What you measure, you manage.
Not everything is quantifiable (has a number, a metric, a unit).
Having fun, for example, can be hard to measure.
But costs are one thing that growers and consumers often overlook.
For example, if you spend $150/week on weed, you spend ~$7k/year.
(And you could be saving $6k of that by growing your own.)
So, every once in a while, it's important to get your bearings by checking in on your efforts:
How they're going?
What results are you seeing?
What's it cost to get those results?
As a hobby grower, you're not out selling 100s of pounds of weed, so it may seem irrelevant to dig deep into something like cost per gram, but knowing gives us one more data point, one more baseline to use to learn and improve.
And, if you’re comparing methods—like an amended soil raised bed vs. a jug-fed container-style setup—it’s one more data point to help make decisions in the grow.
So, how do the costs of my most recent experiment in a raised bed compare to my trusted process with New Millenium in individual Smart Pots? Let’s find out.
—
5-Steps To Calculating Costs Per Unit
Pick comparable cycles
Calculate Total Inputs
Calculate Total Input Costs
Gather Post-Harvest Yield Data
Calculate Cost-Per-Unit
The Results:
Flower (Oz): Soil ~$5 cheaper on 1st run vs bottles; almost half on successive runs
Rosin (Gram): Containers with jugs was cheaper by ~3x (more on that in #5)
Let's dive in...
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