Plant Humboldt Threatened With Imminent Closure
Wednesday, October 28th, 2026
To our loyal customers and anyone who appreciates the beneficial work I’ve done over the last 30 years to improve the nursery parcel in Briceland, I and the nursery crew need your help to convince Humboldt County Planning Department to relent in their extreme and unjustified micromanaging of the nursery and the entire 3.75 acre parcel. Because I have refused their extreme and dangerous requirements, they have suspended our license and are threatening imminent, permanent revocation.
Below is the press release I sent out this afternoon, Wednesday, October 28th. Based on what the County says tomorrow, Thursday October 29th, we may need our supporters to call and email them on our behalf. Check back in here for specific talking points and phone numbers/email addresses, which I’ll update sometime tomorrow. In the meantime, the press release gives a lot of info on the conflict.
Humboldt County’s extreme regulatory overreach threatens permanent closure of Plant Humboldt Cannabis Nursery.
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
For immediate release.
Contact Mikal Jakubal 510-334-8194 via text, phone or Signal, or email mikal@planthumboldt.com
Site tours available. Please contact in advance.
Plant Humboldt Cannabis Nursery has been in operation for the last eleven years in Briceland, five miles west of Redway, CA in Southern Humboldt County, providing seed-grown, sun-grown cannabis starter plants to home growers and licensed commercial farms. It was started in 2016 by owner Mikal Jakubal who had previously operated a bamboo nursery on the site. He switched to cannabis once changes in state laws allowed cannabis nurseries to operate as regular businesses. After a drawn-out permit process started in late 2015, the Humboldt County Planning Department has now suspended Plant Humboldt’s conditional use permit (CUP) and threatens imminent, permanent revocation and closure of the nursery.
“After over a decade of delays and seemingly endless, senseless bureaucratic hassles at the state and county level, I thought this CUP approval would be a simple sign-off, a last formality that would allow me to finally move forward and spend my time and energy focused on the business. Instead, the Humboldt County Planning Department stapled on a bunch of absurd and egregiously burdensome compliance items that are completely unrelated to the nursery. A few of these are so outlandish or dangerous that I am absolutely refusing to comply with them out of practical and safety concerns, as well as out of principle,” Jakubal said. “For this, they are threatening to revoke our permit to operate.”
When asked what exactly he’s asking the County to do, he replied with a specific list.
“First, I want them to decouple the zone change from the cannabis nursery CUP. The parcel’s zoning needs to change irrespective of whether the cannabis nursery is here, so holding the new zoning hostage to the cannabis CUP serves no purpose other than administrative bullying.” [See background notes below]
“Second, I want the County to lift the license suspension and remove all CUP requirements that have nothing to do with the cannabis nursery. If they can identify and articulate any specific concerns they have about unrelated activity on the parcel, I am open to discussing it with officials outside of the CUP framework.
“Holding a gun to the head of the entire business, threatening the employees’ jobs and threatening my livelihood over some of these unrelated and dangerously demented requirements is a gross abuse of official authority,” Jakubal said.
The Conditional Use Permit contains a multi-page list of compliance items for the nursery to continue operations. Some of the conditions are normal and reasonable for any business, but most do not even pertain to the nursery, while a handful of the conditions go far beyond what any reasonable person would consider the County’s purview.
“This parcel is about 3-1/2 acres total, but the nursery only uses about 1/4 of an acre in the upper flat area next to the road, and only for a few months out of the year because we cater to traditional, seasonal, outdoor growers. The Planning Department seems to think that a conditional use permit for the nursery allows them to micromanage my entire parcel, year-round, including areas that have nothing to do with the nursery or cannabis,” Jakubal said.
As an example of the CUP’s overreach, Jakubal give the example of a letter he recently received from Humboldt County Planner Steven Santos saying that based on photos of the site, a small area of sheet mulch in the lower orchard was out of compliance and must be removed.
Jakubal explained that in order to suppress dense annual and perennial weeds in the orchard area near one of his pear trees, he covered an area about 30’ by 30’ with black plastic tarps as sheet mulch, a common method used in organic gardening to remove weeds. This area will later be covered with wood chips, straw or planted in perennial clover once the weeds have been killed and the plastic cover removed. [See attached photo]
“Humboldt County Planning Department is micromanaging the mulch in my orchard,” Jakubal said. “This has absolutely nothing to do with the nursery and is nowhere near the nursery. It is a vast, senseless overreach,” he added.
“Anyone who is currently waiting for a zoning-related permit to be approved should be enraged that that the Planning Department is expending scarce staff time and funding to micromanage my garden mulch,” Jakubal said.
As an example of what Jakubal considers a dangerous, intrusive and impossible-to-comply with condition of approval, the county is requiring that 20’ of the parking area and driveway, plus the access path around the house, plus half of the orchard area be fenced off with a permanent barrier and planted with fire-prone brush and weeds. According to correspondence Jakubal received from Planner Steven Santos, the “permanent barrier” does not have to be a solid fence, but can be steel t-posts with a wire strung between them.
“It is not clear at what height this wire should be in order to comply with this comically dangerous rule,” Jakubal said. “Perhaps throat height, where a person might garrote themselves walking into it at night? Maybe at ankle height so people trip and fall onto their face into the brush? Or maybe it should be at waist height, with a motion sensor that plays limbo music whenever someone needs to shimmy under it?” Jakubal continued, “I have told all the officials no, no and no again, that I am not going to split the lower orchard in half, cause space and access constraints in the parking area, and block the back access way, whether it is with a fence or a dangerous trip wire. None of this has anything to do with the cannabis nursery and it is simply not going to happen. They are way, way out of line and no reasonable person would ever accept this eye-popping level of micromanagement.”
Doubling down on the absurdity, the Planning Department is demanding that the area excluded by the trip wire be planted with fire-prone native vegetation.
“It’s important to understand that in Northern California, ‘native vegetation’ means ‘fire-prone weeds and brush.’ They want me to plant a wall of fire-prone weeds and brush within 30’ or less of my house, storage buildings, parking area and the nursery sales office. This is pure brain rot on their part and I think Cal Fire might like a word.”
There is a small, decorative grove of timber bamboo near the back of the house that has been there for over 20 years. Planner Steven Santos has specifically singled out this grove, demanding its removal. [See attached photo.]
“No,” Jakubal said, “That nice little grove of bamboo is doing just fine and is going to stay right there. It has nothing to do with the cannabis nursery and they haven’t even tried to provide justification for removing it. They simply do not have the right to micromanage my place inch by inch.
“Plant Humboldt should be seen as a model business with a long history of beneficial land stewardship. Instead, they want to shut us down and take my livelihood and the employees’ jobs, all over a dangerous trip wire, a cute little bamboo grove, mulch and my refusal to plant fire-prone brush.”
In response to what he feels is a completely unfair and unwarranted action by the Planning Department, Jakubal has turned to supporters to put pressure on officials to lift the permit suspension, remove the undue restrictions and allow the business to open in the spring as it has for the last eleven years.
“I’m pretty sure that I have a solid legal case against the County,” Jakubal said. “But hiring a lawyer is out of my budget, so I’m turning to our supporters to hopefully pressure the county into coming to their senses.”
To that end, he’s asking people to call and email Humboldt County officials. The deadline for compliance with the list of conditions is November 2nd, so this is a last-ditch effort to save the business.
“I ran a nursery here for over ten years prior to switching to cannabis and we’ve had eleven years as a cannabis nursery since then, all with no complaints or problems. We are a model business, cannabis or otherwise. In fact, to this day, over 30 years after purchasing the parcel and beginning the cleanup and restoration work, people who remember it before I bought it still come in to thank me for the work I’ve done here,” Jakubal said.
“The really incomprehensible part of all this is that if they close down Plant Humboldt permanently, the Planning Department will still not get to micromanage my parcel with their whacko regulatory theater. On the other hand, what they will lose by closing us down are the jobs, the sales tax money and the cannabis tourism we bring to Southern Humboldt. The County government will also lose significant community good will, not to mention the $9,000 administrative fee they’re demanding for the CUP. They should also keep in mind that for every licensed, tax-paying cannabis business that shuts down, another, unlicensed business will fill the market demand. The bureaucrats lose everything and gain nothing,” Jakubal noted. [See background notes below.]
On a final note, Jakubal added, “Part of the reason for putting my foot down and saying ‘enough!’ is that if I were to concede to these outrageous demands, negotiate with the County’s regulatory hostage-taking and comply with their administrative bullying, it would never stop. Today it would be mulch and the bamboo grove, tomorrow it would be something else and the day after that, something more. As it is, I obviously cannot do even the simplest maintenance projects like mulch out a patch of weeds without being threatened by the County. No one can live this way and no one should have to. I am tired of being treated like a criminal.”
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Background Notes
Zone change:
The zone change has to happen for any type nursery to be permitted on this parcel, but the nursery is not necessary for the zone change to happen. Nevertheless, the County has inexplicably tied them together against my requests to not do so for the last ten years. Current zoning is C1 and the change will be to AG, a much more appropriate zone for the site.
Noncompliance issues:
It is likely that the County will say that the CUP is being revoked because I have not paid the administrative fee of ~$9000, nor have I done any of the other long list of compliance items. However, this is completely misleading on their part and they should not be allowed to make that claim unchallenged. If they are going to revoke the CUP on any single one of the requirements, e.g. removing the bamboo grove or installing the trip wire, there is no reason to do any of them or pay the fees for a permit I will never get anyway. If they agree to remove all CUP requirements not directly related to the cannabis nursery and decouple the zone change from the CUP, I will proceed with the process on the rest of the requirements and payment. But at the moment, if the nursery is going to be aggressively closed down, I will need to save all the money I can and devote my time to figuring out what is next. No matter what, they won’t get their trip wire and fire-hazard installed.
Some history of the parcel:
When I bought it in the fall of 1995, it had been used as an illegal auto dismantling yard. The orchard and garden area was compacted, eroding dirt from being used as a dirt bike track. Trash, weeds, scotch broom and blackberry bramble patches covered the rest. There was a pit where the neighbors had been dumping used motor oil for years. There was a massive scrap iron dump over the bank below the parking area, including 6 vehicles, one in the creek.
I cleaned all this up at my own expense. I initiated a process of adding habitat structures for salmon in the Redwood Creek stream bed. I managed the soil and vegetation in the orchard area to build rich permeable topsoil. I installed sediment catching swales across much of the property long before anyone knew what they were or how they worked. I was an early promoter of water forbearance, adding 35,000 gallons of tank storage and the big rainwater catchment pond long before it was required. The pond provides breeding habitat for amphibians every spring, as well as transient habitat for otters, herons, turtles, ducks and other wildlife who frequent it year round. I built a large swale specifically designed to catch and filter road runoff from Briceland Road and Old Briceland Road instead of letting it run straight into Redwood Creek like it used to. I encircled the entire property with vegetation that would create a multi-story canopy specifically to provide bird nesting, roosting and hiding cover. Many of these plants provide bird and pollinator forage as well.
None of this work is mentioned in any documents by the County, CDFW or any other agency. All they can find is imaginary fault while demanding compliance with utterly nonsensical, arbitrary rules.
Photos below are for illustration and may also be used in reporting this story.
Mulch around a pear tree in my orchard that Planner Steven Santos says is out of compliance. This is as far away from the cannabis nursery as one can get on the parcel and has nothing to do with the nursery. I do not think the County has the right to micromanage mulch.
Small bamboo grove outside the kitchen window, but nowhere near the nursery. The CUP will be revoked if this is not removed. That said, it will not be removed under any circumstances