Vancouver medical marijuana farmer Tom Lauerman is launching a new business this fall, which he hopes to turn into a franchise.
The business, Terpworks, is a mobile operation that goes to the site of either a licensed medical marijuana or recreational marijuana farm, harvests plants on the site and processes the material into trimmed buds or cannabis concentrates such as hash, wax or tinctures.
“There’s a need out there for this,” said Lauerman, who added that he’s already lining up customers. “There are a lot of people getting into the cannabis business, and they to some extent know how to grow, but they don’t know how to process their plants.”
Lauerman, who said he will also continue running his farm, is preparing a specialized truck that will have an array of concentrate processing equipment set up. The truck also has a sleeping area for the two-person team that will manage the operation.
“We can even work with I-502 (legal Washington recreational) businesses, I talked to an attorney about it,” Lauerman said. “We’re basically just another contractor, like an electrician. So we roll up into a grower-processor’s canopy space, roll in and process for them.”
One benefit of the mobile business is that the grower can watch or join in the processing and learn more about it. Also, their marijuana doesn’t leave the grower’s site, so the grower doesn’t have to worry about shipping marijuana, he said.
“Nobody wants to travel with pounds and pounds of weed, so this way we can do everything there,” Lauerman said.
For time-strapped I-502 growers, it could also help them get product to market faster, he said.
Because the mobile operation doesn’t transport marijuana, it’s also free to roam between state borders, harvesting in Oregon or elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
“We think this is going to be really good,” Lauerman said, adding that he already has a handful of investors and has hired a few workers to kick things off.
