Humboldt Cannabis started in the 1970's with the hippies who were part of the back to the land movement. The history of Humboldt's Cannabis Industry begins.
Humboldt’s weed industry came into being after Hippies arrived in substantial numbers during a "back-to-the-land’ movement that began in the 1960s. The Summer of Love, the 1967 inciting incident for the Hippie movement, largely took place in San Francisco’s Haight district (and the adjacent Golden Gate Park), which was inherently oxymoronic: kids were tripping and becoming in tune with nature… in the middle of a highly urban environment.
And so a number of communes popped up in the far northern reaches of California. The evolution of this commune culture into weed farms seems pretty straightforward to me: the Hippies needed to grow food to make the communes work, and Hippies like weed. If you’re growing anything at all, why not grow weed too? And if you need money to keep the commune going, why not grow some extra weed and sell it? Etc.
By the 1980s, the previous main source for weed in the USA — Mexico — was under attack as part of the USA’s ill-thought-out War on Drugs; this opened up an opportunity for Humboldt farmers, and by the time bud was becoming semi-legalized in the 1990s, the vast majority of weed in the US was grown in what was known as the Emerald Triangle: Trinity, Mendocino, and Humboldt counties. Some estimates claim that 90% of the weed circulating in the USA at the time came from the Triangle.