Marijuana Business Magazine - May-June 2018

harvest. But some rooms contain about 100 lights and can take as much as half a day to harvest, he said. After getting cut, the branches are sent to drying rooms – which are typi- cally 10 feet by 20 feet, although Grow Op has some that are 20 feet by 20 feet – and hung on hooks attached to lines that run the width of the room. In the Drying Room The drying rooms have air condition- ing, dehumidification, air purification “and a lot of air movement, but gentle air movement,”Morelli said. “Blasting” fans directly onto the hanging branches damages trichomes and the integrity of the flower, Morelli said. “The branches shouldn’t be rocking back and forth in the wind, but just slightly fluttering.” Grow Op uses 10-inch fans made by Hyper Fan in each room that pull air from inside the grow facility, where tempera- tures are usually 65-70 degrees, through a carbonator into the drying room. Once the air is in the room, it travels like a “curtain of air,”Morelli said. The air exits from the other side of the room via another 10-inch fan that performs the outtake.That exhaust fan is set on a timer, so that three to five times per day it can remove the old air and suck in new air. “Depending on the day, we may run those more or less continuously to man- age the humidity in the room. Obvi- ously, you take 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of wet flower from a harvest and throw it into a room, you’re going to have pretty high humidity,”Morelli said. Morelli said the drying process typi- cally takes seven to 10 days, depending on the strain and the conditions in the building at a particular time. Barnette, by contrast, said District Growers dries branches within three to five days. In the drying rooms, Grow Op tries to keep the temperature at about 70 degrees and the humidity at 60%.The grow staffers hold those conditions almost until the end of the drying pro- cess, then lower the humidity to about 55% when they want to start pulling down the dried branches. Generally, once the flower’s moisture content gets down to 12.5%-13%, the grow staff start removing flower from stem.The untrimmed flower is then either sent to be trimmed or to extraction. The ideal drying condition would be 70 degrees and 60% humidity at all times and take as long as needed to get the flower to a moisture content of 12.5%-13%, Barnette said. Left: A dehumidifier in a Grow Op Farms drying room helps remove moisture to dry the plants. Right: Ducts in a Grow Op Farms drying room gently blow air through the facility. Photos courtesy of Grow Op Farms Barnette, CEO and chief grower at District Growers, a producer-processor in Washington DC. “We’re going in and we’re examining that, and we’re letting that happen naturally.” Starting the Process At Gro Op, that strategy usually begins about two days before harvest, when its crew lowers the temperature in the soon-to-be harvested room from about 70 degrees to about 65 degrees and lets the medium (coco in Grow Op’s case) dry out.That, Morelli said, helps reduce humidity in the room and starts the drying process. Grow Op, which has a team of 25 devoted solely to harvesting, drying and curing, then lets the plants spend a day or two in the dark, which helps develop the resin glands and overall ripening of the flower. The grow team then begins the harvest. While some growers prefer to harvest the whole plant and hang it to dry, Morelli instructs his staff to cut branches that are roughly the length of a fingertip to the beginning of the elbow. Most of the company’s rooms have 56 lights and 210 plants, which typically take two or three hours to Cory Barnette is CEO and chief grower at District Growers. Photo courtesy of District Growers 98 • Marijuana Business Magazine • May-June 2018