High Grade Weed $68 per 1 Ounce
- Thread starter iPwnNoobs
- Start date
Yeah paying even close to 4400 was definitely your problem. It's all smoke and mirrors and passing hands multiple times with a hefty tax being added at each exchange. The real production costs for even the best stuff are so much lower then that if done right.
I'm like you and wanted to have caps at $45 an 1/8 for even the best stuff and bomb stuff for $200 an ounce. But I found for most people price tells them more about the quality then anything else, which made me very sad. But now I do marketing and make money off that fact and am over it.
Most strains can be epic if grown right. Strain names are much more marketing then anything else. Every strain I grew most people that smoked it agreed it was the best they had ever seen by a fair margin.
You still want to check on each plant daily to make sure nothing is up, but once you have the system balanced you rarely have to do anything besides trim. The system I used(designed from scratch) myself as well as set up for others was almost completely automated from the flowering stage on. Each plant had it's roots in a specially designed 1 gallon container and was completely aeroponic, which was why the container could be so small and still hold a tons of roots, no growth medium. The plants just had to be grown throw mesh nets because no growth medium means they can't stand up past 12 inches.
So you just pick up each plant when it's about 18 inches and done enough vegging and put in the flowering chamber and hook it up to the system. Then all the plants can be flushed and nutrients changed and adjusted with the push of a button by a pump system. For the main strain I grew the system was completely automated for 58 days of flowering, it always made sure the plants had the perfect amount of water and nutrients that I had found worked best for that time in the cycle. With a bunch of pumps, water supply, 5 big tanks of nutrients, a computer and these extra expensive pumps(so the computer can operate them and add X mL of any given nutrient to the mixing chamber to make the new nutrient bath solution every 3 days) everything would just run on it's own with little work. Climate controlled as well, keeping an indoor grow from overheating during the so-cal summer was my biggest obstacle.
My own system was 16 square meters, each square meter was under a 1000 watt lamp and 9 plants. All set up in a 4x4 configuration with enough space to walk through the groups of 9, although trimming the middle plant in any given group of 9 could be a bitch sometimes. I helped set up some other larger ones as well.
Yes I was very lucky in a few ways about the raid/arrest. It happened right after a harvest so I only lost 4 pounds(and equipment worth far more) and no cash and I was dismantling and moving locations so I only had a bunch of vegetative plants at the time. Then I actually have a very real medical condition that sent me to the hospital for 3 weeks a little over a year ago. My lawyer was able to get the case dismissed after that quite easily. The DA realized they couldn't get a conviction from a jury on a 23 year old college grad with an ileostomy that had donated huge amounts to charity.
I think we may just disagree on what defines "big". I wasn't talking about the commercial grows that produce the food we eat, those are just on another level.
Some numbers from my system :
2 month flowering cycle with 144 plants in 16 square meters under 16,000 watts 12 hours a day. Total produced ~18 pounds. ~14k kilowatt hours of energy for the lamps(they use slightly more then 1000 watts) at .24 cent per kilowatt = $3360, addition energy costs for pumps and ventilation were about 6k kilowatt hours for a total energy cost of about ~$5000. Nutrients were very cheap when bought in bulk and are about ~$200 per cycle, uses tons of water but water is cheap ~$150.
So it produced ~18 pounds for ~$6000 in variable costs (not including rent) then after that you have labor. Taking care of the grow took pretty much no time after it was set up, maybe 3-4 hours a week of actual work. The most labor came from trimming the bud after harvest, which is mindless and easy work and you can even buy machines that do it although they create more waste then the labor costs. There are the costs that go with cloning/vegging the plants before flowering but those are tiny comparatively since the lights are so much small so they produce less heat and use less energy.
Perhaps that helps you see a little bit why the actual costs are much lower then you believe. Besides the set up/design most of the labor is easy once you know the right schedule for the strain you have and you keep out bugs/infections.
:rasta: But I can always agree to disagree as well.
I wish dispensaries would be that cheap! It's 300-350 an oz in my area right now, but the black market stuff is almost just as good (sometimes better) and it's 200-260 an oz.
There was some rastas in long beach with a 25 a 1/8th cap.
150 a oz.
Herb was all indoor as well - still amazes me to this day.
150 a oz.
Herb was all indoor as well - still amazes me to this day.
