With recreational marijuana legal in California for seven months, companies are still jockeying for positions in what will be the world's biggest pot market. CoachellaGro, a California-based subsidiary of Toronto's High Hampton Holdings (CSE:HC), is one such company.
CoachellaGro has a conditional use permit for a full-service production facility in order to serve third party state licensed medicinal marijuana operators. The company intends to construct a 254,000 square-foot greenhouse facility in the cannabis industrial park in Coachella, California.
In its bid to meet this goal, High Hampton has contracted the hybrid greenhouse engineering and design consultancy experts at Aurora Larssen Projects, a subsidiary of cannabis behemoth Aurora Cannabis (TSX:ACB)(OTCQB:ACBFF). Aurora Larson Projects, or "ALPS" as it is shortened, is globally recognized for its over three decades of experience in automated, efficient, environmentally controlled cultivation facilities.
ALPS has been involved in over 1,000 projects worldwide, including the state-of-the-art 800,000 square-foot project dubbed "Aurora Sky" on Edmonton International Airport land that will produce 100,000 kilograms (110 tons) per annum.
The ALPS team will be joining Infrastructure Engineers Ltd. and general contractor Vertical Construction to begin construction of the new CoachellaGro facility.
"ALPS continues to expand its footprint as the designer of choice for highly automated, hyper-efficient, low production cost cannabis facilities around the world. The differences between a typical glass house and what will be the ALPS-designed CoachellaGro facility are numerous and significant", said Aurora Cannabis chief executive Terry Booth.
"CoachellaGro is better described as an environmentally controlled indoor grow operation with supplemental sun."
The news isn't impressing stock traders as measured by shares of HC falling. So-called "pot stocks" were expected to go ballistic with Canada recently legalizing recreational marijuana nationwide, but the mood on Wall Street and Bay Street seems to be more along the lines of "sell the news" for the time being.
Shares of HC have dropped from over $1.00 in about three weeks to Friday's close at 66 cents. The stock is down another three cents, or 4.6%, to 63 cents in early afternoon trading on Monday. Toronto-listed shares of Aurora are also down, shedding 4.9% to $8.20 with about three hours left in the trading day.
