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Driving to Morales Natural Farms in Mount Morris on a summer morning can elicit a fantastic sense of jealousy in a city-dweller.
Something about driving past wide-open, tractor-manicured fields, turning onto side streets lined with too many lush trees, and passing the kind of farmhouses that define the Americana motif can make a person dream of leaving everything behind to start a simple life on beautiful land.
“I wanted to live in the country,”said Marvin Morales, who moved to Mount Morris from Denver. “I wanted to live more of a natural life.”
Back in 2005, Morales made this dream a reality when he left an engineering job at Ball Aerospace in Colorado to buy farmland in his native New York State and make a living growing organic crops. He transitioned to hemp in 2018 and last year planted and harvested marijuana after receiving an Adult-Use Conditional Cultivation license.
On paper, Morales is living his dream. But the reality of his situation is looking increasingly bleak.
Morales is one of 280 hemp growers that New York’s Office of Cannabis Management and Cannabis Control Board licensed to grow the state’s inaugural legal marijuana crop. Messaging from regulators and lawmakers sounded something like a “Field of Dreams” reference: ‘Grow it, and they will buy.’
But more than a year after the CCB issued the first grower license, fewer than 20 legal dispensaries are currently open for business, and Morales is one of many licensed cultivators unable to sell last year’s crop – while again planting seeds not knowing if this year will be any better.
A mixture of regulatory hurdles, limits on grow operations and delayed announcements from government officials has left Morales and partners wondering if independent farmers like him will be able to survive in the Empire State’s supposedly small-business-focused legal weed…
Read the full article here
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