BRENDAN DELANEY

DIRECTOR OF CULTIVATION

Meet Brendan Delaney. Massachusetts local, a delight to talk to and director of cultivation at the completely off-grid, innovation-focused, seed-to-sale cannabis manufacturer Solar Therapeutics. They’re the first business to use a combination of solar arrays and cogeneration units to power a 67,000 square foot facility (mate, that’s BIG). Offsetting more than 50% of their carbon emissions and harvesting and reusing 90% of their water runoff – Solar Therapeutics is passionate about green.
We had a chat to Brendan about working in a rapidly growing industry, how he developed a cannabis career and whether loving pot was a pre-requisite.

Hey Brendan! How are you going?

Good, good! Busy! We’re in start-up mode, and construction and cultivation, so we’re doing some pretty crazy stuff.

Firing on all cylinders! 

Yeah!

So tell us a bit about Solar Therapeutics and what your role is there.

So, Solar Therapeutics is a cannabis brand based in Somerset, Massachusetts. My role is the director of cultivation, so I am in charge of all things plant-related. It really started out with the build of our flagship facility, which is pretty much the first of its kind. It is a 70,000 square foot warehouse, and we are completely off the grid. We’ll have roughly 110,000 square feet of canopy when we are fully built. The company is vertically integrated, so we are seed-to-sale and do everything involved with cannabis. We cultivate, we do extractions, we make edibles and then we also have three retail locations – one of which is open, the second one will be online in the next three months and the third shortly to follow. I’ve been with Solar for a little over two years now.

Whoa. That is incredible! 

This place is incredible. We were going to connect to the grid, but there was a huge price tag once they found out we were cannabis.

Really? 

Yeah, massive. They wanted 2.5 million USD for us to hook up to the grid. So we took that money and built a microgrid, which is a combination of solar and natural gas generators. We create enough energy to power roughly 5000 homes, and that’s what we’re working with right now.

We really pride ourselves on growing sustainably, as the
cannabis industry is massively wasteful – HUGE carbon footprint
– so we are trying to kind of soften the blow there. We are able to
do this at a massive scale, with as little impact on the environment
as possible.

Roughly how many people are in your team?

I think we’re at about 110 people in what we call the back of the house – cultivation, propagation (which is like genetics and cloning) – and then we have a post-harvest processing team, a packaging team, kitchen staff and lab extraction staff. In cultivation alone there’s about 35 or 40 people.
I hired 8 more people last week. We are expanding rapidly.

How did you get into the industry?

After college, I moved to California from Massachusetts. I actually studied criminal justice. I then got into the hospitality industry in San Francisco and had friends that had kind of got into cannabis. I sold my bar and moved up to one of their properties and was a caretaker, which is the lowest level on a farm. From there, I just went back to school for permaculture design and started building permanent farms, then took this job here in Massachusetts. And that's how I got into cannabis. It's really interesting to see where it has gone from where I started.

In the beginning it was really kind of operating in a grey area
which was not always legal, haha. You kind of had to hide what
you were doing…

Now to see that it's legal now and wide out in the open, and all these other industries are applying their technologies or moving into cannabis.
It’s exciting, for sure.

My understanding, as an Australian, is that Massachusetts is a quite conservative state, unlike the super weed-positive states like California and Oregon. Are there still legal hurdles and difficulties despite the largely positive cultural shift?

Yeah. It’s still federally illegal, so we have run into some issues with banking. We had Citizens Bank and they actually dropped us. We work with a very small bank now and our company can’t get credit cards. But, I mean that’s all good. That will come with federal legalisation.

It’s inevitable right?

It’s gotta be. I mean there are still people who oppose it but once they see the money that it brings to not only the town that it’s in, but their state – creating jobs, tax revenue. The states that are dragging their feet are missing out.

It’s similar to Australia – cannabis recreationally is illegal here currently, but there are companies already set up and ready to go for when that changes. It’s inevitable.

Totally.

Solar Therapeutics

What does a typical day at work look like for you?

Typically I get in at around 6:30am. I get my cultivation teams rolling, like where people need to be in terms of plant care. And then just managing the teams. We are harvesting a grow room every two weeks, which is roughly 220 lights. That ends up being between 4–600 pounds of dried flower. Then there’s usually another 500 pounds of trim which is to be extracted.

While that’s going on, we are getting our mother plants ready to take clones of. Each grow room is roughly 2600 plants. So there are a lot of moving parts!

I’m pretty much just getting people in the right place and keeping the machine running! It’s a little different working for a company this big – before
I was in the woods, growing weed.

That’s a pretty crazy personal shift…

Yeah! I started in 2010 and now it’s a totally legitimate corporate job. It’s been crazy to see.

Did you see that shift for yourself when you first started?

Yeah. And I'm still experiencing it, full-time. When I started at Solar I was the fourth person hired. Now, there’s 110 people and that happened within two years. I saw all these departments develop. Now it’s regular paychecks and filling out incident reports when people cut themselves haha.

Do you ever wish you were back in the woods growing?

You know, I go back and forth on that. If you want to stay in the business, I don't think the way that we were growing before is sustainable. It’s progressing so fast that a lot of the black market is going away. And, unfortunately, a lot of the small farmers are going to be pushed out. Everybody knew that was coming with legalisation.

So what are you actually aiming for with your growing? Is it just to yield a higher THC percentage?

The market here in Massachusetts is not quite as mature as in California. People look for a certain nose – the way it smells or tastes, which is the different terpene profiles. A lot of it right now is numbers driven, so yeah, it’s based on THC percentage. Right now, it’s the higher the better but that doesn’t always mean it’s a better product, but that’s what people buy off currently.

We look for very unique strains, the more strains we have on our menu the busier our dispensaries are. So we’re always trying to bring something fresh that is unique – whether it’s super potent or has a crazy smell, different taste.

That’s what I’m diving into now – hunting different phenomes and finding different strains to set us aside from other cultivators here in the state. 

What role has technology played in changing the growing process?

It’s crazy what’s being done now. Just in lighting – LEDs a decade ago were not something that was even being talked about. And now these new LED companies are changing spectrums and adding different coloured light – deep red and UV. They really help your energy costs, but also the yields that are being created is crazy. We do a lot of water reclamation at our facility – 90% of what I put on the plants we reclaim through transpiration, which is the plant’s off-gas. So through our air handling units we reclaim the water, we scrub it with ozone and then reuse it. So just to see that side
of things, in terms of technology, is so crazy.

You said you hired eight people just last week, what are you looking for when hiring? Do people have to love pot?

Umm… you know what, no. I think most of the people that apply have some type of relationship with cannabis, whether it’s that they love plants, or that they have always had something for cannabis. Maybe they smoke weed. My interviews are usually pretty short – I'm looking for people that want to learn, and usually don't have any experience, so they haven’t had any time to pick up bad habits. We train everyone from base. This industry is moving so fast, there’s a guy I hired two years ago, he’s been with me since the start. He is a cultivation manager at this point and he could go to any other facility and run that place.

Rapid growth in every aspect of the business – that's so exciting!

It’s changing every day.

What are some of the products that you guys supply?

So we have about 16 strains of flower, which we sell. We also make pre-rolled joints in a couple different sizes. Any of our by-product plant material goes to our lab where the cannabinoids are extracted in a couple of different ways; one is CO2 extraction, that gets turned into distillate, which either goes into a vape cartridge or is sent to the kitchen!

What do you make in the kitchen?

In the kitchen we’ve just launched three different flavours of gummies and then we are doing chocolates. The stuff that Ky (Brendan’s fiancé!) is making in the kitchen is just next level. And in our laboratory we make hash, and from hash you make rosin which is a solventless extract. People are doing all sorts of crazy stuff with different types of separation to get really pure extracts. Like 95% THC.

That is so hectic!

Yep, it’s pretty amazing.

What do you personally love about your job and cannabis?

When I got into it, I really just needed a break from the city. I just fell in love with the plant. They are super resilient and I mean... they’re beautiful. The fact that what I'm producing helps people, that is huge. They are just scratching the surface on the medical benefits but it helps with different types of addiction, pain management, and I've got to see that first hand, which is super rewarding. And if we can do it sustainably, that’s another benefit, too.

I like that it’s super fast paced. Being able to build something at
this scale and actually see it start-to-product is pretty awesome.
And I do smoke. It’s a way to unplug, and it is nice to test
everything. Most of my employees ingest cannabis in one way
or another – not during work! Haha! But after.

Touching on what we were talking about a little earlier, what do you think is an important part of the conversation about getting towards legality?

I think a legal regulated market is huge for the consumer. The testing that we go through in terms of just having a clean product in Massachusetts, is the most rigorous in the country. For every batch of flower there is a big sample set taken – they test for pesticides, fungicides, heavy metals, residual salts, biologicals... so the product you’re getting is clean. And I think that’s a huge benefit to legalisation. Because [weed] is always going to be there, no matter what, and if there is a way to make sure that it’s clean, then I think that’s a huge plus. Then there’s the financial benefit for the area that it’s being legalised in, that is huge. We pay a big tax to the town, which was pretty run down before we came. And we give 3% of our sales right to the town.

It’s the kicker right? The fact that regardless of whether or not it’s legal, it’s there and people will be using it.

Right. And when it becomes decriminalised, at that point you might as well start making money on it. I mean it’s tricky, there’s so much red tape.
The people who make the laws regarding legal sales, the regulations change every day here. And it’s very hard to keep up with.

Do you think that any of the concerns people have about legalising marijuana are warranted?

No. I don’t. What people have to go through to get cannabis from a dispensary is more regulated than someone buying alcohol. We have limits on what people can buy daily. I think people are going to smoke regardless, whether it's legal or not. Again, it just comes down to regulation. There is
a way to control what people are congesting. But in terms of what people think is gonna happen… like, it's not like everyone is high all the time because a dispensary comes to town haha.

Haha! It’s the same people getting high, just with a better product!

Yeah. They’re just getting a receipt when they buy it. That’s about it.

What do you say to people who think cannabis is a ‘gateway drug’? I feel that point takes up a lot of space on the opposing side.

That term is thrown around so much, and I think it's totally unwarranted. I think cannabis is pretty harmless, honestly. I KNOW alcohol is worse. I don’t think it’s a gateway drug at all. If you look at opiates or prescription drugs, it’s just crazy to say that cannabis, which is not addictive, is the same.

It’s also insane to think about how many people in the US are currently in prison for possessing or using cannabis.

Yeah. I worked with people in California who had done time in prison for cannabis, and they had felony charges. Now it’s just totally legal.

Now the government is like, ‘thank you for your knowledge and expertise’ to some of those same people.

‘Sorry you don’t get those ten years back!’

Now that you’ve gone from cultivating to a business role, where do you hope to be in the future?

There's something special with this company, so bringing it to other states here in the US is an immediate goal. Always being on top of sustainability and doing this as green as possible. I'd love to go international at some point, there are more countries coming online with legalisation. I know a lot of South American countries are making the jump – Colombia, Uruguay, Costa Rica. It'd be super cool to do something down there.

How did you personally find the transition from permaculture to a business position? 

Well I guess the permaculture part of it was more applicable when I lived in California, which was more outside growing and soil based. What I do now is totally hydroponic, so permaculture practices don't really apply. I mean, they do somewhat, but the transition was interesting. We grow in
a totally different medium, which is called rock wool. We’re not dealing with soil or outside elements.

So, the permaculture got you the background knowledge and then you worked your way up.
Yeah, exactly. 

There are so many ways into positions. I love it when people prove that a uni degree isn’t an exclusive, one-way ticket.

Definitely not. Especially with the people getting into cannabis now. This industry has created a lot of new positions that don’t require a university degree. If you start on the ground floor and work your way up, the industry is huge.

Demonstrated experience has a lot more weight now than it used to, especially against a formal certification. And for something that’s evolving so quickly, it would be a completely different industry by the time you’ve finished a degree!

Exactly. They are starting to offer courses here in the United States. All the different aspects of it – the business side, the marketing side, even cultivation.

Isn’t that absolutely wild?! Ten years ago you would’ve never thought that would be the case.

Definitely not!!

I’m just imagining all the horrified parents in the mindset of ‘ABSOLUTELY NOT’ when their kid comes home and declares that they’ll be studying cannabis at uni.

Yeah. ‘I’m going to weed class!’

Did you have any people in your life who really questioned your line of work? Or still do to this day?

Yeah, for sure! My mom is a retired teacher and she was just like ‘what are you doing?’. But then a few years in, she voted for legalisation here in Massachusetts and she comes down for tours. The whole time, my dad just wanted to make sure I had a license to do it. People mainly just have
a tonne of questions, because cannabis was so taboo for such a long time. It's so hard for some people to believe that in Somerset, Mass, we are growing thousands of pounds of weed.

It’s so ingrained that only a certain type of person in a certain demographic smokes weed. As young people we can forget that our parents were smoking it, and probably still are…

Oh yeah. We have a massive amount of older clients. I think what’s exciting for them is that they don’t have to hide it. They leave with a receipt, coming from a legal dispensary, and if they got pulled over they wouldn’t get arrested. It’s something that they can enjoy and not hide.

Which would be so huge for them after a lifetime if hiding it!

Yeah exactly! 

My parents here in Australia, and their friends, already know all about CBD products to help with sleep, depression, anxiety. They’re all over it, it's not just the younger generation!

I actually own a CBD company as well. It’s called Cali Craft CBD. We have started to distribute all over Europe and our sights are definitely set on Australia.

Hooray!

A guy I met in Indonesia is from Australia and we have been working pretty closely with him. The importing thing is not very easy there, especially with CBD. We can make it so that it doesn’t have THC in it, but it’s not very easy. Hopefully you guys will be seeing Cali Craft over there soon! 

Keep us posted! That’s so awesome that you have that as a side hustle! Busy man!

Yeah! I started it about two years ago when I moved here. We have a lab in Sacramento and my partner Jeremy – Fuzz – we are about to get our USDA organic certification. We make tinctures, topicals, bath bombs and then we infuse olive oils to cook with.

Just selling online?

We are actually in dispensaries in Massachusetts and then all over California, as well as online.

Do you have 400 hours in a day? Busy man!

I guess so. It doesn’t really feel like it. I mean, I love what I'm doing. So it’s good.

Check out Solar Therapeutics here and get around their fun, chill vibes. Regardless of your stance on pot, their singular mission of providing industry-leading marijuana with a minimal energy footprint is commendable – and extremely vibey at a time where focusing on sustainability is a must.

WEED READS:
Are dealers essential workers? Decide for yourself. Has the legalisation of possession caused widespread chaos and destruction? Find out. Interested in backing the legalisation of cannabis in Australia? Take a look over here.

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