See how marijuana goes from seedling to dispensary shelves in the Kansas City area
Sandwiched between Liberty and Sugar Creek, 5 miles from Worlds of Fun, is a town with an unlikely green business.
There, an unmarked warehouse houses 68,000 square feet of marijuana plants. Illicit Gardens employs 200 workers in a 100,000-square-foot growing and production facility, near an RV dealership and a fireworks storage facility.
Illicit Gardens is one of the 10 licensed marijuana cultivators in the Kansas City area.
Each plant grown by Illicit can yield up to $1,000 of product after three-and-a-half months in the facility, said Adam Diltz, the chief operating officer of Illicit Gardens.
“I would say we outperform industry standards,” Diltz said.
Since weed became legal in Missouri in 2020, the budding industry has brought in almost $4 billion in sales.
In the garden
“The garden is my happy place,” proclaims a sign on the facility’s door that looks like it belongs in a shabby chic home.
As they start their shift, Illicit’s workers put on shoe covers, scrubs, hair covers and a face mask.
As the employees walk down the long hallway, the lights turn to a weed-tinged green. But the colored lights are not for decoration.
Diltz explained that while human eyes can see with green lighting, the plants don’t respond to it, which helps when the grow lights are off.
Missouri’s marijuana landscape
Missouri’s more than 40 pages of weed laws govern almost everything Illicit Gardens does in their facility. The laws were developed because marijuana is still a federally controlled substance in the same category as heroin and LSD, even though it is legal in the Show Me State.
All the weed consumed in Missouri must be grown in Missouri — no transporting across state lines. Illicit’s plants are grown entirely indoors, as Missouri law requires. Cameras continually monitor the parts of the warehouse where marijuana is grown, processed and stored.
Each plant is marked with an RFID label, which is logged in the state’s database to track each individual plant from seed to sale.
The marijuana packaging is carefully constructed to not appeal to kids — that’s why Missouri prohibits images and illustrations of humans, animals and fruits. Each change to the label, whether for color, font or naming, requires approval from the state, which usually takes 45-60 days.
In the last five years, marijuana has become a big business in Missouri. As of March 2025, there were 63 growers in the state.
The first medical pot was sold in 2020, and recreational sales began in February 2023. Almost 21,000 Missourians have been employed in the industry since 2019.
In 2024, $1.46 billion worth of cannabis products were sold in Missouri, according to the Department of Health and Senior Services.
Growing weed
Inside the Kansas City area facility, the plants, which start out as cuttings from another marijuana plant, begin life in one of four “veg rooms,” as Diltz describes them.
All of the plants at Illicit grow under rows of bright lights, enough to prompt photosensitive people to take out sunglasses.
“We are one of Evergy’s favorite customers,” Diltz said.
To grow from a seedling to a hardy plant, the veg room lights are turned on for 18 hours a day to mimic midsummer lighting. The humid room is kept between 82 and 83 degrees and its seedlings are hydroponically grown, meaning they root in ground-up coconut husk, and get their nutrients through water tubing.
After two weeks in the veg room, the plants are moved to the flower room to have more space. There, the lights are only on for 12 hours a day to mimic fall light.
The room smells like weed, for sure, but Diltz said there were more fresh, greenhouse-type odors.
“It’s different than when you smell it when someone’s smoking it. … I don’t think it’s nearly as strong as walking in a room where a bunch of people are smoking. Definitely smells more fresh.”
A worker pulls down rope netting over the raised cannabis table, so that the plants don’t fall over when the buds get heavy.
“They’re kind of, you know, like tomato cages,” Diltz said.
There are no industry standards for how to grow marijuana, Diltz said.
Illicit has worked to make their plants and process as efficient as possible, because state regulations limit weed cultivators to 30,000 square feet of flowering canopy space.
The company’s growing schedules are now built out a year in advance, but the current precision is based on “years of doing it the wrong way,” according to Diltz.
He remembers getting a call in the middle of the night from a security guard, who found that one of the rooms heated up to 165 degrees, about twice as hot as it should have been.
“Everything’s cooked,” he remembered saying.
Drying the grass
After 60 days in the flower room, employees cut down the marijuana plants and prepare them to dry like aging meats.
Workers have to remove large seven-point leaves, weigh them and account for each piece of plant material before the excess gets thrown away.
“Taking your time in the dry and cure process is really what separates, in my opinion, most growers,” Diltz said. “If you dry it too quickly, it loses all of its flavor, loses those smells, it’s harsh when you smoke it, it smells like lawn clippings.”
In the darkened room, the cut marijuana plants hung upside down like other drying herbs.
The space has both humidifiers, dehumidifiers and fans to keep the temperature as close to 60% humidity as possible. If the humidity rises as little as 2% or 3%, the crop can grow mold and be ruined. “It’s dying plants, right?” Diltz said.
After 10 days, the plant material is then moved to large barrels to be cured for another two to three weeks. An employee rotates and checks each barrel of marijuana, which contains a couple of thousand dollars worth of buds. Diltz said that someone with an illegal operation at home would use a mason jar to replicate this process.
Preparing weed to light up
The dulcet tones of millennial rock music float out of the “trim room” as Sarah Eden gives the buds a good haircut.
She uses small scissors to cut off stems and leaves from the compact buds. The looser buds, she set aside to be packed into prerolled joints.
Eden explained that this step ensures that a jar of flower is mostly made up of actual buds, instead of stem and leaves.
The cleaned buds are put in an industrial packaging machine, which drops the flower into jars. The 2-story contraption is similar to machines that weigh potato chips or pet food, but more sensitive, according to Diltz.
“Where they track to like the gram, we track to like the 100th of a gram. The scale alone in that component is almost $100,000.”
The prerolls are wrapped hundreds at a time in a large contraption, with employees poking in the ends with ballpoint pens.
Delivering the goods
Each box of cannabis products ordered by a dispensary is meticulously recorded, with pages and pages of documentation.
Diltz said the paperwork contains “everything you would want if you got pulled over with a van full of weed by a police officer,” including the route to the dispensary, the VIN of the delivery vehicle, the driver’s name and drivers license number, and detailed information of the contents of the delivery.
Visitors to the Illicit facility do not receive any cannabis samples — the only souvenir is a skunk-like smell on their hair after the tour.
This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 12:14 PM.
