Is there a downside to turning and rotating plants?

[urbanito]

Not a new grower but new here and I have some questions. Although the light in my grow room is good everywhere it isn't the same everywhere so I have always rotated my plants a quarter turn a day and then every four days moved them one position to the left. Right now I have two rows of three plants so the cycle lasts twenty four days. Each ten gallon air-pot is on casters and uses a peony trellis for a modified SCROG that can roll and rotate. It looks like a two foot diameter green disk with colas sticking up.. My system works well and I get good yields but I'm always trying to learn so from time to time I pore over old threads here and elsewhere. In an old discussion I read last week on an unrelated topic, without going into the details someone said that they had stopped rotating their plants and yields had gone up. That makes no sense to me but more than once something made no sense to me turned out to work. Any opinions on this?

[Toker1]

Hard to say what someone else did... but if they were not utilizing the light spread properly, and were rotating crops (like said above) to make up for some plants being in shady spots... then yes, I could understand the illusion of higher yield if they started utilizing their light spread properly when they decided to stop rotating the plants.

[urbanito]

Yeah, I didn't assume they were right, I just wondered if there might be a factor I hadn't considered. In nature the sun moves across the sky and the angle changes through the season. Hard to see how evolution would have primed cannabis plants to yield more under an unchanging light source.

[Toker1]

Ever seen land race buds? Flimsy and Larfy. I don’t think nature intended to have high yields. Probably more focused on vital seed production instead.

[Grinder]

I rotate my plants similar to you 1/4 turn a day. The only downside I see to it is it's not really replicating natural light. Ideally the plants would rotate completely within the 12 hour light period. That would be a much better simulation of the real sun. By rotating daily some areas are getting 1 days worth of light then the next day possibly less or no direct light.

[Toker1]

What about overcast days? Should you simulate that too?
Let’s be real, when we moved plants out of nature and started genetically modifying them by selectively breeding strains...weed got physically better. Nature is a great teacher, but don’t get too hung up on what it’s doing to obtain the desired results you are going for.