The air in Pure Sunfarms’ harvest room is thick with a sweetly fragrant scent as workers busily separate cannabis buds from recently picked flowers, for a company in a hurry to meet the Oct. 17 deadline for the availability of legal, recreational weed.
Up until last November, tomatoes would have been the crop coming out of the sprawling 10-hectare greenhouse in Delta. Now, about a quarter of the facility has been turned into clean, security-sealed growing rooms for cannabis. Ten hectares is the equivalent of nine-and-a-half FIFA-sized soccer pitches laid out in orderly rectangles.
The remaining eight hectares of glass rooms are rapidly being converted for the same purpose as joint-venture partners in the Pure Sunfarms facility — licensed medicinal cannabis producer Emerald Health Therapeutics and greenhouse-grower Village Farms — gear up for the legal, recreational market.
Latest from Produce Grower
- WUR extends Gerben Messelink’s professorship in biological pest control in partnership with Biobest and Interpolis
- Closing the loop
- The Growth Industry Episode 8: From NFL guard to expert gardener with Chuck Hutchison
- Raise a glass (bottle)
- From farm kid to Ph.D.
- Do consumers trust produce growers?
- The modern grocery shopper
- Beyond a burst of optimism
