My Summer on a Colorado Hemp Farm

By Gummy Bear

America depends on its homegrown army of farmworkers to provide food on American tables. Find out about life in the San Luis Valley of Colorado and New Mexico and one summer on a Colorado hemp farm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662432859

Book preview

May 18, 2019

Marijuana has long indulged in a sort of shameful relationship with America. If you remember, it used to be the star of Reefer Madness, a somehow ponderous indictment of the indiscriminate use of weed; and the shady and most often villainous characters were Mexicans.

So now, in the shadow of a hulking Mount Blanca, it became my turn to step forward and argue that, no, marijuana is not a threat to the moral fiber of the US.

Quite the opposite.

Marijuana has blossomed into a lucrative and profitable enterprise where daring entrepreneurs are bound to reap a rich harvest. Never mind the lame lamentations of the opposing forces. Marijuana, or cannabis, has proven its medicinal worth, and its recreational success has boomeranged from coast to coast.

Meanwhile, it has fallen to me to abandon San Antonio, Texas, on the lip of another blistering/suffocating heat wave and to seek relief in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico, the largest valley in the continental US.

The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in the San Luis Valley.

May 19, 2019

The mountains stretched all around us with nothing but the snow, the wind, and a blue sky. Sometimes without looking closely, it seemed like the peak itself was a cloud.

Nonetheless, those of us at Point3 Farma bent our backs gratefully to scrub black plastic pots of various shapes and sizes with nothing more than a brush and a black plastic barrel of cold mountain water to wet our brown forearms and to think of warmer days.

As it was, a cutting blast of wind picked up a curtain of dust, dragging the topsoil like a sagging blanket only to throw the earth and the bits and pieces of rock, mud, chips of wood, empty soda cans, and anything else that could not stay into our faces.

The wind blew harder still, so we bowed our heads and tumbled into the warm and cavernous greenhouse, one of two connected by an imposing, graceful arch well above our heads and below a cramped passageway barely high enough to walk even for a fat short Mexican like myself.

Let’s make one thing clear: I am only a Mexican by choice. Being born north of the Arkansas River and a long way south of the shadow of Pikes Peak allows me to proudly boast of being in the Southwest long before the myth of the US.

Yes, it is true; the pinche Yankees/Rebels stole the land fair and square. However, it seems that elimination is the only answer, but gringos pop up at any moment and they have countless aunts and tios and abuelas and nietas and cunados and nieces and nephews, ay!

A strange truth became even truer and rapidly apparent at Point3 Farma, a few miles north of the Rio Bravo. Point3 Farma could not exist/struggle without its Spanish-speaking farmhands.

May 21, 2019

What a cast of characters that rolled into Point3 Farma.

On Monday, we had three white guys and one white female stroll across the flat stretch of dirt surrounding the office/warehouse complex and the two greenhouses. Of course, there was the fertile field, circular in shape and covering 120 acres, where we would walk and plant, plant after plant, the towering sativa marijuana. The hemp was perfectly legal. However, there were strong reservations about hemp in the community.

Nonetheless, Point3 Farma had made a substantial investment and had envisioned a complete operation ending with the sale of CBD products across the United States.

Now it was up to us, the farmhand employees, to pitch in and make a bold dream a reality.

Jake and Levi were not longtime friends who had journeyed west from Ohio, Columbus, to be exact, to step in on the ground floor of Farma’s big act.

Then there was Noah. If there is an embodiment of a marijuana-friendly being, Noah would fit. By dress alone, Noah stood out. He wore some corduroy (it looked green) pants with a strange set of buttons and a pair of suspenders pulling the pants well above his ankles. The ankles were covered in sand-colored combat boots that looked better suited to the Desert Storm battlefield.

Noah, though, appeared nonchalant. He had what looked like brown/blond hair with ridiculous curls that might have been dreadlocks. It was hard to tell, though, because of the wide-brimmed hat, complete with a band, that covered his head. Noah wore glasses with large circular lenses. He also had a red dot smack dab in the middle of his forehead, making him a Buddhist.

May 23, 2019

It turns out, they were not greenhouses.

They, meaning greenhouses, were actually Quonset huts dedicated to serve as potato warehouses with no direct sunlight and were prone to retaining moisture, Margot told me.

The Quonset huts now served as an indoor breeding ground for several strains of hemp, which would be ultimately reduced to CBD, a lucrative source of medicine. The seeds, by the millions, would also be harvested for a handsome product/profit.

Looking to his right over a five -foot concrete barrier, Margot nodded at the nodding crowns of the tallest sativa plants.

Those, Margot said, are plants that received too much of the growth ingredients.

The idea, he continued, was to have more of a squatting plant, one more likely to produce flowering buds filled with profit-making seeds.

The shorter, wider plants produced much more CBD oil. The hut, which received no sunlight, had to rely on ultraviolet lights hung at regular intervals and installed to help the plants grow. The temperature was set at sixty-eight degrees, and the humidity was kept at a precise level.

Even then, Margot said, some plants closest to the walls did not receive enough light. Even more alarming was the threat of an airborne disease caused by the excessive moisture.

Like every other grow master, Margot had to constantly bear in mind any kind of threat. So Margot constantly overlooked his hemp crop, noting the slightest change of any kind. With that kind of meticulous care and oversight, Point3 Farma carefully maintained records of each generation of hemp as it passed from one stage of development to the next.

May 25, 2019

Point3 Farma sent us out to pull the tarp over the greenhouse.

There were five of us. There I was, Basil Hernandez; a refugee from Wyoming, Steve; Jose Martinez, a practicing nondrinker for the past eight years; Noel or Noe (it depended on if you were speaking to him in English or Spanish); and Junior, who was pretty damn old for anyone to call him Junior.

There we were nearly in the Rocky Mountains, where the highest points drew the twisting and twisted path of the Continental Divide. The water rolling down toward the rising sun would forever flow east. The water tumbling toward the setting sun would forever flow west.

The newly-constructed greenhouses, a dozen of them, were located on L Road, which ran east and west, near Road 45 in Saguache County.

As Jose told me, the San Luis Valley, or SLV, was the most impoverished area of Colorado. Vow! So the marijuana or cannabis culture had extended deeply into the biggest and loftiest of all valleys in the US.

Some may be bigger, but none is higher than the SLV, Jose told me as we sped south on Highway 285. He hummed along to a tune by Eric Clapton.

I don’t really like Clapton, I told Jose. He stole ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ from Bob Marley.

In my book, stealing is stealing, no matter if it is fair and square.

That tarp sure flapped in the gusts of wind that lurched east, coming down sharply from the mountains. It took all of us, a dozen Point3 Farma workers, to bring the tarp to heel. Most of us clutched the plastic, trying not to create new tears. Others moved to swiftly form a knot of plastic in order to lasso a thin piece of clothesline rope around it and then tie it to a grounded strap.

Hercules himself would allow that this was a mammoth task, suitable for