Has anyone used a wood chipper such as the commercial Vermeer wood chipper to shred whole hemp plants? I just purchased a dryer capable of drying 10,000lbs a day and the material going in needs to be shredded in order for it to dry properly. Located in Medford, Oregon and South Carolina.
I run a monster chipper at my house to handle the 12-16" alders I dont want to burn. The chute from the chipper drum or disc will probably give you difficulty. Hemp plants with flowers will just make a messâŚliterally just a sticky mess in the drum and chute. Try throwing something like black berry bushes into a chipperâŚnow image hemp stalks and branches wrapped around the drum or disc. The chips need to carry enough momentum and energy to fly up and out of the chuteâŚI dont see hemp doing that well.
Maybe the new vermeers will chomp weed just fine with their fancy hydraulic feed systems. My morebark 2020, from 1996, would never work for such a task.
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Thanks for your input. I was thinking the sameâŚI dont see how i can prevent the stalks and branches being wrapped around the disk. Going to do a test run next week with some early harvest plants.
Hello Mr. ORHemp @greenwaydevelopments.
I am up here in Ontario Canada and I had a successful female-only experimental Organic Hemp Test plot last year. This year weâre going large (5-10 acres) but I am already loosing sleep. Why? Because I need a reasonable solution for chopping the secondary buds into consistent little pieces. I see your pic that âworks fine with wet materialâ. If youâre not still out there slugging it out in the fields, mind if I ask you about your experience with that machine in the pic?
Regards, Ray.
Iâm in Ontario as well. Had a great season. We did a 30 acre plot with success. What you use to harvest ?
Hey man, how did that chipper go?
Yeah colorado mills are great; we use them ourselves but only for dry. For wet we use shredders, but then we did our mill testing with baled hemp that was around the 9 month mark, so not ideal. But have you successfully used hammer mills with fresher wet product?
Thanks,
John
Youâre right, I havenât, myself, and havenât done the research on it either. Must have missed the whole âfor dryingâ part of the topic. I was talking dried whole plant. My bad.
An industrial shredder is gonna be killer on CBD yields though, no? Thereâs gotta be a better way to do that. With that said, I know drying whole plant is a pain in the ass, and if the drying equipment youâre using requires that input, then youâre pretty stuck with that end result. And Iâve seen way worse ways to do it.
Haha yeah. And that was my first thought but our engineers assure me that though it does effect it, itâs not a big deal because with hemp a lower percentage of the oil is right on the surface waiting to fall off. All we have right now is testing numbers from shredders + tumble dryers, but next week weâll be testing shredders + fluid bed and microwave, and I can get back to you on that if you like.
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More data is always welcome 
Shredding whole plant material without a strategy for separating out stalk/stem material is a recipe for disaster. Stem/stalk material has far less cannabinoids than your leaf & bud material and will drag down your average potency, as an extractor weâve noticed it also loves to soak up more ethanol and hurts our bottom line.
Buyers and extractors willing to do a split with you will prefer better debucked material every time.
Weâve got a nearly perfect solution for this. Hereâs the machine we use to do it and hereâs a picture of the results. Left is input, middle and right are outputs.
Totally depends on throughput/unit size and the intake/output configuration.
If you email me at jhilgendorf@abmequipment.com or text me at 503-347-8104 with that info I can have someone ballpark it or get you a quote.
Ok Iâm back. We still havenât put the report out but with shredding and drying at 8,000 lbs/hr we lost 8% of the CBD (kept 92). So yes you absolutely lose some, but with how much time and man-power it saves itâs negligible. The reason for this is a few things. First when you shred you slice, vs a mill where you mash. Second, though youâre really doing a number on the plant itself, what youâre losing most of is water, and since the oils tend to stick together and donât mix with it, they stay in the plant while water gushes out. (Some CBD is lost here but we can also reclaim that fluid and separate it, but itâs usually not worth the time.) Hereâs a link where the process is explained a bit more, and on the top right in the menu youâll see some testing reports. Those are centered around the old method of tumbler dryers, but the shredding methods still apply.
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Has anyone tried using the shredder on wet cannabis flower?
Do you mean aside from us? Because we do it all the time. We remove the stalk afterward.
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