Business View Magazine September 2018

352 353 want to consume it for its medical bene- fits,” LeBlanc explains. But the landscape in Canada is about to change significant- ly this coming October, when recreational marijuana becomes legal, countrywide. And Green Relief is getting ready, constructing a 240,000-square-foot expansion next door to its existing facility. “The market will explode,” LeBlanc declares. “Right now, all the producers in Canada can- not produce enough product to, theoretically, supply the recreation market. There have been a lot of licensed producers that have been stockpiling product for this legalization, so there’s going to be enough product to start.We think there will be a shortfall, mov- ing forward, but most of the licensed produc- it so we’re getting the exact amount of nutrients our plants need on a day-to-day basis, and as the water flows through those beds, it’s cleaned by the plants and then flows right back into our aquapon- ics tanks, and the entire cycle starts over again. “Every day is the same day within our grow rooms, no matter what the weather is outside.We have 40 air changes an hour which eliminates a lot of mold and mildew issues, which a lot of oth- er licensed producers are having on indoor grows. There are a lot of byproducts with this type of system that we didn’t realize we were going to achieve. One: because it’s a completely organic system– there are no additives into the system, except for the fish food, which is organic. “Two: Our product has a customer acceptance second to none. The product is clean, it’s smooth, and it doesn’t have a lot of mineral salt buildups, or nitrate buildups within the product. Even if you’re growing in a field, and you’re growing or- ganically, it’s almost impossible to achieve organ- ic status due to the fact that you have so many environmental conditions that play in the system: runoff from other properties, acid rain, etc.; there are a lot of things that play into trying to achieve an organic product. “Three: We did a comparison on square foot- age growth on what we can grow in one square foot and compared that to a friend of ours who is growing cannabis on a 65-acre field in Seattle. Our yield on two acres of aquaponics equals what he can grow on his 65-acre field, and we use one tenth the amount of water.” Today, Green Relief sells only to patients with valid, medical prescriptions, and approximately 60 percent of its product is cannabis oil extract, “because we’re selling to medical patients, and most of them don’t want to smoke product; they GREEN RELIEF