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Dec. 15: Gigli THC Tasting - "A free in-store tasting event featuring Gigli THC Canned Cocktails! Stop in and sample these refreshing and deliciously flavored cocktails while you shop." 4 p.m. - 7 p.m. Haskell's Maple Grove, 15304 Grove Circle North, Maple Grove. More info.

Dec. 16: Cannabis Cultivation and Propagation Basics - "Learn the ins and outs of growing and propagating cannabis like a pro." 8 p.m. Roots Hydroponics, 423 Main Ave., Moorhead. Tickets and more info.

Dec. 19: Cannabis Growing 101 - "A beginners class for cultivating cannabis from start to finish." 7 p.m., Urban Grow Store, 275 37th St. NE, Rochester. Space is limited so please RSVP. More info.

Dec. 29: Jokes N Joints - "Jokes-n-Joints is back with more Jokes and plenty of Joints come enjoy the show!" 4:20 p.m., Potshotz, 1553 University Ave. W., St. Paul. More info.

Find more cannabis-related events at mnweedevents.com.

Talk to us! We want to hear what you think about Nuggets. Send feedback, questions, events, story tips or new feature ideas to nuggets@startribune.com.

Jude from Anoka submitted this frosty Blue Dream plant in week 7 of flower, growing in organic supersoil. Thanks for sharing!

Homegrowers, show off your plants! Share your best photo with us by clicking the button below or tag us on Instagram with #stribnuggets and we'll publish one each week in Nuggets. By submitting a photo you affirm that you own the rights to it and you are granting permission to the Star Tribune to publish it on its platforms.

When most people imagine a hemp farm, chances are they picture sprawling outdoor fields, densely populated with industrial-grade hemp plants — not unlike the corn or soybean farms that cover swaths of the Midwest. But what if someone applied the same principles that cannabis growers use to produce high-quality marijuana indoors to growing aromatic and cannabinoid-rich, smokeable hemp flower and to producing edibles, tinctures and topicals? 

To answer this question, Nuggets visited Cornell Urban Agriculture’s indoor hemp farm in the basement of a century-old auto parts plant in northeast Minneapolis. The company has just four employees: founder Stephen Cornell and his girlfriend, Karissa Abbott, and two part-time workers. A graduate of Cal Poly Pomona with a background in race car engineering, Cornell, 41, said he started the company in 2020 after leaving a corporate job and cashing in his 401(k). Nuggets recently visited  Cornell Urban Agriculture’s facility and spoke with Cornell about his hemp business. More from that interview later. 

Grow facility

If White Earth Nation’s Waabigwan Mashkiki is an example of a modern, state-of-the-art grow facility, Cornell Urban Agriculture is closer to the other end of the spectrum: A lower-budget, smaller scale, DIY set-up that one might expect from a longtime homegrower who poured his life savings into his business. The entire space is only 2,000 square feet, including a nursery, vegetative and flower rooms, a production room and a space for drying and curing hemp flower. The flower room is enclosed in vinyl sheeting and cooled with home air conditioners rather than commercial units. Cornell uses a hodge-podge of 650- to 1,000-watt HortiBloom LED lights in the flower room, which produces about 24 pounds of hemp flower every 12 weeks. He said he is in the process of building out additional space that will allow him to cut that turnover time to just 6½ weeks. The biggest limitation of the facility, Cornell said, is the building’s 100-amp electrical service, which puts a firm ceiling on how much power he can draw and pushes him to use his engineering background to seek efficiencies wherever possible.

Grow style

Cornell grows his plants in a homemade organic “supersoil” — soil that is fully amended with nutrients so plants can be grown to maturity without the need for additional fertilizers. He uses microgreens, or herb and vegetable sprouts, as a cover crop, which he harvests for use in topical creams. The hemp leaves, stalks and microgreen waste are all recycled into a large compost bin that Cornell uses to make the supersoil as well as compost “teas,” which are essentially oxygenated, microbe-rich brews applied to the soil to increase the populations of beneficial microorganisms. “We’re closing the loop so basically nothing really leaves the system,” he said. 

Flowering hemp plants at Cornell Urban Agriculture in northeast Minneapolis. - Matt DeLong, Star Tribune

Strains

The flowering room features four CBD hemp strains and 10 phenotypes (different expressions of a strain’s genetics). MN Tangie, a strain that Cornell bred, is the star of the show with its citrusy terpenes that filled the room when Cornell opened a large bag full of curing hemp flowers. Cornell’s Strawberry Orange Trifle, bred by Yellowhammer Genetics of Massachusetts, was named best CBD flower at the Legacy Cup cannabis festival in Minneapolis in September.

Products

In addition to the hemp flower, Cornell’s signature THC product is space ice cream — small-batch vanilla ice cream, freeze-dried to remove the moisture, with one of four toppings: dark chocolate, sea-salt caramel, strawberry cheesecake or banana cream pie. Cornell said the ice cream dissolves in your mouth and the THC absorbs sublingually rather than in the digestive system, allowing it to take effect more quickly than other edibles. The space ice cream also picked up a Legacy Cup award for most innovative THC product. The company also offers a topical cream made with THC, CBD and microgreens and a CBD-A + CBD tincture.

Owner/operator, Cornell Urban Agriculture

I have to imagine that the cost of growing indoors is a lot more expensive than outdoors.

It’s astronomical. But you also have to sell your product. It took a long time for me to build up the value, the quality and the customers to be able to get the prices that we need to grow organically.

If I didn’t see you doing it I would have thought it makes no sense, economically, to grow hemp indoors. What is the market like? 

It’s better now. You can’t go on wild goose chases in a treasure hunt for new genetics. You really have to narrow down your menu and stick to those production strains. You can be more creative and fulfill your artistic fantasies or whatever, but that doesn’t keep you in business. The things that I’ve really worked on a lot that have changed from when I started are increasing your yields, then having a plan for exactly what material you’re going to use for what product or what process. You really have to know exactly what you’re doing. There are other competitors that I had that stuck strictly to flower, and they’re out of business. 

By making tincture and making [topical] creams, you do have a higher profit level. But making other things takes extra time. You’ve got to create formulations. You’ve got to pay for testing for those. You’ve got to create graphics. It’s really tough to build that.

Was it difficult to find the location and the necessary approval from the city and the landlord?

Yeah, it’s really tough to find a space that works, that’s affordable, that your landlord is OK with and the city is OK with. There’s a lot of stars that need to align. 

What challenges have you faced operating an indoor farm in the city?

The toughest part is that the margins are so small for growing that you really have to expand beyond growing to survive because you’re never going to pay the bills. You could pay the bills but you’d need to have such a huge facility. If you’re only making $100 or $200 off every pound, you better be doing a lot of pounds. The really tough part has been to develop standard operating procedures to do things as efficiently as possible. Using labor, actual humans, to do stuff, that’s how we will continue to do it. Because providing jobs for people is just as or more important as any profit. I honestly think the high-end — the really, really high-end – market is the only sustainable market for a small business. 

Are you concerned that the recreational market could push out hemp businesses?

Absolutely. A lot of the hemp businesses haven’t been able to stay in business anyways. A lot of them are struggling because there are constantly new regulations and new laws. How does anybody build something that you can’t have a five-year plan on? 

Do you have a favorite product that you produce?

Our THC cream, believe it or not, because I have chronic back pain and that was the first product we made. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without that cream.

Where did the idea for space ice cream come from?

We’ve been freeze-drying all of our flower. I had a friend in Michigan who was doing a variation of freeze-dried ice cream on the black market. I talked to him and he gave me a little bit of base information. I actually had other friends ask me about it and the idea was floating around. Another company was working on it locally and they couldn’t figure it out. They ended up giving us their freeze-dryer when we figured it out.

Cornell Urban Agriculture's THC-infused Space Ice Cream. - Matt DeLong, Star Tribune

Would you like to get into the adult-use recreational market? 

Yes, eventually. We’ve got a little bit of an advantage because if we can keep building our hemp business, it’s going to start rivaling a microbusiness license size [5,000 square feet of plant canopy]. If we can do that, then we’ll be one of the few businesses in a building paying rent with profit coming in before the full licensing comes in. If we can grow our business enough over the next year to warrant a big enough facility, once they give us the green light on our application it’ll be less than 12 hours before we’re switched over to marijuana genetics.

Are you looking for a new facility?

We’re definitely looking for a new facility. I’d really like to stay in Minneapolis because I feel we’ve got a highly competitive quality of flower that’s unique to the market. I really want to be in the thick of it, competing. 

Correction: Due to a transcription error, last week’s edition of Nuggets misstated the number of banks currently doing business with cannabis businesses cited by OCM Implementation Chief Regulatory Officer Max Zappia. The correct number is 496.

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