From 420 magazine...
Nova Scotia isn’t exactly at the forefront of the country’s burgeoning medical marijuana trade. In the year and a bit since Ottawa threw open the doors to commercial pot producers, 23 companies have been licensed to produce and/or sell medical-grade marijuana, yet not one of those companies is located in the province.
The bulk of licensed producers are in Ontario and British Columbia, but every other province except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador has at least one.
Local startups like the Truro Herbal Co. and Stellarton’s Vida Cannabis Corp. may yet be granted licences, but they’re competing with more than 1,000 other applicants, so there are no guarantees.
In lieu of any production, Nova Scotia’s most notable contribution to the business may well be Amherst master grower Randy Flemming, who has just been hired by the mammoth American Cannabis Co. to oversee its entry into the Canadian market.
American Cannabis doesn’t produce or sell marijuana. Instead, it lays the groundwork for producer-sellers by designing their facilities, establishing operating procedures, procuring plants and doing hiring and training. At the moment, the company has only five clients in Canada, but with so many startups looking for guidance and some established industry cred, that number will rise quickly.
Flemming’s first project is to get two Maritime startups - one in Nova Scotia and one in P.E.I. - ready for production, but after that he’ll be working with companies across the country.
On the face of it, Flemming isn’t the most obvious candidate for the job. Not only is he from a region with no medical marijuana production to speak of, he has no background in business or consulting. Furthermore, he only began working in the field professionally last year, after responding to a Kijiji job post for a master grower.
The company was Moncton’s Organigram, but the man doing the interviewing was American Cannabis co-founder and chief development officer Ellis Smith. According to Smith, finding local talent is a huge challenge in any market, but Flemming revealed himself immediately as a rare bird.
“I realized very quickly that this guy is highly intelligent about cannabis” says Smith, who hired Flemming almost immediately. “You just do not find people with his acumen when it comes to this plant.”
Even allowing for employer hyperbole, the evidence backs Smith up. Under Flemming’s supervision, Organigram was the only producer last year to consistently pass Ottawa’s stringent quality testing; every other producer failed in some capacity at least once, and many have had to replace their master growers.
According to Smith, Health Canada’s top priority is consistency, and the lack of it among startups is the chief reason so few licences have been issued.
In conversation, the 39-year-old Flemming is a man of few words initially, but get him talking about marijuana and it all comes pouring out.
“People don’t understand how special it is,” he enthuses. “It’s not like growing a tomato plant. It grows so much faster than everything else, and there are so many more variables to it.”
Flemming didn’t come to cannabis by being a stoner - he barely touched a joint until he was in his 20s - but through gardening. He started with his mom and dad, growing annuals and perennials in their yard in Truro.
“I’d be 11 years old and digging a 40-foot flower bed while my buddies were out playing baseball or something.”
By the time he was in his mid-teens, he knew how to grow pretty much everything but marijuana, so he began experimenting with it in the woods near his home. He played around with it for several years, but it wasn’t until his mid-20s, when he began using it to treat both early-onset arthritis and his undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, that the hobby became a full-blown obsession.
“I decided then that I would throw my whole life into it.”
Though Flemming insists he never profited from the sale of his plants, which he eventually got an exemption for, he was heavily involved in what he calls “the subculture” for years. Today, he credits that experience for helping to set him apart.
“There are a lot of people out there now trying to break into the industry who were never part of the subculture - they maybe sold lights to a hydroponic store or something - and now they’re calling themselves master growers.
“But those ‘master growers’ just screw companies up and cost them millions of dollars.”
That is, of course, one of the chief challenges of the medical marijuana trade - that so few traditional gardeners and so few traditional engineers have ever dealt with the stuff.
Flemming says he sat in meetings at Organigram listening to engineers reveal how little they knew about, say, the facility’s air conditioning or dehumidification needs. Getting them to listen to him - some punk from small-town Nova Scotia - was never easy. Now that Flemming has joined American Cannabis, he’ll presumably start commanding a little more respect.
Flemming and his employer aim to establish a reputation in Canada as the go-to company for certified organic expertise. According to Smith, many startups are looking to go organic, if only because organic standards are more likely to appease Health Canada.
Flemming himself has always grown organically, but he says his primary interest isn’t in the eco label, per se.
“I just want to grow the best damn pot around.”
Yes, We know!
