It’s been less than two months since California began issuing temporary licenses for the state’s newly legal adult use marijuana marketplace, and while applicants are still lining up for their chance to get in on the action, the state may have already issued more than enough cultivation licenses to meet the projected demand.

As of Monday afternoon, the Department of Food and Agriculture’s CalCannabis division had issued 1,000 temporary cultivation licenses, with nearly a quarter of those (241) provided to applicants in Humboldt County (more on that later). These temporary licenses last just four months, but they’re expected to function as first steps for permanent licenses.

Those thousand growers have more than 10 million square feet of cultivation area to their names, enough to produce roughly 2.3 million pounds of cannabis per year, according to conservative estimates. That’s more than enough to meet the anticipated demand for legal weed in California, according to the state’s own projections.

Let’s zero in on the numbers just a bit: While the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) estimates annual statewide consumption at 2.5 million pounds — and predicts that legalization will boost that by roughly 10 percent, to 2.75 million pounds — the agency also expects that nearly 30 percent of that weed will continue to be supplied by the black market. That leaves an annual statewide demand for roughly 1.9 million pounds of marijuana. Other estimates are even smaller. The 2017 California Cannabis Opportunity Report, for example, estimates annual statewide consumption of just 1.5 million pounds. 

What this all boils down to is a finite and highly competitive market for above-board cannabis cultivators in California, especially when you consider that the state cannabis regulations released late last year included no limit on farm size. (The California Growers Association is suing over that fact.)

“This should scare the shit out of any growers,” said former Humboldt County Supervisor Mark Lovelace, who now works as a cannabis policy advisor for HdL Companies. Indeed, there are already signs that the market will be dominated by just a handful of growers. The Sacramento Business Journal reported earlier this week that just 10 license holders (including two from Humboldt County) control nearly 30 percent of the small cultivation licenses issued statewide.