Despite statewide problems, legal Cannabis is booming in this Californian county
California’s cannabis industry is crashing, with thousands of companies going out of business and longtime pot farmers shutting down their farms.
But one California county appears to be bucking that trend.
Santa Barbara’s pot farming industry expanded by nearly 50% last year, growing far more cannabis than in 2022, according to the county’s crop report released this week. Santa Barbara was already a leader in cannabis cultivation, but this stunning growth makes the Central Coast county an even more dominant force in California’s cannabis industry.
In 2023, Santa Barbara grew 9.8 million pounds of cannabis worth $328.9 million, according to this week’s crop report. That’s an increase of 45% more overall cannabis weight compared with 2022. Overall revenue for cannabis grew at a slower rate, increasing 28% over the same time period, likely because wholesale cannabis prices have consistently fallen over the past eight years.
The crop report shows that cannabis has quickly become an outsized player among the agricultural county’s farms: Cannabis is the second-most valuable crop in the county, worth far more than the $98 million of wine grapes produced in Santa Barbara last year. Only strawberries, with $775 million in crop value, were worth more than pot.
The county’s huge cannabis growth is made even more impressive when put against the statewide industry’s overall contraction: Thousands of pot farms have gone out of business over the past six years, and that trend has continued into this year. California lost a million square feet of licensed cannabis cultivation area last month alone, according to Aaron Edelheit, a cannabis investor who watches the state’s industry closely.
Brittany Odermann, deputy county executive officer for Santa Barbara, told SFGATE that the county is hoping the growing industry will eventually become a stable agricultural force for the local government.
“We’re excited about what this could mean for the future of the industry and the revenue stream [for the county],” Odermann said.
Santa Barbara is now the largest pot-growing county in the state, growing 40% of all cannabis in California, according to the Department of Cannabis Control (DCC). The state estimated Santa Barbara produced 10 million pounds of packaged cannabis in 2023 (it’s unclear why the state has a slightly higher estimate than the county’s figures), which was more than twice the amount of its next-closest competitor, Monterey County, which produced 3.6 million pounds.
These massive production numbers are thanks to Santa Barbara’s supersized pot farming industry. Whereas Northern California counties like Humboldt and Mendocino are home to thousands of small pot farms that are generally around 10,000 to 30,000 square feet, individual pot farms in Santa Barbara can span more than 2 million square feet.
That’s made Santa Barbara home to some of the largest legal cannabis farms in the country — and a powerhouse in growing cannabis. However, the focus leans more toward quantity over quality, as the majority of pot grown in the county is lower-grade commodity cannabis that is turned into concentrates for edibles and vape pens, as opposed to high-quality cannabis that is sold as unprocessed flower.
