According to High Times, cannabis has become America’s fifth most profitable crop. Last November, Leafly Holdings, Inc. released their first ever “Cannabis Harvest Report” which took an in depth look at cannabis production and sales in many legalized states.
According to the report, “Cannabis is medically legal in 37 states, but for purposes of this report we focused on operating adult-use states—the 11 states where any adult can walk into a licensed store and buy cannabis—for salience to the general public,” the report’s authors wrote. “In those 11 adult-use states, cannabis supports 13,042 licensed farms that harvested 2,278 metric tons of marijuana last year. That amount would fill 57 Olympic swimming pools, or over 11,000 dump trucks stretching for 36 miles—and it’s returning $6,175,000,000 to American farmers every year.” The $6 billion, makes cannabis the fifth most profitable crop in the United States, trailing behind wheat ($9.3 billion) and ahead of cotton ($4.7 billion).
Also stated within the report, in five states, Alaska, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Oregon, cannabis is the most valuable crop of the lot. “In each of the 11 states with adult-use retail stores operating, cannabis ranks no lower than fifth in terms of agricultural crop value—often within two years of the first stores opening. In Alaska, the cannabis crop is worth more than twice as much as all other agricultural products combined,” the report’s authors wrote.
The report also showed an increase in cannabis sales in legal states. Within these legal states, cannabis sales increased by 34% when compared to 2020, bringing in an extra $3.7 billion in the 11 researched states in 2021 alone.
Read the unedited article here.
