Standard Farms: Meet the New Standard

Standard Farms is a licensed PA medical marijuana grower/processor that operates an 8-nexus hybrid greenhouse with 32,000 square feet of cultivation space and 30,000 square feet for processing in White Haven, PA.

One of the original license holders in the PA Medical Program, Standard Farms has been operational since 2018 and was acquired from the original owners in 2019 by TILT Holdings—a Phoenix based holdings company that owns Standard Farms in PA and Ohio, Commonwealth Alternative Care in Massachusetts, and Jupiter Research.

In Pennsylvania, Standard Farms employs about 80 people from White Haven and the 570 area. Start to meet the team and you’ll find people that have been there since the start. To them, six years has felt like a lifetime as the program has evolved and they experienced the growing pains of starting a cultivation facility and adjusting to their environment.

Since 2018, different grow techniques have come and gone for SF but the challenge of cultivating in the Poconos climate remained. The mountains in Northeastern Pennsylvania aren’t exactly a pristine environment to cultivate cannabis. It takes time to adjust to hot, humid summers that heat up the greenhouses to over 90 degrees and cold winters that shift the climate in every room as the seasons change.

The Standard Farms team have used that time to figure out what works best for the plants in their rooms. Their cultivation team is made up of locals who began as entry level harvest techs. People who took a job at the new business in town and are now a little over a year into running the rooms. The SF team has learned every step of the way—taking lessons from the past and steering their way into a recipe tailored to their greenhouses.

Whether it’s living soil, synthetics, hydroponics, or Athena and rockwool, every cultivator has their medium for trying to grow the best weed they can. For Standard Farms, their journey has led them to focus on simplifying the process and cultivating healthy plants in a clean environment.

From the greenhouses in full flower to mom/prop/veg to harvest and trim, the Standard Farms facility is spotless. They have a commitment to cleanliness driven by understanding their environmentals and the stresses of cultivating cannabis at scale.

The plants are grown under the sun in hybrid greenhouses with HPS lights to supplement the gray weather days in Pennsylvania. They go single stalk—one plant in each pre-filled grow bag to keep eyes on every flower in the room.

Their fertilizer is made by a Lehigh Valley based family company whose manufacturing facility is located in Allentown, PA with experience making water-soluble fertilizers for the horticulture and specialty agriculture markets that dates back to 1947. To support the feed schedule, Standard Farms has also started using substrate sensors to give a snapshot of what’s happening with the plants and the climate and allows the team to back growing by feel with precise measurements that give a more complete picture of the room. 

Every flower cultivated in Standard Farms’ greenhouses is grown from seed. Packs from Raw Genetics, Equilibrium, Symbiotic, Inhouse Genetics, Compound Genetics, and more have been pheno-hunted in house to find the keepers they bring to patients. Staples in their lineup like Georgia Pie from Raw Genetics and GG#4 feature alongside new selections like Modified Apples & Bananas from Symbiotic and Blue Slushie from Raw. The team identifies winning pheno’s through their looks, nose, structure, yield, and vigor before finalizing R&D with lab results to solidify the choice. 

But after a pheno gets picked and is flowered out there’s one more test it has to go through before it can last in the Standard Farms greenhouse—how well it washes.

The cold room where Standard Farms crafts their rosin is focused on producing live rosin in PA with the right consistency, texture, and flavor for patients. From the wash to the press, to the cure, the process is all about preserving the integrity of the plant—keeping the trichomes and the terps intact by going small-batch and starting with fresh, frozen flower that’s harvested only ten plants at a time for the wash. 

The process begins by taking the fresh, frozen flower directly out of a negative 45-degree freezer and putting it into the machine for its spin cycle in reverse osmosis ice water. The resulting ice hash is flushed into wash bags ranging from largest micron size to smallest to discard all excess plant material but the trichomes. It’s then scraped from the bag to a tray where it’s freeze dried overnight to be pressed into rosin. After it’s pressed the rosin gets cured and then whipped into its final form—ready to be packaged for patients. 

If you’re not into taking dabs or you just want the rosin on the go, Standard Farms rosin is also available in their new All-In-One Rosin Vape. To nail the viscosity for the vape they take pressed, cured rosin, and place it into a convection oven to decarb the oil before it goes into the Jupiter Voca Pro Device. The Voca Pro is built to ensure smooth draws and consistent deliveries of high terpene extracts. For KCRA’s money it’s the best solventless vape option in the program and keeps the vaping experience true to the flavor profile of the rosin. 

Solventless is the focus, but to give patients options Standard Farms produces other products in the lab like tinctures, terpene syringes, suppositories, salves, and full-spectrum CO2 oil disposable vapes in the Jupiter FLEX device. All products are crafted with the same attention to detail as the starting material as the team dials in with each harvest and each batch—working together to set a new standard of quality for their products and taking pride in what they are providing PA medical patients straight from White Haven, Pennsylvania.