If you are a hemp processor or extractor, knowing your potential CBD yield is critical for profitable operations. This article will help you to figure out the potential yield from your hemp biomass and will help you make the best decisions regarding your hemp extraction operation.
Input Your Biomass Quantity and Plant Potency to Calculate Your CBD Yield.
What is Hemp Biomass Yield?
Knowing the yield of CBD isolate, distillate, or crude oil from your hemp biomass is important. This will determine how much you can expect for product development, profits, and whether the hemp farming and hemp extraction journey is worth it or not.
The hemp industry is booming on all fronts with industrial fiber, hemp seed and hemp extraction increasing. According to Hemp Industry Daily, licensed US hemp acreage fell 9% but there was a 27% increase in hemp growers.
Not everyone came out ahead last season. Most of it boiled down to poor planning, extraction contracting issues, there is still plenty of room for growth in the industry.
The Importance of Hemp Biomass Yield
Yield is a unit of measurement for deciding the amount of a crop grown or a product extracted from it. Yield determines return, so it is important to know where you stand on this.
When you know what to expect in terms of hemp biomass yield, this helps you plan your season, plan expenses, give you your potential processing output, and from there, provide CBD production and profits.
There are profit points that keep rising the more it is processed to a refined product. A simple principle is that the more CBD crude oil you get from a given amount of biomass, the better CBD yield you will have.
Refinement Affecting Hemp Extraction Yield
Each time a CBD product is refined, its value increases. Even the act of removing stems and stalks from hemp biomass is a form of refinement.
You are removing less valuable material from the matrix of what is going to be extracted. When you have less valuable input you are using energy, in the form of labor and electricity, to lower your yield and value.
It also has the potential to cause more refinement to be needed further down the extraction process to remove unwanted compounds.
You are lowering the input yield, but the output potency of crude oil will increase and have added value as a final product.
Hemp Compound Value Explained
For hemp extraction, the primary focus is cannabinoids and terpenes. These are the most valuable compounds that come from hemp and are used in CBD products.
Other compounds that are also removed from the plant material include waxes, lipids (fats and hormones), bitter tasting chlorophyll, and many other value decreasing components that will lower the potency of the resulting CBD crude oil and affect the overall value.
So even though we have refined our hemp biomass into CBD rich crude oil, increasing its value, it is still in need of further distillation using a Buchner funnel to remove the unwanted compounds or the DrainDroyd for industrial scale hemp processing.
You are then left with winterized oil. It is a CBD rich oil and ethanol mixture that has filtered using a winterization process to remove the fats and other unwanted impurities that tend to freeze and are not soluble in ethanol.
Through distillation and refinement you make it to CBD distillate and isolate, further increasing the compound value.
Other Factors Affecting Hemp Biomass Yield
In other cases yield can be affected by the equipment you use and the efficiency of the hemp processing method.
CO2 extraction, ethanol extraction, and closed loop hydrocarbon extraction system yields have a range of variables, including the solute power of the extraction solvent and the experience of the extraction machine operator.
Using equipment like the extraktLAB fracTron industrial scale solvent recovery unit, and clearSTILL two-stage wiped film evaporator you simply put in your input and there is little room for error with automated programs and methods, which will minimize and can eliminate user error.
CBD Yield Calculator
The CBD Yield Calculator from extraktLAB is a useful tool for figuring out your total yield of your harvest and process using an E-140 or E-180 supercritical CO2 extractor with a 90%-95% recovery of hemp oils.
You can see how much you would yield in terms of crude oil, winterized crude oil, distillate, and isolate. As explained earlier, knowing what you can expect from your returns can help you make valuable decisions on how you want to process your material.
At extraktLAB, we want to see your hemp extraction business grow – and we want to help you along the way. Use the CBD Yield Calculator below and see what your hemp biomass yield could be with the extraktLAB E-140 and E-180 extractors.
