Grading the crop to quality brackets?

BrutusKajautus · Apr 2, 2025

Hi farmers,

As I'm about to chop up my first grow I'm curious about how people grade their crop / buds. I know some people grade the crop in quality brackets A, B and C, where A and B are suitable for commercial purposes where that's legal, and C is repurposed for processing, be it edibles, kief, ice hash, or whatever one prefers. Some people have said that they get about two thirds of A and B grade crop from the top of the cola max, but that depends on the growing conditions ig.

I'd like to start a discussion about this, since I did not find a thread about this with the search function. So I'd like to ask:

Is there a standard way of doing this?
Do you use a grading system and how does it work?
What are your criteria for evaluation and why?
How did you develop your system?

Ofc you don't need to answer all the questions, they're there to get the discussion started. I don't have a system in place since I'm new to this, but hopefully I and many others can learn something new from this discussion.

edit: Maybe this belongs to harvesting and curing subforum, sorry didn't notice there is one before posting this.

Galgrows · Apr 2, 2025

Don't be sorry. I do tend to focus on the upper colas as being A for myself LOL no sharing

The buds on the mid to lower half of the plant i share with friends in need. I do on occasion make butter with the lower tiny buds but when i'm out of my own stuff and like now i just harvested 3 of the 4 autos all the good hard small buds stay with me to smoke. I still got one auto waiting to harvest and one hanging and 2 harvested curing as we speak in quart jars. I just go for quaility hopefully. I don't know if i helped at all with your question.

BrutusKajautus · Apr 2, 2025

Galgrows said:
Don't be sorry. I do tend to focus on the upper colas as being A for myself LOL no sharing
The buds on the mid to lower half of the plant i share with friends in need. I do on occasion make butter with the lower tiny buds but when i'm out of my own stuff and like now i just harvested 3 of the 4 autos all the good hard small buds stay with me to smoke. I still got one auto waiting to harvest and one hanging and 2 harvested curing as we speak in quart jars. I just go for quaility hopefully. I don't know if i helped at all with your question.

Yeah you actually did! It's interesting to read people's experiences and how they do stuff, thanks!

I'd guess most people who do small scale farming do it by the feel that they get from the appearance. It would be interesting to hear if anyone has actually codified the criteria for themselves. That would make it easy for a commercial, large scale grower to track and categorize the quality of the harvest and would help to maintain a consistent quality of product sold. Also that kind of a system could potentially make it faster to grade and sort the harvest, bringing the costs of work down.

I know I'm thinking like an economist here. I'm just interested in making things easy and if there's a shared understanding of these things it's surely easier to talk about this stuff with people then.

Galgrows · Apr 2, 2025

BrutusKajautus said:
Yeah you actually did! It's interesting to read people's experiences and how they do stuff, thanks!

I'd guess most people who do small scale farming do it by the feel that they get from the appearance. It would be interesting to hear if anyone has actually codified the criteria for themselves. That would make it easy for a commercial, large scale grower to track and categorize the quality of the harvest and would help to maintain a consistent quality of product sold. Also that kind of a system could potentially make it faster to grade and sort the harvest, bringing the costs of work down.

I know I'm thinking like an economist here. I'm just interested in making things easy and if there's a shared understanding of these things it's surely easier to talk about this stuff with people then.

Well i bet they do those large scale growers. Sometimes we get them on this forum. Here's what i've seen in the dispensaries here in Oregon. They call it " flower " and sell it by grams to oz. I see $2 grams of tiny lady fingernail size buds and $12 grams of men's thumbnail size buds or larger. Honestly i buy the $2grams 1/2oz when i'm low or out. It's not bad smoking weed just the tiny nuggets that aren't appelling to the higher end buyer. It's most the time really tasty weed they just can't get top dollar for it. And the market here is flooded lots of older harvested weed in storage houses, they can't move it. Honestly legal growers aren't doing well here.

BrutusKajautus · Apr 2, 2025

Galgrows said:
Well i bet they do those large scale growers. Sometimes we get them on this forum. Here's what i've seen in the dispensaries here in Oregon. They call it " flower " and sell it by grams to oz. I see $2 grams of tiny lady fingernail size buds and $12 grams of men's thumbnail size buds or larger. Honestly i buy the $2grams 1/2oz when i'm low or out. It's not bad smoking weed just the tiny nuggets that aren't appelling to the higher end buyer. It's most the time really tasty weed they just can't get top dollar for it. And the market here is flooded lots of older harvested weed in storage houses, they can't move it. Honestly legal growers aren't doing well here.

That's bad. Wonder why there's been such an overproduction of the stuff. The market's gonna fix itself though, but some people have apparently made sub-optimal business decisions there, if it's not some political instability around the issue that has caused that.

I actually got some buds from a friend once, sold it to me with dimes because they didn't think it's the best. Lower buds. But that was good weed. So dunno, maybe the effect and taste can still be nice, it just doesn't look as sexy.

Grading the crop to quality brackets?

Grading the crop to quality brackets?

BrutusKajautus

Galgrows

BrutusKajautus

Galgrows

BrutusKajautus

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