Genevieve Newton: The rise of Canada’s 2023 Top Grower

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 13, 2023 | Grow Opportunity, Media Partners

Canada’s 2023 Top Grower Award winner for the standard license category, Genevieve Newton, head grower and director of cultivation at Stewart Farm, recalls winning Top Female Grower at Hemp Fest back in 2021. “So I told Tanner [Stewart],” she says, “I was after top male grower. Not just top female grower, but top male grower – so, everyone.” 

Newton sat down for an interview from the LP’s office in the town of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, minutes from their operation and farmgate location, to discuss winning Top Grower and achieving her five-year goal in two.

“It’s funny,” she says, recalling the first winner of the award back in 2019. “[Gregg Wigeland] used to be the master grower at Sundial when I was a lowly grunt,” she says. “He won that award when I was still cleaning up plant piss off the floor; I remember him winning that!” 

Between moving a 70kg load of cannabis destined for Australia, which she had done before the call, the daily affair of overseeing numerous micros while managing the residual riptide from audit season, on top of the other tasks attached to the tail end of an unprecedented year of actual tempests, Newton found time to share her journey and to revel in her well-earned spotlight, eight years in the making. “It means so much to me,” she says. “It was a sign I needed that I’m still needed in this industry.”  

If 2023 were a nute, it’d be Power Bloom

“It’s been a crazy year for growth,” says Newton. It’s now been two full years since starting her position at Stewart Farms, when “topicals were the locomotive, and the dry flower was more of a side hustle,” she says. “Our biggest problem now is I don’t have enough weed.”

Meeting international and domestic needs meant the producer had to rearrange domestic supply, pulling out of B.C. “to feed the OCS because their demand was higher.” Stewart Farms has flower selling in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and several medical platforms, including Abba Medix, where Daily Grape is in the top five selling herbs.  

Stewart Farms’ bath bombs are still a leading topical in British Columbia.

“Isn’t it amazing?” she says. “This tiny little farm has such a big impact all the way across Canada. And a lot of it is because of the topicals; they’re changing people’s lives.” 

The micros were brought in to fulfill international orders, and over an eye-opening series of experiences, the farm has gone through several options in search for ideal partnerships. “Right now, we have one micro facility partner in Fredericton. We have one in Cape Breton and now one near Kelowna, B.C.”

The cannabis farm had their license renewed in October after a complex spring audit season attributed to GMP certification, a CRA audit, followed by a Health Canada audit. 

“When I started two years ago, I had two fellas [Ross & Jon] under me and one was half time security, so 1.5 fellas,” she says. “In order to manage the micros more efficiently, Catrina secured some provincial funding, so I selected a young scientist for my team, Matt. Without these guys I would not have been able to put my effort into post-harvest quality, export and managing the micros. These guys are like my left and right hands.”

Ability, agility and flexibility

Other curveballs the director of cultivation encountered this year was the cessation of the tilapia aquaponics operation at the farm and the closure of their Stepwell soil provider. “Basically both got ripped from me at the same time,” says Newton. “GMP happened in May, so at that time we had to make the tough decision to temporarily remove the fish farm – it was just going to be too hard to get certified while having them, and with all of these 2.0 product orders, we need the space for secure storage.” 

The cultivation team began crafting their own soil mixes, using a base of Pro Mix, while Matt’s scientific research informs the other organic inputs and soil amendments. In a rural town, securing inputs they can “buy locally and get consistently” is crucial. 

“Most [LPs] I’ve been at, their biggest mistake is doing 100 things in one run and expecting to figure out what worked. So, we do everything really slowly and we document everything,” she says. 

Organized chaos: grow journals to SOPs

Newton began growing cannabis with a few pointers from her dad in her 2×2 closet with CFL lights and miracle grow. From there, she became active on 420 magazine forums and developed relationships with old school growers from the southern United States. Around 2016, there was very little online content about growing, so she began documenting each of her grows, participating in weekly podcasts and taping YouTube tutorials for the altruistic purpose of community and education. 

Newton moved from the cannabis production program at Olds College to a practicum at Acreage Farms, a position at Sundial and finally to Candre, where they encouraged her media documentation as a form of free promotion. That’s how Catrina Jackson, Stewart Farms’ COO and product developer, discovered her work. 

“The way Tanner got me over here was, he’s like, ‘you will no longer be working at a weed factory. You will be coming here to run a weed farm,’ and that’s exactly what it was.” Newton’s first assignment was to germinate 300 seeds out of a choice of 20,000 that Stewart himself had seed-hunted globally. 

In a huddle with her growers, she asked them how they germinate. ‘Okay, well that’s how I do it at home,’ she said to them. “I’m full chaos at home, you know, home growing,” says Newton. “I came into this hot and I would do 100 different seeds have them all labeled. I have logbooks from my earlier home grows and they’re wild. So, I was the lady for the job,” she says. 

Of those 300 seeds, Newton oversaw a 98 per cent success rate, then began cutting back from there, finding Daily Grape and other top genetics.

They cleaned up the library that had “40 different Dosi Cakes, a bunch of Brittany’s Frozen Lemons,” and now they have 43 solid genetics. 

Stewart Farms also operates as a nursery that took a back seat during the winds of 2023. Still, they managed to do a lot of clone-selling through their farmgate store and to other LPs with whom they have “genetics deals,” such as Sundial, Organigram and FIGR. “My farm is really small, but it’s everything together – all the canopies together,” she says. 

Newt’s personal herstory

Genevieve Newton is a second-generation farmer. “That’s where I’m different from all these master growers who have black market experience and have been growing for 30 years,” she says, having learned her gardening skills from her dad and grandpa growing up in Saskatchewan. She knew her dad was also growing in his closet, “but weed wasn’t [her] thing at the time.”  

Newton moved to Edmonton in 2003 to complete a degree in social work from the University of Alberta, beginning her 15-year career as a social worker. In 2012, she got sober from hard drugs and alcohol and abstained from everything for four years. “Then I got really, really sick in 2015/16 and was diagnosed with colitis,” she said. Doctors prescribed heavy drugs but due to her history, she opted out. Instead she suffered with chronic nausea for over a year and lost a tremendous amount of weight. A friend advised her to consume cannabis and her reaction was to say no. Her sponsors said they would discontinue working with her and she would lose her support. 

Finally at the end of 2016, Newton tried cannabis and felt hungry for the first time in a year.

Her councillors quit her even though the plant had saved her. “It gave me my nutrition back,” she says, “it helped me emotionally and it calmed me down.” 

The expensive, elusive cannabis prescription led her back to nature, to gardening, and to consulting with her father whom she remembered had grown. She began a grow journal, connected with others online and fell in love with the practice. 

SNDL, no longer growing, was Newton’s first cannabis job. Candre, now closed, hired her as irrigation lead then production co-ordinator. And just when it felt like time to move on from Alberta, Tanner Stewart appeared on a call asking her to transition to New Brunswick. “It felt good to be wanted,” she says. “Before no one cared about experience, or passion, or creativity. Tanner thought it was an asset.” 

Newton moved to the east coast with her operations knowledge and experience in vertical farming from Candre – the “Cadillac facility.” She went east to work with living soil and aquaponics, “and I got all that,” she says. “And now we’ve moved into a different direction with lots of higher-level learning.” Despite hurricanes and market failures, Newton charges forward as the genuine, world-class cannabis cultivator that she is, growing organic medicine for all the right reasons. 

“For four years while I was sober, I was searching for happiness.” says Newton. “Something to replace my addictions, my drinking. That is how you stay sober – you replace that with something you love,” she says. “I tried all these things and it was this thing. That was what it was.” 

Oro Medonte event zeroes in on boundary talks, cannabis farms

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 13, 2023 | Grow Opportunity, Media Partners

By Wayne Doyle, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

BARRIETODAY.COM

While there has been no official declaration, Oro-Medonte Township’s war with the City of Barrie is on.

At a standing-room-only town-hall event Monday night, hosted by Ward 3 Coun. David Clark at Shanty Bay Public School, Oro-Medonte Deputy Mayor Peter Lavoie encouraged residents to stay on top of the conversations surrounding Barrie’s proposed boundary expansion plans. The city says it needs hundreds of hectares of employment land from neighbouring Oro-Medonte and Springwater townships for industrial development.

“It’s important to maintain dialogue, even with your enemy,” Lavoie said. “That’s how the mayor and I see it at this point and we will continue to do so.”

While Oro-Medonte doesn’t see any sort of viable partnership with the City of Barrie in the offing, the township does believe ongoing discussion is important, because it doesn’t want to cede control of its future to another municipality.

“If we walk away from the table, Barrie’s going to go to the province and say no one’s co-operating with us,” Oro-Medonte Mayor Randy Greenlaw told the audience. “What we’re trying to say is this is not a partnership, it is not advantageous to Oro-Medonte.

“We are open to discussion but this is not the right plan,” he added.

Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall has asked Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra to consider his request for more employment land, as reported Tuesday evening on BarrieToday.

Meanwhile, Greenlaw said he and Lavoie have been actively seeking meetings with Premier Doug Ford and Calandra to discuss what Greenlaw says is little more than “a land grab” by Barrie.

Greenlaw said a delegation from Oro-Medonte met with former housing minister Steve Clark in April and one of the topics broached at that meeting was boundary expansion. According to Greenlaw, Clark said the province had no interest in getting into boundary readjustments. They want the municipalities to solve it themselves.

“What we need to know is where does the government stand on that issue today versus seven or eight months ago,” Greenlaw said. “Until we get that clarity, we’re in a better position not making a decision.”

Greenlaw was asked what would he would do if a decision was due today.

“We would actually align ourselves with Simcoe County,” he said. “The county’s vision is to have industrial development along the major highways and corridors.”

Oro-Medonte council has identified the area around Highway 11 and Line 7 – about halfway between Barrie and Orillia – as where it would like to focus commercial and industrial development. The township says easy access to a four-lane highway and a regional airport make it the ideal location.

“The county supports our municipality and the direction we’re going,” Greenlaw said. “The county wants development along the Highway 11 corridor, not down Highway 93 going into Blake Street (in Barrie).”

Satisfied the discussion on boundary expansion had run its course for now, Clark took a few minutes to bring the audience up to speed on what was happening with cannabis cultivation in the township.

There are currently three cannabis producers operating in the township: Carmel Cannabis on Line 7 South, Organibis, which hasn’t started production at its Ridge Road location, and Medical Saints on Line 3, an outdoor hemp production facility right beside the Shanty Bay settlement area.

According to Clark, the township passed an interim control bylaw on Nov. 14, 2018 to prohibit the use of any land in the agricultural/rural zone for the purposes of the growing of cannabis and any related activities.

All three of the township’s cannabis producers challenged the interim control bylaw, claiming it didn’t conform with provincial policy. The township reached agreements with two of the producers, Carmel and Organibis, but not Medical Saints.

According to Clark’s review, Ontario’s Municipal Act specifically lays out where municipalities can and cannot infringe on the province and the federal government’s laws and actions.

“A bylaw is without effect to the extent of any conflict with, a) a provincial or federal Act or a regulation made under such an Act; or b) an instrument of a legislative nature, including an order, licence or approval, made or issued under a provincial or federal Act or regulation,” he read from the Act.

In essence, he said Oro-Medonte can’t make something illegal that the federal government has made legal.

Greenlaw said advice he received from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) supported that opinion.

“I talked with OMAFRA and their opinion is an agricultural crop is an agricultural crop and it can be grown on any land that’s designated agricultural,” Greenlaw said. “They don’t make any distinction between wheat, hay and cannabis. They’re all legal crops.”

That didn’t sit well with the folks who live in proximity to Medical Saints’ farm.

They want Oro-Medonte council to keep up the fight.

The challenge, however, is the fight costs good money – and a lot of it.

According to Greenlaw, the cannabis battle so far has cost the township in excess of $800,000 – all of it coming from taxpayers’ pockets.

“We can’t contradict provincial policy,” Greenlaw said. “We’ve been advised to deal with this issue through setbacks.”

Greenlaw said that’s something he’s interested in exploring.

“If we don’t do anything, we’re out of the process,” Greenlaw said. “At that point, we’re putting the final decision in someone else’s hands.”

Greenlaw said he’s sympathetic to the inconveniences Shanty Bay residents are dealing with and he’s willing to “fight the good fight,” but he needs their help.

“If someone can show me the path from where we are now to where we want to land, a solution that overcomes the current policies and legislation, let me know,” he told the audience. “I can’t see it, but I’ll work with you so we can find a solution.”

Rubicon Organics celebrates double triumph at 2023 KIND Magazine’s awards

by Grow Up Conference | Dec 13, 2023 | Grow Opportunity, Media Partners

(Globe Newswire) Vancouver — Rubicon Organics Inc., a licensed producer focused on cultivating and selling organic certified, premium cannabis, is pleased to announce it has won KIND Magazine’s Cannabis Company of the Year award and People’s Choice for Best Weed award.

Cannabis company of the year

Rubicon Organics clinched the esteemed title of Cannabis Company of the Year, regarded as KIND’s premier accolade. This recognition is bestowed upon the licensed producer that, in the eyes of the KIND editorial team, exemplifies the finest combination of personnel, purpose, and product throughout the year.

People’s choice best weed

The company secured the People’s Choice Best Weed award, a recognition determined by retail owners and budtenders represented nationwide. Budtenders, acknowledged as pivotal influencers in the industry, singled out Rubicon Organics for delivering best-in-class cannabis products.

Expressing her pride and gratitude for the accolades, Margaret Brodie, Interim CEO and CFO, remarked, “I am very proud to receive these important awards. This recognition is a testament to the outstanding work we are doing. Concluding 2023 with these accolades, coupled with our trajectory towards profitability and a robust financial position, brings positive tidings for both the present and the future. The Cannabis Company of the Year title reflects the strength of our team, brands, and quality products”.

Melanie Ramsey, chief commercial officer, shared her excitement, stating, “Receiving both awards is a defining moment for our team. We are particularly honored to receive the People’s Choice Best Weed award. Budtenders play a crucial role at the point of sale, and this award acknowledges these influential individuals who personally appreciate our product and confidently recommend it. This achievement follows earlier recognition this year, where two of our brands ranked among the top 3 most recommended by budtenders.”

Joshua Nagel, Founder and chief dream officer for KIND, said “We are pleased to present two awards, the KIND Cannabis Company of the Year (people, product, purpose) and People’s Choice Best Weed award, to Rubicon Organics. 867 cannabis retail owners and staff voted on the awards this year from across Canada. The largest turnout of its kind.”

Highlighting the significance of the People’s Choice Best Weed award, Joshua Nagel stated “For People’s Choice Best Weed, the most competitive award of the evening, voters could choose any brand in Canada. Simply Bare Organic and 1964 Supply Co. came out on top as the winners.”

Joshua Nagel continued, underscoring the exceptional qualities of Rubicon Organics, stating “Through all of the data we collected this year from events and surveys, Rubicon Organics proved again and again, they not only are producing some of the best and most consistent products in the country, they are one of the great success stories of the Canadian cannabis industry. Combine that with the people inside the organization, how they show up for the community at events and it’s continued focus on quality and innovation, KIND is so very proud to award them with the KIND Cannabis Company of the Year.”