I just read an article by Alan Armitage where he states that America has been “Hydrangized.” As usual, Alan is spot on. Hydrangea sales continue to grow, year after year. As a category, it is the top-selling genus for Spring Meadow, and as a liner grower, we are in a position to see and evaluate trends. Not that this is a new trend: it dates back to the zenith of Martha Stewart and her beautiful multi-page spreads featuring blue and pink blooms, obviously photographed in hydrangea-friendly, maritime climates such as Vancouver or Cape Cod. At the same time, Gen-Xers (and more recently, millennials) began buying starter homes and pulling out the old junipers and yews once favored by their elders. These new generations were looking to add more color to their yards, and few shrubs offer up as much color as a hydrangea. At that time, our nursery offered 53 varieties of hydrangea, 30 of which were Hydrangea macrophylla. Today, we offer roughly that same number of varieties, but only 14 are macs. This is telling, and we will speak more about this market shift later in the article.

Since Y2K, hydrangea sales numbers have grown exponentially. And to give you an idea how the market has changed, we currently offer only four of the same hydrangea cultivars listed in our 1999-2000 catalog. The species have changed, the cultivars have changed, but hydrangeas are more popular than ever. Clearly, the steady stream of new varieties has grown and sustained the hydrangea market.

Mike Dirr and Bailey Nursery’s introduction of Endless Summer Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Bailmer’ pp#15,298 in 2001, with its blue pot and massive marketing campaign, played a huge role in the shift. With the added benefit of remontancy (blooming on new wood without vernalization), who in their right mind, living in Middle America, would want to buy ‘Glowing Embers’, ‘Merritt Supreme’, ‘Nikko Blue’ or another old-fashioned cultivar that might not bloom? The hope and dream of every gardener in Middle America has been to have a hydrangea with big blue flowers, from June until October, regardless of cold winter or spring frost. Everyone was elated with the development, until they found out the dream was, in fact, just a dream. It turned out that remontant hydrangeas did best in milder climates where the older varieties already did well: without a killing frost, you got the spring and summer blooms, as well as the autumn blooms. The problem, particularly with some of the earlier introductions, is that if the plant dies back from winter damage or is cut back in fall or spring, it takes time to grow new stems and flower buds, leaving cold-climate gardeners disappointed, if not downright pissed off. The dream was too good to be true.

The good news is that plant breeders, including Bailey, Spring Meadow, and others kept at it, crossing remontant hydrangeas with hardier species such as Hydrangea serrata, the mountain hydrangea native to colder continental regions of South Korea, China and Japan. This next generation of hydrangeas had better stem and bud hardiness, which resulted in more reliable plants. Endless Summer Bloomstruck (‘PIIHM-II’) and Tuff Stuff Ah-Ha (‘SMNHSDD’) have proven to be reliable bloomers in our trials here in Michigan. However, the more I looked at, trialed, and examined Hydrangea macrophylla, how it grows, and how, when, and where the flowers emerge, the more questions I had about creating a better hydrangea.

While remontancy is a nice benefit, it provides mostly late-season blooms. Improvements in stem and bud hardiness have helped give us more early-season blooms, but the species has its limits. So what else could be done to improve it? I finally found my answer in a research paper by Dr. Timothy Rinehart, a USDA scientist, who noted that a number of hydrangeas on the market appeared to rebloom but were not actually remontant. He speculated these plants were capable of producing vernalized buds at nodes well-below the normal blooming terminal flower bud, which reduced the chance of winter kill, frost damage and even well-intentioned pruning. I began examining the plants in our breeding program for this ability to make vernalized flower buds on the stem within inches of — and even below — the soil line. Combining this trait with remontancy and improved bud hardiness results in a much more reliable hydrangea that can bloom in the spring, summer, and fall, as exemplified in the Let’s Dance series, particularly Let’s Dance Cancan (‘SMNHSI’). With every passing year, Hydrangea macrophylla is getting better. The truth is, however, we are still a long way off from one with the reliability and flower power of Hydrangea paniculata, or our well-adapted, native Hydrangea arborescens and Hydrangea quercifolia. With more breeding and a bit of luck, our dreams may yet come true. Until then, other Hydrangea species will lead the way.

The average homeowner or landscaper wants real-world performance and reliability, both of which Hydrangea paniculata and Hydrangea arborescens deliver in spades. These species flower on new wood, and are much better able to cope with spring temperature swings. Both species are hardy, heat tolerant, adaptable to a range of soils and grow in sun or modest shade. Here, too, breeders have made incredible advances, which you can read about in my May 2019 column on Hydrangea paniculata breeding, “Standing on the shoulders of giants” (bit.ly/tim-wood-giants). With regards to Hydrangea arborescens, the game-changer came in 2009 when Dr. Tom Ranney and his team at North Carolina State University released Invincibelle Spirit H. a. ‘NCHA1’, the first pink flowered Annabelle-type hydrangea. While not a perfect plant (it has since been replaced with Invincibelle Spirit II H. a. ‘NCHA2’), it opened the door to the creation of a series of seven new, sterile, reblooming cultivars offering pink, red, mauve, white and green flowered forms, many of which are dwarf or compact and all with sturdier stems than ‘Annabelle’ and the original Invincibelle. It is garden performance and flowering reliability combined with these breeding advances that have grown the hydrangea market to record levels and shifted our product mix in favor of H. paniculata and H. arborescens. Add all of that to a new generation of homeowners that wanted to come home to a more colorful, low-maintenance yard and you get a rapidly growing hydrangea market that appears to have no end.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of GIE Media, Inc.

Accidents and disasters, either man-made or natural, can strike anytime. No business is immune. The development and execution of an emergency response plan makes sure your employees are prepared to handle a situation.

Every organization, no matter the size, needs an emergency response plan in place, says Zachery Bruce, safety services manager at Hortica.

“An emergency response plan is important because it allows an organization to identify potential emergencies and be prepared for them. You can’t be prepared if you don’t plan,” he says. “A plan should train staff to respond appropriately to emergencies and it provides documentation for every employee. And leadership must know how to execute the plan.”

When it comes to emergencies, weather is typically the first thing people think about. But there are other perils facing businesses such as pandemics, cyber attacks (see page 8 for the story on cybersecurity), accidents and burglaries.

How to begin

The first step when creating a plan is to identify an emergency response team.

“Make sure you have key employees on your team who have a good understanding of the organization and the facilities,” Bruce says. “Maintenance staff should be included because they know where the find the shutoff valves for power, gas and water, for example. The team shouldn’t be so big that it becomes unmanageable, but you need a good representation of people from HR, maintenance and production.”

Once you have your team in place, it’s time to perform a risk assessment. The team is charged with identifying what potential emergencies could your facility face.

If you need help identifying a comprehensive list of emergencies or developing the plan, there are agencies and companies that can help. An interagency site, www.ready.gov, provides a comprehensive list of resources for emergency response plans. OSHA provides e-tools to help businesses create plans. It’s available at www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/evacuation/eap.html.

Your own insurance carrier can assist with training materials or templates, and it’s always a good idea to contact your local emergency response authorities such as fire departments and EMS for guidance, Bruce says.

Once your plan is finalized, choose someone on the response team who will initiate and act on the plan when an emergency arises.

“There needs to be someone who leads the response,” Bruce advises. Name a backup in case that person is not at work when the emergency occurs.

Next steps

It’s critical to perform drills, which often doesn’t happen in many businesses, Bruce says.

“If you don’t practice it, you won’t likely do well in your response,” he adds.

During a drill, take notes to determine which areas need work or where more training is needed. Did everyone get out in a timely manner? Was the plan clear?

“It’s a good learning experience, and it will demonstrate where your shortcomings may be,” he says. “You should also consider having a drill during the peak season when the majority of your employees are there.”

Emergency response plans should be reviewed annually at the very least, and certainly after you’ve completed a drill, he says. Review it and make necessary changes if you perform any major facility changes, such as new buildings and new equipment, which could create new potential exposures, he says.

Your plan and list of procedures must be accessible to all employees. Consider housing it on a company intranet, or putting a copy in breakroom or in another common area. Also consider your non-English speaking employees and make sure your plan is properly translated.

Another consideration when it comes to emergencies is to store copies of important documents offsite, to house data backups offsite and make sure you test that backup system, he adds.

If you are not educating your employees on cybersecurity best practices, you are missing the biggest opportunity for improvement in your entire cybersecurity profile. Your employees have business-need access to a lot of important data, and their ability to protect that data — or to inadvertently let it walk out the door of your organization — is strong.

Lack of education has been at the heart of several incidents of a major security breach. Consider the scenario about the new HR employee who got an email from the president of the organization asking for all the W2 information on every employee, so that person sent them exactly as instructed. The employee did not recognize the fact that the email came from a hacker impersonating the CEO, and a major security breach took place.

Entire business models are based on this kind of fraud. Let’s pretend that I am going to build a site with the world’s best collection of cute pet pictures. I’ll give you the first 10 for free (and those 10 are the most adorable pictures you have ever seen), but to see more, you need to set up a username and password. The access is still free, though.

No big deal, right? Wrong. In this scenario, I own this website, I am a criminal, and my business model is to try to use the username and password you just entered at every major banking website, on all major email providers, on your company’s VPN portal, and anywhere else that I think you might have used the same username and password. I will then extract any valuable information I can from those sites, sell the information for a profit, possibly ransom your own data from you to make even more money, and then move on to the next victim.

Need some numbers to illustrate why educating your employees about cybersecurity practices is important?

• The IDG 2018 Global State of Information Security Survey reported that during the past year, the top sources of security incidents were current employees (30%), former employees (27%), and unknown hackers (23%). The main impacts include customer and employee records being compromised, and the loss or damage of internal records.
• According to the Ponemon Institute, 60% of employees use the exact same password for everything they access. Meanwhile, 63% of confirmed data breaches leverage a weak, default or stolen password.

Cybersecurity training

So where can your company start? Start with a training program. Your employees need to be educated on cybersecurity best practices.

Any cybersecurity awareness training program should address implementing real password policies. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it: Passwords stink. They are no fun to create, no fun to remember, and no fun to type in. But passwords are still the most common authentication method today. It is imperative to implement a password policy requiring complex passwords that can’t easily be guessed, and end-user training to go along with it. Microsoft’s Active Directory “require complex passwords” setting is a start, but end-user training is also mandatory.

Many users apply the same passwords for every online system in which a password is needed. This is a problem. If one site gets hacked, cybercriminals will try your credentials at all common websites, and possibly at your firm’s VPN. It is imperative that your cybersecurity awareness training program encourage your team members to use different passwords for different sites, and especially for any system that your company uses.

Most companies have some sort of safety guidelines that their employees must follow or be aware of and cybersecurity should be no different. There are a number of companies that specialize in this type of training and picking the right type of training is critical.

Cybercriminal profiles

Today’s cybercriminals come at your company from many angles. Their motivations are often more practical than many law-abiding citizens would expect.

Profit. They want money, and you have information they can monetize.

Influence. They can use data to manipulate business or personal situations in their favor.

Power. If your company dominates an industry or owns critical trade secrets, others wish to take that power away from you and use it for their own advantage. Cybercrime is one way to accomplish that goal.

Motives such as these change the way cybercriminals operate. They are organized. They share information among each other. They are often well-funded. And these things make them more dangerous. Some cybercriminals are also your employees. This is a difficult topic. While it’s true that internal employees are responsible for a large number of cybersecurity breaches, it’s also true that most of these are unintentional. They are a result of good people doing something they shouldn’t, either out of ignorance or because a cybercriminal tricked them into doing it (if you saw the movie “Catch Me if You Can” this is Frank Abagnale’s social-engineering behavior). Statistics on the exact percentage of “insider” cyber breaches that are deliberate vs. inadvertent vary widely, but the opinion can be held that the vast majority of insider threats are not malicious. No matter which statistic you believe, everyone agrees that many insider threats would have been prevented if the insider had understood how his or her behavior allowed a breach to occur. It’s easy to see why a good cybersecurity awareness training program is so important to the success of your company.

There is a risk of an employee with malicious intent to breach your sensitive data. Whether it be to share sensitive details to a competitor, profit from your data, or a disgruntled employee looking to carry out revenge against your company. If your company falls victim of a malicious-intentioned employee, finding out what happened is even more difficult because they often have high level system privileges that allow them to erase their tracks.

If your company is one of the unlucky ones where an insider deliberately caused a security breach, then you are automatically in the highest risk category of those susceptible to cybercrime. The keys to mitigate this risk are simple.

• Educate your employees. Establish a strong mandatory and frequent cybersecurity awareness training program for your employees that clearly lays out the policy for cybersecurity and the consequences of violating the policy. Don’t allow employees to take home devices that contain sensitive files due to the risk of the device being stolen or sensitive data being transmitted over insecure networks at their home or other locations. Instruct your employees to never share their passwords.
• Know your people. Perform background checks on your employees to assist in identifying those that may take deliberate actions that would harm your company. Know which people have access to the most sensitive data.
• Guard your most sensitive data. Limit your employees’ ability to obtain access (intentional or unintentional) to sensitive information via a least-privileged approach to your data. Identify your most sensitive and valuable data. Then assign that data the highest safeguarding and most persistent monitoring.

Remove “local administrator privileges” from your users to their company-provided laptops or desktops. A local administrator is someone who can do anything he or she chooses to with a computer, such as install programs, delete files, change sensitive security settings, and so on. Turning on “egress filtering” on your network and limiting the use of USB thumb drives will make it harder for anyone to make copies of it and move them outside of your organization.

Ensure that you have forensics available to you. Tracking down an internal cybercriminal requires logging of network activity, especially for any access to sensitive information. Any logs need to be stored in an area that is limited to the fewest number of employees as possible.

In short, your employees are your most valuable asset, but can also be your greatest liability. They need to be trained on best practices to keep your data safe, and they also need to understand that you have forensic systems in place that will likely catch them if they attempt to access data they should not. A “trust but verify” approach regarding employee access to your critical intellectual property is an important part of your company’s cybersecurity program.

Bryce Austin is the CEO of TCE Strategy, and actively advises companies across a wide variety of industries on effective methods to mitigate cyber threats.

Almost seven years ago, Strawberry Fields’ team worked through the holiday season to adopt a cannabis tracking system, as mandated by the state of Colorado. Their deadline? When the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31, 2013. But unlike the people who organize the annual New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, the cannabis cultivation company didn’t want to drop the ball.

“All the tagging of the plants and getting that system up and running within our grow in a short amount of time was just insane,” says Rich Kwesell, who founded and owns cultivator Strawberry Fields with his brother, Mike.

The business’ roughly 30-day notice to adopt the Marijuana Inventory Tracking System (MITS, precursor to METRC) on the cusp of Colorado’s rollout of adult-use sales on Jan. 1, 2014, was just a preview of the regulatory compliance that would come. The state would become more stringent with its requirements as it transitioned from serving a limited medical patient base to a much larger group of adult-use consumers.

Ensuring traceability and safety in a regulated market is paramount to cannabis cultivators, regulators and other industry stakeholders. To further establish their grip on the cannabis market, or to avoid it entirely, many state and local lawmakers have also restricted cannabis business activity through license caps, bans and moratoriums, complicating regulatory compliance. This piece reviews the evolution from early industry testing and licensing regulations to today, how the patchwork system continues to change, and how regulations can be improved.

Colorado: Paving the way

Since it began cultivating cannabis more than a decade ago, Strawberry Fields has grown to roughly 90,000 square feet of state-legal greenhouse cannabis production and another about 210,000 square feet of greenhouse production of feminized hemp seed, Rich Kwesell says. Kwesell Brothers Group (KBG) is now vertically integrated with brands touching everything from cannabis cultivation, processing and retail to ATM services and online document management.

Although regulations seemed daunting when adult-use sales went online in 2014, they were relatively loose compared to now, and they continue to evolve.

For example, the state started requiring pesticide testing for adult-use and medical cannabis in 2018, as has become the norm in most states. It was an easy adjustment for Strawberry Fields, however, as leadership had already been growing and marketing pesticide-free product.

“Something that we adopted early, early on was biocontrols,” Kwesell says. “I’m just super thankful that we did that.”

Businesses blossomed across the state where they could. Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED) data shows 705 adult-use grow licenses as of Aug. 3, 2020, and 599 adult-use stores as of Aug. 1, 2020. Amendment 64, while avoiding capping licenses at the state level, allowed cities and counties to limit and even ban cannabis industry establishments and institute moratoriums. (As of January 2019, fewer than 30% of Colorado cities and towns had cannabis sales, according to the Denver-based news publication Westword.)

Not all cities and counties have license caps on grows, but with many limits on storefronts due to moratoriums, bans and strict zoning, the market will see consolidation in the growing space, Kwesell says. And that’s OK, he says.

“I believe in free market, and I think that that provides the best products that I buy from all different kinds of companies.”

Some regulations have eased as the market has matured. In 2019, for example, Colorado did away with a ban on cannabis business ownership by publicly traded companies.

Shannon Gray, communications specialist for Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED), the agency tasked with making and enforcing rules and regulations for the state’s industry, says the agency continues to collaborate with many industry stakeholders in the rulemaking process.

“That includes cultivators from different areas, testing facilities, licensees of every type, and then local jurisdictions, public health advocates, public health officials — just everyone who touches this industry in some way,” Gray says.

In a larger effort to collaborate to create sensible regulation for the industry, MED Executive Director Jim Burack says regulators from states with medical and adult-use programs, and Canadian provinces, formed a group about three years ago called The Regulator Roundtable.

“For Colorado, we’ve shared our successes with packaging and labeling, vaping, testing and production management with other states and received ideas most recently about how to create a social equity program that is sustainable and effective,” Burack says.

Burack says MED has also traded regulatory insights with government representatives in the Netherlands and New Zealand.

Colorado’s early foray into adult-use legalization, and the lessons that went with being a pioneer, helped set the stage for rules and regulations for the entire industry, Kwesell says.

For example, over the years in Colorado, residents and business owners have complained of the influx of cannabis operations and sued cannabis businesses. Visiting officials from other states have taken this to heart, Kwesell says, limiting license numbers and implementing strict zoning.

Washington: Controlled licensing but voluntary testing

On Nov. 6, 2012, the same day Colorado voters passed Amendment 64, voters to the northwest in Washington state legalized adult-use cannabis through Initiative 502.

Unlike Colorado, Washington’s adult-use market didn’t follow a regulated medical market, says Crystal Oliver, who co-founded Washington’s Finest Cannabis with her husband, Kevin Oliver, in 2014. “… It was a very different environment as far as what the existing marketplace looked like,” she says.

Crystal Oliver, whose Deer Park, Washington-based operation includes about 30,000 square feet of outdoor cannabis production, says the state’s medical market was split between two federal prosecutors. Jenny Durkan, now mayor of Seattle, allowed storefronts to operate in the Western District. Mike Ormsby in the Eastern District didn’t allow them to operate, as Oliver puts it, “in any significant numbers nor for very long.”

For years following medical marijuana legalization in Washington in the 1990s, only medical patients and their primary caregivers were permitted to grow cannabis, says Sativa Rasmussen, associate at law firm Dorsey & Whitney and chair-elect of the Washington State Bar Association’s Cannabis Law Section. In 2011, the state passed a bill to permit “collective gardens,” allowing up to 10 medical patients to share a garden.

In 2015, the state passed the Cannabis Patient Protection Act, which, among other things, ended collective gardens, effective July 2016, and replaced them with medical cooperatives, says Brian E. Smith, spokesperson for the Washington Liquor Control Board (LCB). The cooperatives are limited to four patients.

The state previously limited producer licenses to one per entity, Oliver says, then changed the rules in 2017 to allow for three per entity, with the stipulation that two of them be gained through an acquisition.

Under the 2015 Cannabis Patient Protection Act, passed after the state’s adult-use market became operational, the state aligned the medical and adult-use markets. Smith says retailers “are required to hold a medical marijuana endorsement to sell certain medical product and must have a consultant on site.” However, producers and processors don’t need a separate endorsement.

As of Aug. 19, 2020, Smith says Washington has 942 active producer/processor licenses, 146 active producer-only licenses and 233 active processor-only licenses.

The state allows cities, towns and counties to ban or set moratoriums on cannabis establishments. Vertical integration, along with out-of-state owners, have been prohibited since adult-use cannabis was legalized.

The ban on vertical integration helped encourage an array of diverse businesses and low barriers to entry, says Oliver, who also has served on a number of regulatory working groups over the years, including on the LCB’s Cannabis Advisory Council. “A lot of the things they did in Washington were done with that in mind: how [to] get these folks who are operating a currently illegal business to step into the light and operate under these regulations instead,” she says.

Out-of-state financing, originally banned, became legal in 2016 in the form of gifting and lending. And out-of-state ownership is still a point of contention. This, Oliver points out, is exemplified by a lawsuit filed in Thurston County Superior Court in June 2020, Todd Brinkmeyer v. Washington State Liquor & Cannabis Board, which challenges the constitutionality of the ban on out-of-state owners.

“... It seems that in order to attract significant investment into Washington state, we would need to be drawing investment from outside our state,” Oliver says. “[It] also … seems the people have figured out other ways to kind of circumvent those restrictions, so I’m not sure how much those restrictions really help at this time.”

The industry’s ability to obtain access to significant capital seems to generally be more difficult in Washington than in some other states, like Colorado, Rasmussen says.

At the same time, Rasmussen says industry members are concerned that “lifting the residency requirement would result in an influx of big money, which would lead to consolidation and the elimination of small, locally owned craft cannabis businesses, which … is already something that small producers are struggling with.”

Washington’s testing requirements for adult-use cannabis include analysis of potency, mycotoxins, moisture, microbiological content, residual solvents and foreign matter, Smith says. The state also regularly updates lists of permitted pesticides and their limits, prohibited pesticides, and allowable limits for four heavy metals. But it doesn’t require testing for pesticides or heavy metals in the adult-use market.

The state’s medical market adopted permanent rules for required pesticide testing and heavy metal testing in 2017 and 2018, respectively, Smith says.

Many participants in the state’s adult-use cannabis industry, however, have conducted voluntary testing to ensure safe product, Oliver says. “Periodically, if there’s been a complaint or some allegation, we’ve seen the WSDA [Washington State Department of Agriculture] and LCB go out to facilities and do sampling to identify if illicit pesticides are being used and that sort of thing,” she says.

This regulatory scheme might change soon, though, Rasmussen says. At the urging of consumers, businesses and other adult-use cannabis stakeholders, LCB may adopt mandatory pesticide and heavy metal testing soon after press time in August 2020, to require testing as soon as March 2021.

Another potential change to Washington’s program, Oliver says, would be the establishment of farm-direct sales. “I think that’s an interesting area and one I’d like to see the industry evolve so that farmers have more opportunity to connect with consumers and educate consumers, and I think that would be good for the overall industry,” she says.

Oregon: Growers glad they were No. 3

With an optimal climate for sun-grown cannabis and history of enterprising growers, Oregon has a long history of growing the plant, says Mason Walker, CEO and co-owner of East Fork Cultivars in Southern Oregon.

Its medical program, which began in the late ’90s, was popular, Walker says. “Prior to recreational, a rich web of medical growers, processors, and dispensaries stretched across the state,” he says. Patients are still allowed to grow plants or designate a caregiver who can, and doctors can prescribe cannabis. But adult-use dispensaries now serve most medical patients.

In 2014, voters’ passage of Measure 91, to legalize adult-use cannabis, followed Colorado and Washington’s legalization initiatives.

“I was kind of surprised that we didn’t lead as one of the first states, but I’m actually in retrospect really glad that we were No. 3 to the party because we got to learn a bit from the mistakes that Washington and Colorado made in the structures of their industries they set up,” Walker says.

Unlike those states, for example, Oregon required pesticide testing when adult-use growers began cultivating in 2016. The state had “by far the longest list of banned pesticides” at the time, Walker says, and it still has stringent regulations for pesticide and solvent testing. Like those states, Oregon does allow local governments to opt out of the adult-use program.

Walker says East Fork Cultivars has had “a seat at the table” during regulation development and rulemaking, and its team members sit on various industry boards. They have, for instance, served on rules advisory committees with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC); most recently, East Fork’s Education Director Anna Symonds joined the rules advisory committee on vaporizer additives.

One of East Fork’s co-founders, Nathan Howard, has been involved in Oregon politics for several years. “He was heavily involved in the shaping of that adult measure that led to legalization in Oregon,” Walker says. “So, we’ve had that inside view from the beginning, which we’re lucky to have.”

Oregon took a “small-license approach” to licensing and limited the amount of production space per cultivator in the adult-use market, says Walker, whose operation, founded in 2015, is growing about one acre of adult-use cannabis and nine acres of hemp in 2020. “They decided that a patchwork with a large number of small businesses is going to be the best approach for a more equitable, inclusive industry,” he says.

However, no limits on licenses nor residency requirements for ownership, and low barriers to entry (non-refundable $250 application fees and annual fees ranging from $1,000 to $5,750), paired with limited demand, led to an oversupply in the Oregon market. In 2019, the state passed a bill allowing the OLCC to freeze the processing of license applications received after June 15, 2018. It is set to expire in January 2022.

And as of Aug. 7, 2020, the OLCC has granted nearly 2,300 recreational producer, processor, retailer and wholesaler licenses, according to the agency’s website.

Oregon’s climatic conditions make it ripe to become a net exporter state if and when interstate commerce opens up, Walker says. That will be a multistep process but is underway. In the summer of 2019, Oregon passed a bill to allow cannabis imports and exports. The next steps, Walker adds, are for other states to enact similar legislation and the federal government to indicate it will allow it.

Tough market conditions, he says, have so far set “Oregon up to be stronger when interstate commerce happens because we’ve gone through that crucible of competition, honed our products, honed our brands.”

Illinois: Rec in the Midwest

The Illinois General Assembly legalized adult-use cannabis in 2019, and sales started Jan. 1, 2020. It was the second Midwest state to legalize recreational cannabis, behind Michigan, and these newer markets have had the advantage of learning from the medical and adult-use pioneers that preceded them.

Bedford Grow Vice President of Sales and Marketing Paul Chialdikas says the state’s medical program required, from day one, that labs test for cannabinoids, pesticides, residual solvents, mycotoxins, bacteria and yeasts.

Aside from following the rules and regulations that address state laws, testing labs often take additional steps to ensure customers get the product they’re looking for. “The labs stepped up at the very beginning, started adding terpenes.… Our labs are so thorough that I trust the product that all the cultivators are putting out in the state of Illinois.”

Over the years, the lab that Bedford Grow uses has increased the number of terpenes for which it tests. In 2020, the state began requiring labs to test for heavy metals, Chialdikas says.

The Illinois Department of Agriculture confirmed these testing requirements, but the state uses the term “microbiological contaminants” instead of “bacteria” and “yeasts.”

With licensing, Illinois has allowed 22 cultivators to grow for the medical market, according to the Illinois Department of Agriculture. Now, those same 22 cultivators grow product for adult-use sales.

“The capped licenses allowed the state to learn [how to regulate the new industry]. Now, can they add more? I think the state of Illinois probably feels comfortable that they can add more,” Chialdikas says. “To have come into the market and say, ‘We’re going to allow 1,000 operators’? Whoa, I don’t know. I don’t know if we’d be at the spot we’re at right now, with the quality of product that we’re putting out in the marketplace.”

(Contrastingly, Oklahoma, has nearly 6,000 active grower and 21 active lab licenses as of July 1, according to the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority. The state announced in July that it will begin enforcing testing for all cannabis products for the first time since sales began in 2018.)

Illinois has delayed issuing additional licenses for craft growers, infusers, transporters and retailers until at least late August, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before COVID-19 struck the U.S., the state of Illinois would send a compliance director to Bedford Grow’s roughly 80,000-square-foot building in Chicago every week for five hours. “He walked the facility with bar coding — everything’s bar coded — checked plants, checked weights. … It was thorough,” Chialdikas says. In the COVID age, “they come in the back door through our computer system and watch our cameras and everything,” he adds.

Ohio: High compliance in a medical market

Ohio’s medical marijuana program launched in January 2019 following legalization in 2016 through the state legislature, grew to nearly 109,174 registered patients by the end of May 2020, says Ali Simon, spokesperson for the state’s Board of Pharmacy. As of press time, 24 cultivators hold certificates of operation, and another nine hold provisional licenses, according to Jennifer Jarrell, spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Commerce.

Ohio’s relatively tightly regulated market works for Brian Kessler, chairman of the board of Youngstown, Ohio-based grower Riviera Creek, which he owns through his company SBL Venture Capital LLC. Kessler was motivated to enter the cannabis industry because he wanted to produce a regulated product that was safe for consumption.

According to its administrative code, Ohio requires labs to test for contamination from microbials and mycotoxins; contamination from heavy metals, “including, at a minimum, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury;” fertilizer and pesticide residue; and cannabinoid potency for THC, THCA, CBD, CBDA and CBN.

“When a state puts in place good, solid testing requirements and makes you have methodologies that you need to do to meet it, I’m a big fan of that. And Ohio has that,” Kessler says.

Testing labs may test for terpenes, per state law. “If terpenes are added to a product, they are required to be on the ingredient panel, regardless of the origin,” Jarrell says. She adds that cultivators and processors can choose to include terpene analysis results on their product labels.

One thing Kessler says could be improved in Ohio is the number of dispensaries. “Some cities are well served, but there are some cities in the state, Mansfield [between Columbus and Cleveland] for example, that require an hour and 20-minute drive to reach a dispensary,” he says.

Several cities and towns in Ohio, such as Mansfield, have banned cannabis businesses. Others have set up moratoriums.

Ohio’s Board of Pharmacy, Department of Commerce and State Medical Board have instituted changes to address public health crises, Jarrell says. In addition to issuing rules in response to COVID-19, Ohio banned Vitamin E Acetate early on.

In explaining the need for stringent regulations, Kessler references the pharmaceutical industry’s tight controls.

“I always worry,” Kessler says, “because if a consumer’s using [cannabis] and says, ‘I need this to help me address this problem,’ but the product varies every time you deal with it, their success rate and happiness about, ‘This is helping me,’ could be affected if there’s tremendous variance. So, we’re not there yet. We’re not at a ‘Tylenol level’ of cannabis.”

Merging the states’ regulatory patchwork

Ahead of federal cannabis legalization, Walker of Oregon’s East Fork Cultivars says he would like industry groups to push for, and states to adopt, model legislation so there is more consistency between them. He says: “It’ll set us up for less pain down the road, collectively, as an industry, to try to compete on a national and global stage because right now, you flip that switch, it would be chaos.

“A lot of businesses would just go out of business because … a set of rules in Ohio or Illinois would not be able to compete at all in a national market. That’s kind of like my last sentiment there on regulation is we’ve got to step our game up here pretty soon, as an overall industry, and stop getting too deep into the weeds.”

Patrick Williams is senior editor of Cannabis Business Times, Cannabis Dispensary and Hemp Grower.

This article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of sister publication, Cannabis Business Times. Read the related “How we got here” articles regarding the cannabis industry during the last decade here http://bit.ly/decade_cannabis_1 and here http://bit.ly/decade_cannabis_2.