Lucas Kerr often wonders what his ancestors would think of the bustling cannabis operation that he has built on the family’s farm in upstate New York. His forebears founded Torrwood Farm in 1846, when they were recent Scottish immigrants. At its height, the farm covered 500 acres in the town of Lumberland, about two-and-a-half hours northwest of New York City, in a hamlet on the banks of the Delaware River.
Torrwood Farm was full of livestock — horses, cows, goats, chickens, sheep, and more — and varied crops. It had a boardinghouse, largely for guests from New York City, and offered farm-to-table meals, way ahead of the trend.
In the 1960s, Lucas’s grandparents discovered an artesian spring on the farm by surveying a spot in the woods where the cows headed during droughts. Soon, companies with 6,000-gallon tanker trucks made daily visits to collect the exceptionally pure liquid that bubbled up on the property. The companies bottled and sold the water, as did the Kerrs beginning in the mid-1960s, theirs in gallon jugs under the name Catskill Mountain Spring Water, Inc.
Lucas’s childhood memories of the farm include watching those tankers fill up and getting to operate tractors — “I felt like I was driving a spaceship.”
Torrwood Farm, which has been family owned and run for seven generations, stopped its water operations in 2005, when Lucas’s grandparents aged out of it, and Lucas’s father, David Kerr, 74, didn’t want to take the business over.
Still, the farm remained a special place for David Kerr, and one that he wanted to keep as a family retreat. So, in 2017, he and his wife, Mary Ann Kerr, redid the farm’s large family home, envisioning a haven where family members could reunite for summers, holidays and celebrations, and where some stayed during Covid lockdowns. It also gave the couple a new place to showcase their treasured rug and antique collections and their interior design skills.
Through it all, Lucas Kerr, 44, dreamed of resurrecting the thriving farm days of his youth.
He eventually did so by capitalizing on New York’s shift to legalization of recreational cannabis in 2021. “I’m glad that my grandfather and my father didn’t sell it because now we can do something new with it,” the younger Mr. Kerr said of the farm. “Ironically, the cannabis is going to make a lot more money than the water.”
These days, products from Torrwood Farm are sold at over 100 dispensaries across the state, from Rochester to Albany and the five boroughs, Mr. Kerr said. Weed for New York from New York has an appeal. “The buyers that we talk to, they want to buy local.”
The Homestead
While one part of the farm is humming with the cannabis business, another, the family home and its surroundings, has preserved its domestic serenity and familial connections.
An avid antiques collector, David Kerr, who’s based in Florida, relishes the history in the home. There’s the 11-foot dining room table made out of old church pews with 10 industrial workers’ swing seats; the old oak shelving pewter rack from, he said, the oldest pub in Edinburgh, Scotland; and the bathroom pedestal sinks from 1930s Beverly Hills. “You got to wonder who used to wash their face in it,” he said. These vintage treasures are mostly from collections. “The good stuff never makes it to auction.”
Thoughtfully curated, the main level of the house now includes floors from Amish schoolhouses and fireplaces and hearths made of stones once handled by their ancestors. “The one thing that the farm grows more than anything is rocks,” Lucas Kerr said, noting that bluestone from Torrwood Farm and the surrounding areas was transported to New York City for its sidewalks in the past. For part of the journey south, slabs often floated alongside the Delaware River via the D&H Canal, of which the early Kerrs were partial owners, David Kerr added.
In addition to the relics that decorate the main home, there are over 100 antique weather vanes that grace the property’s 40-by-60-foot red barn, whose terrace overlooks the trout-stocked pond, soaring eagles, and elusive fisher cats, members of the weasel family. David Kerr adorned it with apple-picking ladders to draw visitors’ eyes to the especially tall side walls, 22 feet instead of the typical 16, he said.
The hand-hewn barn, with its 37-foot peak, was originally built in 1858 in another part of the state. About six years ago, he had it disassembled and brought to Torrwood to be reassembled there. As an antiques aficionado, David Kerr felt new construction wasn’t an option, but barns were needed on the property to give it the desired farm feel.
This one has already hosted one of his son’s weddings and several budtender conferences.
Antique rugs are another of David Kerr’s passions. He has over 1,000, mainly from the Caucasus, and many are hundreds of years old. His close friend and rug-collecting mentor, Alan Varteresian, who died in 2023 and whose framed picture welcomes visitors, taught him that a secret to assessing rugs’ authenticity and quality is in their feel. Mr. Varteresian’s grandfather, an Armenian rug dealer, said his best buyer in Yerevan was a blind man who could tell a rug’s weave, originating tribe and pattern from touch alone.
David Kerr said he loves the farm’s fresh energy from the cannabis operation, but he’s somewhat torn about this new direction. “I’ve never smoked in my life — I’m so scared I’d get caught,” he said. “I guess now it doesn’t matter.”
Growing Cannabis
Lucas Kerr started down the path toward cannabis by first growing hemp, intrigued by what he saw of its healing potential in Iraq, where he did three tours from 2005-2007 as a U.S. Army Infantry Officer. That agricultural venture didn’t work out, but transitioning from hemp to cannabis in 2022 was easy, he said. “All you’re doing is changing out the seed for one that has THC in it.”
Mr. Kerr turned that initial setback into a head start. Today, Torrwood has licenses from the Office of Cannabis Management for cultivation, processing, and distribution. A seven-day-a-week operation, it processes up to 9,000 joints and 10,000 gummies a day. Sales have grown exponentially, and the team of 17 now includes a master grower from California and retired detectives for security. Still, the Kerrs are careful about growing too big or fast.
“We don’t want to be the Walmart of weed,” Mr. Kerr’s wife, Amber Kerr, said.
Torrwood Farm grows cannabis outdoors, while also using its combination license to cultivate cannabis in a greenhouse with sunlight, and, as needed, growing lights to extend the plants’ days, which leads to larger growth with increased yield. The farm also has an indoor research and development nursery where the team is propagating Torrwood’s own proprietary genetics. There are rows of “moms,” plants that will generate 15,000 clones this year.
Other areas house high-tech machinery to process joints and gummies and test their THC content. The team laughed remembering when they were first formulating recipes for edibles and accidentally went too strong on some. Taste-testing them, and unsure of their potency, they were inadvertently playing a game of “cannabis roulette,” as Shane Pearson, the chef liaison of Torrwood Farm, put it. For consumers, the products’ THC content is thoroughly tested internally and by an OCM-licensed laboratory to ensure the correct levels.
Mr. Kerr and his head of cultivation, Paul Bernal, said that growing here has involved constant learning. Mr. Bernal, who grew up in the northeast and spent many years in Humboldt, California’s revered cannabis epicenter, said that cultivation involves constant problem-solving. “I tell people all the time, ‘nature kills things every day,’” he said. “And we’re doing the hardest thing by trying to not have so much nature in nature.”
Mr. Kerr said that voles, a rodent he had never previously heard of, became a big problem, as they were eating parts of the plants and killing them. Cameras revealed that the small creatures were availing themselves of the farm’s underground irrigation system for speedy transportation.
“They were using it as a superhighway to get everywhere,” Mr. Kerr said. He and his team put up traps and grates but understood, “You fight with nature, you’re never going to win; everyday you can do a little bit of mitigation, but really you’re along for the ride.”
New York doesn’t offer the ideal conditions for growing cannabis outdoors — “It’s not California, it’s not Humboldt,” Mr. Kerr said — but the right team with the right talent can overcome the obstacles. Mr. Bernal’s areas of expertise include cultivating live culture soil and practicing Korean Natural Farming techniques. He focuses on enriching and balancing the soil so that the crop can thrive. “The philosophy is you’re not growing the plant, you’re taking care of the soil,” he said.
And Mr. Bernal is protective of the plants. “In order to thrive in agriculture, your energy is just as important as your process,” he said. Torrwood only allows people with positive outlooks to tend the greenery.
Though Mr. Bernal enjoys his work, he acknowledged that it’s labor intensive. During the harvest season, he said, the team will work a minimum of six days a week, 12-hour days, with some starting at 3 a.m. and going until sundown. “A couple days off a month in the peak of the season is a luxury,” he said.
Mr. Kerr added that enthusiasm for cannabis doesn’t always translate to stamina to farm it. “Everyone wants to farm until it’s time to actually do farming,” he said. “We’ve had so many people come in, ‘I love cannabis,’ but when you’re out in those fields, it’s unforgiving; it’s the heat of the summer, what can go wrong will go wrong.”
The Business of Cannabis
The business side of cannabis has also been trying. The year 2023 was a struggle, Mr. Kerr said, but he started to see growth in summer 2024 after injunctions were lifted, more dispensaries opened, and authorities shuttered unlicensed shops.
Kahlil Lozoraitis, the chief executive and co-founder of Weekenders Cannabis, one of Torrwood’s brand partners (companies that use Torrwood’s cannabis in their own offerings), observed that there was a lot of confusion soon after legalization in New York. “When they legalized it with no plan, people just sort of took that upon themselves — as entrepreneurs may do — to just sort of open up totally nonregulated shops and start selling,” he said.
Mr. Lozoraitis, whose brand boasts “artisanal small batch cannabis,” was drawn to Torrwood’s focus on craft. And he valued its sun-grown offerings, comparing the difference in quality between outdoor- and indoor-grown pot to that of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a mass-produced brand. Mr. Lozoraitis noted that Weekenders is one of few Black-owned cannabis brands in New York, and one of even fewer with multistate operations. Though he feels the state’s legalization rollout wasn’t perfect, he commended its efforts toward diversity and helping those impacted by the war on drugs.
Mr. Kerr also wanted to support those who have come before him in the industry pre-legalization. His other brand partner is S.T.A. Exotics, founded by John Morrongiello, 47, who grew up in Staten Island and started selling weed at 11 years old.
In 2018, Mr. Morrongiello landed in Rikers Island for possession with the attempt to distribute concentrated cannabinoid. He empathizes with legal cultivators, given how much they have invested into their aboveboard operations, but with his history in the black market, he said he also supports the legacy sector. “I urge them and encourage them to try to convert over into the legal market,” he said. “That’s the future, and that’s the way it’s going to go.”
Tony Cenicola is a Times photographer.
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