Drying Methods

Hempire Building
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An acre is 43,560 square feet.

When you dry your acre of plants, you squeeze everything that was on that 43,560 sq ft foot print into a smaller footprint. How much you can fit in any given space depends on a lot of things.

For one, it depends on what your actual drying tech is. Are you hanging, racking, kiln or heated floor, belt dryer, or something else? Assuming you are hanging plants, then you have the question of how tall are your ceilings in the drying space? You gain space by going vertical. If you can fit five or six plants hanging in your barn on the same footprint as a single plant in the field, the 43,560 sq ft is reduced by an order of 5 or 6. Of course in the field you have a lot of space that’s not taken up by plants, which will also go away in your facility.

Then you have the question of whether you are hanging the whole plant, or breaking down the plant into individual branches and hanging those. The latter will save you more space, yet cost you in time and labor. And actually, it’s even up for debate if it will really gain you that much space by breaking down the branches. Again it’s variable and also depends on how you grow and how big your plants are. Efficiencies go up when you plant a bit later in higher numbers and harvest smaller plants that are easily manageable.

So let’s say you have average size plants that occupy about a 4’x4’ area when they’re mature in the field. That’s 16 sq feet per plant. Then you hang whole plants, but you squeeze them and crack the branches when you hang them so they take up less space. Now it’s a 3.5’x3.5’ or about 12 sqft footprint. Then you stack em five high cause you have nice tall clear span ceilings in your warehouse. So 5 plants per 12 square feet, approximately.

Assuming you grow let’s say 2000 plants per acre, then you’d need about 4800 sq feet per acre.

That seems wack though, it’s too high. Hmmm…You def gotta take them branches off; You gotta hang them on net or lines. I know of folks who have gone as low as 1000 sq feet per acre. Really it all depends on your system. Here’s one of the warehouses we used this year:

This is an example I like of how big tobacco farms set up efficient harvesting and drying systems that we can learn from:

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I like that system for the tobacco drying. I’m curious if that would work for hemp in the SE or if it would be too humid. I would assume you would need to figure out a way to keep air moving at the top if you’re gonna cover it with plastic.

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Are you drying flower for smokeable, or biomass for extraction?

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Both. For terp preservation.

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For “A Grade Flowers” Currently we’re field topping each section (we have 3 separate plots, two for CBG, and one for CBDv CBDa), net hanging initial round of tops. Those will be dried to approx. 25%, then sweat the facility to slow drying speed down till 15%. Then will be bucked and trimmed up (usually around 10% moisture at this point), into HempSacs for curing for 2 additional weeks min before broken down into standardized weights. Then will be stored in lined airtight totes with N2 as a stabilizer.

For “B Grade” material we are line hanging remaining plants, running through high capacity bucker, to a belt and sifting over 1" screening, whatever goes through is for our biomass and whatever is on top is put through trimmers and put through similar curing process but probably without the N2 tubs, those things are freaking expensive! Probably N2 purged and lined supersacs if we can find the lined sacs in time. If not we will improvise!

There will likely be some hiccups that will require wet trimming and drying some B material on screens, but we have 9 shipping containers setup for flow so we should be good to go. I really want to use dryers, but after the last 3 years of watching material lost terps and turn brown, I just cant. I have not seen adequate technology that allows scaled drying without sacrificing serious margins. I have seen a lot of units all across the country, and all of it is just wrong unless for a very specific purpose of making shitloads of distillate (which theres a finite pool of buyers)

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We offer mobile or stand alone hemp dryers, they are conveyor systems with adjustable mass flow for air and biomass.

We can dry fast and hot and go right to extraction, One of our local farmers dried 25 acres for extraction in 2 weeks!

or low and slow for storage or sale!

Almost every part is fabricated in or shop in Lakeville, MN, which means replacement parts can ship tomorrow and we can answer your calls and questions when you need help!

Grain Handler has been drying corn, wheat and beans for over 30 years and now we are ready to help the hemp community.

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