Cian [00:00:04]:
What's up, everybody? Welcome to AROYA Office Hours, episode 132. I'm Cian joined by our resident cultivation expert for the day, Seth Baumgartner. How's it going today Seth?

Seth [00:00:14]:
Good. How are you seeing I'm doing great.

Cian [00:00:17]:
Today is a sunny day, which is a nice change in pace for me currently. How about you? What's the weather doing in good old Pacific Northwest?

Seth [00:00:27]:
Oh, you know, we had some snow, some clouds, some rain and some sun. Typical day all in one day.

Cian [00:00:33]:
Oh yeah, that is a typical day. All right, so wanted to jump right into our question bank for the week and thank everybody for tuning in real quick, big shout out to our live viewers on Instagram, YouTube. Please let us know in the comments whether you're or where you're watching from today and give us some suggestions on a little bit of, you know, direction we can take for content that might interest you. Anything you want to hear us talk about? Drop our suggestions into our email or into the comments while you're watching today and let us know what we want to hear. First question for the day comes from Super Cottonmouth. He says, I've got a question for the podcast. Great show as always guys. I'm trying to dial in my substrate EC and irrigations.

Cian [00:01:20]:
My runoff EC is about 5 to 6, but I'm seeing swings much higher on my TEROS 12s during max drybacks. What range should I be looking for in either runoff or substrate sensors? I'm currently in stretch. How many irrigation shots per day should I be applying in a one gallon pot given my current situation?

Seth [00:01:41]:
Yeah, I mean there's, there's a few things to look at here. Number one is what we oftentimes refer to as baseline ec, which is your total EC at a fully saturated point. And that's where we start with our ranges on EC during flower. So we want to see generally a minimum amount of Nutrition above a 4.0 on the substrate sensor. And if you're under like a traditional thousand watt double ended HPS light, we're looking at about a 5 to a 7 at full saturation, sometimes swinging up, especially on the T12 to that 10 to 12 range. If you are experiencing ECS higher than the 10 to 12 oftentimes you'll notice that the moisture content in the media is actually lower than it has on previous days. And when that starts to go exponential shooting from let's say a 12 to a 16 over, you know, 3 to 5% loss in VWC, that's when we start to say, hey, this might be pushing too far of a dryback for the level of salinity and the type of acidity we're seeing in the media. At that point you, you have a few choices.

Seth [00:02:50]:
Typically we just look at not quite drying back as far and maybe if you're hitting let's say nine or ten in that thousand watt double ended situation, you might be pushing past the point of diminishing returns on what's going to give you the best yield and the best potency. That being said, when we're talking about cannabis with, you know, respect to most strains, there's obviously certain ones that are a little bit more finicky on feed levels and how high to push that ec, but the range between efficiency and toxicity, pretty wide. So if we've got a big population of plants and we see that some of them, you know, we're targeting let's say a five to a seven. In that thousand watt double ended situation, however, we see some plants going up to like 9 or 10 or even 11 at that baseline ec. As long as the standard treatment has allowed those to walk up slowly to that EC and not experience that because they're getting very, very underwater and running dry, we can kind of count on the fact that like you'll go look at those plants, they'll be fairly healthy as long as the PH has been maintained because they're receiving a decent amount of runoff. At that point we can really decide that, hey, you know. Yeah. Is that beyond what we consider ideal? Yes.

Seth [00:04:05]:
Is what we consider ideal more on the bottom end of what we need to accomplish the goals also? Yes, because as we push these higher and higher ECs and just generally higher input values, we're looking at running on more, more the of disaster, I guess. You know, if we're pumping way too much salt in there and really spiking those ECs or hitting a point where we're actually restricting growth that's obviously not optimal. But again, when you look at like your population distribution, you're going to see some plants that are slightly above and slightly below those ranges. And the bottom end is far more important than maintaining a really tight top end.

Cian [00:04:49]:
I think that's a good way to characterize it. It also is, you know, something useful to touch on talking about the difference between how our Teros 12 sensors traditionally worked when viewing VWC and EC ranges versus how our new sensors, the Teros ones, work. You know, in a traditional sense that TEROS 12s were a linked measurement that resulted in you having in these big spikes like what Seth was Talking about up in ec, whenever you'd experience a severe dryback and that was a signal that your dryback was going a little too far. More than necessarily, it was a signal that your EC was actually reaching the tip top ranges that are going to cause toxicity. And our newer sensors, you know, one of the things that makes them really great is that they split those measurements apart and allow you to have a much more accurate viewpoint on both volumetric water content and EC range when you're looking at just how high that EC is getting at the peak of your dryback. And it's one of the things that allows people to start looking at those ranges differently and understanding when you see this jump up to 16 or 18 from where it was moving in a normal pattern and up the graph at maybe let's say 10 or 12 and it just jumped, that's going to be that signal On a Teros 12 that you've reached a range where, like Seth was saying, you've kind of exceeded the normal parameters of what we want to see for a dryback and as a result are going to be experiencing some acidity issues and some issues with how that plant is going to be uptaking water because you're increasing how hard that plant has to work in order to be able to get water up through its and into the plant.

Seth [00:06:45]:
Yeah. And I think an important thing to realize too, depending on your journey as a grower and what kind of measuring tools you've had access to. I know in my previous experience growing, I've worked with a range of different handhelds and they have a range on how high they'll actually read on ec. So I can think of times where I was thinking, hey, this seems to be topping out. I don't know really how high it's going. And then I got a substrate sensor involved, let's say a year later, then using those same meters, going, oh, let me look at the specs and realize that that topped out at a 6 or a 9 or a 12. And sometimes I'm actually hitting higher than that. Is that good or bad? Well, that's debatable based on plant health.

Seth [00:07:29]:
But now with the substrate sensor, I'm looking at a little bit different range and I need to realize that that's different than what I expect to see in the runoff because there's many situations where we'll see, especially in Rockwall, where we've got a media that's fairly, you know, been fairly overdrive, where we're pushing a lot of runoff through it, but we're getting a lot of channeling. So in the runoff samples we might see like actually a fairly low ec, not really representative to what the plant's experiencing in the block due to the problems with hydration in that media at that point. And with a small coco block, we can see similar things if you're putting water on too fast and just pushing it through. So it's important to look at all those variables, but also understand that we're making this jump from looking at what that runoff EC is to what the plants are actually experiencing in the root zone, which is ultimately the most important.

Cian [00:08:26]:
That brings up a really good point here and kind of leads into the next question that I want to talk about from Ian Warren here says, how do we get the EC up high? We're always struggling to get the EC to hit 6 in a 1 gallon coco with Athena Proline. We use your platform with the Teros one.

Seth [00:08:45]:
Yeah. So there's a, you know, the first thing to look at is obviously what that's doing overnight. So look at how much runoff you're pushing. If you're erring on the side of like 15 to 20% of your total feed volume is runoff, that might be a little too high to drive that feed, that EC up. If you're restricting runoff for a few days at a time and still not achieving that increase. And then at the same time when you do get runoff, noticing that that ph is starting to drift downward at that point, oftentimes we can look at it and say, okay, this plant is uptaking almost everything we're putting in every day, and it's really not allowing us to achieve a higher root zone ec. The easiest solution that I find in those situations, rather than restricting runoff too much, and oftentimes we're going to restrict runoff down to zero. But in those situations, we're looking at really a replacement problem with the amount of salt we're putting in.

Seth [00:09:40]:
And upping that feed Input to a 3.5 and very rarely a 4 is sometimes where we see the best ability to put that stack on and really provide the plant everything it needs. And upping that feed becomes way more important when you're running under today's modern high intensity LEDs. You know, if we can push 13, 14, 1500 PPFD at the canopy, the plants need a lot of nutrition to really support that level of growth. And if we're not providing everything in line in terms of environment and nutrition, those plants aren't gonna be able to perform at their optimum level. And that's where we'll usually see like bleaching, some fried tips and having to back off on that light input because we're just not giving the plant as much as it needs. And it's, you know, coming from outside plants commercially into cannabis commercially, I was personally shocked to see how much nutrit these plants can actually take up. You know, when we look at how cannabis has been bred and selected, most of the time we weren't looking at hay, especially in today's market with what's going on with breeders, we're generally breeding towards like the best smell potency and yield. And that doesn't really leave a lot of room.

Seth [00:10:57]:
And especially with limited research space, like we can't make one cross typically and pop 10,000 seeds and truly evaluate what that looks like. So we're making decisions on selection based on market quality, not necessarily growers quality, which in other crops we would look at saying, hey, this is a specific variety that you might run in a soil with lower nutrition availability because it doesn't seem to need as much to produce an acceptable yield. In cannabis, we don't have that. So as growers, we've got to really tune in and try to provide the plants what they need based on what they're telling us. And the more data input points we can get, the better picture we can paint of that. And you know, for a long time, the substrate EC and volumetric water content were a little bit of a mystery. Unless you had the ability to go put pots on a scale every day and start measuring those deltas and grams, which is very tough. And then the EC part of it, you know, we can do runoff sampling, we can do media sampling, is very difficult to in run, really compile that data and make it actionable in a time frame where you could use it.

Seth [00:12:08]:
And the more tools you can get to help you make those actionable decisions, like substrate sensors and 247 data analysis, you can really, really drive immediate change rather than having to wait, you know, two crops from now to really apply the lessons you might have learned from this crop.

Cian [00:12:30]:
I think that that is a glowing recommendation for crop registration and being able to get all that data put somewhere where look back on it and make actionable decisions. Because at the end of the day, you know, if you're noticing all these differences about how your plants grow, but you're not able to get any of that data put somewhere, you can make good decisions with it. You're not going to be able to understand what's going on and what changes you really need to make to be successful.

Seth [00:13:01]:
Yeah. And I think, you know, looking at some of the baseline data, understanding, I think maybe last episode you made a comment, Ian, about making the choice to, let's say, run a 3.5 EC input in a room where you might have three strains or four strains and only one of them needs it. But realizing that because you're measuring, you know, runoff pH, you're measuring your substrate EC, you're measuring your input EC, you've got enough of a picture to confidently say, hey, although I'm bumping this up for this one strain, it's not going to hurt any of my other strains. You know, in the example of 3.5, they've built up to, let's say a 5.5 to a 7.5. That 3.5 is not going to phase them compared to the 3.0 on the input. You might just push a little more runoff and that's about it. And there's a right back to crop registration. With the more notes, more data, you can start to evaluate how much risk different decisions come with and then decide, you know, long term in a particular system, should you run certain strains together, should you not do certain strains just not fit your cultivation style? That's totally possible.

Cian [00:14:13]:
And I think that that's something that, you know, a lot of people sometimes are reluctant to consider because we all have favorites, we all like the way certain things look. And I mean, for me, unfortunately, my taste is almost always not market taste. And so the things that I really like to grow, the things that I really like to see out of my plants aren't necessarily market wide trends that are going to earn me money in terms of, you know, increased price on my per pound value when it comes to what I bring to the table. And as a result of that, I've learned to have to curate what I grow more to the taste of, you know, who's going to be buying my product rather than what I personally want. And one of those scenarios that that's led to is, you know, what Seth was talking about, having a room where several plants that I'm running are feeding quite differently than a strain that is or a cultivar that is, you know, not quite hitting the EC goals that I'm wanting it to hit. And the old saying that I've always heard is it's really hard to overfeed your plants. And that's generally speaking the first thing that I think of because, you know, you're as long as you're not going to hurt your plants by moving into a toxic EC range. The marginal cost of increasing that EC from a 3 to a 3.5 is nothing.

Cian [00:15:43]:
When it comes to seeing a qualitative increase in your yield or your overall TERP profile quality that brings you a higher price.

Seth [00:15:53]:
Absolutely. And I think you'll agree, SI and just having been in the market a while, any market especially, it's being accelerated now. On the west coast it took a little while to have that rollover from there's this explosion of available market space. All these producers are trying to fill it and trying to fill it with the most amount of bulk product possible. Once we get a few years into it and market saturation hits, that rollover to quality becomes extremely important. On the west coast we're seeing a couple hundred bucks a pound, easily premium on just getting, you know, we've talked about this ad nauseam, but just getting that plant to be purple. And as the market becomes more and more educated, we're seeing, you know, it's not even just purple now, it's terpene profiles. Terpene content.

Seth [00:16:42]:
You know, what, what do those trichomes look like under a macro lens? How long? Yeah, exactly. As that becomes more paramount, we're shifting into a market where investing in your facility, knowledge and abilities is becoming far more relevant than being able to necessarily keep a huge machine rolling. As that market saturation hits, we see some bigger companies rise and fall, we see a bunch of small companies rise and fall. But after things stabilize, we really see a niche for all types of producers. You know, from full term outdoor light, depth guys, hybrid, greenhouse guys, full indoor, HPS led. The market diversifies. But at the end of the day, no matter what system you find with your niche, you've got to be able to make it repeatable and profitable, otherwise you're not going to stay in business. That's just unfortunately how business works.

Seth [00:17:47]:
The cool thing about that is you can use all these data points that you're collecting both automatically and manually to really steer that, that consistency you need in your business to keep it going. You know, like I personally wait for the day that the, the buying public by and large is looking at seeing HPS grown on a bag. And that being a selling point, because on the grower side we have a huge amount of people that swear by hps and it does have a pretty good spectrum to offer in terms of plan expression. That's why it's not totally going away, despite the fact that bulbs are getting more expensive and rare. And is there an immediate solution to that? Maybe, maybe not. But if that's part of the sauce that helps you sell your product. Why not embrace it? You know, we see the same thing with organics, synganics, everything from living soil to, I mean, you name it, right?

Cian [00:18:56]:
Well, I think you bring up a really interesting point, which is that, you know, a big part of our market today isn't just how good your flower is. It's, you know, what's your niche? And are you able to successfully market that to a group of people that want that niche? And you, you know, in my specific case, if I was to bring product to the table that didn't have the right terpene profiles, the right names, or for that matter, you know, maybe we're just a shade lighter than something someone else brought in that same day. That's, you know, potentially a couple hundred dollars to several hundred dollars difference on the pounds that I bring to the table versus what they're paying for other premium product. And, and it's really important to take those things into consideration in today's market because the margins are getting so slim.

Seth [00:19:51]:
Yeah, absolutely. We've really talked about this in the past, but I think it's a good time to dive into it because as the market gets more competitive, the ultimate thing that really keeps coming up for producers is the ability of your facility to be able to adapt and produce whatever it needs to. In the current marketplace, similar to many other industries, we all come into this probably hoping that things are going to be a certain way and you might have a lot of experience with certain strains that you've actually really dialed in with a particular growing system. But if the market dictates you need to move one way or the other or grow certain things to just remain active in that market. The emphasis on reinvesting into your business to constantly make it as cutting edge as possible and able to produce whatever it needs to for the market is increasingly important because as these new markets come online, I mentioned this earlier, we see a compression in that amount of time from bulk production over to boutique production. And if you've ever had the opportunity to participate in some of that scaling, as you grow size in your business, it becomes increasingly difficult to scale to the attention to detail that the boutique style production requires requires to really produce that top shelf quality and make it manageable in a business sense. So the longer you want to stay in business, the more you're going to need to invest and ultimately look at saying, hey, do I want this business to go on 2 years, 5 years, 10 years? And well, fortunately, with cannabis usually that upfront investment pays itself off very quickly compared to not only other forms of agriculture, but actually a lot of business spaces. If that revenue is managed properly.

Cian [00:21:54]:
I think we could probably go on here for a little while about this. Seems like, you know, the market's so tough right now that it's easy to get sucked into the idea of changing things and manipulating what you're doing quickly to try and, you know, keep up. And in some cases they're, you know, there are real reasons to make quick changes. And like with the HPS market currently, there's a lot of growers out there that swear by them and that are finding higher price for their packs as a result of the quality that they're bringing to the table. And many of them in that HPS category feel that they owe it to those lights in the spectrum that they're getting, or potentially some other quality, like the heat that those are producing for them. And it's a difficult proposition to immediately invest money and see a big return on that investment. In the cannabis industry, in a lot of ways, there are areas where that's possible, but I always like to remind people to be pragmatic. When you're making choices.

Cian [00:23:12]:
Think about how do you scale responsibly and how do you maintain as much of that precision like Seth was talking about as you scale? Because, I mean, if you're segmented in a market that really demands quality and you start pushing for yield, you may find out that as a result of pushing for yield, you can't count on the price level that you were sitting at before.

Seth [00:23:36]:
Yeah, and some of the hard decisions to make sometimes are, you know, when do I cut my losses? And I think a lot of people take that phrase to me, like, when do I pull the crop, when do I kill it and start over? That's obviously an extreme. There's very small parts of any business where you can make a call at, when do I cut my losses? And sometimes for cannabis growers, let's just use the example of upgrading from HPS to led. Maybe we had a great spec out on the lights, we got a good deal. But by the math, hey, we've got maybe 20 pints of dehu per 2,000 watts of LED input. We're just vastly underneath. Okay, this month, is upgrading that dehu an option? Can you do it during this flip, or has this all been determined a little too late in the production cycle? With the number of plants, you have to necessarily make a big construction improvement to the room? If not, well, if we already know we're going to be vastly under capacity and that the D hue is the limiting factor. The reality is we're either going to turn down the lights, or we can shut off some lights and shut off some rows. Now, is that appealing to the eyes? No.

Seth [00:24:53]:
But if I am so far under capacity on the H vac that I can't actually run my 12 benches, I might be able to save some money shutting off two rows of lights and running the 10 benches and probably still get about the same yield as if I ran those 12 benches at the lower H vac capacity. Despite the fact that I have that much more light. I'm just not gonna be able to produce that much growth. And those are some of the hard pragmatic decisions to make as an operator in this space. Because the market does fluctuate up and down so much. And, you know, as much as it's nice to have, let's say, a super flush, actually, no one wants a super flush. Full vault area. You want all your stuff sold as quickly as possible.

Seth [00:25:36]:
But, you know, sometimes the. There's a recognition that comes in that says, hey, I've had product sitting for like three months. We're shoving that to distillate profit margins lower. Okay. Well, at a certain point, and this has been my experience in the extract market, particularly once I'm really pushing it just to distillate, really might have not been worth it to put the dollars into growing that and then holding onto it for three months and then putting it to distillate. You know, and as much as that is not fun to look at, saying, hey, we might be overgrowing our market, you can certainly run a more sustainable business if you're growing just as much as you need to sell and can slowly pace that up.

Cian [00:26:21]:
And, you know, I think that brings up a good point. We. We talk about trying to scale responsibly a lot. And, you know, that's a big. Is looking at what your market can bear, how big your business is, how much you're growing, what quality it is, what your price premium is, and trying to make a decision of whether or not you're trying to flood the market or whether you're trying to corner the market on quality. Because personally, from what I've seen, the people who are really pushing for quality are the ones that right now are getting the. A premium on prices and are not worried about paying bills.

Seth [00:27:00]:
Correct. And, you know, a big part of that, too, is just evaluating your overhead. You know, this is. This is another one of those businesses much like Any other small to mid size entrepreneurial endeavor, whether it's a restaurant, a construction company, I mean, you name it in a similar price space, assume you're not going to make money for a few years and go at it with that attitude. You know, I think there's still a lot of perceived glamour around this industry, but really commodity prices have hit and fortunately if you can manage your overhead costs with still a pretty, it's still the highest priced crop we produce in America. So you, you have room to be successful. And I think at this point there's, it's tough to wade through all the resources that are out there, but there's enough examples of what has worked, what hasn't worked, and even examples of, you know, people I know that grow some phenomenal weed at great yields. But may and oftentimes it's not even the operators, it's, you know, two years before that with planning, the business made some critical errors on either location, water quality, just a bunch of things in overhead costs in principle that prevent the business from performing the way it should.

Seth [00:28:27]:
And enough people have made those mistakes that we can learn from it. Well.

Cian [00:28:33]:
And that brings into another question that I got from Instagram here that I think is awesome and it really kind of points out the equity of how you make choices. Right. IG question Shane, EG grows says, what are you saying? Are the biggest investors investments to last the test of time? What's your thoughts on that?

Seth [00:28:55]:
I mean personally I. Well, not personally, objectively. H Vac is always going to be a very limiting thing. And by limiting there's a few different things to talk about there. Number one is capacity so that you can increase your light input to really maximize the growth potential in these plants. Oftentimes that means pushing it up to 13, 1400 PPF to I don't know if we'll see needing to go higher than that, but that requires a high level of dehumidification. And depending on where you're at, let's just talk about like where, where I'm sitting right now this morning I think it was something like 34 degrees and 94% humidity. That is a weird climate to try to dehumidify and deal with, you know, a poorly insulated structure.

Seth [00:29:42]:
So if I'm growing here, I need to make the investment into facilities being very well sealed, very controllable and having a bunch of dehu capacity because it's a very wet a lot of the year. If I'm in, let's say central Arizona, different set of conditions, but no matter what. That environmental control is very important because when we're talking about optimal plant growth, it really goes back to VPD in that environment, light input. And obviously it's holistic approach. But if you can't maintain, let's say between a 1.2 to 1.4 average VPD and we'll adjust that a little bit based on temperature and you know, leaf surface temperature on the plants, but if you can't maintain that tight vpd, you're not going to keep your plants in their optimal range of transpiration and therefore production for the duration of your run. So if you wanted to make investments H Vac, very important, one of the next ones would be lights. You know, make sure you're getting a spectrum and output ability that's going to be competitive in today's market. And by that I mean you need to have, if you're going LEDs, you need high power LEDs.

Seth [00:30:54]:
You know, in some situations lower wattage panels in the 7 to 900 watt range are good. Some situations the easier replacement for let's say thousand watt double ended is the 2000 watt roughly high bay fixtures. Those are also great. But right back to it. Understand that you're going to have some environmental demands based on that. And then one of the next ones is control and cleanliness. So as far as cleanliness goes, you want to have your system designed in a way that's very easy to clean. You know, we're talking about things like powdery mildew.

Seth [00:31:28]:
One of the things that keeps coming up is the inability to just actually clean all the spots that can hide in a facility once you have it in there. So if you're looking at designing any of your H vac, keep that in mind. Can you isolate rooms so that you contain any kind of contamination to one room? Or is a small point of an infection going to just blow up to the whole facility? If you've got 12 rooms and you've got them paired for different H vac functions, you but you know, you might open yourself to the ability to cross contaminate these rooms. And that's something you certainly don't want. And then irrigation wise, anytime you're designing an irrigation system, there's what I like to say is like the manufacturing efficiency side versus the usability side for what we're trying to do. And we're talking about crop steering through irrigation, ultimate controllability, water on demand, anytime you want it, at any time of the day, for whatever duration you need is the ultimate goal. So when you're designing that system. If you have, let's say, one injector, well, not just one injector, but one skid or two skids or three skids, do you have the feed line ability to put that water where it needs to be at any given time without competing with another room? And if you've designed your system in such a way that you can't do that, well, you've certainly limited yourself there.

Seth [00:32:52]:
So as far as where to put your money, I mean, lights, H vac, irrigation, cleanliness. That way you can adapt if you have the irrigation control to grow four wildly different really finicky strains and then also hold VPD temp in the environment you want. So here's. Here's another great point about where I live. If I'm looking at how do I dehumidify things in the winter, it's really not that bad because I've got a blast heat to keep things warm enough, even just to keep my plants up at 65 overnight, late in flower, I'm still blasting the heat. That allows me to burn off a lot of humidity. That's a different strategy than what I might employ in Southern California or Arizona, where I'm actually using AC to do that. And that's the other side of this equation.

Seth [00:33:46]:
Being able to lower your temperature all the way down. I mean, you know, we're talking as a general goal. If you can give me 45 humidity at 63 degrees Fahrenheit, you've got a system that's going to be able to be adaptable to produce almost any cultivar you want at an acceptable quality. And if you've been running any room that's probably bigger than a thousand square feet in the last 10 years, those might sound like some fairly scary and difficult numbers to hit. But that's the reality of where you need to be making those investments. So that you can take a strain like a lemon cherry gelato, for instance, and really hit it with that big temperature differential and ensure that you're going to be able to pass coas for things like mold. And also, you know, at the end of the day, really get that Deep purple expression and terp profile that clients are looking for. Because that's also a big part of the equation, is being able to manipulate that environment in terms of temperature and humidity and maintain those.

Seth [00:34:47]:
Because if we can't hit those set points reliably and regularly, we're just not gonna be able to get that consistency back to the old, you know, camo packs argument, which, hey, it's valid, right? You Know, if you're, If I buy £5 and I'm trying to put it into something more marketable, jars can't look different.

Cian [00:35:09]:
Absolutely. Well, you know, and it's really one of those things where in our industry, if you are going to be spending money, you want to make sure that it really gets you somewhere, because as we've been talking about, the margins are not necessarily there to support wild choices that don't really produce some sort of measurable return on your investment. And I think Seth makes a really good point here, which is that a lot of people for a lot of time found out how they could grow better and better quality by manipulating their environment and their irrigation cues up to a certain point. And many people will tell you that they hit a wall where at a certain point their system capacity failed them and they could not grow or scale beyond the system capacity that they had. And, and that comes down to planning and understanding what you want out of a system ahead of time, which I think we can all agree, unfortunately is one of those things that's very difficult to do unless you have a lot of specific experience in designing a facility and finding out how it works.

Seth [00:36:24]:
Yeah. And I think, though, see, and that's one thing that I talked about earlier and I always talk about it, there is a compendium of knowledge out there now, whether it's listening to podcasts like this, talking to people. You know, we're hitting a point in the industry where sure, there's some, there's some special sauce here and there on maybe what people are doing with nutrients, what they're doing with, you know, particularly genetics is a huge part of it. But you know, I, I, the best way to put this is I have clients that I have permission to share their grass graphs. Why? Because they're like, well, go turn all the levers to make that happen. I don't care if someone screenshots that like, they don't know all of my set points, all of my irrigation schedules, everything that I do that goes into producing this very consistent graph. And as we, you know, get farther and farther into the side of the industry like those, so much more of the sauce. In running a successful business is running a successful business.

Seth [00:37:31]:
Cultivation is certainly difficult. It requires a level of detail that is meticulous, it requires dedication. You know, I mean, it's a, it's a three month process from cut to cut. Just the way it goes. That, that certainly requires attention to detail. But if the other sides of that business are ignored, it still isn't going to work out. So we're really hitting a point where now that we know that using just a little bit of math, a lot of hardware knowledge, we can pretty much go grow good quality product anywhere, as we've seen. I mean, take pretty much anywhere in the world.

Seth [00:38:12]:
As long as you can get enough power, enough power and decent water, you can grow some good cannabis just by shipping in your media, shipping in your nutrients, maintaining a good environment. And now that, that's the reality, it. There really isn't as much of an investment into people keeping secrets. It's a, it's, it's just a big culture shift that's happening and really it's happened much more over the past two years, I would say, you know, even when I started working at with Arroyo, like a lot of people are a little more reserved on certain things. But in that time, those same people have, you know, times, just by asking, being asked to do some consulting projects and stuff with other companies, been exposed to seeing more growth. You know, at, at the beginning of this journey, they might have worked at like two or three places. Now they've seen two dozen and they, you know, kind of come to this conclusion like, oh, hey, we kind of. Most of us that are banging our heads against these problems settle on a lot of the same solutions.

Seth [00:39:17]:
At least the ones that work, work. So that's not the sauce. A lot of the sauce is like making sure everything gets done on time and that nothing gets missed. And I mean, I'll, I'll always say that is a way bigger challenge than understanding what's going on with your plants.

Cian [00:39:35]:
I would say that's always been the biggest variable I've had to deal with personally. Well, I want to steer us a little bit more towards that conversation we were having about lights for a second here. We have a question that came in from Larry Hoover who says, hey guys, love everything you do and the wealth of knowledge y'all share. I have a question regarding hps. Double ended thousand watt lux for a couple sources that the higher EC feed isn't recommended for growing under HPS. Currently feeding at a 2.4 EC, pH is 5.9 to a 6 and I'm in 2 gallon coco coirs. I'm in weeks 1 through 5 right now in my. My cultivars are reading 1.5 EC in the substrate.

Cian [00:40:20]:
After my dryback, the EC only started stacking once I started to hit my veg and bulking towards the end of week four. Start of week five temps are usually 78 to day and then 77 at night with humidity in the 70% range. VPD at 0.9 to 1. We know light intensity in environments are the engines driving the irrigation strategy. So if you could please give me a rundown on the ideal growing conditions for an HPS setup and whether or not I can keep feeding at my current level or go a little bit higher.

Seth [00:40:57]:
Yeah, so from what you're saying, you're seeing like a 1.5 EC in substrate feeding a 2.4. That plants uptaking a lot of nutrition, really making it difficult to stack. Now if you're pushing a decent amount of runoff, you're able to maintain pH. That input sounds good. That's very normal. 5.9, 6.0. That's actually right where we want to be. One of the variables with thousand watt HPS lights, I don't have it pulled up.

Seth [00:41:24]:
I have a, I have a great fun background that's a good old,ousand watt HPS room with ten foot ceilings and lamps strapped to the top of it growing huge plants. That example is funny because those plants are so tall, because the lights are so high high. If you are running a thousand watt HPS room where after stretch your plants are about three to three and a half feet from the lights, you know, then we're looking at getting up into that thousand or so PPFD range. If they're 4 to 6ft, then we're way down at that like 500 to 600 PPFD where that 2.4 input feed might actually be pretty acceptable for those plants. But once we're hitting those higher PPFD, that's typically when we start feeding a 3.0, and that's 3.0 has become an industry standard for a variety of reasons. You'll see it everywhere from 2.7 to 3.2, but under typical high intensity PPFD growing conditions that we see, that's what's necessary to really keep up with plant nutrition. And when you see that EC not stacking up and continuing to stack back up, that's when we'll see just general underfeeding. And it's not always expressed in, you know, bad, bad plant health.

Seth [00:42:43]:
A lot of times where we see that is actually in those yield analysis and COA results where we're seeing like hey, this plant, excuse me, displayed a lower level of potency or a lower yield. And just going to draw a little chart real quick to kind of show what some of that underfeeding might look like if you have a T12 or a T1. So I don't have Yellow, but I do have blue and red. So let's say we're coming in, going up, going generative, and then we've got our EC going up, down, and then let's say we see it go flat and this is lights on. Okay. So as water content goes down in the media, we would typically expect to see salt concentration going up as the plant is typically pulling up more water than salt. However, during the nighttime period we're seeing plants pull up more salt as in the daytime they're using that water primarily for photosynthesis and building shore sugar. Nighttime, that water is a vector for nutrition to come up into the plants.

Seth [00:44:01]:
And sometimes what we'll see is actually instead of this spike like this, we'll see something a little more like this and it comes up with irrigation at your 1.5 EC, it's more likely what you're seeing. And when it goes up in bulk and you're actually just adding enough volume of water throughout the day to actually dump more grams of salt into the media and raise that up. So, so, you know, it's important to identify how much ppfd, how much input energy you're giving these plants and then look for some of the signs of underfeeding. You know, light yellowing of the leaves, especially on new growth, is a sign that you're not providing enough nutrition. If you have subdrate sensors, like I said, flat lining and actually if your EC line ever is parallel to your water content dryback line, that's most likely you're under feeding. And oftentimes especially if you have, let's say you go from that thousand Watt double ended, 900 or 2,000 watt LED setup, you might bump it up. And even some under some HPS setups with certain strains we'll bump it up to a 3.5 for the first three to four weeks just to keep up with that and allow us to get that stack well.

Cian [00:45:15]:
And I mean that's kind of one of those big things I think to harp on is that if you are looking at an HPS room and, and you are seeing results like you know, rams horning, light yellowing, things like that, but you are scared of overfeeding your plants. Don't, don't be scared to bump it up a little bit because the reality is you're leaving money on the table by under feeding those plants in a situation where they are trying harder than they should be to acquire the necessary nutrients and you're under providing. So there's a disparity between what they actually want. And what's available, available. And especially as you start to get into the bulking phase where you want that to have as comfortable of a condition as it can to be able to produce the optimal buds, you know, you really don't want to have that condition existing that way. And in an ideal world, you really want to try to make sure that, that if you're seeing any of those signs or symptoms. My personal first thing to do is to raise my EC because I know that it's really hard to get into toxic ranges. And so, you know, for me, if I'm sitting there and seeing, you know, some ramshorn, some yellowing on the leaves, and personally I do grow under hps, my first thought is never going to be, is this going to hurt my plant if I go from a3.0 to a 3.5, it's going to be how much money am I leaving on the table if I don't do that soon enough?

Seth [00:46:56]:
Yeah. And that's why I always say, like, you know, always have patience running a program. If you're not killing your plants and you're just seeing some tip burning a little, you know, what you think might be subpar performance, wait until you get those yield and COA numbers. You know, once you get that cannabinoid test, once you get that terpene test, you can really have an evaluation of what you did. And you can certainly work on small tweaks from there, but the effect of changing strategies midway through the run, and the earlier you change it, the bigger impact it can have on that yield. And part of the journey in running a cannabis growing facility is finding out how to minimize or eliminate as many variables as possible. And from the grower's perspective, that's helping you just figure out what the hell's going on. You know, when you can look at one thing at a time, you can really evaluate what had an impact.

Seth [00:47:54]:
When you look at it from a financial perspective, you can also evaluate what's actually impacting my cogs. Where, where are some of these big problems? Because you might find that in certain situations, you know, one of the latest things coming up in the industry are not super late us, but really making a big impact on facilities that are maxed out in certain ways is under canopy lighting. Even before, under canopy lighting was a thing where I worked for years, you know, we, we found in our market pre rolls started to demand a pretty significant part of our product. Okay, we can save a lot on labor just by changing our defoliation practices and shifting from a higher percentage of A bud to producing more B bud, but upping our overall biomass and having a market for that product. And those are some of the ways that growers have to adapt going forward here. You know, once you've settled into a space, you know, as much as we all want to be hopeful, when you're looking at the kind of margins we're, we're working with here, you, you, it's really difficult to move spaces every two years. The money's just not there. There's.

Seth [00:49:09]:
I, I don't know anyone getting $4,500 a pound anymore. There certainly was a time, but that's not today. And you've just got to decide. And I think that's also one of the other things we're seeing and I think, you know, seeing working with a bunch of people all over the country, you see this too. A lot of the operators that are more invested for the long term, are the, the companies also generating some of the best success?

Cian [00:49:37]:
I would say that that's absolutely true. You know, a lot of the people that are, I would say by and large the most successful out there that I talk to are, you know, they're targeting a lot of these basic principles and making sure that their business strategy is as sound as possible. And one of the biggest places that I think a lot them talk similarly about the amount of effort that they put in is just making sure that the system that they're running is consistently able to produce a result that they're able to sell. And you know, we would all, like I said at the beginning of the show, love to be able to just grow whatever we want that makes us all happy. But at the end of the day, it's really about what goes to market and what we're able to make return on investment, investment. And in a lot of these situations that that dictates the choices that we get to make. Well, before we wrap up today, let's do another question in here that I thought was an interesting one about breeding. So we have this one who is from Cairo dropped this question into might have an Instagram.

Cian [00:51:00]:
Any tips on breeding specifically stress event to mutate genetics in a positive way. Is it beneficial to breed plants in outdoor environments or potentially more for indoor? Is it acceptable to potentially have strains move into an indoor environment if they've been bred in an outdoor environment or vice versa? And then follow up to this question. If a strain has been bred for an indoor environment and has grown outdoors, would this potentially be a reason why it is producing black ash versus White white ash?

Seth [00:51:36]:
Yeah, so let's, let's tear that apart a little bit. I think one important thing to realize is that breeding is simply pollen being crossed onto a female plant part. So if I make a cross, whether that is indoors, under hps, outdoors, that's not going to have a big effect on the genetic variability. What's going to change? The expression that I see is the conditions that I selected under. Under it. So the most important thing there is when you're selecting. So, and by selecting, I mean, hey, we have a cross, we have X amount of seeds, and I've talked about this in the show. The, the most difficult part about that is with cannabis, the winner you might be looking for might mathematically be 1 in 10,000.

Seth [00:52:25]:
So how much space do you have to pop these seeds? The other one is what kind of environment are you growing it under? You know, if you're looking to do this pheno hunt or do this seed hunt and try to do breeding generation after generation, each generation of breeding, unless you're doing some synthetic crossing, which that has nothing to do with chemicals, that's about open pollination in a room among a population of plants for several generations. What we're looking to do is grow plants out in the exact type of environment that we intend to continue growing them out throughout the lineage that are the breeding line of that plant. So if I want a plant that's going to perform under hps, I'm going to not so much breed, but select each generation, select those genetics that I choose to keep via seed to the next generation under hps. So I'm intentionally narrowing that gene pool to give me the best expression under those conditions. If you're growing outside, that's a different set of conditions you want to select under. So as far as breeding goes, I think the most important thing is really, again, just select for your conditions and then in today's market, obviously select for the best possible quality. Yield is certainly a consideration and then ease of growth, because another side of it is going down the road that, like, hey, I've selected something and it's super susceptible to mold. So for instance, if you're a greenhouse grower and you're feno hunting, this is something I've done even before being in cannabis with peas and garbanzo beans and don't do this, but I've unintentionally done it with cannabis.

Seth [00:54:17]:
Put your shit through the ringer, go inoculate it with powdery mildew, you hit it with some Fusarium, see what you know, go like screening is just exposing it to horrible conditions and seeing what happens despite the fact that you're trying to run everything normally. And if you have the space to do that, by all means do it. In cannabis right now, there's not really a need because as we talked about just a little bit ago, like, improving your facility or your grow environment right now is probably the best way to gain traction in the marketplace and actually grow your business. Cannabis is unfortunately so far behind other crops on breeding things like water, water use efficiency, fertilizer efficiency, disease resistance, because it's so driven by consumer quality and growers, because we can operate in a space. I mean, let's just talk about regular farming. You know, one acre is a little under 43,000 square feet. A typical wheat field that I used to work with is 600 acres. You know, we can control the kind of space that it's profitable to grow cannabis in very well.

Seth [00:55:28]:
So it kind of changes the breeding goals from what can I go plant on a 600 acre field and be the most easy to grow, disease resistant crop possible to what can I grow that gives me, you know, the most sellability to the end user rather than being an industrial commodity?

Cian [00:55:50]:
Sorry, I was muted there. It also changes a bunch of the factors that go into the breeding of our crop. Because if you think about it like what Seth was just saying there, you know, 600 acres versus even at the larger scales, an acre under cultivation, under light is a huge difference in the amount of genetic variability that you can weed out of any specific cultivar that you're working with. Because if you're looking at growing, you know, let's say that one acre of indoor cultivation space versus that 600, how many potential phenotype for idols are used? Not seeing that would allude to the cultivar you are working with right now potentially being much less stable than you currently think it is. And the hard answer is, we don't know.

Seth [00:56:47]:
Well, dude, I can give a great example. Like seeing you got to smoke some of that blood honey I grew, great. Smell was great. But it wasn't done. Like, it just, in my opinion, wasn't done. You could equate that to like, I didn't do the best job drying and curing it, little black ash trash. But ultimately when I held it up to a loop, the trichomes didn't have the appearance I wanted. I would say after smoking it, it wasn't done.

Seth [00:57:11]:
And I ran that thing fairly generative for 65 days. Is there potential there? Sure. Next time I grow out, will I take it out to 75 days. Absolutely. Is that a cut that I'm gonna go sell to other commercial growers? Not right now, because I don't know many people that would be. I wouldn't guarantee that they're going to be happy with that expression at 65 days, even running it fairly generatively. So despite the fact that I think it's got potential, it's got a cool terp profile, it's, you know, hard to take a picture of because it looks almost black and your picture comes back just all sparkly. Doesn't mean it's a winner.

Seth [00:57:56]:
And in that particular case, I have to go. Okay. I asked a few friends, I did a little research. It's awesome. But awesome doesn't equal profitable.

Cian [00:58:10]:
Yep. And I think that that's one of the big things that we've been harping on all day is that, you know, the things that make us happy as the cultivators aren't necessarily always what makes the market happy. And spending a little time researching that and making sure you're growing what the market you selling to wants you to be selling them is just as important as making sure that your curing practices are in line, your irrigation practices are in line. Because it's a full picture. Right. You could grow fantastic cultivar all the way to termination and it look as good as you ever think you have grown anything and go to market and find out that your broker's only willing to give you 700 less than things that you've got from gotten to him in the past and from personal experience. Well, the lesson there isn't that your broker's wrong.

Seth [00:59:10]:
Yep. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately that's just, just the reality to it. And I think one thing both you and I can kind of assure people on is, you know, as long as you can manage to find a sweet spot where you can stick it out over, over time. And you know that that involves not only growing, but running a stable business, having the marketing and branding to work with everything to make it happen. If you can really work hard and a lot of times that means involved, that means being involved in collaborations with other people and other businesses to make it happen. But if you can make that part work for just like in a lot of other businesses, one to two years and just stay stabilize after that, you know, once you, once you have a lot of investment paid off and stuff, you, you then have freedom to pursue some of those more passion driven things. I do know some very successful people that did just that and they now can start driving a little more their passion, what they think is the best smoke in the industry.

Seth [01:00:17]:
You know, they can put that out there and say, hey, I like this. I like that this is what we're going to grow. But for every person I know doing that, there's a couple years of hard work, adaptability, and putting in the effort to just make sure they got to the point where they had the luxury of doing that too.

Cian [01:00:37]:
True. Well, I think I ought to pull us out and start getting us wrapped up for the day. Thank you guys, everyone who's tuned in to ask us live questions today. If we didn't ask them right now, they will probably get asked either this next episode or sometime coming up in the future here. So stay tuned. Thanks, Seth, for jumping on today and our producer Chris as well for another great session. And guys, please put any of your questions in DMS at Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or send an email into salesrooyaio. We'd love to hear from you and it helps drive us in a good direction so that we're making podcasts you guys want to listen to.

Cian [01:01:16]:
Please smash that like button. Leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, wherever you caught our podcast today and tune into us next week for episode one 133.