Humboldt County officials report on ‘overall decline’ of local cannabis industry

California’s Humboldt County, long the heart of cannabis cultivation in the state’s famed Emerald Triangle, has seen an “overall decline” in legal cannabis cultivation business applications since 2018, county officials were told this week by staff.

Although the county still has slightly more than a thousand legal marijuana farms – 1,068 to be precise, the Lost Coast Outpost reported – the number of applications for cultivation permits has dropped to a trickle, Planning and Building Director John Ford told the county board of supervisors.

Ford recapped that there are still 400 more applications being processed, all of which were filed after the 2018 state regulatory system went into effect, and another 657 that were officially denied, but he said there have only been about five new applications submitted in the past two years.

“We’re not seeing new applications come in,” Ford told the board.

That’s a far cry from the roughly 2,000 applications submitted in 2016 when the county first began considering regulating marijuana cultivation, and it’s far below the actual number of cannabis growers in the mountains of Humboldt County, which is often estimated to still be in the thousands of unlicensed farms. In short, it’s a sign that many have lost interest in the legal market altogether.

The county has seen “hundreds” of marijuana farmers struggling due to wholesale prices plummeting and massive overproduction, the Lost Coast Outpost reported, and many have exited entirely.

Almost no local cannabis farmers in Humboldt are looking to expand, one farmer told the board, but are merely trying to survive.

“We’re just trying to hold the baseline,” Craig Johnson, owner of Alpenglow Farms, told the board.

More farmers could go out of business next year as well, county Supervisor Michelle Bushnell said at the meeting, if market conditions don’t improve and cultivators aren’t able to pay county cannabis taxes that were temporarily suspended under Measure S.

“We have a lot of payment plans that are going on with Measure S,” Bushnell said. “If they don’t complete those (payments), then that’s going to be a revocation of their permit.”

The decline is part of a long-term trend of market contraction and downturn that the California marijuana industry has been enduring over the past few years, since the end of the COVID-19 sales boom in 2020 and 2021.