I was guessing either out there or one of the ones vineyards just outside Ashland :).
> The wink-wink nudge-nudge "hemp" growers knew this, and moved with incredible speed to farm as many acres as possible before the regulators caught up.
That's super fair. The ODA wasn't culturally equipped to tell whether a company was a cartel front or a legitimate business. Really nice folks, but way outside anything they had experienced. I don't think OLCC would have done any better though.
The regulatory response also made 0 sense to me: grandfather in existing hemp growers and block anyone new. That just locked in the people they were trying to get rid of
> it was mostly fine until it became clear that there would be a 1-3 year window for growers to extract maximum profits. At this point the whole valley got ground up in the mighty garbage disposal of capitalism.
Oof. That, sadly, hits the nail on the head. The folks who were in it for the long term or more than just the money got eaten alive, and then the bubble popped.
> The wink-wink nudge-nudge "hemp" growers knew this, and moved with incredible speed to farm as many acres as possible before the regulators caught up.
That's super fair. The ODA wasn't culturally equipped to tell whether a company was a cartel front or a legitimate business. Really nice folks, but way outside anything they had experienced. I don't think OLCC would have done any better though.
The regulatory response also made 0 sense to me: grandfather in existing hemp growers and block anyone new. That just locked in the people they were trying to get rid of
> it was mostly fine until it became clear that there would be a 1-3 year window for growers to extract maximum profits. At this point the whole valley got ground up in the mighty garbage disposal of capitalism.
Oof. That, sadly, hits the nail on the head. The folks who were in it for the long term or more than just the money got eaten alive, and then the bubble popped.