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Rural Manitoba family farm gets into growing cannabis

Adam Carritt got one of the biggest shocks of his life when his dad called him a few years ago and said he was thinking of growing something much different on the family farm, than the crops his family had been growing for more than a century.

“He called me up and just said, ‘I am thinking of changing the family farm to grow cannabis’, and it honestly just blew me away when he said it,” Carritt, the current co-owner of Prairie Trichomes said.

“And then he said ‘Would you like to work on it with me?,’ and I said ‘When can I quit my job and get started?’ ”

Generations of Carritt’s family have been farming in the same area near Carberry, about 180 kilometres west of Winnipeg, since way back in the 1890s, first growing crops like wheat and other standard farm crops, before converting to potato farming in the early 1980s.

But by 2005, the family had moved away from potato farming, and Carritt said a large 6,000 square foot building on the farm that was once used for potato farming sat empty and abandoned for years.

Carritt said his dad envisioned a new use for the old potato shed, after the federal government first announced in 2017 that they planned to legalize recreational cannabis before the end of 2018, because he knew cannabis growers would soon be in demand.

“After legalization, we realized pretty quickly there was an opportunity to jump into a new market that was just being born,” Carritt said. “So we liked the idea, and we loved that it was something that was brand new, because that made it all very exciting.”

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