The harvest room at Max Harvest is thick with the pungent scent of cannabis, earthy, intense and unmistakable.

The buds of each plant are heavy with crystal-like resin, and their leaves are tinged a purple-brown hue. One deep breath in, and your lungs are filled with the dense, herbal scent of marijuana just days from harvest.

“After a harvest, you definitely can’t go out to eat,” said Jeff Lipsey, part-owner and office manager. “The smell sticks with you for hours.”

Max Harvest, a 100,000-square-foot facility located on The Island, is one of five licensed, legal cannabis growers in Lowndes County.

The company imported its first 15,000 cannabis plant propagations from a California breeder in September. By February, its team of 17 employees completed the first harvest. Monday will mark the company’s fourth. Still in its infancy, Max Harvest already supplies 82 of the 201 medical marijuana dispensaries across the state.

For Lipsey, it’s been an unexpected change of pace.

“I was peacefully retired until I came out here,” Lipsey said. “But once I saw how it all worked, I wanted to be involved.”

Antonio Fobbs, director of cultivation, was brought in from California to run the operation. He visited Columbus for the first time in October and moved full-time last month to lead the grow facility.

Fobbs has 25 years of cultivation experience, primarily from the West Coast. He’s overseen facilities in more mature cannabis markets but said growing in Mississippi brings its own challenges, like frozen pipes during winter.

“I wasn’t part of the build out here or the design,” Fobbs said. “And so there’s some things that we’re having to retrofit now because of freezing temperatures. As you can see, we deal with a shit ton of water, like a lot of water.”

Growing green

From a laptop, Fobbs controls an intricate $50,000 water valve to manipulate nutrient levels in massive water tanks. About half a dozen tanks ranging from 2,000 gallons to 10,000 gallons are used to store water, and each tank is hooked to a pump system that sends a specific nutrient mix to individual flower rooms.

“Each room is individually controlled, humidity, temperature, even light intensity,” Fobbs said. “Everything is controlled down to a tee.”

Each of the facility’s three flower rooms contains between 3,600 and 4,600 plants across 20 different strains. The plants are fed twice daily based on their growth stage.

“So like a small plant will get probably 500 milliliters a day, compared to a mature plant … will get about 1,250 milliliters a day,” Fobbs said.

Plants begin in a propagation or “clone” room before spending three weeks in vegetative rooms. In those rooms, the lights are on for 18 hours a day. Once transferred to flower rooms, they’re on a 12-hour light cycle for nine weeks. Each room is maintained at 75 degrees with 50% humidity. As harvest nears, the temperature is dropped to encourage resin production.

“The closer you get to harvest, the lower you drop the temperature,” Fobbs said. “That’s to create more crystals on the nug and more resin is what it is.”

Just before harvesting, plants are “flushed,” a process that involves running only water through the soil, which turns the plants’ leaves from vibrant green to purple-brown.

“… I’m running nothing but water through the plants to push out all the fertilizer and everything else,” Fobbs said of the plants in a room that were nearly ready for harvest “That way we’re harvesting the cleanest product we can.”

Harvest takes three days. Afterward, hundreds of pounds of plants hang to dry for 10 days before being hand-trimmed for up to two weeks by a team of 10 employees.

Throughout the process, every plant is tagged with a unique barcode and tightly tracked under Mississippi Department of Health regulations. Medicinal cannabis was legalized in Mississippi in 2022, though only licensed Mississippi cultivators can grow the plants.

“Everything is super regulated,” Lipsey said. “It’s not like people are taking things home. … I mean, not only is it instant termination, but you’ll be prosecuted.”

Once trimmed and packaged, products are listed on LeafLink, a cannabis distribution platform.

Budding market

Fobbs propagates plants from Max Harvest’s most popular strains to maintain a steady supply of high-demand products. At the same time, he continues to import new genetic breeds from California, not found anywhere else in Mississippi.

“Everything we grow, we want it to be different than anybody else,” Fobbs said. “You always want to keep a new rotation. … So that’s the goal for us here in the state, is to produce flowers that no other cultivation facility is producing.”

The price for one pound of Max South’s product ranges between $1,800 and $2,600. Lipsey said it isn’t unusual to receive four to five orders a day, each totaling several thousand dollars.

Fobbs said the company is only operating at about 25% of its potential.

“Since Mississippi is an emerging market, we don’t need to operate at full capacity,” Fobbs said. “The market’s not fully developed yet. It’s not a mature market, as they would say in finance, but it’s an emerging market. We’re trending in the right direction.”

“When everything goes forward, federal, legal, that’s when we get to play on that scale,” he added. “That’s what we’re geared for is a (federal) market where we could export across state lines and be ready to walk like that.”

Despite a somewhat saturated medical dispensary market, Lipsey said cultivators like Max Harvest are in a better position.

“There’s not enough business for all their dispensaries, and they’re all just trying to last the longest and be the last man standing, basically,” Lipsey said.

With 122 other cultivators in the state, Fobbs said he isn’t concerned about competitors.

“I don’t care however many cultivators there are,” Fobbs said. “We care about how many dispensaries. Those are our clients.”

Fobbs opted not to disclose how much revenue the company brings in each month. He said that while sales are “looking great,” he prefers to move “quietly.”

“We’re a humble company,” Fobbs said. “We’re not looking to be braggadocious or nothing like that. … The proof is always in the pudding, and cream always rises to the top, and that’s the name of the game.”