Northern Michigan University has plans for a new indoor cannabis agriculture center

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The school is going to dedicate space to exploring indoor cannabis cultivation

It all started because of a professor with a background in farming and agriculture. Now, Northern Michigan University (NMU) in the state’s Upper Peninsula is getting a new two-year associate degree that will focus on indoor cannabis growth and food production. The professor, Evan Lucas, has also proposed the idea of using blighted and obsolete buildings to give the center additional purposes.

To achieve this, the professor partnered with other colleagues, Kim Smith and Donna Becker, from the school’s Biology department. Lucas works in the school’s Technology and Occupational Sciences Department, and said that they all “created this sort of interdisciplinary approach because we think that there’s also some connections that need to be made between what we teach in higher ed and what the industries need.” This program is comprised of a mix of plant science, facility design, entrepreneurship and business management, with the intention of preparing students for several aspects of the career of indoor agriculture.

Including cannabis topics in NMU is not new; this was one of the first institutions to receive accreditation to launch a Medicinal Plant Chemistry degree. This degree includes plants like cannabis and the potential uses in the healthcare industry. This new program, however, focuses on “plant physiology, the chemical makeup of nutrients within these specific plants and the systems involved to grow these different types of plants indoors,” Lucas explains. “Those are things that are good lessons for students to understand how you can control the environment, which is a big part of why we all thought the inner collaboration of these different building systems plus plant growth is so important to understand so that you can retrofit different types of spaces.”