One of the best ways to run a cannabis grow as efficiently as possible is to track harvests. With the harvest batch data, operators can:
All of this information helps cultivators make smart, data-driven decisions about their cannabis grow operations, allowing them to manage and optimize their cultivation practices.
Cannabis Cultivation best practices go beyond just implementing proper lighting, soil, temperature controls and irrigation. Best practices include using an integrated marijuana cultivation software solution to automate compliance and leverage business tools to manage and optimize your cannabis grow operation. While cannabis cultivation requires a unique combination of agricultural sciences, genetics, botany and cannabis-specific expertise, the addition of a software solution helps simplify the day-to-day workflows and SOPs. With the ability to track costs associated with labor, materials, equipment and compliance requirements from a single interface, growers can focus on the important tasks of cultivating their product with optimal conditions.
Cannabis cultivation is the sequence of processes for growing plants from seed, clone, or tissue culture to harvest, and drying, curing, and packaging base products to use in manufacturing or to sell as finished flower or “bud”. The flower is then used for medical or adult-use consumption within legal markets.
Cannabis cultivation can take place either indoor or outdoor, depending on the climate and size of the operation. Indoor facilities provide greater control and can lead to faster production. Indoor cultivation requires a lot of specialized equipment and technology, including lighting, advanced temperature controls, and automated irrigation systems. All of this complexity makes the cannabis cultivation vertical one of the most costly operations within the cannabis supply chain.
Cannabis cultivators wear many hats, needing to understand genetics, agricultural sciences and botany. Within a grow facility, either indoor or outdoor, cannabis cultivators are responsible for maintaining optimal conditions for the best plant growth, ensuring that the soil, nutrients temperature, lighting, and water is all managed in accordance to the healthiest growing conditions. They are also responsible for ensuring that all processes are followed within the compliance regulations of the governing regulatory body. Depending on the state track-and-trace regulations, plants must be tracked and recorded from the moment the seeds are planted until the final product is sold, hence the term seed-to-sale.
To pick the best marijuana cultivation software, choose a seed-to-sale solution that has an automated integration with the state track-and-trace system is key. By picking a cultivation software vendor that automates regulatory reporting workflows while optimizing your business, you are able to seamlessly manage your business, build efficiency, maximize yield, scale profitability - all without worrying about remaining compliant.
Understanding the role cannabis cultivation software plays in maintaining compliance while helping you run your business effectively is crucial when choosing the right software solution. Most legal states require all operators to use a track-and-trace software solution to stay compliant. While the primary job of track-and-trace regulatory software is to maintain compliance within the cannabis supply chain, the functionality of a track-and-trace system does not provide the business tools and insights to run a successful business. By using a marijuana cultivation software that automatically connects to the state system allows you to follow state reporting requirements and gain the holistic overview you need to streamline operation for maximum profitability, saving time and making you money.
Cannabis business owners need dispensary POS software to help maximize the ROI of their operations. Cannabis point-of-sale software provides them with all the tools they need to run their dispensary; from basic financial oversight with accounting functionality to inventory and staff management features. Keeping an operation running smoothly within a single interface helps cannabis business owners streamline and manage their business from anywhere.
While business owners may live in the back-of-house world, budtenders and dispensary managers are living in the world of customer service. Using a dedicated dispensary point-of-sale software solution helps everyone do their job more effectively. In order to keep customers happy and coming back, dispensary owners need to ensure both their staff, and the dispensary POS systems enhance the customer experience. Dispensary employees rely on their cannabis POS software to quickly and easily facilitate transactions, process sales, and ensure the proper inventory is always on hand. The integration of the POS system with scanners and printers keeps things moving and help staff best serve consumers. The added functionality of built-in loyalty programs lets staff use data and customer history to help them make better product recommendations based on purchase history.
Tracking cannabis cultivation is mandatory in most legal markets. Tracking is required so that government regulatory bodies can transparently see the full journey of each plant from when it is first planted, to when it is ultimately sold or disposed of. However, many cultivators find that using a marijuana cultivation software in tandem to track their operations gives them key insights and tools for running an efficient and profitable business.
Cultivators need to move from the just reproducing compliant workflows to the optimization of operations and quality control. Understanding costs and yield is everything in tracking and calculating the cost per gram or pound of product. Successful cannabis cultivation is actually more math than science. Knowing what the profitability of your yields helps you streamline future crops, and identify how to best optimize your facility space and workflows. Additionally, costs of goods sold (COGS) drive business success in the cannabis industry, as it is the only cost that a cultivator can write-off to mitigate their tax burden because of the 280E tax structure. By tracking processes, yields, labor and COGS, operators are able to get a full picture of the efficiencies of their business, and make any adjustments necessary to scale and optimize for the best possible success.
Learn more about how technology has revolutionized the cannabis cultivation industry
There are a variety of data points and workflows that should be monitored during the cannabis cultivation process. Using a sophisticated software solution designed specifically for cannabis, helps you oversee your full operations through the data you collect and input. All of this information helps you make adjustments to your environmental factors, plan your crops according to the best yields, and fully optimize your grow operation.
Key metrics you should be monitoring for gaining the best insight into your cultivation include:
Tracking things like temperature, humidity, Co2 and light give you insights into the best conditions for maximum yield, and allow you to adjust for future crops.
In order to stay on top of costs, while still optimizing the conditions and health of your plants is a huge task for cannabis growers. Tracking this data, and documenting the best combination of nutrients, water, fertilizer, and soil materials helps operators hone into the best recipe for their strains and their yields.
In order to produce the best products for customers you should be tracking your mother plants and their genetic strains.. Monitor the whole genealogical path from Matriarch plant to mother plant to cuttings. Plus, the different strain codes and phenotypes of your cannabis grow.
While all cultivators are required to track cannabis yield data to stay compliant with their state regulatory system, there are also crucial business insights that are provided by this information. Knowing your top selling strain helps you focus your resources within your facility on perfecting the optimal conditions for that crop, while deprioritizing other yields that do not produce the same selling opportunities.
Tracking your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) within your facility allow you to ensure that your team and your protocols are working efficiently and effectively to positively impact your marijuana grow facility. By reviewing your data, you can find opportunities to improve processes and train staff. Reviewing the SOPs for your cultivation facility should be a regular activity so you can be making ongoing necessary adjustments to truly optimize your business.
Tracking the efficiency of your employees also is important. Seeing where there are lags in productivity, or breakdowns in processes can help you train your staff to be more efficient. Understanding who your best employees are helps you staff appropriately for key workflows within your facility. Cultivation tracking software can help you gain visibility into your staff’s activities throughout all the key processes within your facility, and can be a useful tool to manage labor.
Using sophisticated software is the best practice for tracking cannabis cultivation. Agriculture, in general, has not been known for its early adoption of technology, often relying more on manual processes, and spreadsheets to track yields and manage crops. However, for the cannabis industry, embracing technology has largely been directed by the requirements to report data for compliance regulations and provide traceability. Cannabis cultivation software automates most of the tracking requirements, and saves operators the stress and time of manually entering data into a government system.
Most states require cannabis cultivators to track plants through their full lifecycle, documenting every stage and movement along the cannabis supply chain. Cultivators must constantly track and report activity at their facility/farm and recognize any and all changes in relationship to the constantly evolving and complex world of compliance.
Energy costs to labor and materials, there are a lot of moving pieces when you are looking to successfully and efficiently run a cultivation operation. Being able to see the holistic costs relative to your product output is crucial to determining the profitability and sustainability of your business model. Watch the Webinar: The Top Reports Every Cannabis Cultivator Needs to Know
How you track cannabis cultivation costs depends on the size, type and sophistication of your cannabis grow operation. Tracking cannabis cultivation costs is a very complex and important function of running a marijuana grow facility. In the past, the costs and workflows of cultivations were captured manually, on spreadsheets and in notebooks, but as the industry becomes more sophisticated, and strict compliance reporting is required, a cannabis cultivation software solution is really needed in order to accurately and compliantly run your business.
Using a cultivation software, or a cultivation software module that is part of a larger seed-to-sale solution, captures all the dynamic costs of your cultivation in a single place, giving you the data and insights you need to analyze and gain efficiency from your cultivation business.
Cannabis cultivators use tracking software to stay compliant with their state regulations, and also to effectively manage and grow their operation. Using marijuana cultivation software enables cannabis cultivators full visibility into their workflows and SOPs, providing key insights into inefficiencies that are negatively impacting their business.
Cannabis tracking software should automatically maintain compliance through alerts, specialized reporting and an integration into the state system. This alleviates the pressure on cultivators to manually maintain regulation requirements, and focus on growing their product efficiently and safely. Using marijuana cultivation software allows cultivators for competitive by tracking and controlling all aspects of their grow operations, from planting all the way through the harvesting, curing and packaging workflows.
The cost of cultivation for a cannabis business is highly dependent on the kind of cultivation facility and the size of the operation. Depending on the climate and laws of various geographies, cultivation can occur outdoors, in greenhouses, and in warehouses. In general, the highest quality and highest margin plants are grown indoors, which is also the most expensive form of cannabis farming. The least expensive form of farming is outdoors, yielding lower quality/utility product that are generally used for extraction purposes in manufacturing. Outdoor cultivators face challenges around limited growing cycles, pests, and disease.
With the high cost of equipment, utilities, labor and resources required for an indoor facility, technology is imperative for scalable growth. Cannabis cultivation technology helps cultivators manage their business while operating at the highest efficiencies, helping facilitate compliance, procedures, and optimized workflows. By investing in a robust seed-to-sale tracking system to centralize all the data around costs, labor and yield provides a holistic view of a large marijuana grow operation.
Tracking the projected flower yield of your cannabis cultivation helps you run a profitable and efficient business. Understanding how to maximize the amount of flower you can produce in your grow facility enables you to make data-driven decisions and ensures every harvest is profitable.
There are several ways to track your flower yield. Using various formulas around final product yield per square foot of facility space or average yield per watt of lighting. These formulas help you determine the size of your yield vs the inherent costs of doing business. Using a marijuana cultivation software to help you calculate and track these costs ensures that you are utilizing your facility space and your equipment and utility costs effectively to reach your maximum yield and optimize your profitability.
Cannabis cultivation tracking impacts the transparency and accountability of the full cannabis seed-to-sale software. With the strict compliance regulations in place throughout the cannabis supply chain, regulators are able to ensure the safety and integrity of the product from planting to the final sale. When it comes to products that people are putting in and on their bodies, strict supply chain technologies are necessary to establish the safety and accuracy of the commodities. Consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about the efficacy and safety of what they are using and ingesting, prompting more industries to provide additional transparency to the production and distribution of their products.
The use of cannabis cultivation software to track these life cycles and movement through the supply chain ensure consumers are receiving a product that is safe to consume. Tracking the plants also allows immediate recall and notifications if there is a problem with a certain product, and enables regulators to identify where in the supply chain the issue arose. A few years ago romaine lettuce E. coli outbreak caused hundreds of consumers to get sick, and it took weeks before the FDA was able to identify the source of the contamination. Unlike other, less moderated agriculture supply chains, cannabis regulators can easily and quickly identify the source of contaminated or counterfeit products.
As cannabis cultivation operations grow from thousands of plants to millions, more sophisticated tools and technologies are required to manage and scale.
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