First outdoor Social Equity company on the East Coast prepares its third harvest in Hubbardston
In order to get to and from their legal two-and-a-half acre cannabis farm in Hubbardston, Boey Bertold and Lisa Mauriello have to drive past the prison where the former once did two-and-half years behind bars for trafficking weed.
The story is legendary in Mass marijuana circles. Bertold was arrested with 293 pounds of bud in Natick in 2007, the result of a joint bust by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Massachusetts State Police, and local cops. Seventeen years later, he’s growing legal crops with his partner and their team at Paper Crane Cannabis, the first Social Equity-owned outdoor cannabis farm on the East Coast.
“When he was busted, we folded a lot of paper cranes,” Mauriello said. “There’s a Japanese legend that if you fold a thousand paper cranes it’s good luck, so during the time when he was fighting the case we just got to folding paper cranes as basically a meditation, and something to keep the hands and the mind busy because it was extremely stressful.”
“When I was locked up,” Bertold said, “weed was decriminalized in 2008, so the wheels were turning from that point. The move toward decriminalization was huge and it was definitely a little salt in the wound being locked up with another year-and-a-half to go.”
For Bertold, though, there wasn’t any question that he’d get back in the game. He started growing back in high school, throwing seeds from brick weed into buckets in one of his father’s shade houses. It was ordinary for his surroundings—South Florida, in the 1980s. As Mauriello explained, Bertold is a “third generation cannabis entrepreneur. It was just the way that he grew up.”
Bertold continued, “My dad and his brother were transporters—international logistics specialists. Growing up in South Florida, that was a really robust trafficking environment, with a lot of herb coming in from the Caribbean and Central and South America. But I just started growing for fun.”
Over a number of trips to California during those halcyon days, specifically to party at the Reggae on the River festival in Humboldt County, Bertold learned organic growing practices from a family friend in that iconic region.
Around 2012, Bertold and Mauriello “started thinking about forming a company” in the medical marijuana market, but said “the barriers to entry to the program were extremely high.” In addition to financial hurdles, as a convicted dealer with two trafficking felonies on his record, Bertold was excluded from being able to participate. But “as soon as the recreational law passed [in 2016],” he said, “the conversation began.”
“That’s when we just knew what we were going to do,” Mauriello recalled. “It was important—for [Boey], his legacy, our family. … this conviction was this kind of mark of shame, a shadow, but to actually transform it into something positive.”
Bertold said “the lowest barrier to entry for any cultivator is an outdoor grow.” Luckily for them, that’s what they do. On a recent tour of the farm, Paper Crane partner Ben Sandrof showed off their strict organic practices, like the kelp and fish emulsion they feed plants and the 62-foot long living-soil beds in their 2,000 square-foot hoop house.
“This is how Boey and I were growing for years,” Sandrof said, “So when we opened Paper Crane, it wasn’t a question of whether we were going to use these nutrients—it’s just how we know how to grow. … Exacting standards are the trick of the trade—growing the best flower we can, taking care of the dirt the best we can.”
In their first year, 2022, “it was really dry.” “Which is ideal for growing weed,” Mauriello said. Last year, she said they had “some challenges due to excessive rain,” but that forced them to “improve the landscape.” “We learned which areas of the field we needed to add some drainage, and it helped us with our selection of genetics. We feel like that’s really the secret to success—finding the right strains to grow on this farm.”
“The recurring theme in this story is that it does take a lot of hard work,” Bertold added, “and it does take luck.”
This fall, Mauriello said, they had the weather on their side.
“With so many days of full sun,” they were “able to let everything go to its peak ripeness, so that’s going to contribute to a really awesome crop.”
“We’re doing what we came to do,” Bertold said.
