The Pharm's Sjoerd Broeks Thrives in Arizona's Medical Marijuana Market

This article originally appeared in the March 2018 issue of Cannabis Business Times. To subscribe, click here.

Sjoerd Broeks (pronounced Shored), director of cultivation at The Pharm, is a cannabis industry rock star.

While this could be taken as hyperbole, a case can be made in support of this claim: Broeks, like Eddie Van Halen, originally hails from The Netherlands; he was part of a legendary group: The Flying Dutchmen seed company; he had the opportunity to tour the globe thanks to his unique skill set; and he eventually made it to America, where his fame only grew.

None of these things were lost on Randy Smith, the company’s CEO, when he met Broeks through a mutual friend. “When meeting with Sjoerd the first time, you knew right away he knew what he was talking about, you knew right away he could get the job done,” he says. “You knew that this was a very rare breed.”

A rare breed of cultivator is what Smith needed to complete his ambitious project: turning a 320,000-square-foot Dutch glass greenhouse in Willcox, Ariz., located roughly halfway between Tucson and the New Mexico border, into a premiere cannabis cultivation facility.

Smith was inspired by another cannabis luminary, Harborside’s Steve DeAngelo—who he met after founding medical cannabis consulting firm 4front Advisors in 2011—in creating the farm.

“One of the things Steve was preaching all along was sun-grown cannabis and the belief system that the plant is meant to grow in the sun, that the plant is a healthier plant in the sun, the cannabinoid profiles are better in the sun,” Smith says.

Smith understood that not many cannabis cultivators had experience growing in a greenhouse, even less so in a high-tech greenhouse, so he turned to a neighbor: Johan van den Berg, the founder of produce grower Eurofresh Farm and former operator of the country’s largest greenhouse. Smith says he and his team talked with him extensively and took his input into account during the company’s planning stages. After talking with van den Berg, Smith explains, “we knew what we really needed is somebody that was deeply passionate about the plant, could grow at scale and really had a deep tie to world-class genetics.”

“When we were trying to find those people that checked those boxes in the cannabis side, Sjoerd was the No. 1 guy.”

To read the full article in Cannabis Business Times' March issue, click here. 

Top photo by Molly Condit at SunStreet Photo