Fifty years in, and rarely on a shelf
Behind Mark Turk Farms is Mark Turkheimer – fifty years of growing, an honorably discharged Coast Guard veteran with four years of service, and a chef trained at The Culinary Institute of America. It’s an unusual résumé for a cannabis farm, and it shows up in the work.
The farm is family-owned and veteran-owned, out in Washington County – Capital District, same as us. Production stays intentionally limited, small enough that Mark walks every plant himself.
👨🍳 Cultivated with a chef’s palate
Before cannabis was legal to cultivate, Mark built a culinary career, and he brings that training straight into the greenhouse. Someone who spent years around ingredients tends to think about cannabis the way a chef thinks about produce: variety selection first, handling second, and no shortcuts at the end that undo either.
What that means in practice: he selects for flavor. Terpene expression, aroma, mouthfeel, the way a strain’s character lands when you open the jar and again when you taste it. Where a lot of cultivation optimizes for yield, Mark optimizes for the qualities a cook notices – the top notes, the finish, the reason one cut of a strain tastes nothing like another.
Small batches are what let him do that. A farm running at scale can’t hand-select for aroma across a warehouse. Mark can, because there isn’t much of it.
🌿 One license, one set of hands
Mark Turk Farms holds an adult-use microbusiness license – the only license type New York lets do the whole thing under one roof, cultivation through distribution, capped at 3,500 square feet of indoor canopy. Nothing gets handed off to a third-party processor, nothing gets blended in from another farm.
It’s an indoor grow, run in small batches. That’s the choice, not the compromise: indoor means Mark controls light, humidity, and feed the whole way through, so the Colorado Chem you pick up in February should smell like the Colorado Chem you picked up in September.
That’s the kind of shelf we’re building. Plenty of New York flower passes through three or four sets of hands before it reaches a dispensary, and there’s nothing wrong with that – but when a farm does the whole thing itself, you’re buying from the person who grew it.
It also means there isn’t much to go around. A farm capped at 3,500 square feet can’t supply many shelves, and we’re glad ours is one of the few in the Capital Region carrying him. If you’ve been hunting for something you haven’t tried before, this is it.
Grab the Mark Turk Penny Preroll!
On the floor now
