British Columbia’s agricultural heartland has always attracted people who believe in doing things properly, taking the time, building the soil, resisting shortcuts. It is not an easy place to operate a farm, and it is a harder place to build one from near collapse. Krystine McInnes has done both. She came to farming not through inheritance or romantic idealism but through a career that moved from commercial law to real estate development and finance before landing, unexpectedly, on one of the largest organic vegetable farms in the region. What she found when she got there changed everything she thought she was building.
When Grown Here Farms entered her portfolio, it was generating revenue and running steadily. Then two separate hundred-year flood events hit back-to-back, the kind of compounded disaster that no business plan fully accounts for. The farm faced a complete collapse. Krystine faced a choice that was not really a choice at all: step in and rebuild from the ground up personally or walk away from something that had started mattering more than she anticipated. She stayed. She learned faster than she had learned anything, and rebuilt, this time not as a real estate asset but as a mission. What emerged was not just a recovered farm but a completely different kind of company, one built around regenerative agriculture, radical transparency, and a conviction that consumers deserve to know exactly what they are putting into their bodies and exactly how it was grown.
The Idea Behind the Farm
The philosophical foundation of Grown Here Farms grew directly out of Krystine’s own health journey. Facing personal health challenges forced her to start asking questions she had not thought to ask before: how was this grown, what inputs were used, what is in this product. The answers she found, or more accurately in the absence of answers, revealed an industry built on consumer trust that had not been particularly earned. Transparency was not the norm. Traceability was not standard. Consumers were expected to take claims at face value without any real mechanism to verify them.
That gap became the founding premise of the company she rebuilt. Grown Here Farms would be built on the belief that organic growing should be the standard, not a premium add-on for informed consumers willing to pay extra for basic information. Everything at the farm starts with soil health, building the biome through regenerative practices, cover cropping, and natural inputs, then extending outward to consider the broader ecosystem including sound frequencies and plant communication as factors in plant health. The result is a holistic growing philosophy that treats the plant as a living system embedded in a larger living system rather than a commodity to be optimized for yield.
She explains, “If we expect people to trust what they consume, we need to earn that trust, openly and completely.”
To make that transparency operational rather than aspirational, Grown Here Farms built an industry-first traceability platform that allows customers to follow their CBD flower from soil tests through to final lab results. It is the kind of infrastructure that most companies would consider unnecessary overhead. For Krystine, it is the entire point.
The Cost of Building Something Real
The cannabis industry in Canada is among the most difficult operating environments in the country. Regulatory complexity, market volatility, limited access to banking and capital, and persistent stigma create a combination of pressures that has eliminated most operators who entered the space with optimism and insufficient preparation. Krystine entered it already carrying the weight of the flood recovery, which meant she was navigating a new industry while simultaneously managing extreme financial pressure, legal battles, and the physical demands of running a working farm.
She describes the experience at its worst moments using the same language Elon Musk once used about building companies: staring into the abyss and chewing glass. That framing is not dramatic for effect. It is an accurate description of what sustained adversity in high-stakes entrepreneurship actually feels like from the inside. What kept her moving was not confidence that it would work out. It was a more basic kind of commitment, to the values the company was built on and to the people depending on her, including her son Nolan, whose childhood she had decided in advance would not be a casualty of her professional ambitions no matter what else had to give.
She reflects, “It is not about doing everything perfectly. It is about continuing to show up as a mother, as a leader, and as a person, even when it is hard.”
Rebuilding Through COVID and Beyond
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, Grown Here Farms was already mid-recovery from the flood disasters and navigating the structural challenges of the cannabis industry simultaneously. The pandemic did not arrive as a shock as much as another entry in a long list of things to absorb and adapt to. The resilience built through repeated crisis response turned out to be more useful than any contingency plan.
The approach was not to capitalize on the disruption but to stabilize within it. Krystine focused on maintaining close relationships with customers, staying flexible in operations, tightening processes, and delivering consistent quality regardless of what was happening externally. The lesson she took from that period was one she had been learning for several years already: resilience is built through repetition. Each successive challenge makes an organization more adaptable, more resourceful, and more clear about what actually matters versus what is just noise.
Recognition Built on Results
The external recognition that has followed reflects the substance of what has been built rather than the story around it. In 2025, Grown Here Farms received the Best CBD Flower award in Canada, a direct acknowledgment of the quality that the company’s soil-first, regenerative approach produces when executed consistently. In 2026, the company was named among the Top 30 Innovative Companies to Watch and recognized as one of the Top Craft Organic CBD Brands to Watch in Canada, recognitions that speak to the broader significance of the model rather than just the product.
The most significant milestone of 2026 was receiving the Canada Brand license, which allows Grown Here Farms to represent Canadian agriculture internationally and export its certified organic CBD to global markets. For a small, family-owned company rebuilt from near-collapse, the license represents years of perseverance arriving at something concrete and extensible. It opens a new chapter for a business that has been operating, until now, almost entirely through the force of conviction.
She states, “As a small, family-owned company, this achievement represents years of perseverance and reinforces our vision of bringing Canadian-grown, certified organic CBD to global markets.”
How She Leads
Krystine’s strengths as a leader are legible in the company she has built resilience, values-driven decision-making, independent thinking, and a willingness to challenge industry norms when the norms are not serving the people the industry exists to serve. She moves quickly, thinks ahead, and has a high tolerance for operating under pressure with incomplete information. Those qualities have been essential in an environment where conditions change faster than plans can keep pace with.
The corresponding areas of growth are ones she speaks about with the same directness she applies to everything else. She expects initiative from others at the level she applies to herself, which does not always translate smoothly into team environments where people have different working styles and different thresholds for ambiguity. Managing a hybrid structure with both remote and on-site farm operations has required her to become more deliberate about communication, more patient with explanation, and more intentional about building systems that support people rather than assuming they will simply keep up. These are leadership lessons learned under genuine pressure rather than in a comfortable setting, which means they are stuck.
The Mantra She Lives By
The philosophy that has carried Krystine through everything can be compressed into a single shift in framing: life is happening for you, not to you. That is not a passive acceptance of whatever arrives. It is an active choice about how to interpret adversity, specifically whether to let it define you or to let it develop you. Every flood, every legal battle, every financial pressure point, every season of uncertainty has been processed through that lens, not to pretend the difficulty is not real, but to keep asking what it is teaching and what it is making possible.
Her advice to aspiring leaders reflects the same orientation. Resilience is not about pretending things are not hard. It is about choosing, every day, to keep moving forward with purpose regardless. Perseverance matters more than talent in most cases, because meaningful work takes longer than most people are willing to wait for. And the businesses that last are almost always the ones built around improving other people’s lives rather than extracting value from them. At Grown Here Farms, that last point is not a brand message. It is the reason the company exists.
She advises, “Don’t let your circumstances define your direction. Leadership is forged through difficult seasons, not the easy ones.”
