The Green Promise, The Rotting Surplus: Is New York Failing Its Farmers?
We’ve spent a lot of time watching the OCM play offense, going after “bad actors” like Omnium Canna for breaking the rules. And that’s good—accountability is key. But there’s a much bleaker story unfolding on the other side of the supply chain, and it’s not about rule-breakers. It’s about the rule-followers who are getting crushed.
As videos and reports from across the state show, New York’s small-scale, social-equity farmers are in crisis. They did exactly what the state asked: they took the risk, secured the conditional licenses (AUCs), and grew.
The result? A catastrophic market bottleneck.
The Perfect Storm of Good Intentions
Here’s the core of the problem: New York’s “Seeding Opportunity” initiative put cultivation before retail. It was a novel idea meant to get equity farmers a head start.
But then, the retail rollout—plagued by lawsuits, administrative delays, and a glacial pace—stalled. While hundreds of conditional cultivators were harvesting, the number of legal (CAURD) dispensaries trickled into the single, then double digits.
The result was a disaster: a massive surplus of 2023 and 2024 biomass with nowhere to go. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds of product, grown by the very people this program was designed to empower, sitting in storage, losing potency, or flat-out rotting.
The Human Cost of a Systemic Failure
Let’s be clear about who this is hurting. This isn’t “Big Canna” or multi-state operators (MSOs) with deep cash reserves. This is the “small-scale operator.”
This is the legacy-to-legal entrepreneur, the distressed hemp farmer, and the BIPOC-owned business that invested every last dollar into grow-lights and farmland, believing in the state’s promise.
Now, those same operators are facing a three-headed monster:
Massive Debt: They have no cash flow to pay back the loans they took to build their farms.
Illicit Competition: While their product sits, the illicit “grey” market is flourishing, undercutting the legal market on price and convenience.
Predatory Investors: As their businesses teeter on the edge of extinction, predatory investors are circling, offering “indecent proposals” that would strip them of their equity.
This is more than a market correction; it’s an equity failure.
A “Lifeline” Shows the Path Forward
The situation is dire, but there was a glimpse of a solution. The “Cannabis Growers Showcases” (CGS) program—the pop-up farmers’ markets authorized by the OCM—was a critical lifeline.
It was the only thing that worked. It allowed farmers and processors to partner with retailers and sell directly to the public, creating the cash flow they desperately needed to survive. It was the kind of “tinkering” and “flexibility” we’ve been asking for.
That program was allowed to expire, but thankfully, regulators seem to have gotten the message. New legislation is bringing the showcases back as “Cannabis Showcase Events.” This isn’t just a “nice to have”; it is an essential emergency measure to keep the small farmer from going under.
The Bottom Line
The irony is that while farmers are drowning in a surplus from last year, the OCM is already warning of a potential shortage for next year. Why? Because many of those same farmers are now pulling back, unable or unwilling to risk getting burned again.
The state is trying to balance freedom and fairness, but it’s failing its most important partners. Cracking down on the illicit market is only half the job. The other, more critical half is protecting the “good actors” who followed the rules and are now paying the price for the system’s failures.
The success of New York’s model won’t be measured by how many “bad” operators it punishes, but by how many “good” ones it manages to save.