Every cultivator has a gut feeling about their highest-yielding strains. But feelings don’t always translate to profit. To make smart business decisions, you need hard numbers.
The challenge is that a true apples-to-apples comparison is difficult. Different strains have different cycle times and plant counts. Your METRC data holds all the answers, but getting them requires some work.
Here’s a simple guide on how to calculate cannabis yield from METRC data to find your most profitable strains.
Step 1: Get Your Harvest Data
First, you need a complete history of your finished harvests. From your METRC account, you can export your “Inactive Harvests” to a CSV file. You will need the Strain Name and the Total Weight for each harvest.
Step 2: Find Your Cycle Times
This is the tricky part. For each harvest, you need its flowering cycle time. This often requires cross-referencing your harvest file with your “Inactive Plants” export to find the original date a batch was moved into the flowering phase. This is a common task for any cultivator using METRC.
Step 3: Do the Basic Math
Once you have your data in a spreadsheet, you can find your most efficient strains. Instead of just looking at total weight, a much better metric is grams per plant per day of flowering.
For each harvest, the formula is:
(Total Harvest Weight in Grams) / (Number of Plants in that Harvest) / (Number of Days in Flower)
This calculation gives you a true performance indicator. You might find that a strain with a lower total weight is actually more profitable because its faster cycle time lets you fit an extra crop in per year. This kind of analysis is the first step toward accurate cannabis yield forecasting.
The Challenge (and the Solution)
Doing this analysis manually is a major hassle. You have to export multiple files, ensure all your weights are converted to the same unit, hunt down cycle times, and build complex spreadsheets.
The Mello Pocket Advisor is designed to be the simple METRC data tool that handles this for you. It connects directly to the METRC API, pulls your harvest and plant history automatically, and does the calculations for you. No spreadsheets, no manual lookups. You get the hard numbers without the hard work. It’s the kind of insight that modern cannabis cultivation software should provide.
See how Mello works and sign up for early access to get real insights from your data.