Behind The Bud: Show-Me Organics’ team of cannabis connoisseurs are your friends and neighbors reinventing the Missouri market

October 9, 2024

Joe Ellett,

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Photo by Zach Bauman

Most people remember their first time buying weed. Or, maybe not the first time, but that really sketchy time. Or perhaps a time when that one guy shorted that eighth. Whatever it may be, most average cannabis users would probably say that they’ve had a memorable experience when obtaining the substance.

It’s no secret that a lot of these ‘too close for comfort’ cannabis deals have gone out the window. While black market dealers still exist in the community, many have been etched out as recreational weed was legalized.

Now, walk into a dispensary, provide information, chop it up with a budtender, and you’re out the door. Simple, quick, and overall convenient, although at times can be pricey. It’s great, and it’s a completely different world we live in compared to 20 years ago.

While you may not consider it when purchasing your canister of gummies or eighth of flower, there is a very methodical and thorough process that brings these wonderful buds to dispensary counters. Behind the process are human hands and faces. Day in and day out, they are planting, nourishing, maintaining, cutting, trimming, extracting, manufacturing, and so much more.

Similar to how we like to know who farms our food, it is important to understand and be familiar with the people growing our weed. After all, this is a substance—which was recreationally illegal in the state just a couple of years ago—that your human body is ingesting. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a face behind the flower?

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Meet Your Local Pot Growers

Show-Me Organics is a licensed Missouri cultivation facility with three brands—Vivid, Buoyant Bob, and Missouri’s Own Edibles—under their umbrella, along with their dispensary line, Blue Sage Cannabis Deli. If you have become familiar with the Missouri cannabis market since recreational legality passed, surely you have come across one of these brands that Show-Me Organics is producing.

Vivid—the most popular brand under Show-Me Organics—was recognized as a top brand in the state by Greenway Best of the Industry 2024, receiving multiple accolades as Best Flower Cultivator and Best Pre-Rolls for its Florida Kush. Vivid also won Best Tincture for its Goodnight Grape Tincture 1:1. On top of Vivid’s honors, Missouri’s Own Edibles won Best Edible Snacks for its Red Hot Riplets. The decorations speak for themselves, but those with boots on the ground, growing the green, commonly go unnoticed.

With a staff of hundreds of highly trained and knowledgeable professionals from all walks of life, Show-Me Organics is churning out products night and day. The Pitch had the opportunity to take an extensive tour of the company’s cultivation facility, taking a glimpse at how your neighbors make a living growing some of Missouri’s most acclaimed weed.

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In the Weeds

Like any dispensary, there is a line of security before stepping behind the scenes of the production. After passing through multiple sets of heavy-duty doors, suiting up in a biohazard-style suit, boots, and cap, and stepping through numerous ‘baths’ of a distilled isopropyl solution, just then are employees and visitors allowed into different sectors of the building.

Throughout the entirety of the building, the isopropyl baths are found on the floor in the hallways of their rooms containing plants, which individuals are encouraged/required to step through at each passing. In addition, there are spray bottles filled with the solution outside of each room that must be sprayed on the shoes before stepping foot in the respected space.

“Most people who tour our facility are very surprised to see the level of biosecurity that we practice. In our opinion, the medicine cannot be too clean,” Director of Cultivation Josh Brown says.

“I’ve seen hospitals that are dirtier than this facility,” Director of Post-Harvest Robert Orr says. “I have seen some of the worst stuff in cannabis operations or facilities, not here. This is one of the cleanest ships I’ve ever been on, and I personally think that’s super important.”

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This isn’t your average black market dealer’s basement grow; These rigorous health and safety steps ensure that a quality product is provided to Missouri consumers. One of the ways that this process helps the team at Show-Me Organics control their grows is by eliminating any potential pesticides or other substances from entering the building from other cultivation facilities or outside entities.

“I feel like we do have one of the cleanest facilities not only in Kansas City, but in the entire state,” Mother Room Supervisor Maddie VanDien says.

When it comes to the actual work, the staff is just as meticulous in their scheduling and due diligence in maintaining and nourishing each plant. Large whiteboards used as data sheets with dates, number of plants, strains, and other critical information are posted outside of each room, allowing clear communication between the staff of where each area of plants are in their respective life span.

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“Keeping a tight schedule is very important,” Lab Manager Aaron Berger says. “Everything produced has a shelf life, and you want to ensure the freshest, highest quality product is being put out to the consumers. The testing of the products is also a vital part of the equation and helps maintain safe products for consumers.”

There are eight different flower rooms in the facility, each space within the facility holding hundreds to a thousand plants at different stages within their lifespan. The “mother” room is where the plant’s life begins, whether as a clone from a previous cannabis strain or as a newly found lineage that will serve as a basis for future grows. Nine months later, the plant’s benefits are in your body.

“The aim of the game here is to maximize the amount of cuttings that we can get through here, and that’s through special things called topping from manifolding. Essentially, we’re going to come in, remove this top, and then it’s going to shoot a little bit of root growth hormone down, it’s going to creep these plants out, and they’re going to be like, ‘Awh I’m gonna die,’ so they just keep growing up,” VanDien says.

Show-Me Organics’ mother room is extremely important to their operation, populating all of the veg and flower rooms throughout the facility. They are a clone to kill grow, and all of the nourishment and safety precautions that they pump into their plants to protect them from fungi, gnats, or other harmful entities come from natural ingredients such as beneficial bacteria, beneficial insects, fungi, nematodes, and other naturally growing ingredients that act as a safety shield from potential threats to the plant.

The exercise of producing a quality plant is long lasting, and for the Show-Me Organics’ team, everlasting, constantly replacing old with the new as plants progress down the line.

“A clone comes in, eight weeks later, from that plant, we’ll get about 20 really high cuttings that are exactly the same. So then, those cuttings will go into crop, those will go into veg for flower, and then, a small percentage will come back to be the next generation,” Director of Science Montana Dickerson says.

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Moving from each section where plants are held, the team has carefully sought out the different nutrients and care that must be provided at each point of specific groups of plants’ lifetime, with control variables allowing them to understand if their process is being executed to their standards.

“I thankfully had the privilege of actually doing the production planning. So it’s really nice being hands-on in the mother room, knowing what’s going on here, and then getting to relay that into a nice little Google Doc. If there wasn’t a production plan, this place would fall apart very quickly,” VanDien says.

While it may seem basic, this type of transparency and thoroughness is extremely important, considering this team is producing consumables for hundreds of thousands of Missourians, along with out-of-state customers.

“I love the fact that the hard work that myself and my team put forth each day directly translates into improving people’s quality of life,” Brown says. “Whether we are helping someone with chronic pain, insomnia, or just putting a smile on their face, it is very satisfying to know that we are making a positive impact on so many people.”

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To get into the weeds (no pun intended) of how strenuous and thorough the growth of each singular bud is would be almost like learning a new language. Since the plants are continuously evolving, each day is different for the staff as far as what each stage of plants needs that specific day. The overall time spent maintaining the development is rigorous, to say the least, but mandatory for a successful cultivation business within the state.

As the tour progressed, the plants did as well. It is clear when hopping from space to space that the team’s work is paying off, as buds begin to bloom and the nasal ingestion becomes more potent.

Moving down the line, once the plants have grown to their full potential, the team takes the product to the next specific space, maintaining certain temperature and humidity, where the plant will await further procedures, ending its life and preparing it to go to consumers.

“After the product is harvested, in the flower rooms, anywhere that the flower is going to be, whether that’s this hallway, the dry room, the cure room, where it’s getting trimmed, where it’s packed, the vault, everything is 65 degrees Fahrenheit, 55 to 60 percent humidity,” Dickerson says.

“Spring and summer, especially here in Missouri, we know we’re going to see high humidities, so we’ll start front loading our rooms, taking out as much humidity as we can before we start to see this time of year as opposed to winter time,” Orr says.

Once the plant is off its roots and running, the Show-Me Organics’ team already has the final product visioned and ready to roll. Whether they will be using the cultivar for jars of eighths, pre-rolls, larger quantities of shake, gummy edibles, or certain concentrates, is all something that they had in mind when they began and is now ready to see the light of day.

“Most people probably are not aware of how many products we can make from the flower. There is constantly new innovation being introduced to the industry, so it takes the passion of the people to keep up and implement these developments,” Berger says.

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The Hands in Herbs

It’s obvious that there are many moving parts for this cultivation team to oversee, and simply just impossible to put into words the amount of procedures and precautions taken in their daily work.

Similar to pharmacists, doctors, and others in the healthcare field, these tasks are overwhelmingly information-heavy to the average person, but the scrupulousness is easily recognizable.

“At the end of the day, this is a job. Just like everything else, we are expected to act professional,” Orr says. “But you’re also in a culture, in an environment where you don’t have to keep hush, hush about it, because you know your neighbor smokes weed, your boss smokes weed, we’re all here to do the same thing.”

Similar to some cannabis users, the personnel at Show-Me Organics have a deep-rooted passion that comes from personal experience with the plant.

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“I became very passionate about the plant in my early 20s,” Brown says. “Due to a neck injury sustained from a car accident, my mother suffered from severe migraines throughout my entire childhood. Her headaches were so debilitating that she would spend entire days confined to her bed. She began using cannabis as an alternative to opioids, and it helped her immensely.

“Around the same time, I saw Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s coverage of Charlotte Figi, a young girl who suffered from terrible seizures that were practically cured using CBD. Something about seeing this documentary on CNN, a legitimate national news network, told me that this was a real medicine and deserved to be taken seriously,” Brown says.

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As many are aware, there has been a long-lasting stigma surrounding cannabis users, even within our legal state today. “They’re too lazy” or “That plant is making them stupid” are negative notions that are commonly thrown out from closed-minded individuals. Through personal experience and a gained passion for the plant’s medicinal benefits, the team is a part of the ever-growing community trying to combat these stereotypical characterizations.

“It really just opened me to the possibility of like, ‘Dang, this really isn’t what it seemed or how it was presented to me,’” Dickerson says about his introduction to consuming cannabis.

Employees within the sector are optimistic that misconceptions will eventually vanish as the industry and awareness grows within the state and country as a whole.

“I have been passionate for the last 25 years when it comes to cannabis, so when the state passed the medical program, I jumped at the opportunity to be a part,” Berger says. “The passion comes from my experience with the plant. I have always prioritized my personal experience with the plant versus the negative press that used to be attached to it.

“One of my favorite memories from my time in the industry was the day we started filling rooms with plants and not having a fear or a need to keep my head on a swivel. It was at that moment that it became real,” Berger says.

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Understanding that these negative connotations still exist, even within our legal state, the staff believes that knowing who is growing your pot not only ensures you a safe and quality product, but also helps put an end to the lingering stigma surrounding cannabis users and industry workers.

“I absolutely think the people and faces should be a part of the product,” Berger says. “I tend to invest in products that I can feel a connection to. It’s like when you become a fan of a band or sport team—there’s more to the story than the final product that’s being sold. You might find similarities or connections to the people producing that share a similar story to your own, and thereby want to support those people’s journey. The character of the individuals determines the outcome.”

“I believe it is always good to know where you are sourcing a product, especially if it is a product you intend to consume into your body,” Brown says. “Knowing the people or entity behind a product can help you make a more informed decision on whether or not that product is really correct for you. At SMO, we pride ourselves on being ‘hospital grade clean,’ and people know when they buy our products that they are getting something that is clean and safe.”

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Growth in the Green

Montana Dickerson built the company with his brother Boston Dickerson, who is the CEO of Show-Me Organics.

“I’m really hyper-focused on day-to-day operations and technical things of how we can improve, whether it’s our process for stickering pre-rolls, growing plants, or whatever it might be,” Dickerson says. “He is a little bit more involved in sales, marketing, and making new deals. Our skill sets work really well together.”

The yield that Show-Me Organics consistently produces has gained solid traction within the state, and hopes to continue to maintain their standard of high-quality pot. But none of that comes without a committed team.

“I sleep great at night because I know that we have a team of people here that makes the product what it is, all credit to them,” Dickerson says.

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The team at Show-Me Organics is obviously incredibly dedicated to repetition, cleanliness, and producing top-notch marijuana to the market, and thinks that it is important for consumers to be aware of the many cultivation facilities, which leads them to making a more knowledgeable decision at the counter.

“This is something—in the rawest form—you’re lighting it on fire, and you’re inhaling the smoke that’s coming off the top of it,” Orr says. “I’ve smoked bad weed, smoked moldy weed, I’ve smoked gross weed, and I’ve seen some situations. I want to have a clean product. I want to be proud of what we do here.”

Without these dedicated teams, the Missouri cannabis market would be obsolete. Next time you purchase some of Vivid’s Florida Kush, some Missouri’s Own Edibles’ Red Hot Riplets, or a Buoyant Bob’s Blue Dream Vape Cartridge, keep in mind that these are the working arms, legs, and brains behind your fix.

It’s no secret that the Show-Me Organics team is passionate about their careful craft of cannabis. It’s their duty to supply a safe and quality substance, and consumers’ duty to burn it to the ground.

All Photos by Zach Bauman: