Nick Smith highlights the cannabis plants he’s been preparing for the launch of the adult recreational marijuana markets. He’s one of a handful of cultivators licensed in northwest Vermont.
Wyeth Shamp kneels next to one of his recently-potted marijuana plants. He has 1,000 square feet of space set up for growing cannabis at his Georgia homestead.
Nathan Liberty and his family pose in front of hemp plants grown at Sweet Lou’s Farm.
Nick Smith preps his grow setup at Emerald Vision in Alburgh. He's spent most of his career growing the plant, and he opened his own business to get ready for the recreational cannabis market.
As part of setting up his homestead, Wyeth Shamp plans to expand his maple lines before winter hits. Last year, he made enough syrup for friends and family.
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Nick Smith highlights the cannabis plants he’s been preparing for the launch of the adult recreational marijuana markets. He’s one of a handful of cultivators licensed in northwest Vermont.
FRANKLIN COUNTY — As Vermont’s adult recreational cannabis market expands, local growers are getting into the game early.
The official kick-off date for adult recreational sales is scheduled for October, and the Vermont Cannabis Control Board is focused this summer on making sure there’s enough cannabis available to fuel the industry’s upcoming launch.
A major part of that effort is licensing the growers who will be creating cannabis products.
The board just approved its 100th license this past week, and nine belong to growers in Franklin and Grand Isle counties.
As the market begins to take shape, the Messenger reached out to these newly-licensed cultivators to get a better idea of who’s job this summer is meeting the expected demand.
Nathan Liberty bought a farm in St. Albans in 2017 after spending large portions of his childhood in Franklin County. The Plattsburgh native started growing hemp a year later to make use of his fields.
Nathan Liberty and his family pose in front of hemp plants grown at Sweet Lou’s Farm.
Growing hemp, he said, was a chance to learn about the cannabis industry.
The hemp prices, which fell steeply in 2019, didn’t help.
“I was one of the fortunate few,” Liberty said. “I dedicated my life and career to it. I was calling everyday, contacting people from state to state to find buyers.”
Despite the challenge, a buyer in California helped him make some profit from the endeavor. The real payout, however, was in the industry knowledge he had gained from the work.
“Those relationships bled over into the [adult use recreational] market, and it was something that I knew I had to do. I feel like hemp was the practice to get into the real thing,” he said.
Liberty applied for a Tier 2 outdoor license this spring, which allows him to grow cannabis plants in 2,500 square feet of canopy space. With his license just issued this week, however, he has a lot of catching up to do this summer to get his plants ready.
“We’ll have somewhat of a season, enough to make back what we invested into this whole process,” he said.
While he received his license a few months after the window opened, Liberty had good things to say about Vermont’s Cannabis Control Board and its efforts to launch the statewide industry.
Questions and emails sent to the board often received responses promptly, he said, and they’ve worked quickly to try to match the state’s ambitious schedule for the adult recreational market rollout.
Liberty pointed out that other states often take years to develop their cannabis industries, and with his license in hand, he’s looking forward to how the industry will adjust.
He expects Vermont’s market to really focus on craft growers in the same way that many Vermonters have supported the growth of craft breweries. While there may be large cultivators able to spread their product throughout the market, he said many of the potential dispensary owners that he’s talked to seem to be focused on locally-sourced high-quality products.
“When you walk into just about every restaurant, they serve local beer. You rarely see the Budweiser tap,” he said. “I don’t see dispensaries being any different.”
If he can get cannabis going well, Liberty said the next expansion for Sweet Lou’s Farm is getting into goat cheese. The family farm already raises chickens.
“I always wanted to make my way back here [Franklin County],” Liberty said. “It was really somewhere we wanted to be, and it’s really worked out for the family.”
At the end of a newly-created stone driveway in Georgia, Wyeth Shamp is busy creating a homestead for his family. A few hundred feet from the maple tubing set up back, he’s also growing cannabis in a 1,000 square-foot plot.
Wyeth Shamp kneels next to one of his recently-potted marijuana plants. He has 1,000 square feet of space set up for growing cannabis at his Georgia homestead.
Shamp, born in Jericho, spent a few decades away from the state before relocating back to Vermont during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the move, he had been working in Boulder, Colo., for Twitter, but the idea of remote working meant he could make his way back to where his extended family lives in Vermont. So he packed up and moved back east with his wife and children.
Eventually, Shamp and his family were able to procure 95 acres in Georgia, and he named his cannabis business, Lost Lake Cannabis, after a small lake on the property.
Shamp said the homestead idea, however, came first. While his last stay was in Colorado, he had spent years living in Chicago, Bangkok and Brooklyn, but if he was going to raise a family, he wanted to do it in Vermont.
“I like to be outside right now rather than be in an office from 9 to 5,” he said. “I love being out here, with the dogs. It’s peaceful, quiet.”
As part of setting up his homestead, Wyeth Shamp plans to expand his maple lines before winter hits. Last year, he made enough syrup for friends and family.
With the land in hand, growing cannabis seemed like another good opportunity to pursue.
Shamp said he had considered the idea while living in Colorado, but agriculture out west has water problems that made entry into the industry difficult.
Vermont’s new cannabis industry, however, had a much lower bar for entry. He applied to the state’s cannabis board, received his Tier 1 outdoor license in June, and he already has a few plants in the ground.
Shamp’s setup includes big pots with plenty of room for growing roots. He has a few plants in the ground as well, but they’ve already failed to keep up with the more controlled environment.
Shamp said he’s focused on strains that can flourish in an outside environment to eliminate potential issues with mold and mildew.
Like other growers, he’s hoping to create a high quality product through careful management of his plants, and he expects Vermonters to reward the growers focused on creating solid products, just like they do with those growing local foods.
“It’s not hard to grow weed, it’s why they call it ‘weed,’” he said. “But it is hard to grow really good weed.”
Nick Smith has been preparing to start a cannabis business his whole career. The first iteration of it, however, landed him in a California jail.
Nick Smith preps his grow setup at Emerald Vision in Alburgh. He's spent most of his career growing the plant, and he opened his own business to get ready for the recreational cannabis market.
Now back in Vermont, he’s hoping to take advantage of getting in at the ground floor of the adult recreational use markets.
Smith initially got his start in California, heading out to Humboldt County during his undergraduate years to gain a degree in environmental science, but he ended up talking more to cannabis growers than pursuing his studies.
It’s a relatively simple thing to do in Humboldt County. The northern California county, which is almost half the size of Vermont, is renowned for being the county with the most cultivator licenses in California as well as having 9,700 unpermitted grow sites, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
Smith recalled one time when he had stopped to get donuts, and when he came back to his car, someone had left a marijuana bud on his windshield.
“Someone had left it as a gift,” he said. “I think it’s because I had Vermont license plates.”
Growing and selling the plant himself, however, got him in trouble with California cops, and his time in California ended up lasting six years.
When he finished serving his time, Smith traveled back to Vermont, and he got a job with CeresMED, Vermont’s largest medical marijuana company to do legally what he went to jail for out west.
“It feels great, not to be demonized anymore for growing a plant,” he said.
But Smith said he wanted his own setup. As the adult recreational market nears its own launch date, he had been eyeing a small nondescript building in Alburgh for a few years as a potential grow site. Eventually, Smith and Emerald Vision’s co-owner, Ashley Bowen, took the plunge.
“We closed on the building in April of last year, and we’ve been slowly building ever since,” he said.
Unlike other growers in the area, Smith has set up an indoor cultivation spot, and while he currently is licensed for 1,000 square feet of canopy space, he has room to expand within his newly-outfitted facility.
Any profit he makes, he hopes to sink back into the building to expand the setup.
“I’ve been following the legalization since before it happened,” he said. “Then it was just trying to position myself for the past ten years or so, to capitalize on this moment.”
Smith’s setup includes strings of high-powered LED lights with plants positioned on rolling tables, and a drip irrigation and timed fertilization system helps with dosing and feeding the plants. Unlike outdoor operations, Smith can harvest five to six times a year.
“It’ll be nice to finally use what I’ve dedicated my life to learning,” he said.
Smith said he’s a little bit worried about competing with some of the larger grow setups in the state, and he would have liked Vermont’s Cannabis Control Board to not even consider the larger tier licenses, which allow for 10 to 25 times the amount of indoor grow space Smith is currently permitted for.
But ultimately – like other growers – he expects quality to win out.
“Most cannabis growers want to get better. It’s pushing me to want to continue growing to produce higher and higher quality flower,” he said. “It’s fun to watch the plant grow and try to push the boundaries of what the plant can produce.”
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St Albans Messenger is a twice-weekly newspaper established in 1861 covering Franklin County, Vermont. Samessenger.com publishes new content daily. Our beat reporters are on the ground covering local government, schools, sports, business and culture.