While the practitioners can allow registered patients to grow a limited amount at home for personal use, the regulator’s findings show that such authorizations rose to a staggering 36.2 grams by the end of March, compared with 25.2 grams in October 2018.

Meanwhile, average purchases by registered patients, who can buy pot from licensed producers and federal medical sellers, have stayed as low as 2 to 2.1 grams every month, data showed.

“An early review of the data signals to me a striking difference in the average amounts prescribed per day in the two different channels,” said Deepak Anand, CEO of Toronto medical cannabis distributor Materia Ventures.

With no concrete limits on personal production, Health Canada is facing rising pressure to tackle the perceived abuse of the home-grow program.

“Health Canada is concerned that high daily authorized amounts are, in a few instances, leading to abuse of the access to cannabis for medical purposes framework and are undermining the integrity of the system,” the regulator said.

CBC News reported in October that the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) raided dozens of illegal cannabis grow operations between July and October, a majority of which had personal production authorization.

“It remains unclear if we are dealing with systemic issues as opposed to targeted ones, as a result of the tremendous pressure the regulator has fallen under recently by provincial and municipal governments,” Anand said.

Health Canada’s finding show 43,211 individuals were allowed to grow marijuana for their personal medical use by the end of September, and 377,024 clients were registered as patients.

— Reporting for Reuters by Shariq Khan and Vishwadha Chander in Bangalore and Steve Scherer in Toronto.

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The company on Tuesday announced next steps in the “business transformation plan” it launched in February to “better align the business financially with the current realities of the cannabis market in Canada while maintaining a sustainable platform for long-term growth.”

Industry observers have said cannabis companies’ fight for market position, against illicit as well as fellow licit producers, has left them piling up inventory, in turn leading to significant price cuts.

The Aurora facilities to be closed include Aurora Prairie, the former CanniMed Therapeutics production site in Saskatoon, a 97,000-square foot, 30-room 19,000-kg/year grow and oil extraction facility and the first and only supplier of medical cannabis to Health Canada from 2000 until 2013.

Also slated for closure is Aurora Mountain at Cremona, Alta., a 55,200-square foot, 4,800-kg/year plant. The Cremona plant was Aurora Cannabis’ first cannabis grow facility and was billed as the world’s first-ever custom-built cannabis grow site.

The closures also include two Quebec sites, Aurora Vie (40,000 square feet, 4,000 kg/year) at Pointe-Claire and Aurora Eau (48,000 square feet, 4,500 kg/year) at Lachute.

The two Quebec sites had been set up for cultivation of “niche and exotic cannabis varieties that cannot be grown in other facilities,” and to meet EU export standards. Aurora Vie today also supplies the company’s Canadian medical and consumer markets with dried flower, oil products and softgel capsules.

The company will also close Aurora Ridge, a 55,000-square foot, 10-room, 7,000-kg/year facility at Markham, Ont., which supplied Canadian consumer and medical markets as well as international markets.

In all, the closures are expected to translate to about a 30 per cent cut in production staff over the next two fiscal quarters, Aurora said Tuesday.

By the end of Q2 2021, Aurora said it expects to consolidate its Canadian production and manufacturing work at four sites: Aurora Sky and Aurora Polaris, both at Edmonton; Aurora River, at Bradford, Ont.; and Whistler Pemberton, at Pemberton, B.C.

A fifth site, Aurora Sun at Medicine Hat, Alta., has been scaled back to six grow bays and “will allow for efficient scale production on an as-needed basis as market demand grows.”

Also, where the company was previously supplying some of its European customers through the Canadian plants now slated for closure, it said Tuesday it plans to “immediately ramp up” cannabis production at its Aurora Nordic facility at Odense, Denmark.

From that site, Aurora said, it believes it can “adequately” service the European market with EU-GMP certified product.

Moving production to larger-scale operations is expected to lead to a “material reduction in per unit cost of goods” by Q3 2021, Aurora said.

For the shuttered sites, next steps will be evaluated at the time of the closures, a company spokesperson said Tuesday via email.

“This has not simply been a cost-cutting exercise,” interim CEO Michael Singer said in the company’s release Tuesday.

Rather, he described it as “a strategic realignment of our operations to protect Aurora’s position as a leader in key global cannabinoid markets, most notably Canada” and to “improve gross margins and accelerate our ability to generate positive cash flow.”

Along with the plant closures and related job cuts, Aurora on Tuesday also announced it will cut about 25 per cent of sales, general and administration staff positions across “all levels of the company, including a restructuring of the executive leadership team.”

Of that group, the company said, most of the staff cuts are “with immediate effect.”

Between office and production staff, the cuts are expected to affect about 700 positions across the company, Aurora’s spokesperson said Tuesday. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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University of California synthetic biologists have engineered brewer’s yeast to produce marijuana’s main ingredients — mind-altering THC and non-psychoactive CBD — as well as novel cannabinoids not found in the plant itself.

Feeding only on sugar, the yeast is an easy and cheap way to produce pure cannabinoids that today are costly to extract from the buds of the plants.

“For the consumer, the benefits are high-quality, low-cost CBD and THC: you get exactly what you want from yeast,” said Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor. “It is a safer, more environmentally friendly way to produce cannabinoids.”

Medications containing THC have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to reduce nausea after chemotherapy and to improve appetite in AIDS patients. Recreational use is legal in Canada and 10 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

But medical research on the more than 100 other chemicals in marijuana has been difficult, because the chemicals occur in tiny quantities, making them hard to extract from the plant. Inexpensive, purer sources — like yeast — could make such studies easier.

Plus, he added, there is “the possibility of new therapies based on novel cannabinoids: the rare ones that are nearly impossible to get from the plant, or the unnatural ones, which are impossible to get from the plant.”

Cannabinoids join many other chemicals and drugs now being produced in yeast, including human growth hormone, insulin, and blood-clotting factors.

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“Cannabis affects everyone differently,” says Constable Mike Hibbs, “K” Division Media Relations. “There is no safe limit for drivers who are recreational cannabis users or medicinal users since everyone has a different body tolerance for drugs.”

Drug-impaired driving laws apply to all drivers, including those with a medical authorization for cannabis. The new law is consistent with the Criminal Code’s long-standing drug-impaired driving offence which has never exempted drivers who drive impaired by prescription drugs.

Different drugs act on your brain in different ways, but almost all affect your attention, judgment, reaction time, decision-making skills and more. If you choose to use cannabis, choose not to drive.

Here’s what you need to know to keep roads and public spaces safe for everyone:

• Cannabis consumption is banned in vehicles. Provincial laws have established a number of consequences when cannabis is consumed in a vehicle, including fines and other administrative penalties to discourage and reduce the incidents of impaired driving.
• Keep cannabis out of reach. When cannabis is in a car, it must be secured in closed packaging and not within reach of any occupants.
• Prescription drugs can impair a person’s ability to safely control a moving vehicle. When taking prescription drugs, it is vital to follow doctors’ orders against operating any machinery, for a certain time after taking them. Talk with your doctor about the effects of your prescriptions and how they can react with other substances.
• Know your local rules before consuming. Municipalities have the power to create additional restrictions on public use.

When motorists follow safe driving practices, such as planning ahead and arranging a designated driver, the risk of being involved in a collision resulting in death and injury are significantly lower. The RCMP will continue to positively impact the safety of those travelling on roads through public education and strategic enforcement plans.

The post Tips for safe cannabis consumption appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Facing higher levels of poverty and unemployment than the general population, many Indigenous people see the marijuana trade as a valuable source of income.

Canada became the first industrialized nation to legalize recreational cannabis on October 17.

While Indigenous entrepreneurs have already been selling cannabis for years, they say legalization could allow them to build fully legal businesses and tap into a market that spans the whole country.

And that could strengthen communities’ fight for self-governance, said Samantha McGuire, manager of cannabis shop the Organic Green Dispensary in Tyendinaga, an Indigenous Mohawk community about 250 km northeast of Toronto.

“The production and distribution of cannabis is our sovereign Indigenous right,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It is about self-determination.”

Tyendinaga is at the epicentre of Canada’s burgeoning Indigenous-run cannabis trade. Although it has fewer than 5,000 residents, according to the latest census data from 2016, the Mohawk Territory has more than 30 marijuana stores.

From “Peacemaker 420” to “Smoke on the Water,” most shops are located inside mobile homes parked around the rural community, beside a major highway connecting the cities of Toronto and Montreal.

And the trade is profitable, local businesses say.

The owner of Smoke Signals, a cannabis dispensary company with four locations in Tyendinaga, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he earns between $5,000 and $10,000 per day from cannabis sales.

Canadians spent more than $5 billion on cannabis last year — when it was still illegal — according to government estimates.

Self-determination

What is less clear is what will happen to stores like McGuire’s now that legalization has taken effect.

Canada’s provincial governments, rather than the national authorities, are tasked with deciding who can sell cannabis and under what conditions.

In Ontario, where Tyendinaga is located, recreational cannabis can currently only be sold through a government-owned online portal.

The provincial government aims to allow private outlets to sell cannabis by 2019.

But Ontario Attorney General Caroline Mulroney said in August that anyone operating a store like McGuire’s after October 17 will not be able to apply for a licence to run a legal store.

“The government doesn’t want to be doing businesses with dispensaries that have been operating illegally,” she said, although she did not mention what would happen to cannabis stores operating on Indigenous reserves.

Karine Martel, a spokeswoman for Public Safety Canada, the national department in charge of domestic security, did not confirm or deny whether raids on Indigenous cannabis shops would continue after legalization.

“Provincial laws of general application will apply on reserve land unless they conflict with a federal statute” or with bylaws created by local Indigenous councils like the one which governs Tyendinaga, she said in emailed comments.

Tyendinaga has not passed a bylaw backing the dispensaries, nor have local police conducted large-scale raids on the dozens of stores operating openly in the community, according to the website of the reserve’s Indigenous band council.

McGuire and other Indigenous cannabis traders say provincial rules do not apply to them because historic treaties signed between Mohawks and the national government supersede provincial rules.

Indigenous people have sovereignty to decide what happens on their land, said McGuire — and that includes continuing to sell cannabis even after the Oct. 17 deadline.

“As far as self-determination goes, cannabis has been part of our ancestors’ history and it is something we have always had the right to distribute, use, possess,” she said.

The community received formal rights to the land that McGuire’s store sits on from the British following the War of 1812, said Peter Kulchyski, a professor of native studies at the University of Manitoba.

Mohawk warriors and other Indigenous people joined British soldiers in rebuffing an American invasion of territory that would later become part of Canada, he said in an interview.

That history and their “treaty rights to the land” mean the government should not dictate to Indigenous people how they should develop economically, he added.

“Tyendinaga is a particular situation where you are close to an urban centre and you could create a significant amount of employment for the community,” he said.

Cash crop

Indigenous Canadians, who make up about five per cent of Canada’s 36 million people and face more poverty and violence, have fought for generations to gain greater control of the development of the country’s natural resources.

Nearly one-third of Indigenous people living on reserves faced overcrowding at home, according to government data from 2017, far higher than the national average.

Entrepreneurs like McGuire hope the cannabis trade will help spur economic development on land controlled by Indigenous communities and create more retail hubs.

“There are lots of communities where companies want to do this kind of business,” said Rick Colbourne, professor of Indigenous entrepreneurship at the University of Northern British Columbia.

“Some communities are going to see land as a resource that they can leverage to grow cannabis as a cash crop for economic development.”

The post Canada’s Indigenous people fight for rights with new cash crop — cannabis appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Until now they’ve been required to destroy parts of the plant that might have otherwise been harvested, but new regulations from Health Canada will be arriving along with cannabis legalization this fall.

They will then be able to sell plants for cannabidiol, a chemical usually extracted from medical marijuana and most famous for its use as an anti-convulsive.

Under the new regulations, hemp growers will no longer need to destroy leaves, branches and flowering heads, but will be able to sell them to a licensed processor, “to provide a source of low-THC, high-cannabidiol (CBD) cannabis products.”

Federal guidelines require hemp to fall below 0.3 per cent THC, the chemical that causes the high in marijuana.

However, accessing these new markets may not be as simple as just diving in.

More to do

The change marks a win for the hemp sector, which has been arguing for access to the CBD market for years. But Keith Jones, vice-president of the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance, says pushing changes back to October will lock out any producers wanting to jump into the CBD market this year. The federal government originally hoped to legalize cannabis and update hemp regulations by July.

This year’s licences don’t recognize the changes, Jones said, and any hemp coming up in the fields must be marketed by the old rules.

“The current cultivation licence prohibits harvesting those materials and actually requires all of the farmers to destroy those materials,” Jones said.

The Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance has asked for a transitional guidance from Health Canada so producers can market this year’s crop for CBD.

That might make little difference though, according to Chris Dzisiak, chair of the Parkland Industrial Hemp Growers co-op, although he noted that a handful of marijuana companies have expressed interest.

Dzisiak estimates it will take at least a year, and perhaps two, to start harvesting for CBD on a large scale.

“You’re going to have to have a harvesting process that’s continuous,” he said. “You’ve got to have large, continuous, high-volume dryers. There’s a huge amount of infrastructure that has to go in before anybody’s doing any field-scale harvesting of plant material to get CBD.”

The hemp farmer said there will be a steep learning curve just to figure out how to grow the crop for CBD, although producers have been growing hemp in Manitoba since the ’90s.

Hemp in Manitoba is largely grown for grain, but Dzisiak says that hemp for CBD will likely have to be harvested greener to get the maximum concentration.

Infancy

Large-scale processing is another question mark, he added, and there is little consensus on the best way to extract CBD from a full field’s worth of hemp and little ability for experimentation, given the current legal framework.

A newly opened CBD market also brings new questions on genetics, should producers start to demand varieties tailored for the nutraceutical market.

“Do you need a three per cent or do you need a seven per cent CBD to be able to harvest it effectively and bring it home?” Dzisiak posed. “We’re in our infancy on the whole thing. Can you go out there and harvest individual plants and dry them the way you would tobacco and extract CBD? Absolutely, but what’s the cost of that versus field-scale harvesting?”

Those questions extend to dual-purpose varieties.

CBD harvest might align closely with timing for higher-quality fibre, Dzisiak said, although he suspects that a fibre-only variety might have lower concentrations of CBD.

“If you have a fibre-only variety, you don’t get very much grain from it,” he said. “There seems to be a bit of a trade-off between fibre growth and seed set.”

New rules

Producers will be able to harvest CBD with their regular licence, Health Canada confirmed.

“No additional special licence is required,” an agency spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “However, licence holders will be required to keep records of who they are selling to.”

Growers must record the name, address and licence number of anyone buying flowering heads, branches or leaves (on top of general records which mark how much hemp from each cultivar is seeded, delivery dates and transport information), while buyers must also record the date and quantity of each form of hemp involved in the sale. All records must be kept for at least a year.

Jones also pointed out changes that further relax regulations on hemp.

Health Canada already eased regulations on THC testing and GPS reporting in 2016, along with the launch of an extended licence period that the hemp sector said added flexibility and troubleshot licensing backlogs.

New regulations, however, also do away with the requirement for a criminal record check, double the reporting period to 30 days after seeding, and, for the first time, will allow producers to store grain or fibre in an unlocked location.

“There’s a lot of really good things in the new (regulations),” Jones said. “The one glitch is related to the timing and so, hopefully, we’ll be able to see some sort of special guidance on that here before harvest really gets started. If we don’t get a special guidance, unfortunately, we’ll lose the entire year of 2018 and, of course, we’re advising farmers not to do anything that would violate their current industrial hemp cultivation licence because, with the new Cannabis Act coming in, there’s likely to be a very high level of enforcement.”

Jones further cautioned growers to double-check a buyer’s regulatory status, since the branches, leaves and flowering heads may only be sold to another licence holder under the cannabis regulations.

The post Navigating the hemp nutraceutical market appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Health Canada has just completed consultations on the federal government’s proposed framework for legal cannabis, a document that includes regulations that are, “risk based and that allows cultivators of industrial hemp to sell the whole hemp plant to certain persons licensed under the proposed Cannabis Act.”

The federal government proposed the changes last November and expects any changes to hemp to come in force at the same time as the Cannabis Act this summer.

Hemp licences would expand to include, “the intra-industry sale of leaves, flowers and branches (or the whole plant),” under the framework, while other changes would let farmers store hemp like any other agricultural product, rather than a locked location.

Producers would still report cultivation sites, testing for things like pesticides, and equipment cleaning, as well as any transaction on leaves, flowers or branches to another licence holder.

It’s good news for the hemp industry.

The sector has long argued that regulations write them out of the nutraceutical market.

Cannabis has been the dominant source of CBD (or cannabidiol), a chemical marketed for a wide range of ailments, although most established usage revolves around its ability to treat seizures.

The hemp sector, however, argues that hemp also produces some CBD, but with little to no THC, the chemical causing the “high” in cannabis.

A 2017 report from commercial cannabis data company Brightfield Group put hemp-derived CBD sales in the U.S. at $170 million in 2016, Forbes magazine reported last August. At the same time, The Hemp Business Journal expects hemp to make up about a quarter of their projected US$2.1-billion CBD industry in the U.S. by 2020.

Held back

“We’re missing out on a huge economic opportunity by not being able to use the entire plant,” Clare Dutchyshen, office manager with Parkland Industrial Hemp Growers in Dauphin, said.

The Parkland Industrial Hemp Growers, like most of the hemp industry, has been a firm supporter of deregulating hemp.

The future of the crop does not necessarily mean doing away with licences, she said, and, in fact, she thinks growers should still be licensed due to the very small, but still existing, levels of THC.

“The levels are extremely low and very unharmful, but if they decide to continue a licensing program, it shouldn’t be treated like a controlled substance,” she said. “It should be treated like an agricultural commodity because that is what it has become and is more becoming that way.”

Canada sets hemp THC limits at 0.3 per cent.

The province of Manitoba has also thrown in behind the deregulation of hemp, although not a removal of licensing.

“We think that the controls have to be in place, absolutely. As far as using the whole plant, they haven’t been able to utilize the whole plant,” Manitoba Agriculture Minister Ralph Eichler said.

Eichler says his department has supported looser regulations, and, in particular, the ability of farmers to harvest the whole plant, for years, although there has been no official talks with Health Canada in at least the last six months.

“We see that there’s opportunities for the hemp sector to grow and prosper as a result of this and we’ve asked for exemption for hemp and we’ve been very vocal about that,” he said.

The issue was at the heart of a letter Eichler wrote to then federal health minister Jane Philpott in October 2016. Eichler said the letter outlined Manitoba’s concerns with hemp regulation, although he did not hear any response at that time.

The Prairies will be among the provinces most anticipating the incoming changes.

Manitoba was the third-largest hemp-growing province last year behind Alberta and Saskatchewan with about 19 per cent of all cultivation licences.

Some changes

Hemp regulations have already eased from the first framework in the ’90s.

In 2016, Health Canada did away with THC testing in most hemp varieties, an exemption that also changed pre-seeding reporting requirements, extended the licence period to March the following year, streamlined licensing so that a producer could use a single licence for all cultivation sites and introduced email submission for applications.

Even then, Health Canada tied the changes to incoming cannabis legalization and the need to streamline regulations ahead of it.

Today’s 10-page application includes a mandatory criminal record check, hemp storage locations, where records will be kept, field location, farm address and end use of the product.

“They want to know exactly what they’re going to be doing with the hemp,” Dutchyshen said. “So are they going to be using it for plant breeding or are they just going to be cultivating it? What are they going to be doing with the grain from it? What are they going to be doing with the fibre from it? Do they plan to sell it?”

It is generally easy to get approved if the farmer has no criminal record or drug-related charges, she added.

The 2016 exemptions have made an impact to farmers, Dutchyshen added. Farmers may now report their field locations within 15 days after planting, something that allows them to choose fields at seeding and gives flexibility.

Licensing holdups have also improved, Dutchyshen said. Farmers were frustrated in early 2016 when some ended up missing crop insurance deadlines due to slow licensing.

Dutchyshen says the extended licence has helped deal with that backlog.

“You used to get licensed from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 and then your licence would expire and even if you didn’t plan on growing hemp again the next year, you had to reapply for your licence in case you still had some hemp grain in the bin or fibre bales sitting on your field,” she said. “You have to be licensed to store it. I think that was where a lot of the farmers were running into the issues. Their licence was up Dec. 31, and suddenly there was an influx of applications that Health Canada was having to deal with.”

The hemp industry was among the 3,200 Canadians and 450 stakeholders to take part in the Health Canada consultations this year. The national health agency released a summary of comments March 19.

The post Hemp growers will be able to harvest more material appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

About 4.9 million Canadians between the ages of 15 to 64 purchased both medical and non-medical cannabis last year, the statistics agency said. Medical marijuana is already legal in the country.

The average cannabis user spent about $1,200 on the drug last year, mostly on non-medical marijuana, the report said. Recreational use of cannabis is currently illegal nationwide.

Canadians’ spending on cannabis was well below 2016 levels for alcohol at $22.3 billion and tobacco at $16 billion.

The report, which looked at cannabis consumption going back to 1961, was based on surveys and other data sources. Statistics Canada cautioned that the numbers were provisional and subject to potentially large revisions due to assumptions made and as data on illegal cannabis production is sparse.

The report is part of Statistics Canada’s efforts to measure the economic and social impacts of legalized cannabis. The agency said in November that it would begin incorporating marijuana consumption and spending estimates into economic growth figures in November 2019.

The price of non-medical cannabis has declined by an average of 1.7 per cent a year since 1990 and stood at around $7.50 a gram last year, probably due to increased supplies, the report said.

Nearly all cannabis consumed in Canada came from within the country, accounting for $5.4 billion in 2017.

The size of the country’s cannabis-producing industry was $3 billion last year, down from $3.4 billion in 2014, due to declining prices. That put it on par with the beer industry, which was $2.9 billion in 2014.

–– Reporting for Reuters by Leah Schnurr.

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The Trudeau government is on track for legalizing this recreational drug by that date, one of the highest-profile promises made during the last election campaign.

That’s likely a good thing. While any recreational drug, alcohol included, is a problem in excess, there’s evidence this prohibition causes more social harm than the drug itself. It’s much like the earlier alcohol prohibition where otherwise law-abiding buyers were forced by regulation to buy from organized criminals, funding and empowering them.

One group that’s less celebratory and more frustrated are the nation’s industrial hemp growers. They’ve been labouring, since the crop was legalized in the 1990s, under the heavy weight of government regulation and oversight. The intention was to ensure that nobody was using the legal plant as convincing cover to produce fields of the illegal ones.

At the time that approach made more sense, even if it did occasionally seem a bit heavy handed and out of sync with the realities of the agriculture industry.

Health Canada oversaw the program and those regulators were used to working on a calendar year, to cite just one example, while agriculture runs on the crop year. That meant farmers would have to apply for permit extensions by Jan. 1 just to keep the crop they’d finished harvesting down on the farm, among other annoyances.

Over time that has changed, to Health Canada’s credit, as officials have learned a bit more about the industry they suddenly found themselves regulating. It’s still not entirely in sync with the rest of the sector, but a least farmers now have until March 31 to renew their licences.

But they’re still required to meet some pretty stiff rules. A current criminal record check, for example, to prove no history of conviction for illicit drugs. As well, the rules about storing and selling the crop are very strict.

Growers are also required to provide, prior to planting, GPS co-ordinates for field corners. For irregularly shaped fields, that can be a real challenge, as can providing them ahead of time when Mother Nature doesn’t co-operate in the spring. Also forget about borrowing a little bin space from a neighbour.

The paperwork is daunting. The application form to become a grower, not including some supporting documentation, runs 11 pages. A renewal application is pared down a bit, to just eight pages.

Then there’s the hefty limitations on what producers can and can’t sell. Under the current laws, farmers growing industrial hemp are only allowed to harvest the seed and the stalk of the plant. The flowers and leaves must be left in the field to decay.

Hemp growers insist that’s becoming a very expensive bureaucratic bungle, because despite the fact these products look a whole lot like the illegal products, they contain only trace psychotropic ingredients. Call it the near beer of the marijuana world.

Expensive they say because it turns out those leaves and buds may contain some valuable compounds. The one of most interest is cannabidiol, more commonly known as CBD. It’s being touted for benefits as varied as arthritis relief to epilepsy treatment and relief of some psychological conditions.

It should be noted that much of this research is still in its early days and may still come to nothing, though reputable researchers are finding some hopeful signs. But right now there is a market for these products, and it could grow in the future. Farmers should be able to capitalize on that, and burdensome outdated regulations shouldn’t prevent them.

The question that must be asked, in view of the pending legalization and the inevitable regulation and taxation of recreational marijuana, is whether this level of regulation makes any kind of sense anymore.

Fortunately Health Canada has recently given growers an opportunity to raise this very topic, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way. On Nov. 21 the agency announced a round of public consultations on cannabis regulation, with an eye to being prepared for the looming legalization deadline.

Until Jan. 20, 2018, Canadians have an opportunity to have their say via an online consultation. Health Canada has periodically revisited and consulted on its industrial hemp policies, but the most recent was in 2013, before cannabis legalization was a serious consideration.

With such profound implications on the horizon, hemp growers and processors should use this opportunity to make their voices heard. The government should listen.

The post Editorial: Green tape appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Jen Unwin of Nature’s Perfect Plant Food said the ability for Canadians to grow their own marijuana could be a “huge boon” to small input providers, as consumers learn more about indoor plant production.

“In eight short months you’ll be able to grow your own cannabis for recreational purposes… and the question you have to ask is, how do you want to do that?” she asked would-be growers during a presentation at Hempfest Cannabis Expo in Winnipeg earlier this month.

This is the first time the family-run business has reached out directly to recreational cannabis growers in its more than two decades of existence, but Unwin said that with tens of thousands of Canadians poised to begin legally growing their own cannabis, the market for organic fertilizer could see massive growth.

And while she has little doubt that some marijuana growers are already purchasing her vermicast fertilizer — produced just south of Steinbach — the company can now actively market to that demographic.

“Legalization is going to create new customers for us as organic fertilizer producers,” Unwin said. “I think people who maybe would have never done this before are now feeling safe and ready to grow their own if they want, and I think that’s a huge thing… it’s going to open up some doors.”

Unwin said that while many people are concerned large companies and giant pharmaceuticals will dominate the recreational marijuana market, there will always be interest in organic production methods. She hopes that she can help facilitate that interest.

“I would like to see the power put back in the hands of individual growers and individual people,” Unwin said. “I want to help give them a choice, so they can choose to do this themselves… that’s the joy of it.”

Paul Martin of Green Beaver Genetics is already growing cannabis organically and agrees there’s going to be a surge of interest in growing organic cannabis as soon as prohibition ends next summer. He’s also a big fan of vermicast fertilizer.

“One of these great things about these worm castings is they just will not burn your cannabis plant at any stage,” Martin said. “And one of the joys of worm farming is that you can bring it into your house or your basement or even your grow room.”

In layperson terms, Unwin describes vermicast as “worm poo,” but she is quick to add it’s not a gross or stinky process.

“Vermicomposting is so effective because of the high bacterial interaction that is going on between the worms and the environment they live in,” she said, adding unlike anaerobic decomposition processes, the aerobic vermicomposting process generates carbon dioxide, not methane.

“Vermicast is then the end product of composting with worms,” she said.

At least one person who listened to Unwin’s presentation was prepared to give vermicast fertilizer a try.

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to put worms in my house,” said David Wiebe, who wasn’t familiar with vermicomposting prior to the presentation. “But if someone else makes it… it sounds like a good thing to try out.”

Unwin adds that conventional agriculture is also looking at vermicomposting more seriously.

“We’ve been able to introduce this technology… into a lot of co-operating cattle operations, so they are doing this on their sites now,” she said. “So really once the ball gets going the supply is endless.”

She and her business partner have also expanded to new sites, away from their operation near Steinbach.

“At the end of the day, we’ve been able to bring more understanding to the idea of organic,” she said. “And now by talking to cannabis growers we can do more of that.”

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