Chief Operating Officer at Southern Sky Brands, Steve Merritt says, “I gotta play a little music for my girls,” he says of the flowers blossoming in temporary grow pods while the 70,000 square foot, hi-tech cultivation center is being completed. He says the project set in Canton within sight of the Nissan plant has construction on-going 24-7. Different construction crews are rotating shifts to expedite the completion, which he expects by December or January.
Merritt has been building hi-tech grow-houses since 1996 when California first legalized medical marijuana. Southern Sky has a cultivator’s license, which means this facility is a grow-house. Merritt designs his grow houses to be food-grade, plus medical-grade grow houses.
“The floor, the racks, everything in here is painted with a food-grade paint, it can touch and still be consumed. Super clean. Everything gets washed down – there are two ABCs to growing cannabis – always be cloning, always be cleaning. If you’re not cloning, you’re not getting ready for your next crop. And everything must be cleaned. Clean, clean, clean,” Merritt says.
Merritt explains that it is the cultivator's job to nurture the plants. He demonstrates the cultivator's job by examining the flowers of the plant.
“They turn leaves over. They’re looking for insects. They’re looking for powdery mildew. They’re looking for botrytis, thrips - anything like that that can harm the plant, they’re looking for. Then they trim some of the leaves off every day,” he says.
The Seed-to-Sale system is a finite one when it concerns data. Merritt must show the weight of the plants before they are groomed, and then after, and then the trimmings themselves must be weighed before they are then transferred either to production into cannabis product or into the disposal system.
The Mississippi Cannabis Industry is still under construction. There are a lot of moving parts to the whole system of regulations and there are several sets of regulations, depending on which part of the cannabis industry you are looking into. Southern Sky Brands’ 70,000 square foot facility will produce 400 pounds of product each week once it is fully up and running.