Indoor growing demographics: How many of us are there, geographic distribution, auto vs. photo growers, etc.?

BII said:

Similarly, surely all AFN discussions about cannabis growing and consumption are fictional role playing, including photos of cannabis being artful fakes. Just another online game. Mostly adult males clearly with lots of idle time acting cool, as if they are actually pot growers. So back to the topic, what are the demographic breakdowns of this fictional activity?

Vendors and comercial/legal growers: What's your view of the market? Surely you have good relevant data, such as you must have in your business plans, market research studies, also stock analyses of publicly traded legal growers, etc..

Click to expand...

I can tell you that for the first time since Colorado's legalization, there are more dispensaries than there are cultivation licenses that are active. Over the past 3 years, the flower market completely dropped out here, where a pound of indoor grown cannabis used to fetch anywhere from $1000-2000, where now you're lucky if you can get over $200 for the same product by weight. Because they didn't limit the amount of licenses (which is a double edged sword,) a lot of big outdoor farms came in with the mentality of "we don't have to grow great pot, we just have to grow a LOT of pot." And they did. And it wasn't great pot. But they grew a lot of it. lol

The market hit this "flood" of over abundant flower, and suddenly where you used to fetch these big prices for weight, suddenly it get getting pounded down to NOTHING, but most of these companies were operating on the same fat budgets and sloppy practices that were fine to lean on, because up until this point, nothing was really getting in the way of that.

The result was a tremendous amount of licensed facilities going out of business, where it hit both the big guys but primarily shut down the smaller ma-and-pa grows that had the minimum license/flower count. I've heard numerous farm owners say "we just have to wait this out, because everyone will either go out of business or sell their licenses," and that very thing happened. Big farms purchased smaller licenses, and suddenly they became even BIGGER farms, and the small ma-and-pa's just left.

So now we have primarily big farms, ran by multiple shareholders, primarily dominating the Colorado market. Everything everyone speculated about "big pharma" coming into cannabis is right on track. Only those with the money really survived, and craft cannabis is almost a funny joke, because no one is going to pay the coin for your fire when they get "it's not quite as good, but it'll sell on the shelf" buds for pennies on the dollar.

BII said:

So it sounds like, from what you are familiar with locally, the traditional networks of pot/drug dealers that for decades supplied essentially 100% of the market are gone, dead. history, etc., replaced by an excess of storefront sellers? Or are the drug dealers still around but now selling other drugs, such as psychedelics?

Click to expand...

I can't say for the OK market; but in Colorado the black market is quite alive, and quite well. It's not uncommon to fetch a far better price selling on the black market than you'd ever be able to compete with legally/commercially, and the quality is NIGHT AND DAY better than I would wager 90% of storefront pot. There's people all over Colorado looking for homegrown; and if you tell them "why not just go to a dispensary," they make the "crinkle face" of "been there, done that."