So, "what's been happening on the farm the last few weeks?", you ask. Well, it's flower time! My favorite, but also one of the most stressful times of the year. All of our strains are in bloom throughout the field. Observing the plants with their flowers in various stages of maturity each with their own unique visual appearance and smell is breathtaking each year. We have multiple samples to send out this month as part of the Cultivar Check program for testing strain performance for the Midwest. Our farm is running 10 strains from 6 different cultivators across 4 west coast states. Pre-harvest samples of our early strains are complete and our late harvest strains are set for sampling in mid September.
It is easy to see why this is our favorite time of the year, but how is it also one of the most stressful times? Farmers spend most of the year preparing for harvest in the fall, and when that end is so close the risk of failure seems that much greater. We still have another month of tornado season in the Midwest. Will that last storm wipe out all of our hard work? Hemp has to maintain THC potency of 0.3% to remain compliant. Did we schedule this accordingly, or will our strains run hot? Last year Federal changes were made to the sampling procedure and our state lacked the infrastructure to implement testing in time. This resulted in the destruction of half of our harvest. Cold rainy weather will start to set in at the end of September and beginning of October. Will our late harvest strains reach full maturity with our shorter flowering season? Will the environmental conditions cause botrytis (bud rot) to set in? Then there are pests. They can be damaging in the vegetative stage and are even more so in the flowering stage.
How have we been fairing this season? We have lost less than 12% of the crop thus far from transplant stress, and storms. Not terrible. We thought we had made it through the worst pest threat since we did not have issues with hemp boring larvae this August. However, then the caterpillars pictured above attacked. Were we not thorough in the application and frequency of our biological treatments? Have these pests become tolerant to the type of biological we utilize? We don't know for certain. Moving forward we will continue treatments, mitigate the threat in the affected plants by hand, and hope the losses are minimal.
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