I took a drive to Back Home Farm, founded by Will Leibee, to learn about one of New York’s first and only small-batch cannabis—and specialty organic vegetable—farms.
Will has set his brand apart on his dedication to offering a reliable, craft product and his old-fashioned, personable style. But it is his latest project of boutique indoor flower that has been showstopper in 2025.
As I shadowed Will for the day, from the zen sea-of-green grow room and the futuristic control center, to playing fetch with his dog along Rondout Creek that winds through the property, here is our conversation.
What are the hallmarks of Back Home Cannabis?
Back Home Cannabis all starts with good, living soil—high organic matter and high microbiotic activity. We aren’t allowed to say the cannabis is organic. But the farm is certified organic. The soil is. The crops that are grown next to [the cannabis] are. We also crop rotate and cover crop.
What can people expect from Back Home Cannabis flower?
Back Home Cannabis flower is like a Toyota. It’s reliable and it’s always more bang for your buck. It’s not overly branded. The dog on the logo is literally my dog. The tractor is the first tractor I ever bought–a 1950s Farmall. It’s a direct mirror of what I love about cannabis.
How did your farm come to be?
I moved back to New York from Asheville three years before COVID, in 2016. I had traveled all around the country learning how to grow. I was living in my trailer working at Alewife Farm in Kingston, and was ready to start my own farm.
I was looking for clean water, river bottom loam, and dead-flat land. I love Ulster County. It has a parcel viewer where you can see a wide lens geographic map of an area and this farm was the perfect spot.
It was an old dairy farm, abandoned for 20 years, but the owners had some attachment and didn’t want to sell it. So it sat here getting in balance for 20 years. I wrote a letter to the owner Dan Boice and told him my life story. He was like, ok, go do all your weird soil tests and species tests. The soil series here is called Unadilla, which is the best soil in maybe the country. I did a water test. I looked at the plant species around here. I looked at the insect species. It was hitting on all levels.
All the money I had to my name was from a blip of time where I worked in New York City, right across the street from Gotham, Williamsburg (but the Domino Sugar Factory was completely empty). I took the money that I had saved and put in an all-cash offer on the spot. Dan sold it to me.
Why did you name it Back Home Farm?
I grew up in New York and New Jersey and I was back home.
But back home could mean something completely different to someone else. We all live these insanely crazy lives. How do we reground ourselves? How do we get back to the spiritual sense of home?
Are you still growing vegetables?
Oh yeah. You can find us at the Union Square Farmers Market every Friday, starting in May. We will never stop growing vegetables and other herbs. Chamomile, tobacco, mints. Mugwort will pop up here natively so we just pick it from the side of the field. Same with Mullein. Morel season is always good. Fiddleheads during the spring ephemeral [season] are great. We are going to always grow a variety of plant species.
Describe it in three words.
Triple A fire.
What are you trying to accomplish?
With Milkweed I’m trying to accomplish a high THC exotic powerhouse of the plant.
What do you mean exotic?
The strains have been crossed a decent amount. Like it’s originated from a Kush, but it ended up as this hybridized Kush Haze cross.
Milkweed is more of an exotic push, the power of technology and indoor growth to steer nature. It’s really good to run the whole process from from soil to plant and then run it backwards from plant to soil, reverse engineering everything to know what you’re doing.
What do you mean by reverse engineering?
We are trying to produce what we think is the best expression of the strain. Our job as growers is to manipulate the climate, the substrate, the lighting to produce the happiest plant you can possibly grow: the fattest plant with the heaviest trichomes. We have a crop tracker that tracks every little change that I’ve done in atmosphere, water, lighting or when we play bird sounds versus punk rock. When we finally dial it in, we just click ‘go’ to run that strain again.
Each of our rooms has Sonos [speakers]. They play different music at different parts of the growth stage, and at different parts of the day. In the morning, we wake [the plants] up with bird noises and chirps and stuff from nature. The lights are dim and we start our first irrigation. Then it goes into a zen music period. [The music] reaches its pinnacle at 12 noon and Bach and Beethoven are ripping in here. You can hear it outside. Then we start the come-down period. During all this, the music is an audio representation of what we’re doing with irrigation strategy, light strategy, CO2, electrical connectivity in the water lines, and nutrients. It all follows this pattern every day.
We also break it down into three different growing phases. Vegetation, stretch and bolt, then we teeter off to end the life. We have tricks all along the way that we believe are the best way to take care of the plant during each phase of its life.
Can you see some indication of a preference for one type of music over another?
I have my theories. A lot of cannabis is not seeable with your naked eye. Probably the majority of what makes cannabis good you can’t see and you can’t smell. It’s a sixth sense. That makes it difficult to track through data, but we tend to think it prefers more classical, complex stuff during its bulking period, and calmer, lo-fi beats during the morning and night. Like humans, our brains understand that when it’s bedtime, we want to bring down the frequency, and when we’re in the middle of the day and things are happening, we want to be jamming out and stimulated.
What do you mean there is a sixth sense?
Cannabis picks up on the environment around us and as we all know, environments don’t just necessarily mean climate or what’s physically happening. As we know as kids, it’s what’s actually happening around us, what’s the vibe of the room, what’s going on in the world at the time? Out of the 195 different species of plants we grow here, I think cannabis is most sensitive to that sixth sense environment.
Where did you come up with the name Milkweed?
Milkweed is a native plant here in New York. During the Monarch butterfly migration, the butterflies feed on it. It’s this puffy, white flower, like cotton candy. My brain went to a milky trichome when they are ready to be harvested, and the metamorphosis of a butterfly.
It kind of pulls together all of these sixth sense phenomena in nature. Like a monarch butterfly leaving a leaf in Mexico, going to Nova Scotia and coming back to that exact leaf. How does that exist? Milkweed is representative of these inexplicable natural phenomena, in a way that’s specific to New York because it’s a native plant.
For people that have been smoking weed in New York for a while, do you think the surprise is that it was grown here, or just what it is at large?
I think the majority of people haven’t smoked product like this before. I think that the cannabis connoisseurs are the ones begging for this in the market, but the majority of the market doesn’t even know it exists. The cannabis connoisseurs are all over Instagram and Reddit saying, where’s all the good weed in New York? It’s a valid point, but for the majority of the market it’s going to be so fun to see if this elevates their experience. I hope they give it a try.
When Joanne and I smoked [Lemon Cherry Gelato, Milkweed’s first drop], it felt like we were smoking air.
Yeah, because it’s so clean. I think a lot of the bad rep on pot of couch-potato, feel-like-shit, headache, these types of side effects aren’t side effects from THC. I think they are side effects from things like badly cured chlorophyll, maybe fungicides and molds.
A clean, pure sativa uplifts you and gives you euphoria, but it doesn’t give you anxiety. It’s also different for everybody and that may be a huge placebo effect in my mind, but all I know is that this indoor clean product, from A to Z, clone to your doorstep, has been an amazing experience for me. It opened my eyes.
Do you have a preference of growing outdoor or indoor?
When you’re growing outdoors, god and mother nature are in charge. When you’re growing indoor, you’re playing mother nature and god. So for a mega control freak indoor is the way to go. For a spiritual aspect, outdoor is the way to go.
Do you feel less of a spiritual connection growing indoor?
I actually don’t because to me everything is spiritual. There’s nothing that’s not spiritual. It all has been created from the universe.
What’s been the toughest part of owning a farm?
When I started farming, a big part of me loving agriculture was self sustainability and independence. And when I started, we were really small and I could be independent. But once you grow your farm, you kind of lose a sense of your independence because you’re caring for your employees and their families. I can’t just get up and leave.
Who is Ruby?
Ruby is a little blue eyed, brown eyed, rescue dog that came from Texas during the flood seven years ago. They had this crazy rainstorm and the adoption agency called farmers in New York.
Ruby became the top queen. She’s my business partner and my boss. As people like to say, ‘Let me run that through Ruby before talking to Will.’ Ruby was there during the first sale of legal cannabis in New York.
When I was talking about how I put all my money into buying this land, it was just Ruby and me in a trailer, no electricity, middle of February. We pulled up to this farm and dropped ourselves over there near the river and that’s how we started. Every year we’ve just built and did weird renditions and figured out apprenticeship programs and were creative throughout to get where we are now.
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