Remember the old days when the only way to get ahold of some green was with a medical marijuana card? This was before you could pick up a shiny package with a suspiciously high dosage from the same gas station where you get your $50 tank of gas and a king-size Reese’s. Much like coffee or alcohol, marijuana is a substance that has proliferated to become easily accessible from a variety of sources, and not all of them are created equal.
This brings us to a hot and sunny morning at the medical marijuana production facility for Texas Goodblend, which I will henceforth refer to as “the ranch.” Texas Compassionate Use Program (TCUP) makes it possible for qualified physicians to prescribe THC to patients, and Goodblend is one of the companies licensed to provide products to patients, such as edibles, tinctures, beverages, topicals, and – as of recently – vaporizers.
Nicholas Fallon and Terrence Baugh, market president and marketing manager respectively, handed me a lab coat that made me feel like a mad scientist and led me through a tour of the whole life of the plant from growing to distribution, which takes place in a series of shipping containers. Their office is filled with 30-40 cameras, covering every inch of what is happening in the approximately 250-by-250-foot ranch. The Texas Department of Public Safety has strict rules for licensed dispensaries; Fallon joked DPS regulates them “as if the cannabis is plutonium.”
The Mother Plants
The first container houses big plants known as “mothers.” Only these female plants can be kept here; if males show up, the plants start to seed out and can no longer be used because they turn into hermaphrodites. (This is often an issue with home growers.) The mother plants are nourished with water that has undergone reverse osmosis and go into a vegetative state for three weeks while receiving intense sunlight for 18 hours a day. The plants are all genetically identical to each other. Once the plants start to receive 12 hours of sunlight instead of 18, they begin to flower.
Vegetation and Flowering
In the next container, the team keeps plants just out of vegetation, pumping carbon dioxide back into the shipping container. In the third container, we ran into cultivation lead Richard Ritz, who talked to us about the flowering plants we were looking at and the seven strains of weed they produce, which are a company secret I cannot reveal, although I can tell you that the whole container smelled like pineapple. Ritz told me that all the extra oxygen in the container keeps him energized and in a good mood. “You can’t be an angry farmer,” he added. Apparently the plants will know.
Extraction
The extraction container reminded me of a scene from Breaking Bad. Here, lead extraction technician Logan Van Buren walked me through the science of extracting oil from the plant. Once the flower is cut, Van Buren uses ice-cold ethanol for extraction. This process leaves the part of the plant material they don’t want in the plant, he explained, making it easier to extract what they do want. Fallon jumped in with an analogy to help me understand. “If you’re making coffee, you’re putting coffee grounds and pouring liquid over it. He’s doing something similar with ethanol.”
The cannabis is put in bags and spun in something akin to a washing machine, which agitates the cannabis so that the ethanol can move into the air pockets to extract everything. In the next stage, they remove the ethanol by putting the product in a flask that heats it up to the boiling point of ethanol, turning it into a vapor. The whole process takes about 10 hours. Once they remove all the ethanol they used to extract, what remains is a pure cannabis oil. Through decarboxylation (heating it), the THC is activated. This is part of what happens when you use a vaporizer.
Testing
In the next container, analytical processing manager Adam Richardson helped answer the question you may be asking yourself: Why bother with medical marijuana when I can get THC products practically anywhere these days? Much like every other industry in the United States, the hemp industry (the term for the more commercial side of production and distribution) isn’t as regulated as you might think. While there are good players at work, there are also many bad ones. Dosages are incorrectly labeled, test results differ from what they claim, and sometimes what companies are really selling is repackaged old product with degraded THC.
If you are a veteran with PTSD or a cancer patient, you need your ingredients to be high quality and your dosages to be precise. That’s where Richardson comes in with full panel testing. He tests the genetics and the potency, makes sure the plants are healthy and optimized, and tests the oil in different stages. He tests for residual solvents to make sure you’re not smoking or inhaling anything that’s not good for you. Cannabis is like a sponge, Richardson explained, and it can easily absorb elements of the soil it grows in, healthy or not.
Cooking
Fallon referred to the cooking container as “Willy Wonka Land.” Instead of Wonka, we found Emily Greene, production and manufacturing manager. This container is essentially the kitchen, and Greene is the chef. Everything is made by hand using the pour-and-scrape method. Greene explained the two different types of gummies, gelatin and pectin (vegan-based), and showed us the conveyor belt where they cool the chocolate, rigged with a window AC unit.
Distribution
In the final container, we talked to distribution manager Alex Alvarado. Alvarado manages drivers, makes sure inventory is accurate, and gets products to stores. There are currently three ways for them to distribute: through their stores, through delivery to your house, or through partnering with a doctor to have patients pick up products within a four-hour window. Each one of these methods comes with its own set of logistical headaches and remains one of the major barriers for folks utilizing TCUP.
The common thread with each team member was studious dedication to the mission: to deliver safe, effective medicine to patients with integrity in every step of the process. Considering how tight-lipped they are about the operation, keeping the origins of the plants and even the exact address of the ranch private, it was fascinating to get a rare glimpse at what’s happening back at the ranch.
Subscribe to The Austin Chronic newsletter to get the latest column and other cannabis news delivered straight to your inbox.
This article appears in July 24 • 2026.
