Josh Holleb
Company: Ceres Greenhouse Solutions
Title: Project manager
Age: 37
For the past 12 months, the editorial staff at Marijuana Venture has compiled a list of candidates for our third annual 40 Under 40 feature. This year, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of worthy candidates to come up with a cross-section of personalities across the U.S. and Canada, from salt-of-the-earth farmers to tech savants. All of them have unique stories, successes and ambitions and all represent the excitement and promise of the cannabis business. We feel honored to share their stories and look forward to watching them push forward in our ever-evolving industry.
Like many homebuilders, Josh Holleb was looking for new opportunities after the housing market crashed in 2008, so he gutted one of his unsold 5,000-square-foot homes and converted it into a small grow. Although he became successful at growing cannabis, his passion for indoor cultivation began to wane.
“After about three years of wearing sunglasses indoors and not knowing if it’s day or night, I decided that this is not the way I want to be farming,” Holleb says.
With a resume that includes running a small indoor growing operation, overseeing organic production in commercial greenhouses and operating a 10,000-gallon, solar-heated aquaponic farm at 8,000 feet elevation, Holleb was unusually qualified for a position with Ceres Greenhouse Solutions.
“At this point I deal with the larger cannabis operations, in terms of sales, design and innovation,” he says.
Holleb tackles a wide variety of challenges for the company’s clients. For example, in Boulder, Colorado, a client has a 22,000-square-foot greenhouse on a site that relied on water being delivered regularly. Holleb helped design a cooling system that routes the expired water from the hydroponics system into evaporative towers that cool the glycol that is then used to cool the greenhouse.
“We took a waste stream that would have to be trucked away and created cooling with it,” he says.
Holleb now acts as the project manager for Ceres’ cannabis clients, managing and relaying information between the design, production and installation teams and the company’s cannabis clients, which span from Maine to California and even to parts of Europe.