The past five years of state-by-state legalization in the United States and beyond have brought sweeping changes to every area of the hemp and cannabis industries. New brands and products flood the marketplace daily, joined by a new generation of cultivators interested in trying their hand at growing hemp and cannabis in a friendlier, more legal landscape.

Many of the hemp and cannabis growing practices of the past thirty years were not based on what was the most cost-effective or efficient; rather, they were adaptation responses to the legal environment. Accordingly, savvy cultivators and entrepreneurs are overhauling today’s cultivation techniques. They are adjusting their systems to produce the highest-quality, lowest-cost product in a competitive marketplace. As most seasoned growers will attest, by far the most labor-intensive and expensive part of growing cannabis is the harvesting process. But recent developments in cultivation — especially autoflowering plants — support effective, low-cost harvest methods.

Historical perspective

In the Emerald Triangle and other legacy areas that supported medical cultivation, outdoor growers commonly used low plant counts and large plant sizes. They also relied on photoperiod genetics, keeping plants in a vegetative state to reach the desired massive stature. This was mainly due to per-plant medical license limitations that allowed people to grow a fixed number of plants for medical purposes. The shifting legal landscape has had a domino effect on horticultural practices.

As statewide recreational legalization and broader-scale commercial permits became available — first in the hemp space and later in early-adopter states like California, Oregon, and Colorado — innovators and cost-aware, systems-oriented growers began to change the cultivation landscape again to reflect more common agricultural practices. Thus, the legacy style of growing a limited number of large photoperiod plants needing specific light cycles, up-potting, specialized pruning, trellising with nets, and ladders has begun to give way to larger quantities of smaller, compact autoflowering or “day-neutral” plants. Growers can manage these plants in an outdoor row-cropping system with drip irrigation and tractor power. They can also plant them in manageable successions. This method requires no manipulation or control of the light cycle.

Current practices

Currently, tractors are the most effective tool for lowering overall production and harvest costs in agriculture. These tools enable growers to prepare fields quickly, perform shallow cultivation, and use boom sprayers for integrated pest management programs. Growers can reduce the need for hand labor in biomass harvests by incorporating stripper headers. However, many have yet to fully utilize this technology. Though stripper headers are not in common use yet, this is the inevitable direction for extraction models that supply the vape and edibles markets—which together compose the lion’s share of current market use.

While it would take a team of ten workers three or four full days to harvest an acre of autoflowering plants by hand, a properly equipped tractor could do the work in an hour. Though biomass sorting and loss of trichomes must be accounted for in this system, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the norm. Growers could potentially mechanize labor-intensive steps like big-leafing. Similar equipment used in the vineyard industry may handle leaf removal in the fruiting zone. By creatively exploring these innovations, it’s likely that this process will become more efficient over time.

Hand Harvesting vs. Mechanization in Cannabis Production

Because of the specialized nature of harvesting finished flower for the premium smokable market, this step likely will continue to be done by hand for the foreseeable future. The precision and delicacy needed to harvest high-quality tops while maintaining their trichomes and structure has proved difficult to mechanize. A compact plant row-cropping system will provide additional cost benefits during harvesting. Its efficiency stems from the favorable ratio of flowering sites to plant matter.

Many growers favor larger, trellised, and netted plants because they produce more plant matter to sort through by hand. However, their abundant vegetative growth can obscure and stunt the development of interior flowering sites. Plants with excess vegetative growth can block sunlight and wind from penetrating the canopy, which raises the risk of botrytis. Smaller plants limit the area for non-performing buds to hide, requiring only a few cuts per plant for harvesting tops. A likely model for optimal cost efficiency would combine harvesting premium tops by hand with “lowers” mechanically harvested for extraction.

Looking to the future

As legalization expands, new opportunities will arise for enterprising market leaders. They can develop cost-effective production and harvest strategies based on traditional agricultural systems. The most likely model to reduce overall costs at the harvesting step will combine row-cropping, agronomically bred day-neutral varieties with a compact stature, mechanization, and hybridized harvesting methods that reduce the overall number of hand cuts needed per plant. Many companies have made great progress in becoming more cost-effective. However, the industry is still young, and there are plenty of innovative leaps and bounds yet to be made.

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