The cannabis industry is chock full of small disagreements over cultivation styles but few of them can bring out a more heated debate than the topic of defoliation in the flower cycle. The practice is called Defoliation, De-Leafing, and even “Schwazzing” and the practice is considered a requirement by growers who grow their plants up tall in the Veg state before flipping to flower. In my article titled, Should You Defoliate Cannabis, I went into detail about why I think the practice doesn’t work, and I’m not going to repeat that here.
As much as I disagree with the idea that defoliation increases production, I also agree that these folks simply have to do it because they grow their plants so big that it would create a jungle of vegetation which would invariably become a mold factory if they didn’t do some severe leaf plucking to allow airflow.
The practice of growing big plants is a leftover of the “medical” days when the laws allowed only a few plants in flower so you had to grow them up HUGE to maximize your space in the flower room.
However, we’re not stuck in the medical program any longer and all modern commercial facilities are allowed a certain amount of square footage of canopy space.
Many legacy growers who came from those medical gardens are now working on commercial farms and bringing those techniques along with them without really doing the math to see that they are now in the exact opposite situation.
Before, you had a limit of plant numbers so you grew them big to maximize the square footage each one could cover.
Now, you have a limit of square footage so you need to grow your plants small to MINIMIZE the time they spend in the flower room.
These are two very different situations and they require different ways of looking at the issue of creating the maximum amount of product per year.
In this article I want to show how this practice of growing tall plants costs your business in the form of increased labor and lost time in the flower room.
For example, one of the most common justifications for defoliation is…
We had to do it to prevent mildew!
Looking on the internet (LinkedIn is a great place to see commercial farms in action), it is entirely common to see indoor plants that are five to six feet tall. Without defoliating the plants, this would create a dense jungle of growth from the bottom to the top!
In this case, of course you have to defoliate or your staff might get lost in the jungle.
Is defoliation simply a universal requirement for all farms, or are these farmers creating a situation that requires defoliation due to poor canopy management?
Are they using defoliating because it increases production, or are they defoliating because they grew a jungle and maybe an indoor farm is not the best place for that.
Another argument some will make is…
Defoliation improves light penetration.
If you grow a six foot tall canopy….. it is true that you won’t get light at the bottom, but that doesn’t mean you need to defoliate, it means you needed to grow a shorter canopy.
Again, are you defoliating because it improves production, or are you defoliating because of poor canopy management?
Let’s Create An Imaginary Farm To Illustrate My Point
To get a clear picture of how canopy height works let’s set up a very simple fictional farm to represent an average medium-large indoor cultivation scenario.
Imagine you have a cannabis farm with a single flowering space and a total operating expense of $20,000 per month including power, labor, salaries, advertising, sales….. everything!
In this scenario, everything that happens in your entire farm has to be paid for by product that comes out of that one flower room.
Note: I realize that it in reality it would be impractical to have only a single flower room on a large farm but I’m doing it this way for the purpose of making the math easy to see.
The average MINIMUM time each crop spends in the flower room is 2 months, so that’s a total expense of $40,000 per crop, but in order to accomplishing this your Veg plants must arrive in the flower room happy and healthy, without any real trauma to recover from so you can flip the lights to 12/12 the very next day.
If you do your pruning and topping in the veg room, you can create a short, wide healthy plant with plenty of branch tips and it will be arriving in the flower room ready to go. All the flowering tops will be in the top 18″ or so of the canopy because the plant may be no more than 18-24″ tall if you’ve done this right.
Imagine how your labor expense are reduced by NOT having your employees spend literally days manually pluck off leaves, and your plants never experience the stress of having a large percentage of the leaves removed.
You’ve got short plants with a wide top. If you stack a few more of them in the bed than you had before, you now have two foot tall canopy with little or no undergrowth. This still fills the bed from side to side with branch tips, but at a much lower height.
The simple fact to notice here is this…
A 4′ wide canopy is still only a 4′ wide canopy,
even if you grow it six feet off the ground.
Why shorter is better?
All cannabis farms have a profit limitation which is tied to the time a crop must spend in the flower room. Everything you can do to cut that time, increases your annual revenue. Every unnecessary day a crop spends in the flower room, reduces your annual revenue.
If you can fill the beds in your flower room and flip the lights to a 12/12 cycle on day 1, you’ll have a 65-70 day crop rotation.
However, if you choose to veg your plants in the flower room while they grow 5-6 feet tall, it may cost you another 4-6 WEEKS to get that extra height, but you’ll still only have a 4′ wide canopy.
The big difference is… now you have a 95 day crop rotation.
A 95 day rotation means you get 3.8 crops per year.
While with a 65 day rotation you get 5.5 crops per year.
That’s 1.7 more crops per year with the shorter rotation.
Some might argue that,
A taller canopy grows more bud down the length of the plant from top to bottom.
This is may appear to be true at first glance, but it’s actually false because “A Grade” flowers grow best in the upper portion of the canopy. If a plant is six feet tall, you can be guaranteed that the lower 2/3 of that plant will not produce the same high grade cannabis flower as the upper section no matter how many leaves you pull off. The farther the buds are from the lights, the more they are affected by the inverse square law of light falloff, and the more canopy leaves they have above them, so they will grow less dense.
The truth is that a short plant still has a 4′ wide canopy so it will produce as much A Grade flower as a taller plant, but the taller plant will ALSO produce a lot of B and C grade fluffy stuff in the lower 2/3 of it’s height.
Will you make money selling your B grade?
Sure!
Will you make more money from selling the B grade bud than the cost of running the flower room while you grew the tall canopy?
NO!
In the cannabis marketplace, anything below A Grade is only worth a fraction of the price, so A grade is obviously the goal and anything else should literally be considered… GROWER ERROR!
The moral of that story is…
Shorter plants produce roughly 1.7 more
crops of A Grade bud per year!
So is a tall canopy fruit or folly?
WITH A SHORT CANOPY
Let’s say the farm in our example above pulls down $200,000 in flower product per crop. Subtract the expenses, 2x $20,000/month = $40,000 for a 65 day crop cycle and you’ve got $160,000 gross per crop. On a 65 day rotation, you can grow 5.5 crops per year to create…
$880,000 annual Net
WITH A TALL CANOPY
You grow a tall jungle on a 95 day rotation. $200,000 – $60,000 expenses (3months x $20,000/month) = $140,000 gross per crop. ($140,000 x 3.8 crops/yr = $532,000) Then you have to account for the lower income of the B and C grade buds which will make up roughly 1/4 (I’m being generous here) of a crop produced by a tall canopy, so we now subtract 80% of the value from that 1/4 of the crop. 1/4 of $532,000 is $133,000, subtract 80% ($106,400) of that amount and you’re left with $26,600. ($532,000-$133,000 + $26000 = $425,000)
This doesn’t even begin to account for the added cost of labor for defoliating the plants plus all the extra IPM costs, plus the added risk involved when you have to manage an extremely large level of foliage over a long period of time.
$425,000 annual Net
That’s 52% Less profit!
Being able to see this issue in an objective manner, requires that you first let go of that old dogma telling you that you absolutely must grow your cannabis plants as tall as possible, and instead take a look at the issue from a pure business analysis perspective.
I hope this breakdown sheds some light on the true impact this practice of wasting time in the flower room is having on your bottom line.
Glen Johnson
For more on the topic of business analysis, check out this article… Measuring Commercial Cannabis Production