Developer Sees Big Opportunity for Vader Pot Farm

When it comes to growing marijuana, Brandon Milton has no idea what he’s doing. Milton, a Seattle supplier of German auto parts, has never grown a pot plant. He’s hardly even smoked pot.

“I smoked it twice in college. It was pretty much a failure,” he said during an interview last week. “I’m probably about as good as Bill Clinton. I don’t think I inhaled it right.

Despite his inexperience, Milton hopes to successfully cultivate as many as 21,000 pot plants in a 30-acre industrial complex in Vader. If all goes according to plan, the business could yield as much as $21 million in gross revenues annually.

“It almost just seems like fantasy. It’s like hang an extra zero or two on every number you’re used to seeing in a business plan,” the 39-year-old father of two young boys said.

If Milton’s plan is successful, he will become one of the area’s biggest producers of marijuana following Washington voters’ decision last year to legalize the drug. He is among a small army of entrepreneurs, some more experienced in the marijuana business than others, who are hoping to reap millions of dollars from the world’s first legal, taxed and regulated marijuana market.

Milton is originally from a small Illinois town and moved to Seattle in 1997 to be with his wife, Sarah, who is from Bainbridge Island. In 2005, he bought 30 acres in Vader for his car parts business, Absolute German. The idea, he said, was to find a warehouse half way between Portland and Seattle from where he could warehouse and ship parts for Porsches, BMWs, Volkswagens and other German cars. He is finishing work on a 15,000 square foot warehouse on the property, at 747 Atlas Road.

Now, though, Milton plans to use at least some of the warehouse for a marijuana growing, packaging and processing enterprise. He has applied for three state licenses to produce as much as 90,000 square feet of marijuana (30,000 feet for each license.) He has also applied for a license to package the product and process it into oils, food and other products.

The Vader City Council is expected to vote next week to alter the city’s zoning to clear the way for Milton’s pot enterprise. Mayor Ken Smith said last week that not everyone in town is happy with Milton’s business plans, but the city has no choice but to throw open its doors to the industry.

“We’re embracing the inevitable,” Smith, a retired FBI agent, said last week.

For now, Milton said he plans to grow most of the marijuana outside, in contrast to many of the indoor grow operations in the offing throughout the state. Milton said he’ll hire “a master gardener” and other pot experts to help him cultivate the product. As the business grows, he said, he’ll build more warehouses and grow plants indoors. He said he could lease some of the acreage to other marijuana producers. And, lastly, he still plans to open a car parts warehouse on the property.

Milton stressed that he plans to start small and grow the enterprise over time. But he said the operation could eventually employ as many as 75 people.

For Milton, the new legitimate marijuana industry represents a challenge, a potential cash windfall and an opportunity to change the world for the better.

“It’s an issue that I’ve followed for years just out of curiosity,” he said. “I don’t have a background either smoking it or growing it, but it’s been a point of curiosity for me because I think it’s high time we had a change with common-sense drug policy.”

Milton said he proudly voted for I-502, the 2012 initiative that legalized pot in Washington State, because he wants the U.S. government to spend less money on drug enforcement policies that he sees as “a losing endeavor.” He said he hopes legal pot will be easier to get for marijuana patients who have found the drug helpful in treating an ever-wider array of ailments. Milton said he also wants take the marijuana supply out of the control of Mexican cartels that are killing their fellow citizens.

“It’s a basic humanitarian issue,” he said. “We’re going to save Mexican lives by reducing the need for that product from Mexico.”

Milton speaks in a deep voice and chooses his words carefully. He sometimes pauses between sentences and, despite his commitment to his ideas, presents himself as unexcitable.

“I think he’s pretty insightful and he’s quiet,” said Talima Pearson, Milton’s college roommate at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where Milton earned an undergraduate degree in psychology. “He’s really smart, and when he’s interested in pursuing something, he really learns a lot about it before he decides which way to go.”

“If the whole legalization of marijuana and the legal production of it just turn out to be a real big disaster socially, then I could see him being the first to decide that the plug should be pulled on it,” said Pearson, a 41-year-old research professor specializing in infectious diseases at an Arizona university.

Milton said that, despite what he sees as the benefits of legalizing pot, he realizes he will be profiting from the sale of a drug. Still, he stresses that marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as meth, heroin or cocaine or even alcohol. There are no marijuana overdose deaths on record, he noted.

“I think it does a lot less harm in the world of addiction and abuse than alcohol does, and we don’t think twice about alcohol because it’s been woven into the fabric of our society for generations,” Milton said.

“Yes,” he continued. “There will be people who abuse marijuana, and my response to that is I’m a believer in the value of personal choice, personal accountability and freedom of choice. I believe strongly that it should not be the government’s role to tell you that what you can and can’t do in your spare time, what you can and can’t put in your body.”

Milton said he hopes that by emphasizing the benefits of a legal marijuana market — jobs and tax revenues with relatively little environmental impact — he’ll be able to win over skeptics. For months, Milton has been meeting with Vader residents and city officials over coffee and speaking at public meetings.

“I’ve been down there once a week talking to anyone who will listen,” he said.

Vader, which has a population of just more than 600, is considered a modern-day ghost town. Milton noted that it once had been “a real happening place” with an opera house, saloons and hotels. The economy, he said, was largely reliant on a sawmill and factory that produced clay bricks and plumbing pipes. But in 1914, the sawmill burned down and the clay pipe factor closed. People took out insurance policies on their homes, set them alight and moved away, Milton said.

He said marijuana could be the industry to revive the town exactly 100 years after the town collapsed.

“I would be just tickled to think that I would be the guy that brings industry back to Vader and play a positive role in bringing some economic life to that town,” he said.