Web Exclusive
30 YEARS. 14 LOCATIONS. THOUSANDS OF STORIES. ONE LEGENDARY GATHERING.
For three decades, the New York Harvest Fest has stood as a cornerstone of cannabis culture, activism, music, art, and community.
What began as a gathering of passionate advocates has grown into one of the most enduring celebrations of plant culture in New York, traveling to 14 unique locations while bringing together generations of pioneers, growers, patients, artists, musicians, educators, entrepreneurs, and freethinkers.
Over the years, Harvest Fest has welcomed a memorable lineup of performers and visionaries including Pete Seeger, George Clinton & the 420 Funk Mob, Richie Havens, Immortal Technique, dead prez, Dogs in a Pile, lespecial, New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Wailers, The Dead Milkmen, Cabinet, Fishbone, Melvin Seals & JGB, Levon Helm, Particle, Vince Herman, Aron Magner, Ryan Montbleau, John Kadlecik, Ike Willis, Ed Mann, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Murphy's Law, The Persuasions, Max Creek, Kenny Brooks, ecoustic hookah, Moonalice, The David Nelson Band, Donna Jean Godchaux, Garth Hudson & The Dharma Bums, Vassar Clements, Buddy Cage, Sophistafunk, The Schwag, and countless others! The electronic stage has featured trailblazers including DJ Logic, Frankie Bones, Heather Heart, Rob Gee, Superstar DJ Keoki, Atomic Babies, DANK, Roo, True Risen and more.
Harvest Fest has also served as a platform for some of the most influential voices in activism and social change, including Jack Herer, Ask Ed Rosenthal, Timothy Tyler, Rhoney Stanley, Hamilton Morris, Steven and Ina Mae Gaskin, Dana Beal, Queen Mother (widow of
Baba Olatunji), The Real Radio Rahim, Mayor Jason West, Jimmy Tebeau, John Galt Jr., Doug Greene, Danny Danko, Rick Cusick, Steve Bloom, Don E. Wirtshafter, Donnie Greenthumb, Jim Miller, Steven Hager, NJ WEEDMAN, Rev. Larry Ellis, Rev. Kenny Glassco, Judge James Grey, Vince Herman and many more champions of freedom, education, and reform.
The visual arts have always been woven into the soul of Harvest Fest with extraordinary artists including Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Mike DuBois, Mikio Kennedy, Isaac Abrams, Lisa Betournay Bell, David Dipp, Desiree Rosalee, Groovin Lumens, Smoke & Mirrors, Joint Ventures & Technological Artisans transforming the festival grounds into immersive galleries of creativity and consciousness.
For 30 years, Harvest Fest has celebrated award-winning cultivators, legendary cup competitions, groundbreaking advocacy, educational workshops, live demonstrations and stunning visual art, unforgettable music, master craftspeople, eclectic artisans, lifelong friendships, family traditions, late-night campfire drum circles, and the evolution of an underground movement to a thriving legal industry!
This is more than a festival! It's a reunion, a movement, and a living piece of New York history.
The 30th Annual New York Harvest Fest Cannabis Cup
The longest running cannabis competition in America!
Where everyone is a judge!
Thirty years strong.
The roots run deep.
The story continues.
Oct. 24, 2026 - Noon - Midnight
Griffin House, Palenville, NY
Featuring:
Sam Grisman Project
Skeleton Crewe (Jay Lane, Pete Sears, Rob Barraco, Barry Sless & Steven Inglis)
Pappy Biondo (of Cabinet - Artist at Large)
SAGE
Misty Mountain Ramblers
Laura Leigh Band
Danny Danko (Senior Cultivation Editor High Times 2002-2020)
The Real Radio Rahim
Art Gallery featuring Mike DuBois & Mikio Kennedy
and so much more!
Welcome to our Web Exclusive section. Each month we will be bringing to you poetry, flash fiction, columns and more! With that, we welcome you to our October exclusives!
DECAY 1: SEEPS & SINKS IN
Chad M. Horn
Decomposed union
Eroded eternal path
Cold/ closed casket case
Aroma of dead flowers
You rot in my memory
DECAY 2: HALLOWED OUT
Chad M. Horn
Dates, names eroded
Epitaph erased by moss
Cracked granite crosses
Abandonment issue looks
Years of kudzu crawl consumes
All Carts Are Full
E. W. Farnsworth
The streets resound with groans and cries. Soldiers have their red hands bloodied from fresh slaughter. The magnitude of the “great devouring” is far beyond mere human comprehension.
Show trials are conducted daily in every city, state and region. The accused are never acquitted. No pleading can assuage the harms and hurts. Old forms of torture and new forms of death tax the authorities and drive the people mad.
At the national level, death’s parade has rows of spectators leering from their impaled corpses. Crucifixions are countless, most embellished with hand-and-foot nails--and spears to test for life amongst the hanging figures, uncovered except for loincloths, both male and female.
The major networks are devoted to covering the trials and sentencings. Juries are mere ciphers when every trial ends one way—perhaps beginning with slow torture but always terminating in death. No distinction is made for religions, so priests, rabbis and pastors take turns officiating with last observances—unless they too become victims. Succor is only available to prolong agony of the condemned. There are no appeals, no mercy. All attempts to escape justice spell torture and death to the fugitive and everyone implicated in his or her flight.
Just now, in every city a media center has been appointed to showcase the proceedings. Those condemned to bear their crosses are reviled for their infractions before they are commanded to stop before their allotted stand where soldiers are ready with tools to perfect the fastening and the raising of the still living on their crosses. The bodies’ weights are likened to the grievous injuries the impenitent have inflicted on the people. Those who weep and scream for peace appeal in vain.
For the most visible criminals, the trusty guillotine stands ready in a public square. There the horse and bull carts haul their hopeless passengers. Again; soldiers help the old and infirm step lively to the summit of the platform where the bloody blade stands raised and dripping blood as the victim’s head is thrust, face down through the lower form, which is matched by the descending upper form of neck brace. No individual dies without hearing a recitation of his or her crimes and successive hoorahs of the frenzied onlookers.
If all goes well, the blade descends without impediment, and the veins of the severed head and neck spray wildly as the body trembles in the throes of passing. If the blade gets stuck, more likely than not, the executioner is immediately found guilty of obstruction—and faces the sudden execution once the problem has been resolved.
The supply of victims seems limitless, and the blood flowing from the device makes the surrounding square a bloody bog. The observers are inspired by the revenge they are witnessing. If they show too little ardor when the blade falls, they are likely to be added to the day’s business. The carts come full, and they depart full also. Dogs lap the blood where it pools in the tracks of the carts.
Thanks to technology, the numbers are scored in many ways. So, the numbers convicted, the numbers impaled, crucified and guillotined are instantly available. The giddy announcers attempt to outdo one another in boasting how the pageant is outdoing other such displays in historical terms.
It did no good to separate the ultra-wealthy from the upper middle class. Everyone knew the capitalists were all guilty by the size of their bank accounts or their accumulated ownerships or their corporate positions. The lesser sentences of consignment to the new prisons were barely worth a mention in the media. Spies were everywhere taking notes on named individuals who, anyone might allege, belonged under scrutiny.
Vlad the Impaler served as one example of a shining historical example for the masses. Vlad had used the unusual punishment to strike terror into the hearts of his enemies. In this case, however, the legions of impalers had no ulterior motives than to take revenge for all their imputed wrongs. The commentators remarked in surprise that the impaled dd not die instantly after impalement. Some even survived long enough to give extensive interviews, always arguing their innocence, of course.
Now in the fourth week of their nation-wide festivities, the tribunals are busy inventing new crimes for justice to feast upon. Waste, fraud and abuse, it seems, is rampant beyond all understanding. Not only the accused, but their associates and abettors, are herded to trial. Facts did not matter. One accusor’s asseveration was sufficient to have them all condemned.
With such a universal confusion of values and identities, the media gleefully become the champions of the people. Committees comb through the daily proceedings to compose the next day’s arrest lists. Border units for the nation, the states, the counties and the cities keep busy funneling new detainees into the penal system. A cottage industry quickly grows around the need to do extensive torture to elicit confessions. Templates for those confessions are adapted to accommodate sundry crimes and, of course, to include lists of collaborators.
The organizers have early integrated Ais into their punitive systems. This allows instant fact checking, correlation of data across normal boundaries and the like. The business and political classes therefore are indicted across cities and states. Bounties are offered to increase the intake of victims. As a show of fairness, databases are formed to record every verdict, every sentence, every execution. A specialist AI organization keeps tabs in case the expected outcomes differ from actuals.
Alliances among families, tries and clans, natural among humans, are traced so that no guilty party would not come under strict observation. On the surface, this appears to be discriminatory, but the commentators for the media make the case that some “bad apples” are likely to slip through the dragnets if they are not identified early.
Though the organizers are late to record suicides among the suspicious, they catch on quickly. A suicide is by definition guilty, and so is his or her family and circle of friends. As another effort, AIs recognize when special favors are being invoked to evade the inexorable wheels of justice. So, individuals with sufficient net worths to bribe judges are put on special surveillance in case they try to fool the courts.
The nation is full of cheering as never before as wholesale wealth confiscations translate into summary distributions of cash to the masses. Since no one from the underclass and classless needs to work anymore, they are free to become observers of the pageantry the executions provided. The name of anyone who objects to the proceedings is entered into the lists.
Predictably, owners of firearms and ammunition begin to fight back, but their purchases are a matter of record. Draconian measures to search for weapons are instantiated, and the carts haul away infractors to detention centers, many of which have “black” addresses, meaning they do not exist in formal records. In fact, the AIs have been trained not to recognize a detention center and to tag as a troublemaker anyone who searches for one.
Every day, the numbers show progress on every level. The number of non-citizens has reached equilibrium. The detentions of illegals have pushed the capacity of the detention and prison systems. The AIs determine that any overflow populations could be delivered to the carts. By the seventh week of the proceedings, the AIs estimate fully one-half of the cart populations is composed of overflow illegal aliens.
Although no official mention of the overflow solution is mentioned in the media, the global population has made its own informed view. The influx of outsiders has ceased. The outflow of illegals has also ceased because no one can escape the controls that have been imposed. At the highest levels, the principals have begun to devour themselves. The finger-pointing has become general. Those who recognize the signs of the turning of a fickle population to newfangledness begin to quiet their followers.
Two curves are meeting and converging—the increases of victims and the inflows of new victims are requiring a general retooling. The AIs predicted that, within three weeks, the people will be dissatisfied and require change. They therefore decide to institute thought control, which they could monitor in many quantitative ways. This new source of victims was guaranteed to give the death system ten additional weeks of activity.
Still, the crowds roar all through the days in every city and state. The billionaires have been eliminated, and their estates have been confiscated and redistributed to the masses. Now the millionaires are the targets. And the people cry to lower the bar further. How much money is enough for survival? No one knows. The middle class begins to fear for their future as the underclass rises to accuse them of being part of the enduring problem. Businesses are failing, and the populace is getting used to the daily spectacle of bloody executions.
Unusually sensitive to the vagaries of popular taste, the media signal a change of tone through music and advertising. The music shift from the stadium songs of Queen to the reflective high-end bar music of Glass, for example. The ads change from high-end products to down-home fare with lower-middle-class actors. Imagery in the media transform from those depicting the aftermath of the Spartacus slave revolt in ancient Rome to the winter themes in Doctor Zhivago. Within days, the tenor of the times makes a seismic transformation.
In the media, the themes of victory and a better future replace those of despair and the desire for revenge. The AIs orchestrate statistics to demonstrate how much good has been accomplished through bloodshed and how much remains to be done through the hard work of restructuring and rebuilding. In effect, the mood is positive. Still, the impaling continues, the carts with victims for the guillotine continue to operate at capacity and the smells of human offal and blood linger in every venue for executions.
The people begin to grumble because they have no satisfying work to do. The AIs’ answer is to begin cleaning up the cities and states. Broken windows need to be replaced. Burned cars need to be towed to new automobile graveyards. Factories need to be refitted. Stores need to be resupplied. Money needs to flow to the people while they prepare psychologically for monumental changes.
The impaled bodies and the open-pit burials of the masses who had been beheaded do not disappear all at once. Gradually, the cities determine when they will bury the dead and halt the flow of victims. No one wants to return to the status quo ante. But people begin to think of a day when no further executions will prove necessary. Through the weeks of chaos, many old scores have been settled, but now it is time for achieving a new equilibrium—before new depredations occur.
Mass graves are a necessary part of the planning. Even with such measures, the funeral directors of the nation have a huge job to do as they are suffering from capacity overload, a dearth of refrigerator units and a lack of sufficiently trained staff. Bodies have resulted from enforcement efforts, and there is no way to predict where those corpses lie. Dogs are used to discover the bodies, but the real problem is getting them prepped and underground as quickly as possible.
Writers are encouraged to change their subjects as during the aftermath of the COVID outbreak. Anthologies now look for submissions that do not feature blood and guts. Dystopias are okay, but some form of hope must be indicated, unless the work is science fiction.
We are in the beginning of the transition now, and signs are more hopeful by the day. The smell of human remains will permeate the nation’s atmosphere for a very long time—years perhaps. Folk singers are coming out of their enforced sequestration. They sing old favorites, not focused on the recent tribulations. “Where have all the flowers gone?” is an example. The nation is just awakening from a nightmare of its own devising.