4 ms·

I did the math on this a few years ago and it came out to be less than 10 farms to supply the entire US with weed. Edit:. Found my post: For comparison, bulk

by treis 5y ago

I did the math on this a few years ago and it came out to be less than 10 farms to supply the entire US with weed. Edit:. Found my post: For comparison, bulk price of tobacco is a few bucks a pound. Admittedly I am not an expert in marijuana vs tobacco cultivation, but I doubt it's 1,000 times more expensive. Ultimately, the problem with profiting in a legal marijuana industry is that people simply don't smoke that much pot. Say that there's 260 million adults in the US and they all smoke 1 joint per day. Assuming: 1 joint = 1 g of marijuana 1 lb = 454g 1 acre can yield 600 lbs of marijuana 1 farm is 1000 acres If you do the math, that means we need roughly 350 farms worth of marijuana. Or in terms of acreage, roughly 0.04% of all the acreage in the U.S. under cultivation. In other words, even if we assume a ridiculous level of smoking there's simply not a huge demand for pot. Using more realistic amounts, a handful of large farms could produce all the marijuana consumed in the country.

h2odragon 5y ago
Tobacco is harder to grow and cure than good cannabis. The tobacco industry consolidation bent the market to the point that "tobacco" as sold is the result of a large industrial process that happens to use nicotina plant matter as an input. I think the cannabis industry is flying hellbent to that point just to have an excuse for spending all the investor money. As well as a literal distaste for burning plants as a social thing.
reissbaker 5y ago
I really like this analysis because it's so conservative. Even among regular pot smokers, 1g/day is extremely high! (No pun intended.) Not to mention weed is fairly easy to grow at home; I've had a few friends do it, and they always end up with truly ludicrous amounts that they end up just giving away for free. I don't think the same is true of tobacco, or even alcohol — homebrewing good beer is harder than growing good pot (at least, in my relatively meager homebrewing experience), and making distilled spirits at home is a recipe for blindness and death. I don't know a lot about tobacco curing, but a little online research seems to confirm what the sibling commenter posted: it's a difficult art, takes a very long time (up to a year?), and doing it yourself usually ends in poor quality tobacco. Weed you just... leave out to dry for a week, and then stick in a glass jar for a few more weeks. As a vice product, weed just isn't going to be that expensive absent high regulatory pressure. It's a weed, it's easy to grow. Edit: that being said, edibles are a different story. Making those at home often results in disaster, since controlling the THC levels is fairly difficult. There could be good margins there, as well as for all-in-one vaporizers, where making hash oil is quite difficult and potentially dangerous. Flower, though, seems hard to make profitable as a consumer product.
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by treis 5y ago

h2odragon 5y ago

Tobacco is harder to grow and cure than good cannabis. The tobacco industry consolidation bent the market to the point that "tobacco" as sold is the result of a large industrial process that happens to use nicotina plant matter as an input. I think the cannabis industry is flying hellbent to that point just to have an excuse for spending all the investor money. As well as a literal distaste for burning plants as a social thing.

reissbaker 5y ago

I really like this analysis because it's so conservative. Even among regular pot smokers, 1g/day is extremely high! (No pun intended.) Not to mention weed is fairly easy to grow at home; I've had a few friends do it, and they always end up with truly ludicrous amounts that they end up just giving away for free. I don't think the same is true of tobacco, or even alcohol — homebrewing good beer is harder than growing good pot (at least, in my relatively meager homebrewing experience), and making distilled spirits at home is a recipe for blindness and death. I don't know a lot about tobacco curing, but a little online research seems to confirm what the sibling commenter posted: it's a difficult art, takes a very long time (up to a year?), and doing it yourself usually ends in poor quality tobacco. Weed you just... leave out to dry for a week, and then stick in a glass jar for a few more weeks. As a vice product, weed just isn't going to be that expensive absent high regulatory pressure. It's a weed, it's easy to grow. Edit: that being said, edibles are a different story. Making those at home often results in disaster, since controlling the THC levels is fairly difficult. There could be good margins there, as well as for all-in-one vaporizers, where making hash oil is quite difficult and potentially dangerous. Flower, though, seems hard to make profitable as a consumer product.

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