Olds embraces the new horticulture and a budding relationship with pot plant

Up the road from a grazing herd of bison and behind a fence topped with barbed wire rises a vaguely skunky aroma.

For Olds, a town that lost some of its oil and gas lustre since the price of crude swooned four years ago, it’s the welcome smell of money.

It’s hard to say the Sundial Growers cannabis production facility has changed the visible face of the town of 9,200 an hour’s drive north of Calgary.

The grow operation’s grey, low-slung rows of modular structures don’t stand out from neighbouring agricultural plants that make up the town’s industrial southeast edge.

But there’s no doubting the economic buzz its operators say will only grow dramatically along with the leafy. aromatic harvests in the coming months.

“By July, we’ll have 500 workers, it’ll make us the largest employer in Olds, for sure,” says Jim Bachmann, Sundial’s officer of construction and production.

“It’s not just oil and gas, it’s oil and grass.”

The Sundial operation is one of several that’s altering the dynamic of Alberta’s rural economy and the small towns that host them.

Last year, the company operated with just 20 workers; by the end of 2019, said Bachmann, there’ll be 900.

They’ll help staff 114 flowering rooms expected to come on line by year’s end, with land left over to provide another 210,000 square feet of such space.

Employees pass through a gauntlet of security checks and card swipes before donning navy blue coveralls or hazmat-like suits and hair nets in the labyrinth of 2,000-square-foot modules where marijuana plants are nurtured in a hydroponic matrix.

In a lower-level room, a green expanse of seedlings or clones — about 39,000 of them — basks under bright white LED lights awaiting their turn to graduate after two weeks of fading infancy.

Their next stop is the veg room, where they’re further matured under halide lamps.

Music from the rock band Weezer plays as workers wielding scissors snip sections of them for clones to further populate the rapidly-propagating modular pods.

A final destination is the grow room, where purple-tinged flowers emerge under the yellow glow of sodium lamps, oozing a moderately-pungent aroma.

The strain is dubbed Zen Berry, an indica-sativa hybrid with a THC level of between 15 and 19 per cent that “seems to appeal to the widest audience . . . people really like the balance, it makes them feel comfortable,” says Bachmann.

Eventually, the facility will produce 114 different varieties of bud from individual grow rooms that count seven crops a year, or pot worth about $3.5 million from each.

“We use this strain to break in the rooms and train our people — it’s go time in terms of new strains and product,” said Bachmann.

Outside in a bustling hallway, staff precisely weigh dried buds that are vacuum sealed into clear plastic bags, some of them weighing just over one kilogram.

If sold at $10 per gram in a retail outlet, a single bag would hold $11,000 worth of bud.

Its next stop is a Sundial research facility near Airdrie that also packages the pot for sale.

It’s payoffs like those that coaxed Antoinette DellaSiega to give up operating a grocery store in Olds to take up a position of sanitation manager in the spit and polish Sundial plant.

“It’s just been phenomenal for the community, we will become a city sooner than anticipated,” said DellaSiega as she monitors the comings and goings of staff members in a hallway linking grow pods.

A number of friends, she said, have followed her footsteps into the complex of grow rooms and the passageways that connect them.

“Everybody wants to work here,” she said.

Ramping up to meet the considerable demand of the province’s cannabis consumers hasn’t been without its challenges.

Last December, an overhead grow lamp exploded, landing a hot element onto a growing surface, which ignited a small fire.

Due to the smoke produced, four rooms’ worth of plants were eliminated as a quality assurance precaution, though three of those spaces were back in operation within a few days, said facility officials.

“It was a one-in-a-million failure,” said Sundial vice-president of cultivation Mark Stettler, while surveying the room hit by the fire, fully-rehabilitated and set to resume production in a few days.

The individual modular rooms generally means most arising problems will be confined to that one affected space, said Bachmann.

“If we have a problem, it’s a 2,000-square-foot problem rather than a 500,000-square-foot problem,” he said.

On the facility’s south side, more square footage was being prepared in a muddy field, which will host a complex developing cannabis derivatives and extracts to meet a legal demand that could come as early as the fall.

Stettler acknowledges the fact full legalization still has its critics who contend the drug has physical and psychological downsides.

But he’s adamant his industry is on the right side of history, and is proving its merits daily.

“There are people who couldn’t get out of bed without CBDs and I certainly believe in what we’re doing to get people the products they expect,” he said.

“A decade from now, we won’t be having these conversations.”

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Metres away from where a Sherman tank stands guard, patrons enjoying a drink at Olds’ Royal Canadian Legion say they’ve easily made their peace with the cannabis grow op in their midst.

“If it’s helpful for people and it’s employment, why not?” said Debra Ghostkeeper.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

It’s the same refrain among those bellied up to the legion’s bar, even among those who’ve never entertained the thought of sparking up a joint.

“I don’t care one way or another,” said Don McCracken, 83, as he nursed a rye whisky and water.

“Evidently, it’s going to be good for the economy.”

The woman behind the bar serving him said her daughter-in-law recently landed a job at Sundial, one of many lured away from other employers.

“They get good benefits after three months and they’re taking a lot of workers away from places like Canadian Tire,” said Jenny, 53, who wouldn’t give her last name.

Any anxiety about having a rapidly sprouting cannabis farm right in town was pretty muted from the start, she added, especially given the state of the area’s energy industry.

“Even the older people have accepted it — we can’t rely on the oil industry,” said Jenny.

Besides, she said, it was months after it began operating that she even knew Sundial was blooming bud in her little town.

“There’s a medicinal side to it, anyway,” added Jenny.

A third of those staffers hail from the local area, another third from the Calgary region and the rest come from farther afield, said Sundial’s Jim Bachmann.

On the town’s main drag in his A & J Chinese Restaurant, Mike Ng was relaxing after finishing a lunch hour rush that likely included some Sundial employees.

He’s adamant about the benefits the company has brought to his town and business.

“It’s a good thing, it’s bringing people into my restaurant at lunchtime — I haven’t seen any bad effects,” said Ng.

Any concerns about the presence of licensed cannabis producers were overblown even before their arrival, he said.

“Pot’s legal and before it was legal, people were smoking it anyway,” he said.

His eatery sits a stone’s throw from a building bearing signage of UCP MLA Nathan Cooper, who was re-elected with nearly 79 per cent of the vote in this conservative town.

There’s not much love for the NDP in Olds but you needn’t be a left-leaning, tree-hugger to embrace the effects of legal cannabis in the town.

Delivering orders at Bean Brokers Cappuccino just up the street from Sundial, landlord Patricia Nugent said Sundial’s hiring recently filled a vacancy.

“I just had a place listed and noticed it was a couple from Airdrie who are coming here so, as a landlord, I’m pretty happy about it,” she said.

“It’s a nice economic supplement.”

If anything, locals are more prone to joke about the bustling pot plant on the south side of town than condemn it, said Nugent.

“They say, ‘maybe we’ll be the marijuana capital of Alberta,’ ” she said.

Homes valued under $350,000 have become less easy to find since Sundial began ramping up, said Olds Mayor Mike Muzychka.

“The vacancy rate has come down and I credit that to Sundial,” he said, adding it’s putting pressure on the town’s housing inventory.

“We need a little more affordable housing, and it’s coming.”

He said the town embraced the big grow op almost from when the company first approached its ruling council, said Muzychka.

“As conservative as we are, we’re very progressive economic development-wise,” he said, though added few there could have guessed this new fiscal stimulant.

“I don’t know if anyone envisioned cannabis,” said Muzychka.

The plant has even had an effect on Olds’ educational scene.

Across the highway from the mayor’s office sits Olds College, which has forged an educational bond with Sundial.

An online course is teamed with hands-on instruction at the company’s facility, while other classes focus on the business’s retail side. It’s proven a popular area of study.

Keeping the lights on for plants, staff and students alike has been partly up to local electrician Jeremy Tookey, whose presence on the site for months will likely be extended as expansion continues.

“We’ll be here for as long as they want us around,” said the owner of Olds Electric.

“It’s definitely the best economy we’ve had here for a while . . . everybody’s seen how many companies and people have been employed.”

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on Twitter: @BillKaufmannjrn