Marijuana Business Magazine April 2020

April 2020 | mjbizdaily.com 49 HOUSING INCLUDED The outdoor hemp boom didn’t just change the market for cultivation managers. Less-skilled employees were hard to find, too, in the months after hemp legalization. Yagielo even started seeing employers offer something he’d never seen on the marijuana side: free housing. Yagielo’s clients sometimes offer rooms on or near a farm as an incentive to draw folks to rural areas with little housing available to rent. It’s a job perk that’s somewhat common in traditional agriculture, where salaries are generally low and farmers sometimes provide housing to lure folks. Hemp legalization brought the feature to cannabis. “A lot of these hemp farms are in very remote areas,” Yagielo explained. “So there’s not a lot of places to find housing. A lot of these places, they have farm- houses or cottages on the land, and they are renting them out or just making it part of their salary that their employees can live there for as long as they wish while they’re employed.” TURBULENT TIMES If it seems that hemp legalization has done nothing but drive up salaries in the sector, it has also introduced volatility that can have employers and job seekers alike wishing for the relative stability of the illicit marijuana market. Hemp’s expansion in 2019 led to a huge influx of CBD and other hemp products into the market by the end of 2019. The results were predictable: falling prices, followed by tighter margins and layoffs across the sector. Longtime hemp entrepreneurs such as Michael Bowman, co-founder of First Crop hemp consultancy in Colorado, say the market fluctuations caused by limited legalization in 2014 and then full legalization in 2018 have been significant. “We went from zero (acres) when we started this in 2014 to something like 500,000 permitted acres last year,” Bowman said. “So that’s putting a lot of pressure on a lot of points in the supply chain.” He predicted “downward pressure” on hemp wages as the sector matures in 2020 and beyond. But he said salaries will stay high at hemp businesses that can handle industry turbulence. “Nothing beats a good, loyal employee,” Bowman said. “I think the good, legitimate operators who were able to survive 2019, their employees are going to be taken care of. (Those companies) understand that their future is not only them, but it’s having good employees.” Source: HempSta ff Copyright 2020 Marijuana Business Daily , a division of Anne Holland Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. $0K $20K $40K $60K $80K $100K $120K $140K $160K $180K $200K $220K $240K $260K $280K Chief Executive O ffi cer Greenhouse Manager Farm Manager Lab Director Director of Extraction Sales Manager Operations Manager Senior Marketing Manager Accounting Manager Greenhouse Techs $60,000 $70,000 $70,000 $75,000 $75,000 $100,000 $100,000 $105,000 $125,000 $255,000 Sampling of 2019 U.S. Hemp Jobs with Average Salaries Source: HempStaff Copyright 2020 Marijuana Business Daily , a division of Anne Holland Ventures Inc. James Yagielo