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It looks like there will be some competition in the Nova Scotia medical marijuana market.
Evan Price, who grows beer-making hops at FiddleHop Farms in Glenholme, Colchester County, said this week that he and a group of about 15 others plan to produce up to 15,000 kilograms of marijuana annually in a new building to be built in Truro Business Park.
“Believe it or not, hops and cannabis are actually cousins,” said Price, 30.
“Everybody asks me on the farm, ‘So when are we going to get into cannabis.’ And I always said we have to wait for the laws to change.”
And as of April 1, those laws will change. Health Canada dictates that patients with medical marijuana prescriptions will no longer be permitted to grow their own. Instead, they will have to order the marijuana from commercial operations such as the one Price is spearheading.
“I’m very excited. I haven’t stopped talking about it since we heard that the rules were going to change. Now, we can start working with the similar plant types and use what we’ve done in the hops area for medical patients in Atlantic Canada.”
About 400 growers have applied for commercial marijuana licences, he said. Ten licences have been issued so far, Price said, all in British Columbia and Ontario.
Vida Cannabis Corp. of Ontario announced this month that it raised $1 million by selling shares in the young company, which intends to convert an old Stellarton factory building into a large growing operation.
“We spent six months planning this to get the documents ready, building a strong team,” Price said. “We have some of the best minds the region has to offer. We are very confident.”
That team consists of pharmacists, physicians and medical professionals, financial advisers and several people who have strong backgrounds in agriculture, specifically around medical marijuana cultivation.
And Price’s team has been raising money by selling shares in the yet-to-be-named company. The group will make a submission to Health Canada next week.
The first stage of review is a bureaucratic process “to make sure your documents are all in line, and there are security background checks to make sure that nobody is affiliated with any organized crime,” Price said.
“Following that, they take a look at the needs of the market. There is a strong need in Atlantic Canada for somebody to take on the production for patients. It is a necessary medicine in a lot of treatment regimes.”
He hopes to obtain a growing licence in the spring, start construction of a $1.5-million, 20,000-square-foot, two-storey building in the business park by summer and start producing cannabis by Halloween.
“From there, we’d ship the product through a third-party courier directly to the patients. That’s why it would be such a big advantage to have this housed in Atlantic Canada for the patients who are from Atlantic Canada, because the shipping costs will be so much less than if they have to buy it out of B.C. or even Ontario.”
Price said the group would have to come up with about another $1 million through a further sale of shares, by incurring debt and through product sales to make it through the first year.
Price expects the venture will require about 35 to 50 employees in the areas of research, plant growing and harvesting, and building security.
