The biting cold air outside is a stark contrast to the wave of humidity that engulfs you inside a greenhouse. It’s too hot for winter jackets and my camera lens fogs. Small steel fans whir loudly and metal halide lights blaze, trying to mimic the sun. Bags of soil sit ready for plants. Something is always being watered.

Happy plants produce weed that tests high in THC, which in turn sells for top dollar.

“I think [Josh's] plants are going to dominate,” says Miles. “They’re like prehistoric monsters. They’re going to yield a ton of weed and we’ll be the only ones doing those strains.”

At night, if they’re not holding a brainstorming session, the crew hangs out watching movies, reading, making bonfires or taking dabs. But during the day, “imagine trying to run a multi-million dollar business when you’re high all the time. It’s not going to work,” says Connor.

Just like a tech startup, a pot farm is all about quick scalability, says Zaytsev. In tech you try to create a minimum viable product and then work on turning 10 interested people into 10,000 interested people. That can eat up lots of resources.

Right now, the farm houses 2,200 plants in various stages of growth, with capacity for over 7,000. Each plant, depending on its size, needs one to two gallons of water per day, so the farm ends up using 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of water every week. The site sits next to an irrigation well that Grandpa Deife installed, so their water is free. Miles estimates this saves the business thousands of dollars per month. But the 4,000 gallons of propane they use costs about $2,000 per month. And the 800 amp service panel is the same used to power a Walmart Supercenter. “We have the capacity to max it out,” says Alex with a grin.

Luckily, Washington state has some of the cheapest power in the country due to hydropower generated by dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, according to Washington Public Utility District Association Executive Director George Caan. Right now Amerifarms is spending roughly $10,000 on electricity each month, but it’s currently only using a little over half of the lights in the greenhouses, so some months the bill will nearly double.