COOLIDGE — After working in the airplane industry for 35 years, Ray Halbe had very little interest in or knowledge about growing medical marijuana.
Until his wife was diagnosed with cancer.
The results, he said, changed his entire outlook.
“She went through 23 weeks of chemo, 13 weeks of radiation every day — they burned her, they scorched her — it was bad. But she took an extract from the marijuana plant (and there was) not one sick day, not one nausea day and not one bad day,” he said.
When it comes to cancer patients experiencing the ability to function at a normal level while using marijuana despite their aliments, Halbe and his wife were not alone.
The drug is known for helping patients cope with pain and reducing the effect of nausea, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Some studies even suggest the marijuana might be used to help treat the symptoms of illness from other diseases such as HIV/AIDS and multiple sclerosis.
But for Halbe, the impact the drug had on his wife reflected a turning point for him. It was the moment he went “all-in” and cashed in his 401(k) to join the marijuana growing industry.
When Proposition 203 passed in 2010, he partnered up with his son and a few years later began Agronomy Innovations — an indoor grow located on Industrial Drive in Coolidge.
But after running the facility for some time, he realized that managing the business was growing far too stressful.
“The issue I had at Agronomy was that they wanted to do everything, and when you want to do everything you can’t specialize in anything,” he said.
He then decided to start AZ Development Services LLC. Located on what was once the LaPaglia farm in the western part of Coolidge, the area is now the center of another type of agricultural endeavor: medical marijuana farming.
“My goal and purpose in this was to bring economic development to the area,” Halbe said.
AZ Development Services is strictly a grow facility, which currently services only one local dispensary — Health for Life in Mesa. As such, the company leases its license to grow the plant from the dispensary.
Based on the way the law is written, Halbe said, all the product grown inside the facility is technically owned by that dispensary.
“All I do is grow the plant,” he said. “I harvest it, I cure it and when it comes time for delivery I make a phone call, he comes down, we do all the necessary paperwork and he takes it all.”
At about 7,000 square feet, the facility is relatively small. But plans to expand are already in the works, with the city approving the permits to add two new buildings to the site back in August.
The additional space will add about 59,640 square feet to the grow site and will take nearly two years to complete.
Today the facility grows approximately nine different variations of the marijuana plant.
The process begins with a full-sized plant — called a mom or mother plant. Cuttings are then taken off the crop and planted on their own, eventually becoming full sized genetic replicas of the mother plant.
The process completely eliminates the use of seeds and allows the grower to predict the potency and yield of each type of marijuana plant cultivated.
From start to finish the entire growing process takes about eight weeks.
Since marijuana is a “photoperiod plant” — meaning that growth phases are set in motion based on the amount of sun exposure they get during the day — the facility uses LCD lights to mimic the different types of natural lighting the plants would be exposed to throughout the seasons.
Different light schedules, Halbe said, encourage the plant into different phases of growth, with a final objective of getting the plants to bloom.
Blooming means tricking the plant into thinking the season has changed to fall. Growers achieve that effect by shortening the amount of light the plant is exposed to and increasing the amount of wattage.
But growing a variety of marijuana plants in a variable environment like the Arizona desert is not without its challenges, Halbe noted.
The plants, he said, are incredibly sensitive. Each type, which can come from a number of areas around the world, also thrives best at different temperatures and climates — meaning that only certain strains of the plant can grow alongside each other.
While the Arizona heat presents its own set of problems, perhaps the biggest hitch plaguing the facility is significant temperature swings, which can make keeping the temperature just right inside the facility fairly challenging.
Maintaining the right temperature on the inside of the grow facility means making sure the air conditioner units are regularly working. But in the middle of winter, that’s easier said than done.
“No A/C in the world wants to come on when it’s 30 degrees outside,” Halbe said. To remedy the issue, he’s had to place kits on the units to keep them from freezing.
For Halbe, another issue the process presents is the lack of environmentally friendly resources available to growers.
When the plant is initially cut from the mother plant, the cutting is planted inside a piece of rockwool — a product that is spun from fiberglass.
Rockwool is not biodegradable and cannot be reused — an issue that presents a problem for a facility that is churning out medical marijuana plants on a regular basis.
Yet Halbe has managed to find a happy medium to make the facility more environmentally friendly. Instead of graduating the plants to bigger piece of rockwool as they build their roots and grow, he transplants them into a special kind of soil.
Made from a coco-based medium, the soil is completely void of nutrients. All the nutrients the marijuana plants will need are fed through a series of water tanks and water lines that disperse the right amount of water and nutrients to the plant based on its phase of growth.
Currently the facility goes through about 400 gallons of water a day, he estimates.
In keeping with the principle of making the cultivation process more eco-friendly, Halbe and his team are working on the plans for a recovery system that will help them reclaim any run-off water.
The concept goes far beyond a typical growing facility. A former Coolidge Bear and someone who grew up in Coolidge, Halbe said that the purpose of the grow is to promote economic development in the region — hopefully leading to secure employment for nearby residents.
Given that marijuana growing sites are heavily regulated, however, employment is challenging for the industry as a whole.
Employees are required to be card-carrying members, which means they must submit to an FBI background check and even have their fingerprints turned over to the FBI.
Getting the clearance necessary to become an employee is a process that can take up to a month — something Halbe noted not all prospective employees want to hear.
For Halbe, the requirements just come with the territory.
“I attribute it to something just like the restaurant industry,” he said. “(Just like) you have to have a food handlers’ license to handle food, you have to have a license to be able to grow, cultivate and handle marijuana.”
Despite the challenges, he believes that industry has the potential to bring significant economic growth to the city.
Both AZ Development Services and Agronomy Innovations are multimillion-dollar projects — with the expansion of the facility on Coolidge Avenue expected to cost can estimated $7 million alone.
Coolidge, he noted, could stand to benefit significantly by embracing the industry.
“What we’ve always thought Coolidge should be is the mecca for this industry,” he said. “There’s no work around here and this is agriculture … so why not grow another product here?”
credit:pinalcentral.com