back to the, we’re business partners that have become friends. I highly recommend. Don’t partner up with a friend.

Chip: Yeah. That’ s a better way to do it, that’s for sure.

Jim: Become a friend after you become business. That’s my free information I give you. Some of the other things that Chip has brought up that are pretty awesome are that we’re both businesspeople. We believe that entrepreneurship is awesome, I’ve been selling cinnamon toothpicks since I was eight years old. But the number one thing is that we support cannabis. We really believe in it and Chip more than me, he lives it. His goal is to grow more weed than people can smoke. And my goal is aid people’s lives with cannabis. So we got, if you want to participate in this mission, give us a call, man. Follow us. Follow us, Eric is a big mission actually, Chip and I were gonna talk about this and I want to bring it up is that I’m getting ready to –

Chip: Hey, let’s pause for one second breathe. Because Jim will just start talking and get so excited about stuff. But hey, let’s just break for one second and say, this The Real Dirt podcast. Thank you for joining and listening. Please join us on iTunes or Spotify. Hey, and if you’re out in the world, and you need some equipment of some sort, lights, soil nutrients, cultivateokc.com, cultivatecolorado.com. We ship all over the country. Call us if you’re in Colorado. Call us if you’re in Denver. Call us if you’re in Oklahoma. We’ll ship to you. We have commercial accounts. We’re one of the largest purchasers in the country of rock wall general hydroponics, botanic care, pure blend, growers soil, tuber. We ship all over the country. We support cannabis farmers all over the country, specifically in east of the Rockies. But coming to the west coast soon, and look for all of our products in the west coast, 2021. This is The Real Dirt.

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The Devastation of the California Forest Fires on Cannabis Farms

by The Real Dirt | Oct 1, 2020 | cannabis culture, growing, Season 4, The Real Dirt Podcast Episodes, Weed talk

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california forest fires and cannabis farms

There’s a saying that cannabis farmers have to protect their crop from three things; pests, people and police. But California farmers can add fires to that list too.

Jeff from Little Hill Cultivators has been a featured guest on The Real Dirt Podcast more than once, and he’s a personal friend to Chip. We’ve talked with Jeff about his grow practices, growing organic, California craft cannabis…but now we’re talking about a different topic.

Little Hill Cultivators in located right in the valley of the Emerald Triangle in northwestern California, and it’s also right in the center of the raging California forest fires that have been destroying the state for the last few months. Now, the fire is making its way to Jeff’s doorstep.

With minimal support from local firefighters due to their secluded location, Jeff and his team have been on their own to deal with the biggest fires in California’s history as they burn through thousands of acres and put thousands of cannabis farms at risk.

In this exclusive, last-minute episode of The Real Dirt, Chip and Jeff talk about what’s happening in California right now, why it could be happening, what Little Hill is doing to fight and what the future could hold for Jeff and his farm.