Marijuana Business Magazine March 2019

March 2019 | mjbizdaily.com 93 Guelich also wants Orchard Heights to get into the nursery niche and is building tissue-culture facilities at its Washington state cultivation site. The company had its first harvest last November of roughly 4,000 pounds of cannabis and said the opportunity in tissue culture is too good to pass up. “We want to position ourselves as the leading (seed-to-business) nursery in the state,” Guelich said. But tissue culture can also be useful to craft growers or others who may not want to scale but would use the proce- dure to preserve their plant genetics. “If you’re a breeder and you’ve spent years developing a valuable strain, tissue culture is worth considering because you can use tissue culture as a way to better preserve your genetics,” Jones said. WANTED: SKILLED LABOR Finding people who are qualified to run or work in a tissue-culture operation isn’t easy, and it requires an employer willing to pay competitive salaries. Businesses looking to do more modest micropropagation should have two to three employees, while bigger opera- tions will require more labor. Guelich estimated that entry-level employees or low-level technicians in the Washington state market can expect annual salaries of $40,000 to $60,000. In Arizona, those positions typically pay $17 to $20 per hour, Jones said. For a lead manager with tissue-cul- ture experience, salaries can range from the high-five digits and easily approach $130,000 or more per year, depending on the size of the operation and the employ- ee’s level of expertise. “People who are qualified for these positions will often have Ph.D.s and want to get paid accordingly,” Jones said. While tissue culture is high-tech and can take cannabis production to new levels, it’s still a relatively new tool in mar- ijuana that the industry is learning about. “We’re still waiting for certain robot- ics and automation to come in and help get us beyond the bottleneck for really being able to get into production that is in the millions,” Jones said. “That is especially critical for the hemp industry to figure out. We need tech and R&D that accelerates how we operate while increasing our yields.” Dr. Jonathan Vaught is CEO of Front Range Biosciences. Courtesy Photo Cannabis plant tissue is prepped to go into a tissue culture media at the Front Bioscience facility. Courtesy Photo