Cannacurio #104: Cultivation 2024 Q3 Leaderboard

Following up on our recent overview of Q3 licensing, we now delve into the cultivation licenses issued in the third quarter of 2024. These snapshots derived from our Cannabiz Business Intelligence platform show where new licenses are being created and the total number of licenses and facilities in the US.  

Key Findings

1. 18 states added cultivation licenses – up from 14 in the second quarter
2. Regulators issued 688 cultivation licenses in Q3, down from 1,000 in Q2
3. 5 states accounted for 84% of these new licenses – with Michigan responsible for 48%
4. California leads the country with 5,054 active cultivation licenses

The following table is the quarter-end snapshot of new cultivation licenses added by month in Q3 for the top 10 states. The complete list of issuing states is available on our Cannabis Market Intelligence Platform www.cannabiz.media.

Key Markets

Michigan has been the big driver in new cultivation licenses in 2024 issuing 1,171 new licenses in the trailing 12 months besting California’s 355 over the same time period.

It is interesting to contrast the overall number of cultivation licenses between Oklahoma and Michigan. The graph below charts the changes over the last few years. Oklahoma’s moratorium and regulatory efforts are still having a profound effect on the canopy in the state.

California

California ended the quarter with 5,054 licenses, slightly down from Q2’s 5,167 (-2.1%). Facilities, which we define as a business with multiple licenses at one location, were also down slightly from 3,087 to 2,984 (-3.3%).  

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The graph below shows the relationship between California’s cultivation licenses and facilities over the last 12 months. The line graph depicts the average licenses per facility which has stayed in a tight range of 1.76 to 1.66 licenses per facility over that time.  Some of this drop could be attributed to the Large Indoor and Large Outdoor licenses which have been issued in the last eighteen months. California now has 61 active large licenses up from 59 last quarter. 50 of those are Outdoor – unchanged from Q2.  

Conclusion

The leaderboard below shows the top 10 states and the number of cultivation licenses we are tracking.  The nationwide total is down by 359 (2%) from Q2 2024. The quarter ended with 17,445 active licenses and 12,759 facilities.  The complete list of issuing states is available on our Cannabis Market Intelligence Platform www.cannabiz.media.

The vast majority of cultivation licenses are still centered in a handful of states with the top 3 commanding 64% of the market. The top 10 above account for 90% of the cultivation licenses in the US.  

Cannabiz Media customers can stay up to date on these and other new licenses through our newsletters, alerts, and reports modules. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive these weekly reports delivered to your inbox. Or you can schedule a demo for more information on how to access the Cannabiz Media License Database yourself to dive further into this data.

Author

Ed Keating is a co-founder of Cannabiz Media and oversees the company’s data research and government relations efforts. He has spent his career working with and advising information companies in the compliance space. Ed has managed product, marketing, and sales while overseeing complex multi-jurisdictional product lines in the securities, corporate, UCC, safety, environmental, and human resource markets.  

At Cannabiz Media, Ed enjoys the challenge of working with regulators across the globe as he and his team gather corporate, financial, and license information to track the people, products, and businesses in the cannabis economy.  

Ed graduated from Hamilton College and received his MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.

Cannacurio is a column from Cannabiz Media featuring insights from the most comprehensive market intelligence platform. Catch up on Cannacurio posts and podcasts for the latest updates and intel.