Query: Your The next day in Hashish column, “Drying and Curing Hashish: A 2025 Replace,” left me questioning how a lot moisture and terpenes have been being misplaced on the trimming and packaging phases in my amenities, the place we persistently produce over 1,000 kilos per thirty days.
Over two cultivation cycles (up to now), we tracked weight reduction at the ones two processing phases and feature found out we’re shedding each moisture content material and terpenes at each phases. Relying at the precise environmental stipulations, there was up to 10 grams of moisture misplaced in keeping with pound throughout each phases.
That quantity of moisture loss equates to tens of hundreds of misplaced earnings in keeping with 12 months, and results in shoppers receiving an inferior, overdried product. May you elaborate on the right kind stipulations and gear had to decrease moisture and terpene loss in hashish trimming and packaging environments?
Solution: I first encountered this downside a few years in the past whilst consulting with a Hayward, Calif., dispensary that retailed over $1 million in hashish gross sales per thirty days. The homeowners have been noticing vital product loss at their packaging station. In the beginning, they suspected robbery, however after taking a better have a look at the surroundings, it was glaring the loss may well be attributed to evaporation.
Maximum growers perceive they will have to exactly keep an eye on the surroundings all the way through the rising, drying, and curing phases of hashish manufacturing. However many forget doing the similar within the trimming and packaging phases. This quantity of moisture loss is negligible on the particular person client stage, however turns into crucial when working at scale as a result of, as you identified, the bigger the opportunity of moisture loss, the bigger the opportunity of earnings loss.
The correct environmental stipulations and parameters must be optimized for moisture preservation.
To seek out those parameters, I consulted with a number one post-harvest environmental keep an eye on corporate. That corporate shared those figures as a baseline:
- Temperature: 68°F
- Humidity: 60%
- Dew level: 54°F
- Vapor power deficit (VPD): 14.2 millibars
Slight changes is also required to those relying at the native local weather: West Coast California, Arizona, Colorado, and Michigan all have utterly other regional climates that want to be thought to be. Extra arid places would possibly want upper humidity, whilst cooler climates would possibly want somewhat hotter temperatures.
To care for consistency, you will have to make use of a mixture of heating, cooling, humidification, and dehumidification always. For air this is excessively dry (which can actually suck moisture from buds), fogging methods can be used to stabilize the humidity ranges, in flip minimizing or getting rid of the potential for moisture loss.
For excessively humid environments, a brand new dehumidification means known as reheat can dehumidify an atmosphere with out undesirable warmth. Reheat circulates air thru a finned condenser that turns the moisture within the air right into a fluid that may be tired. The dried air is then reheated to the specified temperature and reintroduced into the surroundings from which it got here. This technique can also be extra environment friendly than using same old dehumidifiers.
Some corporations be offering environmental keep an eye on apparatus particularly designed for trimming and packaging rooms.
No matter your precise settings and methods in the end turn out to be, keeping up consistency is essential. A fluctuation in any of those variables reasons the resin glands to extend and contract, encouraging moisture and unstable oil evaporation.
Kenneth Morrow is an award-winning grower and breeder. He’s the landlord of Trichome Applied sciences, a analysis and building corporate. He’s additionally a expert and writer of the ebook “Marijuana Horticulture Basics” and a founding advisory board member of Hashish Trade Occasions, the place he has been a columnist since 2015. In finding him on Instagram @trichometechnologies or succeed in him by means of electronic mail at: [email protected].
