September means football season for fans who love the NFL and NCAA, and it also means back to school for millions of college students. In recent years, September has also come to mean that it’s harvest season for the nation’s newest legal cash crops: Cannabis.
It wasn’t that long ago that the only data generated from the annual fall cannabis harvest was that of arrest records published by law enforcement and photo-ops of thousands of cannabis plants seized by the DEA. This year, Wall Street research analysts will have their eyes glued on the results of this year’s coast-to-coast cannabis harvest like never before, as more and more cannabis and cannabis-related deals are trading on public exchanges for investors to take advantage of what is arguably the fastest growing agricultural sector in the world.
In the past 5 years, 100,000 jobs have been created across the country in cannabis-related companies, and at least 50 of those jobs have been at the life science company EVIO Inc., currently trading on the OTCQB under the symbol SGBYD. Located in Bend, Oregon, the company operates in a very unique niche in the sector: a chain of nine EVIO analytical testing laboratories staffed by professional scientists that provide accredited analytical testing services and scientific research to the regulated cannabis industry in five states coast-to-coast.
The company’s EVIO Labs division provides state-mandated ancillary services in place to ensure the safety and quality of the nation’s cannabis supply- an enviable position indeed. Legislated revenues to guarantee the safety of the nation’s cannabis supply. Genius.
Early this year, the company reported 1.5 million dollars in revenue in their Q2 2017 financials for last year’s harvest season from four analytical laboratories testing cannabis samples in Oregon. In the past 12 months, the company has added operating EVIO Labs in Sacramento, California, serving the world famous Humboldt County area, Denver, Colorado, and Southborough, MA to their portfolio; additionally, the company and has two EVIO Labs currently working through the respective accreditation processes in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Costa Mesa, California.
With 29 states representing 190 million Americans or over 60% of the total US population with some form of access to legal cannabis, and with eight of those states having full recreational sales in place for cannabis products, the annual harvest is of great interest to many observers. There will be an estimated 1 million pounds of cannabis harvested across the country over the next 8 weeks.
That’s an estimate that’s probably on the low side, but is nonetheless a truly groundbreaking number, as it represents at a minimum 2.5 billion dollars of wholesale business that is not going into the pockets of criminal drug cartels. When a retail markup and diversification of that raw product into the myriad of edible, oil, analgesic, and other products developed by entrepreneurs across the nation is broken down, that number will likely be pushing 10 billion dollars of revenue generated by the nation’s cannabis industry in 2017.
Ten billion dollars removed from the clutches of criminal cartels running guns and trafficking in women and children and financing terror. Rather, those dollars are flowing into the tax coffers of state and city governments while employing thousands of people, freeing up thousands of law enforcement officers across the country to focus on more pressing criminal matters affecting citizens every day, and of course delivering on the American Dream every day to countless small business entrepreneurs.
This speculation ties in nicely with EVIO’s recent announcement of the consolidation of their stock structure. When we first discovered this deal last year, it was trading on the dreaded pink sheet exchange with a fully diluted stock structure in excess of 1 billion shares. Last week, the company finalized a new stock structure much more appealing and comfortable to investors looking for an opportunity to make some profit on what is the fastest growing agricultural sector in the world.
credit:420intel.com
