Cian [00:00:03]:
What's up, Gromies? Welcome to AROYA Office Hours, episode 130. I'm joined by our resident cultivation experts, Seth and Jason, who will be up on screen in just a moment. Big shout outs to our live viewers on YouTube and Instagram today. Please let us know in the comments where you guys are watching from today. And don't forget to smash that, like, button and tell your friends about office hours live. And please leave a review to help our podcast thrive. We make a lot of our headway in this podcast based on reviews and how much viewership we get, so we really appreciate it. Guys.

Cian [00:00:37]:
You guys ready today? How's it, how's it going?

Jason [00:00:40]:
Ready as we're gonna be.

Seth [00:00:41]:
Yeah, let's. Let's jump right in, dude.

Cian [00:00:44]:
All right, sounds good. Well, I guess we'll start out with our first live question coming in from Vanxiety today. Does higher PPFD slash DLI require higher ec? I've seen conflicting information on this. I've heard lower light can need higher ec. Help me learn the truth. Love you guys.

Seth [00:01:04]:
I mean, I think the best place to start is like, what. Look at what nutrition does for your plants. So when we're feeding the plants a specific ec, we're offering it higher, lower levels of nutrition and we crank the PPFD up. We're driving all of the building block processes in that plant harder and harder and harder. We're putting more energy in, allowing more photosynthetic synthesis to occur and driving growth faster. So generally that's where we do see needing higher EC becoming more and more important. And typically, some of the symptoms we'll see, you know, at base level is light yellowing, not having enough nitrogen to keep up with growth. At a more extreme level, especially mid flower, even later, we'll see bleaching on the very tips.

Seth [00:01:47]:
And by bleaching, not so much heat stress parts of the plant, but literally growth that has no chlorophyll in it. And typically that's the plant not keeping up with, with the nutritional. Well, we're not keeping up with the plant's nutritional needs to build that healthy tissue.

Jason [00:02:03]:
Yeah, I'm gonna make this question a little more complicated. Unfortunately for.

Seth [00:02:07]:
Let's do it.

Jason [00:02:07]:
The answer, you know, when we, when we break it down to some of the scientific principles, when we have a plant that is used to a specific metabolic rate, it's used to a specific nutrient uptake, and we reduce the amount of light that is exposed to it, let's say working in a greenhouse and we have a Shady day. Ideally, yeah, we'll actually up the nutrient load because when we think about how is this plant pulling nutrients from the substrate, it's pulling it in a solution of water. And when a plant has high transpiration rates, let's say it's exposed to high levels of light, then it is actually, you know, transpiring more. And so we're pulling a more amount of total nutrition through that plant. Now, if this plant is used to processing that nutrition level and we decrease its amount of light, it's actually gonna transpire less. We kind of still want to supply the same amount of nutrition level to it at that point. And so ideally, our nutrition concentration has to go up in order for it to have more or have the same amount of nutrients at a lower transpiration rate. So there's really two prongs to that question.

Jason [00:03:18]:
Both of them are right. Seth's answers 100% correct. When we're running a. A highly proficient plant, a plant that is hungry and it's, you know, running near optimum, we need those higher nutrient levels. When we also, you know, have an area that may cause that plant to transpire less, yet still require those same nutrient demands, then we also need to. To run that a little bit higher in the ec.

Seth [00:03:43]:
And I think where this hits the ground for most, cultivate, most cultivators is this is part of the reason why we typically run, and not just us at AROYA, but in the industry, you know, a 2.8 to 3.0 to 3.5 base feed has kind of been set as the standard, because in hydroponic growing, our goal is to create an environment in the substrate where the plant has easy access to everything it needs. And we're also recognizing that the plant's only going to pull out what it needs for the most part. There are a few things that preferentially get pulled out or pushed into the plant, if you want to think about it that way. But for the most part, we're trying to curate an environment like in Jason's example with the greenhouse. Are there situations where the plant may need more or less feed? Potentially. Is it practical for us to vary that feed input EC day to day? Not necessarily. Depending on your situation. And even if you were trying to get very exact with that, we're approaching this with a mindset of total plant health.

Seth [00:04:43]:
So if we run down on the lower side of EC and try to, like, let's say lower and raise our feed EC daily for what we think the plants need, based on our, what we're seeing in Runoff, really, oftentimes we're playing. If we're playing on the low end, that's dangerous. You know, if we under feed a plant and achieve poor growth results as a result, like, that's not good. If we overfeed a plant, typically, as long as we're keeping the pH range in line and not stacking that EC up or pulling it down very quickly, it's not as much of an issue to the plant. So I think this is one spot where a lot of growers I've talked to get a little bit lost in really varying that feed rate throughout the flowering cycle. And while there is some science to support that, the bigger and bigger population of plants we grow on, let's say, a single valve for irrigation, the less practicality that some of that very specific nutrition science has, you know, we just can't control enough of the variables to really put that into play.

Jason [00:05:49]:
Exactly right. One of the big challenges that we have in answering questions and in general is obviously what you're talking about is what level of performance optimization are we talking about? And then obviously with journals of talking about high and low, and I think we do a pretty good job of actually putting some numbers to things in general, medium ground, saying, hey, we don't know about the cultivar, I don't know about some of the specifics in a facility. Um, you know, historically speaking, a lot of cannabis actually has been grown at what I would consider to be low nutrient levels. Um, and when we think about certain crops, they. Certain crops are. Are a little bit more susceptible to high ecs. You know, we're talking about leafy greens r vegetables. Those are ones that we definitely don't want to be close to.

Jason [00:06:40]:
The, what we would consider high ECs right now, when we're looking at things like tomatoes and especially important for this show and our clients cannabis, they're not actually very susceptible to issues at higher ECs. Yes, it does impact plant morphology. It changes how that plant is responding to environmental and substrate parameters. But when we're talking about high ECS, I'm looking at like, you know, 10 plus in the root zone for a duration of six hours. Right. Seven hours, you know, maybe even longer. And so these are really kind of important details. And it's one of the reasons that for me, having root zone EC information is really vital because, you know, when I'm pushing a higher performance crop, you know, I might be riding it safe 6C in the red zone for duration of the photoperiod.

Jason [00:07:37]:
And then by the time I get to Irrigation the next day, I might be seeing that EC up above 10. And that's not going to concern me at all. That's actually probably a really good place to be, especially during certain times of this, this plant's health. So hopefully there was something advantageous in there as far as, you know, giving the details on things, you know, talking about high and lows is, is a very relative term for what people are used to. And so some of those things you just have to kind of get some numbers on.

Seth [00:08:09]:
Yeah. And with ec, another important thing to look at is, you know, over the course of history, in the last hundred years, developing fertilizer programs, especially as we got into hydroponics, if we do look at other crops, let's say cucumbers, tomatoes, any other vegetable crop grown inside leafy greens, et cetera, we, we have a long history of also dealing with a crop with very low margins, you know, low value, low possibility of value. The real advantage to farming in that space is the fact that people are going to always need to eat. So, you know, within your limitations, you know that you have a product that will always sell. However, you've got to figure out the cheapest way to get that to market so that you have some margin to create a living on. And hey, if any other crop we've mentioned there's 100 plus years of breeding compared to fertilizer inputs to try to optimize that. I can tell you from big ag background, if I have to put half as much fertilizer on a field to obtain the same result, I'm probably going to steer towards that variety. And the competitive marketplace for a long time has pushed that.

Seth [00:09:13]:
Cannabis is kind of the opposite. The, the cost of fertilizer compared to, let's say, obtaining a higher potency or higher yield crop is not totally negligible. But if I can increase my Yield, let's say 10 to 20% on some strains by running a higher EC, or for instance, for a lot of growers just running a 3.0 input versus a 2.4 or a 2.5 so that they can actually stack. If you're only raising that EC from 2.5 to 3.0 to achieve the stack, your, your inputs aren't actually increasing that much and your outputs can increase quite a bit on some strains. So it's really important over time to start tracking where you're at with that. You know, we've got enough different strains that respond to higher and lower EC situations that show pretty big performance, either advantages at high EC or typically A lot of what we see is as long as, as a grower you're able to maintain a consistent environment on some strains, you might just pass a point of diminishing returns where hey, we take it over a 5.5, 6.0, we don't really see a yield or potency increase in running it at a 9 compared to a 6. And that's where we might decide, okay, we can cut it off there. Then there might be some other strains where we find an economic impact that actually exists, where we have to run a 3.5 for the first three weeks under a really high PPFD environment to actually achieve that stack.

Seth [00:10:49]:
And still going from a 3.0 to a 3.5 is not really a huge increase. That's not a 50% increase in your fertilizer costs, but it could be a 20% increase in your yield. And also for some strains, running higher ECs longer or not quite as long definitely impacts potency. And it's just important to track that in all the strains that you're running so that when you look back you actually have end product result compared to how the plants were growing. Because I think there's a point where a lot of growers, I mean, I've been there, you get so obsessed with how your plants look and plant health and make that your personal KPI versus what, what's our real KPI? You know, we can have some plants that come into that last week and look, let's say very ripe. They got some pretty rough looking leaves, but some of those are the ones we see like the best terpene expression on, best cannabinoid expression, best variety of cannabinoid expression, and usually best smoke quality. So it's important to keep track of that because if I just use my, just my grower's thumb and eyes as an indicator, I might not always hone in during week seven on the details that are actually going to make the crop go from 900 a pound to 1400 pound after I harvest it. And that ultimately is way more important than how we feel our plants look.

Seth [00:12:22]:
Not to say they should look in horrible health, but tracking it helps you really figure out what's going on. And then also we're all operating in, you know, usually an eight or nine week harvest cycle. The level of determinism in some of these plants is highly variable. You know, we see some strains finish really hard at 55, 56 days, especially under highlight intensity. Other ones want to run 70, 75 and just, you know, figuring out which of Those strains actually finishes not just for you, but tap into some of those other resources. If, you know, other growers, if everyone that you know is saying, I have a hell of a time finishing this strain in 60 days, it. It might not actually be you. So really, before you make any big decisions on raising, lowering EC nutrition, there's a few things to look at.

Seth [00:13:12]:
One industry, there's a reason feed schedules are where they're at. Feeding instructions. Number two, does your plant perform in your system?

Jason [00:13:23]:
Yeah. You know, one of the really cool things for me about, you know, giving the plant a little bit of excess nutrition. And, you know, we always hear, traditionally speak, people speaking about tip burn, typically that's actually a nutrient deficiency or a nutrient imbalance rather than an actual excess. Unless we're way high on the scale of. Of ec, you know, and that is really interesting. When I started cultivating at the company that I first worked for, One of our SOPs was to irrigate the same amount every day. And for, for me, I saw that as a huge waste of nutrients, of, of labor, of effort and everything. And really what we can do a lot of times is just start manipulating some of our runoff variables.

Jason [00:14:09]:
You know, looking at how much nutrients are we just completely wasting, is our PH showing that the plant is using what we're giving it imbalance? And a lot of times, if we're just giving it a slight excess, we can allow that to build up. And that's kind of the foundations of when we talk about generative stacking is allowing some of our slightly excess nutrients to build up in the substrate to, to deal with that plant morphology and kind of give us the foundation of prop steering as far as irrigation control goes.

Seth [00:14:40]:
Yeah. I mean, we could do a wonderful experiment where we're able to just manipulate our feed EC all the way up to 7.0, run 100% runoff and completely control what's in that root zone. Right. Like, could we could absolutely do that.

Jason [00:14:54]:
You fund it.

Seth [00:14:55]:
Exactly. But that's where we kind of run into the economic limitations of doing that. Right. And that's. And that's part of why, you know, we look at like, deep water culture, ebb and flow, nutrient film, some of these other, you know, cool hydroponic growing techniques that are out there, they just become difficult or uneconomical to manage at an industrial scale. Like, if I've got to recirculate enough water for 10,000 plants now, I'm going to be spending a lot, like a massive amount of money on reconditioning that Water. And then ultimately, even though I think I may be saving the water, you know, the cost of actually stripping that water and remediating it to be exactly what you want is so high that the traditional way to deal with that is do either like a half tank or full tank nutrient dump and replace. So as weird as it seems that, you know, the world is going to drain to waste and cannabis and even other commercial vegetable production, utilizing runoff as a tool to modulate these EC levels and really have precise control is the most efficient way we have right now and going forward to control this.

Seth [00:16:05]:
Because like I said, if you've got a full hydroponic situation, you know, deep water culture, we, we still have to maintain that. So there's sanitation, everything else, and with drained away. So this can offer us a model where we move plants into a room, grow them out, but then we can actually fully clean the room and there's no backwards flow of contamination into the rest of the facility or system.

Cian [00:16:29]:
I love it, guys. There's a nice deep dive on the whole concept. Just want to point out the thing you said earlier about, you know, the worst you're going to do. Upping your ec as you know, an early stage feed strategy is probably hitting a point of diminishing returns on your the amount of nutrients you're feeding your system. You know, I learned the hard way a couple of different rounds that certain cultivars that I was growing were able to more than adequately use what I had available for the plants. And that was showing in, you know, I run off ecs as well as my substrate EC as it was stacking high enough and plants around it seemed to be doing just fine. Realizing that I could bump that feed up to 3.5 without the rest of the room really having any adverse reactions while providing what I really needed to be providing to those plants that were hungry made all the difference at the end of those runs and being able to actually get something out of that cultivar that was usable. So I really appreciate that piece of advice because personally, that's been one of the things that has been very helpful, especially you know, some of the more finicky candy gas strains that are out there.

Cian [00:17:57]:
I've had, you know, a little bit less predisposition to push my early feed ECs as high on some of those strains and start kind of moving towards a more vegetative feed more quickly in my strategy as a result of that. But then as a result of doing that was, you know, not providing enough available nutrients to some of the other cultivars that I was running that were a little more hungry and wanted to keep running a more generative program for a little bit longer.

Seth [00:18:29]:
Yeah. And I remember when you did that, it was like kind of this aha moment where you could actually see what was in the substrate and go like, oh, a bunch of. These are like, seven. Like, why would it matter if I went from a 3.0 to a 3.5? It's like. Yeah. When you can confirm that it's more saline in. In media than what you're actually putting in. Yeah.

Seth [00:18:49]:
It's not going to hurt the planet.

Cian [00:18:51]:
Yeah.

Seth [00:18:51]:
Or flip side, hey, I was running super low EC at the beginning of this run, feeding a 2.0. All my plants are at 1.8. Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't give it a 3.5 at that point. Like, you know, we can. Can. We can use that to confirm or deny. And I think that's where a lot of growers have spent years operating on the intuitively on the safer end of irrigation, which is generally low ec.

Seth [00:19:17]:
And then if we see, you know, bad results, well, hey, it got too hot in the room. You know, there's a bunch of different things that we can. Whether it's lights, heat, ac, we can. We can pull back the intensity and kind of match that ec. But in commercial production, we've got to try to maximize everything as often as we can. And by maximize, it's not. That doesn't necessarily mean maximize everything towards absolute yields, but maximize towards our end goal. You know, if we want to grow, I'll just throw LCG out there on the West Coast.

Seth [00:19:49]:
It's still going strong. But if you have a target goal where you want to achieve, let's say 30% potency, 2.8 to 3.2 light, you need to be able to repeat that every time as a business owner. And low intensity in terms of EC and light is not going to get you there.

Cian [00:20:11]:
It's a definitely good point there. We had a comment come in from Instagram here on this topic. While we're here, 3 EC or 10 AC. Please settle the debate, boys. I'm reading that, as you know, we might not have outlined quite clearly enough that Tennessee, we're talking about in substrate measurement. So what your EC has stacked to over time. The three EC we've been throwing around refers to your EC at feed. So we're talking about what's going in as your input value there versus what's building up in your substrate over time.

Seth [00:20:49]:
Yeah. And one thing I want to highlight when you're looking at these time series measurements is anytime you're talking to someone about EC in the root zone, it's important to try to figure out where exactly they're measuring it. So let's say we've got our general water line and EC measurement here. Waters red or blue. I mean, EC is red. One thing we're always looking at is what is that EC at saturation? So when the media is completely full of water, what kind of EC are we seeing? So we have a good baseline for what the nutrient level is like at its freshest point in the day, right after we finish replenishing it. And then when we're talking about the upper end of ec, so the end of the dryback, we're talking about the end of a range where water content's gone down. It's allowed salt to build up in the media in relation to the amount of water there is.

Seth [00:21:41]:
We might see a swing from, as Jason said earlier, you know, six, seven, all the way up to like 10, maybe even 11. If that swing starting to get too big, the first thing we'll look at is this actual water content level. If that's too low, typically, we'll start to see that salt content swing up pretty hard. And we know that that's going to stress the plant in a few ways. You know, number one, that salinity is going to increase, make it very difficult for the plant to uptake water and nutrients. And also we're potentially pushing the down into a zone where we'll hit a couple hours in the day where we actually don't have good nutrient availability until we replenish that. But otherwise, you know, under most HPS settings, we're looking for about a 4 to a 7 at this baseline at the wettest point here, drying back all the way up to, you know, sometimes an 11 or 12. If you don't achieve that full range, that's okay.

Seth [00:22:29]:
One of the big things to look at, though, is what is this baseline for fertilizer level? Do we have enough in there? If I look at this point in the day and see that, hey, you're at 2.2 and you have a thousand ppfd, we're probably going to see some signs of general deficiency. And then typically we can go confirm that with our PH readings in the runoff and say, hey, yes, this plant is low pH, it's not stacking up and it's feeding down. So now we can make some changes. But if you're not aware of what's happening here, which is probably the Toughest thing because runoff is not a good representation of what's actually happening at that time. It's really hard to push decisions towards the more productive side. And it's really easy to back off and let's say turn the lights down and push a little more runoff.

Jason [00:23:15]:
Yeah, yeah. No, it's. You're nailing it. Glad we could Both draw things 3D completely out of proportion. Here's our mix tank on the right side.

Seth [00:23:27]:
I thought that was a sample tube at the corner of my eye.

Jason [00:23:30]:
Nope. So that three ec, you know, look at it. Typical feeds of three to four during the flower cycle. And you know what's happening when we're talking about ECS up towards 10, that's like what Seth was saying there towards the spikes. But we know what's happening is we're getting a concentration of nutrients towards the bottom of this block. A lot of times, depending on how much runoff, the more runoff that we push, the less concentration of these ECs are building up when we're in excess, obviously. So typically we want to feed just a little bit more than the plant is uptaking because we're feeding less. That's when we're going to see those PH fluctuations.

Jason [00:24:05]:
We're going to see tip burn. So there's deficiencies in nutrients, specific ions available to the plant. And so yeah, you know, keep an eye on those pHs, obviously. And then, you know, anytime that we can allow some, some excess nutrients to build up in that substrate while staying in balance on that ph, then you know, that's, that's free use of extra nutrients. And that's when we can also take advantage of some of those concentrations, allowing us to do generative stacking without just putting more nutrients in the system.

Cian [00:24:41]:
Well, as much as I would love to do a couple more stabs at the nutrients conversation, I think we best move on to another couple of live questions since we've gotten so many today. I have one that's going to start out kind of a two part question here. So the first one that we have is from Instagram. This was from pre colonial mids. The show rocks. Can you guys break down what your bulking cues are? What actions do you take when you're swimming? Switching to cater to the bulking phase.

Jason [00:25:13]:
Yeah, start with crop registration. So the bulking phase ideally is going to start at a much different point for most strains. I mean, sure, you can generalize and we got a group strains and we're working with as huge a variation that we have out there at this point, which is really fun. I always look for plant height stuff. So for me and pretty much anyone that talks to me very often hears me just always preaching about plant height and runoff ph, those are, for me, those are my crop registration numbers that, like, I just cannot operate without. And obviously, the last question to hit on why runoff ph is so important. Plant height is so important when we're coming out of veg, right? Because we really need to know that as kind of a, you know, choke point. All right? So if I'm at the right height in veg, that's something that now I'm.

Jason [00:26:06]:
I'm kind of starting a new process. When we're going into flower, a lot of times we're in a new room, different nutrient levels, different light levels, all that types of stuff. So if I have a plant height at the end of edge, that's kind of a choke point that says, hey, I'm. I'm. I'm here where I need to be for plant growth in order to hit anticipated or or previously recorded levels of plant growth by the end of flower. And so when we think about generative stacking, obviously we talked about allowing those ECs to build up a little bit. You know, we're talking about some time frame that's usually about the same time frame as the very ubiquitous stretch time. Right? You know, we talk about stretch.

Jason [00:26:45]:
Well, stretch not only is, you know, genetically related to how this plant grows as far as a specific strainer cultivar goes, but it also is a response to how we're treating this plant. And so when we allow generative stacking to do what we want it to do, as far as physiological change in the plant to end up in the morphology we want, we're thinking about, you know, stacking those nodes. We're trying to reduce the actual amount of plant stretching that happens during its stretch phase. And that gives us more bud sites. It helps us induce a little bit more reproductive response that is building bud sites in that plant. So what I like to think about is when. And I'm sorry if I'm going to get kind of mathy nerdy on y'all, but that's for me, that's how I understand plant science. And so when graphs are good, let's say veg.

Jason [00:27:45]:
All right, here's. Here's the beginning of flower right here. I'll put it up now, and I'll try to draw on screen. Sorry, guys, if it's really crazy, but so we got a plant height that says coming in somewhere. You know, here's our plant height. At the end of edge. And that is, like I said, that that's really, really important. If we're not going to take any other plant heights almost throughout the entire cycle.

Jason [00:28:07]:
We want to know what happened at the end of veg, because that gives us the cue of do we need to talk about what we're doing in the veg or do we need to talk about what we're doing in the flower to improve plant, you know, crop quality, weight, I. E. When we're looking at generative stacking, obviously we're employing those cues to reduce node spacing a little bit, combat the plant's natural stretching. But we're always going to have some amount of just natural stretch from that plant that's going on. So thanks for being patient while I write and draw bulking. That was the question.

Seth [00:28:46]:
We'll get there. Jason's explaining here kind of the lead up to some of the decisions you're going to want to make in bulking.

Jason [00:28:53]:
Yes. So here's our generative stacking. This on the Y axis is plant height, and this is the natural stretching of the plant. And my curve is probably not exactly what you're seeing out of your plan. I can guarantee it's not what we see out of a lot of types of plants, but. But it's going to generalize what we're talking about. And so this plant's actually growing faster and faster. Right.

Jason [00:29:15]:
So our node spacing is trying to increase our plant height every day. You know, maybe the first day record, it's at 0.6 inches. Next day is 0.7, 0.8 inches, 0.9 inches an inch a day. That's what we're calling stretch. Right. This plant's actually growing higher and higher every single day that we're recording it. The slope of the plant growth is increasing. Typically, when we're inducing some successful generative stacking, we're combating that a little bit.

Jason [00:29:41]:
Right. So let's say a plant that usually grows an inch a day and maybe increasing when we don't do any crops during, if we employ generative stacking, maybe we get that down to, you know, it goes from 0.7 to 1 inch a day. Right. And that's successfully getting us more. More node sites. When I like to think about when to start bulking is when the slope of my plant height line is no longer increasing on a day to day basis. So let's say we've been generative stacking. We saw, we got up to, you know, 1.1 inches a day, 1.1 inches a day, 1.1 inch the next day, and now it's at, okay, 1.1, maybe 1.15, 1.17.

Jason [00:30:25]:
Our plant is no longer stretching. The rate that its height is increasing is not increasing.

Seth [00:30:32]:
Usually just shoulders off quickly in a few days.

Jason [00:30:35]:
Yes, it does.

Seth [00:30:36]:
You know, that's one cool thing about trying to monitor this is you'll find, like, it's different for a lot of your strains, but when it slows down, it's quite dramatic. So, you know, one thing we tell a lot of people is like, hey, if you can't get in there every day, if you don't have a camera that can pick this up, go take it like every other day.

Jason [00:30:53]:
Yeah.

Seth [00:30:54]:
So again, week three, the worst you're gonna do is miss it by a day. And it's still gonna take a few days to actually go from, yeah, 1.5 to maybe low ones to once you've hit less than a half inch, you can be pretty sure it's done and then right back to crop registration. Take pictures of that time period. Different strains will do some different pre flower conditions. So some you'll see heavier sets of Bracton Pistols that are more mature. Some you won't see hardly any of that until you're done stretching. And identifying those markers is important because as we go into bulking, like Jason explained, like what, you know, what are we trying to do here mainly with our irrigation, that's sending cues to the plants.

Jason [00:31:35]:
Sure. So, you know, one of the probably most important things we're doing is, you know, reducing the osmotic differential between the root zone and the plant itself. So if, you know, most people are gonna be like, all right, I know what osmo. Osmosis is. And, you know, we always talk about. Well, I don't. But some people talk about osmotic stress and all of these other things that really are just buzzwords, keywords, whatever. We have some amount of salt in the plant, we got some amount of salt in the substrate.

Jason [00:32:07]:
Whichever one has more or less is going to be pulling where that sub. Where that salt. Where the water's going. Where the salt's going. The solution is going. The plant almost always has more. So when we talk about decreasing the osmotic differential, basically it just means we're increasing what's in the substrate for ec. When we're increasing the osmotic differential, we're lowering what the EC is in the substrate.

Jason [00:32:30]:
And so that kind of actually has some amounts of regulation on how quickly that plant is pulling nutrients from the substrate, solution from the substrate, variegation from the substrate. So when we go from generative stacking to bulking, typically we're looking to reduce our root zone ec. So we're actually increasing the osmotic differential between the plant and the substrate. And that's because, all right, we've already gone through stretch. We've kind of changed where this plant is at hormonally into a more regenerative or, excuse me, a generative, a re a reproductive type of hormone balance. And now we can kind of cue that, that rebalance plant hormones into actually growing as much of the new parts that has created. Right. So once we've got good bud sites, we've stacked some of our nodes up.

Jason [00:33:22]:
We want those nodes and those bud sites to get bigger rather than just developing tons and tons of small buds. Sure. Maybe for your brand or your strain, you want a lot of, you know, medium smalls.

Seth [00:33:33]:
I think the good way to encapsulate this is we're, we're lowering that EC in the media just a little bit. You know, we're not trying to drop it from a 6.0 to a 2.0. For instance, if you're at a 6.0, we might lower it to a 4 and a half, 5. But it's increasing availability of nutrients to the plants to rapidly build tissue at a time in its life cycle. Once we've crossed our stretch line here, that's when these plants are naturally going to start to focus on floral development. And that's where we're looking to optimize both that nutrient availability and the plant response to putting irrigations on throughout the day. So in early flower, we're using fewer, bigger irrigations in a shorter window to not only stack that EC up, but limit stimulating stretching activity throughout the day. Once we get into bulking, we're looking to lower this EC just enough to increase availability and nutrients, yet still maintain, you're good, still maintain the amount that we need for successful plant growth.

Seth [00:34:35]:
Right. So if we don't nail that transition from the endogenerative into bulking, let's say we drop it out way too hard. We had a seven, we dropped it down to a three. Now I might actually have to actually build that back up to get that plant happy again in that range and produce the growth I want. But we're utilizing runoff to modulate our AC and keep it exactly where we want. We're utilizing ph to make sure that we're giving the plant enough nutrition, not too little, and keeping in the happy zone. Of ph, where it will uptake as much nutrition as possible. Then we're extending that watering window out, you know, from two hours in generative to eight hours in vegetative bulking, sometimes more.

Seth [00:35:17]:
If you've overgrown your media to keep that plant in its happy growing spot. Right. Like, if that plant could envision anything, suddenly it got access to more food with less energy. And now it's raining and sunny all day. But if we don't hit this line that Jason drew here for the end of stretch, we can kind of see things turn a little south when we go into bulking it. Bulking some things with, you know, often I'll say too hard, which basically just means too many individual irrigations throughout the day. And that timing is very important. That's part of why Jason brought up crop registration.

Seth [00:35:53]:
The variability on these strains is wild. Even among strains that stretch for, let's say, you know, some might stretch for 21 days, is a pretty good average we find in a lot. But I've certainly seen strains that stretch still up to 28 days but will finish at 60, whereas some other strains will stretch 28 to 30 days and finish at like 75. You know, if you don't have that kind of information, it's really difficult to optimize these changes to really make an impact on what your ultimate yield and potency goals are going to be. And without the registration, like, good luck repeating it, you know.

Cian [00:36:31]:
Makes some great cases for crop registration with that one, guys. You don't necessarily know when to start your. Your bulking phase unless you're tracking that and being able to understand, you know, when your plant height has stopped increasing the way that you think it has. And I mean, sure, we can all use the walk in and take a look method if you're in there often enough and have a good enough sense of height for those things. But, you know, make the argument why not just put a number to it. Yeah, you go in and look well.

Seth [00:37:02]:
And you've done enough feno hunting scene. I'm, you know, you can definitely comment on how, how variable. Just, hey, I've got one pack of F1 seeds. You can see quite a bit of variability, you know, just because you have two parents that you recognize and have maybe grown one cut off of a similar cross or the same cross, you go, you know, pop 25, 30 seeds. You're gonna see some pretty interesting, very variable rates on things like stretch and.

Cian [00:37:30]:
Plant morphology in general. I mean, you know, when you're running that many different iterations of phenotype you're gonna look at this thing and be like, okay, well the front corner might be short, squatty, have really short internodal spacing, stout looking stems, and might not get much over about 50 inches tall at the peak of its height. And then at the far end of that tray you might have one that looks about as opposite as you could possibly want. And it in fact did come from that same genetic lineage. You're just seeing that wide of a expression of that genetics available options in the way it might dis or the way it might present its genetic traits.

Seth [00:38:22]:
Absolutely.

Cian [00:38:24]:
Well, to build on the conversation of bulking a little bit and tie it back into the conversation about nutrients we were having earlier, we have a question from Justin Butt. His question is feeding Athena Proline at 3.0 EC and 6.2 pH in 1 gallon cocoa. Nearing the end of my bulk phase, my runoff PH is as low as 5.3. Overnight drybacks may be a bit much and contributing to my issues having. I'm not entirely sure what issue he's referring to there, to be totally honest.

Jason [00:39:01]:
I was going to say, I mean it sounds like it's doing all right. Like most of those numbers are kind of in check where I like to be. You know, for Coco, I do like to feed her around 5, 8. But it sounds like maybe he's up that probably to combat some of the low that he's seen at the end of bulk. You know, one of the things here obviously is there's a chance you could just go up to like 3.2 EC and then maybe feed at 5 pH. Like try to just play around just with small adjustments on that ec.

Seth [00:39:30]:
To be honest, Red Star dude, your numbers aren't super low. You know, I tell people a lot like, hey, when you're looking at your runoff ph, if you're hitting P1s properly, getting, you know, as much saturation as possible before achieving runoff not having channeling. 5.4 is usually our action line to start pushing either a heavier feed or a little more runoff. So you can kind of make the line, draw the line and say, hey, am I actually stacked up above Feed EC and I'm now experiencing this low pH? If so, we're probably just talking about a problem with nutrient replacement. We need to push a little more out and put a little more in and that's just a volume situation. If on the other hand, in your 1 gallons you're drying back from let's say 65% at peak saturation all the way down to like 17% already. We might be in a situation where, hey, that is drifting down, but it's because you can't get enough volume of water in there to maintain that for the plant. It's just going through it too fast.

Seth [00:40:33]:
So in your next round, you might either try right back to that flip height. Look at your notes. If you flipped a 16 inch plan on that strain, you might flip a 14 inch plant, see if we can get it a little smaller so it matches those pots for its steerability aspects. If you're, you know, struggling to get your inroot zone EC above a 3.0 and you're feeding a 3.0 and your pH is drifting down, that's usually a sign that we need to up that to a 3.5. Or look at like, hey, if you're pushing 50% runoff already every day, let's start pulling back on that, for instance. But it's important to make the distinction on where the problem actually is with your lowering ph, and also to understand that using strong acids and bases to raise and lower the PH in your feed solution has less of an impact on root zone ph than actually running a higher salinity feed to it. You know, back to what we were saying earlier. If we wanted to stack this up forcefully, we could literally run 100 runoff and increase our feed EC every day until, you know, incrementally, until we hit, let's say a seven and then hold it there and keep replacement hold and do it that way.

Seth [00:41:45]:
However, since that's not the case for anyone growing in any kind of media other than straight deep water culture, that's controlling that directly, we're dealing with runoff as a variable to manipulate this. And if you don't have some good confirmation of what's actually going on in the root zone in terms of your salinity, it's really tough to make the decision to feed more. But as Jason said, you know, start. If you start feeding it, let's say a 3.2 to start combating this, that can often be helpful. You know, just using EC and pH is extremely helpful. One of the tips I give a lot of growers is, you know, if you're using AROYA or something like it, take runoff from the plants that you're actually sensing, or if you have the solace, go get the EC reading at saturation of the pot that you're trying to evaluate the runoff from. That way you can directly correlate some of the stuff we're talking about.

Jason [00:42:40]:
Yeah, Seth's telling you how to do it the right Way I was assuming maybe you didn't have some time series data and you could just start playing with some of your inputs to see how it fixed things.

Seth [00:42:51]:
No, that's, it's great advice though, because intuitively a lot of people like to lower their inputs when dealing with ph issues. And it's. Intuitively, it makes sense practically. It doesn't have as much effect as you want.

Jason [00:43:06]:
And this is why it's awesome to have both, you know, some runoff EC numbers and some, or excuse me, runoff PH numbers and root zone EC numbers. So the one situation, I've got two red lines just to confuse you guys lots here. The top red line would be when we're feeding at 3ec, y axis being feed level here. If we see that stacking up, then, hey, our, you know, our plants not eating more nutrients than we're feeding it, right. So we have some level of stacking up when we irrigate here. This black dotted lines irrigation event, you know, it's dropping back down closer to our feed, you see, you know, in that case, that's one where, all right, some of our corrective actions might be. All right, let's, let's play with our nutrient balance, that type of stuff. The other red line is this one that's starting at 3 EC and we're actually dropping.

Jason [00:43:57]:
Our plants are eating more nutrition than is in the substrate. And this irrigation dotted black line is showing irrigation event. We see the EC going up. This is like a super easy indicator. This is probably when I see this, I'm working with clients. One of the easiest things to make. Great recommendation that we just need to up our EC levels. Right.

Jason [00:44:15]:
If we see our ECs dropping throughout the day, then we know that our plants are eating more nutrition than we are supplying them. And anytime that's happening, I am going to expect some EC or excuse me, some ph imbalance, especially in our runoff. Like if we're eating more nutrients than is available, that means that every type of one ion is pretty much getting sucked up by that plant. And we're going to see more cations than anions or more anions than cations. And so that's one of us. Like what, what's the easiest answer here? Sure, just up our EC levels. You know, the most right answer is get to a custom blend fertigation system. Have, you know, on ongoing leaf tissue analysis and determine which ions that you really should be supplementing to this plant.

Jason [00:45:04]:
No one's there yet. I mean, like, that's just a waste of money. You can just give them More nutrients and avoid some of that.

Seth [00:45:09]:
Well, and that's, you know, I think where we're at with some of these. Like you can. That's one of the most frustrating things for me when I'm talking to clients about tissue analysis, for instance, they really want there to be a magical silver bullet on like, hey, which one of these values is out of whack? And how do I, you know, which one of these, like, okay, we can identify that.

Jason [00:45:29]:
The.

Seth [00:45:29]:
How do I fix it? You give them more or give them less, you know, push more runoff, push less runoff. It's not usually in the form of a custom blend nutrient solution. What Jason was talking about is the ability to raise and lower your feed EC so that if you have, let's say you're, you're in a lucky enough position where you've got thousand square foot rooms, mono cropping strains, you can just go, hey, this room needs a little more feed. I'm going to give it a 3.2 or a 3.5 today and start, you know, impacting this ph. The more important thing as a producer, as a grower is to continue to register that. So you know that this particular strain you might be best off running at a 3.5. And toy, you said earlier, seeing if you have enough data on your previous runs with different strains, you can also match it up and say, hey, I've also run this strain. Does it seem to need the 3.5? No.

Seth [00:46:23]:
But from previous data, it looks like there's going to be no harm in throwing it in this room so I can maintain my menu variety. So I think that's one really important thing for growers here to balance is, you know, not only, you know, like identifying what's actually a nutrient deficiency, but standardizing as well. Because if we see this kind of line on one run, the bottom plants, the bottom one, the plants feeding heavily. Yeah, there you go. Plants feeding heavily over and over before we really try to diagnose a potential. Because there certainly are some strains that have difficulties with particular elements and situations that we can see with tissue analysis. Like if you've got excessively high boron levels, we're gonna go look at your RO filter immediately. That's one of the first elements.

Seth [00:47:11]:
It's accumulates on the membrane and then leaks through easily. But aside from a few telltales, usually, again, it's less or more. So we need a few runs with this top line as a baseline to really decide if your plan actually has problems or is it just such a heavy feeder that your Normal program that works for most strains just doesn't keep up with it.

Jason [00:47:33]:
I, I mean, I think this kind of gets down into the details of, you know, we were talking about, you know, general levels of cultivation and then, then, you know, the next level of starting to get proficient. When I, when I was a grower, for me, it was really fun. I'm super nerdy. If you guys watch the show much, you're like, probably understand that, sure, I can grow 90 of the plants using this type of general science and application, but when I've grown a dozen strains or two dozen strains, know a lot of our clients are running way more than that. But like, all right, two dozen strains is pretty manageable for me to start building out some custom ideas of this is how long I want to run these for. These might be some slightly different nutrient requirements of a certain plant. And here's what to identify in order to optimize it. You know, if we're growing, you know, 3,000 pounds of, of whatever strain, then that's probably going to be worth it in the end to get an extra 10% by having the details, the data to support this is a better way to grow that £3,000 than my 4 or £5,000 of Y strain rather than X strain.

Seth [00:48:44]:
Well, and we just see such a variety of responses. There's so much variability in cannabis that, you know, this same basic program that we talk about, generative, vegetative, generative, can be tweaked slightly enough for different strains that we do see pretty massive yield differences depending on how they're applied. So it really is in the best economic interest of every grower out there to try to optimize it for every strain that they have. You know, I, I know for myself, I meet a lot of people can reliably grow 1.8 to 2.5 pounds of light on pretty much any strain they're given time, over time. Unfortunately, depending on what your overhead costs are, where you're at. I mean, there's so many factors in this business, not just, not just overhead even, you know, what's your access to marketing brands, how do you ensure your product price? It's, you know, more involved than being in some other industries just as a producer. And we're hitting a point where that's just not competitive anymore. Yeah, like 2.5 pounds of light, you break it down to turkey bags.

Seth [00:49:48]:
Looks like a lot of weed out of a room. But when you start to get into the spreadsheets now, like, we are hitting a point where, you know, 80 grams, I would say, is kind of the benchmark for the industry right now to say I'm going to be here tomorrow and stay competitive in the marketplace versus how much it costs per square foot to produce this crop.

Jason [00:50:10]:
Yeah. You know, a lot of times I talk to new clients and it's like, all right, well, if I'm at 80 grams or 85 grams a square foot, that's only a 5% difference. Well, right. Right now, when things are emerging, that's what's going to help you stay ahead in, you know, two years, five years. I don't know that 5% is what's going to make or break your company.

Seth [00:50:31]:
Oh, yeah. And then once we get to a bigger scale, you know, if I've got, let's say, 50,000 square feet of flower space, a 2% difference between two different strains on yield is significant for my revenue forecasting for the year. And is, even as a small producer going to affect. You know, you're always going to try to grow, if you're a small producer, the strains that get you the best return. But let's just take it back to LCG or runs for a minute. There's a reason so many people are still trying to grow that, because they get the return for it, you know, and if they can guarantee that return, that's insanely valuable in what right now is a pretty volatile commodity market for cannabis. Like, we know where the bottom is, what you can get for your top ticket. That's still kind of all over the place.

Jason [00:51:17]:
It is.

Seth [00:51:18]:
You know, I know some people pulling down some good, good pack numbers, but everyone who says that also has the dichotomy where they're like, man, I grew this strain that just, you know, is absolute fire. Like, I'll get a hold of some. Smoke it. They're right. But it doesn't fit the profile of exactly what their brokers want that month. So, you know, they might get 14.

Cian [00:51:40]:
Some of those that I've grown before, it's some of the favorite, My favorite smoke I've ever grown. And I have no idea why people wouldn't want it, but my brokers tell me it just does not have the right profile either in the nose, the look, the color profile, whatever it is. And, you know, that's the reality of the situation that a lot of us find ourselves in, is that some of the things that are fun to experiment with, that we all really love to grow for our own personal favorites, aren't necessarily what the market is dictating. Gets the prices right now, maybe you.

Jason [00:52:11]:
Shouldn'T have named it Cheetah Piss.

Seth [00:52:15]:
He's got some funnier ones.

Jason [00:52:19]:
They're out there.

Seth [00:52:21]:
Uh, but, yeah, that's. That's totally true, though, right? Cause, I mean, right now we're talking on some of these strains. Like, just. I know in the last two years or so, a bunch of the stuff that you've grown seeing, like, some. Some of the strains we're talking about just didn't get a great purple expression, but the Terp quality was there. Everything else. And, like, you know, in our opinion, that's great. But, yeah, to the brokers, hey, it missed the color mark.

Seth [00:52:45]:
Other strains is like, man, dude, you're. You're two months too late. When you threw it in the room, it was worth 1400 when it came out. They're like, yeah, we're getting 900 now. Sorry.

Cian [00:52:56]:
Well, and to the point of that volatility, right, My last one that I pulled down, the highest prices that we got were actually for the greenest packs. So, yeah, completely on its head. But part of that's because I found a few people that that's all they wanted, and they wanted the best green packs they could find. And it just so happened that one of the cultivars we pulled down, just absolutely gorgeous, but, you know, 100% the wrong color profile to take further down into the Central Valley of California. And turns out there are places in the country where that is still a highly valued expression. Just. Just not everywhere.

Seth [00:53:42]:
Oh, yeah. I work with some growers on the east coast that. It's one of my first questions for them, like, what's. Please, please tell me about your market. I see a few strains that I recognize here, and I can tell you, we're like, depending on what you want, we might. And depending on your rooms, how good your dehumidification is, we might really be choosing yield or purple here. You know, there's quite a few strains that really need that deep cold overnight to achieve that purple. And if you can't keep your humidity in check, it's.

Seth [00:54:08]:
We're going to mold everything out, guys. And, you know, I love posing that question because in those markets, you know, New Jersey, Florida, etcetera, they'll go ask around. They're like, it doesn't seem to matter. Why are you so worried about this? I'm like, oh, you haven't. You haven't been to California in a while, dude. But, you know, in that market, like, okay, cool. We don't have to cater to that necessarily. And I think that's another.

Seth [00:54:35]:
I mean, always go back to it, dude. Our opinions really don't matter. It's what sells, you know, like, we all have our personal KPIs. We see it every day in the garden. It's part of that passion driven thing that makes people successful. But at the end of the day, it's customer driven. Some of the most popular cannabis I've ever grown, I thought smelled awful. That's just a personal opinion, you know, but people like this tank, you know, you open a jar and it blows up a room for a lot of people.

Seth [00:55:08]:
That's their metric. On, like, this is gonna really, like, this is gonna be some good weed.

Cian [00:55:18]:
Well, I, man, I'm just a lot of nostalgia thinking back on so many of the different cultivars I've grown over the past few years that I will probably never get to grow again. And you know, the reality is kind of like what you said, at the end of the day, we're growing this for a market and if it doesn't sell, that one probably isn't going to get planted again the next round.

Seth [00:55:42]:
Yep.

Jason [00:55:43]:
And most of us here aren't picky enough to like be like, we're going to grow this for ourselves.

Cian [00:55:49]:
Just do it anyway.

Seth [00:55:50]:
Yeah.

Cian [00:55:53]:
Well. And I mean, you know, a lot of us wish we could, right? But at the end of the day, we're spending a lot of money to produce these crops and input prices are not getting cheaper. So it's worthwhile to remember that as much as we like certain things, the, the almighty dollar unfortunately tells us which ones we're gonna be enjoying in the future. All right, well, because I think it's probably as much as I would like to jump into a few more of these questions. With our average timeline on per question finishes today, I think we're probably getting close to the end. Thank you guys all for writing in so many questions today. We have a huge bank of questions that we're going to work through on this next episode. When we come out for today, I want to thank everyone that has jumped on, participated.

Cian [00:56:49]:
Thank you, Seth and Jason, for all of the wonderful knowledge today, especially around the nutrient conversation. I think that's fascinating, personally and something that hopefully we get to spend more time on as the episodes roll out.

Seth [00:57:04]:
So here, let me finish with this one real quick.

Cian [00:57:07]:
Oh, you got a couple more drawings. We did get a couple of great compl. Three dimensional drawings today.

Seth [00:57:17]:
I just didn't want to say this out loud. I've been running into people lately that. There we go. Seem to be having issues with that not not being aware that your your RO filter can fail for micro things before you'll actually see it fail on a level that produces contamination or massively high ppms coming out of it. So tip of the day there. Filter maintenance always worth its weight in gold.

Cian [00:57:56]:
All right, well thanks you guys Seth and Jason and producer Chris for another great session and thank you guys all for joining us again. To learn more about AROYA please book a demo at Aurora IO. We will always welcome your cultivation questions. Please drop them into our Instagram or our YouTube our email at any time. Salesroya IO is our email. You can also as always send us that DM via Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. We always want to hear hear from you. Please smash that like button and leave us a review at Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you're listening to our podcast today.

Cian [00:58:27]:
Thanks for the feedback and we'll see you guys all at episode 131.