It was the fall of 2015, the year before California legalized recreational cannabis. A woman walked toward me on Seabright Avenue in Santa Cruz, fastidiously buttoned up and well-heeled; she carried a tiny dog. The lady was clearly from out of town.
She stopped me: “Do you live here?”
I said, “Yes, I do, ma’am. How may I help you?”
“Well, I love Santa Cruz. But I do not understand why everywhere I go in this town I smell skunks. I do not see them, but I smell skunks everywhere here.”
Here comes the judge
How do we judge weed? Can quality in cannabis be measured? What can science measure versus what a human nose, palate and brain can perceive?
Budist describes Christopher Carr as a Santa Cruz-based educator, advocate and host of The Cannabis Connection, a radio show focused on science, culture and policy. He was selected as one of five judges evaluating pre-rolls for the 2026 California State Fair Cannabis Awards.
Tough gig: He had to spark a blunt every two hours.
I asked Christopher, “Say you’ve got several samples of cannabis in front of you. What makes one of them great?”
Carr says it starts with the smell.
“Yes, there are attributes and tasting notes and there’s a rubric system. But you start with the aroma; it’s the nose. If it’s lacking in smell, I think that it’s not a good start, right?”
The lady with the dog on Seabright apparently had a great nose.
Carr says terpenes are central to cannabis aroma and contribute to the sensory experience of the flower. Limonene is produced in the resin glands, known as trichomes, alongside cannabinoids such as THC and CBD.
He looks for a distinctive aromatic profile—floral, sweet, savory, fruity, earthy or “gassy.” Then comes flavor.
Carr says exceptional flower should retain its distinctive character from its aroma through the “dry hit”—drawing air through an unlit joint—and into the smoke itself. If a Blue Dream smells of blueberry and haze before lighting it, those qualities should remain after combustion, detectable when the partially smoked joint is relit later.
“That makes it something special.”
He can smell where it was grown
I asked Christopher if Santa Cruz can grow California’s best weed.
“Hell yeah. If it’s not grown here, it was bred here.”
Carr is a second-generation cannabis farmer. He grows the same genetics in Santa Cruz County that his father grows in El Dorado County, allowing him to compare how identical varieties express themselves in different environments.
Christopher can smell a ZIP code.
“You could put the same variety in front of me and I can smell, ‘Oh, that’s Apple Hill … this is clearly some Coastal Kush that I grew in Bonny Doon.’”
Carr attributes some of the distinction to Santa Cruz’s marine layer and Mediterranean climate.
“Santa Cruz punches way above its weight class in cannabis.”
Here come the home growers
Carr is excited by one change at the 2026 State Fair: Homegrown cannabis was allowed into the competition.
He says legalization created two kinds of cannabis innovation. Commercial growers have payrolls, taxes, licensing costs and customers to satisfy. They have strong incentives to grow varieties that sell.
Home growers can grow something simply because it’s interesting. The commercial grower has a business plan. The home grower has landrace seeds and all afternoon.
“The home growers are where it’s at as far as pushing the boundaries of the genome, innovating, finding new profiles,” Carr says.
Carr thinks some of Santa Cruz’s finest growers never made the transition into the licensed industry. He argues that county zoning and licensing regulations made the transition to legal commercial cultivation difficult for many small legacy growers, pushing some out of the legal marketplace.
Yet the plants and the knowledge didn’t disappear. They preserve old varieties that have fallen out of commercial fashion, cross plants, save seeds and chase an unusual terpene or cannabinoid profile without worrying whether the result will command shelf space at a dispensary.
Some of Santa Cruz’s home growers, he believes, are producing “arguably some of the best cannabis in the world.”
Carr would like to see that culture celebrated locally. He is working toward a possible Santa Cruz cannabis event that could include a home-grow competition alongside music, education, art and legal cannabis sales and consumption.
The idea is still being developed, but Carr says the goal is an event at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds, potentially in April 2027.
It’s a wonderful circle: California spent decades arresting people for growing cannabis in their backyards and mountain gardens. Legalization transformed cannabis into a regulated commercial industry. And now the California State Fair, the institution that awards blue ribbons to the state’s agricultural best, has opened its doors to the home grower.
California’s next great cannabis plant may not come from a multimillion-dollar cultivation facility. It might already be growing behind somebody’s house in Corralitos.
