Star Tribune
Le Sueur’s old Green Giant plant could become a cannabis-growing site
LE SUEUR – Chris McPhillips knew more than four years ago producing cannabis would be a lot more profitable than selling it.
It’s the next gold mine, oil industry, the wave of the future. And the Twin Cities businessman was determined to get in early on the action. What he didn’t know in 2020 was the millions of dollars, the former Green Giant factory, and the support of a greater Minnesota city he would need to to make it work.
McPhillips, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs, is waiting for Minnesota’s Office of Cannabis Management to start awarding licenses to companies ready to grow cannabis and marijuana that will soon be for sale across the state. But he has built-in advantages that could position his new enterprise, Minnesota Valley Cannabis Co., to take a hefty share in the billion-dollar-plus industry that’s poised to take over Minnesota.
“When we spoke to the city of Le Sueur, they didn’t balk at us coming here,” McPhillips said. “I decided to invest the money that I’ve made here.”
McPhillips is getting outsized attention for his audacious plan to turn a 50,000-square-foot building built in the 1960s into a massive cannabis-growing operation. He bought the building, one of four in the former Green Giant complex in Le Sueur’s industrial neighborhood, about two years back. Once he secures a manufacturing license, he plans to invest up to $10 million into the facility and hire up to 250 workers — 50 full-time, up to 200 part-time — to start operations by the end of next year.
Chris McPhillips, the owner of Minnesota Valley Cannabis Company, and his dog, Scrappy, pose for a portrait inside the former Green Giant canning building he bought in Le Sueur, Minn. (Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
McPhillips owns Crown Automotive, an auto parts distribution company out of Bloomington. He’s also worked with partners to found CrunkBabies, a Twin Cities-based clothing line. But he switched interest to cannabis once word came from state leaders that Minnesota was interested in legalizing the sale of recreational marijuana.
“There’s only a few markets that come in our history that are brand new,” he said.
Industry experts expect Minnesota’s retail cannabis sales to top $1 billion once they start in 2025. Some financial firms predict Minnesota’s industry could hit $1.5 billion in annual sales and serve one out of eight residents by 2029; other firms are more optimistic.
He needed to make money. When he found that spruce top buyers would come to nearby towns like Floodwood and Embarrass, he decided to give it a try.
“I just kind of went with it,” Buschman said. “I got better at it. It’s not a common thing.”
The season is short. It starts in early September, ideally after the first freeze so the tops will stay green and fresh. It ends in early November, when stores have typically stocked up all the fresh spruce they’ll be able to sell through the holidays.
Buschman looks for areas where the spruce is mostly short, in the 9- to 15-foot range. He’ll snip off the top 2 to 3 feet. He’ll spend several hours or days in a good location, cutting and tying the tops into the bundles of 10 buyers prefer. Years ago, he would sometimes have help from his brother or friends. Mostly, he’s been on his own. In some seasons, he would use his black ATV — a three-wheeler — and a makeshift trailer with a bed-frame propped up as one of the sides to haul the tops from the woods. Other years, he goes by bicycle and on foot into the bogs and drags the tops out with a sled.
“I used to do it straight by the book,” he said. “Completely legitimate. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I cut them in a legitimate place or not, he’s taking them from me. It’s become a head-butting battle, this Bermel character and me.”
Bermel said he’s frustrated, too, and that sometimes as fast as he can write a ticket, people are back cutting more. He likens it to any other kind of theft, but in this case people are stealing trees.
Selling bikes is interesting, but being in the woods in spring, gathering maple sap, is addictive, a distinction Mark and Melinda Spinler know well.
The Spinlers live about 7 miles outside of Grand Marais, the small town on the North Shore that was more quaint than trendy when the couple moved there in 1984.
Mountain biking wasn’t yet a thing when the Spinlers arrived in Grand Marais. But they were into it, and opened the town’s first bike shop, which they operated for about 30 years before selling it.
Now, instead of two-wheelers, they peddle wood-burning stoves. Also, Mark has a chimney-cleaning business. And together, come March, he and Melinda, both 65, decamp to two relatively small stands of maple trees — one they own and one the state owns — to begin a process that will produce about 270 gallons of syrup, which they market to local businesses.
“Northern Minnesota is a wonderful place to live,” Melinda said. “But a hard place to make a living.”
Mark Spinler returns his chain saw to the sugar shack on his Grand Marais, Minn., property after trimming some downed limbs that had fallen on the network of tubing he uses to collect sap from maple trees. (Jeff Wheeler/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
It’s the syrup business that has embroiled the Spinlers in a standoff with the Department of Natural Resources that speaks to a larger debate about public lands and their proper use. Similar issues have affected northeast Minnesota residents since at least 1926, when the border region that would become the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was first established as a roadless area.
But the Spinlers’ brouhaha has nothing to do with paddling or camping.
At issue instead is a 13-acre tract of relatively isolated state land adjoining their property that they have leased from the DNR for about 25 years.
A Richfield man said he was mad at being targeted by thieves when he shot at a pickup truck and killed a woman in the fleeing vehicle, according to a criminal complaint.
Luke Joshua Cain was charged Thursday in Hennepin County District Court with second-degree murder in connection with the shooting of Sofia Rose O’Hotto, 26, of Minneapolis, outside his home in the 6200 block of 5th Avenue S.
O’Hotto was shot in the back of the head of 3:30 a.m. and found in the pickup about a half-hour later after a 911 call sent Minneapolis police to the 4500 block of Hiawatha Avenue S.
According to the complaint:
A report of gunfire sent officers to Cain’s home, where he told police that he saw several people appearing to steal items from his van that was parked out front.
Cain said he confronted the people, who got in the pickup and drove off. He did not say anything about shooting at them.
Police interviewed Cain again on Wednesday and identified some of the items officers had recovered from the pickup, when they found the vehicle soon after the shooting.
Cain acknowledged that no one in the pickup had a weapon or threatened him in any manner. He then admitted firing two shots at the pickup as it left.
