Illinois Fought Two Outdoor Cannabis Grows for Years. Now It's Proposing Razor-Wire Fields for Everyone

In Vermont, Illinois, a farm town outside Springfield, Tim O'Hern's family has raised cattle and grown corn for five generations. Since 2019 it has also grown cannabis under the sky. Nature's Grace and Wellness, where O'Hern is chief operating officer, won state permission that year to put low-THC plants in a screen house of roughly 43,500 square feet, ringed by a six-foot fence, with the crop bound for extraction rather than the smokable shelf. Two years later the Illinois Department of Agriculture tried to take that permission back. Its rescission letter said the structure had no floors, walls or roof, was open to insects and animals, and was being used for high-THC plants. Nature's Grace went to court and won. (S1, S2)

"We like it quite a bit," O'Hern told the Chicago Tribune last fall. "To use Mother Nature to grow the plant is probably the biggest advantage. It's a lot lower electricity bill." (S1)

On August 14, the same department that tried to shut O'Hern's screen house down published a proposed rule that would let every licensed cultivation center and craft grower in Illinois do what Nature's Grace has been doing for six years. The catch is in the fencing. Under the proposal, printed in the Illinois Register at 50 Ill. Reg. 11504, an outdoor cultivation area must be "fully enclosed by a continuous physical barrier that is at least 8 feet high; constructed of chain link and topped with razor wire or other security wire along the entire length," screened from "ordinary public view from nearby streets or roads," and secured by a gate built to the same standard. Outdoor-grown cannabis could be used only for extraction. Public comments are due September 28. (S3, S4, S5)

The Tribune called it "a major reversal," and it is. Illinois launched adult-use sales in January 2020 with a statute requiring cannabis to be grown in an "enclosed, locked facility," language the Department of Agriculture read to mean solid walls and a solid ceiling. For most of the state's roughly $1.5 billion-a-year market, that has meant warehouses: the 21 large cultivation centers, most of them owned by multistate operators, are allowed up to 210,000 square feet of canopy each, in warehouses and greenhouses. The rule would open the state's fields, at least behind eight feet of chain link, to those operators and to the craft growers who were supposed to be the program's small-business tier and have mostly struggled to open at all. (S6, S7, S1)

The proposal does two things. It adds a definition of "licensed premises" that includes "contiguous areas outside of an enclosed, locked facility," which is the phrase that has kept cultivation indoors. And it repeals craft-grower canopy rules that conflict with Public Act 104-463; a separate recent change in state law raised the craft canopy cap from 5,000 to 14,000 square feet. The outdoor area must sit next to the existing licensed facility, so this is not a license to buy a cornfield in another county. The same cameras and access controls required indoors would apply. (S4, S5, S7, S3)

The people who have waited longest for this are the craft growers. Scott Redman, president of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers Association, told the Tribune last year that building an indoor craft operation runs $5 million to $10 million, against as little as $250,000 for a hoop or screen house. His group had asked the state for exactly this relief and been turned down. "We said, 'Flex here a little, let us grow outdoors for extraction only,'" Redman said then. "The ability to grow outdoors would be a game changer for all these craft growers trying to get started." This week, after the rule dropped, he told the paper it was "a significant step forward for the industry as far as I am concerned," and estimated the savings on lighting and HVAC in the millions. (S1, S7)

The Tribune reported last fall that more than 60 license holders had not been able to open, mostly because of buildout costs and difficulty getting loans. Crain's Chicago Business put it at 49 of 87 licensed craft growers in July 2025. The state's deadline for craft licensees to become operational was June 1, 2025, though extensions are available. For those operators, a razor-wire field next to a half-built warehouse is a cheaper path to a first harvest than finishing the warehouse. (S1, S8)

The price environment explains the timing. Illinois sold roughly $763 million of cannabis, medical and adult-use combined, in the first half of 2026, according to the state's Cannabis Regulation Oversight Officer, with June nearly flat against June 2025 even as the average price fell to $5.61 a gram from $8.67 a year earlier. Adult-use retailers reported $684.3 million through June, with unit volume up and dollars down. Growers who built for $8 wholesale are now selling into a $5 market, and the cheapest pound in the state is going to win. Sun-grown biomass for extraction is the cheapest pound there is. (S9, S10)

Nobody has litigated this harder than Curaleaf. In December 2024 the company's Illinois subsidiary, Compass Ventures Inc., asked the department for permission to build a hoop house with about 42,900 square feet of plant canopy at its Montgomery County cultivation site, with perimeter fencing, locks, 24-hour cameras and plans for two more. The state never acted on the request. On July 21, 2025, Compass sued in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Case No. 2025MR28, citing two circuit-court rulings, in Rock Island and Fulton counties, that let Green Thumb Industries and Nature's Grace keep their screen houses. Both courts found the department's solid-walls interpretation invalid because it had never gone through notice and comment. (S11, S12, S1)

"This roadblock represents yet another unfortunate example of state regulators obstructing the growth of the regulated cannabis industry," Curaleaf Chairman and CEO Boris Jordan said in a statement at the time. "We believe that when regulators prevent licensed operators from expanding access to legal cannabis for patients and consumers, they are effectively pushing demand toward the illicit, unregulated market." (S1, S12)

The department's answer last year was that any change had to come through legislation or formal rulemaking, so that "the entire industry, as well as advocacy groups and other impacted parties, all have an opportunity to participate in the discussion and that any resulting policy shift is applied to all licensees equally, at the same time, and in the same manner." It also said outdoor growing "is complex, and presents challenges of its own, including the need to mitigate the impacts of animal and insect life and the chemicals designed to protect against them," and raised pesticide drift from neighboring farms. The August 14 filing is the department doing what it said it would do, on a timeline the Curaleaf suit appears to have accelerated. (S1, S3)

Not every small grower is cheering. Reese Xavier, chief executive of HT23 Growers in Chicago Heights, told Crain's that many craft operators have already sunk their capital into indoor facilities and may not have adjacent land to fence. For them, a rule that drops the cost of entry for the next competitor is not obviously good news. And the extraction-only restriction means outdoor flower cannot reach the smokable shelf, where most of the retail margin lives. (S8, S3)

Cole Preston, who publishes The Cole Memo and first reported the Nature's Grace and Green Thumb approvals in December 2023, has a different objection: the rule stops at the commercial fence line. Illinois allows medical patients to grow five plants, indoors only, and the proposal does nothing for them. "I believe that as long as operators can produce a product that meets Illinois' strict testing standards, there shouldn't be an issue with how they grow," Preston told the Tribune last year, "be it in an indoor cultivation center, a screen house, a hoop house, a green house, or another type of setup." Judging from the outdoor grows already operating, he said, "there don't appear to be any issues." (S1, S2)

“To use Mother Nature to grow the plant is probably the biggest advantage. It's a lot lower electricity bill.”

— Tim O'Hern, Chief Operating Officer, Nature's Grace and Wellness

There is an energy case as well as a cost case. The Tribune cited a University of California, Berkeley researcher's finding that an indoor cannabis warehouse emits roughly 100 times the greenhouse gases of a similarly sized Walmart, and that outdoor cultivation could cut that by 76%, which would help a state that has set a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The Illinois climate allows only one or two outdoor harvests a year, which is why the first movers used their fields for extraction biomass rather than premium flower. (S1, S6)

O'Hern's complaint last fall was not about fences. It was about hemp, which can be grown in an open Illinois field without security, without the state's testing regime, without cannabis taxes and, as he noted at the time, without even a minimum age for customers. "I don't think we should be as scared of cannabis as maybe we were when legalization was passed," he said. The new rule does not make the field any less scary to the state. It just moves the razor wire outdoors. (S1)

1. September 28, 2026: written comments due to Sam McGee, Illinois Department of Agriculture, P.O. Box 19281, Springfield, IL 62794-9281.
2. After the comment period, the department may revise the rule before it goes to the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules for second notice and review.
3. Compass Ventures Inc. v. Illinois Department of Agriculture, No. 2025MR28, Montgomery County Circuit Court, remains pending; a final rule could moot or reshape the case.
4. The Department of Agriculture has not said whether outdoor-grown material will be tracked separately in the state's plant-monitoring system.

Back in Vermont, the screen house the state once called unenclosed is now, more or less, the state's template, once you add two feet of fence and a run of razor wire. If the rule survives comment, Nature's Grace will have spent five years and a court case earning the right to do what every licensee in Illinois could do as soon as the rule is final. O'Hern did not sound bitter about it last fall. He sounded like a farmer who had been waiting for the state to notice the weather. (S1, S2, S3)

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