Author and cannabis advocate Ed Rosenthal recently spoke with Marijuana Venture.
It’s been said that Ed Rosenthal has turned more people on to pot than Cheech and Chong.
There’s no doubt Rosenthal — the Guru of Ganja — is one of the foremost experts and activists in the world when it comes to cannabis cultivation. He has written or edited more than a dozen books on the subject in a career spanning nearly four decades.
The movement to legalize marijuana, with Colorado and Washington taking the lead by opening markets for recreational sales, is a first step in the process of restoring a long-lost civil right, Rosenthal said.
“For most of America’s existence, marijuana was totally legal and unregulated. We’re winning our freedom partially back,” he said.
Rosenthal said he doesn’t have a problem with the government taxing marijuana.
However, he said much of the over-regulation that is being installed is “fundamentally un-American.” He pointed to two specific issues that stand out. First, marijuana needs to be regulated civilly, and not as a criminal offense. And secondly, people must have the right to grow their own.
“Those are two fundamental rights that have to be won back,” he said.
“Fundamentally, we haven’t won until people have easy access into and out of the market,” he added. “That means you can start a company and you can close a company, just the same as a farmer with tomatoes. One year, he may decide he doesn’t want to grow tomatoes.”
At the risk of dating himself, Rosenthal said he remembers when pizza shops began to gain popularity in the 1950s.
At first, it was just one, he said. In a short period of time, four more had popped up. Not long after that, three of those pizza parlors had gone out of business. The point is “let the market decide,” he said.
“Nobody said you have to be profitable or successful, but people have a right to put out their fishing pole.”
Marijuana Venture: In terms of growing, what’s one of the best pieces of advice you’ve received from either a mentor or somebody else you respected?
Ed Rosenthal: It wasn’t necessarily just about this, but be realistic and don’t try to do more than you can do. Especially, with plants. Let’s say you’re building a building and it takes more effort than you think. The thing is that the building is not a living thing. You don’t have to care for it, or feed it, or water it, or harvest it.
But with plants, plants don’t wait. You shouldn’t be over-ambitious with it.
MV: What’s a common pitfall you see more inexperienced growers affected by that would have a large potential to ruin their crop, and what kind of steps can people take to mitigate that potential.
Rosenthal: The first thing is that the equipment is quite costly. Information — in terms of the amount of savings and effort and increase in yield — information is the cheapest way to go.
Most people, especially if they’ve grown for a few years, think they’re total experts and they don’t think they need training or don’t need to work or do more reading or look at more techniques. They just stick to their old ways.
What I’ve seen in some consulting firms is that they have a certain pattern, which is good for say, a 20-light garden. And then, rather than having a different pattern and accommodating economies of scale, they’ll do that same pattern in a cookie-cutter way.
They don’t have economies of scale. That’s common.
MV: Talk a little more about that learning process. You mention people that have experience and get to a point where they stop learning. How much have you continued to learn and change some of your methods, or improve some of your techniques? How much of that has been an ongoing process despite all your experience in the industry?
Rosenthal: Well between July 12th and July 19th, I won’t be available because I’m taking classes in Ohio on agriculture. … I lead a team called Quantum 9. What we are helping people do is go from market gardening to farming. The difference between market gardening and farming isn’t in the quality, or even the yield. It’s in the amount of labor per unit of yield, and also the amount of energy used.
So by enlarging and going to economies of scale, you can bring down the cost of production. It’s hard to risk your property on something you don’t know, because you’re spending all season on it and then you’re not sure it’s going to come in. This other method that you’re using, it might not be the most productive, but it’s reliable.
So it’s a hard choice for farmers, and a lot of farmers won’t take that jump.
Time marches on. Science is advancing at a faster pace, so there are new ways of doing things.
MV: There are obviously going to be challenges of scaling up a smaller grow operation to a commercial grow. What are a couple things you would advise people to keep in mind as they’re going through the process of scaling up to a much larger grow operation?
Rosenthal: Well, I can liken it to something that’s happened in the dispensary industry. It started off as activists. … A lot of the dispensaries are now owned by business people rather than activists.
And also, even the first business people that came in, that was the first step in an evolution of business people that have come in, so then a different type of business person has come in when there’s less risk.
In terms of cultivation, just because somebody was a great cultivator with five lights doesn’t mean they have the knowledge or information to scale up. As far as cultivation is going to be concerned, in five years, it’s going to be a whole different group of people coming in.
There will be some people that will be self-trained, but most of them are going to be out of more formal schools. That’s what I think is going to happen.
If you have a 20,000-square-foot greenhouse, you might want to look and see if there’s a graduate who studied horticulture, rather than this grower who’s been doing the same thing for 20 years.
Of course, there are some of those growers who have been doing it for 20 years who are really into the science of it, and that grower would be a perfect person.
MV: What are some of the projects you’re working on right now?
Rosenthal: I’m not focused enough, but aside from my publishing company (Quick Trading) and writing, I’m trying to develop products based on my original research. Some of those products are going to be coming out soon. I’ve been working on increasing the scope of my publishing company.
I have other projects, too, because I’m always doing experiments.