Cresco Labs offered ABC 36 a behind-the-scenes tour of its Cannabis Cultivation Facility
YELLOW SPRINGS, Oh. (WTVQ) — Just a couple hours north of Lexington off of I-75, one cannabis facility is offering a preview of what “Cannabis in the Commonwealth” could look like.
“This is our clone room, where the life cycle of each plant begins,” says Joe Chek, who runs Cresco Labs’ location in Yellow Springs, Ohio — a 50,000 square-foot building in Ohio that’s home to about 10,000 marijuana plants, allowing them to harvest about 180,000 grams of dry product per week.
The company’s CEO holds a license to operate in Kentucky, though no announcements have been made just yet. However, Cresco Labs invited ABC 36 to their facility to tour their operation and give Kentuckians a glimpse of what the marijuana industry could soon look like in the Bluegrass.
The process all begins the clone room, where Chek says “baby plants” are grown from the cuttings of “mother plants.”
“After a couple weeks, we start to see root development on the bottom of the plant,” Chek says.
Once the plants get a bit taller, they’re taken to what’s called the ‘veg room.’ Here, the plants continue to grow and fill out.
From there, the plants make their way to the spacious greenhouse, where they mature and grow their buds. It’s here where the plants develop their signature smell.
Once the plants are about 13 weeks old, they’re moved to what’s called the ‘drying room,’ where they’re hung upside down. In this room, dehumidifiers suck the moisture out of the plants.
After a few days, buds are cut off the plants by employees and are weighed, sorted and packaged. Just down the hall in the kitchen, extract from the plants are turned into colorful, ‘edible’ products.
Jason Erkes, the spokesperson of Cresco Labs, says the entire process — or what they call ‘seed-to-sale’ in the industry — is carefully monitored and regulated.
“Everything is about regulations and compliance here,” Erkes says. “From the second you get to the gate outside, to getting inside, to the way the plants are grown and tagged and manufactured with a child safety seal and lab tested. That’s what compliant, regulated, focused cannabis is all about.”
Cresco Labs has facilities in eight different states and they’re looking to expand — right here in the Commonwealth.
“The regulations in Kentucky and the regulations in Ohio are very similar,” explains Erkes. “If we picked up this facility and moved it across state lines, probably 90% of the compliance measures would be in place and be appropriate for Kentucky. So what you see here today is very similar to the way regulated cannabis will be in Kentucky.”
Erkes explains that each plant is tracked with its very own bar code. Eventually, each product can be tracked back to the very beginning of the plant’s life, providing a record for the state — and confidence for consumers.
“The way regulated cannabis works is state by state,” says Erkes. “So there’s four walls around every state that we operate in, as there will be in Kentucky, where the product has to be grown, manufactured, tested, distributed, and consumed within the four walls of those state, per federal law.”
