URL: https://postharvestreport.com/field-notes/two-numbers-investors-should-ask
Labor cost per pound and sellable flower yield tell you more about a cannabis operation than an entire board deck. The benchmarks, the trap, and what to ask management.
Field Note · 2026
By Jay Evans, CEO, Keirton Inc., August 31, 2026 · 6–8 min read
Post-harvest is where labor piles up, where value gets destroyed quietly, and where most investors never think to look.
If you're invested in a cannabis operation, or thinking about it, you're probably drowning in the metrics management wants to show you. Canopy expansion plans. Genetics libraries. Brand awareness. Those numbers tell you very little about whether the operation is actually run well.
There is one area of the business where two simple numbers will tell you more about operational discipline than an entire board deck. That area is post-harvest, the stage between chopping the plant and packaging sellable flower: drying, bucking, trimming, sorting and curing. The two numbers are labor cost per pound and yield.
Labor is the total cost of getting a single pound of flower through post-harvest. The biggest labor consumers are bucking, trimming and drying. Ask management what it costs. If they can't answer within a day, that alone tells you something.
Benchmarks for large, well-grown indoor flower: hand processing, $35 per pound is a great target; above $55 per pound, there is almost always room for improvement; with automation deployed, the cost should land below $25 per pound.
This is not cultivation yield. It is the yield of sellable flower: how much of the harvested biomass ends up as trimmed, high-value flower versus trim or downgraded material headed for extraction. You'll hear it called flower recovery, flower-to-trim ratio, or post-harvest yield. What matters is that management measures it and can tell you the number.
Sellable flower can be worth ten to twenty times the price of trim, so every point of yield lost in post-harvest is high-margin revenue converted into low-margin byproduct. For well-functioning indoor producers who defoliate during flowering, good yield lands in the 80% range: for every 10 pounds of biomass, 8 pounds of trimmed flower and 2 pounds of trim. 80% is the gold standard for hand-trimmed flower.
Management sees labor as the obvious cost to attack, so they automate. Labor cost per pound drops. Nobody is watching what happened to yield. Many producers who went hard after labor reduction hurt their yield by up to 30%. Any time yield degradation gets above 10%, there is next to zero labor reduction that will offset the loss. You could cut labor costs to zero and still produce less profit than doing everything by hand.
A very well-functioning facility shows labor below $35 per pound and yield above 70%. The holy grail, possible but rare: labor below $25 per pound, yield above 75%, and quality preserved at its maximum.
Quality is not created after harvest, it's protected. The job of post-harvest is to not degrade what cultivation produced. Drying: over-drying or under-drying can cause an off scent or funk that follows the product to the shelf. Curing: poor or nonexistent curing costs aroma, texture and shelf life. Bucking: bucking machines should not be used for flower production, they turn A's into B's; their place is pre-rolls and fresh frozen. Trimming: automation is only 50% of the success, the other 50% is the process around it.
What is our post-harvest labor cost per pound? What is our sellable flower yield, and how has it changed since we automated? How are we protecting quality through drying, curing, bucking and trimming? If the answers come back fast, specific and tracked over time, management is running the business. If they come back vague, you've found exactly where to dig.
If you get those numbers back and you're not sure what they mean, send them to me. I'll analyze them at no cost and tell you where the operation sits against other commercial producers. No obligation, no pitch. If the operation is already running well, I'll tell you that too.
Equipment referenced: Twister T-Zero, Mobius, Softrim. Full machine comparison.