Critics often highlight odor nuisances associated with cannabis cultivation, but it is important to acknowledge that vineyards, too, emit strong smells due to the use of agricultural inputs like sulfur. Addressing odor concerns without considering the broader context of other agricultural activities may lead to unfair treatment. Similarly, noise and lighting impacts are often cited as potential drawbacks of cannabis cultivation, but vineyard operations involving heavy equipment and non-downcast lighting practices can also disrupt neighboring communities.
Let’s step off the cannabis farm for a minute and instead look to agriculture as a whole. The cannabis industry has picked up a lot of lessons from the farming world, and while taking a fallow year doesn’t yet appear to be a widely-adopted trend, this year may be different.
While winter brings some time for rest and recovery, for those involved in year-round cultivation, the new season brings added complexities for growing cannabis. The plant is thought to have evolved about 28 million years ago on the eastern Tibetan Plateau, which is home to extremely cold winters. While cannabis can grow in the winter, taking some extra steps to support your greenhouse cannabis cultivation can certainly help.
In a market that’s increasingly being taken over by large-scale production, lower quality, and cheaper prices, it’s important to look at the better alternative: craft cannabis. What makes Giving Tree Farms and other craft cannabis producers stand out? From seed-to-package, there’s a certain mindfulness involved. So, let’s take a look at what harvesting craft cannabis entails.
Fresh-frozen cannabis has taken the cannabis world by storm in recent years. As the name suggests, fresh-frozen cannabis entails freezing the harvest directly after it’s been picked. It’s been growing in popularity—especially as it’s one of the best methods we have to preserve terpenes and cannabinoids.
Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at how we go about producing fresh-frozen cannabis.
As owners and operators, we know how valuable our time is. We wear a dozen different hats, take responsibility for the outcomes, and find ourselves fully immersed in all things business seven days out of the week. But what separates the overwhelmed from the productive is respecting the time we are given each day. Without planning and scheduling, we hurt our business's efficiency, costing ourselves money in the long run.
As anyone with a small business knows, staying afloat isn’t always easy. For those with a small-scale cannabis business, navigating the technical world, securing capital, and staying on top of regulatory compliance add even more complexities. Fortunately, equity grants have made life a little easier for some California growers—here’s how.
Both cannabis and hops have terpenes and terpenoids, but that’s not the only overlap between these two plant-derived worlds. In recent years, similarities—in particular between craft cannabis and craft beer—have become more apparent. So, what can the relatively infantile but similarly regulated craft cannabis industry learn from the older craft beer industry? Let’s take a look.
Fortunately, the world is warming up to medicinal and recreational cannabis. As of October, 2021, recreational cannabis is legal in 19 states, Washington, D.C., and Guam. With this increase in legalization, comes an expansion of cannabis business ventures as well as all of the cannabis compliance and business valuation considerations that come with them.
When purchasing a product, many feel it's important to know where that product came from and how it was made. It's natural to care about the origin of your purchases because they affect our lives, whether directly, like through consuming food we buy, or indirectly, like how our dollars are applied to the business, its employees, and its production process. We care about transparency because it connects us to the source of what we've purchased. It puts an understanding of creation and highlights the efforts taken to make the product into the finished good we hold in our hands. Craft cannabis is no different, and Giving Tree Farms embraces transparency as one of our core values.
With efficiency as one of our main objectives, we like to regularly evaluate our workflow and see if there are areas where we can improve. Because of this, we've made changes along the way, some that turned out well and others that presented challenges. But what we've found through our years of discovery is that a linear workflow design works best for our farm for several reasons, and maybe it will work best for you too.
A successful business operation is a well-oiled machine. All of us cogs have a place in the system, and in order to improve business efficiency, we all have to own our roles and trust others on our team to own theirs. But being a small business owner can make this tough. We're used to having our hands in every aspect of the business, so when should we back off and let others handle their sector? When the "lanes" of our organization start to become defined, it's time to retire a few of our hats, and put our confidence in the team that supports us each day.
Communication comes in many forms, the majority of it being non-verbal. Indeed, only seven percent of all communication is your choice of words, meaning 93 percent is some version of non-verbal interaction, such as body language, tone of voice, behavior, and color choices. With those figures, it's easy to see why non-verbal methods of communication have the most significant impact on how others view us. In a world that's full of these influential bits of media around every corner, it's no wonder businesses and individuals alike take special care to ensure the places they claim as their own are an accurate representation of who they wish to be. We all judge a book by its cover, even when we know it's not always the best illustration of what's inside. Therefore, we have to design our "cover" in a way that angles others to see us how we view ourselves.
When the to-do list spans over multiple pages, the workload stacks up into the clouds, and stress snakes its way into our consciousness, it’s no wonder we sometimes feel like we are running a marathon in mud up to our thighs. It’s tiring, overwhelming, and at times, seems impossible to finish. But we tell ourselves a great entrepreneur has a passion for hard work, and use that as an excuse to keep going, despite the swarm of tasks threatening to sting our mental health.
