The first room in the stage two cultivation facility.
The first room in the stage two cultivation facility.
A Taranaki medicinal cannabis company will produce quadruple its current output of cannabis flowers with the introduction of two new growing rooms.
Greenfern Industries managing director Dan Casey says moving from 120kg to 600kg a year means the business will be able to meet the current demand for their products.
He says in June 2022 Greenfern Industries signed a deal with Ampyl Sciences enabling them to purchase from Greefern up to 300kg per annum of medical cannabis flower at agreed prices.
The stage two cultivation facility.
In November the Normanby-based business received funding for the completion of a stage two facility, including two new growing rooms. Dan says they have now started using the first of those rooms which currently contains 300 plants.
The second growing room will start operating in the next few weeks, he says, allowing the team to stagger the harvest of the rooms, which are expected to get four-five harvests of approximately 200-250kg of cannabis flower crop per room per year.
“Having this control over the full environment within the rooms is the beauty of growing wholly indoors in a fully enclosed and controlled environment. With New Zealand’s very strict growing and testing regulation this is the best way to ensure a finished dose formed medicinal cannabis flower crop.”
He says the new rooms aren’t the only change, with the business close to finalising details of a hydro-power station upgrade.
“This aims to more than triple our generation capacity and will resolve ongoing reliability issues experienced with the existing ageing equipment. Again, we will update the market once the completion of the agreement gives us a clear time frame for the completion of the work.”
A close-up of the first room in the cultivation facility.
Greenfern is also continuing its BPA (Bio-resource Processing Alliance) research alongside partner Hemp Connect and research partner Callaghan Innovation.
“We are into the second phase of grant funding and research for the project which is seeking commercial opportunities for value-added products created from the hemp seed and, in particular, the hemp seed hull. We are finding some promising outcomes with potential commercial avenues. However the research still has about another 12 months to go.”
Greenfern chairman Marvin Yee says the new growing rooms open more opportunities for Greenfern Industries.
“We are excited at this opportunity and foresee cultivation being a strong line of business for our group.”
