Out Of The Weeds
Sara Rotman at her Buellton property
After legalization, Santa Barbara is poised to become the epicenter of cannabis farming
Written by Maxwell Williams | Photographs by Brian Bins, Curtis Peterson, York Shackleton
Up in Los Alamos, surrounded by greenery and lush farmland in every direction, York Shackleton kicks at a pile of horse dung. He looks and talks like any young farmer, wiry and rugged and proud of his crops. Except there aren’t any crops yet, not until the cannabis growing season begins in June. Still, mature plants in planters are lined up in a row on the seat of a picnic table by the farmhouse. “I have a lot of rare genetics that only I possess,” says Shackleton, as excited by plant propagation as any grad-school horticulturist. “We’re going to cut those down now and clone them.”
“Most of the farms are geared toward high-yield production, with an eventual eye toward the sort of cannatourism that will turn the Central Coast from wine country to weed country.”
Shackleton’s High Star Farms is one of an estimated 100-plus cannabis farms operating legally under more than 1,000 licenses in Santa Barbara County. It’s the most by county in the state, recently passing longtime cannabis stronghold Humboldt County, since the state shifted from medical to recreational cannabis at the beginning of the year. Most of the farms are geared toward high-yield production, with an eventual eye toward the sort of cannatourism that will turn the Central Coast from wine country to weed country.
All of the other farms are working under temporary permits, Shackleton says, but because he had been running large-scale grows in Monterey for years before buying the Los Alamos property—which features a hotel he plans to get online as soon as he can, and enough fields to grow thousands of pounds of cannabis—he didn’t qualify for the grandfathered temporary permit.
Sara Rotman and her husband, Nate Ryan, have converted the property— originally meant to be a polo horse farm—into a legal cannabis farm
And because he was compelled to apply as soon as he could, he says that High Star has felt an urgency to pass through all the notoriously difficult, but necessary, hoops to get a business license, and they stand to be the first such farm in Santa Barbara County with one. No easy task, says the farmer/filmmaker (he’s directed movies starring Nicolas Cage and Guy Pearce) from Calabasas, who employed his mother to do the permitting. “They chose us as a guinea pig,” Shackleton says. “It’s a huge milestone. We’re in an area that’s premier land. It’s wine country. It’s very prestigious.”
Just a few miles down the 101 in the farmland outside of Buellton, Sara Rotman is also on prime land. A goat chews at her boot through a fence as she gestures to the area where her polo grounds were supposed to be. She’s an equestrienne, having played top-level polo for years, and her savvy is readily apparent, coming from the world of high-end fashion branding, where her clients were the likes of Michael Kors and Goop.
Adrian Sedlin of Canndescent, one of the nation’s biggest cannabis brands.
“Most of the farms are geared toward high-yield production, with an eventual eye toward the sort of cannatourism that will turn the Central Coast from wine country to weed country.”
But in 2014, after she closed on the property in Buellton, a life-or-death fight against Crohn’s disease debilitated her. Doctors put her on high doses of morphine, prednisone, and Remicade, a strong immunosuppressive that left her susceptible to, and nearly dead from, tetanus. After doing some research, her husband, Nate Ryan, convinced Rotman—who describes herself as a caffeinated, type-A personality—to try CBD, the nonpsychoactive version of cannabis. “Lo and behold, it worked,” she says with a laugh. “It was better for my pain, and it worked on my inflammation.”
Soon, the couple rejiggered the plans for the farm. And as with all Rotman endeavors, the plans turned into a full-fledged business. They produce a crop of organic outdoor-grown cannabis flower for other manufacturers like Select, a fast-growing company specializing in CBD vaping products. Rotman says she is looking to expand her own brands, Bluebird805 and the newly launched Busy Bee’s Farm Flavors, which focuses on vaping products with farm flavors like rosemary, honey, and pomegranate.
York Shackleton looks out over his Los Alamos farm
Rotman feels that the explosion of farming in Santa Barbara boils down to the growing conditions—the cool breeze and the fertile soil—which have long made the region a prime spot for Pinot Noir grapes and other produce. Still, Rotman says there are myriad challenges to running a successful cannabis business, not the least of which is pushback from already established farmers in the area, who believe the smell of cannabis will impact their wine, a concern that remains unproven.
“We share a lot of the same values,” says Rotman. “We have a product that is style and taste oriented—olfactory requirements are just as important for cannabis as wine. We have an aesthetic appreciation for this specific plant that we grow and its intricacies and its idiosyncrasies and how do we express that plant. Our terroir impacts the plant, so we have very sympathetic business and farming practices.”
High Star Farms is one of an estimated 100-plus cannabis farms operating legally under more than 1,000 licenses in Santa Barbara County.
Adrian Sedlin, whose brand Canndescent is one of the biggest cannabis companies in America, believes that Santa Barbara County is great for outdoor grows, but the financial ceiling of the cannabis farms is much lower than that of the vintners. Canndescent’s headquarters are in Santa Barbara, though their grow operates in Desert Hot Springs, three and a half hours south, because the Inland Empire town was the first to offer licenses to cannabis cultivators who wanted to get in on the ground floor in 2014.
“We have a lot of visitors coming through to look at wine country, so why not cultivate cannabis country as well?” Sedlin says. “I fully believe some will make that successful. Where the analogy breaks down is that you’re not supposed to sell product across state lines. So understand that the opportunity that’s available for California wine growers is conceivably the seven billion population of planet Earth; the [cannabis] growers can service the 39 million people in California.”
A Cannabis Flower Blooming in Buelton
The retail end is one of the sectors that has growth potential, says Coastal CEO Malante Hayworth and CFO Julian Michalowski. Coastal won a highly coveted license to be downtown Santa Barbara’s only dispensary, and their beautifully designed high-end 6,300-sqare-foot dispensary experience one block over from State Street on Chapala, is opening in June. They’ve also opened a 10,000-square-foot headquarters where they will run a delivery service, a distribution company, and a lab where they’ll make their own products and develop new ones.
“Most of the farms are geared toward high-yield production, with an eventual eye toward the sort of cannatourism that will turn the Central Coast from wine country to weed country.”
“It’s a very competitive process to have a dispensary,” says Michalowski, who says Coastal will employ 50 people by opening day. “There were hundreds of pages of applications, and it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to apply. But everybody has been great to work with; it’s as new an experience for them as it is for us, so everybody’s cautious. Everybody wants to make sure it’s good for the community.”
The fact that the city is playing it safe could pay off in the long run. Rotman says that making sure things are organized will benefit everyone in the end, from the cannabis growers to the vintners. “Some of our lawmakers understand that we have the opportunity to be the Napa of weed,” she says, “and that there is going to be extraordinary benefit to the community from a health and wellness perspective, from a financial perspective, from a tourism perspective, from a farming perspective.”
