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The man behind California's brand-new $15M weed ranch - Jayman - 08-17-2025
The man behind California's brand-new $15M weed ranch
A new Santa Barbara cannabis farm could be the answer to California's pesticide crisis
Aug 15, 2025
By Lester Black, Cannabis editor
Micah Anderson was driving around the corner of a dusty dirt road in the high desert of Southern California when he stopped his car to say, “This is where I knew we needed this ranch.” A few heads of cattle laze in the shade of some juniper trees, a mountain range blocks the view to the south. Absolutely nothing of this scene looks like a place you’d want to grow cannabis, or really any other crop. But that is exactly the point.
Anderson is the CEO of Leef Brands, one of California’s biggest marijuana processing companies, and this ranch in northern Santa Barbara County is the company’s massive entry into the cannabis farming business. While thousands of cannabis farms go out of business in a bleak market, Leef has invested over $15 million into this ranch, buying 1,900 acres of land and securing the largest single cannabis permit in Santa Barbara County. The farm is a major bet on the future of California’s legal market and has single-handedly made the company one of the largest cannabis growing operations in the state and the world.
The new mega cannabis farm is also a sign of the lengths cannabis companies are willing to go to grow pesticide-free pot. A marijuana pesticide crisis has scared consumers across California, and forced the state into issuing hundreds of recalls for potentially contaminated cannabis. That’s left companies scrambling to find clean cannabis, and simply not using pesticides isn’t enough. Cannabis farms frequently lose an entire crop because a neighboring vineyard sprayed an insecticide that hit their cannabis, or historical farming operations left behind heavy metals that are sucked up from the soil by the cannabis plants.
That’s why this new farm in an overlooked corner of California could be the future of legal weed. And it’s why Anderson was on pins and needles in early July, as he was just days before the first harvest and waiting for the pesticide test results from his first crop.
“If this thing has anything in it,” Anderson said, looking out across his massive cannabis crop, “just someone f—king bury me on this ranch.”
First, a failed bet
Leef Brands launched its new cannabis farm this spring with 800,000 cannabis plants spaced out in orderly rows spreading across the Salisbury Canyon floor. Up close, they’re short and squat and topped with engorged flowers, but from far away, they turn into wide brushstrokes of green set against the khaki dirt of California’s high desert.
It’s a far cry from where it all started for Anderson. His first foray into cannabis cultivation was a single plant he grew in a disused San Diego field near his house. He was 14, and the plant ended up being a male, meaning it didn’t even produce the sticky flowers used to get you high. It did, however, cultivate a passion that sent him on a lifelong path in the cannabis business.
Anderson started selling cannabis as a teenager in San Diego, and then moved up to Mendocino County in the late 1990s after he had graduated high school. It was the beginning of California’s medical marijuana boom. Cannabis was still illegal under state law, and almost as soon as he got to Northern California, he was arrested for cannabis possession and spent weeks in jail. He wasn’t deterred, spending the following decades growing cannabis across the Emerald Triangle counties of Mendocino and Humboldt and supplying California’s booming medical dispensary market.
By 2015, legalization in California appeared imminent, so Anderson along with his business partners set about trying to figure out how to get involved. They landed on extraction, predicting that the process of concentrating cannabis into extracts and oils used for products like edibles and vape pens would be a lucrative business in the legal era. They knew they needed to build their processing facility as close to cannabis farms as possible; extraction companies need large amounts of cannabis to produce high-quality concentrates, just like running an olive oil business requires access to lots of high-quality olive trees. At that time, Mendocino County was in the middle of the country’s biggest cannabis growing region, so Anderson and his partners decided to launch Leef Brands there, investing $15 million into a state-of-the-art facility in what they believed would be “ground zero for cannabis in America.”
“We put millions of dollars into this extraction facility thinking that like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be in the hub, this is perfect,’ and that the county’s going to accept it and this is going to be the Napa of cannabis. And it honestly — quite honestly, it was just the exact opposite,” Anderson told SFGATE.
The same things that made the famed Emerald Triangle so good for growing cannabis prior to legalization made it terrible in the legal era. The long, winding roads and extreme topography went from an asset to avoid law enforcement to an expensive headache for transporting legal products and building larger farms.
The local government made it even harder. Mendocino’s county government struggled to license any of its farms because of delays at the local government level. The county also outlawed farms larger than 10,000 square feet, constraining the industry and making it impossible for extraction companies like Leef to get enough cannabis locally. Meanwhile, Southern California counties like Santa Barbara and Monterey County opened their doors to massive farms 100 times larger than anything in Mendocino County.
Almost as soon as Leef opened its giant facility in Mendocino County, Anderson was driving down to Santa Barbara and buying cannabis there, from the exponentially larger farms that could supply him much more product at once. Then he was loading that product into semitrucks and shipping it back to Mendocino. Before long, Anderson was renting an apartment in Santa Barbara because he was spending so much time in the county.
It was hardly a practical arrangement: The costs of shipping were enormous, not to mention the logistical hurdles and timeline delays. There was another issue too: Even when he looked to farms farther south, it was still hard to find cannabis that was actually clean enough to actually use for extraction.
‘No-go zones’
Legal cannabis in California faces some of the strictest product safety rules in the world, with strict thresholds for levels of pesticides and heavy metals. The rules are significantly tighter than, say, the requirements around pesticide contamination in organic foods. Cannabis is also very good at pulling historic contamination out of soil — scientists planted hemp plants around the Chernobyl nuclear fallout zone to absorb radiation.
This combination has created a major problem for cannabis companies.
California’s farmland is so contaminated from historical pesticide use that there are wide swaths of the state that are “no-go zones” for cannabis farms because it would be impossible to grow clean cannabis. That includes most of the Central Valley, according to Josh Wurzer, an analytical chemist and co-founder of SC Labs who has been testing cannabis since 2008.
“Cannabis is a fast-growing plant that sucks things from the soil really quickly and stores it. It’s really good at doing that,” Wurzer said. “It’s another reason why it’s a bellwether for the general contamination that we don’t always see in our food supply.”
California’s cannabis regulator, the Department of Cannabis Control, has been heavily criticized, including by this outlet, for not fully enforcing the state’s ban on contamination. The agency recently increased its enforcement efforts, so the best way for a cannabis company to avoid a crackdown from the DCC is to be dedicated to producing clean products.
Yet even if a farmer finds pristine land to grow cannabis on, where there’s no risk of contamination from the soil, banned chemicals could still end up on the cannabis flowers if they waft over from a neighboring vineyard that was spraying pesticides. Wurzer said he’s seen cannabis cultivators lose an entire crop because a neighboring farmer sprayed pesticides.
This is an even bigger problem for extraction companies like Leef Brands. Processing companies take cannabis flower and turn it into an oil by removing things like the plant material, which increases the potency of active compounds like THC but also increases the relative concentration of undesirable things like pesticides and heavy metals.
Extraction companies like Leef Brands will frequently send samples out for testing before they commit to buying a farm’s crop, and Anderson said he has declined to buy millions of dollars worth of cannabis that failed for pesticide contamination.
“Everyone always talks about how there’s an oversupply of product, but there’s an undersupply of clean, pesticide-free material,” Anderson said. “When you’re in the extraction lane of the business, 50-60% of what we test when we go to a farm fails.”
Leef Brands kept struggling to find a clean supply of cannabis for its extraction machines. So, four years ago, Anderson set out on a new mission: transform his company from an extraction business to a full-scale farming operation.
‘It’s not even a blip’
Anderson spent years looking for a place to set up a new cultivation site, but it wasn’t until a fateful lunch in 2019 at the Cuyama Buckhorn, a restaurant in the tiny town of New Cuyama, that he had a true lead. He was describing his predicament to a friend, saying he needed a big swath of land that was pristine and not surrounded by farming neighbors, when someone leaned over and said they knew a family Anderson should probably talk to.
That tip led Anderson and his partners to a 3,000-acre ranch at the other end of town that has been owned by the same family since it was homesteaded in the 1890s. The family said they’d never used pesticides on the property, only running cattle and growing organic hay. Their property had an incredible physical buffer — with mountainous Los Padres National Forest on one side, and 1,000 acres and two hills on the other — between it and any other farm.
Anderson was sold as soon as he saw the sheer size of the thing. Leef Brands, which is a publicly traded company, bought a major slice of the ranch in 2023 for $5.5 million, then spent even more getting it ready to grow cannabis. The company has invested $7 million in the past two years in improvements to the property, $2 million on local permitting and $750,000 a year on state licensing. Leef Brands has a 179-acre permit from the county to grow cannabis, but is planting only 65 acres this year. If things go well, it has water rights and the ability to apply for far larger cannabis permits in the future, according to Anderson. Leef Brands also has a 100-acre hemp permit, although that only cost them $900 in licensing fees, showing the extreme disparity between hemp and cannabis regulations.
This spring, Leef Brands planted its first crop, those 800,000 plants that Anderson was anxiously waiting test results for on that cloudless day back in June. A few weeks later, Anderson breathed a sigh of relief: The plants were indeed pesticide-free, he confirmed in an email to SFGATE, writing, “This is great news.”
Anderson said he expects to harvest 162,000 pounds of dry flower from that first harvest alone, which will then be sent back to Leef Brands’ extraction facility in Mendocino County to be made into oil for millions of consumer products.
Anderson’s new ranch represents cannabis grown on a scale rarely seen in the cannabis industry; it’s already the third largest cultivator in California, according to the state. Now, he’s anticipating the next big cultivation challenge facing legal cannabis operators: the prospect of big agriculture companies getting involved in the cannabis trade.
“I will say that even just standing here and looking at everything, I still feel like this is a freckle in the sense of size when it comes to ag,” Anderson said, referencing big agriculture. “Like, we think it’s big because it’s cannabis — and it is big for cannabis — but in the grand scheme of things like other crops, it’s nothing, it’s tiny. It’s not even a blip.”