Yerba Buena

When people hear “marijuana grow operation”, they often picture some stoner in a bathrobe, named Chazz, running up his mom’s electricity bill in the basement. What you don’t think of is 29 acres of lush, fertile land tucked into a hidden valley on the Oregon Coastal range; these folks aren’t making ranch though. They’re producing some of the highest quality herb Oregon has to offer.

While their products aren’t currently available in medical dispensaries – you can thank Uncle Sam for that one – they still produce some of the highest CBD strains on the market. CBD is a non-psychoactive compound found in the plant – producing a euphoric sense of relaxation, without the high. Their new strain, Corazon, is an easy one to fall in love with, producing a whopping 22.5% CBD!

There’s a lot to love about this place. They’re good people creating a great product. Everything they produce – from their unaltered herb to the bud that will be used for concentrates, is high quality. Even the pre-rolls are made with smaller, A-grade buds instead of shake. To reiterate, if weed were a bag of Doritos, these guys are using entire chips, instead of just the crumbs at the bottom of the bag.

Yerba Buena has products in two dozen recreational dispensaries starting on the Oregon Coast, and extending inward to the Oregon Desert. They are in dispensaries as far north as Portland and as far south as Medford. For those who are too stoned to navigate a web browser at the moment, here are some of the dispensaries that carry their ganja:

   Portland District – Oregon’s Finest, Electric Lettuce, Nectar, Chalice, CannaDaddy’s, Serra Cannabis and the Green Remedy.

   Bend – CannaCopia and Oregrown.

   Eugene – Moss Crossing, Nectar, Serra Cannabis and Sproutly.

   Medford – Fireside

   Oregon Coast – Chalice and Nectar.

Establishing your brand as an awesome product is one thing, but creating that product without harming your surrounding environment is an entirely different challenge. Yerba Buena is a company committed to taking that on; dedicating itself to sustainable practices such as utilizing everything from LED light bulbs to reusable soil containers.

The company does an immense amount of research even for their bat guano. Yes, they study up on their bat turds. Ensuring they’re extracting it from an ecosystem where the bats have a year round food source, as to not impact other inhabitants of that environment. As for their own environment, they use a system called IPM (Integrated Pest Management), where they hire a team of natural-born killer insects to exterminate unwanted pests. These predatory insects are sort of like the Jason Bourne of the insect family and work in place of harmful pesticides. The farm’s drying/curing program is controlled by four systems that regulate temperature and humidity to dry over 10-14 days to let the terpenes fully express. This also allows the bacteria to eat the chlorophyll so that the buds smell like weed, not grass. Nobody wants their special grass to smell like plain ol’ regular grass. Good herb is determined by how much of a stank face one makes when that skunky aroma reaches their nostrils. They follow the two-week drying process by curing the weed for an additional four weeks! Patience stoners, like any good spirit, weed this amazing takes time.

What separates this grow-op from Chazz’s mom’s basement and most other grow-ops isn’t the comely setting, the bat poo, or the Jason Bourne insects. It’s the love. The care they put into every individual plant. Every plant at their farm is hand-trimmed. Tended to by selected trimmers with specific prowess for different plants. Every plant gets touched and cared for every day. That’s a lot of love. Now, if only I could receive that sort of affection. I can hardly get a friend to scratch my back when I have an unreachable itch. I digress. Yerba Buena is paving the way for sustainable, ethical practices in the industry.

“There are no standards for best practices right now in this industry so we have to make our own. We are making them as high as possible. Why not? We can.” –Laura Day Rivero, Yerba Buena Operations Manager.

People and plants have come to form this delicate, symbiotic relationship. The relationship has always existed. We need plants and plants need us. To produce dank kush, you need dank employees, and to produce dank employees, you need dank ethics. Large-scale corporations tend to put ethics on the back burner. Yerba Buena is a small-scale operation of about 40 employees, giving them the liberty to treat their people right. All of their employees, including trimmers, receive full health benefits. It’s a little higher overhead, but it’s the right thing to do. Their facility even hosts a company garden! They’re like Google, without the ping pong tables – but who needs ping pong tables when you have weed and veggies? “I really see this as an opportunity to make a huge difference in the world…” Laura Day, OM, explained, “[To inspire change beyond this industry.”

Yerba Buena is Spanish for “good herb,” but there’s a level of depth that comes along with that title. The herb coming from here is more than good, it’s fantastic and the folks running this close-knit farm are amazing. They treat their employees GOOD, they treat their plants GOOD, and they treat their environment GOOD. This company gives me stoner butterflies, and I’m excited to see how far they grow in these next few crucial years.