The Brookhaven man who reluctantly entered farming and made tea a viable commodity in Mississippi and beyond has branched out into the medical marijuana business, and by extension, politics.
Jason McDonald, owner of The Great Mississippi Tea Co. and Old McDonald Farm, whose local operations are in Lincoln and Walthall counties, told the McComb Exchange Club on Thursday about his foray into specialty crops.
“I kind of came to farming a little bit differently than most people do,” he said.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed about three quarters of his grandfather’s tree farm just as McDonald was about to inherit the property.
“I really didn’t want to sell it off because I was told land never gets lower in value, they don’t make more of it,” he said.
But land that’s not in production takes a lot to maintain.
He got inspired to consider the tea business when he was vacationing in Savannah, Ga., and sipping on a cup of tea that said it was from “America’s only tea plantation,” in Charleston, S.C.
McDonald said he knew azaleas and camellias grow well in Mississippi’s acidic soil, and tea is a type of camellia, so he planted nine small trees in his front yard and decided that if any survived by the end of the summer, he would try to grow more.
“At the end of the summer three plants were still alive,” he said. “I went into the extension office in Brook-haven, and I said, ‘Y’all are going to think I’m crazy, but I want to grow tea.’ ”
McDonald received some research grant money through Mississippi State University, which has been working closely with the farm.
“They’re at our farm right now testing various fertilizers,” he said.
Now his tea is selling for $180 to $240 per pound. He said the London-based Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon sells McDonald’s tea for 1 British pound per gram, which is about $1,000 per pound.
After seeing his success, there are now 19 tea growers in 13 U.S. states, McDonald said.
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A few years after getting into the tea business, McDonald started growing hemp in Hawaii, and he considered doing the same in Mississippi after the Farm Bill legalized hemp production in all 50 states.
In 2019, he learned of the ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana in Mississippi and got behind those efforts.
The initiative passed, but the Mississippi Supreme Court threw out the voter-enacted greenlight for medical marijuana and the initiative process itself on a technicality.
McDonald’s still miffed that the Legislature hasn’t done anything to restore the initiative process, and he believes it’s because lawmakers fear voters will try to bypass them and make recreational marijuana legal.
“That’s the last thing I want,” he said, noting that a recreational market would lower the price of medical cannabis.
While medical marijuana was eventually legalized through the legislative process in Mississippi, McDonald still ran into some challenges when the Lincoln County Board of Supervisors voted to opt out of the program. He had to petition voters to change that through a close referendum.
Medical marijuana hasn’t been an easy business, with banks unwilling to take cash earned from a product that remains illegal under federal law and insurance coverage limited to subprime policies. Plus, there was reluctance from local law enforcement to investigate a burglary.
Those matters aside, McDonald was fed up enough with the hurdles he’s faced locally to run for county supervisor this year.
“I’m actually running for supervisor because of all of this stuff they’re making us do,” he said.
McDonald said the process has enlightened him to some other things about Lincoln County. For instance, when he was collecting signatures for the petition, he only needed 1,500, but he had to gather three times that many just to find enough registered voters.
“That’s just kind of shocking to me,” he said. “Two out of every three people aren’t registered to vote.”
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McDonald said he was “late to the party” in getting into the medical cannabis business months after other producers, but it allowed him to see what was happening in the market and “see the regulations.”
Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson said he didn’t want anything to do with medical marijuana, and so state leaders assigned the job of regulating the industry to the Mississippi State Department of Health.
“They had about three months to get this entire program off the ground,” McDonald said.
His company only produces edible products for sale — anything from hot sauce to pumpkin spice coffee creamer.
“We don’t do smoking marijuana,” he said. “We’re actually tying it with our tea. They can do a THC tea. We’ve got a THC honey that’s coming out.”
McDonald said more regulations are coming to Mississippi’s medical marijuana market, but so are more patients, estimating that 5% to 10% of the population generally has permission to use cannabis in states where medical marijuana is legal, which would be about 100,000 to 150,000 people in Mississippi.
“We’re hoping everything will stabilize in about three years,” he said. “You’ve got 25,000 patients around the state. You can’t have two or three dispensaries in the county.”
He said legal medical cannabis costs about as much as it does if bought on the black market, which is good considering regulations tend to make the legally grown product more expensive than its illicit counterpart, but bad considering “you’re dealing with sick people.”
“Even with the regulation it’s competing with the black market on prices,” he said.
McDonald said the medical cannabis industry is generating money for the state and putting people to work.
“This is actually a way where people can make money in Mississippi,” he said. “There’s over 3,500 work permits that have come out in the past year. It’s about a $5 million-a-month industry. It will have an economic impact as long as it’s tightly controlled.”
