From Seed to Sale #1: The Model Farm

Wendy Kornberg is a felon.

She is also a mother, a CEO, and a second-generation American farmer.

Just the same, she is a felon. And she has admitted as much, on paper, to the government.

“Coming out of the cannabis closet, so to speak, and really admitting that you're a cultivator and this is what you do – it has been a really hard process for a lot of people.

To be a legitimate cultivator, you tell the government that, yes, I grow weed and yes, I am a felon according to federal law. There was the very first letter we had to sign that said you admit to cultivating cannabis prior to 2016 – and, by the way, this was by no means any type of confidential letter. And if the County was subpoenaed, they would absolutely give it to the government. Let's just say nobody really wanted to sign that thing.”

Wendy’s story is not unique among the current cultivators who are helping to legitimize and modernize our burgeoning cannabis industry. She learned world-class farming techniques illegally, and carries the weight of an overbearing police presence into the current, lawful world.

I caught up with Wendy last month and asked her background, the obstacles she has faced (and continues to face), and her prognosis for the cultivation business that she’s be a part of for so long.

Humboldt Roots

Humboldt County is nestled in the northwestern portion of California and is the most famous of the three counties that comprise the Emerald Triangle, a world-renowned region for cannabis cultivation. Even if uninitiated, you’ve probably heard of it – if not directly from someone that has visited and enjoyed the world-class cannabis grown there, then at least as a recognition of the Humboldt County name, as it features prominently in various consumer products and cultural references in the cannabis space.

Hippies settled the region in the seventies during a back-to-the-land movement that spawned a northern migration from the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco to the relative wilderness of Humboldt County. They were disaffected. They wanted to homestead and live “off the grid,” self-reliant and free from governmental intervention or oversight. They built houses, planted crops, and lived freely in the mountains, among their smiling neighbors. This land-revering, independent ethos – unbeknownst to its early adopters – formed the zeitgeist of a multigenerational cannabis business.

The Kornbergs

Wendy Kornberg’s parents were part of that original hippie movement, arriving in southern Humboldt County with bare feet and good intentions. Her father was a master carpenter and supported his family primarily with that skill.

“We were living off the land for the most part. My dad was a hunter, so he would kill a couple deer every year. We had our big garden and, of course, they grew a little bit of cannabis for themselves and their friends.

And right around that time in the late seventies was when all the old hippies started realizing that they could grow much better cannabis in Humboldt County than you could buy from Mexico.”

In Humboldt, using cannabis wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t a small deal. It just wasn’t a deal. The only indication that someone smoked cannabis, according to Kornberg, was the infamous “roach jar,” a graveyard of joints sitting on the majority of coffee tables in the homes on the mountain. Roach jars were so much a part of the culture that they didn’t really warrant mentioning – just as one likely would fail to mention a tin of fresh coffee.

Kornberg, born of that benign attitude toward cannabis, started cultivating the plant, on a very tiny scale, when she was 13.

The First Patch

“I started cultivating when I was a teenager. I loved growing everything. I found these little weed seeds and I set up all these little four-inch pots on my back deck where my parents never went.

Everything was super seeded out ‘cause I had no idea what I was doing.

That moved rapidly till when I was 16, I started a little guerilla grow patch on the edge of our land with 10 plants. My friend and I did it. At that point we had learned enough to know how to sex a plant and tell a male from a female.

We got like a pound and a quarter or a pound. Actually, I remember that we got three quarters of a pound each – it was great.”

Wendy didn’t know it at the time, but she was building the foundation of a legitimate cannabis business called Sunnabis.

Compassionate Care

Wendy’s journey is deeply rooted in the medical benefits of cannabis – both for herself and for her friends. During college, Wendy became disillusioned by the establishment in which she operated – and she kinda freaked out and fled to Maui to visit a friend. She was diagnosed with endometriosis at that time and experienced constant, debilitating pain.

“I got prescribed Vicodin. It was an open prescription, which they don't ever do anymore, but that's how bad my pain level was at that point.

It was like, you can have as many refills as you possibly want, which, after the whole opioid epidemic and everything that's happened, sounds crazy.”

She discussed her pain with her sister, who pointed out that it roughly coincided with her move away from Humboldt County and, consequently, her departure from a regular cannabis regiment. She took her sister’s advice and sought out a shady Prop 215 doctor – which admittedly was “sort of sketch” – but ultimately conferred with one Dr. William Courtney.

“Dr. William Courtney is pretty well known in the medical industry for being one of the forerunners of bringing some really good information back from abroad, mostly from Europe. So I talked with him.

He prescribed fresh cannabis leaves. He said, ‘I want you to be juicing five leaves a day.’ And obviously, that’s not going to happen in Hawaii. So, I came back to California and I started cultivating for myself – and I remembered how much I absolutely loved it.”

When her friends (and friends of friends) discovered what she was doing to manage her pain, they were intrigued. Wendy’s social circle included some HIV positive patients in the Bay Area, whose inquiries and entreaties transformed Wendy’s backyard gardening hobby into a concrete mission: to grow world-class cannabis, the right way, for people who need it.

“It just really opened things up to the point where I was getting referrals – a friend of a friend type of thing – and under 215, that was fine. I still wasn't comfortable being out there saying, yes, I grow weed. There was stigma, sure, but it probably stemmed more from stuff we dealt with growing up in Humboldt.”

To the uninitiated, it may seem like the stigma could have been easily overcome. Wendy was helping HIV patients, after all. But most people didn’t have the childhood that Wendy did. Growing up in southern Humboldt, she was “flown” (insider talk for having the DEA helicopters buzz your land) every week from June through October. Her family faced a constant threat of prosecution from above – agents hanging out of choppers, flying so low that they spook animals and make insane noise. They sometimes would fly so low they would damage trees.

Wendy’s community banded together at that time. A group called CLMP (“Civil Liberties Monitoring Project”) formed to ensure that these American citizens from Humboldt were treated rightly and fairly.

“You could listen to KMUD radio and the CLMP report would come on and they would tell you where [the helicopters] were flying. People would call in and they say, ‘there’s a convoy headed out towards Shelter Cove. There's a convoy headed up towards Alderpoint.’”

That allowed people the chance to fall a tree in the middle of the road or park a car in the middle. It was to slow them down, especially if harvest was getting close, so people could get out and cut their plants down super fast and get whatever they could get out before they got CAMPed on or raided.” ["CAMP" was an acronym for Campaign Against Marijuana Planters, a DEA-supported Humboldt County law enforcement unit charged with eradicating marijuana on private and public lands.]

The local police were no better. Wendy recalls being pulled over constantly as a teenager – being questioned, harassed, and searched.

Take a moment to consider the implications of that kind of policing. You have threats in the sky; you have threats on the roads; and you are considered guilty until proven innocent. Yes, Humboldt growers were, for the most part, breaking the law. But when the laws were changed, is it so surprising that they were hesitant to trust authority and sing it from the rooftops? They had been conditioned for decades to hide and maintain a healthy skepticism of authority.

Coming Out of the Cannabis Closet

“The first event I went to was a High Times event down in San Bernardino: High Times SoCal. And I went with a friend of mine to work a booth, check it out and see what it's about. It was crazy hard for me to be comfortable there.

The first day, people would take their camera out to take a picture of the beautiful booth, and I would literally duck and hide. I would turn my head, or I would cover my face. By the second day I was like, all right, well, I already signed a piece of paper with the government that says I'm a big old felon.”

Shortly after her experience at the trade show, Wendy entered some flower in the Emerald Cup – a legendary cannabis competition. There were hundreds of entries. Both of her strains placed in the top 20. She decided to go all out; to do things correctly and above board, and to launch a real business.

“So at that point it was just like, all right, let's really do this. Let's go fully into this and see where it takes us. The first year as a legal cultivator in Humboldt County was…hard.”

This is perhaps the understatement of the century.

“We were an early adopter, so they kept changing things. So they'd say like, ‘Oh, just fill out the application like this. You don't actually have to do this. Actually, we're going to need that actually, wait, sorry. Now we're going to need this. No, you're okay to do that. No, you're not okay to do that.’”

This was a consistent theme. At one point, a representative for a firm handling applications admitted that Wendy’s cannabis permit had been sitting on his desk, unopened, for six months.

After many similar stories of incompetence of the various regulators, I asked Wendy if she had been tempted to just bulldoze the process and do things her way, laws be damned.

She paused.

“Yeah. Many, many times actually. After realizing, in the first year, that our pond permit wasn’t going to be given to us, I was like, you know what? Screw it. We're going to build it anyway. So I called my engineer and I said, I've got a guy on a D 10 heading out right now to my property to make this pond. And she's like, ‘Oh my God, Wendy, you need to call him right now and tell him to turn around.’ It was close, but she convinced me to stop.”

If the regulations are so cumbersome and illogical, would people actually jump through the hoops to do this the right way?

“I really feel like people are trying to do it the right way. It's really hard when you've been doing something a certain way forever, and then you're told you have to stop – and also fill out all of this ridiculous paperwork.

The black market in California is not going away; the traditional market is here to stay until California fixes the regulatory policy. I got really disheartened with [Proposition] 64 because I actually read that thing. I printed it out and I read it four or five times. And then I started speaking out about how this actually does not help people.

There are a lot of inherent problems – the one-acre cap disappearing last minute, for instance. It WAS in there at the beginning, but it ultimately ended up being cut from the final regulations. People thought 64 was great because it would allow us to get people out of jail. You know what? We had a bill that passed in 2012 that allows for nonviolent criminals to be expunged and get out. Tax structures were vague, at best.

People thought it was a step forward, but here we are two years later and we have less access for our patients than we've ever had. We have more people buying from the guy on the street than ever.”

A Model of Legitimacy

Wendy has a small, 18,000 square foot operation at the moment, of which she has only been able to cultivate at about 15% of possible yield due to water restrictions set by both CDFW and the state water board (now no longer a problem since the construction of a 1.5 million gallon pond this October), with plans to expand in the short-term. She is dead-set on providing a model for the small, craft farming operation – one that is above board and whose owners are driven by the mission of compassion, and one that can be replicated everywhere.

“You know what? Everybody's growing tons of weed and most of it is not very good.

So how can we get a really good quality product to as many people as possible? Well, we know how to scale up. I've been cultivating my entire life pretty much. So I know how to spot things right off the bat where I can look at a plant a lot of times, even photos at this point, and say, oh, micronutrient deficiency.

I'm excited to be able to make enough money to not only finish getting our farm up to operational status, but to be able to not just talk about being the model farm, but actually have that open so people can come out and say, ‘Oh, this is what it can look like.’”

I spoke with Wendy about the supply chain, which many consider completely hamstrung by regulations. I asked her if we were hopeless – and I asked her what we need to do moving forward.

“The supply chain has to learn how to communicate and work together better and not think that, well, retail's making millions. Well, distribution is making millions. Well, I should get more money as a cultivator because everybody else is making a killing. The only one that was supposed to make the killing was the state of California and they didn't even make that happen.

So, we're kind of broken in like every possible way. But that doesn't mean it can't be repaired. It's just going to take people with more open minds, more creative thinking, and more realization that the money will come. It will, but only if you do business right. And if you don't do business right and you don't support the other parts of your supply chain, you're not going to have long-term relationships.

You're always going to be struggling. You're going to be spending more time training and retraining and meeting and re meeting, and I mean, it's just never ending. Unless we can learn how to make the cannabis community a community again.”

Wendy Kornberg is the CEO of Sunnabis: Humboldt’s Full Sun Farms. Check them out at https://www.sunnabis.com/