On a recent Saturday at George Washington Carver Farms, a room full of teenagers have a lot of questions.
About 10 had gathered at the nonprofit’s location in north St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood to learn about the cannabis industry. It’s hot without air conditioning in a house on the farm’s property, but everyone huddled in the living room of the house listens intently to Zach Post and Brandon Meeks. They talk about the industry and their work as medical cultivators, as fans blow a slight breeze.
“You’re at the beginning of an industry that’s going to last forever,” Post says to the class. “You’re actually a part of this, and you can make it look the way you want it to look.”
Throughout the class, questions pop up around the room. Do they need any formal training to enter the field? What’s better for growing cannabis, hydroponics or soil? Can you grow it outside?
Years ago, Post had similar questions. When he first entered the industry about a decade ago, he knew little about cannabis. He learned how to cultivate it mostly through trial and error.
But he’s come a long way since. Post and his nephew, Meeks, 32, founded a nonprofit called Elite Home Growers Academy shortly after Missouri legalized medical cannabis in 2018 to teach medical cannabis patients the art of growing their own cannabis indoors. At these classes, which have mostly been on hold since the pandemic, Post was often asked the same thing — could attendees smoke the product he was growing? Missouri law prohibits sharing cannabis cultivated for medical use, so the answer was always no.
But the question got Post thinking. What if he found a way to share the genetics of the plants he bred so other people could grow them themselves?
The Elitist Urban Agriculture brand was born soon after. Together, Post, Meeks and collaborators Brian Hamilton and Jason Ford work within the limits of Missouri’s medical marijuana laws to breed the best strains of cannabis. Each cultivates their own strains at home, looking for the perfect combination of flavor, smell, feel and yield.
The clones and seeds of winning combinations are then sold to legal cultivation facilities. One of Elitist’s strains, Meltz, is now sold at Viola St. Louis, Luxury Leaf and Bloom Medicinal dispensaries.
Post, Meeks and Hamilton follow a long and arduous process they call “pheno hunting” to create their desired strains. They take attributes of certain strains that they like and try to breed them into one super strain. One strain may have a good smell, for example, but it may yield little trichomes — the sticky “hair” of the plant that produces cannabinoids. So Post and crew will breed the good-smelling strain with a trichome-heavy strain to put the two attributes into one plant. They'll then do a second or third round of growing to make sure they get consistent results.
The whole process can take months, or even years, and an understanding of genetics that everyone at Elitist learned mostly on their own. Meeks, a long-time home grower, started cultivating by himself using hydroponics. Hamilton found medical cannabis to treat his spina bifida.
“I’m very hard on myself when it comes to the medicine I create,” Hamilton says. “I think that’s something the bigger market lacks because it’s all about money to them.”
Cannabis always fascinated Post. Even though he didn’t smoke it until much later in life, he felt inspired to grow it as a teenager in St. Louis. His few attempts to grow were failures. “I got busted each time,” Post says. He once tried to grow it at his mother’s house in her bathroom, but it of course didn’t work. Then there was the time he grew a plant on a window sill in the attic. It sprouted and grew quite large, Post says, but then “my sister told on me, and my mom came and killed them.”
He finally tried to grow it in the backyard. “It grew a little bit, but then I think somebody ended up cutting it down with a weed whacker or something.”
His first job in cannabis was as a trimmer at a Las Vegas cultivation facility. It was just a means to pay bills, Post explains. He had some knowledge of cannabis but knew nothing about the science or medicinal side of it. But the cultivators at the facility, some who had been growing the plant for decades, shared their knowledge with Post, fueling his passion. He learned about terpenes and cannabinoids and the difference between sativa and indica strains.
“It was like a foreign language to me, but I started to pick up these keywords, and I would go home and do my own research,” Post says. “That’s when I started to really get a better understanding of the plant.”
Now Post works to share that knowledge as legal cannabis sales becomes a billion dollar industry.
“I want people to find the relief and this medicine, but I would be a better service to them if I could show them how to cultivate it, because that’d be something they will have for the rest of their lives,” Post says.
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