One of Colorado’s largest vacant marijuana farms has a new owner.
Mammoth Farms, a wholesale marijuana production company based in southern Colorado, purchased Los Sueños Farms from multi-state cannabis company Curaleaf at the end of December, according to the pot farm’s new owner.
The 36-acre marijuana farm in Pueblo County has been bought and sold a few times since opening in 2015, most recently to Curaleaf in 2021 as part of a $67 million package. Curaleaf shut down its Colorado operations less than two years later, however, leaving Los Sueños empty for 2023.
Mammoth owner Justin Trouard says the property was “fairly up to date” and adding it to the fold “just made sense.” He declines to name the sale price, and Curaleaf did not respond to requests for comment.
“We were made aware that it was available in May of last year. It fits into our brand and the way that we do things,” Trouard says. “It’s a distressed asset, and we got a deal, I’ll say that.”
Los Sueños was once the largest licensed outdoor marijuana cultivation in Colorado, but in 2018 that title was overtaken by Mammoth Farms, which owns an eighty-acre pot farm in Saguache County. Trouard believes the Mammoth grow in Saguache is the largest licensed pot farm in North America.
“I feel like we understand the value proposition of outdoor marijuana — truly outdoor, not greenhouse. I don’t think its intention is to be sold as finished buds in a bag. I don’t think it should be sold as flower,” he says. “When we harvest, we harvest with farm equipment. There’s not sixty people in the field cutting it down, because that’s too hard to scale. It’s got to be automated. It’s got to be scalable.”
Los Sueños is a big purchase during hard times for Colorado’s pot industry. After increasing for seven straight years to a record $2.2 billion in 2021, annual marijuana sales have been falling in Colorado, hitting just over $1.5 billion for 2023. Record-low wholesale prices, a long list of business closures and a 30 percent decline in employment have also hit marijuana businesses during that span. Colorado marijuana jobs fell by almost 30 percent from 2022 to 2023, according to a Vangst market report, while Colorado Department of Revenue data shows that the number of recreational marijuana growing licenses fell over 21 percent from December 2022 through December 2023.
Los Sueños sits on 36 acres and includes an outdoor farm and greenhouse facilities.
Thomas Mitchell
Mammoth hasn’t been immune to cutbacks, closing a medical dispensary in Denver in early 2023, but Trouard says that Mammoth’s ag-focused growing methods have helped the company counter the industry recession and jump on new opportunities. The company is also “in the process of expanding” its manufacturing footprint in Denver, he says, with plans to use the expansion for extraction. All of Mammoth’s harvests are utilized for extraction and infusion purposes, he notes.
Being a mass producer of extracted products like edibles and vape cartridges could also help Mammoth Farms better position itself for federally legal or rescheduled marijuana, he says. The Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to issue a decision on the potential rescheduling of marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule II substance after favorable recommendations from the Biden administration and the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
“We’re looking to be centralized. I know a lot of other players in the industry have chased out-of-state licensing, and it didn’t work for us,” he says, pointing to a strong base of Colorado operations to ready Mammoth for “getting out-of-state lines, whenever that’s allowed here.”
If the DEA approves rescheduling as anticipated, marijuana will have a legal status similar to ketamine. Neither industry nor legal experts are exactly sure what that means for state-legal pot businesses, but the wide assumption is that business owners and investors will find more favorable tax statuses and easier financing rules.
“It’s a funny thing to speculate on,” Trouard says of potential rescheduling. “Where it stands now is clearly far more restrictive, and the penalties are far more aggressive, than under Schedule III. I think and hope that the federal government will relax the view of marijuana under Schedule III. I think they will make the NIDA process a little easier to get through, and I think interstate commerce will be allowed.”
Los Sueños, now named Mammoth Farms, will be up and running for this year’s harvest season, Trouard says.
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