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The Tao of Grasshopper Farms

A conversation with Grasshopper Farms founder and owner Will Bowden is not quite what one might expect to have with a former SWAT officer, but that is probably because most of us do not regularly converse with former SWAT officers who then go on to have careers in the Navy and Coast Guard (and corporate America) before shifting gears and focus 180 degrees to embrace not just the cannabis industry but its most fragile form of expression – outdoor farming.

The journey from serving one’s country to endeavoring to grow high-quality cannabis is not that great a leap, of course. A lot of veterans have been drawn to the business for a variety of reasons, and many have thrived in it. But Bowden has a rare commitment to growing cannabis under the sun, and a singular ability to articulate why, that frames him more like a cleric than a cop. During a recent call with Cannabis Business Executive, the California native explained the logistical and epistemological foundations of his dedication to sun-grown cannabis, the high ambitions he has for it, and why Grasshopper Farms was initially built in Michigan, with additional farms to come in other markets.

“I never dreamed that I’d be in this industry,” said Bowden of his previous life. “I was a former police officer; I was on the SWAT team. I was serving our country in the Navy and the Coast Guard, I got my MBA, and I worked in corporate America. I was still a commissioned officer in the military about 12 years ago, but I looked at this industry and I said, ‘Wow, what an amazing business opportunity for someone else.’ I was just appreciating the opportunity for other people because I was not allowed to partake or work in the industry because of my career choices.

“But I am from Santa Cruz,” he added quickly. “I’ve been around this product since forever and it’s never been controversial to me. I wasn’t able to participate in it, but everybody else I grew up around appreciated cannabis, and I never saw it as something that was destructive to people’s lifestyles. Nevertheless, I grew up at the same time we all did, and lived through the impact of the very effective marketing from the Nixon and Reagan administrations telling us that drugs are bad, and marijuana is part of that; it’s a gateway drug and don’t do it. I think there were all the best intentions there that probably went beyond the actual product to the violence that went along with it and was part of the reason for the campaign, but nevertheless, as it was being legalized, I was looking at it, saying, ‘What an amazing opportunity.”

Serendipity soon came calling. “Wouldn’t you know it, the exact same month I retired from the Coast Guard as a Lieutenant Commander, I met this guy who also was former military. I tell him my story of where I’ve been, on the SWAT team, retired from the military, did some corporate America stuff, some pharmaceutical operations and marketing experience, and he’s like, ‘I think you should come work for me.’ ‘Great, what do you do?’ He was starting an MSO out of Delaware that aspired to be in several states, and the first state he was trying to tackle was Michigan. I got back home to my wife, and I’m like, ‘Remember when I said it’d be pretty cool for other people to be in the cannabis industry?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I just got an offer to work in cannabis.’”

The skills Bowden brought with him were distinctive. “I ended up being a part of very small, specialized units in the military,” he said. “Special Operations units, so high logistical things that we had to manage for sure, complex scenarios. As I look back now with all the clarity hindsight gives us, the time at the police department, at the military, and at Merck actually gave me great education and experience, mixing my MBA with that, to do what I’m doing today. I just never would have guessed it in the moment. It was something I had to appreciate later after life started unfolding for me, and when I put that declaration out there saying I appreciated other people’s opportunity in cannabis, little did I know that that energy was going to come back to me.”

There was also another quality that helped land him the Michigan job. “I’m an operator, and there is confidence that comes from knowing that you can figure anything out,” he said. “That’s something that I adhere to ferociously, so there isn’t really anything that’s going to stop me, there’s just something I need to learn.” It’s likely why, after his friend got to know him better, Bowden was offered the chance to turn licenses in Michigan into operations. “I accepted the position, went to Michigan, and started to do just that,” he said. “I got three retail locations up and running, an indoor grow up and running, and manufacturing on its way, but along that process, I started looking at outdoor farming, and I started to get really curious about it.”

A 2011 university study conducted also caught his attention. “It said that indoor grow was at that time occupying 1 percent of the US power grid,” he said. “I thought to myself, we’re going to have to figure some things out here, because that’s not sustainable. I know that there’s more technology coming out to address that, but I think the balance of indoor greenhouse and outdoor has yet to be understood and realized. I just started looking around and thought it was a good idea. I took it back to my last company and said, ‘Why don’t we look at doing this?’ For all the right reasons, they were already resourced to not be able to make that decision, which I agreed with. I said, ‘I’m going to keep this as a project, and keep working on it on my own, and I did.”

The Making of Grasshopper Farms

Bowden first created a detailed list of criteria to do on his own if the opportunity presented itself. “Some of the things that I saw were that people weren’t picking the right locations for properties, or they were trying to do too much at once, or they were focused on trying to do too many aspects of the industry, which could have been scale or types of facilities. One of the big things I also noticed is that everybody was bringing in their guy from a different place that knew how to farm.

“And this is just Will talking, this isn’t for everybody,” he added, “but I thought, I’d rather have a local farmer of another kind of crop transition to cannabis than I would want to bring an out-of-state or out-of-country cannabis grower to grow in a new location, because farming is really more about your environment, your land, and the things that Mother Nature gives you. But I went a step further. I said, I want to find somebody who has been farming locally in Michigan, outdoors, at scale over a long period of time, and also they’re producing flower that doesn’t have to be remediated, it’s going to pass the state test. And I found that person.”

Since he was striking out on his own anyway, did he need to stay in Michigan? “I got to know the regulatory landscape,” said Bowden, “but most of all, I got to know the people of Southwest Michigan, and I think that life and certainly this industry is all about the people. When people talk about the proprietary nature of how they grow and what they grow, what comes out the other side, I get that everyone’s got their secret sauce. But I actually think that protected proprietary approach to things really comes not from the fact that they’ve got the one way to do things, but it comes because after [cannabis] was illegal everybody went into pull barns and basements. At that point, whether we want to say it out loud or we just don’t recognize it, we developed a sense of this industry before it was legalized that we have to be secret about things we do. So, we didn’t talk to anybody about it. And now, what’s happened is that has been poured into the legalized side of what is basically a big change management exercise that comes down to the number one thing you can do for yourself in this industry, which is build a great team.

“I don’t think that’s unique to cannabis,” he stressed. “I think it’s anything we do in life. When I was conceiving of this project, I went back to some of the folks I’d gotten to know in Michigan and said, ‘Hey, I think I’m going to do this; are you in, do you want to try it?’ And that’s how I built the team, and that’s why Michigan first. And as I built the team and we continue to grow it a little more, I tell people, this team is amazing, and the fact that we’re doing cannabis farming happens to be a secondary thing. I would take this team out on a military mission with me. They’re very good operators, they’re solution oriented, and they work really well together. It’s a really, really good team.”

It was just about all he needed. “After I left my last company and started this one, first shovels went into the property where we are now towards the end of 2020,” he said. “It wasn’t the first property we selected, but it’s the property we got, and I think it happens to be the best property out of all of them. And then we got to work. We have 160 acres, and one of the things that I kind of grounded the team on is we have to know who we are; we have to know what we’re doing, and we have to understand what’s our path. The way I like to describe it is, what’s our identity and our core competency. One of the reasons why I started this farm is that I noticed the thing that was lacking on the shelves as far as selection goes to consumers was what somebody might describe as a premium outdoor product, what we call premium sun grown.”

Bowden saw an opportunity that had a particular origin. “I think that as cannabis became illegal, and people went into basements and pull barns, it wasn’t just for decades, it was generations, so it was like, I learned from my parents who learned from their parents, and my grandparents may have started it,” he explained. “And what happened was, people who were growing outside before it became illegal went inside, and they became very good indoor growers. But indoor growing and outdoor farming are really different disciplines, drastically different, and I think what happened is that as this became legalized, people started applying their indoor growing techniques to outdoor farming, and they started producing what the market would call low-quality flower.

“Of course, people define quality different ways,” he continued, “but at the end of the day, outdoor got a bad name for itself. What I think happened is that people were just not yet experienced enough to be outdoor cannabis farmers, but they were probably very good indoor growers. And that’s why I had to develop that criteria for my team.  I said, let’s create a new segment on the shelves and retail, let’s make something that’s sun-grown, and let’s offer it in retail in the same way that if you go into a grocery store, people are going to expect to see an organic section. So, that’s what we did. We had 160 acres, but as I told them, we needed to know our identity and core competency, so the identity is premium sun-grown flower, and the core competency is single season, outdoor grow. It’s just that simple.”

Casey Jones

It takes work to make things look simple, however. ‘Then what we do is go furiously after quality and consistency, and that means that we have to maintain a very strong position of discipline,” said Bowden. “So, what does discipline sound like? Discipline sounds like this: we have 160 acres, we built out 40; the state gave us eight licenses, and since it’s a plant count state that meant 14,000 plants; we took four licenses, which gave us 7000 plants, but we planted less than 5000 plants. Now, a lot of people’s business models would say that’s nuts; if they give you 14,000 plants, you plant that so you can make more money. But we’re going after quality and consistency of a segment that seemed to be missing from the market, so that’s not the strategy for us. We planted just under 5000 plants, we produced it, we brought it to market, and I felt like in the beginning everyone was patting us on the head, like, ‘Good luck to you.’”

Grasshopper Farms went to market with its very first harvest, for a good reason. “The grow team that joined me had been growing for over 10 years in the caregiver market, so they were very fluent with the outdoor growing of cannabis already,” said Bowden. “All we were doing was taking them from the caregiver market and putting him into the commercial market. Our first year, we produced 5000 pounds of flower and 1000 pounds of preroll material, which is all flower; we don’t use shake and trim for our prerolls. We started doing our sales and marketing efforts about seven months before our harvest so that we could really tell our story and get our name out, and when we came to market, we said, ‘Our intent is for you to assess us as a higher-quality, outdoor product, as premium sun grown. In the beginning, everybody was very skeptical of it, but by the time we got to August of the following year, we had sold out.”

Bowden explained the reasons why he thinks Grasshopper Farms experienced success out of the gate. “Retailers who know what they’re doing will give you a shot, they’ll put you on the shelf, and if it moves, great, they’ll give you that shelf space and they might even give you more shelf space,” he said. “That’s kind of how it works for any retail, and what we found was that as people started trying our product, they started telling other people about it, and then they started going back and buying it again. I think what was happening was that people were appreciating the effects, what they were feeling. It was what they were seeking, and as you and I know, that’s more about the cannabinoid profile and terpene profile, and a big part of the benefit of being outside is having good strains with good terpenes. So, as people were enjoying the effects, they were coming back and buying more, because at the end of the day the effect is what people are chasing. They’re not chasing a THC percentage or what the flower looks like but the effects.”

Sticking With What Works, Breeding for the Future

I got a similar answer when I asked about the genetics used to start the company’s cultivation process. “Part of my strategy was to change what they were already doing as little as possible, because they were already doing it successfully on the caregiver market,” said Bowden. “So, as we transitioned to the commercial market, we brought in the genetics they were already growing, plus we brought in some additional genetics. The first year, we took about 15 strains to market, we let the market tell us, and we sold out. The second year, we did 17 strains in the commercial market, but out of the 20 beds that we have, 19 are production beds, and one of them is an R&D bed. So, in the first year, we did somewhere around 17 to 20 strains just for R&D, to see how they performed outside? How much did they yield? What was the actual CoA? How were they in post-harvest processing, since we’re doing a lot of that.

“In the second year, we did 17 strains in the 19 beds, and the R&D bed had 28 strains in it,” he continued. “And this year, we’ll probably do about 20 strains on the commercial side, and we’ll do 30 strains on the R&D side. That way we’re always making sure we’re devoting an entire bed to investigating what strains we are looking for next. We’re looking for quality from the plant itself, how does it survive outside, what does it yield, and we test every single one of our strains for cannabinoids and terpenes, whereas a lot of folks just test for cannabinoids for the sake of CBD and THC. But we publish our terpene count as well, because we think it’s important that people understand us, and eventually when the market catches up and they’re a little bit more educated, they’ll start making decisions that have very little to do with THC.

Gorilla Glue

“I don’t know that everybody needs to get to that kind of status as far as being able to look and smell and know what’s going on there,” he added, “but they certainly should be able to read reviews, and also read the profiles of cannabinoids and terpenes to understand that this one’s going to help with anxiety, this one’s going to help with focus, and this one’s going to help with sleep, based off of those profiles.”

I noted that plant breeders are kind of like fashion designers, pulling the industry into the future by creating strains for the masses and the elites. “The way I describe it is we’re simply building ourselves to already be in a future market, knowing that it will catch up,” replied Bowden. “For example, we publish the top five terpenes and the total terpene percentage so that people can understand more about the effects they’re going to experience. Nothing in the market requires or even requests that of us today, but it’s going to someday. By the time that people get educated and start to catch on, they’ll see that we’ve been doing it the whole time, and it will be familiar to them.

“We’re an outdoor farm that doesn’t do white-labeling, and we created a brand successfully in two years, which is pretty unheard of in any industry, but what we’re doing is just trying to be in a future market,” he reiterated. “We know that eventually the market is going to require us to be very transparent with cannabinoid terpene profiles, and we know that eventually our facilities are going to need to be GMP-certified because we’re making a consumable product, so we’re already gearing ourselves up for those requirements and expectations, whether it be from regulatory bodies or our facility partners, like retailers, or our actual customers.”

The proof, he said, was in the pudding. “When the regulators come on our property, they tell us every time that they love coming here, because we’ve already got everything taken care of, and no matter what they throw at us, they know that we’re already prepared for it,” said Bowden. “It’s just us preparing for expectations that we know are going to be there eventually anyway. That’s just how I look at it. We put a significant amount of effort into marketing upfront because we knew that telling our story was going to be important because we’re doing something different. Whereas a lot of folks were still in a year-one mindset, which is, if you grow it, they will come; if you sell it, they will come. But after you get out of year one and you start getting into years two through five, you better have some sort of sales and marketing plan, because people are going to outpace you, and you’re going to be like, ‘Hey, I got stuff to sell,’ and nobody’s going to care.”

Grasshopper Farms was founded in November 2020 with initial funding from private sources. “We raised money once,” said Bowden. “It ended up being from people who heard about us and were interested in supporting the effort. We maintained 100 percent of our equity, we just borrowed money from folks, and within the first year we transitioned into profitability. We are not at risk; we don’t need to borrow any more money; we are paying all of our own bills; we’re paying great employees. In fact, we just actually released benefits to all of our employees. We’re doing great right now, and I think it’s because of our discipline and identity – premium, sun-grown flower, single-season outdoor grow. And we produce three things, premium sun-grown flower, flower preroll material that we turn into prerolls, and biomass.”

Van Helsing

Bowden continued, “There are other good ideas to do out there, but right now those are the things that we need to focus on to maintain our operational and financial excellence. Otherwise, if we start trying to do all these other things, we’re going to get our focus a little bit off of the premium outdoor flower. But it’s really important that we maintain our quality so that we can preserve that shelf space, and quite frankly make room for other farms that want to do the same thing. I think there is a huge opportunity for farms where the grandkids are like, ‘I’m out, I don’t see the profits in growing corn.’ Well, there’s something else for you to grow, and it’s called cannabis. Now, it’s a commoditized product when you get to a mature product market, but it’s totally doable. You just have to make a business plan, and you have to work on that business plan to make sure that you’re ready for a future market.”

I mentioned the necessity for fiscal discipline I was hearing in interview after interview. “To that point,” said Bowden, “if you talk to my team and ask them questions, one of the things you’ll hear is that we make decisions with the numbers. The numbers will tell us what to do. One of the examples I give on that is that we have 160 acres, but we only developed 40 acres. I’m asked, ‘When are you going into the next part?’ I’m like, ‘I’ll know when it’s the time.’ Well, next year we’re going to expand, not a lot, but a little bit more. Why are we doing that? Because of the demand within the market right now. The Michigan numbers that are published every month show that we’re still on an upward trend, and we haven’t found the ceiling yet.

“We also did a customer analysis of who we’re selling to” he added, “and we know the number we could get to that we could sell out and still remain in that craft category. For me, it’s between two and 4 percent of the market demand, and so I know what we can grow, not get too far in front of the market, and still be able to sell to our existing customers even if there’s a retraction somewhere in the market, because the amount we’re selling to them is only a small percentage of what their overall inventory is. The folks who are trying to maintain a relationship supplying 80 percent to a retailer are going to have a problem someday if that retailer has an issue or if the state has an issue. Somewhere in the next five to 10 years, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin are going to legalize, and when that happens, all of the traffic coming over the border is going to stop, and if people haven’t planned for that, they’re in big trouble. I’m looking at stuff that’s 10 years out. That’s the fiscal discipline you mentioned.”

Expanding Grasshopper Farms & Teams

Thus far, we had only spoken about Michigan, but there had to be more states in store for Grasshopper Farms unless it saw itself similar to a small, high-quality winery that only produces 5000 crates a year and sells out every year. “I think this goes back to having to know who you are,” said Bowden. “If we compare cannabis to beer for a second, you have your Budweisers, which are the really big players out there, and their goal is to produce a lot of easy to consume products at a really big scale. And then you have some amazing craft breweries, and they’re not trying to take over the United States market; they only have limited supply, and they can only go to certain places. One of them is Firestone Brewery from California, in Paso Robles. They make great beers, and for a long time you could only find them along the central coast of California, and then it started going out a little bit further, and now you can find them in different East Coast, West Coast pockets around the United States.

Kush Mints

“My point is that when you start your business, you have to know who you are today, and what you are trying to grow into tomorrow, and then you’ve got to stay very loyal to that,” he added. “And if you’re going to change, it has to be a deliberate change in that strategy. We’re going to be one of your craft growers, we’re going to be someone who grows outside, we’re 100 percent sun-grown, and we’re putting out a really good product. We’re going to give you all the information you want to see about it. Heck, we’re also inclusive. People come to the farm and take tours and take part in transplanting. We’re super open and inviting, much like a vineyard might be. That’s who we are, and because we’ve had such success in creating jobs for 45 people in Michigan, my goal now is to take that farm experience to other states as well.”

It turns out that serendipity had struck once again, this time in the east. “My wife is from New Jersey, which was just opening the application process for licenses,” he said. “They were giving away 37 cultivation licenses, and I said, ‘Great, let’s apply.’ We got one of those 37, and we’re in final build-out right now in New Jersey. As soon as they give us our plant-touching authority, we’re ready to rock-and-roll, and we’re going to do New Jersey.”

The Michigan model will be replicated. “It’s back to the people,” said Bowden. “I was narrowing down the properties, and I found one that had an amazing farm team already there. They’ve been on the property for 30 years, and they thought that they were going to sell and retire. But instead, they said, ‘We’ll sell, but we’d love to stay and work for Grasshopper Farms, because they really believe in what we’re doing. There you go. That’s just whatever you believe in guiding me to say, ‘Hey, this is the right property,’ because it starts with the team. The property is important, but the team has to be there.”

That’s not the only prospect in front of Bowden. “I also have an opportunity right now to go into Colorado,” he said. “The team is ready to go and it’s a turnkey farm. Everyone’s like, ‘Why are you going to go to Colorado? That’s crazy. The price per unit is nothing,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, but it’s one of the most predictable markets in the United States right now.’ As long as you can make the numbers work, there’s no risk in going into it. It’s less risk than going into New Jersey, in my opinion.

“There are opportunities to go into other states,” he added, “like New York, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma. I’ve recently talked to some folks in Minnesota and Indiana as well. When all is said and done, I think it’d be nice to create teams at ten farms. And the way we would operate, I call it a deconstructed MSO, because each farm has got to make decisions for the farm. It cannot take marching orders from a headquarters someplace because that’s the nature of farming. It rained today, it snowed today, we had high winds today. They can’t wait around for headquarters to get to the office, assess what’s going on, and say, ‘Here’s what to do.’

“I call it a deconstructed MSO,” he continued, “because all of the farms will be under the same family of Grasshopper Farms, we would have regular meetings where like all the cultivators get on the line and share best practices, all of the compliance people get on the line and share best practices and so forth, and then the one thing that we would be able to co-locate is administrative support, like HR and stuff like that. But otherwise, we need that ownership down at the farm level. People, by the way, arrive when they have ownership in what they’re doing, so creating these farm teams that can manage the local property is going to be a critical piece to what we’re doing, and it’s already working in Michigan, so I know it’ll work other places, too.”

What about California? Did it hold any interest as a possible home for a Grasshopper Farm? “Absolutely,” replied Bowden. “In fact, I think we will learn that California and Michigan both have a deep, deep, deep rooted history with cannabis. California has just been more vocal about it; Michigan, less so. But I think that as the legalized market continues to march on in both states, we’re going to find out that Michigan has this incredible network of people who have been doing amazing breeding for a long time. I’m really proud to be in Michigan, but I grew up in California, and I would love to and in fact I’ve already talked to a vineyard owner there about taking a small portion of his farm and doing cannabis there, because the medicinal aspects of this have just been an off-the-charts incredible journey for me. People I talked to – starting with men and women who had served in the military who were using cannabis for PTSD or combat injuries – and then suddenly I’m getting into all the other things that people are using it for, and then it’s landed me into what I think is the absolute worst thing happening to all of human beings in the world.”

Hellcat

That worst thing, he said, is sleep-deprivation. “If you put all the diseases together, it doesn’t even come close to the number of people who are not getting enough quality or quantity of sleep,” he added. “We just don’t call it a disease because people think, ‘I’m just in the grind at work,’ or ‘I’ve got new kids,’ or whatever it is. It’s not diagnosed like insomnia, so it doesn’t get that disease code, but there are so many people with that one issue that can benefit from this product. So, I would be very excited to do a small farm in California. I already have some team members picked out to do it when it’s appropriate to do, and part of it is to pay homage to where I’m from, and part of it is to pay homage to where this product has a deep-rooted history.”

I had to ask Bowden about three other interesting markets: Texas, Arizona, and Florida. “I think Florida is really interesting,” he said. “It’s a great environment to grow some amazing strains for the same reason that Hawaii is interesting. Florida is a vertical state, however, and I’m not a fan of regulatory agencies requiring vertical integration. I think it forces somebody who probably knows one of those disciplines really well to then have to somehow figure the other two out. But you don’t want your retailer learning how to grow; you want your grower to grow, you want your retailer to sell, and you want your manufacturer to make beautiful products in between. That aside, I think that Florida has some great potential; it’s got a great population that could definitely benefit from cannabis, and it’s got some great environments for certain strains.

“I think that Texas is going to be an amazing place to grow this product,” he added. “It’s just that the regulatory body is going to have to just get through its change management of, ‘I was always told this is not okay.’ Every state is a little bit different in how it is that they internalize that, and a lot of it comes from culture; where we were when we grew up, and who we were around. So, I totally understand it. They’ll get there in their own time, but I think that Texas is going to have to do a lot with the folks who served in our armed forces benefiting from this to really understand the folks who are amenable to cannabis, but then also be able to apply it to the folks who aren’t getting enough sleep. It’s just going to be a change management process there.

“Arizona is a great state right now,” he continued. “It’s a little bit different because the conditions for outdoor growing are drastically different depending on where you are. For instance, in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, they have full-blown sandstorms at times. That’s going to be a problem if you’re planting flower and you have a dust storm come through, because it’s going to leave a lot of particulates in your flower. So, site selection in Arizona is going to be important, and then maybe discipline as well, because it might be a better place to do something like they’re doing just outside of Ventura County with Glass House, where they’re doing more of a greenhouse type of grow. I’ve seen some of the greenhouses that use geothermal temperature control, and I think that’s a really smart way to go, especially in places like Nevada or Arizona, where you have super dry and hot climates.”

The Future of Sun-Grown Cannabis

When asked if Grasshopper Farms has any plans to add SKUs or additional products to its menu, Bowden was for once equivocal. “Not sure yet,” he replied. “What I’ve preferred to do is work with really good manufacturers who already know what they’re doing. If somebody is doing it well, maybe we will just work together in a complementary way, and maybe someday we will merge together. Who knows? I’ll be open minded to that, but right now I’m focusing on the outdoor farm opportunity. That said, every year that we’ve harvested, we’ve also turned an indoor grow of the same plants, and here’s why. There’s such a focus on indoor and outdoor, and my take is, it shouldn’t be about where you grew it. It should be about what you grew. That’s what it should be about, and what we’ve done is take clones off the exact same mother plant and we’ve put those clones inside and outside taken care of by the same team in the same ways, just to see on the other side what came of it.

“What we’re finding is that the terpenes outside are so much more robust than the indoor, even though they share the same mother plant,” he added. “I’m not ready to go on record and say this versus that. I don’t want to badmouth indoor greenhouse flower. I think they’re both necessary and important, and awesome. But what I would like to say is that we’ve got to get over this idea that indoor is high quality, outdoor is low quality, and greenhouse is kind of a hybrid of both. It needs to not be where it was grown; it needs to be what did you grow.

Sunny D

“I don’t like comparing cannabis to alcohol,” he continued, “but there are a lot of interesting comparisons. Craft beer comes to mind. THC today is what ABV (alcohol by volume) used to be for craft beer. You would walk into a brewery, you’d see a 14 percent ABV and be like, ‘Alright, I want to try it.’ But you didn’t even know what kind of beer was. It was the novelty of a high ABV. Well, that all went away when people started getting educated. Then it was, ‘Okay, cool. I would like an IPA, or I would like a Hefeweisen.’ And then they were like, ‘If it’s craft beer what other hints or things are in it, and ABV would be the last thing that you would look at.

“I think that cannabis is going to go the same way in the sense that everyone is focused on high THC and getting blasted,” he concluded. “But as soon as people start focusing on effects, that’s when they’re going to ask, ‘What terpenes are in this? What are some of the effects that I can expect to feel from this? Who made it? How did they make it?’ And I think it’s going to follow that path as we go forward, and people get more educated.”

In this reality, it won’t matter as much where a Grasshopper Farms farm is located. “I think this goes back to knowing who you are,” said Bowden. “That means you have to know where you’re operating as well. There’s a reason why the only state within the United States that produces coffee is Hawaii. But I think that a lot of people also don’t know that the number one blueberry producer of the United States is Michigan. So, I think that when we say that out loud about a singular thing, like cannabis, I get where it’s coming from, but I don’t know that we have enough information yet to declare that all the quality stuff is going to come out of a particular place.

“I think right now people are trying to test their model in different places that’s largely dependent on geographically where they are and the arc of legalization in that particular place,” he added. “And no doubt we’re going to find that there are places that produce something that’s a little bit better for that climate. But if we’re in the Mendocino hillsides and producing different qualities from the different hillsides, that’s a vineyard model right there. You’ll have the same Cabernet that’s grown on the east side of a mountain and the west side of a mountain or hill, and they will have a completely different profile by virtue of being on the east or west side of that mountain.

“It’s so wonderful, and that’s why we don’t need all this crazy naming conventions and things like that,” he said. “What we need to say is, ‘Oh, cool. You grew that in Oklahoma. That was grown over in Arizona. And that was grown in Texas.’ And you’re going to find that, ‘Oh, shoot. I like that sourdough bread that comes out of San Francisco, so I’m going to buy that because I like it,’ versus another person who says, ‘Well, I like the bagels in New Jersey, so I’m always going to get there’s.’ I think we’re going to mine that later, but boy, are we early being able to say that one place is going to be the place.”

Wedding Cake

As we wound down our long but interesting call, I asked Bowden what if anything he wanted to achieve at the recent Benzinga Capital Conference, which he had attended. “A couple of things,” he said. “We went to Benzinga, and we were not selling anything, and we’re not buying anything, which I think is a really cool thing to say out loud when you’re going to a convention. We bought one of the booths, and we set up our pictures and everything else, and we were just telling our story. We didn’t know it at the time but what we found is that our story is pretty unique: what we’re doing, that we’re already profitable, how our people operate, how the farm is organized and clean.

“Also though, we’re now going into other states, and the thing I know is it’s all about the people,” he stated again. “So, I found myself starting to interview people and they were interviewing me – do we want to work together – because I can’t do this alone, nor do I desire to. I want to build something that’s amazing for more people beyond me, and so now I’m looking for different kinds of operators or people who might contribute. While I’m not looking for capital for Michigan, I do think that we’re going to be working with a strategic financial partner very shortly because we’ve found a very good model to now expand into specific places. So that’s kind of where we’re at.”

With the build-out complete in New Jersey and the turn-key deal in Colorado close to completion, Grasshopper Farms could be in three states by the end of the year. “I think there’s a pretty good chance that we could maybe be in a couple more states, like Massachusetts or New York, and there’s a couple more states we could probably be in in 2024. But even if it was just those three states for this year and next year, that’s an amazing opportunity, and the goal will then be to assess how to provide jobs for up to 10 states.”

It sounded like he is in the process of creating a national flower brand, of which only Cookies perhaps comes to mind. “I think that’s right,” said Bowden, “but the difference between us and Cookies is that that’s not what I was trying to do. What I was trying to do was to provide a premium sun-grown flower to the Michigan market. When we did that successfully, I said, ‘I think we can create more jobs,’ so now what we’re doing is we’re growing into the opportunity to become a national brand. And I have to believe that part of our success is the fact that we’re building something for people, and building teams that happen to be growing cannabis. But don’t get me wrong, we all really enjoy cannabis.”

Tom Hymes

Tom Hymes

Tom Hymes, CBE Contributing Writer, is a Connecticut-based writer and editor with over 20 years’ experience covering highly regulated industries. He was born and raised in New York City. He can be reached at [email protected].

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