Good morning Orion, tell us a little about yourself.
I was born and raised in San Diego, I am 40 years old, I’ve been growing for about 20 years total.
What originally made you interested in cultivating cannabis?
I wanted to grow cannabis because it was better and cheaper to grow it than to buy it. I started a clone company in 2013 filling racks and selling those in dispensaries.I’ve always been interested in clone aspects like trait genetics, aromas, smells, tastes, size of plants, those are all the things that you can pay attention to, and manipulate, which makes it fun.
Whats your favorite strain to grow?
My favorite strain for the moment is our flowhite, and it’s the (campus) favorite, it yields like crazy. I tend to like traditional southern California OG strains.
How has it been cultivating at the Needles indoor campus vs a more traditional outdoor grow?
Vertical is different in that we get to fine tune all aspects of grows with sensors and monitors, humidity, temperatures etc. It’s vastly different cultivation conditions compared to outdoor being in the dust, wind and bugs, which makes it fun because there is such a high level of cultivation manipulation with indoor growing. You can make micro adjustments and fine tune strains which makes things very interesting.
How was cultivating and the cannabis industry in California before recreational laws were passed?
I was still young when the medical law passed and I told my mom to vote for it saying,”hey mom vote for this, this is a good thing” and she was pretty open minded. I can remember a friend showed me all of the steps of the growing process from a seed to the final product and was astonished. They say money doesn’t grow on trees, but that’s a lie, its apples, oranges, cannabis etc, and farming is something that I’ve always loved to do. We would grow plants everywhere we could, outside and in rooms. The clone business brought me to a lot of different people, and this is how I was introduced to the Vertical team.
What are your thoughts on Federal legalization?
When cannabis becomes federally legal there will be a lot of big money pushing their way into it and a lot of the growing will move towards outdoor greenhouses and controlled environments like that as it becomes even more of a commodity, it may not be as financially feasible to continue to solely grow in an indoor environment. Even in the last 15 years going from medical legalization into recreational legalization (in California) has brought so many changes. You also have to consider other states with ideal growing conditions. There was never a thought about such strict regulation within the industry although this is the reality. They could have made it a lot easier, but for some reason there will be a lot of control placed on cannabis.
