Okanagan ideal climate for growing cannabis; getting bud to consumers a challenge

The idea of a cannabis farm might bring up classic depictions in movies of a warehouse with purple lights and electronic music, rather than a small, organic cultivator in the Okanagan.

Years of flooding pushed Krystine McInnes off her vegetable farm near Cawston, so she started growing pot near Kelowna.

Now she warns others to avoid the cannabis industry.

She’s the director of Grown Here Farms, a small craft farm that grows hemp plants for CBD buds, and she said the crop itself can handle challenging weather but the industry regulations are brutal. Hemp is a cannabis plant but with a lot less THC, the chemical that produces the high.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I had known what I know now,” she said.

After a series of floods on her Cawston area farm, vegetables wouldn’t grow so McInnes pivoted to CBD flower in 2019 and eventually relocated to Kelowna. She said hemp was one of the few crops resilient enough to grow on her land.

“When we looked at what we could realistically do in the fields, given the conditions we were facing after the flood. So it was really kind of a move based out of desperation… not something I would re-choose, that’s for sure,” she said.

A lot of focus was on indoor growing operations when legalization first rolled around, but the Okanagan is actually well-suited for growing hemp and cannabis outdoors, she said.

“We have kind of an ideal climate. We have those long, dry summers. We have an extended growing season. A lot of places in Canada deal with mold and mildew issues, particularly on the east coast or in the north,” she said.

Sometimes extreme heat in the summer can be an issue, but McInnes said irrigation protects them from burning.

Cannabis and hemp also have a shorter growth cycle than other crops common in the area like grapes and stone fruit, so the timing is more forgiving to allow farmers to harvest before the frost comes.

Even when it comes to drying out the flowers to get it ready for market, McInnes said a drier climate like the Okanagan’s will help reduce mold growth during that process.

Since it’s so expensive to grow under lights she expects a shift to more outdoor farms.

“All these big companies were going in and buying 50,000 square foot greenhouses and blah, blah, blah… it is so expensive to grow under lights indoors. They all went bankrupt,” she said.

McInnes said the actual farming part of the business is going well, it’s just the regulations in B.C. that drag things down like high taxes and distribution laws.

The province’s BC Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch centralized most of the cannabis distribution in the province. McInnes said when a product doesn’t meet the sales threshold to make it into the branch’s warehouse that kills sales.

“The industry itself is just such a nightmare,” she said. “It’s geared against your success. It’s hyper over regulated. The liquor boards basically control whether your brand lives or dies,” she said. “They can take your product sales from reasonable to zero in just like that one decision.”

Without the distribution branch producers have to go direct to consumer and McInnes said it’s a struggle since most retailers get all of their product right from the government out of convenience.

“With the provincial platform, what the retailers love about it is they can get all of their products with one shipment,” she said.

She said that hopefully one day cannabis will be treated the same as alcohol.

“The industry itself has this stigma to it,” she said. “I do think that we have to really start educating and communicating and doing all these things so that stigmatization can relax.”