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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

You can get a lot more than $500 off a single plant. Outdoors grown right into the soil, you could get a pound or more off a single humongous plant, and in California with a medical card you can have 12 of these plants growing at once. Even a small indoor tent grown plant is good for like 5-6 oz or more 3-5 months from start to harvest. Genetics are great these days for seeds and clones. Imagine parting that out for $200 oz or better yet the $30 a gram metric the cops use when they weigh their busts.

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You can get $5000 or a lot more for a single bottle (~1 plant) of wine, too. But if you're growing acres of either crop you aren't making those numbers reliably.

Is your bottle of wine ready for market in 6 months or less from when you plant your vineyard? Probably not though. The speed at which you can get these yields is another huge advantage for these crops. Some commercial growers are having new plants grow up to harvest continuously, with separate rooms for vegetative growing, flowering, and even maintaining a genetic library of clones fit for expanding and out planting in your greenhouse. You can also grow this crop anywhere in the world, unlike grapevine.

You have to have 3 rooms, otherwise you're buying clones, which is stupid expensive, when you can just take cuttings and make your own super easy. The two precursor rooms don't require nearly as much space or power though.

You think bulk growers are making significantly more than $500 a lb? $30/g was fictional even before legalization.

I've been out of the game for a little bit, but bulk rates for black market weed was about $1000/lb a few years after legalization in CO.

That jibes with the $500 per plant figure and the other fellow's 'could get 1 lb+ off a single humongous plant' figure, typical yield is closer to 1/2 lb.

these are full time farmers, they aren't sitting around at home with 2 phones waiting for teenagers to pay retail price between fortnite matches. Instead they sold bulk on average for $660 / LB this last year, so ~ $250-330 per outdoor plant. MOST of that average is indoor high grade, so this can be seen as a ceiling on outdoor plant economics.

So your napkin math that "you can get a lot more than $500 off a single plant" appears to overly enthusiastic.

I had a legal grow in Northern California for almost 10 years.

You can get a lot more than $500 per plant, even at $500 per pound.

I've seen guys with 10'x10'x4' raised beds for each plant. They start them indoors or in the greenhouse so they're already several feet tall when they're transplanted outdoors at the beginning of spring. One friend in particular consistently harvested over 5 lbs per plant this way. So did most of his neighbors.

Yeah ten pounders are not that hard to achieve, just veg all winter and plant in a yard of in a huge hole dug by a backhoe. Important too to use strain that rocks up at the end.

If you are still paying $200 (retail) for an OZ you are getting scammed.

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