Ecology: A New Leaf
Originally published in Beside. Learn more about the magazine here
Photography by Chloë Ellingson
During his undergraduate years, Mark Spear, founder and CEO of Burnstown Farms Cannabis Company, was the only person in his friend group who didn’t smoke weed. At Fleming College, in Peterborough, Ontario, where he studied computer security and investigations, he was the dorm-room scold. “My roommates hated me,” he says, “because I would give them a hard time for hotboxing the bathroom.”
In his third year, he was returning to school from vacation when the motorcycle he was riding collided with a van. He flew over the hood and tumbled 50 metres down the road, shattering his femur and ankle. The bones healed, but he was left with chronic back and shoulder pain. He went from doctor to doctor, seeking pharmaceutical remedies: Tramadol, Amitriptyline, Pregabalin. “The side effects usually outweighed the benefits,” he says. “I felt listless and detached. I didn’t care about anything.”
It was only when he tried medical marijuana that he saw an alternative to a life of discomfort. “Cannabis didn’t really take the pain away,” he says. “It just changed my relationship with it.” The plant gave him mental distance from physical sensations. The pain became more abstract, less all-consuming. It no longer seemed incompatible with happiness.
In 2016, he qualified for a medical grower’s license. Soon, he was learning everything he could about cultivating marijuana, a crop more complex and diverse than its generic nickname, “weed,” implies. For evolutionary reasons—to fend off predators, say, or protect itself from UV—the cannabis genus has developed hundreds of chemical expressions. One of them, THC, gets people high. Others have implications for the treatment of nausea, seizures, neurodegenerative disorders, and autoimmune conditions, like HIV/AIDS.
The species isn’t only rich, though; it’s fecund. It’s easy to breed and to cultivate (although growing a quality product takes some talent). It can be farmed indoors or outdoors in virtually every part of the world. Of the hundreds of existent strains, some thrive in tropical conditions, others on Arctic tundra.
But if there are many ways to farm cannabis, is there a right way? At the very least, some ways are surely wrong. In Northern California, the epicentre of the American industry, marijuana farming has been linked to deforestation, water diversion, and pesticide runoff. And in regions where cannabis is grown indoors, energy costs can be exorbitant.
Spear has an alternative approach. Beside his house in the Ottawa Valley, he has a small personal farm: 26 bushy plants arranged in rows under the sun. This project is a prototype for his nearby commercial venture, which will get underway in 2019. He’s hoping to not only build a viable business but to influence the national conversation on marijuana production.
Last October, the Cannabis Act went into effect, making Canada the second country, after Uruguay, to legalize marijuana for recreational use and distribution. (Cannabis has been permitted in Canada since 2001 for people with medical prescriptions. Recreational weed is also allowed in some parts of the United States.) Legalization, a campaign promise of the Trudeau Liberals, is expected to make cannabis easier to regulate—and to enable growth in an industry where the country already has a competitive edge. Because the end of prohibition can happen only once, Canadians have a one-time opportunity to shape the industry before it gets so entrenched it’s difficult to change.
This is an excerpt. To read the full article, purchase issue 05 of Beside.