One Good Year

For three generations, the black-market marijuana economy has shaped nearly every aspect of life in Humboldt County, California. One Good Year, a documentary currently in post-production, takes an intimate look into the Humboldt County pot farming and back-to-the-land lifestyle.

Latest Posts

A trim room for one.

A little something on a Sunday morning, for once without a ton of words.

Trim room for one.

Labor Day in Whale Gulch

By Mikal Jakubal

Whale Gulch Labor Day party at Four Corners.

 

One of my main documentary peeps lives in the Whale Gulch community, possibly the most remote region of the SoHum area, straddling the Humboldt/Mendocino County lines on the ridge above the ocean. You get there via a winding, one-and-a-half-lane mostly-paved road with blind corners and [read more ...]

Hillbilly internet behind the Great Redwood Firewall

Internet antennas atop ancient redwood

SoHum’s off-grid lifestyle and our extremely rugged topography create special access challenges, whether by car or computer. We live on the dusty, tortuous, slide-prone backroads of both the physical landscape and the internet superhighway. We surf the web in high-clearance 4WD.

While many people are still on 16K-24K dialup modem connections [read more ...]

Google me silly. Funny search keywords that led to this film blog.

A key element of a social media outreach strategy for an independent documentary is knowing who your readers, fans and supporters are and how they’re finding your blog. To that end, I usually monitor my Google Analytics data for this site pretty closely. That way, for example, if I see a spike in views after [read more ...]

Save the ravens! Boycott SoHum weed?

By Mikal Jakubal

“Huh?”

That was my first thought as I drove by the woman holding the sign in Redway this morning. Being one of the more unusual protest signs I’d ever seen, I pulled over and walked back.

Here’s the short version that I got from her, paraphrasing a bit since I didn’t record it. She (who [read more ...]

It's a boy!

By Mikal Jakubal

While the world condemns countries that practice female infanticide, in the Emerald Triangle, we do the botanical opposite, nipping mostly-useless male plants in the bud long before they can pollinate any nearby females and ruin the quality of the finished “buds.”

For those unfamiliar with marijuana botany, the plants are typically dioecious, meaning male [read more ...]

New draft medical marijuana ordinance proposed for Humboldt County

The Humboldt Medical Marijuana Advisory Panel has posted its latest proposal for a Humboldt County medical marijuana ordinance on its website. It’s long, but worth reading if you’re into policy wonkery around this subject.

Almost a month ago, there was a somewhat contentious meeting of the Humboldt County Planning Commission in Eureka, the county seat. The [read more ...]

What is Humboldt County's real economic index?

Reprinted here from the Humboldt Medical Marijuana Advisory Panel‘s website:

The Humboldt Economic Index has been used as a measure of economic activity across the county for over a decade, but it has never included our county’s prinicipal economic activity—pot production. Erick Eschker, Director of the Humboldt Economic Index and [read more ...]

The Day The Wave Hit.

By Mikal Jakubal

Note: I had started the previous post about seeds before the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. I wanted to finish the story as it was, so what I excluded was the fact that as I was off photographing those seeds, a boombox in the background at the friend’s house was tuned to our local [read more ...]

And it starts all over again.

Cannabis seeds

By Mikal Jakubal

For some people it’s February 1st, for others March 1st and for others, Daylight Savings Time. Some people start their seeds by the phases of the moon or by astrological signs.

There is one school of thought that suggests that starting seeds later—around April 1st—will provide the same yields with less work, [read more ...]