Cian [00:00:05]:
What's up, Gromies? Welcome to AROYA Office Hours, episode 131 I'm Cian joined by your resident cultivation expert, Jason. How's it going?

Jason [00:00:13]:
Doing well. Doing pretty good. How are you?

Cian [00:00:17]:
Doing pretty well myself, although I am just getting tons of rain and I really wish it would do something else, you know, either sun or snow. But the rain, the rain is a little hard to live with this time of year.

Jason [00:00:30]:
Yeah, well, we could have sent some cold down your way. We were negative 10 last week or last couple days here, so that's what I kept hearing.

Cian [00:00:39]:
Freezing fog.

Jason [00:00:40]:
Yeah, a little bit. And I think today we're up to 25 coming in to the studio here, so it felt pretty good. Thanks.

Cian [00:00:48]:
Swinging up towards the warm side. That's good.

Jason [00:00:50]:
Yeah. Hell yeah. We got Seth rolling in right now here. He's looking good. We're both got our sweatshirts on today, so. Hey, Seth, change.

Seth [00:00:58]:
How's it going, man? Oh, we're live already?

Jason [00:01:01]:
Oh, yeah.

Cian [00:01:02]:
Oh, yeah, we're rolling.

Seth [00:01:03]:
Of course.

Cian [00:01:05]:
Yeah, we're rolling. How are you doing today, Seth?

Seth [00:01:07]:
Oh, not too bad, dude. Nice, nice. It's just got lost in Pullman. You know, that's always fun to have to drive through wsu.

Cian [00:01:17]:
Well, let's get rolling. Big shout out to all our live viewers today on YouTube and Instagram. Please let us know in the comments where you're watching from. Don't forget to smash that like button. Tell your friends about office hours live and leave a review to help our podcasts thrive. We super appreciate the exposure and anyone you turn on to us. To start today out, I want to jump into a live question from Vanxiety. So Vanxiety's question is my overnight dryback EC he later corrects to substrate EC is 8 to 9 using a 3.5 input EC.

Cian [00:01:53]:
But I've noticed my runoff EC is always around 6.0. What's the theory on this and does it mean I should increase my input EC? My pH is 5.7.

Seth [00:02:05]:
Yeah.

Jason [00:02:05]:
So, you know, runoff EC is obviously going to depend on basically three direct variables. Obviously input EC is going to cause some changes in a runoff. Maybe we'll get to the third variable to talk about that red zone ec. And then obviously, how much runoff are we pushing? Right. So let's say our zone EC is at 8 or 9. We have very little runoff. We would expect that to be, you know, closer to 8 point or 8 or 9. Obviously, as we're filling that pot with more 3.5 EC, it's going to be diluting some of those concentrated salts in that substrate.

Jason [00:02:43]:
So, you know, obviously those numbers are really pretty good. I don't think I would make any changes based on the numbers presented. Obviously, like I was saying, you know, more runoff is going to push your runoff EC closer to 3.5 as it mixes with that higher EC and substrate.

Seth [00:03:01]:
Yeah, I mean, I think this brings up why substrate sensing is actually so important. Because we're trying to base things off of ec. It is always dependent on actually achieving that runoff. And we're always going to dilute that. And there's a few different ways to do it. You know, if we're getting some leaching on our way up on the P1, we're going to see some interesting runoff readings because we're pushing more of that diluted solution through. However, because we can see what's going on in the root zone, that's what we're actually targeting. That's generally the value we want to follow.

Seth [00:03:34]:
The runoff, you see, is for that to be accurate, it's going to be highly dependent on you being able to achieve the top of your P1 full saturation without any leachate occurring on the way up. And that's more or less impossible when distributed across a bigger and bigger population of plants. So in this situation, just like Jason said, I wouldn't change anything, would keep operating off of, you know, your, your root zone ecs look good. Um, and then following your root zone ecs, just keep a check on your ph. Make sure that in achieving that kind of stack, you haven't necessarily driven the ph down in the media by restricting runoff too much. Um, yeah, I think, I think everything sounds good. Keep on rocking it. And then probably if you have 24 hour, you know, EC monitoring, you can start to look at that overnight EC spike and see when, like, hey, we've been running that 3, 5 to, let's say, stack up above the, the nutritional needs of the plant.

Seth [00:04:32]:
We can look at that EC spike and see if, hey, maybe around week four, week five, we drop back from a 3.5 to a 3.0, save a little money because we're not seeing the plant uptaking quite as much nutrition to build structure.

Jason [00:04:47]:
Yeah, you know, and, you know, one of the things that you said there is like, you know, the accuracy of things, and I'm sure that, you know, the accuracy of your EC meter in your runoff is it's reading what the EC of the runoff is. How that's affecting plant growth really is just an inference. Right. And so all of us have been trained before we had access to high quality zone ec. Hey, let's use that to infer what type of root zone that our plants are encountering. Obviously once we have zone ec, that information, it's much, much more like maybe a luxury or something you really don't even need to consider because you have that root zone ec as far as runoff, that's the one that you really want to be putting the effort in to get.

Seth [00:05:33]:
Yeah, I mean, I think a good comparison here would be trying to diagnose your plants deficiencies based on only symptoms that you see. In that case, you know, when we're looking at deficiency symptoms, sure, we have known symptoms that are associated with certain deficiencies, certain types of spotting, marginal leaf edge necrosis, pale green growth, yellow growth, those are all indicative of certain things. But if we look at like for instance, the ph variable, if that ph is too, too low, out of range, we're going to see deficiency across all inputs. That's going to happen. So at that point, I mean the, the comparison I would make is your runoff is like looking at those symptoms and trying to diagnose it, whereas your substrate sensor is a lot more similar to just getting a tissue analysis and seeing what's actually deficient there. And while that's not a direct comparison, the point is we're looking for the most direct representation of what's actually affecting the plant. And runoff is a high relative measurement that can be influenced really even by our effort to try to collect that sample, which makes it very difficult to actually gauge on what kind of nutrition the plant is living in, what kind of salinity levels it's living in, and what we're actually providing it and targeting.

Cian [00:06:53]:
Yeah, I think, you know, it's one of the questions I get probably most frequently from growers when they're first starting to use our system and they're used to tracking that runoff EC is why am I seeing this difference? What does this mean? Should I be worried? Shouldn't I be worried? And I think you guys explained that really well, kind of just to touch on it. You know, the overall concept is that those numbers shouldn't necessarily be equal. They aren't a one to one relationship.

Seth [00:07:24]:
Right. And I think in your own journey, seeing you experience like, hey, running for quite some time off of just runoff readings and then being highly surprised at what you're getting out of substrate EC once you actually plug in 24, 7 monitoring to that, it's, you know, we're with runoff. If we really nail it, we're Getting a very small window and to do proper testing via relative methods. You're gonna go pull samples. It's not, it's not really that efficient to go take scoops or cores out of your pots every single day to try to figure out what's going on with the media. If you don't have enough plants, eventually you're just going to reduce your media size trying to sample that and actually do like a lab grade wash test which is, you know, ultimately highly useful. But the turnaround time and processing time on that type of sampling is not really efficient for the commercial production we're looking at, especially if we can get a much more direct reading in the root zone.

Cian [00:08:28]:
That's a great way to explain that. Well, I want to move us on to another topic that we've had a number of questions on recently. Going to move into the realm of under canopy lighting because we just get bunches and bunches of questions on this. I think, you know, because it's an up and coming technology, people are excited about it. So this one, have you guys implemented under canopy lighting? If so, does the place it, or does the place it comes from matter? China, us? What are your opinions?

Jason [00:09:01]:
So most of the large diode manufacturers have consolidated and so typically it just kind of comes down to what, what diode is that manufacturer using? What kind of warranty do they come with? What's the price point that you can get them at? You know, so we're just talking about, all right, build, build quality and well, you know, what's the quality of diode and implementation? So where they come from? I'm not sure. I know of actually very many under canopy lights that are manufactured anywhere but.

Seth [00:09:34]:
China right now, or LEDs for that matter. China or Korea. Yeah, diodes aren't made in the US or Canada or so where most of us live.

Jason [00:09:45]:
So yeah, like I said, what it comes down to is what's your trusted source of those as that manufacturer, do you think they're going to be around long enough to supply replacements on your warranty? What's the performance of the actual diode and power supply that they're supplying?

Seth [00:10:04]:
Yeah, I think another important thing to look at is obviously spectrum and then spectrum tunability. So if we're looking at under canopy lights, there's a few different concepts we're looking to implement to improve. So earlier on, while we're building structure, if you have under canopy lights that have a lot more blue spectrum, basically that white presentation that a lot of us are used to seeing in LEDs, that's going to drive a lot more vegetative growth early on. Whereas we have, you know, different models on the market from different manufacturers that have slightly different spectrums, some of them leaning much more towards or having tunability towards the far red spectrum. And there's different ways to implement that. If we're looking at early flower, we typically want a more blue spectrum to produce vegetative growth and actually beef up that plant. After we hit a certain point, we're looking to implement more and more of a red and far red spectrum to get better. I don't say get to implement better.

Seth [00:11:04]:
Light penetration is the wrong word. We're getting light deeper into the plant, but not by penetrating more from above. We're just providing photons in the right spectrum down in the canopy to really drive ripening. Because, you know, one thing we see with a lot of strains, especially like in today's world of candies, is that spectrum and light exposure have a lot of influence on anthocyanin expression and potency and finish, you know, ripening expression. So by introducing that deeper red light down into the canopy later in flower, we're driving that response early in flower. With the blue lights, we're actually driving more growth and bud site production. So it's important when you're looking at under canopy lighting to evaluate what your specific goals are and then also look at like how you're going to achieve those. So for a lot of people that implement under canopy, especially with LED applications or very, you know, high bay HPS applications, you know, what we're, what we're looking to do is increase that light and actually beef up yield.

Seth [00:12:09]:
And also in those situations where we're dealing with not necessarily the best PPFD from above, part of what we're doing is trying to really beef up that growth. And oftentimes that's accompanied by, let's say you have a 700 watt panel led, you're not getting good light penetration. One of the first things you're going to do to increase that yield is do less skirting up. Because if you've been trying to produce, let's say a grade flower under a 700 watt panel led without good penetration, you've probably been skirting up pretty high and throwing away a lot of your B and C buds because they're not worth anything on the market. They're just contributing to that. That camo pack look purple and green, right? And if the intent is to drive better maturation, we're looking at more of the deep, deep red light intensity. If we're looking to beef up growth, we're looking at more of that blue. But it's important to understand when to use those in the cycle because we do look at, now look at, talk to growers who are experimenting with this.

Seth [00:13:08]:
We kind of see both spectrums. Some of them try to implement a very blue white LED all the way through. Don't necessarily get the ripening results they want, but they're achieving greater biomass. On the flip side, if we go just pushing that hard red later on and not necessarily having the tune ability to push growth earlier, we might not get the yield increase as we expected, but we can maybe influence the pound price by having a more consistent or saying, hey, if we get 1300 a pound for our top purple nugs, usually we're having to separate those middle nugs and get, you know, 600 a pound for those because they're green. Now hopefully we can take that pack and make it 80% the $1300 rather than before where we were at 60%. So when looking at, under canopy, it's very important to establish, like Jason said, quality. You know, one thing we're looking at is, hey, you put these plants in, you slam your under canopies in and then you go ahead and spray. You know, are the lights cleanable? That's a, that's a huge thing for me.

Seth [00:14:12]:
And something I see a lot of LED growers struggle with the bought LEDs with like exposed diodes and boards and stuff. And now they're limited on how easily and efficiently they can clean their, their systems. So there's a few factors to look at and I, I encourage people to shop around and when looking for them, don't focus on price point, focus on spectrum and tunability because you either want a specific purpose which is ripening, a specific purpose which is bulking up biomass, or the tunability to do all of it. And, you know, we kind of see representations in the marketplace of all of those options.

Jason [00:14:51]:
Yeah. So one of the interesting things, I'm going to share the screen here as well. You talked about spectrum, Chris. I don't know if I need to zoom in on that a little bit better if we're good. But Most manufacturers of LEDs are either extremely tunable or they have the selectability for under canopy lights that are designed to go in HPS rooms or under canopy lights, they're designed to go in LED rooms. And ones that are going in HPS rooms are actually usually a little bit heavier. On the, the blue side, they're typically focused on a Little bit lower end of the spectrum to kind of not necessarily offset, but to supplement to fill in some of this blue light that may not be present with your HPSs. And this picture here I'm showing is kind of a, it's actually a really nice graphic, but it's showing us the, the wavelength distributions for output light of hps.

Jason [00:15:49]:
Obviously CFL is just in there, but LED and then sunlight. Right. So if we think we combined LEDs, you know, cylinder canopy, which are traditionally these a little bit higher on the blue end and then these HPSs, we're going to have a more, you know, full spectrum presentation on the plant. And what this is important for is activating certain molecules in the plant that are producing things like anthocyn, anthocyanins, phytochrome, chromes, those enzymes that are outside of our typical activity in chlorophyll A and B absorption wavelengths. You know, it's one of the reasons that we see really good ex expression when we are able to, to balance those out. And some of them are actually responsible for a little bit higher amounts of growth and definitely higher, higher THC percentage and terpene production.

Seth [00:16:40]:
Yeah, that's a good point. You know, between chlorophyll beta carotene and a few other pigments that we're looking to activate to produce responses in the plants, all of those respond to different wavelengths of light. I think this is a good example. You know, full sunlight is obviously what these plants have evolved for millions of years to produce in. And by tuning that spectrum, we can focus on different available or different aspects of plant growth, different morphologies. But it's also important to recognize that when you have these spectrum differences with different types of lighting, we're dealing with a lot of the same strains under different situations. And it's important to log and keep track of what kind of expression you're seeing based on that spectrum and then also balance that with how many changes are you making at a time. So if I was growing under hps, I switched to name a brand of LED light and then name a brand of under canopy light.

Seth [00:17:39]:
I would really want to do a lot of work to make sure that, hey, I'm trying to match the spectrum as best I can for these strains and then just logging like, hey, what, what are the differences? Because another thing we'll see is with the incredible genetic variability in cannabis, you know, we've got some guys that run strains that have been selected for HPS under like let's say 12 generations they go to H, they go to LED. We're getting a different expression. And that's because they've so hard selected for that spectrum, oftentimes not on purpose. And we, we just see a different expression under most LED spectrums. And unless we can match the spectrum that that plant's been tuned for, we going to get quite the same output. And really that just goes back to crop registration, logging the results of what you see, and then making choices in your business about what, what is most important to your customers. Because we'll always go back to that. Like, man, we stare at plants every day.

Seth [00:18:37]:
It hurts to see a sick plant. It hurts to see something that looks rough. But, you know, the difference between having, let's say 100 plants and 10,000 is the ability to look at some ugly plants and go, hey, that's gonna happen. I only have so much control here and then extend that to, you know, there are certainly plants that I've grown that I'll be honest, in the last week look like absolute garbage. But they're giving me some of the highest thc, some of the highest yields, and some of the best herb profiles. So it's important to look at your end results as well when considering all of this. It's exciting for us growers to get a new toy, throw it in the garden, and be like, man, my plants look great or they look terr, but ultimately the end product is what we're really going for, right? So that's one thing I've talked to a lot of growers about, is like, hey, you know, some strains we are forcing into senescence through ripening conditions and irrigation. Other ones, and if you've had the, the luxury of growing, let's say, 60 different strains, you'll find that some of them, if you grew that strain 60 times and tried it 60 different ways, 45 of the ways, it's going to be about the same.

Seth [00:19:51]:
Because that plant is so determinant in its growth habit that as long as it has enough light, enough water and enough nutrition, it's going to hit a good yield number. But then we'll hit other plants that if we're not tracking all the variables going in, are going to hit a lower yield and quality number. And that's really the important thing to dial in on. And then also, you know, moving forward with your business, expect that, like, hey, we're still a long ways from having stable genetics that are great for growers. You know, right now it's, it's one thing I think is really cool about the cannabis industry is generally, we're still selecting for nose quality, consumer, consumer satisfaction at the end, you know, as growers, we'll do a feno hunt and you know, always kind of try to run that balance. Like, hey, we popped 20 seeds. One of these, the best, the best nose we all agreed was like a semi dwarf. Okay, we're not going to take that one because we can't get it to yield.

Seth [00:20:50]:
But then the next thing is, hey, okay, we've got these other eight finos, we've got a range of terpene expressions, we had a range of THC expressions and a range of yields. And we're always looking for kind of that, that nice, nice balance of yield and quality. But ultimately, as the market saturates and starts to condense, we all know that quality is becoming more and more of an upfront issue. So it's forcing growers to basically up their game and improve their facilities to be able to grow some of these genetics that don't respond easily to general cultivation practices and that require a little more finesse and attention to get that competitive result out of. And unfortunately or fortunately, depending on if you like challenges or hate them, that's going to be the state of the cannabis market for a while. Because there's not a great correlation between the genetics that consumers want to buy. That jar, they crack and it blows up the whole room. And again, the strains that are easy for growers to grow and produce on a regular basis.

Seth [00:21:59]:
And you know, for me that's one of the things that keeps this industry interesting. You know, the fact that we don't have genetics that are so tuned to these commercial production systems that we can just hit play on five different factors and let it run. We've actually gotta fine tune our system. And then when we do fine tune that, that, that top, you know, it be a few small adjustments between two strains in terms of irrigation strategy and environment. But those tiny adjustments, a couple degrees here and there, a little higher EC a little lower EC at different times, especially riding out towards the end or at the very beginning, in the first three weeks, we can see some pretty large differences. I know one strain that is a notorious heavy fear that I've been playing with a lot lately is cap junkie in just EC differences and nothing else in terms of irrigation strategy. Oftentimes I see a 15 to 25 gram difference in weight run to run, just because we were able to keep EC at a certain point in the run and not flush it out. Okay, is there some science behind that? Sure.

Seth [00:23:04]:
But one beautiful thing about this cyclical production system is you have, every run is a chance, I don't want to say a chance to experiment, don't go wild, but it's a chance to gather data and learn from it. You know, the more you can collect, the more you can understand about that run. And then if you can replicate that to the best of your ability with minimal variables, you're going to start to tease out some of the differences in these strains. And you know, we, we always talk about this. Unfortunately there's not, there's not good information in cannabis the same way that as there is in other crops. About what exactly different strains. Like, you know, right now we have so many producers out there that are growing intuitively and honestly doing a great job. But communicating what you're doing if you don't have enough tools to measure it to another person is incredibly difficult.

Seth [00:23:56]:
And in agriculture you can well control the ag especially, you might, you might have the, the golden ticket on your environment and irrigation, but if you can't define it, you can't replicate it it. And I think that's where a lot of people really struggle. You know, I mean it's, I don't want to say it's easy to set up a 10 lighter and have great success, but it's going to be easier to set up a 10 lighter and have good success compared to a thousand lighter on that scale. It's, the calculations are a lot easier. You're dealing with less dynamics in your system. Be, be prepared for that as you scale up and really understand the difference between gardening and farming and try to decide what you're going to focus on. Because those are two different things. And while there is crossover, one is more intuitive and passion driven, the other one is, hey, we're putting numbers on this so we can repeat that process and form a sustainable business on it.

Jason [00:24:57]:
Yeah, I think for me it's one of the reasons that I enjoyed building out the Arroyo product as much as have over the years. And that is just to really give people a robust place to do crop registration, to do crop journaling, to try and tie results, photographic evidence, you know, sensor data haul into one spot. That's a little bit easier for them to keep organized, store, share and, and make comparisons to help them make those small tweaks as they're experimenting.

Seth [00:25:35]:
Yeah, yeah, well, and using technology to capture it because like I tell clients all the time, you know, rewind, rewind life. 10, 12 years and I had a job that was just to take this data in Spreadsheet format, build graphs at the end of a growing season and present it to people. Okay, 10, 12 years ago that took a person to do all that. Now you can get some technology to keep logging it for you and, and not have to necessarily dedicate a huge portion of your company's budget to just data collection. And when we expand that to greater ag, you know, if I'm a wheat farmer, a barley farmer, garbanzo bean, I mean rotational crops around where we live, I'm not taking any of my land, hardly, unless someone pays me to, to do research. I'm looking at available resources using soil testing and making sure I nail that. And then if I happen to work with an agronomist that does things, they're going to go do all that sampling and then look at my end results and try to draw correlations. We're not, we're not talking in cannabis.

Seth [00:26:40]:
It's the same thing. We can't necessarily take a whole lot of space and dedicate it to research. This is a farm. And although we, you know, have the highest profit mark, well, depends who you are. But the highest sale price of any crop per gram or pound. If you want to run your business at 100%, you've got to find a way to harvest data off of your ongoing production system without taking chances that are going to push you backwards. And you, I mean, you need technology to do it. There's just no cost effective way to do it without that.

Seth [00:27:13]:
I mean, if we look at greater ag, we're talking thousands of production acres to one research acre. Okay, translate that to your nine room facility. If you have one room, that's R and D, that's a huge proportion of your farm that you're taking a chance on. And while it may seem cool in the beginning, fast forward a few years, pay a bunch of bills and those are not going to sound like great chances to take on a regular basis. I can definitely tell you that.

Cian [00:27:45]:
I think this is definitely one of those conversations that we can expand on in a lot of ways just in terms of how prevalent it is right now for people to be talking about, you know, what are the effects of potential changes that can be making to my grow under canopy lights is one of the biggest ones we hear time and time again. You know, I've got a bunch of questions that have come in just during this conversation about things as ranging from like, what's a good way to clean the LED diodes? A couple of answers from people in the comments as well, saying they prefer to use looks like 99% rubbing alcohol to be able to go through and clean those guys off. Which, you know, great suggestion there. And brings up, you know, just that point you were making about how important it is to have serviceable and cleanable equipment. We also had another question from North Fork Farms that was dealing with pretty much the same thing that you expanded on, Seth, which is, you know, what is the role that light plays when it comes to anthocyanin production and noticing how over time he's seeing that the branches, especially a lot of these candy gastrains that he is growing, are responding more to, to light exposure in their anthocyanin production versus just the environmental changes that he's instituting. And, I mean, you did a great job talking about how you will have a lot of these factors that play into what affects your plant morphology. And Jason, just to back up what you said, having these robust tools to analyze and register all of your data points about your crop gives you the ability to go back through and understand which ones of which of those factors is contributing to, you know, that anthocyanin production. I know a lot of people out there are, you know, looking to increase that and kind of like Seth said, get away from the camo bag look so that they're able to increase that sale price.

Cian [00:29:45]:
And, you know, one of the best ways to do that that people seem to be finding is to, like you were saying, Seth, kind of look at how to even out that. That photon distribution further down in the canopy so that more of those green buds turn into, you know, finished, mature purple buds. But, yeah, I just really just.

Seth [00:30:10]:
Just log it. I mean, I got a great example. I was talking to girl the other day that was playing with I'll name drop here, Favan. One of my favorite under canopy lights, they're very tunable spectrum. He was running complete far red starting at, like day 18. He's like, all of my stems turned purple in, like, less than a week. It was like, okay, maybe don't do that, you know, But I think one good thing to do is research it as much as possible and kind of learn some of the already existing science about, you know, different wavelengths and what kind of plant expression they affect, because that's all readily available out there. You know, we know that having a little more far red compared to more blue, just the classic white LED versus hps, right? We can get a little better spectrum expression out of having more red and yellow in the spectrum.

Seth [00:30:59]:
Look at that and really take that into account when you're doing these and then understand that like, like that example I gave. That's a small difference. That's like one switch, you know, like, let me twist the dial and if I did the wrong twist at the wrong day, that gave me an expression I want. Or on the other hand, does that matter if, if red light made the stems express purple or red is. You know, a lot of times we'd associate that with a particular deficiency, but that's not always the case. I've grown strains that'll give me red stems no matter what the hell I do, and they still end up yielding and testing just fine. So it's also important to take those notes and establish like, are we dealing with, you know, I mean, I think that's one thing that gets skipped over. And especially people have gotten more into commercial cannabis growing recently.

Seth [00:31:49]:
Just look back at some of the historical genetics that were on sale. You know, I mean, if you go back like 10 years, certain traits, like duck foot leaves was a funny one that came on saw blade leaves. Like there's, there's some different weird genetic expressions that can happen that are way outside of what we normally see. And with the prevalence of, I'll say, pollen chucking, just untracked breeding basically going on, who knows what the heck you're gonna run into. I've seen some really interesting expressions out of stuff where like, wait, you cross this with that and you got this lumpy like saw bladed, weird plan out of it. They're like, yeah, I don't know. You're like, well, it is what it is. Let's.

Seth [00:32:32]:
Let's track it and see what it can do. And who cares if it's got skinny saw blade leaves, if it yields 3.2 pounds of light and has 32 THC, right? Like that might bother you, but get over it.

Jason [00:32:44]:
I was. It's been a while since I've looked at a lot of mutations, but man, some of the funniest ones were here. You polypoid, polyploid mutations. When. See that the cola like stretch out like rather than being, you know, apical dominant cola, it would be like kind of splitting by itself.

Seth [00:33:07]:
Yeah, yeah, sure. That one, it's like an oval. If you look from the top, like an oval shape, not a round shape, bud. Another one I've seen that used to drive me nuts is corkscrew shaped pistols. Really hard curled in pistols, rolled leaves. And again cyclically, as long as a plant is performing on an economic level, you have a fun chance to evaluate some of these things and see if they're actually plant responses or is that just a weird plant? Because, you know, people have spent the last, at least in the US the last 50, 60 years connecting, collecting, collecting weird genetics from all over the world. And I can say as a plant nerd, the weirdest, most interesting looking stuff is the stuff that catches my eye and I want to keep for better or worse sometimes, you know.

Jason [00:33:56]:
Yeah, the hard part there is it's, it's also a lot of times the least commercially viable stuff.

Seth [00:34:01]:
Right.

Jason [00:34:02]:
So it's like, yeah, we like the exotics, but how much of it can we grow? You know, all these topics bring up kind of really good point as to how do we make improvements without taking large risks. Right. And you know, Seth and I are both in really good positions to think about that obviously come from very different backgrounds. As far as education experience go.

Seth [00:34:29]:
We both grew a lot of dope.

Jason [00:34:30]:
Well, yeah, yeah. But before, before that, while we're doing it, kind of different perspectives, but really what it comes down to is let's combine proven science with some experience and make those tweaks based on hypothesis. Right. And when you brought up that experimentation thing, it's not like let's just throw ice in our fertigation tank and see what happens. It's going down to that next step and we say, okay, well if I do this, what type of parameter impact does it have have on the plant itself? Well, now let's do some research on, you know, how does that parameter affect plant growth? Make a hypothesis and say, sure, if I, you know, if I turn on my red spectrum a little bit earlier in the cycle with, with those plants, am I going to anticipate slightly more anthocyanin production and then evaluate it, obviously. And you know, as we said, crop registration, tying it into one, one place to document that really kind of the only way that at scale you can start to track and implement what changes have made that outcome. It's kind of funny when we talk about in Arroyo, we've got these recipes, these grow templates that I usually basically help people build out a generic one. And then as they start possibly implementing that with a few strands, or maybe they already have some ideas of what certain strains that they're growing, kind of like as far as how long are we running a generative stacking, what should we set our thresholds for EC levels at light levels when we need to change that stuff up.

Jason [00:36:17]:
And really the best of those growers are they're, you know, making duplications and then they're also, you know, changing Some of those variables and building out basically a library of genetic templates on how they want these plants to, to be grown. And every once in a while we get one that someone makes a mistake or a piece of equipment and has an issue, and they get to go back and look at, wow, we didn't even catch this during the growth cycle. But we had either phenomenal yield or extremely good chemo type come out of there. And they have that resource to go back and say, hey, let's update our recipe to something. May not even on purpose, but by tying it together with our outcomes, we know this was an improvement. So it's limiting the number of variables so that you can be sure that when we improve it, you know, we change that variable again. We have an anticipated outcome.

Seth [00:37:13]:
Yeah, I think the hardest part, honestly, guys, is like, if I was to draw a timeline here, you know, flip harvest, what Jason's talking about, these fluctuations that happen, and this is the hardest part for growers. That might happen here, that might happen here, that might happen here. But you can't judge anything until past here when you've got yield results, quality results, and you know what the final product looks like. And that's probably one of the hardest things is if this happened, let's say an irrigation failure. We had dehu failure for like, like a week. High humidity during bulking, let's say, you know, any number of things can go wrong. As a grower, the important thing is to look at and go, okay, where am I at in this crop? Is this. Did this mean total disaster and plant death? And if not, okay, we're gonna.

Seth [00:38:17]:
We correct it on this day. We need to finish the program and not think that, like, hey, I need to change a bunch of variables here because this happened. Because that's simply not true. We need to get back on the program, continue it out the way we would, provided we can get all of our parameters back in range for plant health and then evaluate from there. And I think that's the hardest thing. I talk to a lot of growers that go like, oh, hey, should I raise light intensity, Lower light intensity, change CO2? Like, we start throwing too many variables at it after we've, you know, acknowledged this one variable that's like, hey, let's correct and then finish it out and try to evaluate that experiment. If we start adjusting CO2 levels here and then light levels here and do things, you know, if we introduce five different variables compared to how we normally run, it's going to be really hard to parse that data. Apart and actually decide what made the difference.

Seth [00:39:09]:
And a lot of times if we made all these changes, well, if your dehumid went down and bulking and we couldn't get the VPD of above a 1.0, we didn't get water pumping through the plants. We're not going to see as much growth. Don't, don't stress about the fact that that happened. Get everything back in line and keep on trucking and go. Okay, let's not have that mistake. Let's start talking about equipment maintenance intervals and trying to make sure we have proactive maintenance that prevents us from breaking down mid run. Whereas you know, some other times we might see a happy accident. What I've seen is on certain strains like hey, our, our AC broke or humidification broke and this one strain that we struggle with herming out out didn't this time.

Seth [00:39:50]:
Okay, cool. Happy accident. What was the yield like on that? 1/2 to 2/3 of what it normally does when it harms. Okay, well I don't care if you paid ten grand for that cut. Sounds like a junk strain. If you can't run it in a way that makes your other plants happy and still get an acceptable yield or right back to. I remember popping some feeders and, or doing some seed hunts and finding some semi dwarfs and things like that that had like, like literally the best nose expression. I mean I went through this my last feno hunt.

Seth [00:40:20]:
There's one that I just is never going to be released because man, if you can get more than 1.8 pounds of light out of it, good for you. Just slow growing and terrible. And like dude, that, that happens. You know, the, the tracking on all this stuff is not perfect. And also because of the variability, I mean cannabis, it's not an obligate outbreater like apples for instance, but we see a similar level of genetic variability where if you take an apple and sprout the seeds from that apple apple, you could have a Granny Smith and it could turn out to be more like a sour green crab apple that grows out of it. And that's, you know, we don't always see a direct correlation between parents and seed offspring. And it's important to remember that because, you know, if you've been in cannabis long enough and the term bag seed is relevant to you, there's a lot of those out there and if you've been growing those, they pop out quite different. Just remember that like you might think something is special because you've put a lot of effort into it, but those two Things are not always equatable.

Jason [00:41:23]:
Yeah, that kind of leads back into, you know, what you were talking about as far as certain genetics being optimized, if you will, under specific breeding conditions. And I thought, oh, it'd be really cool if a breeder had two rooms and they were breeding, you know, under LEDs and under HPS, almost never would they be selecting that exact, you know, the phenotype. From those rooms, we're going to see distinctly different morphology and the plant responses there are going to give us, you know, a very different choice of phenotype based on responses from a different environmental impact.

Seth [00:41:59]:
Good point.

Cian [00:42:01]:
Absolutely. Well, I love this conversation because we've had a couple of other questions that popped in here. This one that I wanted to throw past you guys because it deals directly with what we were talking about in terms of what factor is causing this particular. Let's say it's either an uptick or a negative in my crop and how that works. And the question that Finlay asks is, so, hey, guys, I love the show. I look forward to it every week. I notice that when I get a notification to change out my CO2 bottle, the room will drop down to, say, 150 to 200ppm before I can get it to change or before I can get the new bottle in. What I've noticed is that the plants pray super hard when the CO is that low.

Cian [00:42:45]:
I always keep my CO2 levels 100 to 200 ppm higher than the PPFD levels. The plants look happy, but not like when they drop the CO2 that low is there. Do you guys have any idea why, or is this just a correlation?

Jason [00:43:01]:
It's very likely due to impacts of CO2 on water use efficiency and still model response. So, you know, I kind of brought some of this stuff up a few episodes ago. Oh, Tess can draw a nicer one than I drew.

Seth [00:43:16]:
I didn't realize you drew that already. I was going there.

Jason [00:43:18]:
No, you're good. Mine was red and resembled other things. So, yeah, when we think about what's going on in the gas exchange at the leaf surface, those stomates are opening up and they're allowing for exchange of CO2 into the plant. Right. When obviously we think about photosynthetic process, when we think about, you know, what, what are the molecules that are building this plant? Carbon is extremely significant. It takes up, you know, the. The greatest portion of the plant mass of, of any chemical element in its growth. And so when we have a lower concentration of CO2, the plant actually has to exchange more More air, more gases in order to get its carbon requirements right.

Jason [00:44:05]:
And so when, when we see what's. And we've got some guard cells in here as well, those guard cells are allowing that stomach to be as open as possible when that CO2 is dropping.

Seth [00:44:16]:
Not so as open as well, optimal. So like when you have the Correct amount of CO2, your guard cells have great trigger pressure and they're holding a perfect aperture shape and transpirational shape that balances the amount of transpiration we're getting out of the plant to optimize. Oh, thank you, sir. The, the actual use of that water coming in when the CO2 is too low, we actually see a bigger stomatal opening that's pushing. Sorry, not here, here. Basically that's pulling more water up and allowing us it to escape without the plant actually utilizing it. And when we have the correct CO2 range, it's going to keep that stomata more reliably open at the right shape to regulate that airflow in the right range that we're getting. Perfect plant cooling, perfect photosynthesis here.

Seth [00:45:08]:
I'll try to show it up more and really stability on that throughout the day. So that's kind of a funny thing. If you've got CO2 monitoring, you'll definitely notice like, hey, when you drop down to 100, 150, your transpiration actually goes up, especially overnight. And I mean, my best advice would be to start taking notes on how often that happens and try to calculate your CO2 usage. So I would rather give a bottle back and trade it in with 10% left in it than run out for a few days personally.

Jason [00:45:39]:
Yeah, or have a, have a spare bottle just so you're not, you're not in that, that emergency to, to get her wrapped up. There's some awesome articles. One of my favorite resources for learning about, you know, scientifically proven and studied relationships like this, and that's water use efficiency is what I'd be looking up. Frontiers in is a really good. A journal site that you can learn a ton from it. If you're not a nerd now, read a few of those documents and you will be afterwards.

Seth [00:46:13]:
Yeah, there's, there's a lot of little stimulus inputs, CO2 being one of them, that affect plant growth. And if, you know, we always talk about a holistic approach. If holistically across the board you don't keep everything in range, the problems that result are going to be hard to predict, but predictable if you mess up the same way every time. And it's important to make sure all those. And that's one of the rabbit holes that I think we talk to a lot of people that go down with either plant nutrition or plant morphology responses is, hey, I've been trying this, this, that and that. And then it's like, okay, well you, you can't get above two pounds of light. A month later, oh, your PPFD is pinned at 600, dude. Like, you know, have every factor influencing your plant growth in line.

Seth [00:47:06]:
We can't expect optimal performance. And also we, without enough data, can't predict how well or poorly a particular strain will respond to that environment with its compromises. I've, I've certainly, like, just the other day I was talking to a customer, had a, a plant. We're looking like, man, this thing, it's just not getting the drybacks we're used to to in a slab. Like, hey man, we're 12 to 15%'s the biggest we're hitting at the end of generative and square is he's so concerned about this, like, hey, this is a sign of poor plant health, right? And I'm like, okay, well you ran it through how this last run go? Oh, it threw down like 3.2 to 3.5 light. Like, well, damn, that's an efficient plant, dude. You know, it didn't need nearly as much water. It was a heavy feeder.

Seth [00:47:57]:
But like, hey, that's a, that's an easy trade off. We can bump it up to 3.3.5 and wow, you, you found a real special plant. And the truth is there's thousands, millions of those special plants out there. We've just also, once we can isolate all those variables and decide whether it's our inputs or the plant that's causing this result, then we can make a solid decision. I personally have thrown away a lot of strains that I absolutely loved because they just. The commercial viability wasn't there, you know, like, in my opinion, they hit all the marks for me, but it won't turn purple.

Cian [00:48:35]:
You know, say it several times where some of my favorites that I've grown over the years, you know, just aren't the ones that brokers were really wanting to, you know, take to market. And it's because they didn't check some of the boxes for them. Whether that happened to be, you know, a specific terpene profile, composition, or whether that was shape of the nugs, color, quality, consistency, whatever that happened to be, even though it checked all the boxes for me and was maybe one of my favorites to grow, you know, whether it was a large yielder or whether it looked really good, whatever quality that I was attracted to ultimately didn't matter. But it also kind of leads to talk about the fact how important crop registration is when you're growing these things because you don't necessarily know for sure how these things went until you get all the numbers back at the end and are able to analyze, you know, what did I do and what did this get me? And this taught this topic about CO2 that Finlay gives us is a really good one because, you know, without looking at your crop registration and then being able to understand that, you know, you're having this CO2 issue periodically throughout the run. Praying plants traditionally to most people is a sign of a healthy plant, that people are like, yes, this is what I want to happen. However, this may be one of those scenarios where you know, growing that out to the very end, you know, are you seeing the same type of a yield that you would be off of that plant had you been supplying it with the amount of CO2 that it needs during those moments where it was, you know, running short? And if you're not participating heavily in your crop registration, it's going to be hard for you to identify, you know, what it is that might have caused this, this to work the way that it did. And you may be mistaking that praying plant for a result that's going to net you higher yield or higher quality, when in fact it might not.

Seth [00:50:39]:
Yeah, I mean, the way I like to describe praying plants is kind of, kind of. No matter what religion you're a part of, prayer in the morning is important. Two hours later, unless you're, you're a monk or something, it's less important, important. So you know that praying is like, that's a sign that we're hitting a high turgidity, low water kind of stress point. And that is a healthy sign. But as you said, that's not something we want to see all day. Right. And so it's important to also not focus in on one little factor that's giving you an indicator because whether you've got substrate or climate data, you can still read those responses ounces on the plant.

Seth [00:51:21]:
And it's just important to identify what is actually important. You know, you can, you can tweak some small things like CO2 and see some stranger responses in that, but they may not actually be good, you know, and it's, it's hard to, you can't determine it that day. It's, it's only a month past harvest when we sit down and look at the final result that we can say, hey, maybe that's good, or wow. We had a run where they prayed in the morning and relaxed by, you know, three hours after lights on, after we gave them a good amount of water. And that was a better run than when they were just like spraying or praying like, you know, all the time. And I know, I've seen that, Jason. You have in the summer in the greenhouse around here, you're like, these things, look, they're rocking and then you look at your yields and you're like, what? What happened? Man, they look so excited for the last two months.

Cian [00:52:13]:
Yep. And that's one of the things, right. You know, if you're not taking notes on all of these little factors, it's easy to go by the. I don't know what to call it exactly, the colloquial knowledge, the gro bro knowledge of it's praying, it's doing good, that's going to be fine. But it's not the only factor to consider. And without taking all these notes and having something to compare to and look back to, it's going to be difficult for people to, to parse out what happened here and why did this one not yield the way that I wanted it to, even though it was showing all the signs that checked the boxes for me. And then to kind of touch back on that topic of genetic variability in cannabis, that's another aspect that heavily document that in your notes. Where you got things from, what the respective crosses are, what your known documented history with this plant is, and that will help you, you long term down the road understand, you know, some of the changes that you've seen happen in your plants, as well as some of the results that you get out of the different cultures you grow.

Seth [00:53:29]:
Yeah. And don't mix up your cuts. Labeling is really important. Just call it out. A few people that send cuts from the west coast to the East Coast. No names needed.

Cian [00:53:42]:
Oh, I mean, not even just cuts, but wires. Irrigation wires. Please, please label your irrigation wires. I can't be clear enough about.

Seth [00:53:51]:
Yeah, it really sucks to like have to call up a buddy and be like, can you go stand in the room while I turn this off and on and see if the one that's supposed to click clicks. It's a defeating feeling when you're like, oh, I could have labeled that.

Cian [00:54:06]:
Or if something happens. I mean, there's been times where I've had to go through and replace solenoids on the fly really quickly before a feeding happens. And if you don't have clear labels on things. You might be searching around trying to figure out what wire you're going for for a feed seconds before you actually land on the right one. And you know, I've seen people have to do major resets and things like that on all sorts of different equipment. And whether you're dealing with low voltage irrigation wiring or whether you're dealing with, you know, all sorts of different runs of Ethernet cable, please, please, please label it. This is, this is one of those industries where it is just wildly important to be good at. Label rolling breakers.

Jason [00:54:50]:
Label your breakers.

Seth [00:54:51]:
I was gonna say you're dealing with a lot of electronic equipment. Don't be, don't be scared of a brand called Fluke when it comes to multimeters and buying one that can monitor current flow as well as do resistance metering. Again, for better or worse, if you're not already there, you're going to learn to diagnose electrical systems and components. And if you don't want to learn that, you're always going to be chasing your tail. If you learn it just, just this much and invest a tiny bit in having a decent multimeter. Stay way ahead of the curve on your equipment breakdowns.

Jason [00:55:24]:
And if you're gonna pour some concrete, don't, don't be afraid of like getting a little bit extra sized conduit for the next run. And leave, leave, leave a rope in there, you know, your pull string so that later on when you're like, oh, we need, we need another line or we need another wire or whatever, you can get it in into that facility, greenhouse, whatever.

Seth [00:55:45]:
Yeah, if your contractor tells you half inch conduit, it's going to save you 20%. You trust me, you need the three quarter the one inch later down the road. It'll be worth your time compared to having them run another piece of half inch conduit a couple hundred feet.

Cian [00:55:58]:
Honestly, it's a fun topic that we should probably do a little bit longer expansion on at some point. You know, ways that a lot of us have learned the hard way over time that if we had a do over to replan our ideal facility, there's lots of little bits and pieces that we would do differently. And I love that comment about put bigger conduit than you think you need every time.

Seth [00:56:23]:
Also, don't hide your irrigation lines, don't put them in the ceiling or the walls. They need to be serviced, certainly not on the ground. Yeah, I've only seen that a couple times. Had to work at one place that had it.

Jason [00:56:39]:
So you Know, don't, don't plug your. You guys got me started. Now we're gonna have to have another epis out this. Don't plug your 240 fan into a 14 or 120 outlet.

Seth [00:56:52]:
It won't work, right?

Cian [00:56:54]:
No, not for long.

Seth [00:56:56]:
Yeah, or, you know, or 220, 240 lights. If you have a 480 power supply. There's just, there's little things that, you know, if you're looking to get into larger and larger scale cultivation or you know, back in the day scene, I remember we had conversations about your spot looking at, you know, the power efficiency at different voltages. Take some time and read about that. Like there's a lot to understand there. And you can actually get in a lot of cases, especially nowadays that, you know, with LEDs and even the Marmar HPS like things are more different, products are more adaptable and just learning about like, okay, if I invest X amount into a better power supply and panel, I might actually be able to use a lot of my same equipment and get higher efficiency, greater light output, etc, or I definitely can't. And now we have some goals for next round of upgrades. You know, I think between the three of us, if we could build a facility, the, the, the amount of 110, 120 volt outlets in there would be pretty minimal.

Seth [00:58:02]:
Like why? Because literally everything except the pressure washer and vacuum operates much better at 220, 240 or even 480 for that.

Cian [00:58:15]:
You know, how many iPhones do you need to plug into the room at that point? That's really all we are concerned with because everything else is going to be running on a different power band.

Jason [00:58:24]:
Depends what I'm doing with those iPhones.

Cian [00:58:29]:
Well, obviously this is a conversation I think European power block about quite a ways. I should probably start wrapping us up though. As much as it sounds like we could go on for a good long time about this one, maybe next week we can get into a little bit more of that facility planning talk. And you know, there's a few questions in here that go in to deal with that. Talking about, you know, things people would do differently. Should I put in a veg room? Should I plan to go immediately into flower? Would I build that extra bedroom into my budget? Things like that that, you know, strategies have changed for a lot of people over the years and it's, it's worthwhile to go into a conversation about, you know, how to plan out facilities because there's a lot of people out there that are, you know, still expanding and putting money into new facilities. And, you know, if we can save you guys a couple of headaches by a few good suggestions, I think that's pretty worthwhile to me. All right, so to close out today, thanks Seth, Jason, our producer Chris as well for another great session.

Cian [00:59:37]:
And thank you guys all for joining us today. Thanks for all the live questions. We got a ton of them in here. Sorry if we didn't get to you today. We will try to get you in on one of these next shows. To learn more about Arroyo, please come book a demo at Arroyo IO. We always welcome cultivation questions. Drop them in the link anytime at the Arroyo app.

Cian [00:59:56]:
Email us at salesroyaa DM us at Instagram or Facebook LinkedIn. We want to hear from you guys specifically. If you guys have any good suggestions on long topics you'd like us to cover, throw them into the chat sometime or put them on our Instagram. We'd love to have a few suggestions on what you guys would like to hear from us. Well, thanks so much for coming, you guys. Smash that like button. Leave us a review. Spotify, Apple, Music, YouTube, wherever you listen to our podcast.

Cian [01:00:23]:
We appreciate the feedback back. Thanks and we'll see you guys all at episode 132.