Tweed secures license for significant increase to cannabis growing space

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont.—Canopy Growth Corp., the recently renamed parent company of Tweed Farms, has received Health Canada approval to begin cannabis cultivation in all 350,000 square-feet of its Niagara-on-the-Lake growing space. The license will allow the company to increase its growth space by nearly 10-times.

“Our production team has now iterated through several harvest and growing cycles, improving and refining growing practices harvest over harvest,” Angus Footman, president of Tweed Farms, said. “Now we can apply our expertise over an additional 315,000 sq. ft. of production space, drastically reducing our operating costs per gram.”

The company said the new license will allow CPC to meet the demand for Tweed’s high quality medical cannabis, which is produced in a carbon-friendly environment, without the use of artificial lighting or cooling.

“We realized very early that diversified growing platforms would allow us to produce a greater range of products, some suited to indoor growing and others that thrive in a greenhouse environment,” Bruce Linton, chairman and CEO of Canopy Growth, said “We can leverage the production capacity of the greenhouse to meet the needs of an evolving market that will increasingly require scale as we move closer to licensed cannabis oil sales and as more and more patients seek medicinal cannabis as a treatment option.”

Given the scale of growing capacity, Tweed Farms said it will produce genetically consistent cannabis plants efficiently using tissue culture processing, rather than the area-intensive and more labour-intensive method of cloning from mature “mother” plants.

The company’s greenhouse facility is used to cultivate cannabis plants that are then transferred to Tweed Inc.’s facilities in Smiths Falls, Ont. for processing, storage and shipment to Tweed customers.