Harvest Failures / Crop Loss and Wholesale Transfers Between Florida MMTCs: What Changed in 2025 and Why It Matters
Florida’s medical marijuana system is built on vertical integration. Every Medical Marijuana Treatment Center (MMTC) must grow, process, and dispense its own product. That structure leaves little room for operational flexibility when something goes wrong, such as when a cultivation facility experiences a crop loss.
Florida’s law allows one narrow exception to the vertical integration requirement: limited wholesale transfers between MMTCs following a verified harvest failure. See s. 381.986(c), F.S. But as of December 2025, that exception is far far less forgiving than it used to be.
The Statutory Baseline: Wholesale Transfers Are the Exception, Not the Rule
Section 381.986(8)(c), Florida Statutes, makes the policy clear:
“A medical marijuana treatment center may not make a wholesale purchase of marijuana from, or a distribution of marijuana to, another medical marijuana treatment center, unless the medical marijuana treatment center seeking to make a wholesale purchase of marijuana submits proof of harvest failure to the department.”
In practice, this has always meant:
No routine wholesaling between MMTCs
No supply-balancing across licensees
No true “marketplace” for excess product
Wholesale transfers exist solely as a safety valve for catastrophic cultivation events, not as a business strategy.
How OMMU Evaluated Harvest Failures Before December 2025
Prior to late 2025, the Office of Medical Marijuana Use (OMMU) evaluated harvest failures with relatively flexible, informal standards. While documentation was required, the process tended to be:
More discretionary, not limits on the amounts purchased or number of crop loss occurrences
Less time-sensitive, with purchases carried out over a period of months or even years
Heavily dependent on narrative explanations and internal records
MMTCs that could demonstrate a bona fide crop loss, particularly from storms, disease, or pests, often had a reasonable path to approval, even if documentation was assembled after the fact.
That era is over.
Emergency Rule 64ER25-4: A More Rigid, Compressed Framework
In December 2025, OMMU promulgated Emergency Rule 64ER25-4, fundamentally reshaping how harvest failures and wholesale transfers are evaluated 64ER25-4.
The rule does three important things:
Tightly defines what qualifies as a “harvest” and a “harvest failure”
Imposes strict documentation and submission deadlines
Limits the frequency and scope of wholesale relief
1. What Counts as a “Harvest Failure” Is Now Narrowly Defined
Under the rule, a harvest failure must be a complete loss or destruction of an entire harvest—partial losses do not qualify. Acceptable causes are limited to specific events such as:
Natural disasters
Equipment malfunction
Pest infestation or disease
Contamination rendering plants unfit for consumption
Flooding or fire
Critically, any loss tied to willful action or failure to follow SOPs is disqualified. This shifts harvest failures from a factual inquiry to a compliance-driven analysis. OMMU is no longer just asking what happened, but whether your systems were followed perfectly when it happened.
Additionally, in order to be eligible fora wholesale transfer, the MMTC must have dispensed marijuana for the eight consecutive weeks immediately prior to the submission of the wholesale request. This means that newer MMTCs that aren’t actively dispensing will not be eligible to replace an initial crop loss.
2. Documentation and Timing Are No Longer Forgiving
The rule imposes three major timing constraints:
Harvest failure certification must be requested within 30 days of the failure
Wholesale transfer approval must be requested within 30 days of certification
The purchase must be completed within 90 days of approval
Missing the deadlines will likely be fatal to the request.
In addition, OMMU now requires submission of standardized forms through the licensing portal, along with detailed supporting documentation pulled from the MMTC’s internal seed-to-sale tracking system. Informal explanations and post-hoc justifications are unlikely to suffice.
3. Wholesale Relief Is Quantified, Capped, and Serialized
Even when approved, wholesale transfers are tightly constrained:
OMMU specifies the exact quantity and stage of product that may be purchased
An MMTC may only receive one harvest failure certification per failure type per cultivation facility per year (with limited exceptions)
MMTCs must complete any previously approved wholesale transfer before requesting another
Wholesale transfers also:
Cannot include packaged or consumer-ready product
Must be fully tracked and manifested
Are subject to standard testing requirements
Cannot be marketed as originating from another MMTC
In short, wholesale transfers are now regulatory triage, not operational flexibility.
Why This Matters for MMTCs
The practical effect of Rule 64ER25-4 is that harvest failures are no longer just cultivation problems, they are compliance events.
MMTCs should assume:
Documentation will be scrutinized
SOP adherence will be evaluated retroactively
Timing errors will not be excused
Wholesale relief will be limited, not expansive
Operators who do not have:
Clear harvest definitions
Contemporaneous incident records
Well-documented SOP compliance
Internal timelines tied to regulatory deadlines
are at real risk of being left without supply continuity options following a crop loss.
Key Takeaway
Florida’s vertical integration model was never designed to absorb routine operational disruptions. With Emergency Rule 64ER25-4, OMMU has made clear that wholesale transfers are a last-resort regulatory exception, not a backstop for weak cultivation controls or delayed reporting.
For MMTCs, the message is simple but consequential:
If you want access to wholesale relief after a harvest failure, you must be prepared before the failure occurs.