Large harvest for extraction

We are harvesting 150,000 pounds of outdoor this season with the end goal being distillate.

Interested in the community’s advice on grinding full plants with a mill vs removing stalk with a motherbucker first

Since its distillate, I’m leaning toward grinding the whole plant and running cryo to combat undesirables but wanted to hear from the GLG 1st

Thanks in advance!

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Hand strip it

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Remove shuck by hand

Can’t speak to the equipment you need to debuck other than an army of laborers with leather gloves, but from experience whole plant doesn’t like to be ground through a hammer mill or chipper, just too much fibrous material in the main stalk of the plant and it ends up clogging whatever equipment you use to reduce size. The fibers are a giant pain in the ass to cut apart and clean out of your mill too.

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You do things by hand and can preserve the trichomes best. As long as you have the resources to hire a large crew of helpers this is do-able.

There are some interesting options showing up for harvesting equipment. I came across these folks recently:

And then there’s the machine buckers, Hemp Robotics makes one that strips the whole plant. Certainly there’s room for improvement and the price is off the charts, could give you some ideas though:

As for grinding, I’ve seen folks turn out some decent material using a modified combine. Hammer mills suck and destroy the trichomes. This is @alwaystiredfarms turning out some beautiful ground biomass using a combine:

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Destroy? I wouldn’t be surprised by “knock kief loose and blow them all over the place” given the speed most run at and the air system a lot of the cheap ones use but actually destroy would surprise me

Hammer mill smooshes the trichomes is what I mean. When it comes to plant oils, the more smashing and high-intensity mechanical handling involved, the more degradation and oxidation is likely to occur rapidly.