00:00My name is James Leavesley and I work for Dalgety, it's a UK cannabis cultivator.
00:04So when the law changed back in 2018, we were looking at growing cannabis for a variety of different reasons.
00:11Not necessarily medicinal cannabis, but just looking at the plant in general and what it can do,
00:16and the fact it was the first time you could cultivate it in the UK.
00:19And the more research that we did, we looked across markets throughout the world,
00:24in Canada and Israel and other places that were leading the research,
00:28we actually found the incredible properties that the medical cannabis flower holds.
00:32Dalgety were founded five years ago and it's taken us four and a half years
00:37to actually get to a point that we're fully licensed by the medical regulator and the Home Office
00:44to cultivate medical cannabis in the UK.
00:46And we're the only one with a license that can have an API product as the dried flower
00:51available for prescription in the UK.
00:54Products that are available tend to be of very low quality because it costs so much just to be able to import it.
01:01So that means that when patients are prescribed medical cannabis
01:04and they come up for their repeat prescriptions, often it's out of stock or not available
01:09or even if it has to be imported, it can take 12 to even 20 weeks just to be able to get it into the UK.
01:16We finished the build here two and a half years ago.
01:18Each one of the rooms has been temperature mapped.
01:21And just depending on which stage that the product is in, we're in a flower room here at the moment.
01:27So we've got the lights above me. These are energy efficient LED lights.
01:32And there's no greater difference anywhere in the room greater than 5%.
01:35And that's really important to maintain consistency throughout the canopy.
01:40We can measure the humidity here to within one degree and the temperature to within 0.5 degrees C.
01:47And we can actually put seasons into each of the rooms to be able to get the best performance out of the plant.
01:53The facility that we've got here, we can't obviously give away any of the locational details,
01:58but it's incredibly high security.
02:01We've got ex-military personnel here 24-7, a series of access control points
02:06and over 150 CCTV cameras monitoring every corner here,
02:11which is incredibly important for security and the home office requirements to grow a product like this in the UK.
02:19There are actually over 1,300 different types of alarms that can go off in a facility like this.
02:25And that can be you leave the door open for longer than seven seconds,
02:28or if the humidity drops slightly out of spec,
02:32then the computer automatically picks up and corrects itself.
02:36But we have an alarm that notifies any of the growers that they might need to respond or monitor.
02:41And that's really important to be able to get a consistent product,
02:45not only throughout one batch, but batch on batch.
02:48So when a medical cannabis patient has a Dalgety product in the next few weeks,
02:52that that will be consistent in 12 months time, 24 months time and further into the future.
02:58And the benefit of having all of the licenses in-house is it means that as soon as we finish processing
03:03and manufacturing the medicine in its final form, we can then send it straight to our distributor.
03:08And when it's finished our processing and has all the quality tests within a month's time,
03:13it can be within a patient's hands.
03:15This is vastly different to all of the products being imported at the moment.
03:18They can often take 12 weeks just to get an import permit from the MHRA.
03:22And then to go through all the various customs and clearances can often take another 12 weeks on top of that.
03:27We, being located in the UK, can cut out all of that supply chain complexity and issues
03:33and we can get it straight to the patient that has a prescription in under a month's time.
03:38I'm Brady Green and I'm the head grower for Dalgety Medical Cannabis.
03:42I started in the medical cannabis industry in Canada, my home country, about 2014.
03:49And I've been in the cannabis space ever since.
03:52So I oversee the grow team here.
03:54Our day-to-day varies quite a lot depending on different stages of growth and what needs to be done.
04:01Our crop cycle runs about 5 months in total.
04:05So it takes about 2 weeks in the propagation stage for rooting, about 2 weeks in veg,
04:11and then flowering takes about 7 to 12 weeks depending on variety.
04:16From there it takes another 2 weeks to dry and 2 weeks to cure.
04:20A little bit of time to trim.
04:22And then once it's packaged, we can get our product to patients within a matter of weeks.
04:28At my previous facility in Canada, I operated a 12-acre greenhouse or glasshouse.
04:35We had about 450 employees just at the glasshouse.
04:39We produced about 50,000 kilos a year.
04:42Yields are obviously very important for commercial viability.
04:46But for us, we don't cut any corners in terms of quality of production.
04:52If we're growing for quality, we can get good yields.
04:55But if you're growing for big yields, you don't necessarily get good quality.
04:59Something we are really trying to deliver to the patients is really top-shelf flower products.
05:06A lot of people are surprised by that, that it's even possible or even legal.
05:11I think that's part of it. It's important to discuss it and break the stigma of this plant a little bit.
05:18It's the opposite of evil and dangerous, and hopefully it can provide a lot of assistance for people.
Comments