You could certainly do it manually. The best though would be to tap into precision ag technology and use drones to locate males and then they have autonomous robots that can take them down.
I’ve seen a lot of this stuff in development at my University and it is pretty cool stuff. Most of the folks I know who do this work love working with small scale growers to help them be more efficient in detecting crop issues
no you couldn’t. not for more than a few acres anyway. 40k per acre and you’re talking about culling males? are you planning on reintroducing slave labor?
Most small farms are pretty close to that now
Drones are doing some seriously cool shit and I bet they could be used to automate. They have autonomous robots that can receive coordinates and then recognize plants that are weeds in a field and remove them. I heard one time they can kill as many as like 25,000 plants a day
What would the cost be for such a system?
It certainly is possible and this is premised on seed being affordable for the planting
Making fem seeds wouldn’t be a problem at scale. I like a lot of the ideas here. The more the merrier.
I don’t know personally but I can ask around. Its technology that is developed for high value vegetable crops. I think it would be awesome to write a grant to collect drone data on Cannabis farms while bringing that technology to small farms. There is a real chance that grant gets written
This is Atlas seed. Field scale genetics
Hey I misunderstood your point, my fault.
Where I live i see corn fields detassled for seed production by workers at 10 acre farms. Plus drones!!
Edit to add: hand culling may not be the best answer, but it is a starting point for a discussion and I think this is an important discussion.
not realistically. if you have 40k plants in one acre and even 10% males that’s 4k per acre that need cut down. it’s impossible to fly drones through that canopy cutting males down while leaving females and cost prohibitive to pay humans to do it for more than a few acres. then you gotta do something with them, unless you leave them lay i guess.
Small farms starting out don’t have the capital this would require. Manual culling is what will happen
2 people can do half an acre to an acre.
Manual planting we were able to do half an acre. Machines would greatly increase that
nah, feminized seeds is the only answer so far with that dense of a planting. take a few hundred clones inside a high house and turn about 50 to males to get the seeds.
Fem seeds will still require inspection for herms and males. The rate of 1 per 1000 was pretty accurate from my experience
Am i missing something?
You would do clones? Grow 10-12 mothers out and make a few hundred/ thousands of clones.
Acres of non femmed seeds sounds like a terrible idea. Just increase your biodiversity with mushrooms and legumes if you so desire.
I appreciate your input here and will have to respectfully disagree. I have seen and participated in detasseling on organic farms seeded at 30,000+ per acre. It is certainly doable. Its not fun, but its doable.
I also suspect that if you focused on growing high density single cola plants you will likely save money on trimming. This would take some purposeful selection for plants with less leaves, but I’ve grown cultivars with that characteristic.
Maybe I need to share a little more information here. A small farm is considered less than 10 acres, most of these growers are producing either specialty grains or food crops because of premium price for produce. I want cannabis to be something that can be incorporated into planting rotations for these growers. It has many benefits that organic growers would appreciate and more importantly has great potential for sustainable agriculture (more Cannabis as genus, but high THC fits in). I also think our current cultivation methods for cannabis can be improved to increase the land use efficiency of growers (higher densities means less bare soil or weed suppression fabric and plastic). In order for that to happen, I think we need to modernize cannabis cultivation in a way that provides a premium return for growers and clean flower for users.
If fem seed can be produced and be affordable for high density planting, then that is a much better option. It sounds like it is possible, which may make the point moot. But if not, having an alternative idea ready is important.
Also, if you do have to hire labor it stays in the community and recirculates in local economies. It’s what kept Mendo afloat in some tough times I believe
Not a terrible idea at all!
its easy to make femmed seeds inexpensively.
Take those 10-12 mother i was talking about and reverse 1 or two of them. Than you will have 100,000s of femmed / herm seeds
side brances happen around 12-15 days old. So if your triming for single colas start now.
i had to rethink as well, since my estimates were way off base. i was just about to add something along the lines of what you said just now. i was basing my thoughts on 100+ acre sites. we used to do a small farm and it was doable manually up to about 25 acres. but that was tobacco and not hemp. the density and difference is throwing me off in my head.
edit: hell of a discussion though.
I think people do just that in countries like India, i have not seen any fields directly but I’ve seen pictures from malana, arakku valley, odisha etc., and the plants are planted very close to each other…
The results, lot of totem pole phenotypes, humidity resistant strain in the long run, buds are fully loaded with seeds, fluffy buds etc., and all the every disadvantages we used to get from the brick weed in the past…