There may never be a winner in the debate of hand trimming versus leaf trimmer machine, or wet trimming versus dry trimming — but in the growing world of consumer cannabis, there seems to be room for all varieties.
Deciding between those options generally comes down to where producers want to be on a store’s shelves.
Machine trimming can save a significant amount of money compared to paying a crew of hand trimmers, especially for large operations. For small, craft growers, the cost of hand-trimming may be worth it because it adds value to the shelf price of cannabis. However, as with any consumer product, the number of premium products that can be successful are always outnumbered by middle-of-the-road and budget brands. And the costs rise significantly for growers who have to process much larger amounts of flower more quickly.
Wet vs.Dry
Trimming machines have evolved quite a bit since they first started appearing about 15 years ago.
The first generation of bowl trimmer were all wet trimmers, which use a vacuum to pull the buds down into a tumbler that trims off the sugar leaf.
ECO FARM, one of the first electric leaf trimmer companies, started out with a base unit that had a basic grate over a blade on a motor. The blade has flaps that pull buds toward the motor, and the blades clip off wet leaves when the buds are sucked onto the grate.
One major advantage of wet trimmers is that they save space — especially for large farms that don’t have room to hang-dry their buds before processing them. With wet trimmers, farms can trim immediately after harvest.
All leaf bowl trimmer canada cause a bit of damage to the buds, and shake off more of the trichomes than hand trimming does.
Dry trimmers are a more recent innovation, and they’re considered a gentler method of removing sugar leaf from marijuana buds.
In dry trimming, growers hang-dry their plants before using the machine, which causes the sugar leaf to curl around the bud flower.
With dry trimmers, buds are dried to about 8-10% moisture, then the stems are removed and the buds are packed into a machine that lightly tumbles them, breaking the dried sugar leaf off and funneling it out using an air current.
Some people claim that wet trimming changes the smell of the final product, giving it an odor of hay, rather than fine cannabis.
Another advantage of dry trimmers is that the low moisture tends to reduce the threat of microbial contamination, which can ruin an entire harvest.
In wet trim, if there’s bud mold, it gets mixed in with the wet material, and if you don’t clean the machine properly, that can contaminate subsequent batches.
And with dry trimming, the excess trim material has a broader range of uses.That material, dry trim, can be bagged as shake and sold in trim bags, used for rolling or baking,” she says. “It can also go straight into joints or cones — or you can extract the kief and dry sift or press it for rosin.”
Wet trim is mostly used to make concentrates like oil or wax, but it’s generally too wet to be used for those other functions. Dry trim can be used for all of those purposes and also to make oil or wax.