Nebraska's First Legal Cannabis Crop Is Weeks From Harvest. No Lab Is Licensed to Test It.

On Monday, Oct. 19, Garrett Elting stood before the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission in Lincoln and asked for something the state has never given Nebraska's medical cannabis growers: a date. Elting is the cultivation systems manager at MahāMotā Cultivation Co., which grows near Raymond, outside Lincoln. MahāMotā is the only one of the state's four licensed growers with plants in the ground. He told commissioners those plants would be harvested within the next seven weeks. (S1, S3)

What happens after that, nobody in the room could say. Nebraska requires cannabis to be tested by an independent lab before it can be sold, and the state has not licensed a single lab, manufacturer, transporter or dispensary. Elting wanted to know how long MahāMotā would be holding its harvest. Dried and stored in a temperature-controlled unit, he said, cannabis can start losing potency in three to six months. (S1, S4)

Commissioner Lorelle Mueting, the panel's interim chair, said that clock was MahāMotā's problem, not the commission's. The commission had never offered a six-month timeline, she said, and had asked every cultivator whether it could store product because the rest of the supply chain probably would not be ready at harvest. "Every cultivator assured us that they could store product," Mueting said. Commissioners told the growers to be prepared to hold their crops for a year to two years. (S1, S3)

"I understand that it may degrade and all those things," Mueting said, according to the Nebraska Examiner, "but I feel like those were things that possibly you knew or the owner of the company knew going in." (S3)

Elting had raised the same alarm a month earlier, when the harvest was four to six weeks out. "With the storage we have degradation of the biomass, and we're going to be losing terpenes and cannabinoids the longer it is stored," he told commissioners in September, according to the Nebraska Examiner. "We're kind of wondering: What happens there?" MahāMotā did not want to sacrifice the quality of the crop, he said, and did not want to be sitting on its hands. Meanwhile the ordinary costs of a licensed grow, from rent and payroll to security, utilities and insurance, keep running with no sale in sight. (S5, S6)

The exchange put a crop on a calendar for the first time in Nebraska's slow-motion medical cannabis launch. Voters approved two medical cannabis measures on Nov. 5, 2024. Nearly two years later, no patient in the state can legally buy the product. Four days before the meeting, on Oct. 15, all four of the state's licensed cultivators signed a joint letter asking the commission to change two things before it locks in its next set of rules: spell out how testing labs will be authorized, and stop charging growers $36,500 a year in recurring fees before any of them has a legal way to make a sale. (S2, S4, S5)

The letter is signed by Dustin Krajewski of Meadowlark Medicinals LLC, former state Sen. Kent Rogert of KRL Med LLC, Pat Thomas of MahāMotā and Robert Wagner of Midwest Cultivators Group. It is polite, precise and alarmed. The proposed regulations require independent laboratory testing and set testing standards and sample-collection procedures, the growers wrote, but "do not establish a laboratory license category or clearly explain how laboratories will be authorized to receive, possess, and test cannabis." They asked the commission to say who may carry samples to a lab, how transport and manifest rules apply, and whether out-of-state labs may be used. (S2)

The draft rules already describe what a finished lab report must look like: a certificate of analysis has to list the lab's accreditation under ISO/IEC 17025. What they do not describe is how such a lab comes to exist in Nebraska. And that gap is not only the commission's to close. Under state law, the commission has no authority to license or oversee testing facilities, the Nebraska Examiner has reported, and the Legislature has had two sessions since the 2024 vote to step in and has not. Bills to protect physicians who recommend cannabis, which the growers also want, failed in 2025 and again in 2026. Lawmakers did not authorize the commission to charge fees until April of this year, and the commission has said it will not issue more licenses until those fees are in place. (S3, S6)

Those fees are now on paper. The proposed amendments to the commission's regulations, known as 238 NAC 1, set a cultivator renewal fee of $23,500 in section 07.02. Sections 18.09 and 18.10 add a $13,000 fee for the state inventory tracking system, due from existing licensees by Feb. 1, 2027, and another $13,000 at each renewal. New applicants would pay a $5,000 application fee, and a dispensary license would cost $15,000 on issuance. Until the new rules take effect, the commission says, licensees stay on the current six-month renewal schedule. (S7, S8)

The growers said they support paying for oversight and tracking. What they asked for was timing. They want the commission to publish the cost basis for the fees, compare them with other medical programs, and defer "substantial recurring charges" until labs, manufacturers and dispensaries exist. Failing that, they asked for materially reduced fees, and for the Feb. 1 tracking deadline to be replaced by a schedule tied to publicly documented readiness milestones, with fees prorated or phased in once those are met. Depending on how long the open questions take, they wrote, operators could face up to two more years with no viable path to revenue. (S2)

Their warning was blunt. Without that alignment, the letter says, the proposed fees could put the existing businesses at risk, potentially forcing replacement operators to repeat licensing and facility construction and pushing patient access back further still. (S2)

The commission's path to fixing any of this is long by design. Its website lays out the sequence: staff compile the public comments from the Oct. 15 hearing, and the commission is scheduled to consider the rulemaking package at its Nov. 16 meeting. If commissioners adopt it, the package goes to Attorney General Mike Hilgers, then to Gov. Jim Pillen, and takes effect five days after the governor signs. Any substantive change triggers another 30-day comment period and another round of sign-offs. Hilgers and Pillen have both opposed the program, and Hilgers' office fought the ballot measures in court until the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled against the challenge in September. A new manufacturer application window, for up to four manufacturers, is expected to open in early 2027. (S4, S5, S7)

“The longer we hold on to this product, the quicker it degrades.”

— Garrett Elting, MahāMotā Cultivation Co., to the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission, Oct. 19, 2026

Commissioners have pushed back on the idea that they are dragging their feet. At a meeting in September, Commissioner Jim Elworth of Nebraska City reminded the public that the commission did not meet until June 2025, lost two members that September and had no money for staff until the Legislature acted this spring. "It was only then that we were able to hire staff, procure office space, for goodness' sake, to buy a printer, or a chair," Elworth said, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner. The commission hired its first executive director, Brett Long, in September. On Oct. 19 it renewed the licenses of three of the four growers; KRL Med's renewal is on hold while the company works through local zoning. (S1, S6)

Advocates hear something else in the delays. Crista Eggers, who leads Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, the group behind the 2024 measures, told commissioners this fall that she has been showing up at the Capitol for about 10 years, while her 11-year-old son, Colton, has had thousands of seizures. "My God, 10 years of my life I have shown up," she said. "That is far too long." At this point, she said, the delays feel intentional. (S6)

The fight has reached the governor's race. Lynne Walz, the Democratic candidate challenging Pillen in the Nov. 3 election, has promised to sign an executive order on her first day to speed access, and suggested she would replace commissioners who are "slow-walking" the program, according to Marijuana Moment's account of a WOWT-TV interview. Eggers, for her part, said in September that she doubts sales can begin at any point in 2027. (S5, S9)

The commission's defenders have a point, too. Mueting has compared standing up a new agency to building a house, and the testing gap traces to a statute that gives the commission no authority over labs and a Legislature that has not changed it. Some of the risk was also the growers' to take: by Mueting's account, MahāMotā chose to plant before the rest of the chain existed after assuring regulators it could store its harvest. (S1, S3, S6)

For Elting, the practical question is what happens by early December, when the plants near Raymond come down and go into storage with no lab, no manufacturer and no dispensary to send them to. The commission's answer on Oct. 19 was to plan for a year or two. The growers' answer, in writing, is that a business carrying $36,500 a year in fees and no revenue may not last that long. Commissioners will see both on Nov. 16. (S1, S2)

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