White-knuckling through hairpin turns and snaking on makeshift roads from Redway to Honeydew in Humboldt County, the map app switches to “offline sources only.”
That’s when you know you’re on the raggedy edge. This is Outlaw Country.
Cody King knows these hills and valleys. His family helped build the Cannabis community out here, with his dad, mom and uncle contributing to the local legend when King was an up-and-coming prince.
Like so many NorCal farmers, ranchers and of-the-land entrepreneurs, King bears the marks of a life hard-lived under the War on Drugs.
“I came from this life,” he said, recounting stories from his childhood. “I came from the trap.”
King lost his father to suicide at the age of 15, and left home, moving from place to place in the Triangle. Like many people born into the world of guerilla farming, he had to build his own future.
He’s never had what you might call a real job. King cultivated his kingdom, drawing from an internal well of strength that Fortune 500 business owners only read about in leadership books.
Now he’s one of the largest-scale legacy cultivators in the NorCal game, overseeing roughly 16 acres of heat-churning canopy in a patchwork of ranches and farm properties under the banner of Xotic Flavorz. Other farmers talk about him with hints of reverence and even envy, edging their tones. To him, there wasn’t another path to walk — his fate was etched in time from the beginning.
Maximum escape velocity
When he turned 18, King moved out of NorCal to go to college back East.
He wanted to distance himself from the life but naturally found his people among the hip-hop heads and smokers. Before long, the life started calling him back. He didn’t have enough escape velocity to tear away from NorCal’s gravitational pull.
“They’d say, ‘Yo, you’re from Humboldt,’” King said. “‘Where’s the packs at?’”
The wheels started turning. It wasn’t the life he was running from. It was his life, and he couldn’t deny it.
Then, sitting in anthropology class one day, King had a realization.
“The professor was talking about what job I could get after graduation, and he was saying I could get $30K a year,” King said, laughing. “I had already made $30K that semester.”
He realized that he was meant to build an empire, so he dropped out and moved back home.
“I came back from school hella ambitious, ready to put my nuts on the line,” he said.
Forward momentum only
Spending the day at Xotic Flavorz, one feels King’s energy permeating everything. Here is someone who does not rest and will not rest until he has built everything he intends to build.
He handles the vision, the sales and the hustle, while his brother-in-law, Gerardo, handles the nuts and bolts of day-to-day farm operations. King started with one piece of property and used that to buy another and another.
He continues to grow, while the local economy struggles under the weight of what the new legal weed landscape has done to the community’s major profit centers. While other farmers wonder if they’ll survive another harvest, King adapts, moving forward with unstoppable momentum.
When the price drops from $1,000 to $300 per pound, that just means he has to grow more. Push harder. Find efficiencies.
When neighboring ranchers and farmers faced bankruptcy due to the trials of the local economy, King sat down with them and offered to work with them to build his hoop houses on their land, run them and give them a cut bigger than their own work could offer.
Anything it takes.
“I’ll invest everything I’ve ever made, and everything I’ve worked for, back into this brand,” King said. “You’re not seeing me hang my head. I’m not even sad.”
He currently operates nine farm properties in the backwoods of Humboldt County, and counting.
Fire in, fire out
The internal fire that powers King’s momentum transmutes to fire flower in the Xotic Flavorz bags.
“We do everything we can to maintain quality and integrity,” King said. He feeds a sizable team with his operation and only asks that they work as hard as possible to push out as much heat as the market can handle.
He feels comfortable out there on the raggedy edge, where the map apps go offline and where the heart of Cannabis thrums deep in the hills. It’s that deep history — the layers of composted and compacted scars and stories — that sets him and other legacy farmers apart from the rest of the entrepreneurs in the industry.
“It’s easy for me to adapt to a corporate setting,” King said. “But it’s not easy for someone corporate to come out here and do this right.”
