A cannabis plant touches Metrc at least twice before it's ever harvested: once as part of an immature lot, and once as an individually tagged plant. Everything that happens between those two points, and after, has a specific recording requirement, and most of the mistakes cultivators make in Metrc happen in this section, not in transfers or sales.
The Immature Lot
A single plant tag covers an entire immature lot of up to 100 seeds or clones. That doesn't mean the individual plants go untracked, it means you're responsible for labeling them yourself. Metrc doesn't ship individual immature plant labels; you produce those, and affix the lot's UID to each container, or the plant itself, in a way that makes it possible to identify which plant belongs to which lot. If a plant in that lot dies before flowering, you record the waste and reduce the lot's plant count. The lot doesn't just quietly shrink, it has to shrink on paper too.
Going Individual
Once a plant moves into designated canopy space or begins flowering, it gets its own individual plant tag, attached to the main stem at the base with a tamper-resistant strap or zip tie. In Metrc, this transition is recorded through the Change Growth Phase action, which retires the lot-level tracking for that plant and assigns the new individual tag.
Waste Has a Clock on It
Plant waste has to be recorded within three business days of destruction, whether it's immature plant material, flowering plant material, or waste tied to a specific location. If a plant is no longer viable, the waste record has to be entered before the destruction itself is logged, not after. Waste from multiple flowering plants can be recorded as a single event, but every contributing plant still has to be individually identified in that record.
Every waste entry needs a reason from a fixed state list, plus a waste method (Compost, Self-Hauler, or Waste-Hauler) and a note on anything the waste was mixed with before disposal.
| Waste Reason | When It Applies |
|---|---|
| Contamination | Degradation by environmental elements: pests, filth or foreign material, mildew |
| Damage | Physical damage to the plant |
| Failure to Thrive | Failure to grow or develop vigorously |
| Male Plants | The plant is male |
| Mandated Destruction | Destroyed as a result of a state or local authority mandated or supervised process |
| Mold | Plant must be destroyed due to mold |
| Pesticides | Improper usage or application of pesticides on the plant |
| Pruning | Byproduct produced during routine pruning |
The Harvest Sequence
Name
Every harvest needs a unique, strain-specific name. Not required by the state, but naming it with strain and harvest date saves you from guessing later.
Weight
Weighed whole, right after being cut from the root ball, stems, flower, leaves, and trim included. The state doesn't require the stalk in that wet weight, but leaving it out means following organic waste rules for whatever wasn't weighed in.
Waste
Same three-business-day rule applies here as anywhere else in the plant life cycle.
Package
Product from the harvest batch gets packaged and tagged as Fresh Cannabis Plant, Flower, Leaf, Kief, or Seeds, strain-specific, pulled from the Harvested tab using plants harvested at the same time.
Transfer
Moving the packaged product to a Processor, Distributor, or Manufacturer requires its own transfer manifest.
Finish
Once everything from the harvest batch is packaged, whatever wet weight is left over gets attributed to moisture loss when you close it out with Finish Harvest.
If you're trimming a flowering plant with the intent to sell or process what's removed, or performing a partial harvest, that trimming has to be recorded as its own manicure batch. It's a separate action from a full harvest, and skipping it is one of the more common ways cultivators end up with inventory in Metrc that doesn't match what's actually on the shelf.
Adjusting Plant Batches
A handful of situations come up often enough to have dedicated tools. If part of an immature lot needs different lighting or was mislabeled with the wrong strain, Split Plantings breaks off a new batch, inheriting whether it's seed or clone from the original. If a physical tag gets damaged, Replace Tags swaps in a new one, though this is rare since the RFID tags are built to hold up. Strain corrections and location moves each have their own action too, separate from splitting.
Packages of immature plants or clones can also be created directly from a plant batch or a mother plant, whether that mother is still tracked as immature or has moved into flowering. When packaging clones from a mother plant, marking the "package from mother plant" option keeps the source plant's count intact, since the mother isn't being consumed the way a normal immature plant would be.
The Tag Doesn't Come Back
Plant tags are used once. A tag that gets detached, because the plant died, got replaced, or was reclassified, doesn't return to your available inventory. Once you understand that, the earlier advice about ordering tags makes more sense: undercounting mid-cycle means a shipping delay standing between you and your next legal planting.