Growing For Hash: Episode #2 with Humboldt Kine Farms

That's right we're back with another episode and more flavors and features to show off. Take a brief tour around the home gardens and facilities as Eric dives into the details and shares some insights in the building and maintaining of a wholesale hash farm. Responses are largely provoked from my inquiries and questions, leaving Eric to do the talking and the explaining as we navigate around the farm.

A key element many miss, is that while hash has been around for millennia, fresh frozen harvests and six star hash and live rosin are still brand new concepts and products. At best, we have 5-10 years worth of experience growing cannabis and specific cannabis strains intentionally for their ability to produce or rather, yield significant numbers in hash. The fresh frozen harvest on even a smaller scale commercial farm, is still far beyond the numbers ever attempted before. All of the early hash makers were growing and washing strains intended for hash indoors. It wasn't until around 2018-2019 that Humboldt County farmers dove in and began fresh frozen harvests. Actually, fresh-frozen harvests began in 2015-2016 for BHO extracts using butane, but the real switch over occurred in the following years. Most failed. Many went under, but the lucky farms who hit the nail on the head, proved mixed light cannabis or sun grown cannabis that uses light deprivation, provides some of the highest quality hash and rosin around.

Therefore, we have just beyond five years of experience in outdoor growing of strains intended for hash and a long list of questions remain. Questions such as the length of time it takes from the chop until the plant is put in the freezer. Mere minutes could in theory, lead to drastically varied yield totals. Considering the fact that a "dumper strain" only produces around 6-7% of it's total weight into usable and sell-able high grade hash, the dynamics are anything but set in stone. And while many farmers have their personal SOP, standard operating procedures, with what they think works best or has proven to work for them, research and development on this scale is something to ponder. We certainly do not have the numbers and evidence to say this is the way to do it, needing a significant amount of research and testing to truly distinguish the best methods. And to complicate things further, the best method or timing at one location for one cultivar may only apply to that cultivar and or to that terroir, aka location.

Other things to consider are the day of harvest, the hour of harvest, the time it takes from harvest until the material is lightly trimmed and placed into refrigeration, the temperature of your refrigeration, and even how long it takes from the time you place the cannabis into the freezer until the time the material actually freezes. All of these variables present a long list of difficulties as well as things to consider when growing for hash.

Having won numerous Emerald Cups, Humboldt Kine Farms has found what works and is happy to share some insight of the home farm for the betterment of cannabis everywhere. Shared knowledge was necessary to get us this far, despite the tendency to keep new tech a secret. With some shared info and insight becoming more common and more prevalent as a way to distinguish your farm and provoke sales, the entire industry has begun to shift in the direction of higher quality cannabis everywhere. Lets keep sharing the info and helping one another to elevate the culture, community, and the cannabis plant we love so much.

*Looking to learn the basics? As a consumer or someone considering hash making there's truly only one place to turn: "The Hashish Manifesto: Understanding Retail Cannabis Through The Art of Hashish" available on Amazon.

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