Nonna Farms was never given the hearing it requested in December 2025. OCM valued the crop at up to $127 million. The company says the agency ignored its own precedent and let the harvest sit until it was worthless.

VERNON, N.Y

On September 22, 2025, inspectors from the New York State Office of Cannabis Management walked a 55-acre outdoor cannabis farm in Oneida County. On September 22, 2026, one year to the day later, OCM’s Deputy Counsel wrote to the farm’s owners that, based on the condition of the cannabis, the agency could not permit it to be sold. In the twelve months between those two dates, OCM never held the hearing the company asked for, never issued a destruction order, never seized the product and never tested it.

The farm belongs to Nonna Farms, LLC, the first social equity registered organization licensed under New York’s medical cannabis program and the first company ever permitted to grow medical cannabis outdoors in the State. Its crop was harvested, moved to an OCM-approved storage facility, quarantined, and weighed twice at the agency’s request. It was never sold. OCM’s own charging document put its value at up to $127,140,000. Today it is worth close to nothing.

Nonna Farms has now filed a renewed request for a hearing before OCM’s Office of Administrative Hearings and is asking the tribunal to find that the agency destroyed its crop without due process and in defiance of a ruling OCM’s own judges issued a year ago.

A Hearing Requested on OCM’s Own Form, Then Lost

OCM charged Nonna Farms on November 26, 2025. Twelve days later, on December 8, the company requested a hearing using the form OCM provides for that purpose. The hearing was never docketed. OCM has since represented to its own tribunal that it was unaware any request had been made. The signed request form was filed as an exhibit this month, by OCM.

How the Charges Came About

Because no medical licensee had grown outdoors before, there was no rulebook. OCM has acknowledged under penalty of perjury that outdoor cultivation was not an option on its application and that the agency changed its own policy to accommodate Nonna Farms. The one requirement it put in writing was security. Nonna Farms installed fencing, 42 cameras, perimeter alarms, flood lighting and round-the-clock staffing the same day.

Between May 21 and June 20, 2025, the company wrote to OCM four times asking for authorization to plant and for a pre-operational inspection. It gave its planting date in advance, copied the Chair of the Cannabis Control Board, and invited unannounced visits. None of the four letters was answered. With seedlings dying, the company planted.

OCM approved the site on July 25, 2025 without mentioning the planting. On August 4 it asked Nonna Farms to measure its flowering canopy and explained how. On August 18 the company reported 36 acres, more than OCM itself later measured, and sent photographs. There was no response. Inspectors arrived five weeks later. On November 12, on a recorded call, OCM’s Director of Compliance told the company the matter was not the start of a disciplinary proceeding. Charges followed fourteen days later: operating without the inspection Nonna Farms had asked for, planting before the approval OCM had delayed, and exceeding a canopy limit based on the acreage the company had volunteered.

The Canopy Cap Was Written for an Indoor Building

The 100,000 square foot limit OCM is enforcing came from the tier Nonna Farms selected on its application for an indoor facility in Castleton. OCM has conceded outdoor cultivation was not on that application. No regulation, decision or order sets a canopy limit for an outdoor medical grow. The only outdoor canopy rules in New York are in the adult-use regulations, which do not contemplate an outdoor medical license, and even those give outdoor farms more canopy than indoor facilities because an outdoor farm harvests once a year. Nonna Farms does not recognize the cap and will ask the tribunal to find it does not apply.

OCM Wrote the Settlement, Then Walked Away From It

On March 3, 2026, OCM proposed a settlement: Nonna Farms would keep its licensed product, sell the disputed remainder and surrender the proceeds to the State. The company accepted in writing within three days and lined up a buyer at $6.8 million. OCM took 133 days to put its first substantive position in writing. The buyer was gone. On the day Nonna Farms warned the buyer would walk, OCM said it would not recommend the company’s pending dispensary locations, the other sales channel its own framework depended on.

On August 26, two days before OCM’s next settlement response was due, inspectors arrived unannounced at the storage facility, ostensibly to weigh the product. They did not weigh it. They issued a Stop Work Order that afternoon. On September 3, OCM declared its interest in settlement “extinguished” and said it would seek appropriate relief. Nearly four weeks later, it has sought none.

OCM’s Own Judges Already Ruled on This

In OCM v. Omnium Health, Inc., decided in July and November 2025, OCM’s Office of Administrative Hearings held that holding perishable cannabis indefinitely is in effect a destruction order, because the product loses value until it is worthless, and that such a restraint is a sanction requiring a hearing before it is imposed, not after. OCM took no exceptions to those decisions. A year later the agency has repeated the conduct against the first social equity licensee in the State. Nonna Farms will ask the tribunal to find that OCM departed from its own precedent without explanation.

Leadership Turnover, Unanswered Letters

OCM has been under a Governor-ordered operational overhaul since 2024. In December 2025, the Governor removed the agency’s acting Executive Director and its Deputy Counsel following the Omnium matter. An acting Executive Director ran the agency from February 2026 until a Senate confirmation in June. Within Nonna Farms’ own file, the Executive Director changed, the General Counsel changed, and the matter passed through three attorneys. Calls were postponed, letters went unanswered, and deadlines OCM set for itself passed. Nonna Farms does not contend that anyone at OCM intended to destroy its crop. It contends that the agency lacked the people, process and leadership to keep its own commitments, and that the cost of every silence fell on the licensee.

The Cost

Nonna Farms’ social equity owners borrowed more than $7 million on OCM’s written assurance that “the compliance unit will work closely with you as you work toward operationalizing in New York State.” The company has had no revenue since the 2025 harvest. The debt is secured by the crop. The lender has moved toward foreclosure.

“We asked OCM for an inspection. We asked for approval. We reported our canopy when they asked for it. We accepted the settlement they wrote,” said a spokesperson for Nonna Farms. “Every time, the answer was either delay or silence, and every time, we paid for it. A year ago OCM’s own judges told the agency that holding a crop until it rots is a destruction order. OCM did it again, to the first social equity licensee in New York. That is a regulator failing at its most basic job. Social equity means nothing if the agency charged with delivering it cannot answer its mail.”

What Happens Next

Nonna Farms has asked the Office of Administrative Hearings to docket all three charges, hold a preliminary conference within ten days and assign an Administrative Law Judge on an expedited basis. It will ask the tribunal to find that the charges are not established, that the indoor canopy tier does not apply to an outdoor medical grow, that OCM’s restraint on the product has no basis in the Cannabis Law or its regulations, that the crop was destroyed without due process, and that OCM abandoned its Omnium precedent without a stated reason.

The company is represented by Patrick J. Hines of Hodgson Russ LLP. It is prepared to proceed on any date the tribunal sets, as it has been since December 8, 2025.

About Nonna Farms, LLC

Nonna Farms, LLC is the first social equity registered organization licensed under New York’s medical cannabis program and operated the first outdoor medical cannabis cultivation permitted in the State, in Vernon, Oneida County.

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Phone: 917-753-6000

Peer-reviewed Missouri Medicine article by Drs. Mark S. Gold and Nicole M. Avena is now indexed in PubMed

Washington, DC

The Global Kratom Coalition today highlights a newly published peer-reviewed medical review urging physicians to distinguish natural kratom leaf from the high-potency, semi-synthetic and synthetic alkaloid products increasingly falsely sold under the kratom name.

The article, Kratom in Clinical Practice: What Physicians Need to Know, by Mark S. Gold, M.D., and Nicole M. Avena, Ph.D., appears in the July–August 2026 issue of Missouri Medicine, the peer-reviewed journal of the Missouri State Medical Association, and is now indexed in PubMed (PMID: 42757335), with free full text available through PubMed Central. The review provides practical guidance for physicians screening, counseling, and documenting care for patients.

The authors explain that products marketed as “kratom” can have dramatically different compositions and risk profiles. Natural Mitragyna speciosa leaf contains a complex mixture of alkaloids, primarily mitragynine, with 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) present only in trace amounts amongst high fiber and anti-oxidant content. By contrast, many newer products that falsely label themselves as natural kratom contain isolated concentrated synthetic 7-OH and other synthetic derivatives like MGM-15. The review reports that in some cases these concentrations exceed the levels found naturally in kratom leaf by more than 100 times, producing pharmacologic effects that differ substantially from natural kratom leaf.

“The public-health conversation has too often treated every product bearing the word ‘kratom’ as if it were the same,” said Nicole M. Avena, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said. “It is not. Physicians, regulators and consumers need to know whether they are discussing natural kratom leaf or a concentrated synthetic 7-OH product. That distinction is essential to sound risk assessment and patient safety.”

The review also examines the safety record. Citing a 2024 toxicology review, the authors report that the available evidence is insufficient to support a causal association between natural kratom leaf alone and severe acute adverse effects. Across 2017–2023 poison center data, 23 reported deaths were associated with “kratom” ingestion — more than one-third involving documented polysubstance use — compared with more than 2,000 deaths reported in association with opioid-related calls. The authors caution that adverse-event surveillance often conflates natural kratom leaf with concentrated or synthetic alkaloid products, obscuring which product a patient actually used.

For the Global Kratom Coalition, the article reinforces the need for targeted policy solutions: keep high-potency and illicit synthetic products out of the marketplace while preserving responsible adult access to traditional kratom leaf.

“Consumers deserve care informed by facts, not labels that flatten important scientific differences,” said Matthew Lowe, Executive Director of the Global Kratom Coalition. “This review gives clinicians a clear framework: ask what product a patient used, document it precisely and respond to the actual risk. Policymakers should follow the same approach by targeting concentrated synthetic 7-OH products instead of advancing blanket prohibitions that miss the real problem.”

About the Global Kratom Coalition

The Global Kratom Coalition is an alliance of natural kratom consumers, experts, and industry leaders dedicated to protecting access to natural kratom leaf while advancing scientific research, driving consumer education, and developing robust regulations to protect consumers. For more information, visit globalkratomcoalition.org.

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New Corporate Identity Reflects Company’s Focus on Autonomous Defense Technologies; Kharkiv Facility to Support Prototype Development, Engineering and Front-Line Testing

VANCOUVER, Canada

Branded Legacy, Inc. (OTC: BLEG) (“Branded Legacy” or the “Company”) today announced that the Company has begun the process of changing the corporate name to T4 Robotics, Inc. (“T4 Robotics”), reflecting its strategic transition into the autonomous defense and robotics sector.

The Company also announced the acquisition of a warehouse facility in Kharkiv, Ukraine, which will serve as a development and operational support location for T4 Robotics’ autonomous defense initiatives, including prototype development, engineering, systems integration and preparation for front-line testing.

The establishment of a physical presence in Ukraine represents an important step in T4 Robotics’ strategy to move its technology development closer to the environment in which it will be deployed.

The Kharkiv facility is expected to provide the Company with dedicated space for prototype assembly, modification, maintenance and testing activities. The location is also intended to support collaboration with engineers, technical personnel and front-line partners as the Company advances its development programs. The exact location of this facility shall remain a secret to protect operational security.

“We believe the transition to T4 Robotics represents a significant milestone for the Company,” said Mackenzie Hughes, Chief Executive Officer of T4 Robotics. “Our objective is not simply to develop robotics in a laboratory environment, but to build systems around the realities of modern warfare. Establishing a development facility in Kharkiv puts our team closer to the engineers, operators and operational environment that are driving some of the fastest innovation in autonomous defense.”

The Company’s initial development focus includes the LADI-Hornet interceptor platform, an AI-commanded aerial system designed to address FPV drones, loitering munitions and other low-cost aerial threats. T4 Robotics intends to use its Ukrainian operations to accelerate prototype development and prepare systems for controlled operational and front-line evaluation.

“The pace of innovation in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of rapidly moving between engineering, prototyping, testing and deployment,” said Hughes. “We intend to build that same development philosophy into T4 Robotics—short development cycles, rapid iteration and direct feedback from the field.”

The Kharkiv facility is also expected to support the Company’s longer-term development of a layered autonomous defense architecture, including unmanned ground vehicle platforms and the KADS-Widow close-range hard-kill point-defense system.

T4 Robotics believes that establishing dedicated development infrastructure in Ukraine, combined with its existing relationships with engineers and operators, can help shorten the distance between prototype development and real-world validation.

The Company expects to provide additional information regarding its Ukrainian operations, development activities and technology milestones as those initiatives progress.

About T4 Robotics, Inc.

T4 Robotics, Inc. (formerly Branded Legacy, Inc.) is a publicly traded technology company focused on the development and commercialization of autonomous defense and robotics systems. The Company’s strategy is centered on developing scalable, cost-effective autonomous systems designed to address emerging aerial and ground threats.

Through its development programs and strategic relationships, T4 Robotics is building toward a layered autonomous defense architecture incorporating interceptor systems, unmanned ground vehicles and close-range point-defense technologies.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the Company’s Ukrainian facility, prototype development, testing activities, technology development timelines, operational validation, commercialization opportunities and future development programs. These statements are based on current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law.

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T4 Robotics, Inc.
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Website: www.T4robotics.com