Wales Welcomes its First Cannabis Shop

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Cannabis Connection

In what certainly must be a first, the Waukesha County Village of Wales (population about 3,000), will celebrate the opening of Lake Country Growers, the village’s first retail cannabis shop. The grand opening is scheduled for Saturday, August 24, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and will feature giveaways and product sampling.

The 1,500-square-foot retail location at 200 W. Summit Ave., which will share space with Rohaven Holistic, may also be the only women-owned cannabis business in the county if not the state, according to Rebecca Ramage who, along with Maureen Lawrenz, cofounded the business first as a wholesale hemp-growing operation. The two women also blended their two families – Ramage calls them a “farm-ily” – and spouses and kids all help produce and distribute their Gold Leaf brand of CBD products.

A retail business was not the pair’s first goal back 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’ Iowa family farm as they neared retirement and noting the changing laws across the country that supported legal, smokeable cannabis, Ramage introduced the idea of a hemp growing operation. Eventually, the idea re-rooted itself in Waukesha County and Lake Country Growers was established despite state laws prohibiting so-called Delta-9 cannabis with a tetrahyrocannabinol (THC) level above 0.3%. That’s the level after which users can get high.

First-Time Farmers

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

The first crop, which Ramage said was more like horticulture than agriculture in its processes, yielded an abundance of plants. So much so that the “farm-ily” eventually cut back to five acres, which was sold in bulk to other CBD product producers.

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

Ramage initially hoped that Wisconsin would legalize “marijuana” as it’s known in its more familiar role. Absent that, Lake Country Growers currently does everything according to current state statutes and its crop and resulting products are tested, retested, and then tested again to make sure it adhere to agricultural standards and stay on the right side of the Delta-9 line.

“I do eventually envision national legalization,” she says. “Then everything would become more efficient. I would support that.”

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