What better way to get a taste of the Oklahoma cannabis industry than to take a tour of an indoor cultivation. Smokey Okie’s Cannabis, based in Spencer, is a family-owned cannabis wholesaler operating a 17,500 sq. ft. indoor cultivation. Recently, the company has shared a video tour of their cultivation. Together with them, there’s one of their clients: as the grower explains, they always invite their customers to see how their products are developed. Greg Milton, one of the owners of a dispensary, indeed commented that “from a point of simplicity and operational efficiency, this cultivation is top-notch.”
Setting up a perpetual harvest
The tour started with a visit to Room D, which was just being flipped: this means that new plants were just introduced in the room. Soon, those plants would receive some defoliation, after the post-veg stretch.
A crucial aspect of the operation is the harvest schedule. As the grower explains, Smokey Okie’s is a perpetual harvest operation, which means that the company is constantly putting out flowers. To do that, you can see the harvest manager showing customers the harvest schedule. This is a critical instrument as the company needs to carefully plan the timing for every batch well in advance.
They further explain that when it comes to harvesting, they start from one side of the room to then proceed to the other. Indeed, they show that one side has smaller, younger plants, which will of course be harvested later on.
Harvest department
After the grow room, the tour continues in the harvest department. This is the place where the grower dries all the product, and the crew takes care of the trimming. They explain that they do hand-trimming, yet they do utilize a machine to get rid of the bigger parts. Smokey Okie’s does hand-trimming because they explain that there’s no machine in the market that would do 100% of the work for you.
Then, we get to the actual drying room, where whole plants are hang-dried for two weeks. As the harvest manager pointed out, it is of the utmost importance to control the conditions of the room to ensure a thorough and proper drying. That’s also why plants are spread out so that each has its own space to balance it out – they indeed point out how they don’t even make use of the entirety of the space because of that.
Curing
Once that has been cleared, it’s time to get into the curing room, where the trimmed flowers are stored for the last phase of production. The harvest manager takes out sealed containers to show the product, inside of which can be seen something on top of the flowers. He explains that with that product they make sure that the humidity during the process stays consistent to preserve terpenes. “We do everything we can to keep every drop of terpenes in here,” he says. “If the humidity goes under 55%, you damage terpenes and once they are gone, they are gone.”
