WeedMD Site Tour: WAY Bigger Than You Thought

WeedMD Inc (CVE:WMD) (OTCMKTS:WDDMF) (FRA:4WE) CEO Keith Merker shows viewers the company’s Strathroy operation. The facility sits on 98 acres of land with 14 acres of greenhouse space. WeedMD has retrofit the facility adding the latest technology to create a fully automated growing experience. In total, there will be 18 hybrid indoor/greenhouse grow rooms measuring 10,000 square feet at the site. Each room will be strain independent, which ensures consistency and quality of product. The operation has another seven acres of traditional greenhouse under construction, which will be used to grow large scale crops for the production of edibles, topicals, and extracts. WeedMD’s licenses allow the company to grow high-yielding strains of CBD as well as THC, generating significantly higher volumes of pharmaceutical ingredients.  In additional to its hybrid greenhouse capacity, WeedMD is planning a 10 acre outdoor grow at the site this year which will produce 8 tons of product. Between its hybrid greenhouse, its traditional greenhouse, and its outdoor grow, WeedMD expects to produce more than 100 tons of product at its Strathroy site. WeedMD has one of the largest production platforms online for 2019 and is looking to become one of the largest cannabis producers in Canada.

Transcript:

Keith Merker, CEO: We’re all about precision. We try to marry the historical growing techniques with science and technology in order to provide a tried and true, consistent quality product time and time again.

I’m sort of an accidental cannabis aficionado. I come from a background in finance, and I was working as a consultant. WeedMD was one my very first mandates back in 2013.

We took a property that had 98 acres of land, 14 acres of greenhouse already built, we retrofitted to bring in shade light deprivation curtains, full HVAC to control the environment, dehumidification, automated fertigation, diffused glass in the ceilings, and light control sensors. So everything is plug and play here; it’s all automated.

Whenever you’re in a new environment, you’ve got to slowly learn and dial in all of your resources that you use, most specifically the strains that are going to thrive in these sorts of places. Fortunately, we’ve got the right human capital, our people involved. Our growers understand these strains, have grown them before in these environments, and so that gives us a head start and that’s the reason why we can produce this.

Right now we’re standing in one of WeedMD’s model 10,000 square foot grow rooms. We’ve ramped up this facility over the past year and are now in full production the space that we’ve got licensed. We’ve also got some further construction going beyond this five acres, another seven acres, but we haven’t retrofitted to the same specifications that we have in this room; we’re going to have a massive crop that will be devoted solely towards edibles, topicals and extracts, so massive expansion underway.

So now we’re in the second flowering room that’s online here, and we have currently three strains growing in this room. Ultimately, as we progress and get more rooms online, six of which, for instance, are set to be populated any day. We’re looking to do an outdoor grow on this property. Initially, a more modest 10 acres, which we plan to produce north of 8 tonnes of product next year, starting in the spring with the planting, coming down later in the fall.

One thing about what WeedMD will have online in 2019 is that we’re going to have a multitude of different grow technologies. So we’ll have our indoor facility in Aylmer, Ontario, where we’re growing very high quality indoor craft cultivated cannabis; we’re going to have the hybrid greenhouse here. We step into this space, and we’re growing in a more traditional greenhouse fashion. So we’re creating a different product in all these different environments. We like to call this are the juice farm. We’ll be growing very large plants in here that will be destined for extraction. It’ll be a very efficient operation because the space is so wide open. The goal here is to create APIs; to generate cannabinoids by virtue of generating large plants grown in a traditional fashion in a very efficient methodology.

There’ll be a total of 18 10,000 square foot grow rooms in this five-acre space when we’re said and done here. The beautiful thing about having so many of these 10,000 square foot rooms online is that each one will be strain impendent; will have the same strain growing in the same room, time and time and time again. And we’ll have it completely dialled in through the standpoint of all the intricacies of growing this plant through the cycle.

And so with that comes consistency of product and quality of product over the long term.

We at WeedMD, of course, have a cannabis license, see, which means that when we grow outdoors here, under the Cannabis Act, which our licensing, we can grow very high-yield strains, be it THC, CBD or some mix thereof. And therefore our 50 acres of cannabis is going to produce a whole lot more active pharmaceutical ingredients than would the equivalent amount of hemp.

So as this property is developed and grows forward, we’re looking at producing potentially over 100 tonnes on this property between the hybrid greenhouse, the more traditional greenhouse and the outdoor grow.

We track and trace the moisture content as we’re drying and through the whole process, to be safe ultimately for our medical channels, Shoppers Drug Mart, and ultimately to the provinces for the recreational market. We have one of the largest production platforms that will be online in 2019, so by mid 2019 we’ll be one of the largest producers in Canada.

We’re very excited to be able to produce such a vast amount of quality cannabis for Canadians. WeedMD stands behind our product, this is our product, we’re super proud, we’re super strong, and I think that our client base, our customer base, is very satisfied with the products that we’re producing.

Original article: WeedMD Site Tour: WAY Bigger Than You Thought

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