Phil Higdon is tired of smelling the marijuana odor that wafts over the rolling hills of his scenic property in Garland County. Higdon, 67, doesn’t oppose marijuana and even admits to having smoked it in the past. But he’s tired of smelling it. “Do you like smelling a skunk?” he asked.
Higdon’s family has been in the area for generations and his great-grandfather once drove the ferry that crossed the Ouachita River (now Lake Hamilton) and gave nearby Higdon Ferry Road its name. But things haven’t been the same since a new business joined the neighborhood in 2021. New Day Cultivation, a family-owned cannabis cultivator now known as Leafology, set up shop a couple hundred yards away from Higdon’s house. Since then, the smells of Arkansas’s $1 billion cannabis industry have reached different parts of the neighborhood, depending on the direction of the wind.
On a recent February afternoon, the smells didn’t amount to much at Higdon’s house, although a drive through a nearby apartment complex yielded a faint cannabis odor. Higdon said the smell follows the wind and noted it can be particularly powerful at the back of the apartment complex.
While the odor issues have improved recently, Higdon said it’s still “pretty darn strong” at times. Higdon and his neighbors sent a letter last year to the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Division, which regulates the state medical marijuana industry, to express their concerns with the smell, noise and lights from the cultivation facility. The residents said they were concerned for their health, quality of life and property values. In the letter, they asked the ABC to require Leafology to move to a “more remote location.” Neither the ABC nor the state Medical Marijuana Commission has such authority, though.
In August, the ABC hit Leafology with $15,500 in fines and a 15-day suspension — the agency’s first and only suspension of a cannabis business — for a variety of issues, including a failure “to ensure cannabis odors were not perceptible from outside your licensed facility.” The cultivator appealed the penalties to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, which later reduced the fine to $10,500 and waived the suspension.
At the end of the meeting, board members told the neighbors to contact the ABC if the smells continue.
Griffin CoopDuring a tour in February, Leafology President Brent McCord didn’t dismiss complaints about the odor but pointed to the odor-suppressing misting system he has installed and a pair of weather-related incidents that exacerbated the problems.
To understand Leafology’s odor issues, it’s important to understand the cultivator’s facility. Leafology looks like a collection of tan-colored warehouses and, while all of the growing appears to take place indoors, in cannabis terms, the facility is considered an outdoor grow. The company uses a greenhouse method of cultivation that relies on big fans to move outdoor air through the grow rooms rather than the HVAC units used for indoor grows. The system, which Leafology controls with a sophisticated computer system, can move the air through the grow rooms in as little as 19 seconds, McCord said.
McCord has also adopted a system of “burping” the grow rooms overnight by using the fans to release air that has settled at the top of the grow rooms for about 45 seconds. McCord burps the rooms several times over night rather than sending it out all at once, he said.
Griffin CoopTo mitigate the smells, McCord has installed an odor-mitigation system that involves a series of circular sprayers that dispense a fine mist outside the facility. Ecosorb, the liquid emitted by the misters, is non-toxic and can help remove “nuisance smells” in many settings, including cannabis cultivation, solid waste, wastewater and more.
McCord estimated he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the misting system and another $500 a gallon on the odor-eliminating liquid that the system emits. “I’m doing everything I can to make everybody happy,” he said.
Other problems have been out of McCord’s hands, he said. In late 2022 and early 2023, a bout of cold weather froze the misting systems and required many more replacement parts than McCord had been told to keep on hand, he said. Once the misting system was fixed, a hail storm in June 2023 damaged the roof, which was patched in the short-term but wasn’t permanently fixed until October.
McCord said he understood the neighbors’ complaints about the smell during that time and was particularly saddened to upset Higdon, at whose pond he recalled hunting ducks in his youth. “It broke my heart that he was one of the main antagonisers, but I understand, because when (the misting system) was broken, it stunk,” McCord said.
Before the weather problems, Leafology had gone a year without a complaint, McCord said. With the roof repaired and the misting system working properly now, McCord said he “hasn’t heard a peep” about the smell aside from one individual.
Scott Hardin, spokesman for the ABC, however, said the ABC has continued to consistently receive complaints about the smell since the November hearing.
There’s one group of stakeholders that seems to like the facility: the plants. That’s according to Leafology Director of Operations Meagan Chris who joined the Leafology staff in October, drawn to the job because of the opportunity to grow in a greenhouse.
Griffin CoopChris said the plants need “real natural sunlight” and said the growing environment produces better yields, bud structure and “way more” trichomes, the tiny crystal structures that form on the plants and carry psychoactive THC as well as other cannabinoids and terpenes. Chris noted the trichomes on the plants in one of the grow rooms before showing them off under a microscope. Several of Leafology’s strains have surpassed 30% THC content, a benchmark in the industry, McCord said.
The greenhouse also offers energy savings and a low cost of operation, according to Bill McCord, Brent’s father — a contractor who oversaw the construction of the facility.
Plant development aside, Higdon believes Leafology shouldn’t have been placed in a residential area. Most of the state’s other cultivation facilities are in rural areas or industrial parks.
Hardin said the state Medical Marijuana Commission, which makes such decisions, follows the commission’s rules and the state marijuana amendment, which requires cultivators to be at least 3,000 feet from schools, daycares and churches. The amendment does not have a distance requirement for residences.
Bill McCord said the company informed the residents in the neighborhood prior to building the facility and Hardin said no one opposed it when it came before the commission. Higdon, however, said he didn’t know much about it and now he fears an expansion. “The whole issue is it never should have been put there,” he said. “It’s here now and it’s not going away. I know that.”
