URL: https://postharvestreport.com/what-we-cover
The scope of this publication: cannabis drying, bucking, trimming, sorting, curing and QC, with benchmarks for labor cost per pound, recovery rate, and automation.
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Commercial cannabis post-harvest, end to end: drying, bucking, trimming, sorting, curing, and the labor, yield, and quality economics that decide whether a harvest turns into margin.
Most cannabis publishing is about cultivation, brands, or policy. This one is about a single stage of the business: post-harvest, the window between chopping the plant and packaging sellable flower.
Post-harvest is where the largest block of facility labor sits, where quality gets protected or quietly destroyed, and where a few points of recovery rate are worth more than most capital projects on the cultivation side. It typically represents 6 to 30 percent of total production cost, and almost nobody measures it properly.
Everything here is written for people running or funding facilities at commercial volume, not for home growers. The numbers assume large, well-grown indoor flower and North American or European labor rates.
Where the most yield is lost and the fewest people are looking. Over-drying costs saleable weight directly and makes every downstream machine harsher on the flower. Water activity is the control variable, not moisture content. We cover 60/60 drying, snap dry, and why funk shows up above 0.60 aw in dense flower.
Bucking removes flower from the stalk. Done by hand it is slow; done by machine on flower-grade material it converts A's into B's. Bucking machines belong on pre-roll and fresh frozen streams, not on anything headed for the flower shelf.
Trimming is where operators trade labor for yield, and where most automation purchases go wrong. We cover dwell time, feed rate, tumbling versus brush-belt architectures, tight trimming, the skim and re-pass method, and the potency myth.
Sorting and grading is the stage most facilities treat as an afterthought and the one with the clearest automation case. Stream separation and intelligent trimming are where machine vision is actually changing the cost structure.
Curing buys aroma, texture, and shelf life, and homogenizes moisture across a lot.
The last chance to catch scarring, trichome degradation, and grade drift before product reaches a buyer.
Definitions live in the post-harvest glossary, and the reasoning is worked through in the post-harvest scorecard.
Jay Evans is founder and CEO of Keirton Inc., parent of Twister Technologies. Twenty-plus years in commercial cannabis, ownership in 10 facilities, 500-plus grows toured across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Keirton equipment has processed more than 80 million pounds of cannabis to date.
We manufacture post-harvest equipment, so take the arguments on their evidence. Where we publish a benchmark or a head-to-head trial, we state the conditions it was measured under so you can reproduce it at your own facility.