How Cultivation Businesses Can Use Incentives to Reduce Labor and Increase Productivity

Cultivation companies should be careful when offering growers production-based incentives because even world-class cultivators can only increase production by so much.

Every plant has an inherent production capacity, and once that is reached, crop output will plateau.

A cultivator may be able to increase a grow room’s production by 15% through switching out varieties or playing with pruning techniques or fertilizer, but it’s unrealistic to assume they’ll realize this kind of increase with subsequent harvests.

Even under ideal conditions, a crop’s productivity will max out, and your grower knows that. Once this happens, if incentives are only based on production, your grower will start looking for a new job.

Instead, offer incentives based on other improvements that are within the grower’s control.

Focus on quality, not quantity

The battle for cannabis supremacy won’t be won with mediocre cannabis. It will be won with remarkable product that everyone raves about. If production plateaus, there are still ways to increase the profitability of a crop without increasing grow room output. Consider the following:

New varieties

Encourage your grower to organize R&D trials that aim to replace mediocre varieties with new cultivars that offer higher THC or more desirable terpenes. THC and terpenes will drive the recreational cannabis market in the coming years, and R&D experiments that result in the introduction of new, more profitable cultivars should be rewarded.

Canopy management

The average flowering canopy is a few feet deep, and top flowers tend to mature faster and have higher cannabinoid content than flowers hidden deeper in the canopy. These lower flowers are sold as “mids” or sent for extraction. But the strategic de-leafing, pruning, and training of a crop could allow more light to penetrate the canopy, potentially increasing the value of these lower flowers. Incentivize the implementation of canopy management techniques that result in more of the harvest being sold as premium flower.

Crop steering

By manipulating temperatures, humidity, irrigation volume, and frequency, growers may encourage plants to produce more of the “good stuff” that consumers want, specifically, THC and terpenes. Crop steering is a technique used in traditional horticulture to force plants to flower or produce fruit on a specific schedule. With cannabis, crop steering has the potential to help improve both the quantity and quality of flowers produced. Incentivize the use of crop steering techniques that could make your most popular varieties even more desirable.

Reward efficiency in the grow room

Keeping production costs low is as important as maintaining high price points. Help drive production efficiency in your company by rewarding innovation that helps drive down operational expenses.

Replace wet sprays with predatory insects

By implementing a beneficial insect program, your grower could eliminate weekly wet sprays of pest control products. Timing, planning, measuring, mixing, and applying pest control products takes time and focus, and many cultivators schedule weekly “wet sprays” of these products onto the crop. Although organic-based, they need to be re-applied often. Instead of your team walking the crop, let the bugs do the work. This switch could help control insects while freeing employees to focus on other essential tasks.

Hasten the harvest

Harvest day can be clunky, especially in large grow rooms. Clipping support netting, cutting down plants, separating questionable material, and packing everything into transport bins takes time and a lot of people. Refining (or establishing!) protocols for harvest day can help prevent excess personnel or empty hands. If harvests happen every two weeks—or more frequently—a few saved hours of labor can translate into huge savings at the end of the year. Incentivize growers to focus on the efficiency of harvest day.

Eliminate empty rooms

It’s not unrealistic to expect a cultivation team to re-populate a grow room within 24 hours of harvest. Empty grow rooms cost money and allowing excess time for sanitation between crops will negatively affect a company’s ability to squeeze as many harvests out of a room as possible. Incentivize the introduction of sanitization processes or technology that could reduce the number of hours employees spend sloshing around mop buckets of bleach.

Don’t forget about post-harvest

Just because a plant has left the cultivation area doesn’t mean that the importance of efficiency has gone, too.

Tighten up the trim room

Trim rooms are notoriously labor-intensive, especially when a crop is manicured by hand. Are there ways to re-engineer the flow of the post-harvest process so that employees spend less time grabbing plants, emptying bins, or looking for tools? Incentivize your grower to collaborate with the post-harvest department to eliminate inefficiencies in the trim room.

Increasing production is a noble cause, but don’t forget about efficiency. Bonuses based on lowering production costs, minimizing labor, and improving crop quality have more extended staying power than production incentives alone.

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