In our last blog we compared cannabis trimming to picked-cotton cleaning or ginning. It is an apt comparison. The cotton gin revolutionized the economics of cotton yields. The first marijuana machine trimmer (out in 1997) was a very large machine with a lot of moving parts, had a daunting learning curve, and was very expensive. It did not “revolutionize” the cannabis trimming process, but it started an fast-moving evolution of machines and techniques for cannabis trimming. And fast trimming led to higher speed prep and much larger loads ready for kief trichome extraction, which led to much higher production of kief-related products and CBD or other cannabis-related oils, which led to an explosion of CBD or marijuana extract products from foods, ingestibles and topicals. It also led to revolution in botanical trimming and extraction for botanicals like chamomile or hops.
Now, cannabis trimmers come in all sizes, a variety of engineering shapes, range in price from cheap to six figures, can be very easy to use, and utilize a variety of methods for the bud trimming.
Trimming is now a science and technology in the cannabis/hemp world. All this for the removal of the excess leafage from around the buds on the harvested plant. Of course, this used to be done by hand, and there are still small hand-held tools that help DYI types who clean their own harvest buds.
Now, in 2020 there is a remarkable new technology called Cryo-Trimming® which takes the best of CO2 cryo (or freezing) the flowers to the next level of efficiency and affordability. Imagine a machine that has an output of trimming a pound of flower material a minute, without damaging or reducing the inherent trichome quality of the flower. And that machine is very affordable ($5,800 for the smaller model and $8,500 for the larger model).
So, in a typical day of work (dealing with cannabis or hemp harvest that has a good bucking and big leaf removal job done), the output could be 40 pounds an hour, or 320 pounds in a good days work. Convert that into the profit you make for 320 pounds of flowers ready to extract, then you get an idea of the very attractive ROI for the purchase of this TOR machine.
