The last thing I want to do is remove healthy plant tissue and force the plant to regrow it. That's a net loss to the plant. Does it regrow? Sure - the plant needs those leaves to survive but I've never seen any data that it increases yield or improves crop quality (the ratio of flower to above ground mass).
And removing leaves from the canopy "to expose bud sites" means that you're exposing leaves below the canopy, which are less photosynthetically efficient than the leaves that make up that canopy and those leaves are getting a significantly lower amount of light than the leaves that make up the canopy.
Grab a PAR meter and check out the PPFD readings inside the canopy of a plant. Light falloff from an LED is
very rapid. Check out a PPFD map for 18" and then one for 12". There's a delta of, what, 300µmol? That's not too awful is you're running 1k at the canopy but how many growers are running their lights at anywhere near that?
Another interesting metric - for every 50µmol increase in average PPFD, crop yield increases by about 4% (see attached). Conversely, for every 50 µmol drop in PPFD, yield drops about 4%. Again, if you're at 1k, cannabis yields a shitton but the average grower is running…700µmol, maybe 800. SO when you drop from 800 at the canopy to 500 by at canopy -6", you get to the point where it may not be that great an idea.
The biggest issue, of course, is "show me". Do a test with clones, document methods, equipment, and results and publish it so it can be reproduced. If anyone has done that, that would be great but I haven't seen anything to support the idea that heavy pruning is a valid means of increasing crop yield.
And the irony (to me) is that growers will go to such lengths but they won't spend $32 to buy a light meter and get lots of light on their plants, a practice that has been repeatedly shown to directly improve plant morphology, crop yield, and crop quality.
Not that I have an opinion on this, of course.
