A Cannabis Campus the Size of Eight Football Fields Is Going up in the Desert

Construction is currently underway for the future home of Sunniva, a Canada-based medical cannabis company that plans to grow, process and sell marijuana from a base in Cathedral City, the desert community that neighbors Palm Springs. The current building going up is larger than the nearby Palm Springs Convention Center, and is only the first of two buildings that will be built on the Ramon Road campus. When both buildings are finished, they’ll cover 489,000 square feet, or more than eight football fields.

“The campus will employ more than 100 people, likely rivaling the number of people working for Cathedral City itself,” according to the Desert Sun. “And Sunniva’s site is projected to generate $5 million or more every year in city cannabis tax revenue when finished, no trivial sum in a city with a total expenditure budget of $112 million.”

A quick breakdown:

• The facility on Ramon Road will cost $54 million to build.
• When both phases are complete, it will grow 187,000 pounds of dry cannabis a year—enough to roll somewhere between 160 million to 390 million average-sized joints a year.
• Last year, Sunniva estimated that three or more shipments of product will leave the facility every week in 5-ton trucks.

You can read more about Sunniva’s journey to the SoCal desert and how other cannabis companies work with the Golden State on licensing and development here.