New Mexico\u2019s largest cannabis producer last week announced plans for a massive expansion, boasting that it would make the Land of Enchantment the top-producing state in the country and earn the distinction of biggest marijuana grow.<\/p>\n
Ultra Health<\/a>, the state\u2019s top-grossing medical marijuana company, hopes to open its new cultivation site, Ultra Health Tularosa, on 200 acres of agricultural lands in Otero County,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0Albuquerque Business First. The new site is slated to include 20 acres of indoor cultivation, 80 acres of outdoor cannabis fields, 100 acres of outdoor industrial hemp fields and 120,000 square feet of production buildings.<\/p>\n Ultra Health said its mission is to \u201csupply New Mexico with a diverse variety of high-quality cannabis that satisfies each and every client and propels the Land of Enchantment to unprecedented heights.\u201d<\/p>\n As New Mexico is one of the states\u00a0with the lowest median income<\/a>, you can imagine that many citizens view this as welcome news.<\/p>\n However, this plan for the biggest marijuana grow is all predicated on the state\u2019s gubernatorial hopeful Jeff Apodaca winning office in November, and then being able to implement his plan to legalize cannabis in\u00a0New Mexico<\/a>. He\u2019s running on a platform of boosting the legal cannabis economy as a means to lift the state out of poverty.<\/p>\n There is a certain sense of poetry to Apodaca\u2019s ambition. As Albuquerque\u2019s\u00a0KOB4\u00a0reports<\/a>, Apodaca\u2019s father was the governor who signed\u00a0the legislation in 1978<\/a>\u00a0that made New Mexico the first of several states to allow participation in the (now moribund) DEA-permitted medical marijuana program. This was a wave of legislation nearly 20 years before California\u2019s Proposition 215 and largely forgotten today, with the DEA program frozen.<\/p>\n New Mexico got its own medical marijuana program (not recognized by the feds, of course) in 2007. A general legalization bill is currently pending in the state house, and\u00a0cleared the Senate Rules Committee<\/a>\u00a0in February. While this is encouraging news, there is still a sense that Ultra Health is gambling that the legalization wave will reach New Mexico.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, there is also a sense of\u00a0d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu to all this. We\u2019ve heard claims to the title of biggest marijuana grow and top cannabis-producing state before.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The new plans are certainly far more ambitious than those announced as record-breaking over a year ago \u2014 a testament to soaring hopes for the legal cannabis industry\u2019s future. It remains to be seen if they will be more realistic.<\/p>\n In December 2016,\u00a0AmeriCann<\/a>\u00a0of Denver\u00a0announced plans<\/a>\u00a0to develop the country\u2019s biggest marijuana grow, for the medical market, in Freetown, Massachusetts, some 50 miles south of Boston. At one million square feet, the\u00a0Massachusetts Medical Cannabis Center<\/a>\u00a0was planned to be \u201cthe place in the northeast U.S. for the creation of a wide variety of exciting new advanced products for medical cannabis patients,\u201d said AmeriCann CEO Tim Keogh. The project was to initially include a 130,000-square-foot cultivation and processing area, and a 30,000-square-foot research and development site. Even if it expanded to the anticipated million square feet, that would still be only a tenth the size of the anticipated New Mexico facility.<\/p>\n And with the 2016 announcement, Keogh said the facility was projected to be operational by the end of the next year. But\u00a0a report this week<\/a>\u00a0still calls the facility \u201chighly anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time of the AmeriCann announcement, it was said that the Freetown facility would\u00a0supersede<\/a>\u00a0that under construction by\u00a0GFarmaLabs<\/a>\u00a0in Desert Hot Springs, California \u2014 until then the largest marijuana grow in the country, at 100,000 square feet.<\/p>\n Finally, if we are to judge the biggest in North America, the prize goes not to any U.S. state, but to a Canadian province,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0cannabis industry trade website\u00a0Growers Network. They give the place\u00a0of honor to\u00a0Canopy Growth<\/a>\u00a0corporation of\u00a0Smith Falls, Ontario, with 568,000 square feet. The runner-ups are\u00a07 Acres<\/a>\u00a0of Kincardine, Ontario, at 304,920 square feet, and\u00a0Organigram<\/a>\u00a0of Moncton, New Brunswick, at 227,500 square feet.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t until we reach fourth place for North America that we come to\u00a0Copperstate Farms<\/a>\u00a0in Snowflake, Arizona, with 217,800 square feet. This appears to have beaten AmeriCann to the punch in overtaking the Desert Hot Springs operation.<\/p>\n White Mountain Independent, an Arizona newspaper,\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0that Copperstate Farms opened the Snowflake facility last year on the site for the former Nature Sweet Tomato plant. By June of last year, it was hiring to the tune of 10 employees per week.<\/p>\n But Canopy Growth of Ontario, in addition to being far in the lead, is also\u00a0expanding its operations overseas<\/a>. And with Canada about to legalize nationwide, its gain over the United States is only set to widen.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b>\u00a0where do you think the biggest marijuana grow should be?<\/p>\n The post Big Pot & The Race for the \u2018Biggest Marijuana Grow\u2019<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
New Mexico\u2019s largest cannabis producer last week announced plans for a massive expansion, boasting that it would make the Land of Enchantment the top-producing state in the country and earn the distinction of biggest marijuana grow. Ultra Health, the state\u2019s top-grossing medical marijuana company, hopes to open its new cultivationContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4083,3176,50,3950,461,2678,5,4084,1902,124,1809],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25774,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25773\/revisions\/25774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Big Pot & The Race for the \u2018Biggest Marijuana Grow\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"