Cannatrek: Lemnos, Shepparton cannabis farm construction starts 2021
If your dream job involves working in a giant greenhouse caring for 16ha of cannabis plants, read on. Shepparton is about to be home to one of the state’s first medicinal marijuana farm. Here’s what you need to know.
Goulburn Valley
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Construction on one of Victoria’s first large-scale medicinal cannabis farm is set to start in early 2021, in a project expected to create 400 jobs for the Shepparton region.
When completed, the 160,000sq m farm is anticipated to produce 160 tonnes of medicinal cannabis each year.
Stage one, which has expected completion in early 2022, will produce about 15 tonne of cannabis from 10,000sq m of land.
While construction on the Lemnos site has been delayed by six months due to COVID-19, Cannatrek chief executive Tommy Huppert said the company was already thinking about the 60 to 70 people they would hope to employ next year.
He said they were looking for people with a university degree in horticulture with “very wide skill sets”.
“People need to also be trained in lab work and logistics,” Mr Huppert said.
Cannatrek has already started discussions with Melbourne University’s Dookie Campus and La Trobe University to integrate some of the skills they are looking for into existing agriculture courses.
Mr Huppert also said they would like to hire locally and have started working with organisations in the Goulburn Valley to promote the career path to young people.
“We really want to integrate early on to show kids and teenagers and uni students there’s a pathway,” he said.
“Agriculture is very wide, and this is a speciality.”
Committee for Greater Shepparton chief executive Sam Birrell – who used to work in agriculture – said specialised farm work was a growing opportunity for locals.
“With the expansion of all the industries we’ve got around horticulture, there’s an increasing call for highly skilled people,” he said.
“They say someone who wants to run a farm needs to understand a spreadsheet as well as a tractor.”
But Mr Huppert said there would be other employment opportunities for locals, including with local Shepparton civil engineering group CAF Consulting, who will be overseeing construction of the site.
“There’s going to be employment from building the site and operation of the site, as well as in manufacturing,” he said.
While the Shepparton site will not start producing cannabis until 2022, the “prototype” farm in Brisbane already producing eight strains of medicinal cannabis which will be dispensed soon via chemists in Australia.
Mr Huppert said products would be used to treat illnesses such as pain, inflammation, anxiety, and insomnia.
“Importantly, the medicinal cannabis industry is now a fully regulated industry; this has happened in a very quick time frame,” Mr Huppert said.
“Today in Australia you can go to a pharmacy, hand over your script and identification and leave with your purchase.”
Cannatrek has so far sold imported cannabis totalling close to 20,000 units across the last four years to nearly 2,000 patients.
The company recently announced it would be able to import its products to the UK through Astral Health – a specialist importer and distributor of medicinal cannabis products.
“This first export represents an important step for Cannatrek, and we expect it to be the precursor to further significant export orders, to both Astral Health and other medicinal cannabis importers,” Mr Huppert said.
Mr Huppert said the aim of the company would be to provide more affordable and accessible medicinal cannabis, with the aid of a new digital platform launching soon.
“It will helps patients, doctors and pharmacists better equipped to choose product, prescribe and dispense,” he said.
The company has raised over $17 million to fund their growth to date, and will shortly look to raise more capital through online platform OnMarket.
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