Developing a new cannabis cultivation facility requires attention to a lot of moving parts. The projects often have to jump through a lot of hurdles before a single plant is grown, beginning with the process of obtaining that coveted conditional use permit or getting preliminary approval for a cultivation license in your jurisdiction.
Once you’ve passed “Go,” the real work begins to design a facility that supports the production of a crop that promises to deliver an abundance of cash quickly. Time is of the essence: Everyone is trying to enter this game, so the sooner you are in production the more likely you are to avoid the looming price crash.
This rush-to-build mindset is understandable, but in most cases, totally unrealistic. Regardless of whether you plan to grow in a greenhouse or a warehouse, the process of getting that structure built-out and ready for production can take substantially more time than you’d think. Even if you have a crack-shot design team or greenhouse supplier that can turn over design drawings in a month, you still need to procure equipment with long delivery lead times, improve and prep the site, pull new power or natural gas service to the property, construct or renovate the building, install benches, lights, HVAC and irrigation systems, and then get approval from the building inspector that you checked all their boxes and deserve a building permit — all that and then you can finally populate your facility with seeds or clones or maybe even plants ready to flower.
It’s easy to get lost in the paperwork of licensing and permitting, the frustration of waiting for new 4,000-amp service, or ratcheting up fundraising efforts to raise the capital your original budget did not predict. But remember, your ultimate goal is to grow a crop and create a product that will keep your customers coming back for more, regardless of future market prices. Therefore, getting the facility designed right from the beginning with plants as the central focus will make you more competitive and more profitable in the long run.
To increase your chances of success, here are five key factors to consider when developing your cannabis cultivation facility.
Sabeh on site at Columbia Valley Farms in Othello, Washington, with owner Tom Buggia.
- Assemble the Right Team
Finding the right team to design your cultivation facility is essential to meeting your immediate project goals, as well as your future production targets. Not every design professional — whether it be architect, engineer or contractor — is created equal.
Some of these professionals are looking to turn over as many projects as quickly as possible. These designs may check all the inspector’s boxes and get you a permit to operate, but they won’t necessarily achieve your plant production goals. Oftentimes these projects are designed without consideration for the plants, especially if there is no grower (or grow consultant) on the team. These projects tend to be delivered without enough (or any) floor drains, lack of adequate humidity control, and a disregard for risk prevention and pest management concepts.
On the flipside, there are professionals out there who are focusing their practice on the design of indoor cannabis facilities, who are trying to understand the plant’s needs, who may have experience with other critical environments, and who can give you a competitive edge once your facility is up and running.
- Hire a Good Grower
Having a grower on the development/design team will help keep the project plant-focused. They can assist with floor plan layouts, recommend cropping systems and lighting types, set initial climate control targets and provide guidance on specialty systems for air purification, odor control and water filtration.
In a nutshell, having a grower on board creates cohesion among cultivation team members by setting design expectations and reducing uncertainty about project goals.
- Create a Realistic Budget
I know everyone is attracted to the pretty yellow or pink lights that illuminate cannabis exhibition floors, but there is a lot of other technology serving your farm that requires greater attention.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a project where the budget for lights was $250,000 or more and the budget for HVAC was one-tenth that number (or less!). This budget allocation is a recipe for disaster. You will end up wheeling in a bunch of portable dehumidifiers, calling up the HVAC manufacturer to reconfigure controls, and applying band-aid after band-aid in an attempt to resolve a problem you could have avoided by creating a more realistic budget. Growers (or grow consultants) you hired early in the project should be able to help you develop this budget. They should also be able to lead you away from unnecessary or superfluous technologies that do not provide the value promised, and whose budgets could be reallocated to essential facility needs.
- Avoid Paralysis by Analysis
It’s easy to get caught up by the promises of new technology, the sales pitch of a cold-calling equipment vendors, or “cutting-edge” research. But too often chasing these leads can derail the schedule of a project and eat through the fees of your crack-shot design team.
I’ve seen cultivation projects delayed by months while the developer crunched numbers to determine if next-generation LED lights would yield more product than current-generation LED lights that cost two-thirds the price. Without the cutting-edge research desperately needed in this industry, making that last-minute switch to different lights is a gamble that affects everyone on your team: the electrical engineer who has to pull power to those lights; the HVAC engineer who has to recalculate the cooling loads; the structural engineer who has to reassess the support and anchorage of lighting fixtures; and the grower who may have to change operational practices to fit within a new lighting environment.
Once the developer realizes this chain reaction, the project often slows or stalls, while more numbers are crunched and everyone holds their breath waiting for a decision. My suggestion: Wait until the next project.
- Plan for the Future
If you are planning to hold a license to cultivate for more than five years, purchase and install equipment that is durable, easy to maintain and reduces operating costs like energy. If you have a lot of property and plan to expand this initial build-out with future greenhouses, extraction facilities or other revenue-generating activities, think about how the property might be laid out to facilitate labor efficiency, control traffic through the property, and limit risks associated with contamination and security.
Hire a consultant who can assist with master planning and create development milestones that will lead to a successful future.
Nadia Sabeh is the president and founder of Dr. Greenhouse, an engineering consulting firm focused on designing HVAC systems for indoor farms. She is a licensed mechanical engineer in California, received her Ph.D. in agricultural and biosystems engineering from the University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, and has nearly 20 years of experience helping clients maximize crop productivity by translating the plants’ needs into the design and operation of the facility. She can be reached at nadia@doctorgreenhouse.com or through her website www.doctorgreenhouse.com.