Mechanic Farms’ focus has always been getting New Yorkers access to the highest quality Cannabis. For founder and head cultivator Chris, that mission comes from his first time smoking as a teenager. At a time when your strain choices were some weed or none, Chris’ first smoke, rolled in notebook paper, is the opposite of the experience he wants for consumers.
Knowing he could be smoking better is what started Chris flying across the country, trapping. If New York could not get truly fire flower, he would bring it back himself.
When the near-weekly flights became untenable, Chris made a decision with an imperial instinct: If New York was known as one of the top states for Cannabis consumption, it should be for production too.
He started growing under the name Mechanic Farms in 2018. Building on relationships forged during trips to California, Chris began putting together a menu of strains that drew loyal customers with eye-catching collaborations.
Mechanic Farms made a name for itself on the East Coast by growing for some of the trendiest West Coast names, like Doja and Fya Farms, showcasing Chris’s ability to grow outstanding expressions of modern genetics with unique terpene profiles. For Mechanic Farms, the focus to this day is on finding cultivars that consumers may not have experienced before.
In 2024, Mechanic Farms made the transition to New York’s legal market, again driven by a push to bring connoisseur-level craft Cannabis to New York. The response has been immediate. Starting small with a 30-light grow, Mechanic Farms has quickly climbed to the top shelf of the New York market.
Mechanic Farms’ recreational lineup is built around customer accessibility: an uncomplicated menu that offers unique flavor profiles cleanly divided into categories consumers recognize.
When talking about how his years catering to a more selective consumer base impacted his grow today, Chris told me his focus is all about the genetics.
“I want the consumer to know exactly what they’re smoking and what the genetics mean,” he said. “If they know a cross tastes like one parent or both parents, then when they’re in the mood for something, they can say, ‘That cross was great’ or ‘That strain was great,’ and they can start looking for other crosses they might find interesting.”
Where the work gets harder in the regulated market is the tension between freshness and the state’s regulatory process. Chris “wants to drop super fresh flowers for rec, but there are so many things slowing you down or stopping you. You get put in a queue with hundreds of other people waiting for testing, and you can hit backups, like three weeks or a month, and then it’s not as fresh as you’d want it to be.”
Mechanic Farms has stayed committed to the same mission: quality over everything. While legal markets can be like a race to the lowest price for producers, Mechanic Farms is a proof point that craft Cannabis has a clear lane: selling out, even on the top shelf.
