“This is not something people welcome a lot of blacks into. We’re the guy who’s selling it. That’s all we are, and that’s the way they look at us.”

Co-published by Fast Company

A slim hall leads into a dark room where one enters the soul of the Blaqstar Farms cannabis grow, an 85-light operation rooted in East Los Angeles. On the other side of this warehouse where the lighting is standard luminosity, a couple of cool brown cats in their forties trim a strain called Birthday Cake and fill bags with the fluffy, freshly coiffed green nuggets. But it’s in this dark room where Blaqstar begins. Its owner Bryant Mitchell, 40, shows the soul of his business, a clutch of genetics — prime cannabis plants for breeding.

“Dah-nale,” Mitchell says in his Texas drawl, “all these plants here come from those plants back there.” He points to some weed that’s ready to join the cool brown guys at the breakdown table. The plants, he says, “come from buddies, from respect, from people trying to see if I could grow their old stuff.”

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If the cannabis equity movement in America is to ever be more than just Green Rush theater —an inconsequential sideshow to the emerging multibillion-dollar legal marijuana industry — it’s going to need a lot of anomalies like Mitchell. Black people didn’t get our 40 acres and a mule after the Civil War, and we’ve yet to gain the trust and money to be brought into the cannabis industry at a foundational level. In a world where black celebrities endorse cannabis brands that people of their racial heritage don’t own, Mitchell is the rare black grower operating at the 85-light level and in the light of adult-use legal scrutiny. Necessity brought Mitchell from dispensary owner to grower after he hired someone who couldn’t repeat what he’d previously cultivated. In only a few years, Blaqstar has earned the endorsement of the popular rap act Migos and the admiration of cannabis equity supporters.

This grower is not blind to the turnabout he represents.

“This is not something people welcome a lot of blacks into,” says Mitchell. “We’re the guy who’s selling it. That’s all we are, and that’s the way they look at us.”

The enabling real estate, money and cannabis have not come together for the hundreds of aspiring legitimate cannabis entrepreneurs presently struggling to get in.

Who is this cash-rich black dude whose eyes shine with intelligence? He’s not a rapper or actor or a man who plays with a ball. Bryant Mitchell is a master marijuana grower. Cross the street from his warehouse for a cup of coffee — where his neighbors “know, but they don’t know” — and the joy that folks show from just seeing him is apparent. They won’t let him be, and it’s not just because of the pot.

Sit down with Mitchell over that coffee and see him let loose a single tear while running through the list of family and friends he’s lost to the war on drugs. That lone tear tells a story with dimensions the nation’s only beginning to comprehend.

Mitchell comes from sales, but in a first-class sense. The son of a cop, he’s taken operations and strategy as the basis of his training. After graduating from historically black Prairie View A&M University, just outside of Houston, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago. Mitchell flew around America pointing out to corporate executives whom to fire, telling his clients the time while using their own expensive wristwatches to do so.While he was in the Bay Area in his twenties and consulting for Chevron, Mitchell complained to a colleague that travel aggravated his sciatica, and the colleague introduced cannabis to his world. Not long after, Mitchell began buying and growing for himself, both in California and at his home in Houston. His oil industry consulting after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill brought the trove of money that allowed Mitchell to buy and invest in cannabis so heavily. In a sense, that Birthday Cake in East L.A. comes from hours billed to British Petroleum, a kind of bonus treat.

Women Abuv Ground CEO: “Most underground growers don’t want to come out. It took me years to find a lot of black growers.”

He bought a medical marijuana dispensary in the San Fernando Valley called Valley High. It was a smash hit, but Valley High was raided at the end of 2013. Mitchell says he lost $250,000.

But he had $400,000 banked, he says, part earned from consulting, part earned from his dabbling in the marijuana market. He’d put another $400,000 into building an indoor grow. But Mitchell’s cultivator was proving unable to repeat the dope work he had done for Valley High.

“Here’s my chance to do it,” he said. “I don’t know how to grow at this volume. As a consultant, one thing you learn is how to learn. I’ve got to learn fast as I can, and I can’t learn from my grower because he doesn’t know how to grow.”

Mitchell resigned from his day job and decided to go all-in on cultivating cannabis, big time. Then he headed to Sonoma County and Guerneville, California, 75 miles north of San Francisco.

Most Californians couldn’t find Guerneville on a map. Mitchell drove the 450 miles between Los Angeles and Guerneville twice a week. He started off watering outdoor plants on a partner’s 78-acre property. He also volunteered at Sonoma County wineries, learning, among other facets of horticulture, how distillation practices could be applied to making marijuana concentrates. In Sonoma County the newbie Mitchell unearthed the goods to become a master grower.

After Bryant did a second harvest, this MBA learned that he still needed to learn.

“I’d go out with the guys and would be like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna help,’” he says. “They’d say, ‘Come on in.’ No roadblocks. I’d be out for a week and would be one of the best trimmers. Never told ‘em I was growing.

“I wanted to see the plant from start to finish.”

Back at the East L.A. indoor grow, the first post-Guerneville harvest came in. The first large-scale weed came out larfy — immature and lacking in structural density.

“You ever cook eggs?” he says. “Easiest thing in the world, right? Ya throw ‘em in the pan, you get ‘em out. But cook eggs for 200 people, it’s a lot more complicated — even though it’s not that complicated. You’re not going to be consistent.”

He did a second harvest. The pot came out better. But then the thing that sets this MBA apart kicked in yet again. He learned that he still needed to learn.

“I’m doing these damn [harvests] every six months,” he says. “I gotta change that shit. Why does everybody do it that way? It’s a project. So why don’t I make every room a project —stagger it, and make sure I can deal with cash flow issues. It was out of necessity, but when I staggered it, guess what? My learning curve turned over so much quicker.”

It’s a characteristically African-American approach, turning necessity into productivity. Improvisational like basketball, if not as innovative as jazz.

“Bryant represents what we want to see in the culture, someone who’s compliant and doing business the right way,” said Bonita Money, CEO of Women Abuv Ground, a networking organization assisting people of color enter the cannabis industry. “Most underground growers don’t want to come out. It took me years to find a lot of black growers.”

Compliance has come because Mitchell’s money is cleaner than most. His techniques are organic, so his marijuana is also compliant. He says that living in the warehouse with his product nudged him toward clean growing; if spraying chemicals made him sick, the stuff could not in the end be good for customers, he surmised. Most black-market growers don’t know what he knows.

The legion of small-time pot farmers knows nothing of Guerneville tactics. Certainly, they don’t have multi-acre, outdoor Cali grow money, prompting this question: Until the state’s cannabis equity programs set aside opportunities for those with no legacy of having land, are we just doing theater?

“They are; I’m not,” Mitchell says. Cannabis equity programs “don’t know how to make sure social equity is delivered. Not defined, but delivered.”

The enabling real estate, money and cannabis have not come together for the hundreds of aspiring legitimate cannabis entrepreneurs presently struggling to get in. Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento have defined the strategy of a business initiative, but the means for realizing the goals aren’t yet in place. Help connecting investors and developers and building relationships with money sources is still missing in action.

So, too, are relationships with the weed veterans still deep in the black market.

“You treat adult-use marijuana like a business, then forget that there’s been a business here for 35 years,” Mitchell says, growing animated. The fact is that the underground pot market, in large part popularized by Californians of color, is far, far older than that.

“Today I’m gonna learn how to do this,” he continues. “And I’m going to share this. We need an ecosystem. That ecosystem doesn’t preclude white people participating. I want to include. But I want them to understand: You’re coming to us, ya dig?

“We made it because once they got our shit, they had to keep getting it,” Mitchell goes on. “Once you get into a motherfucker’s spot, and they’ve got to have your shit? They’ve got to have it. You turn from a want to a necessity. That’s what I had to position Blaqstar as — a necessity.”

Tomorrow: The Trimmigrant’s Tale

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