Why Automation in Cannabis is Proving Helpful

There’s perhaps no better time than now to talk about automation in agriculture. Social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19 have severely limited the available workforce in nearly every corner of farming. It’s a question that’s been asked countless times on the major network news programs: Will we ever be back to what we once considered normal?

For what I’ve witnessed, normal in the commercial greenhouse cannabis world is and always has been a large crew of very capable team members often working near each other.

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Until a vaccine is widely available and adopted, or there is a significant breakthrough on instant test availability to the public, it begs the question: Will we ever be able to work in that manner again?

Due to the soaring cost of labor in many markets, plus the seemingly never-ending reports that finding manual laborers for farm jobs is growing even tougher, legal cannabis growers have taken a keen interest in automation and how it could help them lower operating expenses.

On a visit to greenhouse medical marijuana grower SunMed (Warwick, MD) back in January, I had my first encounter with a Greenbroz (Las Vegas) product in the hulking form of the companies’ giant stainless steel Precision Batcher flower separating robot that automates the process of weighing and packaging small amounts of cannabis for retail.

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Sleek touch screen controls and sensors placed all over the thing, to this former precision ag journalist, it looked more like something John Deere or Topcon would be putting out than what I’d thought I’d encounter at a cannabis grow operation.

Harkening back to that first encounter with the batcher, Greenhouse Grower recently touched base with the company’s Founder and CEO, Cullen Raichart, to talk all things automation:

GreenhouseGrower.com (GG): Any thoughts on how the coronavirus crisis demonstrates the need for cannabis growers to automate as much of their operations as possible?

Cullen Raichart, CEO & Founder, Greenbroz.

Cullen Raichart (CR): The COVID-19 crisis has put into focus the fact that when labor is not available or labor is limited, it impacts production negatively. Automation allows production to continue and can effectively insulate a business from the risks associated with a dependency on labor volume.

The more steps in your production line that are automated, the more effectively you can mitigate contamination of your final product with mold and other pathogens. This ultimately leads to a higher-quality, cleaner end-product. Those operations that lean toward more automation are definitely benefiting from having less people needed to run their facilities, and are more easily able to implement social distancing guidelines during this crisis.

GG: Having come up in the row crop precision ag world, one of my takeaways on legal cannabis thus far is that the sheer uniqueness in which each grow is set up probably makes automating processes more difficult for some of these guys than in the row crop or even orchard world, where you’re almost always going to be working with similar infrastructure characteristics (30-inch rows for corn and soybeans, similar trellis systems, etc.), whereas in cannabis you could view 100 commercial grows and 95 of them will be markedly different from anything else you’ve viewed?

CR: One of the big barriers that inhibits bulk automation at this point is the fact everybody does things a bit differently. The industry is diverse with respect to growing practices, production system set-ups, and packaging requirements. That’s what’s unique here. If you grow soybeans, you’re going to grow soybeans in basically the same way that most other producers are growing soybeans; you don’t have the variability in traditional agriculture that you currently have in the cannabis sector.

We help businesses set up unique automated harvesting and production systems based on their needs and on their desired end product. I really enjoy the challenge of looking at each business as a unique entity and then coming up with a combination of machines that will solve the particular production challenges of that company. You really have to be innovative and flexible to come up with solutions for businesses. It is not a one-size-fits-all kind of a scenario. It’s much more fluid, which makes it more challenging, but also more interesting.

We haven’t reached the monoculture stage in the cannabis industry on a large scale yet. That kind of sterile, uniform, large-scale grow operation is not ubiquitous at this point. Once you get past the growing phase, you can move toward a bit more standardization in the harvesting phase. With harvesting and packaging, it starts to become a bit clearer that there is one well- defined, efficient way to automate.

GG: For both newer and the more experienced greenhouse cannabis growers that might be reading this, what are some of the easiest areas of the production cycle to automate with technology? And then, conversely, what are some areas that have proven especially difficult to automate?

CR: The answer to that is dependent on the individual producer and their end goals. In general, we are always trying to identify the pain point or bottleneck, and then we work on eliminating that. We look for pieces of the puzzle that are slowing down processing, and then we focus our engineering team’s effort in that direction.

That’s where any cultivator should start. They should start by looking for the longest pole in the tent, so to speak, and start by automating that first. That’s why trimming became the first part in the process to be fully automated. Trimming machines were the first commercially successful equipment in the industry because trimming is known to be a time-consuming and difficult task, so it made sense to automate that first.

There are places where it does not necessarily make sense to automate today, but I don’t think there is any part of the process that does not have the potential to be automated in the future. When you look at the way plants are potted today for example, that is an area where we are not seeing automation , but that process could be automated.

In the future, I envision robots and machines moving up and down the rows of plants harvesting, dissecting, and hanging. This could be done today, but everything has an associated cost and it remains to be seen how large companies invest in this kind of technology in the coming years.

GG: Do you run into a lot of grower skepticism of technology in this space? It seems sometimes like it’s a harder sell than, say, the new John Deere combine every two years in the row crop world?

CR: That has been true, but that also has changed quite a bit in the last few years. A lot of businesses have automated one part of their production but have not really embraced automation in the majority of their operation. That depends on the scale of the business. Many smaller producers have automated part of their production, but finish by hand-trimming, whereas larger operations have really embraced automation and are automating everything that makes sense to automate in their production lines.

If you are a commercial grower today, and you buy a trimmer for $20,000 and it lasts for 10 years, that’s a great investment. With the amount of money that the trimmer makes you, it will pay for itself in the first month or two, so you could literally buy a new one every year. If it breaks down, you just buy a new one. That’s what’s happening. That’s what farmers do. They run the equipment hard, and then they sell it and buy a new one. They just look at it as the cost of doing business.

The banks are involved, and they have incentivized the way that these commercial transactions happen. The big companies like John Deere in the traditional agriculture sector, they get to reap the benefits because the farmers’ margins are set. A farmer who’s producing corn for example, he knows what everything will equal out to be. In cannabis, those margins are not so clearly defined yet, so there is a lot of uncertainty regarding profit margins.

We are starting something new by offering producers a leasing option. This way, businesses don’t have to worry about replacing parts, doing repairs, or updating equipment. This way, they don’t have to worry about anything. We take care of everything. They can also switch out equipment more easily as their needs change. We are envisioning this to be something that will become more popular over the next few years.

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