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An unsuspected early season winter storm in Pueblo, Colorado is causing huge headaches for the Centennial State’s largest cannabis producer, after bouts of frost ruined nearly half of the farm’s multi-million dollar outdoor grow right before harvest.
According to Marijuana Business Daily, the country’s largest legal pot grower, Pueblo-based Los Sueños Farms announced that they had taken a loss on some 20,000 outdoor pot plants after freezing temperatures and snow destroyed millions of dollars in potential product.
“It was going to be a huge, bumper year,” Los Sueños founder Bob DeGabrielle said. “Unfortunately, you can’t do anything about Mother Nature.”
Los Sueños grows both indoor and outdoor cannabis, and produces both full-flower bud and biomass trim that is eventually sold off to extractors and edibles producers. But after an unexpected temperature drop and snow storm on October 10th, DeGabrielle and his team will now be forced to sell off nearly all of the frost-damaged bud as extractable biomass, leaving only a small portion to hit the market as flower.
Gallery — Moldy Marijuana and Bad Bud:
As the freeze set in and snowflakes started dropping, the Los Suenos team pulled down as much product as possible, using warm water to keep roots alive and blankets to try and cover any plants that couldn’t be harvested. Unfortunately, 50mph winds quickly made the blankets obsolete. And since Los Sueños grows at such a large scale, the lost crop has implications beyond just the company’s bottom line.
“This is definitely going to affect the entire state’s supply,” Joshua Haupt, chief revenue officer at Denver-based Medicine Man Technologies, told MJBiz Daily.
Even after a soul-crushing visit from the ghost of global warming future, DeGabrielle is still confident that the remaining crop can be sold as extractable biomass, and that any flower that did survive the hurried harvest will come out as beautiful — and as potent — as planned.
“We had some beautiful crops,” DeGabrielle said. “And of what we got [left], we have some beautiful bud to sell.”
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