Re-educate the locals on Cannabis, to rid the community of misinformation to empower the people with knowledge. We dream to form part of the creation of a cannabis industry within Swaziland by creating an organization that was Swazi owned and run, that facilitates contracts between manufacturers and local farmers. Ensuring that harvest-long lease agreements entered into with farmers are fair and compensation for land leased is empowering. Skills transfer is to form part of the overall agreement with farmers. The research vision was to find the original Swazi strain, bring it back home, and put the strain back into the hands of locals.

‍Now to chop the dream into bite-size pieces and make some achievable goals; This step is painful, that is essential when you’re trying to change the world you live in, it is necessary to take it from idealistic to practical.

‍This means a lot of disagreements and debates; this means a lot of “what the h*** are we even doing” type questions and the meeting cut short. This step of the growth cycle is essential if there is any hope for company sustainability because we live in the real world, not the dream world.

‍So, I present to you our dream chopped into bite-size pieces:

1. Establish Budgets
2. Establish a Presence
3. Engage in Research Projects
4. Institute a pilot project with a farmer

Establishing a budget was a yearlong process with a monthly investment deposit by partners for future projects. The year also consisted of the monthly meeting to discuss the path and align visions. At the beginning of year 3 in our journey…. haha you didn’t realize it had been that long… yup … 3 years since that very special stoner chat that sparked it all.

‍Anyway, at the beginning of the 3-year journey, we formulated our first annual budget and because we had what we had, so now it’s time to agree on what to spend it on. We had a couple of options, our options were Testing, Extraction, Research, Farming, Agricultural Development, and many more, but we debated our way down to 3. This was war….

‍I fully intend to have a blog fully dedicated to why choosing the right partners is important, but a little taste of my views; It gets ugly in the “build-together corner”, and it’s important that you’ve chosen partners that you stick with even when you disagree… Let me dive a little deeper here; I think you need to be able to; have your partner look you dead in the eye and say “F*** Y**” … Immediately have yourself contemplating packing your bags and finally moving to Canada and …. choosing not to. If you can’t pull yourself back from the ‘give-up and end-it-all’ cliff for your chosen partners, then you have chosen the wrong partners.

‍Back to Establishing a budget; As I was saying the selection for the budget focus was warlike but I’m happy to report that compromise reached, and order restored. We landed on focusing on; Research, Re-education and Agricultural Development project for the year . We split the available budget depending on what each department required, and we were ready to go.

‍Establish a Presence……