Should You Automate Your Cultivation Facility?

Cultivation operations automate their production processes for two reasons:

1. To minimize production costs.
2. To ensure product consistency.

Automation usually involves computer-controlled equipment executing work tasks that employees would otherwise handle.

These tasks can be finished in a fraction of the time that it would take an employee to complete the same job, and since they’re performed precisely the same way each time, automation also helps operators to grow a more consistent end product.

If you’re thinking about automating your grow facility, keep these factors in mind before taking the plunge:

Who should automate?

For cultivation start-ups, how much of the facility should be automated?

For existing businesses, what should be upgraded, and what can be left “as is?”

The simple answer—in my experience—is that indoor growers should automate as much as possible. For greenhouse growers, anything beyond one acre (about 40,000 square feet) should be the tipping point for automation.

I have run a one-acre greenhouse manually, and while it’s possible to pull off successful crops in a facility this size without automation, it requires a ton of labor. Mixing fertilizer, hand-watering, and manually adjusting vents and screens throughout the day involves a lot of attention and frequent disruptions to work. 

What should be automated?

For starters, look at the work activities that your cultivation team does every day. These areas are ripe for labor savings when it comes to automation. These tasks may include:

Fertilizer preparation – Hand-mixing nutrients can be replaced with an on-demand, direct-injection system. Recipes are pre-programmed and mixed exactly the same way each time.

Irrigation – The delivery of water and fertilizer to the crop can be automated with a fertigation system. Moisture sensors and plant scales help the grower determine when and how much to water a crop. With the push of a button, a fertigation system allows the grower to irrigate thousands of plants at once.  

Environmental control – Sophisticated grow facilities should not have dozens of independently operated pieces of equipment. Heating, cooling, dehumidification, CO2 supplementation, and lighting schedules should all be automatically controlled by one piece of software that can be accessed anywhere there is an internet connection. This eliminates the risk of someone forgetting to turn on or off a critical piece of equipment.

Once you automate daily tasks, look to work projects that are done less frequently, but every month, such as:

Pot filling – By automating the pot filling process, growers can avoid the manual labor of opening stacks of soil bags and filling up hundreds (or thousands!) of pots by hand.

Bucking – This post-harvest process removes whole flowers from plant branches so they can be trimmed and dried. Although usually done by hand, automatic bucking machines can strip all the flowers from a branch in a split second. This can mean substantial labor savings on big harvests.

Trimming – Preparing a harvest for sale requires a lot of trimming. While traditionally done by hand, trim crews can eat up a lot of labor. The average trimmer processes about one pound of dry cannabis flower per 8-hour work shift. If you are harvesting several hundred pounds per grow room, that’s a lot of people!

Automatic trim machines streamline this process, with the largest units capable of trimming hundreds of pounds in the same day. These units can be daisy-chained for more detailed work or to move larger volumes in a shorter time. The key is to plant a pair of employees at the outlet of each machine to catch rouge buds that may need some extra touch-up before the sale.

Curing – Instead of manually checking and “burping” dozens of containers of recently-dried cannabis, many companies are streamlining this process with cure chambers that automatically release gas as it builds up inside the unit. This helps minimize the labor invested post-harvest while removing a lot of the guesswork inherent in this last step of the production process.

What shouldn’t you automate?

Some automation only makes sense for commercial facilities of 100,000 square feet or more. For small operations, some types of automation can prove inefficient and result in a poor ROI for investors.

Mobile growing trays (sometimes called “Dutch trays”) are a perfect example.

Unlike rolling benches or grow racks that move from side to side and create a floating aisle way, with Dutch trays, the entire bench top is mobile. 

The system involves floor-mounted tracks that hold and move large growing trays. Instead of handling individual plants, growers use mechanical lifts and hydraulics to push trays of plants throughout the production cycle, from vegetative and flowering growth all the way to harvest.

The lifts, hydraulics, and space required for this system do not make sense for small growers.  However, for large operations, these mobile trays can dramatically reduce the amount of labor needed per 100,000 square feet of greenhouse. 

Smart entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for ways to safely lower their production costs while maintaining crop consistency. The next time you see your team doing a repetitive task by hand, ask yourself: “Can this be automated?”

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