If you’re in the licensed Humboldt County cannabis world, you could legitimately paraphrase Charles Dickens and say, “it’s the best of times; it’s the worst of times.”
Best stuff first: What Humboldt does well, which is growing craft cannabis largely outdoors, is becoming acknowledged as the highest quality way to do it. Humboldt growers and makers absolutely killed it at the recent Emerald Cup Awards. Sungrown shines when it comes to producing the tastiest flower and the terpiest, most wholesome, manufactured cannabis products. Humboldt makers tend to lean into solventless manufacturing, meaning no hydrocarbons and other chemical solvents are used, and the products retain all the green goodness, rather than producing a clear, uncomplicated distillate. Solventless products also competed very well.
At those Emerald Cup Awards which, for the non-weed person have been described as the “Olympics of Cannabis”:
- Whitethorn Rose, a strain by legendary grower Johnny Casali of Huckleberry Hill Farms, took home several awards, including first place wins for collaborations in the icewater hash and CO2 cartridges categories.
- Ridgeline Farms and Jason Gellman won the prestigious Breeders Cup, as well as first place in the mixed light category.
- Space Gems took first place for both edibles and alternative cannabis edibles for their gummies (congratulations and drat you, Wendy Barker … we at Papa & Barkley finished second in the edibles to Space Gems this year, and we won that alternative cannabis category last time).
- At Papa & Barkley, in addition to the above, we entered four gummy products in a field with 86 entries and put all four in the top 10. We also placed in the top five for our dark chocolate caramel-filled bites, our Rainbow Belts hash, and our Strawberry Rainbows rosin.
These are just a few of the highlights, and there’s not space in this column to list all the Humboldt accolades. But to name a few more, important awards went to Rebel Grown, Royal Key Organics, Mattole Valley Sungrown and Willow Creek’s Sol Spirit Farm.
The Emerald Cup is really about cannabis connoisseurs. It’s terrific that Humboldt performed superbly when judged by those with the most sophisticated palates and highest standards.
The bad news, however, is that this level of quality is not widely winning in the broader California market. Being the Napa of weed doesn’t help much if almost all of the customers prefer fortified wine.
The licensed market remains bad. Foot traffic in dispensaries is down. Prices, possibly showing the tiniest uptick in recent weeks, are still substantially down. Customers largely still prefer the look of indoor-grown cannabis and shop for the highest THC, the equivalent of drinking Everclear rather than Mondavi.
In some ways, legalization has worked. Lots of cultivators and other companies got licensed. Some things worked as intended. In Humboldt, there were intentional moves to get cannabis cultivation out of the most environmentally sensitive habitats and into spots more suitable for agriculture. Humboldt County has seen a remarkable reduction in grow sites. Before Proposition 64, which birthed the current legal market, the best assessment is that there were about 15,000 grow sites on 5,000 to 6,000 parcels. Now there are 1,200 permitted sites and substantially fewer illicit market grows. (I’ll point out that the illicit market remains larger in California than the licensed market, an ongoing problem for those of us in the legal market, but there are far fewer grows total in Humboldt.)
If you ever thought that cannabis — both licensed and unlicensed — didn’t matter to our local mainstream economy, the data should make you think again.
Sales taxes tell the macro story. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Humboldt sales taxes were down 5.2%, while the greater Far North area saw a decline of 3.9%. Statewide, sales taxes were up 3.1%. Humboldt County sales are down in all major categories, except for the restaurants and hotels group.
The reality on the ground is worse in places. Garberville and Willow Creek and their environs, for example, feel bleaker than these numbers indicate.
We find ourselves in a classic good news/bad news situation. Currently, unfortunately, the bad news predominates. However, if you believe that quality will eventually win out, then the good news is that Humboldt farmers continue to grow much of the world’s best cannabis, and others of us turn some of that into many of the best value-added products. A happy future could still exist for us, even if it remains a ways off.
Michael Kraft is the compliance and government affairs officer at Papa & Barkley. You can reach him at michael.kraft@papaandbarkley.com.
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