CARROLLTON, Mo. — Carrollton, Missouri, is a small town an hour and a half northeast of Kansas City. Its population is just under 4,000 people.
It's the type of place that even a few years ago you wouldn't have talked about marijuana.
In an unassuming warehouse, it is using more energy than the entire town.
No one would know what the warehouse is for on the outside, but the smell is undeniable the closer you get to the building. It's a medical marijuana cultivation warehouse full of 12,000 marijuana plants.
"These guys are what we're after, these are the buds, these are the medicine," Brandon Green, vice president of sales at Carroll County Cannabis Company, or C4, said as he displayed the plants on a recent visit.
C4 gave us the tour, something many people have been waiting to see for two years, since Missouri passed a constitutional amendment legalizing medical marijuana.
"We start out with little clones, then they go into a one-gallon pot. They're in there for eight or 10 days to get rooted up. Then they go into what we call 'pre-veg' for another 12 days," Green said.
C4 uses a dosatron fertilizer injection to mix up the nutrients needed to feed the plants. They have an automated drip system in four of their rooms.
Employees started out hand-watering the thousands of plants, until they upgraded the system.
On the day 41 Action News visited, employees were transferring the small plants into larger five-gallon pots to go into the "veg" stage for another 12 days.
Then, they move to one of the 'bloom rooms,' where they'll finish out the rest of their cycle until harvest.
Every plant is tagged and tracked.
C4 just completed its first harvest, which was about a three-day turnaround.
"We just harvested Bloom Room 1 and then 12 days after that, Bloom Room 2 and 12 days after that, 3," Green said. "Every 12 days we'll have a new harvest."
C4 uses LED lights for the veg stages and high-pressure sodium lighting for the bloom stage. They need optimal humidity and temperature levels to take the plants from clones to flowering plants.
"When it's in the flowering stage that's when buds start coming out. This is everything we're looking for," Green said.
C4 has about 12 different strains in each bloom room.
The buds we saw will be ready for harvest in the next couple weeks. For someone not familiar with the process, they may look ready to go but they still have several more steps before they hit the shelves.
The plants will go through a bucking machine that pops the buds right off. This helps C4 get the product out to meet demands, but they'll focus more on hand-trimming as they ramp up.
"We have some Sativas, we have some Indicas, we have a lot of hybrids," Green said, showing us the buds that most people would picture when they think of marijuana. "A lot of the stuff now is a hybrid, a mix. There's a lot of different uses for different plants."
According to experts, Sativa strains generally provide more of an uplifting, cerebral effect, while Indica strains generally provide a relaxing, body-heavy effect.
Some strains have more dense buds and some are more fluffy. When they are picked and cured, some of the strains will develop different colors, such as purple and orange.
"They're almost ready for curing now and we hope to have some product tested next week," Green said.
From Carrollton, C4's product will travel 77 miles to Green Precision Analytics in the Northland. It is a medical marijuana testing lab that just received its final inspection from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services on Thursday.
GPA hoped to get its final approval for operation as soon as Thursday afternoon.
This is the final step. In the lab, GPA scientists will process hundreds of pounds of medical marijuana. The process is scientific and precise.
"As we receive it in the lab, everything comes in here for grinding and shaking and centrifuging before we dilute it down to put it on the instrument," Josh Kollmeyer said, Laboratory Director and Owner of Green Precision Analytics.
Let's break that down: Scientists will test the marijuana for potency, pesticides, and any other dangerous bacteria.
They'll put the flower into a tube with a few steel balls that will be inserted into a machine that vibrates.
"The steel balls are going to move around and create a nice, fine powder so we can get a great potency test and draw out all the cannabinoids in the sample," Kollmeyer said.
Cannabinoids are chemical compounds found in marijuana. The most recognizable cannabinoid is Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), or the part that makes you feel high.
Next, the scientist will add a solvent to the powder and shake it up for 20 minutes, spin it, then take the solution off the top, and into the testing machine it goes.
The sample will go through a couple more testing machines before it's ready to head to the dispensary or a manufacturing facility, where it'll be turned into an oil or edible.
The machines test for 66 pesticides, up to 20 residual solvents and five heavy metals. They also test for Aspergillus (molds and fungi), E-coli and salmonella, which is fatal if heated and inhaled.
If any test comes up positive for pesticides or bacteria, GPA will call the state and go from there. The product may have to be tested again or destroyed.
Under state protocol, the labs have five business days to complete the testing.
Kollmeyer said they feel the pressure to get up and running due to the demand.
"We'll definitely have our challenges once we are in full swing," Kollmeyer said. "We've set ourselves up for quite a bit of throughput here, being able to do 40 or 50 samples a day in the beginning."
Kollmeyer anticipates they'll grow to a team of 10 scientists and order more testing machines.
For both facilities, it's been a mad dash to the finish line.
C4 is the only cultivation facility in the Kansas City area this far along. They are in the process of building another warehouse that will hold even more plants.
They applied for three cultivation licenses, one of which is already approved. They also applied for manufacturing license to be able to turn their product into oils and edibles.
"We'll be in nine or 10 dispensaries in the next month or so," Green said. "It'll be gone. We'll deliver it and it'll be there a couple days and it'll be gone."
For Green and Tyler Klein, founder and CEO, they would have never imagined they'd be in this industry. Green comes from a background in gaming and Klein is a contractor. Both are from the area.
"I think the community is welcoming, it's a big deal to them," Green said. "There's a lot of industry that's moved out of here, there's not a lot of jobs, there's not a lot of people coming in."
They hope to fill that void. They will soon need to hire 40 more people, and eventually will expand to 100 employees.
"So at that time you're making a difference in the community," Green said.
Kollmeyer hopes that more people will understand the process now.
"The testing is almost pharmaceutical-based, just like you would get for your blood pressure medicines or anything like that," Kollmeyer said. "We have specific methods that should make you more comfortable that the medicine you're receiving is accurate with its potency, and safe."
You can expect to see medical marijuana up to sale in the Kansas City area within the next two weeks.
Last week, the state granted final operating approval to nine dispensaries, five cultivation sites, and one testing lab.
Two of the approved cultivation sites are in the Kansas City area; C4 and Focus Partners of KCMO.
Most of the approved sites are in and near St. Louis, but two approved dispensaries are in Sedalia and Lee's Summit.
The state has issued 400 industry worker ID cards, which includes everything from groundskeepers to security.
