‘We’ve drained our savings’: New York Cannabis farmers struggling to stay afloat
Nic Fera, part owner of Goldfinch Flora in Amsterdam, is not shy about describing the precarious nature of his cannabis crop.
“It’s next to impossible to keep the cannabis operation afloat when it keeps soaking up all the revenue from our vegetable farm,” he said.
Two years after he planted his first cannabis crop, Fera said it was fair to say he was significantly “under water” with it.
It was only last week, he noted, that he was able to sell the bulk of his 900 pounds of biomass from 2023 to “someone who took it off our hands” for processing into oils.
“But we don’t get paid until the distillate is sold” for use in making gummies and vape cartridges.
And as for 2024?
“I need another thousand seeds” for this year’s planting, he told NY Cannabis Insider, but like “so many of us, I don’t have the money for it. We’re at the mercy of businesses that still owe us money.”
Like many of the state’s licensed cannabis growers, Fera might not be on the razor’s edge if millions in grants and loans had been allocated in the state’s 2024 budget as had been proposed by both the Senate and Assembly.
But none of the $80 million sought by the Assembly in its one-house budget, or the $128 million in cannabis relief proposed by the Senate, made it across the finish line for 2024.
For Tess Interlicchia, owner of Grateful Valley Farm in Steuben County, it’s been a rocky ride.
A registered nurse for 25 years, she transitioned into hemp farming in 2019 because she strongly believed in the medicinal benefits of marijuana.
But it hasn’t worked out the way she envisioned.
“I was near foreclosure twice,” she said. So “I took a full-time nursing job off the farm at Cornell University, and I’ve been working my butt off trying to save the farm.
“There are a lot of farmers in the same boat,” she continued, “trying to stay above water. It’s been awful.”
The kick in the pants farmers got when the funding proposals went nowhere still stings. “We fought hard” to get relief, she said, and “we couldn’t get the time of day” from the executive branch.
Interlicchia noted that she “finally” received payment for her 2022 crop “at a fraction of what it should’ve been,” and she is still sitting on the 2023 crop.
Getting seeds in the ground has been a daunting task for nearly all the farmers contacted by NY Cannabis Insider.
For Ed Cleary and Lisa Keller, owners of Weaver Road Farms in Fredonia (Chautauqua County), their struggle to plant this year has been eased somewhat by partnering with other Adult-Use Conditional Cultivators for wholesale seed purchases, along with the “generous donation of over 4,000 seeds … by our seed supplier.”
However, they said the presence of unregulated dispensaries posed a significant challenge.
“These establishments offer cheap, untested cannabis, saturating the market and making it difficult for licensed growers like us to compete,” Cleary said.
And they minced no words about their personal plight.
We’ve “drained our savings, leaving little to nothing to cover testing, packaging, and labeling expenses. Lisa has been a delivery driver for Walmart seven days a week starting at 7 a.m., and sometimes drives all day.
“This leaves me solely responsible for managing the farm,” Cleary added, and ensuring compliance with OCM. “Without Lisa’s income, we couldn’t afford to keep the lights on.”
Jeanette Miller, owner of Eclectic Farmstead in Niagara County, blamed a “lack of understanding” on the part of Gov. Hochul for the failure to get relief funding.
Miller, who said she was on the ground floor of the legalization effort and was at the MRTA signing in 2016, said that by legalizing marijuana, but not allowing home grow or having “any legal ways to buy it created the black market.”
The $50 million allocated for enforcement in 2024 will accomplish nothing except for producing a new revenue source for the state, she maintained.
That money should’ve gone to the farmers who have “basically bankrolled the industry” for the past several years.
Miller, a former head of the Cannabis Farmers Alliance, said farmers “got screwed with the hemp,” and now the same thing is happening with cannabis.
