Veteran hemp grower thinks most licensed farmers ready to grow weed

Brittany Carbone

Brittany Carbone is Co-Founder of Tricolla Farms in Berkshire and founder and CEO of Tonic CBD.

NY Cannabis Insider is hosting its first in-person conference in Albany on May 20th. The event will feature panel discussions led by industry experts, networking opportunities, a vendor fair and more. Tickets are available now.

Brittany Carbone thinks NY hemp farmers conditionally licensed to grow marijuana are in a good position to make that transition, but she isn’t sugar-coating the difficulty.

Brittany Carbone is Co-Founder of Tricolla Farms in Berkshire – one of the 52 companies the state’s Cannabis Control Board issued a conditional cannabis grow license to earlier this month. Carbone is also the founder and CEO of Tonic CBD.

She has heard concerns that many New York hemp farmers aren’t prepared to grow full-THC cannabis, and she’s not discounting it. However, Carbone thinks the majority of hemp farmers understand the challenges and risks of growing weed.

NY Cannabis Insider sat down with Carbone for a discussion about hemp farmers transitioning to weed and their place in NY’s adult-use cannabis industry.

This story is one of two around the issue of cultivator preparation. The other, available here, is a Q&A with Colin Decker, who believes most conditionally licensed cultivators are not ready to grow full THC marijuana. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

NY Cannabis Insider: Why are hemp farmers in a good position to grow New York’s first legal weed?

Carbone: Hemp farmers are experienced. A lot of them have greenhouses that they’ve been starting their plants in; doing some greenhouse cultivation. Many are growing smokeable flower because that has actually become a much bigger market than I think a lot of people realize.

Farmers have been growing smokable hemp flower, high CBD, high CBG varietals that are compliant with the farm bill but offer farmers a higher margin product to bring to market. It was a big problem when New York started to go against the sale of smokable hemp flower last year because a lot of farmers had turned to that — they focused much more strictly on really high quality smokable hemp flower.

I’m sure that there will be a handful of hemp farmers that are not prepared to make this transition, to be honest with you. But a lot of the hemp farmers who are qualified to get this conditional license and begin cultivating for the adult-use market have been in this market for a long time.

What are some of the differences between growing hemp and marijuana?

I think that the biggest difference comes when you’re talking about top quality flower versus biomass – which is material that is going to be used in extractions to make the distillate or the extracts that go into edibles, or vapes, or topicals. Those two things require two very different approaches. I think that the hemp farmers are going to be much better positioned to be able to supply the extractions market; the biomass market is going to be much closer to a direct crossover.

But let’s say that you want to grow flower as your final product: you have to trim flower in a very different way than if you’re growing for biomass. Every plant needs to be very carefully monitored, and you need to be pruning each and every plant; which is not something that hemp farmers are used to doing by any means. Like I said, there has been a large switch of a lot of farmers transitioning more so into the flower market, but for the most part, it’s an outdoor, biomass kind of approach.

There’s an argument that some hemp farmers are just trying to cover losses they incurred through downturns in the hemp/CBD market. What’s your take on that?

Let’s just say there are about 150 hemp farms that qualify for conditional grow licenses. I would say maybe 25 to 50 are just really looking forward to something to kind of lift them up from the financial holes that a lot of us are in after the downturn of the markets. I’m not saying that they’re necessarily in it for the wrong reasons, but they’re not fully prepared to take this on.

They’re kind of looking at it as like, ‘Okay, this is an opportunity for me to make some of this money back, and maybe flip the license afterwards and get out.’ There’s probably another 50 that are going to do everything right from the very start, and another 50 who are in it for the long run and are going to be responsible with this first year in terms of figuring out which genetics are best, what kinds of cultivation methods they should go with, those types of things.

You mentioned growing biomass for extractions, do you see that as the best segment for hemp farmers in the cannabis industry?

Yes, I believe so. I definitely feel very strongly about reeducating consumers in a way that places more value on sungrown flower; less value on THC percentages and more value on terpene profiles and things like that. But given what’s demanded in the New York market currently, top shelf flower equals indoor flower at this time. Consumers are demanding indoor flower, and that’s not something that hemp farmers will even have the option to be able to do during the first two years. Just given the kind of requirements of the conditional licensees to grow outdoors or in greenhouses, it’s just going to lend itself more so to the extract market.

Do you think there’s a risk that a lot of these farmers will produce failing crops at the outset of the legal market?

It would be very silly for me to take a purely optimistic stance at this point. I think that anybody who’s been really entrenched in the hemp side of things for the past four years is approaching this with very, very cautious optimism. There’s definitely a high level of risk involved for any farmer who’s getting into this. No matter how prepared you are to take on this endeavor to start growing for the adult-use market, there is a risk no matter what. Especially this first year, there is going to be a learning curve for a lot of growers, partly because we have such a limited time between when we learned about the conditional licenses and when the season starts. That could just translate to failed test results, or just product quality that isn’t on par with what the market is demanding or expecting. All hemp farmers that have been granted this opportunity should be very aware that this isn’t a sure thing, golden ticket kind of situation. I wish it was different, but you have to have a strong stomach to be in this industry at all. There’s no exception here.

If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.