That Good Life by Anna Ervin
Pura Vida
When Jason and Jennifer Hicks packed up their family and moved to Costa Rica for a few years, they learned to embrace the Pura Vida lifestyle. I recently had a chance to visit their facilities in Durant, Oklahoma, and found that Hicksford Farms is the perfect representation of “the pure life.” But what does that mean? HIcksford Farms is owned and operated by the Hicks and Crawford families. I wanted to learn more about how these families were bringing Pura Vida to Oklahoma medical cannabis, so I took the opportunity to sit down with some of the crew; including Lead Cultivators Jory Hicks and Kory Bailey, Media Manager Brett Hicks, as well as two of the owners, Jason and Jennifer Hicks. Jory explained that Pura Vida “is a part of Costa Rica’s culture. They don’t mean pure life when they say it. It literally translates to ‘pure life,’ but they use it in many situations as ‘it’s all good,’ or as a way to keep going and keep grinding through the hard times and the hard work.” “It shows in their attitudes towards each other,” he continued, “and that spoke to us because we’re coming from a different culture where people aren’t necessarily that caring with each other. There’s nothing in our language that’s really deep in our culture like that. There, you’re going to hear it every two seconds. So it permeates. You’re saying it, and it becomes how people are.” Jennifer added that “we feel like the cannabis culture has really adopted that for us here in Oklahoma. So that is where we tie that in, it helps us come together as a community. We’re reaching for something natural, helpful, and pure.” Pura Vida is appropriately the name of Hicksford’s new CO2 extracted, full-spectrum oil, but we’ll dive more into that later.
A Day in the Life
As I toured their facilities, I couldn’t help but wonder what a typical day in such a large operation might look like. When I asked Jory, he informed me that the job involves a lot more plumbing and electrical work than actually getting to work with the plants.
“There are 20-30 HVAC units in all the rooms, so at any given point one of them is doing something weird,” Jory said, “so we’ll tinker with that, get our water made, record our temperatures and get all of our data recorded, then we set out and make a plan for the day. As far as taking care of the gardens, the building, there’s a lot of stuff going on.” Hicksford Farms is currently working with over 3,000 plants in their 7,000 square foot operation. They offer 14 commercial strains at their CannaMed dispensary, with over 30 currently in testing. With that many different plants under their roof, I had to know if they play favorites. Which strain is their pride and joy? Brett explained that picking a favorite is harder than it looks. “It’s so cool to be vertically integrated because the way that we sell it is actually a huge indicator of how we grow it. Our budtenders and our staff at our dispensary are always talking about the medical side of it, the terpenes. What are you trying to solve with this plant? What is this plant giving to you that you want more of ? It then educates our grow that this is what’s missing. This is what’s missing from our lab, what’s missing from the market. “So it’s hard for me to say which is my favorite,” she continued. “I mean, I have different ones that taste amazing one week or something that I use for pain at certain times... But all of them are so intentionally picked, that there aren’t any that we get bored of. They are all here for a really good reason. Everyone who grows it and sells it knows that reason.” “Acai Gelato is my favorite thing right now because we’re about to harvest it, and when we’re about to harvest a plant it’s just so gorgeous. This is our first time getting to harvest a strain-specific room.” Making a room strain-specific allows lead cultivators Jory Hicks and Kory Bailey to truly hone-in on the needs of that individual strain. Jory tells me that having more than one strain in a room makes it quite difficult to make adjustments between cycles. “The more rooms we get, the better the current strains we have will get because the more space they’ll have. Eventually, maybe it’ll just be two strains in a room.”
