Miracle-Gro CEO: "I Want To Target The Pot Market"

[RandomGuy]

Hopefully the big businesses with money to make can add to the push for more formal de-criminalization.

Oddly enough, I can see the criminal cartels bankrolling lobbyists to fight this. They would lose a LOT of money, if legitimate businesses got into it.

Funny that. Criminals and puritanical jackasses on the same side? Talk about strange bedfellows.

By DANA MATTIOLI
Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. has long sold weed killer. Now, it's hoping to help people grow killer weed.

Scott's Miracle-Gro is hoping to cash in on the growing medical marijuana business. In an unlikely move for the head of a major company, Scotts Chief Executive Jim Hagedorn said he is exploring targeting medical marijuana as well as other niches to help boost sales at his lawn and garden company.

"I want to target the pot market," Mr. Hagedorn said in an interview. "There's no good reason we haven't."

The medical marijauana market will reach $1.7 billion in sales this year, the story says. Scotts-Miracle Gro's annual sales are $2.9 billion.

So on the face of it, marijuana growers can't add much to the company's revenues. Of course, there's clearly a very large non-medical-marijuana industry in this country that the company could also sell into.

What's more, Hagedorn tells the WSJ that he's looking for growth in smaller and smaller niches.

In the past, Scotts wouldn't have considered pursuing businesses or product lines that generated less than $10 million a year in revenue. But, Mr. Hagedorn said, "We can't operate our business like that anymore."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/...the-pot-market (note this article provides a link that makes it through the WSJ paywall)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...249741032.html

[4>0rings]

Every grower knows to stay away from Mircle Gro cause it sucks balls and doesn't provide all the nutrients in the correct formuals to properly grow a plant... this came to me in a dream.

[RandomGuy]

Every grower knows to stay away from Mircle Gro cause it sucks balls and doesn't provide all the nutrients in the correct formuals to properly grow a plant... this came to me in a dream.

Rollitup.org, a website geared toward the marijuana-growing community, has several forums that debate Miracle-Gro's effectiveness. A user with the moniker Weedqueen12 wrote: "i think [Miracle-Gro] works well." Another user, dannyboy602, countered that Miracle-Gro causes pot plants to "burn and stress."

The 55-year-old Mr. Hagedorn isn't a typical suit-wearing CEO. A former F-16 fighter pilot, he flies his Cessna to and from meetings in Port Washington, N.Y., where he grew up, and the company's headquarters in Ohio, much to the chagrin of his board. He also peppers his language with swear words and military references, and he showed up at the office on a recent June day in jeans and sneakers.

Mr. Hagedorn took over Miracle-Gro from his father, who co-founded the company. The idea to merge with Scotts dawned on him after he looked at the company's market value in 1995, he said, so he called his father's tax lawyer to vet the idea. "I said, 'Bob, I got this f— crazy idea. Do you think it'd be f— possible to take over Scotts?'" he recalls, sitting in the Port Washington office that his father once occupied.

ing sounds like my kinda guy.

[spurs_fan_in_exile]

Oddly enough, I can see the criminal cartels bankrolling lobbyists to fight this. They would lose a LOT of money, if legitimate businesses got into it.

Funny that. Criminals and puritanical jackasses on the same side? Talk about strange bedfellows.

Criminals side by side with the jailers too. Locking up three strikers is big business.

[Viva Las Espuelas]

It'll never work. Haven't these guys ever watched Nice Dreams.

"You wanna Big Stick?"

[leemajors]

Criminals side by side with the jailers too. Locking up three strikers is big business.

Prison industrial complex is a big, big business