Fife Symington IV is the CEO and managing director of Copperstate Farms, a vertically integrated cannabis operation he launched in 2016 in Arizona. This year, Copperstate Farms was named to the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies in the U.S.
Copperstate started as a 40-acre greenhouse; today it’s a 1.7 million-square-foot canopy colossus.
In 2019, Copperstate launched dispensary brand Sol Flower, which now has five locations, including one that features a cafe and wellness classroom open to the public.
In this episode of “Seed to CEO,” Symington will share:
- Expertise from commercial agriculture that can be applied in cannabis.
- Developing a long-term business vision.
- How to upgrade, update and expand your greenhouse grow.
- Keys to low-cost production.
- The importance of community involvement, especially when you are getting your business started.
Who is Fife Symington?
Fife Symington IV is the CEO and managing director of Copperstate Farms, a vertically integrated cannabis operation he co-founded in 2016 in Arizona. In the 1990s, Symington co-founded and developed several commercial-scale greenhouse operations in Mexico, including International Greenhouse Produce in Culiacan, Sinaloa, and Nueva Agronomia de Nayarit in Jala, Nayarit, as well as Apache Produce across the border in Nogales, Arizona. Collectively, these greenhouses covered 850 acres and shipped more than 175 million pounds of vegetables to the U.S. each year. In 2016, Fife transitioned his vegetable-growing expertise to medical cannabis with the purchase of a 40-acre glass greenhouse in Snowflake, Arizona, that became Copperstate. Today, Copperstate’s greenhouse operations cover 1.7 million square feet of canopy, and the company employs more than 700.
