Pot Farm

The author of "Pot Farm" tells the story of a summer spent working on a medical marijuana farm in California. The author's wife is a masseuse on the farm, and the author himself is a field hand. The author's observations of the farm's inhabitants and the farm's operations are both funny and insightful.

After eight months in his childhood home helping his mother through her bout with cancer, Matthew Frank and his wife were themselves desperate for comfort. They found sanctuary in the most unlikely place amid a collection of outcasts and eccentrics on a plot of land miles outside their comfort zone: a mostly medical marijuana farm in California. Pot Farm details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back. There is also Lady Wanda, the massive, elusive, wealthy, and heavily armed businesswoman who owns the farm and runs it from beneath a housedress and a hat of peacock feathers. Frank explores the various roles that allow this industry to work from field pickers to tractor drivers, cooks to yoga instructors, managers to snipers, illegal immigrants to legal revisionists, and the delivery crew to the hospice workers on the other end. His book also looks at the blurry legislation regulating the marijuana industry as well as the day-to-day logistics of running such an operation and all the relationships that brings into play. Through firsthand observations and experiences (some influenced by the farm's cash crop), interviews, and research, Pot Farm exposes a thriving but unsung faction of contemporary American culture. Review: Pot Farm is a simultaneously beautiful, dark and life-affirming story that recounts the summer Frank and his wife spent as workers at a California collective, Frank as a field hand, and his wife as an on-site masseuse. It's a book I would've paid to read. - John Warner, Inside Higher Ed Pot Farm is the curious and compelling tale of a hazy season spent harvesting medical marijuana. The cast of characters rivals those found in the finest comic fiction, except these folks are real, and really peculiar. Pot Farm is smart, sly, revelatory, often laugh-out-loud funny, and entirely legal. - Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire Sex, politics, intrigue, crime, adventure, life and death it's all here, in a strangely compelling hybrid of action flick meets postmodern philosophical meditation meets Cheech and Chong. This compulsively readable expose from a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator has it all, including a cast of outcast characters who simply jump off the page. - Gina Frangello, author of Slut Lullabies