GROWING FOR GOOD AT YASHA FARMS
IGOR RAKUZ BEGAN cultivating cannabis over 15 years ago by creating a small medical grow for a friend with ALS. After witnessing the many benefits of the healing flower, he set out for a life of horticulture and a constant hunt for more natural and sustainable techniques. Rakuz started a nursery in Maine and opened a couple of hydroponic growing-supply stores, but he never felt great about selling grow lights and chemical nutrients that he viewed more and more as unnecessarily expensive and ecologically damaging.
After seeing firsthand the connection between growing food and medicine, Rakuz opened a small restaurant called GRO Café, which served locally produced foods featuring its own organic mushrooms and microgreens. As cannabis became “more legal,” Rakuz realized it was time to get out of the secret cover of a clandestine indoor grow operation and move into the open sun.
I asked Rakuz about this epiphany, and he admitted it took him a while. “One of my grow stores was formerly a nursery with large greenhouses, which gave me a place to experiment with organic techniques using tomatoes, peppers and flowers as my test subjects,” he said. “I would grow my organic produce along with plants grown with the chemical fertilizers we were selling. It didn’t take long to realize that I
