I’m not here to talk about any specific brand or any particular strain, but as a journalist, I’ve been tasked with telling the truth and telling you the truth: I’ve been deeply disappointed by the lack of quality in the California cannabis market lately.
We’ve all heard the news stories and insufferable words from cannabis CEOs about how not only can the legal market be able to compete with the traditional market, but after press releases and traffic, anyone in the cannabis space needs to ask themselves: What exactly stands in the way of making weed available? harmful widely on the legal shelves?
To find the answer to this question, I enlisted the help of some California weeds and the Emerald Triangle who’ve been around long enough to figure out what good weed is and/or have all managed to set fire to dispensary shelves. Sourwaves is a longtime farmer and meme maker who has been on the brink of disrepair for years due to his unwillingness to pick his foot off the industry’s neck when it comes to growing practices and quality.
John Casale A Huckleberry Hill farmer who has been growing and living in the same Emerald Triangle valley his whole life and has many awards under his belt including Ego Clash winning 1st place for Riddlez rosin Heritage Hash Inc Finally, Robert Gill Council of Humboldt Terp They produce some of the best concentrates I have ever had the pleasure to use, and I am a vocal member of the Humboldt County community on the state of the industry and cannabis in general.
After extensive conversations with the aforementioned, I have summarized the most likely reasons for mass reproduction to occur in the following three explanations:
- Red tape/excessive taxation
- Reducing corporate margins / market manipulation
- General lack of growing experience
Uncle Boof-Smoking Sam
Almost every state has been objectively wrong in the way they set up their cannabis laws either to match the “pay-to-play” market, lack of foresight when it comes to issues of caps on licenses, no caps on canopy space, or both.
“Overproduction and taxation have basically caused a race to the bottom and everybody loses,” Gill said. “Other issues, especially with flowers, only have a certain window where they’re good and they take a long time to get ready, packaged, and tested, unless you vertically combine weeds that get really stale by the time they hit shelves.”
Testing is her burden beast. Every legal state requires some form of THC testing but with little to no guidance on exactly how to implement this process has opened the door to manipulation and consumer confusion when they buy an eighth of 31% THC that doesn’t make them high at all.
“There is no set calibration for the test, one. Second, you can buy the test results,” Surwaves said, noting that there are no regulations surrounding the methodology by which California labs conduct the tests. You’ll pay more than the next tester but that’s what makes the tester famous. ‘Oh, my, THC is over 30%,’ that makes things fly off the shelf. There are little tricks people do to a hot test, like drying it really big and very dry and things like that. like that.”
In addition to overproduction and excessive taxation, many business owners in the cannabis industry have lamented that excessive regulations on how the cannabis business operates have caused gridlock in the industry and put unnecessary money down the road.
One of our biggest obstacles is giving [our cannabis] For a distributor who takes 17% and does not pay us up front. Then they give it to a retailer who doesn’t pay a distributor who doesn’t pay us. And then, if the customer doesn’t buy that product, or it takes a year to pay the retailer, it takes a year to pay the distributor, which in turn takes a year for the farmer,” Casale said.”More [often] Most farmers don’t get paid much.
Revenge on Chads at Rec Markets
The jury is out: Big Money is growing a lot of cannabis for their own good. Of all the cannabis people I’ve talked to over the course of my life, volume is the number one reason cited for boof production. However, the extreme measure is also a very effective tool if you’re a really rich guy who wants to get into cannabis but would prefer if traditional market growers got caught or caught on fire easily.
This mentality led to market manipulation and the payment of legacy operators by huge growing corporations, some of which were accused (if not unofficially) of condoning and pressuring politicians for economically unsound advantages such as removing the one-acre cap on farming licenses, for example. example, or more generally making it easier for people to buy their way into the industry and weed out people with less capital.
“If a man has a one-acre farm, that’s just the basic economics of why it costs larger men to produce a pound of weed,” said Surwives. “So these glass house idiots would cost $30 to $60 a pound, so if they need to get broke, the market sells packages for $150 to $250, because they know these small farms can’t keep up with these low prices.”
For someone like Casali who only grows 5,000 square feet of canopy, who does water deliveries with his girlfriend/partner, it’s almost impossible to compete with the margins set by some of the big operators, so even if the product is much better in terms of quality, it creates a situation. In which the consumer is faced with a cheap option that is not decent enough to defend an extra $20 to $40 for every eighth he would have spent on something worth smoking.
“Growing in the Emerald Triangle, it costs a lot to produce a pound, and in the country up in the hills, being environmentally friendly, it costs us $300 to $400 to produce a pound,” Casale said.
“You’ve got people who are only at this to make money and this is America. I’m not against making money, it’s not. The problem is weed sucks, right? So how do we make that better?” said Surwives.
While no one I spoke to took a hard line on a plant or light number considered “too big to be wet” nearly everyone can attest that once you pass a certain threshold, it’s basically impossible to produce a high-quality bud and at scale some producers in California They produce in, they have created a whole storm of nonsense.
“There are a few people who do that, but they are few and far between. I think a place like Fig Farms has managed to keep their quality and slowly increase their size,” said Gill. “Man, it’s hard to scale the quality. Most of the things we consider to be of quality don’t stand a chance of what people are still producing in the traditional market.”
No love for plants, no knowledge of plants
I’ve never met a single grower worth their salt in my time as an herbalist who wouldn’t love a plant and/or sacrifice enormous time and hard work for the sake of a plant. Maybe it’s some hippie jumbo you picked up while eating acid in the Arcata yard, but if every good grower on Earth said the same thing, there’s a very good chance they know what they’re talking about and all stress it out while learning how to grow might be easier than any other. time ago, you still have to put in 10,000 hours to be able to consistently produce the best representation of a plant.
One of the things Sourwaves stresses regarding growing techniques that he believes lead to poor quality is high density, full synthetic nutrient cycles for large indoor growth which he believes can be improved incrementally by introducing organic nutrients as well as synthetics.
“When you feed a very high amount of EC several times a day, and you force this plant to suck up all these nutrients because you use sensors to measure your dry back, and tell you how and what you need to feed that crap. Access to this information is very dope, don’t get me wrong, But the way it’s manipulated to push the crop to a higher yield, it doesn’t result in a smoke that’s pleasing to the end user,” Surwives said.
It seems that inexperience and lack of love for the plant extends to every part of the industry other than just the growers.
“Even in 2018-2019, if you worked in a dispensary, it was because you loved weed and because you wanted to be closer to it,” Gale said. “And now that it’s been five years since legalization, and the fact that you have a lot of staff in dispensaries that have moved on Ordered to 10 different places, and happened to call them the dispensary instead of Subway or the shoe store or Orange Julius.”
Could Mother Nature simply be a fail-safe from allowing herself to be taken advantage of by people who don’t show her the love she deserves or is this even more bullshit and dumber? I’ve spoken to many farmers who firmly believe that when you do the work, it comes back.
“Most of us, our parents, were part of the earth movement. They taught us that it is just as important to take care of the environment and take care of the earth and the more time and more energy and the more love you put into any type of plant, whether it be fruit trees, grapes, vegetables, Or cannabis plants, the more time, the more energy and the more love, the better in the end,” Casale said.
So what do we do about all this, asked the obnoxious journalist who had learned never to ask rhetorical questions. Something small:
- We get rid of the produce taxes and any/all red tape that stands between the farmer and the consumer so that small farmers can make a living.
- We have set a reasonable limit on license size and/or number of active licenses so that Chads can still play but not spoil it for anyone else.
- People who grow cannabis for a living need to learn how to grow cannabis.
- Show respect to the factory and the factory will respect you.
