Colorado was one of the first states to legalize adult-use cannabis, and more than a decade later it offers an early look at what happens after a market matures: falling wholesale prices, ongoing consolidation, and many operators that have been acquired, changed direction, or closed.
Jonny Radding is still here.
A founding partner of Durango Organics, Radding has spent close to fifteen years in Colorado cannabis—first in the medical market, then through the launch and grind of adult-use sales. The company began like many others: small garage grows, homemade nutrient programs, and a learning process based largely on trial and error. Today it runs greenhouse cultivation, medical licenses, and multiple retail locations across the state’s southwest corner.
“We were bootstrapping everything,” Radding said. “Power upgrades, perpetual-grow scheduling, nutrient recipes—we were figuring it out as we went.”
The five lessons that kept him in business, he says, had less to do with growing cannabis than with building an operation that could withstand market volatility.
1: Legacy Growers Still Have a Place, If They Adapt
The prevailing wisdom for years held that small and legacy operators were destined to get steamrolled by better-capitalized competitors. Radding rejects the premise.
“The idea that legacy growers can’t compete anymore—I don’t buy it,” he said.
What’s changed isn’t whether craft matters, but what has to accompany it. Passion for the plant still counts, he argues, but only when it’s paired with operational discipline: compliance, standard operating procedures, and repeatable systems that don’t depend on a single grower’s instinct. For Durango Organics, that meant moving cultivation into greenhouse environments, tightening production schedules, and formalizing practices that the team once ran on feel.
“What makes legacy growers special is still important,” Radding said. “That relationship with the plant …
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Author: High Times Partners / High Times
