You can smell BeLeaf Medical's cannabis growing facility before you see it. A strong scent of weed hovers in the air blocks away, like an outdoor concert festival. But inside, it's all business. Pristine grow rooms beam brilliant LED light over cannabis in various stages of progress. Workers hammer away, building walls and floors to expand the facility, which opened on Cherokee Street last year. Demand for cannabis is sky high in Missouri, as the medical marijuana industry just begins to ramp up.
Aaron Abrantes, the director of cultivation at BeLeaf, spends his days hustling from room to room in the retrofitted warehouse, handling new stages of construction, checking on top-of-the-line equipment for irrigation, lighting, and air filtration. When he's not chasing down supply-chain knots, there's piles of regulations to tend to and, of course, working with his staff to grow, clone and sort their way to a top-quality product.
Currently, the BeLeaf crew is on its "big genetics hunt," sorting some 2,000 different plants grown from seeds to find the best plants to clone. That includes 40 different strains to sort.
"You take one plant that you thought was great, and you're able to create thousands of plants that are genetically identical," Abrantes says.
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