For decades, cannabis cultivators harvested their crop by hand, wielding garden shears in garages, farming under the cover of forests.

Before California legalized marijuana, growers often watered their gardens one plant at a time and trimmed their buds with scissors. And some of the companies trying to get a license in the state’s newly-regulated market still do.

But as cannabis becomes a commodity, the old ways are changing.

On a recent Friday morning, Simon Watson, the director of operations at the cannabis company VetsLeaf, donned a white lab coat, a baseball cap and the kind of black disposable gloves you might expect to see on a medical technician. At the company’s facility in Desert Hot Springs, a community of 28,000 just north of Palm Springs in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, twangy bluegrass music played in the background, while Watson dumped plastic bags full of untrimmed marijuana buds into a whirring, cylindrical machine called a Triminator.

Inside the cylinder, a metal drum spun like the inside of a washing machine, trimming leaves off each bud as they tumbled.

Watson finds that the machine can trim as much weed in fifteen minutes as a person would in two to three eight-hour days of work.

“I’m able to take about three pounds — two, three pounds, roughly — and I’m able to trim it out in this machine in 15 minutes,” Watson said. “We’re able to be a little bit more economical with our time.”

As more states and countries move to regulate cannabis, weed-specific hardware abounds. The Mother Bucker munches cannabis flowers from their stems. The Twister Trimmer spins lush bunches of marijuana into smaller, rounded buds. Besides the dry trimmer VetsLeaf uses, the brand Triminator makes a device that looks like a high-octane waffle maker and squeezes syrupy rosin out of buds.

Proponents of technology like this say it’s necessary to stay competitive. They predict that as more legal markets for the drug mature, cannabis wholesale prices will plummet. Using machines, they hope, will bring down their costs and increase their profits.

But not everyone is on board. One grower interviewed for this story said the adoption of machines like harvesters and trimmers is likely lower in the cannabis business than in analogous horticultural industries, in part because of the perception that machines will blemish delicate buds.

Lise Bernard, the sales director at GreenBroz, another company that makes trimmers, extractors and sorters for the pot business, said some of the company’s customers are “super-secretive” about the fact that they’re using machines at all, fearing customers will think they’re skimping on quality.

Because of the gray market, the goal used to be “to get the product out of the grower as quickly as possible,” Bernard said. GreenBroz has a different objective. “When we designed our trimmers, the goal was, ‘Can we create a machine that replicates hand trim?’”

There’s no way to know how many growers have started mechanizing and automating their farms. Brent Burman, vice president of the Coachella Valley Cannabis Alliance Network, said he still sees cultivators using equipment they bought at a hydroponics store to run multi-million dollar farms.

“They’re coming into this commercial arena, still, with this hobbyist mentality,” he said.

Sandra Silva-Tello, Tony Rivera and three others — four of the five are Marine Corps veterans who trained nearby in Twentynine Palms — started VetsLeaf in 2016. From the start, the five decided they would share a portion of the proceeds of their cannabis business with organizations that provide services to veterans like them.

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VetsLeaf is not completely mechanized. Some employees trim buds or label packages by hand, sitting together at desks in a small room.

But machines save the business a lot of time. Besides the Triminator, VetsLeaf uses a $4,000 machine that sifts dry cannabis into 300 pre-rolled joints at once. In a room resembling a commercial kitchen, the company uses a heated press to squeeze rosin out of cannabis as well as cooking equipment like a Vitamix blender and a KitchenAid mixer to make edibles. Where possible, Silva-Tello said, VetsLeaf buys the kind of consumer electronics available to home chefs, rather than specialized machinery for cannabis businesses, which can sell at a considerable markup.

The Triminator, though, gets a room to itself. Depending on the size and model, Triminator sells trimmers for between $2,800 and $16,500, according to its website. Watson said VetsLeaf’s machine cost the company about $6,200.

“It’s about what you would pay somebody for a month of trimming,” he said, and a huge time saver for trimming small buds, which can be “an endless task.”

More machines doesn’t necessarily mean less labor.

Burman predicts that workers trained to use specialized machinery in the cannabis industry will earn higher wages. Meanwhile, even if some growers need fewer people to work on their farms, he said the demand for products like vape pens, topicals and edibles could fuel manufacturing jobs downstream from the farms.

“We’re going to need more bodies as the industry grows,” he said.

Then again, some cannabis companies might choose to do things by hand. If the cannabis industry begins to looks more like the wine or beer business — where smaller, craft vineyards and breweries coexist with multinational behemoths — Burman said some growers will promote hand-harvested buds as a luxury product. Others, aiming for mass production and mainstream appeal, will turn to machines to churn out the volume they need.

“There’s thousand dollar bottles of wine,” he said, “and there’s ‘Two Buck Chuck.’”

In the California cannabis industry, small growers like VetsLeaf face competitors whose farms may span tens of thousands of square feet.

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Robby Flannery, founder of Dr. Robb Farms in Desert Hot Springs, sees technology like basic irrigation and fertilizer systems as a way smaller growers will be able to stay in the game by growing more efficiently.

“I’m really motivated to help mom and pop farmers be successful,” said Flannery, who has a doctorate in plant biology from the University of California, Davis.

But he said cannabis farmers are more attached to manual processes than mature industries like flower growers.

“I’m telling you right now there’s no other horticultural or agricultural industry outside of cannabis that’s doing hand watering,” Flannery said.

For now, nearly two-thirds of VetsLeaf business is manufacturing and distributing cannabis products for other growers, Silva-Tello said, not growing its own cannabis. She said the co-packing portion of the startup — the packaging, labeling and distributing services VetsLeaf does for other companies — will grow to 80 percent of operations in 2019.

And as the co-packing business grows, the next harvest from VetsLeaf’s 10,000-square-foot greenhouse will be its last. The greenhouse is too hot in the summer and it would be expensive to pay taxes on the crop or add air-conditioning to control temperatures. The company plans to use the space for manufacturing and distribution instead.

“We’re going to call it at that and we’ll be done,” Watson said. “Some of the facilities I go pick up product from, for other vendors (are) massive, massive greenhouse complexes and massive outdoor farms. We’re just little desert dwellers.”

Amy DiPierro covers business news at The Desert Sun. Reach her at amy.dipierro@desertsun.com or 760-218-2359. Follow her on Twitter @amydipierro.