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| Grow applications in Washington State |
You'll find an interactive map at this link that will show you all of the grow applications that have been made to the liquor control board as of the first two weeks of the license period. Zoom around and see where they are in your neighborhood; each grow operation has a little clickable area, so you can see the type of grow and the name of the entity and the street address. A couple of the addresses (17 out of approximately 630)
didn't work, so this isn't a complete map, but it's a good start.
The state has allocated 2,000,000 square feet of "canopy" space; that is, the area that is actually used by plant leaves; each application has a "tier" associated with it. Tier 1 to tier 3, with 3 being maximum sized grows, 10,000 to 30,000 square feet.
Just taking the canopy space and dividing it by the maximum size grow gives you 67 operations for the entire state. Clearly with over 10 times that number applying, we are going to run out of canopy long before applicants. So the state has said that they will reduce the canopy requested proportional to the amount of over subscription.
So if they get applications for 4 million square feet, they will give everyone 50% of what they have asked for. The producer canopy space is being handled differently than the retail licenses -- there, if they get more retail license applications than there are licenses available they'll hold a lottery.
I'm actually a little surprised that the applications haven't broken 5,000 yet.
A quick perusal of this list shows that some of them have obvious location problems; I fully expect some of the applications to be rejected because of background or finances or whatever, but it's clear that at the start of this process there will be more than 1,000 people who are licenses to produce marijuana in Washington state.
Should be an interesting competitive environment.
One thing that should be noted: None of these producers have any idea who they're going to be selling to. They're only allowed to sell to retail stores, and those licences won't be handed out for months. Unlike other farming where you can sell your crop before you plant it, these producers will be forced to plant and grow without having customers yet.
They are doing their best to limit production. I guess they don't want the black market to go away. I can see how they are also favoring a future oligopoly since the limitations they've imposed give a competitive advantage to large scale, high capital enterprises. The production licensing scheme does this through tiering. All grows should be restricted to the same space and that space should be the area of the facility.
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