Global Ganja Report

Small is Beautiful for the Berkshires’ Badass Bud

Nestled in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts is the town of West Stockbridge, where Wiseacre Farm boasts that it is the smallest artisanal cannabis producer in the commonwealth.

Grower Jon Piasecki has been on the land since 2001, putting to use his impressive credentials. He studied forest science at Cornell University and then earned a masters from Harvard in landscape architecture. He later worked in that field, specializing in native plants and stone sculpture, before finding his new passion with legalization of cannabis in Massachusetts. He was in on the second regulated recreational-sector harvest in 2020.

But Piasecki emphasizes that he’s a legacy producer, “I’ve been growing pot since the ‘70s,” he says, having started in his boyhood home in New York’s North Country, near the St. Lawrence River. So his approach is an amalgam of the grassroots and scientific—with an focus on a sustainable and place-specific approach to cultivation.

“My life’s mission is adapting this plant to New England,” he tells me as we stroll through his garden, in a secured and video-surveilled enclosure, in accordance with state regulations.

Global genetics for local conditions
“I’m breeding autoflowers,” he begins, showing off samples of his diverse colas—when I visited, in late October, in the process of being harvested. “I’m working with three types of ruderalis from Siberia. Instead of flowering as light decreases in late summer, it’s based on time passage—after four weeks germination. By the time light starts to decrease in the land of midnight sun, the temperature is already low, and frost becomes a threat to the flower. And that’s perfect for the short growing season here. I can harvest in August, after just eight weeks.”

“With the ruderalis, there’s not much yield and not much THC, but they are interfertile with sativas and indicas,” which helps offset that, Piasecki says. He’s marketing his own sativa-ruderalis cross, Golden Bough Automatic, sold primarily for extract due to a comparatively low 18% THC. “I’m working on increasing cannabinoid content,” he says. “I like having the full diversity of the plant growing in my garden and see the fullness of what cannabis can do.”

This is a variant of his Golden Bough strain, developed from Black Lime Special Reserve, an indica-heavy California variety. “I adapted it to growing conditions in New England, with an early finish for the shorter growing season,” he says. “It’s approximately 20% THC, with lots of ancillary cannabinoids. It’s incredibly narcotic, and is said to enhance female orgasm,” he adds matter-of-factly.

Piasecki always uses “F1 cross,” as it’s called in the seed industry—applying pollen to the flower, as opposed to cloning or feminizing seeds. This means there are always two known genetically stable parents.

Another of his creations is Golden Sugar—based on a Spanish-developed indica strain, and clocking in at 25% THC. “It looks like it’s been doused in confectionary sugar, it’s so covered in trichomes,” Piasecki says. “I’m selecting for disease resistance, diverse cannabinoid profile, and fragrance.”

Piasecki next points to his Vietnamese Dragon—based on a sativa landrace called Vietnamese Black “that probably came back during the Vietnam war.” This is another fruit of genetic adaptation. “There’s 90% relative humidity at times in both Vietnam and Massachusetts, and last year my crops were damaged by bud rot because it was so wet. I went with this strain to hedge bets in case we got another wet, tropical year.”

But the other varieties it is crossed with adjust the strain for the colder climate and shorter season. He holds out one of the dark, dank colas and says proudly: “I got this to happen from Vietnamese genetics in fucking New England in October.”

Still in development is a New England variant of Black African Magic, a landrace from the Congo’s Ituri rainforest. This is to be marketed at nearby Devine dispensary in the village of South Egremont, which happens to be co-owned by an African American—Ari Zorn, the first person of color to hold a cannabis license in the Berkshires.

Piasecki views his experimenting as part of a long human legacy.

“I’m one of the people who have been doing this over millennia. Cannabis is probably one of first plants ever cultivated.

The climate change challenge
Piasecki sees the key challenge for this long human endeavor at this moment as climate change. This has already extended his local growing season—but at a cost.

Referring to his now college-age offspring, Piasecki relates: “When my kids were growing up on this farm, there used to be snow on Halloween, and snow is the kiss of death. Now I can keep plants growing into November. This was a perfect year for growing pot, one of my best years ever. But last year was the worst. It was wet all summer. We had two tropical storms in August—very warm, with relative humidity at 100%. And fungus hit in and defoliated everything.”

“Now I’m experimenting with sativas to ride out tropical weather,” he adds. “Climate change is really bringing chaos, and you need diversity to be ready for anything.”

The Berkshires are currently in Zone 5, an annual designation issued by the USDA for its national climatic zone map, based on first and last frost of the season. New York’s Franklin County, where Piasecki grew up, further north, was usually zone 4 or 3. “But with climate change, the zone map has been shifting warmer to the north,” he says. “The Berkshires were in Zone 5A some 20 years ago—now it’s Zone 5B, borderline 6. In 10 years we’ll be in Zone 6.”

Again, this isn’t necessarily good news for farmers. The fungus that damaged Piasecki’s crops last year was cercospora—heretofore typically seen in the southern states.

Artisanal versus industrial
The fungal infestation was not a total loss, as the bud could still be used for extract. In fact, Golden Bough vape carts were entered in the Massachusetts Cannabis Cup, held in Brookline in October 2021.

Piasecki has an ozone machine, which he calls a “minimal treatment” for bud sold in herbaceous form to pass testing. He sees Massachusetts’ extremely high standards as tilting the market to the multi-state operators. “It allows the MSOs to leverage the ability to afford a Gamma irradiator,” he says.

Piasecki is skeptical about the growing use of irradiation for remediation of cannabis. “If you’re dumping stuff that should be going to extract into irradiation, you’re still smoking fungus corpses.”

This is where Piasecki shows some political outrage at the direction legal cannabis is going.

“The MSOs come in and the market collapses. Then the MSOs pick at the corpses.” In Massachusetts, he says, they’ve been converting some of the state’s old industrial facilities into massive indoor grow operations.

By his calculations, producing an eighth of indoor also produces 4,900 kilograms of CO2 pollution. “That’s as much as me driving my truck for an hour. I don’t think people understand the environmental costs of that perfect indoor 30%-THC bud. It’s like Bitcoin mining. Indoor is destroying the world.”

He contrasts his own land-rooted methods. “I haul water out of the stream for my plants. That’s living water that comes right off the mountain—it’s very clean, it has life to it. The plant really appreciates that.”

His plants are fertilized with compost from animal waste—a sheep-goat-donkey-cow mix, all produced by his own livestock, on his own 55-acre property. Some half the land, up the mountain, remains wooded as a conservation easement overseen by the Berkshire Natural Resources Council. That’s where the stream emerges, the waters eventually meeting the Green River, a tributary of the Housatonic.

“I use the tomato analogy,” Piasecki expounds. “Who would you rather get your tomatoes from—your local organic farmer, grown in soil that the farmer has been nurturing, watered from a stream coming down from a mountain? Or from a factory, where it’s grown under electric lights in rockwool and has never touched soil, fed with bags of chemicals?”

“I grow under the sun, with this soil, this water, and this shit,” he continues, indicating the sky, the ground, the stream, and the pigpen. “It’s not grown in some fungal-polluted factory in Springfield or Holyoke. This plant is a fucking goddess, and they have it in a cage to sell to people. I grow it in fucking heaven.”

“Sun and landrace genetics are the key to a more subtle product,” he insists. “With insane terpenes and multiple cannabinoids. Nobody gets paranoid from smoking my stuff.”

And, in contrast to industrial-scale indoor, it is ecologically sound. “I fixed carbon to do that,” Piasecki says of his garden. “This is a carbon sink. You have to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

The farm is also producing maple sugar and honey, with the bees helpfully pollinating the fruit trees—apple, pear, apricot, berries, paw-paw and chestnut.

Artisanal ambitions for 2023
Currently growing some 180 plants on 5,000 square feet, Piasecki actually has plans to massively expand. By next planting season, he’s hoping to have his license transferred to a 100,000-square-foot former gravel pit that he’s purchased, some seven miles from his current farm. While the current Wiseacre Farm is among the smallest licensed cannabis grow operations in the state, its new incarnation will be one of the biggest.

But he stresses that this new operation, while set to become the biggest employer in West Stockbridge, will also adhere to his artisanal and ecological ethic. A 100-foot buffer will protect the wetland along the Williams River, another Housatonic tributary, seeded with native plants. These will provide a habitat for bees, to make make cannabis-infused honey.

“We in New England are where California was 35 years ago,” Piasecki sums up.

“This miraculous plant has travelled around the world with human beings for thousands of years. It has been in New England before, when the colonists grew hemp. But it has returned because it needs something from us Yankees, like it needed something from the amazing growers in California decades ago now. Not sure what the plant wants from us or even me in particular, but I am very happy to be along for the ride, and to devote myself completely to her needs so I can hopefully find out. But I am not kidding myself, we are just one stop on her travels.”

Image: Global Ganja Report

 

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