The Waukesha County Village of Wales (population 3,000) is celebrating the opening of Lake County Growers, the village’s first retail cannabis store, in a very special situation. The grand opening is scheduled for Saturday, August 24th from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and will include giveaways and product samples.

The 1,500-square-foot store at 200 W. Summit Ave., which will share space with Rohaven Holistic, may also be the only woman-owned cannabis business in the county, if not the state, according to Rebecca Ramage, who initially founded the company with Maureen Lawrenz as a hemp wholesale operation. The two women have also combined their two families — Ramage calls them a “farm-ily” — and spouses and children all help manufacture and distribute their Gold Leaf-branded CBD products.

A retail store wasn’t the couple’s first goal in 2018, when the U.S. Farm Bill lifted restrictions and made it easier to grow and sell hemp products across the country. Looking for a way to support her parents’ family farm in Iowa as they neared retirement, and noticing changing laws across the country to support legal, smokable cannabis, Ramage floated the idea of ​​a hemp growing operation. Eventually, the idea found new roots in Waukesha County, and Lake County Growers was formed, even though state law prohibits so-called delta-9 cannabis with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) levels above 0.3%, the level at which users can get high.

Farmers who are farmers for the first time

“As first-time farmers, we thought it would be fun to run a growing operation,” says Ramage. “We hand-planted 10 acres with 22,000 individual seedlings.”

The first harvest, which Ramage says was more akin to horticulture than farming, produced an abundance of plants. So many that the “Farm-ily” eventually whittled down to five acres, which were sold in bulk to other CBD product manufacturers.

“There are so many misconceptions about cannabis,” says Ramage, the company’s CEO. “The industry is fairly new and it’s been a rocky road to get to where we are now. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. People don’t know what they don’t know.”

Ramage had originally hoped that Wisconsin would legalize “marijuana,” as it is known in its more familiar form. Since that hasn’t happened, Lake County Growers currently abides by the state’s current laws and continually tests its crop and resulting products to ensure they meet agricultural standards and stay on the correct side of the Delta 9 limit.

“I can imagine that there will be nationwide legalization at some point,” she says. “Then everything would be more efficient. I would support that.”

“Lake Country Growers currently has a surplus of product and has no plants in the ground this year,” Ramage added.