Most of us on the magazine team started growing marijuana before most of you readers were born. We’re not bragging about that—as the Rolling Stones sang, “What a drag it is getting old,” and The Who put it best when they sang, “Hope I die before I get old.”

One team member started growing in the 1960s! We started growing marijuana because it was illegal everywhere, and imported weed from Mexico, Thailand, Jamaica, Colombia and other places was full of sticks and seeds, bricked and compressed, dry and dusty, with a max of about 7% THC.

The Netherlands legalized retail cannabis and later on came the birth of North American legalization with Dennis Peron’s Proposition 215 in California, the big legal home growing explosion that started the legalization ball rolling in the USA in 1996. But all along, if you wanted the highest-quality seedless buds, you had to grow them yourself.

Growing and selling black market buds was wildly profitable until about 11 years ago, when legalization created a supply glut of mediocre buds and killed the market value, but gave consumers an alternative to black market growers.

From about 1987 until 2012, tens of thousands of growers paid off mortgages and put their kids through school solely on profits from marijuana growing and selling.

There was a time during that period when wholesale premium bud was selling for $3500 a pound and ounces were $450 retail or more.

Now, legalization has killed the fun—in legalized states like Oregon, premium bud is selling for $700-1000 a pound wholesale, and many professional and craft growers are going out of business because they can’t afford to grow.

Commercial growers find themselves in a constant race to increase economies of scale, meaning they have to grow more and more plants just to break even. Massive outdoor and indoor marijuana farms are energy and water hogs that create serious environmental harms.

Professional home growers who grow strains from Humboldt Seed Company, Serious Seeds, and the few other excellent, fire marijuana seeds companies we feature here in the magazine, face increased challenges because customers can go to legal dispensaries and buy vape pens, cannabis concentrates, edibles, dabs, and beverages that most home growers can’t make.

Yet, it’s still true and always will be true that dispensary and other legal retail marijuana buds are vastly inferior to premium homegrown craft marijuana.

That’s why customers try dispensary buds and then come back to us to get fresh, sticky, just-dried, unicorn, connoisseur strains that are more potent, tastier, and much cleaner than legal buds.

But recently we’ve been calculating return on investment, and it’s sad.

Start with the fact that the cost of electricity, water, grow lights, hydroponic nutrients, soil, grow systems and all other marijuana growing supplies has gone up by at least 40-60% in the last ten years.

Yes, there’s a new crop of cheap knockoff garbage marijuana growing gear and supplies that would seem to reduce the cost of growing marijuana, but those products are so defective that they’re not worth using.

When you add up the initial start-up costs of running a grow room or tent room that can hold ten or more full-size photoperiod marijuana plants, along with the ongoing costs of growing marijuana, you see it costs a lot more than you realized.

For example, a lung room with two 5 x 5 tents and one 4 x 4 tent cost $4500 for initial set-up because we bought grow lights, AC Infinity CloudForge humidifiers, Quest dehumidifiers, bales of Pro-Mix, grow pots, PPFD meters, pH./PPM meters, reverse osmosis unit, exhaust and aeration fans, monitors and controllers, hydroponic nutrients, and other supplies and gear.

That’s just the cost to get basic professional grow op infrastructure. Then you have to buy premium marijuana seeds or clones, use up your nutrients, pay for electricity, and waste large amounts of water making reverse osmosis water.

Monthly costs for energy, water, nutrients, and other needs is at least $275 in this example, and doesn’t include cost of renting or owning a building to have your grow op in.

If you own, the use of the building will cost you big money on property taxes, maintenance, homeowner’s insurance, security, wear and tear.

Rents are increasing nationwide, with average rent for house big enough to have a grow room in in most locales at least $1000 a month or much more.

Of course, renting sucks because your landlord can walk in any time (regardless of whether it’s legal for them to do that), and bust your grow op.

Ongoing costs include replacing equipment, like replacing pH probes ($180 each) every year. We just had to replace a commercial humidifier—$1700.

Add all this up and realize you have to sell at least $6000 worth of marijuana to pay for initial start-up costs and your first season ongoing costs.

After that, costs are lower and profits are higher because you only do your start-up once, but our growers report total cost of a 4.5 month photoperiod season at about $1150.

So right away, you know you have to sell $1150 worth of buds just to break even.

In states where marijuana isn’t legalized, that’s not a problem, because you can sell ounces for $400 or more.

But in legalized states like California, Oregon, and Washington, where you compete with legal trash dispensary weed, you likely can’t sell that high per ounce.

So if you’re not making a ton of money growing marijuana, and most serious growers not only spend money to grow it but also give at least ten or more hours per week to run the grow op, is all that time and money worth it?

Those of us who insist on a constant supply of connoisseur marijuana find that it is. Legal marijuana is about 50% less good than what we can grow for ourselves. If we had to buy it, it’s about $250-350 per ounce.

The fact that we can grow weed that’s twice as good as legal weed, sell some to cover expenses, and still have pounds left over, is what makes it worth it.

Also, there’s a lot of joy that comes from growing marijuana, so even if you do it just as a hobby, and don’t mind how much it costs, you win.

Of course, in a few places it’s legal to grow marijuana outdoors. Outdoor cannabis growing costs a lot less and is potentially more profitable, because sun and rain are free and an outdoor plant can yield a kilo or more of dried buds.

But outdoor marijuana is not safe from weather, thieves, gray mold, powdery mildew, aphids, thrips, and other unique outdoor marijuana growing problems.

The bottom line is you can grow better marijuana indoors than anybody else can grow for you. But you want to pay attention to our articles that talk about the most productive marijuana gear, techniques, seeds, and strains, because every dollar and hour of time you spend growing marijuana should produce the maximum amount of resin glands filled with as much potency as possible.