The wholesale worth of marijuana throughout 15 adult-use states has reached $5 billion—making it the sixth most dear money crop within the nation, above potatoes and rice—based on a brand new report. And that’s not even accounting for the large medical hashish market that gives for sufferers in virtually two dozen different states.
Leafly’s 2022 Hashish Harvest Report fills in vital gaps in agriculture information concerning the crop, which has been understudied via conventional means as a result of marijuana stays federally prohibited.
The hashish firm analyzed licensing information for authorized hashish states, gross sales and tax experiences, industrial pricing information, subject measurements, U.S. Division of Agriculture (USDA) crop values and skilled enter to develop the report. The evaluation covers previous 12-month information in some states and full-year 2021 information in others.
The highest-level takeaway is that the marijuana trade is a major factor of the agriculture trade, even when it’s solely authorized and controlled by sure states at this level. There are virtually 13,300 American farms rising marijuana for grownup use within the 15 lined states, it discovered.
The crop’s estimated $5 billion in wholesale worth places it above a number of American staple crops like potatoes. The one crops that exceed its worth are corn, soybeans, hay, wheat and cotton.
By way of Leafly.
“Merely put, native and federal governments don’t deal with hashish farmers like farmers,” David Downs, the report’s lead writer and Leafly’s California bureau chief, mentioned in a press launch. “There’s systematic discrimination on the native, state, and federal degree. Grownup-use hashish is a high money crop in states the place it’s authorized, however that tune goes unsung,”
USDA is likely to be monitoring industrial hemp tendencies because the crop was federally legalized, nevertheless it doesn’t present analyses of the marijuana trade due to its federally illicit standing. Leafly known as {that a} “vital omission with actual implications.”
“Individuals need to finish the Drug Struggle and transfer customers to a authorized, taxed, and examined crop,” the report says. “Voters and group leaders want manufacturing, value, licensing, and crop worth information to measure our progress. Regulators in some states can’t provide probably the most primary truth about their hashish markets.”
Researchers discovered that farmers grew 24 % extra metric tons of adult-use marijuana in 2021 in comparison with the earlier yr. Total, the sector cultivated 2,834 metric tons of hashish, which “would fill almost 15,000 dump vehicles lined up end-to-end for up for 45 miles.”
The report says that if medical marijuana states had been included within the evaluation, the full yield could be “about 3 to five occasions bigger.” It additionally doesn’t embody federally authorized hemp cultivation, which might additionally enhance the hashish complete even additional.
USDA launched the outcomes of an enormous, first-ever federal survey on the hemp trade earlier this yr, offering a “benchmark” evaluation of the financial influence of the burgeoning market and discovering that the trade reached $824 million in worth in 2021.
A state-level breakdown discovered that the wholesale worth of adult-use marijuana ranged from $20 million in Vermont to $1 billion in California.
The worth of leisure hashish was $687 million in Colorado, $445 million in Illinois, $551 million in Michigan, $420 million in Nevada, $500 million in Oregon and $350 million in Washington State.
“Not one of the 15 authorized states included within the Leafly Harvest Report formally listing hashish amongst their high agricultural commodities,” the report says. “Regardless that marijuana is the No. 1 crop in Alaska, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, regulators in two of these states don’t even publish manufacturing totals.”
“Authorized marijuana grew to become the No. 1 money crop in New Jersey inside months of the primary retailer opening in April 2022,” it discovered.
Leafly additionally highlighted issues that uniquely influence state marijuana markets, together with ongoing criminalization, a scarcity of entry to conventional banking companies, overregulation, excessive taxes, no federal catastrophe aid, costly insurance coverage charges and excessive software charges.
“Broadly talking, over the previous yr, farmers within the American West expanded their hashish manufacturing by lots of of metric tons,” it mentioned. “Comparatively, growers in most Midwestern and Japanese states expanded their harvest at a snail’s tempo.”
“On the identical time, the pandemic-fueled shopper urge for food for hashish slackened in 2022, which led to a dynamic during which elevated provide met a market with tightening demand,” it continued. “And that meant decrease wholesale costs for hashish farmers.”
Leafly additionally put out a separate report in February the discovered virtually half one million individuals are employed full-time within the hashish sector as extra state markets come on-line and mature.
Final yr was the primary time that job creation within the marijuana trade exceeded six figures, with 107,059 new jobs created, in comparison with 32,700 in 2019 and 77,300 in 2020. As of 2021, there are 428,059 folks employed within the marijuana area, in comparison with 321,000 the prior yr.
Photograph courtesy of Mike Latimer.