HUMBOLDT GROWERS NETWORK: BEHIND THE REDWOOD CURTAIN

Northern California’s Lost Coast is a wonderland of rolling hills and ancient forests, steeped in outlaw history. The place is the Bermuda Triangle of the West, shrouded in the mystique of the counter cultural revolution that has taken place here over the last 35 years. Humboldt County growers have set the international gold standard for quality in cannabis production. With  legalization, Humboldt County Network is moved by the same keen sense of urgency, a concern that Humboldt County small farmers, with their exceptional product, will be cut out of the cannabis trade. We are at ground zero. Our reputation is unrivaled. Our local genetics have dominated the world market for over 30 years. But it is all at risk.

We will stand our ground as best we can. As all of us must.

Through a combination of research, interviews and editorials, we are bringing to light issues and offering solutions relevant to cannabis farming in Humboldt County and across the State. Humboldt Growers Network is about offering answers. Humboldt Growers Network wants to foster Humboldt cannabis.

By engaging together, we can support each other. We want Humboldt County’s reputation to continue to dominate the world of cannabis as it has for many years.

Resist

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you may contact us at answers.humboldtgrowers@gmail.com

we encourage readers to remain in strict compliance with municipal, county and state laws and regulations; as well adapting to future, ever-changing applicable laws.

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Flore down in the Castro…

There is some confusion over at http://kymkemp.com/2018/06/07/sfs-castro-district-not-sure-if-cannabis-retail-store-featuring-humboldt-county-farmers-is-good-fit/. The commenters are knee jerking – they have not bothered to understand the whole situation.

Let’s start with our local Humboldt County farmers. Both Humboldt Growers Network and Flore want to support those hard working farmers – it is hysteria to think that helping our farmers is equivalent to milking them. Humboldt Growers Network fully intends to bring as much Humboldt pot to market as we can and we have developed a relationship with Flore and we hope it grows. I am an old San Francisco boy and I can’t think of a better clientle to serve than the Castro community and San Francisco. We up here in Humboldt are a natural fit with San Francisco and the Bay Area – hey, its always been the City to us. And why wouldn’t San Francisco want to get its hands on the best cannabis out there – especially when you consider that Humboldt is one of the few places you can get clean, killer pot.

The destroyed lives of innocent children…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/6/7/1770133/-Trump-s-Monstrous-Immigration-Policy-Child-collapses-sobbing-Mama-Papa-over-and-over

Go look at this link if you dare. Trump, the Trump Administration and ICE are animals.

“Donald Trump and his cohorts are pure evil.”

Reject them.

 

Resist

 

Ecole…

Years ago, maybe 23 years, I took my 11 year old daughter down to Pucon, Chile for a month. We have a small investment in a hostel down there. We were down to backpack and visit the fjords much further to the south.

It was a really great trip. The people were terrific and the town of Pucon was unique. Ecole itself is packed with travelers, mainly South Americans and Europeans – a couple of gringos thrown in. Ecole is very active in the Chilean ecology effort – particularly the Alerce. There is a volcano looking over the town; as we sat on the hostel deck drinking beers in the evenings, we could see the glowing red rim of the thing above us; but there is also a large lake and beach. It was super hot.

Humboldt Growers Network is now bringing Ecole into the fold a little; at least enough to let you know about it. Authenticity is something that we reach out for in all the businesses we work with. Ecole has got this.

We are happy to introduce you to the place. It is a long way off, it really is; but you will never regret the adventure.

Here are a couple of pictures from back then; I will see if I can get some new ones soon.

A bunch of our friends setting in the Ecole courtyard. That’s me in the white shirt with the glasses. My daughter is next to me.

Here’s my daughter on her first horse in the Andes.

Orchard house flower garden…

It’s Spring…

Trump…

Stop lying. Just stop lying.

Have you no respect for our democracy at all?

Or, is it all just about you?

and, we got turkeys…

so, my neighbor has been feeding wildlife close to our property for several years. This is actually illegal; the practice creates artificially expanded wildlife populations. Now we have an overflow. We found these turkey eggs under one of our olive trees today. The hen waddled away with a limp; this must be why we found them in such an unlikely place. Usually we don’t see hide or hair of our turkeys’ eggs. Just plenty of birds. Anyway…

Pretty things, huh?

And, a turkey egg, asparagus and ham quiche – and it was really good…

My Wife’s Tools of the Day…

 

2018 Cannabis Bed Preparation…

so, we had to move our gardens up out of the woods and put them on government “approved” ground – the only ground that would please them was my previous vegetable garden. Here is a sequence of images from bare ground to the finished and planted bed. When we are done, we expect each 25 square feet to produce about a pound and a half.

 

 

 

And, we ran out of soil; so, we will use beds targeted for the new veggie garden.

A few name changes…

With legalization making our “215 cannabis collective” irrelevant, Humboldt Growers Collective is morphing into Humboldt Growers Network, a distributorship dedicated to serving the Humboldt farmer and bringing Humboldt product to the cannabis consumer. Our new cannabis farm names are Homegrown Farms, Inc., Mazari Farms, Inc., and Flore Farms, Inc.. We will have our nurseries up and running as soon as the County starts granting temporary nursery licenses.

You can continue to use answers.humboldtgrowers@gmail.com to communicate with us.

Biomass

 

The way we sell products is changing and it seems like the distributors want your trim and don’t want your flower. How do you spend $500+/lb in production, while selling trim at $50/lb.?? With that plan, you can’t afford to trim your flower. Can we keep our high grade flower market? Not if you are selling it for what it cost you to grow. That won’t work.

The distributors are each looking to sign up 200 plus farms based on the amount of trim they need a year for their business plan….. 200 farms x 300 lbs per farm = 60,000 lbs of ex-tractable material a year. They get their material but these farms all go bankrupt. Now if that distributor would take biomass “whole plants bucked”,  he could get the same amount of material from half the farms. In this model the distributor takes all the produce from each farm he works with. This will work for the farmer if the price point is right.

We just need to settle on a price that is fair in relation to the cost of production. This would be a model that can keep farms alive. For example: Humboldt’s leading product becomes whole plants bucked selling at $500/lb – this would include both flower and trim. By weight, flower and trim are on a 1 to 1 ratio – this means the farmer is getting twice the weight. Humboldt will have an estimated 250 acres of permitted cannabis cultivation in the next few months……that is still a large enough crop to sway the extraction market.

The plan is simple: extraction companies need so much material, they have to get it from the Triangle. The Triangle is only offering bucked whole plant material…..trim and flower are no longer separated. The wholesale price of that product is our production costs x 2 – at minimum. That is the bottom line that we need to enforce. The sooner we all start using the math to our advantage, the sooner we can get the pricing set on this new product line and sleep at night.