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Welcome to the wonderful world of cultivation. This Winter issue features several pro growers from the Canadian cannabis industry, including our Top Grower spotlights Gerrit Richards and Patrick Pagé, Rob Baldwin author of our cultivation column, Q&A subject Wade Forrest, and the LPs featured in the stories by Aly K. Benson and Joe Navarro.
This season we bring you the winners of our fifth annual Top Grower Award. To celebrate, Top Grower sponsor CANNA provided two branded BMX bikes (ontop of their usual swag) and I couldn’t think of two more deserving lads. Congratulations Patrick and Gerrit!
Thank you Top Grower sponsor Biofloral, for supporting this contest and for providing an essential service to the domestic market – outfitting so many of our cultivators with top shelf supplies and guidance.
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I’d also like to thank our panel of judges. OG grower David Kjolberg has scored the contest candidates since its inception. Thank you to three-time returning judge and award-winning master grower Stacie Hollingworth, two-time judge and expert of the highest integrity, Av Singh, and first year judge and winner of our 2022 award, Alexandre Gauthier. I’m happy to close 2024 with a focus on the heart of this industry, the growers. To toast and take a closer look at how it is we all got here.
This year we highlight one standard and one micro-LP winner. Two men representing the Eastern and Western conferences, equally: an Anglophone from Quebec and a B.C. boy from Alberta. There’s a parallel between the two profiles, including how they got their start in cannabis, trimming at Aurora facilities, and meeting and working alongside their dedicated partners. They are the women who nominated them for this award, Beth Talbot and Mehgan Race Widdison, growers who go above and beyond in performance and attention to detail. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have gotten to hear these tales of dedication to soil biology and the evolution of a refined pallet, respectively.
I’m always inspired when I speak to young talent who have moved into serious leadership roles and are helping others along the way. This industry should be proud of the legacy knowledge it retained and the networks forged among growers of all ages and stages in their career development. To the folks who learn the ropes of a corporate environment even if it goes against their nature. It is a powerful thing, integrating a skill you didn’t know you were made for and then putting your own spin on it. Something perhaps I explored during my time as editor of Grow Opportunity magazine.
This is the 12th and final magazine I’ll be putting out for this beloved brand as I carry on the road of my own story.
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There is room for B2B storytelling in this space, and the people are still here to read long-form human interest pieces despite constant inundation with bites of information. Thank you to the many folks of varying expertise I’ve spoken to and called upon over the last few years, to my colleagues at Annex Business Media for taking a chance on me, and above all, thank you to the sweet cannabis plant in all her otherworldly glory.
Thank you for inspiring in all of us the creative avenues that are the spice of this life – the titillations made bold enough to follow, and for fostering an interest in gardening that for some like me, provide a powerful bridge to stewardship of the natural world. To be frank, I’m still not entirely sure of my grasp on the nuts and bolts of cannabis as an industry, but I can be sure of my place in it.
Finally, Denis Gertler writes about potential growth opportunities in the sector using the blue ocean strategy analogy, supported by this Socrates quote: “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” While likened to business possibilities in cannabis, I just think they’re sound words to live by.
This post was originally published by our media partner here.