Separating biomass

Hey everyone -
I was wondering how growers separate green biomass. More specifically, the stems from flower/leaves before drying/extraction to yield a higher CBD content.
Screens? Decortication? Aspirator?
-Keep grinding, Dan.

empirical data says they usually don’t…

I’ve pulled what looked like nightshade out of combine harvested material.

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The only way I have seen it done well is by hand. Even when bucked and stripped by hand, there is always some amount of undesirable biomass mixed in.

I was the one who pointed out the suspected nightshade to @cyclopath. We’ve also seen combines polluted with whatever they harvested before contaminate the biomass. One time the harvesting combine cleared mint fields prior to harvesting hemp. Let’s just say that the minion grinding the biomass was happy about how lovely it smelled.

It’s not uncommon to find legumes and any other cover crop as well as noxious weeds mixed in with the biomass. With greater scale of production comes lower quality control.

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Thanks @Akoyeh and @cyclopath for the heads up! Below is a picture of the typical material coming out of our larger Hammermills. Tougher to separate after it has been pulverized.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QJK459avhNAnlmwtFcpsOTPva1ubdZdW
(file too big to load directly)
This was the first time i had seen a chicken plucker being used for removing biomass from stems but it worked wonderfully!

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“…it was what we had on hand…”

:heart_eyes:

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Sometimes thats where the most labor saving ideas come from… shit just laying around. :upside_down_face:

they say necessity is the Mother of invention?

I’m pretty sure laziness is the Father…

“this is too much work! how else can we do this?!?”

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So, the Chicken Plucker…was this used on recently harvested material or was it dried before pluckin’?

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This also means that the overall potency of the biomass goes down with the introduction of greater volume of plant material that is not super saturated with cannabinoids. I also worry about how effective the drying process for this type of milling will be and whether or not it will contribute to molds, especially if stored in super sacks without being appropriately dried.

And I’m pretty sure the chicken plucker will only work well on dried material. Everything in that video was very clearly dried.

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Colorado Mill Equipment has a device they say can separate stem fibers from flower in line with the grinding process. They showed me a picture of the different output streams, which did seem dramatically different (basically powder vs fiber fuzz). I don’t know how it works

This was hang dried

much too dry if you ask me! :smiley:

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Anyone know what kind of damage is done to the trichomes during this? Seems aggressive. For those of us interested in bubble hash…

I’ve seen videos of them, when we were asking about having them install mills at some of the locations where we’ve installed extractors. They are damn sweet!

It has to be super dry or the augers get jammed up.

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I know it’s off topic but look at how many views!! It must be a sign lol

I am where I’m supposed to be!!

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Late to the party on this but, Colorado Mill is a great company in terms of equipment quality and customer support. However, their sales people over promise at a near criminal level. After dumping a disgusting amount of money on some equipment from them they casually mentioned that they haven’t quite figure out how to make it work well. smh.