SoHum History: The Rise and Fall of the Marijuana Industry
![Marijuana in a unpermitted greenhouse with other plants. [Photo by Kym Kemp]](https://kymkemp.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Marijuana-in-a-greenhouse-with-other-plants.jpg)
Marijuana in a unpermitted greenhouse with other plants. [Crop of a photo by Kym Kemp]
How did we go from hippies sucking on the Green Nipple in the Roaring Eighties to the scene today with large legal pot plantations, surviving mainly by breaking the rules and selling weed on the black market, locally and out-of-state?
Starting at $1000 a pound in 1975 the price rose to $5000 by the early nineties, then after the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996 (legal for medical use), the price annually dropped as the hills filled with the greenrushers operating multiple light dep greenhouses, and everyone else had to grow more to make a still-good living.
When it dipped down to $1500 you had to grow so many plants that the Green Nipple was replaced by the Green Monkey: were you riding it or was it riding you? The challenge was juggling trimmers, weather, mold, powdery mildew, ripoffs, drying sheds, and the hardest part of the whole operation: trying to sell it. (Cops and helicopters had mostly disappeared from the list of stresses by then.)
When the price went below $1000 a pound, a lot of people around here stopped growing, then Proposition 64 passed overwhelmingly in 2016, bringing statewide legalization of cannabis for recreational use, and the price went to $500 and lower. None but the brave, naïve, or desperate decided to wade into the legal system, make a deal with the devil, ie, the Humboldt County Planning Department and Board of Supervisors, and attempt to keep growing, while following often changing and expensive rules and regulations.
I ran into one grower from Salmon Creek at the bank a couple years into legalization who said, “Estelle told me it would cost $20,000 to go legal, now I’ve got $100,000 into it and it’s a big hassle, but I’m in too deep to stop and have to keep trying to finish the paperwork.”
Another guy from Ettersburg around the same time was complaining that it had already cost him a few hundred thousand dollars to “come into compliance,” he was still far from getting his license, and if he could do it all over, he wouldn’t. (He used to be handsome and youthful-looking but was spotted the other day looking old and haggard, and still struggling with his large weed farm.)
When another person, a former clone dealer from Sprowel Creek, had told me with a big smile that he was going legal I said, “Really? Why? You know what you’re getting into?” He had a beautiful piece of land, including a spring which started and stopped on his forty acres, one of the state requirements for licensing. California Department of Fish and Wildlife examined his land, discovered damage from logging decades before he bought it back in the seventies, and the expensive remediation costs would be more than the land was worth. (He dumped it at a loss.)
There are many stories like this, as businesses in town have closed, the hills have emptied out, and would-be farmers who got in late and have large land payments are abandoning their land.
Many of those who are able to stay are looking for regular jobs with which to survive in this depressed economy, as the pound price plummets to $250. (Yet there’s still farmers with good connections growing and selling like it’s 2008, and may have a few good years left.)
Another big question is what’s going to happen to all those back-to-the-landers and old growers, now in their seventies and eighties, still living in their off-grid cabins in the middle of nowhere, without the steady income they had over the last forty years, and no retirement plan?
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Paul Modic’s piece on Humboldt’s cannabis history lays bare a slow-motion train wreck, but it doesn’t dig deep enough into the rot that’s really behind it. California didn’t just stumble into this mess—our state sold us out, lock, stock, and barrel, to the mafia and cartels, just like they gutted the timber industry decades ago. Back then, corporate greed and cozy government deals turned thriving logging towns into ghost towns, leaving families high and dry. Now, the same playbook’s been run on weed, and Humboldt’s the poster child for a community betrayed.
The hippies of the ‘80s sucking on the “Green Nipple” didn’t see this coming. They built something real—small-scale, grassroots, a lifeline for rural folks. Then Proposition 215 hit in ’96, and the greenrushers flooded in. Prices tanked from $5,000 a pound to $1,500, and the honest growers had to scale up just to survive. But the real knife in the back came with Proposition 64 in 2016. Legalization sounded like freedom—instead, it was a Trojan horse for corruption and organized crime.
Here’s the dirty truth: California’s government didn’t legalize weed to help the little guy. They partnered with the mafia and cartels to monopolize it. Look at the black market—still thriving, even with “legal” weed everywhere. Why? Because the state’s regulations, cooked up by Humboldt County’s Planning Department and Board of Supervisors, were designed to choke out small growers while letting big players with shady ties skate by. Permits costing $20,000 ballooned to $100,000 or more, as Modic’s Salmon Creek grower found out. Ettersburg’s guy dropped hundreds of thousands just to stay in the game, aging decades in the process. These aren’t accidents—they’re traps set by local corruption to funnel control to the connected.
The timber industry got the same treatment. Politicians and regulators let corporations clear-cut the forests, pocket the profits, and leave behind busted communities. Now, weed’s legal market is a sham—cartels run the show, laundering cash through “compliant” farms, while the state looks the other way. Our towns are hollowed out again—businesses shuttered, hills deserted, old growers in their off-grid cabins staring down a broke retirement. Sound familiar? It’s the timber collapse 2.0.
And don’t get me started on the price scam. Modic notes pounds dropping to $250, but that’s what growers are getting offered—not what it’s worth. On the street, legal weed’s still fetching $1,000-$2,000 a pound, depending on quality and where it’s sold. Check X—users in LA and SF brag about paying $300 an ounce retail; that’s $4,800 a pound. So where’s the money going? Middlemen—distributors, dispensaries, and their cartel buddies—are pocketing the difference. They’ve turned a $5,000-a-pound industry into a grinder where growers get scraps and the suits get rich. Greed didn’t just ruin legal weed; it built a whole new layer of parasites on top of it.
The state and its cronies didn’t just destroy an industry—they torched a way of life. Humboldt’s not alone; this is California’s MO. Timber, weed, whatever’s next—they’ll sell it to the highest bidder, legal or not, and leave us picking up the pieces.
Thanks for your deeper look, I do tend to just skip over the surface of things, my fear of boring people, not that yours was boring, it wasn’t…
Spot on analysis. I am just actually grateful I have CHS which is basically a systemic allergy to cannabinoids. I don’t buy it or grow it or have anything to do with it anymore after about 4 decades. So give me weed, whites, and wine, and I’ll show you Flake County.
Gold miners rarely saw weath. The merchants who sold them the equipment needed all did very well…..nothing new under the sun.
I think glass house in ventura should cut back 30%. Large farms should be trimmed back 25%. And mom and pop growers need to be brought in to the fold. Or northern California will be a ghost town/ghetto. Oh that’s right it already is.
The dispensaries are nice but to expensive for a regular smoker. Black market is still the only option if you want more then a couple of grams.
It’s a weed. Easiest thing to grow in your backyard. Or your side yard. Or if you live in Myers Flat in your front yard.
Now that the knowledge of how to grow outdoor has been exported to Oregon and Oklahoma, and the knowledge of how to grow indoor has been exported to Los Angeles, there is no way to bring back the emerald triangles cannabis industry.
Not just OK or OR. Tennessee, Michigan, Maine….all of them have slowly growing industries. Eastern Europe buyers know this because it’s a hell of a lot shorter distance to that part of the world from the east coast, and less handling and hassle getting it there. Easier to hide 1000kg of processed bud on a ship carrying 10,000 containers than some mule with expired tags on a moving van.
Somehow, alcohol, in its various forms and permutations, remains a mass-produced as well as a small-batch, craft, gourmet product, produced in many States and around the world. Why is that? I have seen locally produced booze at Costco, but not cannabis. Marijuana is legal in many States, but it’s federally illegal to use the national banking system; all cash, no bank cards. Good luck running a legal business on cash only. Also, you might want to talk to a lawyer about what can happen to your federal right to own firearms even if you consume cannabis legally in your State. Pot growers face, in California, additionally, a gouging, punitive, byzantine, labyrinthine regulatory system not faced by craft alcohol producers.
so it’s not an issue of the inter-dimensional, not-of-this-world, power-plant being beyond comprehension, production, or control. It’s still a matter of a wonderful plant and its people still being hounded, harassed, fined and legally obstructed and contained by the people who hate it and us and always will.
California’s biggest issue in the legal industry is retail.
It’s so heavily constrained that the big players who have vertical monopolies dominate the shelves and leave most consumers unable to source (and even generally unaware of) the quality they would prefer.
There’s no point in constraining farms. There’s always going to be excess production without exports. The only chance that small growers have is to be given actual market access, either through dramatically expanded retail licenses (unlikely because it would require the state to override city zoning/permitting which is always unpopular and rarely works out as hoped anyway) or by opening up legitimate options for direct to consumer sales.
Glasshouse wouldn’t be paying outlets to display their weed up front, and selling it below cost if they had a solid demand for their over production. Their investors are losing money to gain market share and put the small farmers out of the game
Indeed. And making market access limited is a key part of the plan.
If only big players can afford to get on the limited shelf space then only big players will stay in business.
Wider market access would give small farms a chance, and that’s not the goal.
Glasshouse alone could almost cover the entire State cannabis consumption. If the State had only hired a fifth grader to do the math they could have figured this out. The only vent for excess production is the out-of-state black market. Why on earth would regulators allow 180 acres of weed, if out of the other side of their mouths they complain about kids having access, or out of state sales? There’s news going around that there are now 10,000 suspended licenses, and 8,000 active. I wonder how many of those are cultivation permits. If %15 of Californians go through an average of 1/2 gram of weed a day, that’s a consumption of about 5,700 lbs per day. If spread out equally to 8,000 cultivators, that’s only 265 lbs per year. That level of production is on the very low end of what most permits are pulling off. With these numbers there’s no way in hell multi acre weed farms make sense. Let’s say there’s only 4,000 cultivators. There’s still no way a Glasshouse scale operation makes sense from a regulatory standpoint, unless you want a “Single Player” type system like Florida.
>”Another big question is what’s going to happen to all those back-to-the-landers and old growers, now in their seventies and eighties, still living in their off-grid cabins in the middle of nowhere, without the steady income they had over the last forty years, and no retirement plan?”
—
A guess:
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They will elect legislators that will give them money and propose more chicken-fighting laws ???
If you didn’t build your safety net, that’s on you.
Well Paul, you could always write a book. You saw it all, and have the rare quality of telling it like it is/was. It would be a New York Times Best Seller… Is the New York Times still in Business? Printed paper is folding up everywhere.
Outlaws have always been my heroes and I’m in good company along the north coast.
You could tell about the phenomenal corruption in CAMP. They took an enormous amount of money with the promise they would “get rid of weed”. They wasted it renting helicopters. They flew around hanging from ropes dropping in on weed plantations, having parades with truckloads of Marijuana and rolling in their glory. Nobody told them you need to do something about whatever was putting the seed in the dirt.
We were all fooled by the acronym CAMP. (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) We thought they would actually stop planting, not drive up the price by selective pruning of the crop.
I could go on, but I’ve probably said too much already. But, we are are all in this North-Coast-boat suffering with the good bad and the ugly.
Our only consolation is we have more good Outlaw Stories.
Modic only likes sexy stories, and few of his stories stray far from the simple occurrences and the mundane…
Crime did pay, but the smart ones buried Krugerrands in the hillside back when gold was $300/oz…
You mean you DIDN’T save something for later?
If you made your nut by growing weed, you must have been big and paying off LEO’s, but buying those Diesel Duallys with the GROWTBRO License Plate was excessive, and I hope you paid off your hilltop home long ago…
My neighbor told me he got a pound of “Blue Dream” for $100, a couple years ago, and HIS neighbors house smelled like Lower Redway in October, and the customers were lined up to buy the Bubble Hash they were making daily from the Toters of Flower that seemed to arrive every night…
Pastures of plenty indeed, and in Lake County they grow outdoor fields of flower, so there’s no shortage of cheap silage…
Sorry to hear it all crashed on you, and it was truly wild while it lasted, but your County screwed it all up while being located far from the market, but as long as weed is illegal somewhere, flowers will flourish, in the terroirs of Humboldt…
“few of his stories stray far from the simple occurrences and the mundane…”
yup, like i posted on Fb yesterday: “Sometimes I wonder why all my friends aren’t reading my stories, as I find myself fascinating. I mean who else states the obvious better than me?”
Yeah you get me, that’s why I call them my non-stories or stories-about-nothing.
And yet I continue…
“You mean you DIDN’T save something for later?”
Of course we did, I’m not that stupid. I even told my friends to get a REAL live and a REAL job. I always thought that weed was a flash in the pan. Then… they went on to be multi-billionaires while I worked my ass off the rest of my life. It took 50 years to be able to say… “I told you so”.
Nothing wrong with working for a living…
At least you don’t have to worry about being thrown into a jail cell, or being nervous that the helicopters are coming for you…
There might be a few wealthy dealers, but wealthy growers are few…
Corporations ruin everything, and greed does filthy things to humans, which is why some live in small places and desire only enough to get by…
If you are breathing, own a business and relatively healthy, you did well, and I know a few 75 year olds living in their parent’s old house and still going to work…
Being frugal and having steady habits pays off, and times always change but possessing valuable skills and knowledge makes you valuable, no matter what happens…
Crime paid, but now you have to adapt. Saving and investing works, but in a long life, the best thing you can do is have high earning children…
Just a quick note, it takes work to run an agricultural operation and that was true for weed as well, Ernie. I think you know that. I can tell you’re a bit bitter, but anybody who planned for it could be well off now due to the temporary high profit margin, but they won’t brag about it to you just to ease your feelings or confirm your biases. Some folks paid a price for the good times and got lessons but they are certainly not going to tell you so. The industry carried this County for at least a decade and if you didn’t get a piece of the pie, that’s on you. If memory serves, I suggested to you a while back to get the Redwood Capital Bank’s outstanding economic analysis of the Humboldt County cannabis economy by Senior Vice President Jennifer Budwig. Told you so.
I still remain perplexed and chagrinned by how pot affects the minds of people who DON’T use it!?! The gloating, the schadenfreude, over the the industry’s problems seems a tad gleeful. But that’s just me.
Oh, I remember standing next to people trimming plants, or trying to hide them in rows of corn watching CAMP choppers carrying bales overhead. What worked against them is sound travels very well, the hills have many eyes, and there was no sneaking up on anyone’s operation, and definitely not in a helicopter.
Back in the day when CAMP or other raiders came there were either those who ran TOWARD their plants (to try to save some) or those who ran AWAY from them.
Hard to hide it from a STABO (Short Term Airborne Operation: dude hanging from a cable, boots on your colas). You couldn’t just move a serious grow in the 30 seconds you had once they popped over into your canyon.
Probably why we got the latest president: Americans like outlaws…
A book! I have a few home made ones, they’re fun to make.
(I have only two copies of the latest one, so I’ll have to sell them for
$15,000 each…)
And remember, Trump’s Grandfather sold liquor and had a stable of sex-workers… He took his wealth back to Germany and then died of Spanish Flu after braving everything in the Klondike.
Trump’s dad sponged off Federal programs to build housing, partnered with the Mafia and owned 18,000 apartments…
Donald probably emptied coins from the washing machines, but he conned his way to a real-estate fortune, and defrauded the government repeatedly…
Obviously, crime pays, but it can also kill…
Give me a quiet life and some steady income streams, and save the weed garden for the drug dealers…
After WWII, everyone wanted a small business and a little home. Somewhere we all went crazy, but economies and governments align with Karma in the end, and every person faces the same outcome…
Give me a small life, and few complications, and few worries.
Everyone I went to College with wanted the big income etc, but they were all from L.A….
Big money, big problems.
There is a big difference between an outlaw and crook/ criminal
Spot on Ernie…
Ernie, I remember painting an interior out in Whitethorn, when CAMP came swarming in with their helicopter. Tim Hare went running out the front door, waving a pipe wrench, yelling “I’m only the plumber, I’m only the plumber”! Hilarious.
But corporate-directed ” legalization” sure is great! We are FREE and SAFE!!! Safe from burglaries because we now have nothing of value. And Safe because there is less activity because people left because there’s no money or jobs here. Great! But at least that little black kid in LA isn’t risking his college chances by selling weed on the corner anymore!! ( He’s selling fentanyl now).
So all around we must say Yes- always believe the government and their wealthy corporate friends and definitely always be compliant. That’s the American spirit, right?…
Everybody knew with the commercialization of cannabis that it would be a race to the bottom boom and bust just as it happened when these were just all logging towns now the abandon lands left littered with trash will be vacant to be taken over by nature once again even with gov newsoms lies you all knew that big corps with deep pockets would price you out and it happened more and more states going legal producing there own products locally the rest of the nation does not need California’s weed anymore so just like any industry if you can’t adapt to change and pace of a new era of cannabis you will just be swallowed up and spit out
Welp, it was fun while it lasted. I’m glad I invested my profits along the way, and I’m working a regular job now. I always have lived below my means. So I should be good for retirement. As for the people that enjoyed the lavish baller lifestyle along the way, and blew all their money…sucks to be you.
True dat! A lot of money went up noses and the partying never stopped. Until it did. Never ever put all your eggs in one basket. Many people forgot that part and never developed skills for living in the so called “real” world in case the bottom dropped out of weed. It’s a shame, Garberville will never be that vibrant and alive again. Looks like the 70s here now.
“Garberville will never be that vibrant and alive again. Looks like the 70s here now.”
You must not have lived in Garberville in the 70’s like I and my family did. Garberville was thriving, had more of everything than Garberville has now, you are totally off base and have no clue what you are talking about!
Grow food, we’re going to need it. Fill those greenhouses with vegetables to sell at farmers markets. Those old holes for pot will grow excellent carrots, turnips, parsnips. Plant corn, beans and squash in those holes, at least you’ll feed yourself.
Anybody who can run a personal, raised bed, pot garden is well-trained to convert to food growing. It’s an overlooked benefit. Glad you pointed that out. My upvote doesn’t always work. If you can grow good weed, you can grow great tomatoes. Very useful skill if Trump succeeds in destroying America; we could wind up feeding the hand that bites us.
Great piece Paul! Only note- I wish you also mentioned (or write about later) the young families trying to carry on the culture and make it as modern back to landers in the hills, particularly considering the gas price explosion amidst all of these changes in the market. when I tried to get a side in-town job after Ed passed, I calculated the costs to get there it was a total loss. Also Idk if you’ve noticed but divorces have skyrocketed in these boarded up ganga communities, many families with young kids couldn’t sustain the off grid lifestyle without side flow and had to relocate. Most of the old timers I know have savings to retire on but it’s increasingly more dangerous for them to be so far from services, I do worry about them.
I’ve convinced some of my friends to get on the senior housing waiting list, when I see a group of young people, your age, still here I think wow, somehow they’ve figured out a way…
I blame government for creating the green rush to begin with. And then also killing it. All through taxation. Old time ranchers know this. Back in the 70s the state and counties decided to change the land tax valuation from something like 25% of the land value to 100%. It would have been higher if not for Prop 13 that I see commenters pissing and moaning about. Ranchers couldn’t afford the taxes on 1000 acres (or more) so ended up losing land to the government through liens, parceling out and selling, selling whole ranches or land trades to the government in exchange. I know of a couple ranches that were looking at near-instant multi-million dollar tax bills.
What ended up was a huge glut of land for almost pennies. $10-15 an acre was possible to find in 1975. And hundreds of people swooped in to take advantage of it. For the new homesteader (and growers of anything) this was a Godsend. Hell yeah, your own mini-ranch for $500. The drawback was the same as the old ranchers that retreated: it’s not easy to make a profit on the land when most of it is too hilly and rocky to do anything. Cattle don’t do well on hills and you’d need 5000 of them to make a buck unless you had other avenues of income. So weed reigned supreme. We could grow our own gold. For a while anyway.
Then as the legalization sun rose above the horizon, we went from being producers at any price point we chose to a market that favors the buyers looking for champagne quality product at beer prices. And then when full legalization came to fruition, that was the beginning of the end as people quickly found out that to make the money they had been, they’d need entire mountains of crop growing. And then all the various groups also got involved. And then things just snowballed to today and those same folks that were around in the beginning or some point in the middle are gone or leaving and a lot have either sold land, or let it go and disappear and let it go up for a tax sale.
This doesn’t help the new owners much either, regardless if it’s government land now, or a new private or commercial owner. What infrastructure was left has to be remediated before anything can be done with it. I’ve seen properties in the $100-200k range (that were going for $800k 10-12 years ago) I’d love to have for growing other things beyond weed, but cleaning up someone else’s mess and getting government to sign off on it is going to cost 2-3x what I want to pay. So somebody else with deeper pockets will get to deal with it.
And the government is never going to fully recover those costs. Have fun with that BOS. Can’t get blood from a turnip when you already ate the turnip.
Thanks for your deeper look into the discussion…
(However your prices for land in 1975 seem unbelievable…)
Then again Bob Mc Kee was selling some for no money down so, hmm…
He bought some of my relatives ranch land during that time. Not quite as cheap as I mentioned, but then turned around and sold it too for cheap. There were other parcels I’ll call them micro-parcels of less than 5 acres that had weird misshapen property lines that seem like they were parceled out by some drunk that did go for well under $100 an acre. And no access road except through someone else’s land. Government has a neat way to create problems to solutions that weren’t problems.
Trinity Pines is a good example. That weird subdivision could only have survived with weed dreams.. now a few Laotians can get busted each year, while some family in the Central Valley made generational wealth, definitely NOT growing weed.
His prices for land ARE unbelievable or a zero or two was inadvertently left out. Cheapest land from Bob McKee that I remember was $250 per acre for 30 to 60 acres, on average. I got in at $350/acre which was not bad. Bob would take your check for several hundred dollars and hold it for a year or so until you somehow got the down payment. Very cool dude. He liked to be sure you had a water source on every parcel.
3 beautiful souls welcomed me into the surreal, magical world of Whale Gulch about 25 years ago. I tried to visit the area 2-3 times each year, when the real world brought me down and I needed temporary escape.
I had the opportunity to learn about the gulch (including it’s history), and watched how it changed over the decades. One friend, who was involved in the industry, knew what was coming long before it all crashed and burned.
He was smart enough to save his money, he lived simply but had everything he needed. Physical disability slowed him down in later years, but he was always happy working his land, he was the only person I knew who actually whistled while he worked.
Sadly, they are all gone now, nothing but fond memories. The small towns I drive through to reach the area are now a shadow of their former selves. But now that I think about it, so is my current town of Portland. But that’s a whole other topic…
It’s the 35th anniversary of Operation Greensweep when the army invaded to wipe out marijuana gardens on the Northcoast. The formerly dirty hippies transformed into upstanding citizens by the good ol’ do re mi, had been riding the boom for fifteen years and were shocked to see the copters dive right through the fog to look for plants.
Every afternoon for a week when the helicopters got too noisy a hundred nouveau riche hippies drove up to the staging area to demonstrate, chanting “U S out of Humboldt County!” It was the classic growers protesting the cops.
Ray Rafael wrote a story about it for “High Times.”
Then it was off to Shelter Cove for brunch at the Pelican’s Landing.
Those were the days, demo and brunch!
Here’s a gem I found in a box of memorabilia the other day about land prices in the ’80’s.
note the “elbow estimates.”
Testing
The 80’s were a good time to be young and in Humboldt. If you could manage. Weott was thriving, a gas station, store, post office. Two coke machines and two pay phones! Parties at the vets hall, we played basketball and baseball at A.J. School.
the ccc center was just north of us. Wednesday was free chili night at Meiger’s bar. There were some lean years and tough times, but for the most part the memories are good ones. Even when viewed through rose colored glasses ?. Glad I’m still here.
When the terminology changed from “garden” to “farm” we were doomed
when people started talking about calyxes was when it got weird for me…
California-style regulations killed it when CAMP could not. Oklahoma could beat us at our own game. Nice job!
Lol at the hyper compassionate types on a boat full of people that has holes in the bottom yet they rail against the will of the passengers and proceed to drag more people out of the water and on to the boat, thinking they are saving people while ignoring the fact they are making the boat sink faster killing all on board.
I miss the good old days.
The passage of Prop. 64 resulted in economic and social disaster…
“Fishhooks at eye level”
Nostalgia is fun to visit from time to time , but living in the past is not healthy, neither is being perpetually stuck in the griefing/mourning process over the passing of the “good old days”. The same people re-telling the same old stories over and over and over and over again to the same people. Move on already.
I know, that’s why I held on to this essay for a year before turning it in, it just seemed too depressing…Yeah, I’ve been deep into the past the last ten years, me me me way back when, but I’m mixin’ in some current ones now so that’s something…
Social Media
When you block me from Facebook
and I see you in town
what is the etiquette, ignore your frown?
Why’d you unfriend me, were you in a bad mood?
More likely because I was rude crude or lewd
Let’s not get our panties in a swirl
Facebook’s not the real world
Any fool can grow dope. A couple of plants in home or outside for personal consumption just makes sense. Kinda like growing some veggies for your own consumption. Any moron that pays $5000/lb for something one can grow themselves deserves to be as broke as those that thought they could get $5000/lb forever.
Your $5,000/lb # is way too far off the long term average to make a point with. The truth is, at $625/ lb, and if the dozen+ agencies had a predictable fee schedule, it would still be rational to grow weed
That’s a mighty big “if” when this state has a Democrat supermajority. Means there’s a stupid majority of voters, in my opinion.
When you can’t sell what you’re growing, grow something else. Accept these challenges and be flexible. Apples, tomatoes, grapes, plums, lumber and God knows what. Humboldt is a grower’s paradise.
I was thinking fields of San Pedro and Peruvian Torch, but they take a couple years to get established, and require a lot of processing from a large amount of plant material.
Then again, growing some fields of rye inoculated with ergot would be much quicker.
saffron
You gotta grow and process 100 lbs of beans to get the same value as one poorly priced pound of weed. You have to sell 400-500 lbs of beans to buy a set of tires for your farm truck. You gotta own flat acreage, and have spent some money on fencing prior to the steel tariffs to even grow food crops. One has to be independently wealthy to have the luxury of being flexible.
Of course one feels sad for anyone having it rough, but this industry wasn’t any different than any other: you work and you plan for retirement…all that extra cash when times were good ( and there were a lot of good times of plenty) should have been partly invested for retirement like any sensible person does… I grew a few plants for just a handful of years and reinvested the profit into a couple of rentals. I did not foresee this crash so it wasn’t because I was expecting things to go bad, but I was conscious like any semi-smart person that one day you’re gonna been to old to work…
Alot of us grew enough to just pay the mortgage for as long as we could, and that in itself was great while it lasted. Anything that easy and that profitable isn’t meant be multi generational