In many ways, cannabis entrepreneurs face the same challenges that confront any agricultural business. Plants need to be raised with care, harvests need to be tracked, and measures need to be taken to ensure that the product stays fresh.
But as cultivators of a controlled substance, cannabis farmers also face additional difficulties. While cannabis is increasingly becoming legal for recreational and medical uses in jurisdictions across the western world, it is still subject to tight regulatory controls. Producing cannabis can be a lucrative business, but it means investing significant amounts of time and energy in staying compliant with state, provincial, and federal regulations.
This means that cannabis businesses often succeed or fail based not on their ability to cultivate a high-quality product, but to find efficient ways of doing so that keep them on the right side of the law.
For this reason, software tools that help producers keep track of their inventory and file reports with government auditors play an out-sized role in keeping cannabis producers afloat.
Seed-to-Sale: The New Regulatory Standard
Most jurisdictions that have legalized recreational or medical cannabis, including states like Washington and Colorado and countries like Canada, have done so in part to combat the flourishing black market in cannabis products. The laws legalizing cannabis were often explicitly designed to keep the profits from cannabis production out of the hands of criminal organizations.
In order to guarantee that cannabis products sold within these jurisdictions have not been produced illicitly, regulations require that every product sold be tracked from seed to sale. Producers that want to stay compliant with the law must be able to produce extensive documentation about the cultivation and movement of every one of their plants.
How Seed-to-Sale Software Makes Compliance Easy
These regulations place a huge burden on cannabis producers to gather and store a large amount of information. In order to keep track of this vast amount of data, producers have turned to high tech software solutions that help them keep track of their plants and products.
These digital seed-to-sale platforms use barcodes and wireless scanners to track plant growth and automatically update databases. The software can also be used to track batch results and lab tests to ensure that all the information about a plant is instantly available through the platform.
If you want to produce cannabis you can enhance your seed to sale efficiency with this software by reducing the number of man-hours required to manually track and record plant movements.
Because the software can be designed specifically to meet the needs of producers working under particular regulatory schedules, it can also save time when preparing and filing production reports, and often contains integrated medical marijuana patient registration software to help producers connect more effectively to patients who are looking for a reliable source for their medical cannabis products.
The sale of recreational cannabis in states and countries that have liberalized their controlled substance laws has proven to provide a significant economic boost, and many companies are hoping to get into the cannabis production business to take advantage of this emerging market.
Given the regulatory burden of cultivating cannabis, prospective producers that want to make the most of these exciting opportunities will need to find a seed-to-sale platform that will help them stay compliant.
