I got to visit Farmer Tom Lauerman Wednesday morning to check out the harvesting process on his farm.

But as often happens when I spend time out in Washington’s highly creative cannabis community, I ventured onto an interesting side project that Lauerman is working on.

Terpworks is a new business he’s launching this year and hopes to eventually turn into a regional or national franchise.

What is it? It’s a mobile operation that goes to the site of a farm, harvests on site and then processes the material – either into trimmed buds or concentrates like hash, wax or tinctures.

“There’s a need out there for this,” said Lauerman, who’s already lining up customers. “There are a lot of people getting into the cannabis business, and they to some extent know how to grow, but they don’t know how to process their plants.”

Lauerman is setting up a vehicle (big trailer sort of thing) that will have all the concentrate processing equipment ready to go. It also has a sleeping area for the two-person team that will manage the operation.

“We can even work with I-502 businesses, I talked to an attorney about it,” Lauerman said. “We’re basically just another contractor, like an electrician. So we roll up into a grower/processor’s canopy space, roll in and process for them.”

One benefit of being mobile is that the grower can watch or join in the processing, and can learn more about it. Also, their marijuana doesn’t leave their facility, so they don’t have to worry about shipping it back and forth, Lauerman said.

“Nobody wants to travel with pounds and pounds of weed, so this way we can do everything there,” Lauerman said.

And with time-strapped I-502 growers, it could also help them get product to market faster, he said.

Also, because the mobile operation doesn’t actually transport any marijuana, it’s free to roam between state borders, harvesting in Oregon or elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

“We think this is going to be really good,” Lauerman said, adding that he already has a handful of investors and has hired a few workers to kick things off.

He said customers are welcome to call him at (360) 910-2972 if they’re interested.

Cheers,
-SueVo (sue.vorenberg@columbian.com)