In its January/February 2020 issue, High Times published “Growing for Good at Yasha Farms,” written by Danny Danko. The finished farm was the obvious story: long light-deprivation houses, thousands of vigorous cannabis plants, a carefully managed harvest, and flower grown with a fraction of the outside inputs many commercial operations depended on. But the most important part of the story began before a single cannabis plant went into the field.
The ground we started with was compacted sandy clay with very little biological activity. It could hold a farm, but it was not yet the living system we wanted. Rather than force a crop into an unfinished foundation, we made a decision that frustrated people who wanted immediate production: we did not plant cannabis during the first season. We used that year to build the soil.
From medicine to a regenerative farm
Yasha Farms grew out of years of cultivation, medical cannabis work, and a growing discomfort with the idea that cannabis should be produced by pushing soluble inputs into biologically empty ground. In Maine, short wet summers and heavy humidity made dependable outdoor production difficult. Oregon offered a longer season and an established agricultural landscape, and Sauvie Island, near Portland, offered open ground, access to water, and room to build.
The farm was named for my late father. The goal was not merely to grow outdoors. It was to grow in native soil, under sunlight, with a system that could improve rather than deplete the land. Korean Natural Farming, JADAM, regenerative agriculture, and the soil-food-web work of Dr. Elaine Ingham all informed the direction. The practical question was always the same: what does this field need in order to function as a living ecosystem?
1. Test the soil before prescribing a solution
The first step was soil testing. We needed to know what we were actually dealing with before choosing amendments or equipment. The tests confirmed the physical problem—dense sandy clay—and the biological problem: the ground lacked the diversity and activity required for reliable nutrient cycling.
This mattered because regenerative farming cannot be built from labels. A product can say “organic,” a field can look green, and a compost pile can smell earthy without any of them containing the biology the crop needs. Testing established a baseline. Later, microscopy and plant-tissue testing would let us check whether the system was moving in the right direction instead of relying on appearance and hope.
2. Open the compacted ground without repeatedly turning it
Before biology could expand, the ground needed oxygen and pore space. We opened it manually with a heavy broadfork. The tool lifts and fractures compacted soil while leaving its layers more intact than aggressive repeated tillage. It was slow, physical work. The broadfork weighed roughly forty pounds, and gloves did not prevent the blisters.
The reason was structural as much as philosophical. Roots, fungi, aerobic bacteria, protozoa, and beneficial nematodes all need air and water pathways. Compaction restricts both. Opening the soil gave roots and organisms somewhere to go; moving toward no-till afterward helped preserve the channels and fungal networks that began to form.
3. Add carbon and habitat with woody compost
The crew spread approximately 250 cubic yards of woody compost across the field. This was not simply an attempt to add fertilizer. The material increased organic matter, improved the physical condition of the clay, held moisture, created habitat, and supplied complex carbon that could support fungal growth.
That distinction is central to living soil. The objective is not to replace one bottle with another. It is to create the conditions in which roots, decomposers, grazers, minerals, oxygen, water, and organic matter can interact. Compost is useful because it can contribute food, structure, moisture management, and organisms at the same time—but only when it is mature, aerobic, and biologically useful.
4. Collect and expand locally adapted microorganisms
We then went looking for indigenous microorganisms in a healthy local environment. Beneath forest litter we found the white strands of fungal hyphae we wanted to encourage in the field. An untreated wooden box filled with cooked rice was covered with a breathable paper layer and buried beneath leaf litter. The rice acted as a collection substrate for organisms already adapted to the local climate.
When the box was recovered, the rice had become a white mat of mycelium. We stabilized that collection with an equal weight of brown sugar, then expanded it into roughly 250 pounds of barley hulls. The inoculated material was allowed to colonize and then cool. It was mixed with field soil at approximately equal volume and distributed across the ground.
Each step served a purpose: the rice collected organisms, the sugar stabilized the culture, the barley hulls provided a larger carbon-rich carrier, and the native soil helped acclimate and distribute the biology into the field. The point was not to claim that one inoculation could create a complete ecosystem. It was to introduce locally adapted decomposers and then give them habitat, food, moisture, and living roots so they could persist.
5. Keep the soil covered and keep living roots in it
We established cover crops rather than leaving bare ground exposed. Living roots feed the rhizosphere through exudates—carbon-rich compounds released by plants that support microbial communities around the root. Above ground, cover crops soften rain impact, moderate soil temperature, suppress erosion, and continuously add organic matter. Below ground, their roots open channels, hold aggregates together, and keep biological exchange active between cash crops.
Mulch and straw protected the surface and provided additional carbon. Mycelium-inoculated straw was also used to help extend fungal habitat. Covering the field was not cosmetic. Bare soil is an unfinished system: it heats, crusts, loses water, and offers fewer resources to the organisms we were trying to establish.
6. Use vermicompost and compost extract to scale biology across acres
Finding enough fungal biomass for a field-scale project was difficult. African night-crawler vermicompost provided a dense biological starting material. The crew loaded worm compost into paint-strainer bags, submerged the bags in 50-gallon drums of water, and kneaded them by hand for about ten minutes until the water darkened with extracted material.
That process was repeated until approximately 1,000 pounds of worm compost had been worked through the system. The extract was sprayed across the cover crop and soil in the fall. The purpose was coverage: solid compost is valuable, but a carefully made extract allows organisms and soluble compounds to be distributed over a much larger area and into the soil surface without importing an impossible volume of material.
Compost extract was never treated as a magic potion. If the field remained compacted, bare, waterlogged, starved of carbon, or repeatedly disturbed, introduced organisms would not solve the underlying problem. The extract worked as one part of the sequence because the habitat had already been opened, fed, protected, and planted.
7. Put the soil under a microscope
Dr. Elaine Ingham’s work gave us a way to think about the field as a food web rather than a bag of nutrients. She came to the farm and taught me microscopy: how to prepare samples, identify major groups of organisms, and use what was visible to guide the next decision. She later connected me with her student Nick Tomasini, who continued working with us on the farm.
The framework was practical. Bacteria and fungi decompose materials and immobilize nutrients in their bodies. Protozoa and beneficial nematodes graze on those organisms and release part of that nutrition in plant-available forms. Mycorrhizal and other beneficial fungi extend the effective reach of roots, contribute to aggregation, and participate in exchanges around the rhizosphere. The ratios and populations matter because different biological communities perform different work.
Microscopy helped us ask better questions. Was the compost actually aerobic and diverse? Was the field still overwhelmingly bacterial? Were fungal strands present and intact? Were protozoa and beneficial nematodes participating in nutrient cycling? Instead of adding more product whenever a plant looked imperfect, we could examine the system, compare it with plant and soil tests, and make a targeted correction.
Within roughly a year, a soil probe could pass through about fifteen inches of living soil where the ground had once resisted us. Over the following seasons, the combination of compost, cover crops, roots, biology, and reduced disturbance developed more than two feet of productive topsoil in places. That result did not come from skipping steps. It came from stacking them in the right order.
Building the cultivation system around the field
Once the soil foundation was ready, the infrastructure had to support it rather than work against it. Light-deprivation hoop houses allowed the crop to use sunlight while giving us control over flowering. Opaque black-and-white coverings reflected heat on the outside and created darkness inside. Timed opening and closing produced a dependable twelve-hour dark period during the long Oregon summer days.
Blackout without environmental control is dangerous, so ventilation was designed as part of the light-deprivation system. Fans started before the covering finished closing, establishing airflow before heat and humidity could build. Lightproof intake paths allowed air exchange without interrupting the dark period. Roll-up sides restored natural ventilation when the covering opened. Dehumidifiers were generally reserved for the final weeks of flowering, when dense flowers and cool nights created the greatest risk of Botrytis.
Water required the same systems thinking. The farm drew from an old agricultural canal that carried enough debris to clog drip irrigation. An automated Amiad filter handled the main load and flushed itself when the pressure differential showed that cleaning was needed. A secondary filter protected the drip tape. The reason was not technological novelty; it was to prevent thousands of plants from depending on a system that demanded constant emergency cleaning.
Designing the work before planting 6,500 clones
The field and greenhouses were only part of the build. Labor flow mattered too. Before approximately 6,500 clones entered the greenhouse beds, we designed a planting sequence. A plywood template marked four holes at the correct spacing. One crew positioned the template and burned openings through the plastic ground cover. A second crew followed with drills fitted with three-inch augers; tape around each auger marked the correct depth for the four-inch pots. Carts of clones followed immediately behind them, and the planting crew set each plant as soon as the hole was ready.
The system reduced measuring, carrying, waiting, and variation. We used the same principle elsewhere. Stationary mixing tanks and permanent hose runs allowed several spraying crews to reach six greenhouses from one location, reducing spraying time by more than twenty percent. Tools had assigned homes, workers carried the basics with them, and bicycles shortened long trips between houses. None of those improvements made the plants grow by themselves. They removed wasted motion so people had more time to observe and care for the crop.
Harvest was designed backward from drying capacity
Yasha Farms used insulated 40-by-8-by-8-foot shipping containers as field-side drying rooms. Commercial dehumidification, cooling, and fans maintained the environment, while long trellis walls kept branches organized and allowed air to move across the room without blasting directly into the flower. Planting and harvest dates were staggered so the field did not overwhelm the known drying capacity.
This completed the same logic that began with the broadfork. Soil preparation, greenhouse design, irrigation, labor, harvest, and drying were not independent projects. Each step had to prepare the conditions required by the next one.
What the High Times story captured
Danny Danko’s High Times feature was titled “Growing for Good at Yasha Farms.” It recognized the visible result: a family farm using regenerative techniques and sustainable production practices to grow clean, potent cannabis while improving the soil and lowering costs. What mattered just as much was the process underneath that result.
We tested before amending. We opened the ground before inoculating it. We added carbon before expecting fungi to thrive. We kept roots in the soil. We scaled biology with compost and extract. We used microscopy to verify what we could not see with the naked eye. We waited a season when planting immediately would have produced less value. Then we built the greenhouse, water, labor, and drying systems around the biological foundation instead of treating the field as an inert platform.
Those lessons became part of The Cannabis Farmer’s Handbook. Regenerative cultivation is not one recipe and it is not a promise that biology eliminates management. It is a discipline of observing the whole system, understanding why each step is being taken, and improving the conditions that allow plants, people, and soil life to do their work.
Further reading: “Growing for Good at Yasha Farms,” High Times; Yasha Farms press archive; selected publications by Dr. Elaine Ingham; and the USDA NRCS Soil Biology Primer.
Leave a Reply