Welcome back to Office Hours Live! Today, we’re exploring how environmental tweaks can shift your plants’ growth in surprising ways – like how substrate EC levels and CO2 affect crops, or how under canopy lighting can help where you least expect it. We also dig into crop registration and how technology fits into the cultivation puzzle. Whether you’re grappling with ever-changing conditions, mapping out a new facility, or just looking to fine-tune your grow, you’ll find plenty of useful cultivation science here.
Here are some of our favorite quotes from the week:
“If you are going to be spending money, you want to make sure that it really gets you somewhere, because as we've been talking about, the margins are not necessarily there to support wild choices that don't really produce some sort of measurable return on your investment.
“Seth makes a really good point here, which is that a lot of people for a lot of time found out how they could grow better and better quality by manipulating their environment and their irrigation cues up to a certain point. And many people will tell you that they hit a wall where at a certain point their system capacity failed them and they could not grow or scale beyond the system capacity that they had. And, and that comes down to planning and understanding what you want out of a system ahead of time.”
— Cian
“There's still a lot of perceived glamour around this industry, but really commodity prices have hit. Fortunately if you can manage your overhead costs, it's still the highest priced crop we produce in America, so you have room to be successful.
“At this point, it's tough to wade through all the resources that are out there, but there's enough examples of what has worked, what hasn't worked, and even examples of people that grow some phenomenal weed at great yields … but the business made some critical errors on either location, water quality, in overhead costs that prevent the business from performing the way it should.”
— Seth
“The market is being accelerated now. On the west coast, it took a little while to have that rollover from the explosion of available market space – all these producers are trying to fill it with the most amount of bulk product possible. Once we get a few years into it, and market saturation hits, that rollover to quality becomes extremely important.
“On the west coast we're seeing a couple hundred bucks a pound premium on just getting the plant to be purple. And as the market becomes more and more educated, we're seeing that it's not even just purple now, it's terpene profiles. Terpene content.”
— Seth