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Mike Boutin
Mike Boutin was raised in the mountains of California after the age of 9 in Siskiyou County. Not exactly the Emerald Triangle but the lines have always been blurred when it comes to marijuana in northern California. Mike lived in Horse Creek, Scott Bar, Mt. Shasta, and Montague during his school years while his step father worked for the USDA forest service, and then became a Deputy Sheriff.
Mike watched a contradiction even at that young age concerning marijuana. People who his cop father had openly and respectfully admired, were now the bad guys because they were "marijuana growers."
Right before leaving for a stint in the Air Force as a jet engine mechanic, Mike smoked marijuana for the first time at age 17. After a school event one night a "bad kid" as he had been taught to believe challenged him "smoke some weed cop's kid," and so the story goes.
Mike didn't get high but he got an awakening. The next time was different. Marijuana was common in the service and it worked wonders for altering the mood of an otherwise troubled youth from that day on he recalls when asked why?
After the service Mike Boutin became an axeman on a high lead yarder and moved on to driving log trucks and then highway trucks and that is where he met Tawni. Mike and Tawni met at a specialty glass hauling company and became a couple and life long partners, or "the Boutins."
They worked together driving over the road trucks, gravel trucks and owned three trucks together at one time with intra and interstate authority of their own, essentially a mini trucking company.
Technically speaking Mike Boutin reports that he has smuggled contraband in the form of personal marijuana over so many state lines for so many miles over so many years, that he is the high milage/ low quantity king of marijuana smuggling! We're not talking quantity here folks. Just a joint or two.
After the loss of their 2001 Volvo dream ride to a crash in the Ohio snow, Mike and Tawni Boutin picked up the pieces and tried to rebuild, but were forced out of business by intractable financiers, and they set out to find a new way.
Leaning on their understanding of what marijuana could do, freed from the narrow focus that can trap people in the same spot for year after year, they decided to leap into something they knew a little about: Weed.
They founded Grace Farms in Trinity County to grow the best natural organic cannabis possible under proposition 215 to help people who could not help themselves and found a new calling that few are so uniquely trained for over a lifetime of experience. Mike Boutin became an advocate for others to be able to save themselves with the same freedom he had fought for himself and continues to be a voice for reform, along with his Cannabis Nation Radio partner Julie Rose.
The producers of reality TV were looking for a best practices collective growing marijuana and found Mike and the result is "Weed Country" the Discovery channel show about America at war with itself.