Harvest time, the culmination of weeks of hard work to create those beautiful buds for our customers to enjoy. A time filled with expectation for our room yield, the good kind of tired you feel after a job well done, and before Entrinsia…..dread…..The kind of dread that keeps you up at night, thinking about all the records that have to be entered into METRC. The amount of information needed per plant and the amount of time it will take to enter data on 1,000+ plants
I don’t know about the rest of you, but data entry is not my cup of tea. Therefore, harvests can be high stress times. Along with the work required to cut down a room, set everything to dry, and prep for the next batch of plants, each harvest cycle included dedicated days to working in the METRC site to update everything. This is where Entrinsia Cortex streamlines operations in the pre, during, and post harvest phases.
Pre Harvest
They say preparation is half the battle and it definitely applies to having a smooth harvest. The Entrinsia app is more than just a collection of data. It is a constantly evolving system that learns about your operation with each action so that it can provide better assistance. Let’s take a look at scheduling a harvest and the multiple factors involved. Some of the things to consider are
- Optimal day to cut down the plant at their peak
- Size of the room and how many team members are needed to bring it down in a single day
- Are there any incoming transfers, sales orders or other activities that can impact the harvest
Entrinsia Cortex does more than just monitor grow activities. Its live connection to METRC allows the system to know about all incoming transfers as soon as your suppliers register them to the state. In addition, its view into sales orders, packaging tasks and day to day employee tasks allows Cortex to create a 360 view of each day of operation and helps you juggle all of the moving pieces. When it comes to scheduling a harvest, Cortex combines both historical data from past harvests as well as scheduled facility activities to predict the harvest yield on different days. A week before harvest, Cortex provides alerts with possible harvest days, wet yield for each day, and staffing requirements for each harvest day candidate. Then as the facility manager, you can use the suggestions from Cortex to schedule the actual harvest on the day that best works for your team.
The final pre-harvest task is to weigh all of the totes to be used in moving plant material into the system. This allows the Cortex phone app to accurately bulk weigh your plant material and is used to provide you with tracking information as the material moves around the facility.
During the Harvest
The biggest change factor to a harvest day operation is the Cortex mobile app. This free app, part of the Entrinsia cultivator toolkit, can be installed on the phones of each of your team members. With the app installed, when everybody shows up to work, the app tells them their assignment for the day, eliminating confusion and pre-harvest meetings……your team can just go.
Starting at the canopy room, each member of the team responsible for cutting down plants grabs a tote. At each tray, the employee scans in the tote, the tray, and enters the number of plants being cut. This provides a record of who brought down each plant. Once the plants are cut and the tote is full, it is weighed before leaving the canopy room for the drying room. Each scale in a facility integrates with the Cortex app using WiFi, which eliminates the need to pair a scale with a phone and allows all employees to share all scales without any slowdown in activity.
At the drying room, the tote is weighed again using the app and connected scales. Besides checking in the tote to the drying area, this second weight provides a quick way to detect that no plant material was dropped between rooms and sets the stage for weighing individual plants for compliance purposes. While this process can seem daunting, Entrinsia Cortex makes it easy with connected scales. Place a plant in either a hook or a pre-weighed tray and place on the scale. Then scan the plant tag and the app automatically records the weight of the plant. This process only takes seconds per plant and can be seamlessly incorporated into your workflow of taking plants from a tote and hanging them to dry.
Post Harvest
At the end of a harvest, there are a couple of automatic housekeeping activities that the app takes care of for you. First is verifying the integrity of the harvest data and flagging any potential issues such as missing tags and unexpectedly light totes. Once these issues are resolved by the harvest manager, the system generates a detailed report of the harvest and also automatically uploads data to METRC. The time spent on METRC for a harvest literally goes down from hours and days to zero
Now while team members are working through a harvest, there is no need to wait till the end to find out what is going on. The Cortex administrative console provides you with a real-time view of everything happening with a harvest. This console can be viewed on any device and selected data and dashboards from the console can be displayed on TV’s to keep everyone motivated and on the same page.
If harvests are causing you stress and headaches in juggling all of the moving pieces, why not take a page out of the playbook at Proper Herb Co and see for yourself how Entrinsia can streamline your operation.
Recent Comments