Beginner’s 101
How is Hemp Harvested?
The journey to creating high quality hemp is filled with many intricate processes, miss one vital step and a whole batch of CBD oil can be ruined.
To ensure the quality and safety of our products remain of a high standard, we control every step of the way before it ends up on your shelf.
In this post, we’ll discuss why harvesting hemp the right way is vital for CBD product safety, and all you need to know about the harvest process.
We’ll guide you through our step by step process, so you can see exactly how it’s done.
- How to grow hemp and harvest it
- How to dry hemp after harvesting
- How hemp extract is made
1 How to harvest hemp
Our process starts with our non genetically modified seeds in one of the world’s largest hemp seed banks. Our breeding program ensures our seeds produce a unique formula that is rich in CBD.
We plant our seeds in clean organic soil in the favorable climate in northern Europe. The soil in this region is fertile and has been prepared for organic crops, every year we process over 100 metric tons of organic hemp.
Hemp is a reasonably easy plant to grow and cultivate so growing hemp is the relatively easy part. All you need is the sun, fertile soil, and water. The quality control aspect of planting and cultivating hemp– now that’s the hard part and maintaining a high quality the whole way through the process.
2 How to dry hemp after harvesting
We harvest our hemp under strict quality control using custom-built farming equipment built by our engineering teams. Combine harvesters are used to harvest the hemp and then it’s loaded on to trolleys that transport it to our dryers.
Here our CEO Henry Vincenty talks us through the hemp drying process, which is a vital stage of maintaining good hemp quality.
Join Henry as he explains how we dry hemp on a large scale and how to avoid big mistakes that could ruin the quality of a whole crop.
After the hemp is harvested it’s a race against time to get the hemp into the dryer. It needs to dry immediately before the quality of the hemp starts to reduce. At this stage of harvesting, a lot of things can go wrong. That’s why we have our dryers onsite next to the fields so it can be dried immediately.
It’s important to be well prepared when working with nature – you always have to be ready for the unexpected as you never know what could happen, having back up machinery is imperative to save your crop if something goes awry.
3 How to stop hemp spoiling after harvest
When hemp is harvested it holds a lot of moisture, so getting it to the dryer as quickly as possible is important to make sure it does start to spoil and grow mold.
To prevent this, we have developed dryer trolleys that blow air directly underneath the harvested hemp, to push air into it while it’s fresh from the field.
If at any point before the hemp makes it to our main dryers something goes wrong, we have developed these dryer trolleys to have on standby to keep the hemp ventilated and to start the drying process.
They aren’t as effective as the larger dryer, but it starts the drying process before the hemp ready to go into the main dryer. This keeps the crop ventilated at all times.
It’s a 3 step process of drying hemp once it comes from the field, with constant ventilation and hot air. Every step is electronically controlled so we can adjust our process depending on the environment. We keep the temperature between 40-60 degrees celsius – nothing higher otherwise it changes the quality of the hemp.
4 How hemp extract is made
After the hemp is dried it is bagged up, it’s transported to the next facility. We have a strict quality control program where we test everything at every stage of the production process. From the fields right up until we package the oil. We monitor the process at all times to make sure there are no contaminants in our products.
Testing the raw hemp at this stage is also important; we monitor the temperature before it’s exported to be made into pellets. Once the pellets have been made we take samples that are sent off for further testing.
We use cutting edge CO2 technology, processed by the air you breathe to create the highest quality CBD oil. Our extracts contain high concentrations of CBD and we follow strict quality assurance guidelines to ensure your safety and standardized products.
The extraction process uses low temperatures to keep the integrity of the plant and maintain a full spectrum of cannabinoids – which can convert if temperatures are not stabilized properly.
Pure Co2 is pumped through the raw plant material at high speed creating intense pressure (200 bars) that forces the plant to be made into a thick golden paste – a similar consistency to butter.
This is a highly controlled operation that requires state of the art machinery. After the CO2 has evaporated when the hemp is removed from the machine, all that remains is a clean and pure extract, with no solvents residues.
5 Hemp quality control
Our production practices fall under the Good Manufacturing Practice guidelines (GMP). This certification means our practices are in line with pharmaceutical standards which is one of the highest levels of quality control. But just to make sure, we also send our extracts off to a 3rd party lab to test it again for your safety.
Why do we have a third party test? This is important as hemp can be exposed to external factors such as pesticide cross-contamination and other factors while being transported. Even though our hemp is organic, we need to check it hasn’t been compromised at any stage of the process. We make sure that every bottle we send out of our factories has been tested at every stage.
If you would like to know more about our extraction process you also might like to read our post on supercritical CO2 extraction.