Croptober & Cannabis: How to Maximize Your Harvest's Value

It doesn’t feel like fall yet in most places but the season's largest annual harvest period is almost here. Colloquially known as Croptober, much of the cannabis grown outdoors and in greenhouses tends to come down right around mid October, which supplies the market across the US and beyond for many months to come. 

With advanced storage techniques and the rise of fresh frozen, this also means that abundant fall cannabis harvests can be properly stored for up to a year or sometimes longer. In this exclusive Lowtemp Industries article, we’ll walk you through what Croptober is, how you can maximize your crop’s total value, and more.

What is Croptober?

“Croptober” is a popular industry term that combines “crop” and “October” for cannabis growers in the northern hemisphere to denote peak outdoor harvest season. It’s the culmination of many months of planting, feeding, and preparatory effort to take tiny cannabis clones or seedlings to large, fully mature plants.

It’s an especially busy time for cannabis growers because the actual harvesting of their gardens (or in some cases, significant field acreage) is extremely labor intensive because of the short amount of time they have to take a live plant and prepare it for drying and curing or extraction purposes. Croptober is also when many growers who operate in the red throughout the middle part of the year finally get into the black financially as their hard work pays off. 

When is Croptober?

Croptober typically starts in mid October and lasts through mid November, which is when mature outdoor cannabis plants are at their most resinous, late flowering stages. Depending on the strains grown, certain sativas especially can go well into late fall before they’re at their peak, but climate and latitude largely dictate how long the growing season goes by location.

The farther north a grow is, the shorter their season is, and the earlier those plants have to come down to avoid freezing. Most growers start planting many months in advance (often as early as April) and have been waiting essentially all year to pull down their largest grow cycle annually. 

When Does Croptober Weed Hit the Shelves?

Although cannabis plants tend to come down in October and November, it still takes another 3-4 weeks in most cases for them to be ready to smoke. Markets are typically flooded with supply heading into December and January, so cultivators need to carefully manage their harvested biomass to ensure they don’t sell it for bottom dollar.

Conversely, this is usually a boon for consumers who can benefit from lower end of year prices given the glut of available cannabis, which is especially noteworthy in places like California, Oregon, and Washington where large outdoor grows are prevalent. Sun grown cannabis can be very high quality when properly cultivated, especially in terroirs along the west coast that enable proper humidity levels, warm days, and cool nights. 

How to Prepare for Croptober

Whether you’re just entering the market for the first time or are a seasoned veteran, there are a handful of key things to keep in mind to prepare for Croptober whether you’re a cultivator, extractor, or both. Check out this handy checklist to make the most of this time of the year.

Cultivator’s Croptober Checklist

• Resources and staffing: your grow is properly for the fire drill of harvest time to cut, big leaf, buck, and process your harvest. This typically means bringing on temp labor to help ensure everything goes smoothly.
• Post-harvest game plan: you have a well defined game plan for what you’ll be doing with your harvested cannabis – is a portion or all of it going to fresh frozen to be made into rosin? Or is it going to be dried and cured? Make sure you have all the equipment in place that you need at least 2 weeks in advance to execute your plan.
• Fresh frozen or dry: if you’re pulling your harvest for fresh frozen, do you have enough freezer space, and enough backup power via generators to ensure it stays cold in the event of a power outage? Losing your crop to a loss of power can be easily mitigated with some planning but disastrous without foresight. 
• Planning for rain: what’s the weather looking like? If heavy moisture is in the forecast around harvest time, it can be intelligent to pull your plants a little early or a tiny bit late depending to avoid any potential mold or mildew related problems. Make sure you have all of your resources lined up to prepare for either scenario.
• Adequate storage: ensure that you have more than enough room to accommodate your crop so drying and curing isn’t an issue, or like we mentioned, if you’re freezing it, do the math on the amount of freezer space required at least a month or two in advance. You can typically rent this kind of equipment to avoid a huge CapEx hit at a bad time (aka right before harvest when funds are low). 

Solventless Manufacturer/Processor’s Croptober Checklist

• Source farms contracted: how much legwork have you done to secure biomass for your lab ahead of time? Harvests tend to be spoken for in advance, and especially if you are trying to get quality material for solventless extraction, lining everything up well ahead of time is advisable. 
• Genetics: many farms will grow specific strains or genetics that do well for live solventless (or even hydrocarbon) applications with enough advanced notice so you know you’ll get biomass that washes well instead of loading up the lab with material you then need to pick and choose from. 
• Pre-harvest checks: chances are you’re relying on certain farms to deliver on the contracts you’ve signed with them, but what happens if they have a pest or other issue late in the game? Make sure you can stop by ahead of time to check on things so there are no surprises and try to find cultivators who are transparent about how the crop is going you’re expecting to process.
• Equipment on hand: you could have all the biomass you ordered and more on hand, but if your equipment isn’t there or you don’t have enough capacity, you’re going to get beat by better prepared competitors. Make sure you have correctly sized hash washing equipment, rosin presses, and concentrate dispensing on lock well before your material shows up. This also tends to be when our lead times are the longest, so don’t wait.

Tips on How to Maximize Your Croptober Harvest’s Value

Simply put, when your business is about to have a large amount of cannabis, you have to triangulate the best way or ways to maximize its value. This doesn’t always mean taking it through the traditional dry and cure route if you’re in a mature market however, but in newer states, it almost always means that. Each market has its own dynamics based on maturity, Croptober biomass availability (or lack thereof), and other factors that you need to consider. For many cultivators these days, taking at least a portion of each Croptober harvest and turning it into live rosin can be a very lucrative way to extend its aggregate value. 

This can be done either with toll processing contracts if you don’t have the equipment, or by getting your own gear to do it yourself and save a boat load on the backend. In fact, there are contract processors that will either come to your lab and run your material so you don’t have to pay that 40-50% fee for having someone else do the work in the event you don’t have an established team in place.

The most important considerations when deciding how to squeeze the most of your Croptober plants are:

1. Will it be more lucrative to turn most or all of it into extracted products? 

2. Do you have everything lined up to extract it, or if you don’t, do you have toll processing options?

3. If you’re drying and curing all of it, do you have enough retail outlets established to ensure your dried flower isn’t degrading while waiting for buyers?

4. If you had problems with your plants or part of your crop, do you have a back up plan to extract it with solvents?

This guide should help you ensure each Croptober goes a little more smoothly in the future, and if you’re planning to turn some of your harvest into live rosin or solventless SKUs, make sure to talk to our experts today to get set up with the best equipment in the game.