Cannabis Business Times Cover Story: Diversify & Differentiate
The past 5 years have been incredibly rewarding and incredibly challenging. We’ve found solace in being able to tell our full story — the good, bad, and ugly — in the latest cover story for Cannabis Business Times. The following is an excerpt from our feature in the October 2019 issue of CBT. You can read the full story here.
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In life, we all get dealt bad hands: poverty or financial ruin, lost relationships, poor health, etc. We don’t control what cards we’re dealt, only how we play them.
It would have been easy and understandable for Nathan and Aaron Howard, the co-founders of Oregon-based East Fork Cultivars, to see the cards handed to their family and their other brother Wesley and fold. Wesley had a severe case of neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes tumors to form on nerve tissue such as the brain, spinal column and nerves.
Under Oregon’s original medical cannabis program (passed by ballot measure in 1998), Aaron grew for Wesley and others at his southern Oregon home (a former llama breeding ranch). Cultivating mostly high-THC cultivars that Wesley requested to manage the pain and other ailments associated with his condition, the Howard family saw up close the side effects those type 1 cultivars had on their late brother. (Wesley passed away in 2017 due to complications from his condition.) “It definitely helped him just deal with the severe pain he was in and the mental pain of being dealt a really, really difficult and unfair hand in life,” Nathan recounts. “But we thought maybe we could find or create something that was less intoxicating that could still bring Wesley relief, because he was essentially always high, like really intoxicated, and that was pretty much the only option available.”
Nathan and Aaron began searching for cultivars that would provide the pain relief and euphoria that their brother searched for in cannabis without leaving him debilitatingly high: elusive type 2 and 3 cultivars. Little did they know, that search for genetics better suited for treating their brother’s symptoms would be a major differentiator for their future company, carrying it through the tough times ahead.
