Leaf Brief: April 2024

Zen Cannabis is Coming to New Mexico

Edible brand Zen Cannabis will be entering the New Mexico market in the next 60 days. The company has been making gummies and chocolates since 2020, and also offers tinctures and beverages.

Zen Cannabis CEO Jeremy Zachary says in an email from the company’s PR representative the company will be targeting local New Mexican dispensaries to work with.

Zen Cannabis offers an assortment of gummies. I sampled a grape-flavored fast-acting night-time edible with 10 mg THC and 40 mg CBD, as well as a fruit-punch-flavored 10 mg fast-acting indica and a watermelon-flavored 10 mg hybrid.

Regarding the latter, I woke up at 4 am one Saturday with a hangover so intense I swore I’d never drink mezcal or wine again. Not the smartest of combos, but what can I say? I walked into Susan’s with the best of intentions. I’d share a bottle of wine with some friends. Simple enough. Then someone bought some mezcal shots and things swerved off course from there.

I tossed and turned in bed, and watched some television. My body felt like it was being thrown against the wall repeatedly and an elephant was sitting on my head. I had the symptoms of food poisoning without the food poisoning.

After being up for hours with no sign of relief for my poor choices the night before, I turned to Zen Cannabis’ watermelon hybrid gummy. The claim “fast acting” was no lie. Maybe 20 minutes later, the half gummy I had ingested made me feel crazy good.

Like really, really good. How was that possible? I had been awake since 4 am, curled up at death’s doorstep.

I couldn’t believe my change in luck. The elephant on my head must have moved on to torture someone else. My head felt cloudy and soft, and not in a negative way, more like my brain was encircled with a fluffy haze that felt like bubbles bouncing off my skin in a warm bath.

My body began to sink into the world’s softest bed. It must have just been a feeling though, because I was finally out of bed.

Everything seemed good again. I heard myself giggle. I felt like I existed in the midst of some magical realm.

That Zen Cannabis hybrid edible had resurrected me from Satan’s hangover. This edible may just be the holy grail of hangover cures.

I also gave the night-time edible a go. The first time I tried it, I consumed half a gummy, so roughly 5 mg. I fell asleep fast. I woke up once to pee, of course, and had a little trouble getting back to sleep, at least right away.

The next night I popped a whole edible in my mouth. I awoke the next morning after sleeping more than nine hours. Sleeping through the night has eluded me for roughly 20 years. As someone who’s been diagnosed with insomnia and prescribed sleeping pills for years, it was refreshing, first, to fall asleep and stay asleep, and, second, to wake up not feeling groggy.

Keep an eye out for these edible gems at your local dispensary in the coming months.

AI Spyder Soars Above the Grasses to Deliver for the Masses

Move over Charlotte. The world’s smartest Spyder can be found suspended over a canopy of marijuana plants, not in a web spinning encouragement over the barn at Zuckerman’s farm. An artificial intelligence robotic Spyder, a creation from Neatleaf, is changing the playing field of marijuana cultivation.

The Spyder is a researcher, photographer and data collector all rolled into one. It hangs suspended from cables above a canopy, covering up to 5,000 square feet. Its eight sensors and two cameras collect data, scan plants for variation and illness and take photos, tracking every stage of a growth cycle.

The Spyder works 24 hours a day and takes no days off. It’s completely autonomous, uploading data and images to a dashboard that cultivators and Neatleaf plant scientists use to analyze and determine what’s working and where things need a tweak or two. The dashboard tracks trends and can alert a grower to a deficiency up to three days before it becomes visual to the human eye.

Every plant, leaf and bud is monitored by this robotic creation. It detects mildew and leaf yellowing and folding. It works out of the way of cultivators, catching issues even the most diligent of growers can miss. It drops down to examine light intensity and quality. The Spyder tracks what a plant looked like when it was healthy, how it changed and how symptoms spread.

Neatleaf’s founder and CEO Elmar Mair grew up in the countryside of Northern Italy and had never set eyes on a robot until he was at university in Austria where he studied computer science. Mair continued his education in Germany. He spent his career working with robotics and industrial automation at Google X, Lucid Motors and the German Aerospace Center before founding Neatleaf four years ago.

After years of developing droids and self-driving vehicles, Mair wondered how robotics could play a role in agriculture. He wanted to devise a system that could help growers, provide more data and do so with a system that was flexible and low in cost.

The Spyder’s development took six to nine months. The first prototype was in the field roughly two and a half years ago. Developing and testing the system for cannabis was always the idea, because the plant grows fast, there are high margins and most cultivators are open minded.

“I have so much respect for cultivators,” Mair tells the Leaf.

Currently Mair says Neatleaf’s Spyder can operate in greenhouses and in indoor grows, but eventually he’d like to weatherproof the system so that it can be used for outdoor grows, perhaps even in vineyards. Besides cannabis, the Spyder has been used to track the growth of leafy greens in nurseries.

“I believe in the system,” Mair said. “We’re just scratching the surface.”

Last summer, Neatleaf amped up production to address a backlog of customers. This year the company has tripled installations, which take approximately four to five hours. So far, Neatleaf hasn’t lost a single customer. In fact, they say customers frequently return for another Spyder.

Neatleaf client 22Red, a California-based premium cannabis lifestyle brand, uses five Spyders. Stephen Hess, head of cultivation at 22Red’s Phoenix grow, says the company has been harvesting for just over a year. They brought in the Spyder in early August. After the initial meeting with Neatleaf, it had a system installed and running three weeks later.

“We have a weekly report meeting (with Neatleaf plant scientists),” Hess says. “We can look at all the rooms from the week prior and see if there’s something that we can make adjustments. They suggest corrections whether it’s, say, a deficiency on calcium. They’ll throw in suggestions for calcium spray that might help correct those deficiencies that you may be experiencing.”

The Spyder “kind of adds a new layer of scouting and quality assurance that I never got from a human,” he adds. " And a lot of humans from the cannabis space are products of the product itself. You get what you smoke.”

The Spyder is constantly evolving and improving from the relationship between the Neatleaf plant scientists and the cultivators. Hess reports, “It’s almost too smart for its own good.” Hess is referring to an issue that arose where the Spyder thought it was detecting a deficiency, but really the LED cameras were just detecting light spectrum changes. So, the Spyder was just creating a false alarm.

The Spyder is thorough, and perhaps can be a bit of a drama queen at times. The Spyder has even told Hess he’s a bad grower.

“Yeah,” says Hess. “I make the joke all the time, that because it gives a report and it will detect like three problems in a room and create like a 10-page report about those three problems. Meanwhile, 95 percent of the room’s fine.” In other words: “It will ego check you,” Hess says. “There’s some love/hate to it as well.”

Nonetheless, Hess, a cultivator for over a decade, recommends the Spyder. “I tell people, for a grower who’s a novice, it’s your best friend because it will teach you how to become a really skilled grower,” he says. “Because all the things you read online are not good information. And so I think a lot of people don’t go to actual horticulture school, or learn botany and plant science.”

Hess pauses and laughs, then says, “They just learn from Billy Bob Thorton, who did it, you know, in the ‘90s in LA. We gotta get away from that kind of like old school, I mean I don’t mind the culture of the old school, but it’s a dead science. I mean we gotta grow up at some point and get to the next level. I know it’s the uncool thing to do, but unfortunately the cool thing is to have it be nationally recreational so that we don’t have people going to prison for no reason. I think that’s way more cool than cool.”

Neatleaf is headquartered in Santa Cruz, and also has an office in Munich, Germany. The company has roughly 20 employees. As of yet, none of New Mexico’s grow operations are using Neatleaf’s Spyder.

Exercise + Cannabis = Fun

Can cannabis improve a workout? That’s the question a recent New York Times article sets out to answer and, according to multiple sources, the answer is a hard yes. Some people reported it lessened their anxiety about going to the gym, and overcoming anxieties about their body in general.

Others noted it can keep pain at bay, so that you can keep pushing through a workout without overdoing it.

I decided to put on my jogging shoes, pop a 5mg edible and see what happened. The sun was out, it was wildly windy, but the breeze felt like a warm blanket.

I hadn’t “jogged” in months, but as soon as I started, I began to enjoy myself. I could feel my calves tighten, my knees twitch, but those annoyances felt so far out of reach that I just kept going. Sometimes I couldn’t even feel my feet pound the pavement. Had I become a gazelle simply bounding through each stride along the river trail? Not quite, but my body felt like it was moving through water, rather than pounding pavement straight into the wind.

Thirty minutes passed, and I was still jogging. Not once had I thought about stopping to curl up in a patch of sun and take a nap.

I could have kept going, for how long I don’t know. I took note of other people on the trail and the cars on the road, but I was really deep in my head, enjoying the moment, not dwelling on any intrusive thoughts. I could hear the wind over the music flowing through my headphones.

Even more amazing, my pillow-top tummy felt less jiggly. No longer could I feel it bounce with each step.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I felt really good. Was it the edible or the endorphins? I don’t know, but I’ll be doing that again.

Shake: Odds and ends from New Mexico and beyond

• Could pot legalization be a deciding factor in the 2024 presidential election? According to a recent survey, the answer is: most definitely. The survey polled likely voters who consume pot and found that 59% will vote for a “pro pot” candidate, no matter the political party. The survey also noted that 85% said cannabis policy was a major issue they’ll consider when filling out their ballot. The Biden administration has been getting more vocal about cannabis and rescheduling. Vice President Kamala Harris, who has softened her stance about marijuana, held a roundtable on cannabis reform at the White House. So far, the Trump campaign has been quiet on the cannabis front. It’s clear from the survey that the cannabis vote is worth targeting in this election.
• US Customs and Border Patrol agents continue to seize legal cannabis products at New Mexican checkpoints. Top Crop Cannabis Company suffered a blow when federal agents took 22 pounds of product worth $139,000 back in February. The New Mexico Cannabis Chamber of Commerce told KRQE News the feds had taken product from 12 legal and licensed New Mexico cannabis businesses, totaling more than $300,000 in product losses over the last several weeks. “The promise of the cannabis industry in New Mexico was to bring everybody along, to create pathways for homegrown businesses to launch and flourish and this is a slap in the face to all the hard work our state has done to legalize cannabis the right way,” New Mexico Cannabis Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Ben Lewinger told the station.

One Last Thing, Happy 4/20!

April 20 is just around the corner. There are plenty of ways to enjoy the holiday this year. If you feel like going out to celebrate, here are two options:

Nuckolls Brewing Company and Up All Night present Towers and Flowers, a 420 dance music experience beginning at 12 pm at the brewery (1611 Alcaldesa Street). Come to the patio for a day of music.

The Albuquerque Collective and local dispensary Bad Company will be hosting a 4/20 backyard market from 12 pm-6 pm (1321 Eubank Blvd NE), featuring comedy from Zach Abeyta, live music and an open mic. Ticket price is $75 plus fees.

Happy Holiday to those who will be celebrating!

Correction

Following the publication of last month’s Leaf Brief, a representative from Verdi Cannabis contacted Leaf Brief and said the company is not in fact launching with Priscotty in NY but, rather, launching on its own. Priscotty, in turn, tells SFR a deal and launch date with Verdi was in place at the time of his interview with SFR, but subsequently fell through. Verdi also disputes that characterization and says no launch date had been discussed, nor were there signed papers and “it was completely premature and inappropriate for Scott to be discussing this deal.”