The 40-hectare farm in Southwestern Ontario will soon be home to the province’s first commercial outdoor cannabis crop when planting begins next month.

The operation east of Brantford — approved by Health Canada last week — will create nearly 200 jobs at the Southwestern Ontario pot producer 48North and catapult it into one of the country’s largest by capacity. Most of the crop will be used for cannabis extracts, concentrates and edibles — products that VanderMarel, 48North’s co-chief executive, believes will dominate the market once they’re introduced in the fall.

“Outdoor is the future, for sure,” she said, noting no other agricultural products produced for extraction are cultivated inside.

“We don’t grow grapes indoors for wine, or canola for canola oil.”

Production efficiency can be defined as the ratio of output produced by a process to the total energy or resources expended to produce that output.

When looking at cannabis companies, one way to gauge how efficient they are is by looking at the ratio of grams produced to the square footage of production facilities.

This can provide an outlook on how efficiently a company is using their facility given its size to maximize their cannabis output.

Today we’ve identified four Canadian cannabis stocks that have notably efficient domestic operations, based on estimated domestic gram production capacity divided by the sum of the square footage of all their domestic production facilities.

In the seven months since the Trudeau government legalized recreational marijuana use, licensed producers across the country have been locked in a frenetic race to grow mass quantities of cannabis for the new market. But amid the rush for scale, questions of sustainability have often taken a back seat.

According to EQ Research LLC, a U.S.-based clean-energy consulting firm, cannabis facilities can need up to 150 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year per square foot. Such input is on par with data centres, which are themselves 50 to 200 times more energy-intensive than a typical office building.

Cannabis stocks had an upbeat start Wednesday, with shares broadly up across US and Canadian markets.

The North American Marijuana Index, which tracks the top cannabis stocks in the US and Canada, was up 0.5% to 276.3 points by Wednesday's close. The Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences Index ETF was up 1% at C$20.40.

Buds

Namaste Technologies Inc (CVE:N) (OTCMKTS:NXTTF) shares were soaring on Wednesday, up 17.6% at C$0.87, up 16.8% at US$0.65. 

There might be no industry more popular among investors right now than marijuana; and there's good reason for that. The cannabis industry is expected to grow by as much as 19% a year on a compound annual basis between 2015 and 2030 -- that's if projections of $75 billion in annual worldwide sales by 2030from Cowen Group prove accurate. But if this estimate holds up, investors in pot stocks would stand to make bank.

Choosing between the hundreds of companies looking to profit from the growing cannabis sector isn’t easy. While some might win big in the long run, many others will likely end up on the sidelines at best. Let’s turn our attention to two potential big players in the cannabis sector: Hexo (TSX:HEXO) and Charlotte’s Web Holdings(CNSX:CWEB). Which of these is the better buy?

The case for Hexo

Hexo is increasingly becoming an attractive pot stock. While the firm currently focuses on the recreational marijuana market — an overpopulated and low-margin opportunity — Hexo currently holds about 30% of the market share in the province of Quebec, thanks to a supply agreement it signed last year.

Big things are happening in the marijuana industry, and Canada is currently the epicenter of the action. Last year, our neighbor to the north became the first industrialized country in the world to green-light recreational cannabis, and it's expected to generate $5 billion to $6 billion in annual sales within the next couple of years.

Major Upside Ahead?

When there’s a penny stock well-positioned to capitalize on a booming industry, one catalyst is usually enough to send it soaring. But this marijuana stock, which was trading at $1.41 apiece at the time of this writing, has not one, but three catalysts that could give a solid boost to its investor appeal.

I’m talking about Supreme Cannabis Company Inc(OTCMKTS:SPRWF, TSE:FIRE), a marijuana producer headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Unless you follow the pot industry closely, SPRWF stock probably won’t sound like a familiar name. With a market cap of around $410.0 million, the company doesn’t make headlines in mainstream financial media as often as the industry heavyweights.

If you've been keeping score, three of the top four biggest Canadian marijuana producers by market cap have reported their latest earnings results. Cronos Group (NASDAQ:CRON) kicked things off on May 9, with Tilray (NASDAQ:TLRY) and Aurora Cannabis (NYSE:ACB) following with their quarterly updates last week.

EBITDA positivity and a licensing announcement lifted a Canadian cannabis stock Tuesday. Here’s some small stocks making big moves on Tuesday, May 21, 2019 (as of 11:30 am EST):

48North Cannabis Corp. (TSXV:NRTH), a Canadian cannabis stock, powered 18% higher to $1.19 on Tuesday after announcing that it remained EBITDA positive for its third consecutive quarter with its Q3 EBITDA totaling $78,000. The Company added that it has received its outdoor cultivation license from Health Canada for its 100-acre (3.7-million-sq.-ft.) organic farm (Good Farm). 48North is expecting to harvest 40,000 kg of dried cannabis in 2019 from Good Farm.