 I've noticed in the last three or four or five years that some of my prosperous clients, people with a billion dollar accounts, good clients, the kinds of people who are in this room right now, use marijuana. They didn't use to talk about it, but they do. They use it, I'd say kind of as a sleep aid. Sometimes as a pain deal, sort of instead of Advil or instead of a sleeping pill. They honestly, they seem to handle it pretty well. Maybe some people don't. The old notion I had in 1967 was sort of like the old notion I had about the melon business in 1967. In 1967, marijuana was about stoners. It was about people who were more or less dropping out of college. People who weren't doing their college work. My observation in the last couple, three, four, five years is that marijuana has repositioned itself. It's now sort of a miller time among people who are actually handling the lives pretty well. And so I guess my observation as a sort of farmer is that marijuana is a farm crop. Just like grape juice. And it's a farm crop with profit potential and with that, I'm now going to introduce Marcus. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. I'm also one of those who's really affected by smoke and the obligate is really bad. Don't let that stop you from coming out. We have, thanks to Buzz, great filters in our tasting room, but if I cough a lot, that's the reason. And I am wearing my mask, but it's difficult. So this is a good example of what happens when you step up in a group and get on a little bit of a rant is you tend to volunteer yourself for something like this. It happened to me at the Oregon Community Foundation with Roger and Bill Thorndike and of course Lynn and a few other people, I don't know six months ago or so when they said, well, tell us about agriculture and applicant, I said, okay, well. And at the end of my little passionate speech, Bill said, well, that's a road reprogram. And I was like, I don't know. And then of course somebody came up from Klamath who was a road tarry and said, oh, you got to talk to our club about it. And then somebody from Ashland said, oh, it definitely got to talk to our club. And I'm like, okay, well, if I'm going to do this, my club comes first. And Bill was supposedly, going to do me some favors, which was, okay, we'll have it at the end of August when no one ever comes. So as a trial run, you probably won't bomb too bad. And then he said, of course, well, who do you want to introduce me? I said, well, the obvious choice is either Jerry or Peter, Jerry's done it probably a dozen times, but he'll probably get a bit emotional, which means I'll get a bit emotional. And I don't want to sit up here with a big lump in my throat. So then it deferred to Peter. And of course the benefit of Peter is that I only have about four minutes to talk. So he was not quite to deformed today. So I may have a little bit more to say than I would be otherwise. So normally I stand up here and talk about wine, other than, you know, when I had my little foray into politics and school bonds and things like that. But, you know, through the 40, well, 30 years running the winery, 40 some years of the winery being there. You know, I talk about how when my parents came in 72 and planned the first commercial vineyard and started the first commercial winery since prohibition in Jackson County in 1976. It just sort of wrote by now. No, it was 12 years till 1988 that another winery came into Jackson County and we forget about that. Now we drive around even the people who've been here for a really long time and when we see something new going in, it's like, well, it's a new vineyard, new winery, we don't even question it. In fact, we say, well, that's taken a long time to plant grapes up there. I wonder why they didn't do it sooner. There are a huge amount of vineyards and winery not just in Southern Oregon and Oregon and what became, you know, what was really an anomaly. You know, people drove down our driveway and said, you know, what are you doing? You must be insane to grow grapes here. And, you know, of course, my dad would always ask, you know, why and the question was because no one's done it before. Now we don't think twice about it. The grapes in Southern Oregon, you know, went from an anomaly to a novelty. Now it's a million dollar industry. There's over 700 wineries in Oregon. It's a billion dollar industry. There's over 75 wineries in Southern Oregon and that's last year's number. So we know that that's probably increased, probably 10% or so. The industry as a whole is doing really well. The industry individually, generally not. It takes a lot of money to start the business. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of outside capital and oftentimes that outside capital keeps getting pumped into the business for a lot longer than most businesses would be considered technically solvent. So, you know, really there's a lot of probably insolvent wineries that are existing because they have some deep pockets. So not exactly, you know, what you would call a true business model. But it is what we would all pretty much say we wanna see. It's taking relatively less profitable or less productive lands. It's turning them into not simply a commodity but a value-added branded agricultural product that by the way has a lot of societal problems and we all know that. I mean, this is my business. I know the impacts of what my product contains and how it affects society. Even though, of course, we can all sort of be up here with the wines and say, well, geez, I mean, I have a $20 wine. I mean, you know, most people who abuse alcohol don't do it with fine wine. Well, that's not really true. They do it with alcohol and it comes in many different forms. It does have impacts. I also happen, I think most of us would agree it has societal benefits as well. Now, coming into the wine industry in the Applegate Valley or Southern Oregon in the early 70s, brand new industry, well, of course, we got threats coming from, you know, California and the East Coast into the marijuana industry, the cannabis industry. My parents, like probably most everybody's parents here, were not pro-cannabis. And the Applegate did not have, at the time, very many people, certainly very many laborers. And you need a certain amount of laborers to be, you know, to put in a business. And my dad had a construction company. Had a hard time finding people there as well. So most of the people that put in our vineyards and worked our vineyards were what we would all call hippies. There were not a lot of migrants. There was not an established Hispanic population. I grew up with hippies and who were they? I mean, a lot of them lived way up in the Applegate and I thought I lived far out in Rouge. Communes got out of it, got out recently of the Bill and Namor. You know, we now know what they were suffering from back then, we didn't. And they wanted to drop out, literally. And they would go up to their place, way up, you know, even into California, the places that are burning down right now and come down every once in a while to make some actual cash to pay for the things they couldn't grow or do themselves. So I grew up around this culture. I grew up with my mom, you know, bringing in my dad's potential employees and asking Point Blank, do you smoke marijuana? And of course, my siblings, we would all kind of go, oh my God, Mom, I can't believe you said that. And, you know, the answer usually was yes, but I won't smoke it at work, you know, but it is an important part of my life. It was something that, you know, I looked pretty much the same and I was pretty straight-laced back there. So I was not pro-Marijuana because if you smoked a lot of marijuana, you lived in a cabin without running water and you had super long hair and you went barefoot most of the year, you know, and you were not a true, you know, American, I guess. So the interaction of cannabis and wine, pretty much for my whole life has been really interesting because if you think about when we started in 1972, prohibition was over in 1933. So the time frame from 1933 to 1972 is actually shorter and it is from now till 1972. So it wasn't that long after prohibition, relatively speaking, that we started a winery in the alcohol business and winery started back again. So we didn't know whether prohibition would come back. This transitional period that we're finding after the legalization of cannabis in Oregon and in other states is very, very similar. Of course, in prohibition, it was legal federally, but then each state decided that they would have their own rules. So you still had this gray area, which we still deal with today with wine. There are certain states that we still cannot ship the bottle of wine to. I mean, we live in the United States of America, which primarily went from 13 colonies to 13 states so that we could drop all of our interstate barriers to commerce. And yet you can mail pharmaceuticals to all 50 states. You can get pharmaceuticals from Canada. I can't mail wine to Canada. They can't mail wine to me. And I can't mail wine to people who visit our winery if they live in certain states. And yet the pharmaceutical company can. So rules are often or laws are often developed for other reasons than maybe what we would say common sense. Monopolies, that's really the big one when it comes to shipping wine is there's distributors in those areas. If they do not have an established wine industry, then distributors rule the system. So what we're seeing now is we're seeing a transitional period that's very similar to the years right after grow vision. You have a lot of money in it. You have a lot of people who are entrenched in their particular ways. You have a product that is high value that is branded, potentially branded. And I really want to stand up there last year and talk about this, because I could say I have no vested interests in the cannabis industry. Now I can't, now I do. When I talk about the word cannabis, cannabis is the entire family of basically the cannabis plant. On the one side that people are most familiar with is the part that contains THC, the active ingredient, that's the psychoactive ingredient, marijuana. The other side is the CBD side, which is the side that legally cannot have any THC. So we are currently growing about 10 acres of what, for lack of a better word, is called industrial hemp, even though for all practical purposes it looks exactly like a cannabis or a marijuana plant, because it basically is, but it has been bred, whereas the THC has been removed to virtually zero. There's actually substantially more cannabis grown for CBD oil than there is marijuana plants, both in Southern Oregon and in Oregon. So it is a huge industry. It's been in the paper multiple times the last year or so. That is part of the whole cannabis industry because the DEA just simply has not sort of caught up with the times and has identified hemp or non-THC cannabis as being any different than cannabis containing THC. It's still a schedule one drug. Yes, there's sort of this wink, wink, nod, nod. We just won't really go after it. We'll allow states, there's about 15 states due to the 2014 Agriculture Farm Bill, thanks to believe it or not Mitch McConnell, because Kentucky is pretty much the leader in industrial hemp. So he snuck in a little rider that allowed certain states, if they chose to go by the rules, to allow people to grow hemp and license it through their Department of Agriculture as long as it was below 0.3% THC, which is an arbitrary number that the EU came up with years ago. But it's at least there. So you have to get a license. You have to be tested within 28 days of harvest, which not only did we get tested, I just found out actually on the drive today that our gigantically expensive 10 acres of cannabis is past the test. So we're below the 0.3% THC. So that was good news regardless of what happens here today. So what this does is we're growing essentially the same type of plant, doesn't have THC. It will be dried and processed just like marijuana would be, but primarily then it is extracted for oil. You could certainly consume it like you would THC with smoking it or vaporizing it. But for the most part, it's consumed as oil. It is technically legal in 50 states. Technically you can mail it to all 50 states. Again, it's a bit of an interesting area because when you concentrate it down into oil, it can often exceed the 0.3% because you're concentrating the product, but then it's usually diluted quite a bit. So if you ever get a chance to see Sanjay Kupde's special on cannabis on CNN, it was a couple of years ago where he followed this young girl named Charlotte who was having 50 to 100 seizures a day. It's a very powerful documentary, especially to see any child having that many seizures and how they were able to control that and even to this day still control it with primarily CBD oil. In fact, some of the very few studies that have been allowed to happen on any cannabis product are resulting to child seizures and the studies so far coming out are really incredible. They're taking the most difficult seizures to control with medication in children using CBD pills, which is not as effective as oil, but again, when you're dealing with studies, you typically have some relationship with the federal government so you're limited what you can actually use and it has reduced seizures from 50 to 75%. Whereas the medication reduces them anywhere from 10 to 30%. So again, we're all pretty common sense smart people. Smart people here, we would say no brainer. However, the medication is about $1,200 a month so we're also pretty realistic that if somebody is selling a medication for $1,200 a month, that potentially can become irrelevant if somebody's just extracting oil from a plant, there's gonna be a problem there. They're not gonna just go away. They're gonna fight for it. So the pharmaceutical industry is of course, unless they can make money off this, which is gonna be difficult because any of us can grow this plant. It doesn't take much to extract it. What do we need Pfizer for? Then they're gonna have the ear of a lot of people to make the rules that will affect us. So yes, there are laws, but we need to understand why those laws are in effect or why those laws, there will be a continuation of having this product that has no psychoactive drug still be considered on a level with heroin and believe it or not, worse than meth. Meth is a schedule two drug, okay? CBD and THC is a schedule one drug. So what I'm growing according to the DEA is worse than meth. That's pretty tough to handle. So when it comes down to, you know, if we all sort of got together as business people, as community members and said, what is it that we have in Southern Oregon? Obviously, we have the beauty. We have the real Grand Rio Crater Lake. We have great quality of life. We have a high five running down through the middle of it. What don't we have? Well, we don't have particularly a super high educated workforce. We don't have a very inexpensive place to live. Wages are moderate, taxes are about in the middle. We're not going to have a Toyota plant coming in. We don't have a lot of sort of unskilled labor in a sense. If we had gotten together and paid one of those fancy consultants to come up with what would do well here, you know, it's not gonna be Elon Musk battery factory. We're not on the list. There's a lot of things that we're sort of immediately excluded from. I'm convinced that if all the options are on the table for that consultant, what he would come up with is what we already have, which is for the most part a decently thriving wine industry, probably overextended, but you know, that's business. But the other part would be a cannabis industry. We grow the best cannabis in the United States hands down. We also have some of the least cost of production of cannabis growing in the United States hands down. I call it Napa Valley Cabernet at $8 a bottle. So the best wine that America produces at that rogue red prices. So, you know, but yet you can't sell it outside of California. So what's gonna happen? Every wine drink in the United States is gonna want it. So they come to California and drink it, but you can't bring it back, really? You don't think they're gonna put it in their trunk? And they're gonna mail it to them? I mean, you know, it's a difference between sort of dogmatism and pragmatism. I mean, we have to be pragmatic that we can't stop the best quality, lowest cost product that tens of millions of people in the United States want and are currently using from getting to them. Now obviously we have barriers. Obviously people can't say certain things that we would like them to say. I don't think, I think there's nothing stopping the governor from her saying that there's, we make the best wine in the United States for to saying we make the best cannabis in the United States. And I'm not going to say that we encourage people from out of state to consume our cannabis illegally, but we certainly encourage the economic dollars that are coming in. The money that is coming into Southern Oregon, I would love to have a slideshow. I couldn't because Peter introduced me and that would, that's the kiss of death as we all know. But I really, there's the numbers, there aren't the kind of slides that a traditional industry would show. This is an industry that has been underground for decades and the bulk of the people with the intellectual capital, which is another component to the fact that we happen to have some of the best climate to grow cannabis. We also have the best intellectual capital in Northern California and Southern Oregon and that is critical. They are growing the best clone saying know how to do it. Now, of course, with what I'm doing is not in what they're wanting necessarily. There is a conflict between the CBD side and the THC side. Mostly because for 40 years, the THC side has been trying to get rid of CBD because CBD somewhat counteracts the effects of THC. It stops to a certain extent, it stops the psychoactive effect. So it doesn't make you as high. It's more of a, it actually in some cases, again, this is, I'm not a doctor, this is somewhat new because we're not allowed to do any research, not allowed to do research on how to grow CBD and for Morgan State. We're not allowed to have anything involved in federal money, no one seems to be able to touch any of this stuff. So when I say, hey, what kind of nutritional analysis these plants have, it's anecdotal. I'm not used to that. I'm in a business where I should be able to take a leaf analysis and get a whole analysis of what that great plant needs and what I can do. Very little of that in the cannabis industry. So it's a lot of anecdotal information. But the CBD side doesn't necessarily care if there's male plants. Well, the THC side really doesn't want male plants because it fertilizes the flower, which is what they're producing. You want a female flower that keeps producing, producing, producing this resin. And the resin is what contains the active ingredient. You don't want seeds in it. So whereas I'm not as concerned with males, although we have feminized seeds and we do in the nature of being a good farming neighbor, remove as many males or all males that we can find, it is possible that the pollen can cross pollinate. So there is a conflict there, not unlike the whole GMO conflict that we just went through. So there is that little bit of a conflict already in the industry. But living sort of and doing business at ground zero in the Applegate, this spring, I've never seen anything like it. I mean, there was every truck you could possibly imagine carrying every single agricultural product you could imagine. It took me six weeks to get PVC pipe and drip irrigation because Fresno was running 24 hours a day. I mean, you cannot get pumps. You cannot get electrical people. You cannot get irrigation specialists. I had to use every connection I could get to get water to my field. There is, I mean, there's a friend of mine who bought a load of compost for $6,000. You're hearing of fencing companies like the one in Sunshine Point that did a million dollars by June, Hilton Fuel. I mean, these guys are making millions and millions of dollars. Just like it was 170 years ago when we had the greatest wealth creation event or the first wealth creation event of the European in Jacksonville as well, when you could pick up gold off the ground. No one knows any of the miners other than maybe Jim Lynn. We know people like Britt who work like one day mining and say, well, that's too much work. I'll sell the equipment or Beekman saying, well, geez, these guys are gonna need a bank. So it's the ancillary people that will benefit. It's not necessarily the growers. It's the financial advisor in Peter, not the melon guy in Peter. So it's the next level that is benefiting. And like when I did my little rant at OCF and Pat's he said, well, what's the first step Mark? And I said, well, first steps passed. We're probably on the second or third step. This is going ahead regardless of any of our help. But if there is a first step, it's to stop the giggling and that was where the title sort of came to. It's like, okay, all right. Well, I could have brought free samples, but by the time it got to the effect that I would want, you guys would be driving home. So I want you to be a little bit more, and then it gets into the whole wine part and I built two samples there. So what we need to do as influential members of our community as legislators, as travel people, as chamber people, as people who have the ear of decision making, these people, and I'm using that generally, the people involved in the cannabis industry are not going to come to you. You have to go to them. You have to do what is necessary to lay the groundwork so that this wealth creation event of which we had gold morphed into orchards, timber. Maybe I'll put wine in there, but I don't think so. I mean, actually wealth creating where you can take something from the ground and add value to it and have the rest of the world want that product. And believe me, that is a special thing to have. We need to at least lay the groundwork for encouraging that because if we don't, other communities will grab it. Bend has already grabbed it. And Bend has no right to own this. They're a lousy place to grow cannabis. Portland is a lousy place to grow cannabis. Seattle, they had to grow in some industrial area in a warehouse with these expensive lights. That's our motive. Mars is sun grown. We have a sun right there. Why would you possibly need to have expensive power generating lights? We're not doing it in a warehouse in a dingy neighborhood. We're doing it out in the beautiful Applegate Valley and we're going to brand it as Applegate Valley just like we brand our wines. And we're going to say we produce the best cannabis and if you choose to consume it because the fact is when any one of us walks around or drives around and sees a new taste room or sees a new vineyard or a winery going in, you're proud of that regardless if you yourself drink wine. Beater's proud of it and he doesn't drink wine. We're proud of it because of what it brings us. You don't have to consume cannabis in order to appreciate that this is a pretty incredible thing that there are a lot of people even though we have very low unemployment, the people who are unemployed or can't find work are the most difficult to employ. The ones who maybe just have a high school degree. The ones who probably can't pass a drug test that has a test for THC. These guys are making $20 an hour. Would you rather than making $20 an hour or not? Because they're taking that money and what are they doing? Buying products. They're being able to afford housing in the least affordable place to live in terms of our income in the United States. They're able to send their kids to college or pay off their student loans. I mean that's what I smell when I drive down a field or drive in the neighborhood and I smell what we're all gonna start smelling in a couple weeks here. I smell that. I smell economic development. I smell my neighbor whose mom's 85 years old who just like my mom after several years of trying to convince her that look I'm trying to grow something that doesn't contain THC. He paid off her mortgage. My bank manager who finally confided in me because the fact is as I start talking about this more and more people come up to me and it's like the people Peter said, you know? I mean I grew up thinking a gay person was Liberace. Maybe Elton John. Wasn't certainly the guy down the street. Well Liberace is the gay people like many people's prototypical pod head 25 year old living in his mom's basement with dreadlocks is to marijuana. I mean there are awful lot of people in this room that you deal with who consume cannabis like many people consume alcohol. You know, it's a relatively responsible thing. So I'm getting the nudge here. I do definitely want to leave it open for some questions. I'm sure there'll be some questions. Thank you very much for talking. Yes sir.