45 days. That is the window every fall where three of our farms hit harvest maturity at once. September 15 through October 31. Get it wrong and the season is gone. Every pound that comes off those farms has to be cut, transported, hung, dried, cured, trimmed, sorted, packaged, and tracked. And we make every one of those steps happen at a single facility.
That is not a default. Most multi-site operators dry, trim, and package on-farm where the biomass is grown. It is the simpler answer. We chose the harder one. This is why.
The harvest window does not negotiate
Outdoor cannabis in Michigan finishes when it finishes. There is no extending the back end of October without paying for it in mold pressure, frost damage, or trichome degradation. When the genetics are dialed and the season cooperates, all 3 farms surge into peak ripeness on overlapping calendars.
Across the 6.5-week window, we are pulling tens of thousands of plants out of the ground in scheduled passes. Different cultivars finish at different points inside the window, which is a feature, not a bug, but only if the post-harvest infrastructure can absorb a sustained surge for 45 straight days. Every plant that comes down is a clock. From the moment a stalk is cut, the biomass is degrading until it is in a controlled drying environment. Wet weight loses moisture every hour it sits unhung. Trichomes are most vulnerable in the first 12 to 24 hours post-cut. Mold and bud rot do not wait for transport scheduling.
The constraint is brutal: harvest a season’s worth of plant material across 3 separated farms over 45 days, get every cut plant to controlled dry within hours, and don’t lose a batch to a weather event, a vehicle delay, or a labor shortage at the wrong moment.
The easy answer is to dry on-farm. Three farms, three drying barns, three trim crews, three packaging stations. We don’t do that.
What consolidation actually costs
Routing every cut plant to one post-harvest facility means we are operating a fleet, a schedule, and a chain of custody system that most cultivation operations don’t have to build.
The fleet. At peak, we are running 5 53-foot semi trucks and trailers every day between farms and the post-harvest site. Wet flower is bulky and fragile. A trailer that holds 40,000 lbs of finished product is moving a fraction of that in wet biomass on the same cube, because hung whole-plant material does not pack like dry trim. That math drives trailer count, route sequencing, dock scheduling, and the labor crews staged at both ends to load and unload without bottlenecking the cut.
The METRC manifests. Every transfer between licensed locations is a regulated event. Manifest generated, weights captured at origin and destination, reconciliation logged, variances documented. At peak harvest we are running multiple manifests per day per farm. The compliance lift is real and it is non-negotiable.
The wet-weight capture. Field weights at point of cut, transport weights, arrival weights at the dry facility. Three weight events per batch, all reconciled. Moisture loss in transit is a known phenomenon and it has to be modeled into the variance budget so the reconciliation does not flag every shipment.
The peak surge capacity. The dry facility has to be sized for sustained 45-day throughput, not the annual average. Hang space, dehumidification, air movement, and trim staging all sit underutilized 9 months of the year and run at full tilt from mid-September through the end of October. We accept that capacity carrying cost because the alternative costs more.
What it earns back
One facility means one quality standard, one team, one set of equipment, one set of SOPs, and one chain of custody. Every pound that ships out of Grip went through the same hands, the same room, the same humidity curve, and the same trim line. That consistency is not a marketing claim. It is what the dispensary buyer is paying us for.
It also means we get to apply real industrial economics to post-harvest. Three small operations cannot.
Trim throughput. A single trim line running 60 lbs/hr with a specialized crew, dialed equipment, and consolidated QC outperforms 3 separate lines at 25 lbs/hr each. The labor productivity per operator is higher. The equipment cost per lb processed is lower. The variance between batches is tighter.
Drying environment. Engineered humidity and temperature control across a single integrated dry room beats 3 separate barns running on whatever the building geometry happens to allow. Cure is consistent because conditions are consistent.
Packaging line. One SKU management system, one labeling station, one batch coding pipeline, one set of certificates of analysis. The packaging cost per finished unit drops because the line never has to stop and reset for a different facility’s quirks.
Capital efficiency. One $250,000 trim line at 80% utilization beats three $100,000 trim lines at 30% utilization each. Same logic for hang racks, dehumidifiers, vacuum sealers, and label printers. The capital we spend, we use.
Labor concentration. A single skilled post-harvest crew, well paid and trained on one set of equipment, is more productive and more retainable than 3 separate crews of varying experience operating in 3 separate sites. Labor turnover at one facility is a problem we can manage. Labor turnover at 3 facilities is a problem that compounds.
The math at $1,042 a pound
When wholesale flower in Michigan was over $2,200 a pound in 2020, a $50 per lb post-harvest cost was 2.3% of revenue. That is easy money to leave on the table. Most operators did.
When wholesale dropped to $1,042 a pound in 2025, that same $50 per lb post-harvest cost became 4.8% of revenue. The cost did not change. The margin impact doubled.
At consolidated scale, our post-harvest cost lands closer to $25 to $30 per lb. Operators running on-farm dry-trim-pack at split sites are typically at $55 to $75 per lb when honestly accounted.
That delta is the difference between a profitable season and a season that ends with a banker on the phone.
What it would cost us not to do this
Cannabis operators love to count the cost of doing something. They are slower to count the cost of not doing it.
Three on-farm post-harvest sites means 3 quality drift trajectories, 3 sets of equipment to maintain, 3 separate compliance footprints, and 3 separate places where genetics can cross-contaminate if a trim line is not flushed properly between strains. It means dispensary buyers tasting the difference between a Farm 1 batch and a Farm 3 batch of the same strain and asking us why. It means a packaging error at one site that does not get caught until the product is on a shelf.
Worst of all, it means we never get to apply the operational discipline that lets us survive a market that is paying us less for our flower than what it cost us to grow it.
We made the harder choice 5 seasons ago. The math has only gotten more right since then. The operators still shipping flower in 2026 are not the ones who optimized for the easy answer.
Logan Hey is Director of Farming and Dennis Wallace is Director of Operations at Grip Cannabis in Cass County, Michigan. Combined, they are responsible for the production cycle from clone to finished case.