Note: transcript is AI-generated.

all right it's thursday 4 20 p.m. that means it's time for office hours aroya's weekly session for cultivators to hear from the experts and talk to each other about what they're seeing with their grows my name is kasia i'll be co-moderating today with my good friend mandy what's up hey akisha i'm over here fielding questions so if you guys got one uh go ahead and type it in the chat at any time um so if anyone's got a question live on our show go ahead and mute yourself and you can ask away or i'll ask for you we're also going live on our arroya channel so you can go ahead and join us over there if you're not able to join us here we're taking questions too and uh subscribe and uh you'll never miss any of the education that's going on on our channel there's so much that we add to it to it every week so uh yeah back to you okay awesome thank you mandy okay so first time question asks askers you're going to get swag and everybody who's on today will have a chance to win a limited edition or a t-shirt all you have to do is type your email address into the chat for your chance to win we're limiting that to us residents and one winner per household seth and jason how are you guys i'm doing well yeah good today how about you kaisha i'm good good to see you guys are you ready for our first question from instagram why not this is a great one this is from our friends at river city growers they ask how important is labor organization and delegation and how much can it cost you if you aren't doing it right and he also left the note loving tasks by the way i mean i guess on the worst case it can cost you so much that you can no longer operate your business and nobody has labor anymore uh at your facility so that would be definitely the worst case uh you know i think best case is is that you have a perfect balance on how much hands-on that your plants need the appropriate amount of process touching and those types of activities to keep the best product that you can and yet still produce as much wasted labor as possible yeah i mean this is another agricultural industry you know at its heart and uh typically the way most of horticulture and agriculture has gone over you know the course of human civilization is we're always attempting to get more outputs with less inputs and traditionally one of the most expensive and most difficult to obtain inputs is labor so if you're not organized you're going to be very wasteful and you know also even if you're not just losing money if you don't have good organization your product quality is going to suffer your yields will suffer it's not even just about being wasteful in terms of man hours but you also have to have a competent crew that is well organized and can do things efficiently and as the industry gets more and more competitive it does becomes one of the most critical factors at your facility is making sure that you've got qualified happy employees that are getting the work done as efficiently as they can without extra staff that that isn't getting stuff done so you know let's use like a traditional industry for example and the strawberry industry there's a really high level of automation it's a very seriously scaled system of cultivation and i think that the cultivators only get to touch the strawberry once or they start to lose money in there so pretty much everything else has to be perfectly in line and they get a pick those strawberries and if any other labor goes into it they lose money obviously now in the cannabis industry there's a there's a lot of extra profitability to be made and we can have some amount of wasted labor going into the process but but that is definitely one area that i like to to look at and cut it cut into if at all possible yeah as the industry moves forward i think you nail it it's getting more and more competitive and different growers are approaching different markets some of that becomes more and more important if you're a boutique grower that's getting top dollar for your straight flower well you can afford to put a little more on if you're uh you know we're moving into a market where there are people growing strictly for concentrates okay well at that point we've really got to look at you know what is the benefit to every time we touch the plant if none of it's going to market do we really need to focus on like you know bag appeal what we really want to focus on is you know cannabinoid content and uh probably you know different characteristics about making that plant easier to process so there it's much more important you know we're dealing with a plant that's after being made into concentrate less valuable the plant itself is much less valuable by weight than flour and when we look at the cultivation processes there's there's things that you can do to make labor optimization easier you know if we look at some of the traditional amounts of energy going into things like topping and over de-leafing um specific genetics can definitely offer a pathway into reducing how much labor is going into your work there yeah and it's i think it's important to evaluate some certain practices you're doing and you know if you've always de-leafed a certain way let's say you go with four d-leafs throughout your cycle and they're evenly spaced and you feel like that's the way to do it you might be leaving something on the table and you may not have the data you need to compare that to not doing these practices and now there's enough people out there that have done it enough different ways if you can read around and look at people's results you can kind of get an idea for what's starting to work the best because a lot of times you know there are things that might bother us when we look at the plants as far as wanting them to look a very certain way like if we want if we want a plant to look exactly like some of the best pictures that you've ever seen in high times or online a lot of those plants are manicured right before harvest to have nice big buds you know most of the you know it's just like the rest of the world you don't you don't see a picture of a dirty sports car they clean it up i just use the filters on my ipods oh yeah yeah

so i mean yeah there's a lot of things you can look at and try to find places that you can reduce labor costs and you know that only comes around when you've got good organization and a good way to quantify and monitor how much work's getting done per unit per unit of labor input

i love this topic especially at a time right now cultivators are dealing with a lot the market's crazy all over the country um can you guys speak to a little bit of like how arroya does help with task management river city growers straight out with like loving tasks by the way so yeah maybe we can give our our audience a little bit of an idea of how aurora kind of helps with labor kind of streamlining um the labor practices and so forth yeah absolutely so i think the the first way that it does it is just building a uniform consolidated digital growth journal so when we look at capturing data from agro a lot of this used to be done in just in journals written down walking bench for bench capturing maybe runoff readings maybe moisture and easy readings too and so obviously the digital grove journal so if we pair that with an automated sensor system where it's instantly capturing that type of stuff it's all going into one system so even if you are taking manual readings on top of that it's way easier to just type right into the database than it is to transcribe it from a journal i know i spent a lot of hours doing that type of work back in the days of cultivating uh before we were working on aroya oh yeah and even just utilizing the recipe to have your task task reminders automated so basically you know you apply your recipe you've got a calendar now it saves a lot of time versus going back and forth between spreadsheets and staring at a whiteboard calendar and counting out days every few days and figuring out when everything's going to happen this just consolidates that all in one place especially if you have you know three four or five you know when we we have clients that have quite a few flower rooms and it would be really hard to keep track of all those schedules without some sort of tool to automate that task organization it you know it would be a whole i mean for a lot of people it can be a whole couple hours a day just trying to organize all the tasks that have to happen in the facility especially if it's a bigger one yeah and i'm glad you brought up the whiteboard thing what if uh one of our ux designers and early in the stages they said well if we're very successful we're going to uh we're going to take over the whiteboard industry because no one will need them anymore and obviously that's that's never going to be completely true uh but but i think we've done a pretty good job of utilizing computer systems to put it up on a screen and we see it at tons of facilities where they have a facility dashboard up where they have a control room where they're looking at this type of thing and going back to the whiteboard there was one time where it was day 28 when i left on friday and it was day 28 when i came back in on monday uh and that's one one thing that's nice about computers is obviously we're not having to go in and update that whiteboard manually and we can apply those schedules so that the right activities go on the right days regardless of whether the staff is is there and has time to update that type of stuff yeah and you know at this point where you know most facilities are somewhat of a melding between a farm and a factory everything we're doing is cyclical and ideally we're doing it you know as close to the exact same every time as possible for consistency so there's really no reason not to utilize some sort of automated system to track that

you know it does so much it consolidates it simplifies it helps you with consistency and accuracy so yeah i mean these are all things that we love over here we do have a lot of questions coming in so uh i wanted to move on to a slightly different topic well let's just talk about the one one more thing that kind of came to mind was the automated uh harvesting system so when we look at being able to capture plant weights really fast and doing some of the metric compliance work uh the systems that we've put in place for it make you much more efficient and reduces the amount of air that's going in from writing numbers down or tags down weights down on on cards and hand those off letting someone else transcribe them the stuff's going right into the system off that bluetooth scale the rfid scanner that are tied directly into aroya so sorry to interrupt it that's a yeah point i mean there's so many moving parts and there's so many different people involved so i mean think about all the different things that can go wrong um so anything to reduce that chance it's uh yeah it's big especially involving this much money so sorry seth i cut you off oh i was just gonna make a little joke and you don't have to you know try to drop the pen anymore when your hands are all sticky from harvesting

i mean you save on so much rubbing alcohol too so there's that

anyway um sorry is there anything else that you guys want to say about that um i know it's a big topic yeah i'm sure we could go on for quite a bit longer on it but uh let's keep removing well our next question is about tissue analysis so i feel like you guys are going to have some stuff to say about this um so the chemical grower wants to know what's your opinion about tissue analysis with within cultivation if you're running into any nutrient concerns get some tissue analysis it's probably not a bad thing to do occasionally anyways just to keep on check on on how your plant's health is is going beyond what a cultivator can see with their eyes um you know it does cost money though so it's kind of up to how much benefit you get out of it but anytime you do run into some issues i think a tissue analysis is probably one of the first steps that i would take yeah it's by far the easiest way to try to quantify what kind of nutrient problems you have having you can directly see what's deficient and solving those might not always be so simple but at least having eyes on what's actually going on inside the plant makes a big difference versus looking at it and going oh yep that's you know that's a calcium deficiency well let's just test it real quick because if it looks like it but it's not then we're just chasing our tail one thing about it is it is hard to find information about that and there are several resources out there for consultants and services to help people you know wade through those waters

excellent yeah we talked about that a few times in previous episodes but um yeah a little extra knowledge is a good thing um just a reminder we've got another we've got a lot of questions from instagram but just a reminder to the folks who are on with us live we want to talk to you too so if you have any questions type them in the chat mandy will either ask for you or we'll unmute you so you can ask yourself um this question came from alessi music they were wondering if you can tell how much dli or ppfd your plants need can you tell by differences in plant structure or leaf burning if the intensity is too high or if the plant is getting too many daily photons

i guess maybe we'll just open that one up on general talking about dli let me kind of dive into the specifics what they're talking about there uh dli being daily lighting integral so that is going to be the photon flux density times by the number of seconds minutes or hours depending on the units that you're using so it's just photon flux density times time so it's integrating the amount of energy under the ppfd curve and so a couple things when we're keeping in mind with what dli should be is it's nice to keep it fairly consistent throughout the cycle obviously we are stepping it up throughout the early stages of plant growth i think one of the most important things to kind of keep in mind though is when we're going from 18 hour cycle to a 12-hour cycle that we want to make sure that the dli is the same for the plants so when we're flipping from veg to flower going from that 18 to a 12 hour light cycle we actually have to up the intensity by about 33 or so just to make sure that we're getting the same amount of energy to the plant it can continue its rate of growth and make sure that we're not actually halting it during that transition phase yeah and so you know with that the challenge becomes right how do i increase from 150 ppfd in my cloning room to you know trying to get that 550 to 650 at the end of edge and that can be a tough strategy to harden plants off to light but it is something you have to start doing early and ramp up and that can be a challenge when you're starting to get into those sub two week veg times especially that a lot of our multi-tier growers are experiencing trying to keep that plant height down yeah and obviously with greenhouse growing tli is a lot harder to manage you're going to need to do some supplemental lighting and change how much supplemental light that you're producing for those plants based on cloud coverage what time of year you've got where your what your your longitude is in uh in location and so i think uh as far as digging into some of the stuff they was talking about burning leaves it's not typically related to light amount i think it's usually going to be more related to some nutrient compositions type of stuff um what it could be is too close to the water well it's going to say especially when we're talking about you know whether we know if you have led or hps so like hps when you see that typical burnt leaf that's the leaf surface temperature getting extremely high because there's a large amount of radiant energy hitting it and the actual surface temperature of that particular leaf is heating up yeah that's why we see only those top leaves close to the light under led we don't typically see as much of that although with some of the you know current enhanced spectrum lights that does happen a little more but if you do get those those too close and you actually have an intense enough led you will get a little bit of bleaching on the leaf surface itself and um you know i think probably one of the best ways to dial that in the future is going to be using something like a leaf barometer so we can really figure out exactly how much ppf ppfd we need to get maximum transpiration in a given time as far as dialing it i think the guidelines out there have been pretty great you know shoot for a little over a thousand through flower if you can go higher and you have the co2 supplementation to do it do it but that's not a new science that i think we need to explore super deep

awesome thank you guys for that um we just got a question in the chats actually husky uh i can ask for you uh seth and jason what are good crop steering irrigation and basic environmental environmental parameters for good density and ripeness in buds

uh it's a pretty general question um i think i would watch some of the other open office hours that we've gone through kind of the different phases of crop stirring and then talked about the general parameters that we recommend always do keep in mind that you know making sure your environment is dialed before you do some of that crop steering and also keep in mind the genetic variance the preference of this genetics can vary quite a bit as well yeah you know if we're talking about density and ripeness you may be asking more about that last phase where we're going generative um certain strains are going to require a longer generative phase at the end certain strands are going to require you know a little bit more generative stress as far as promoting ripeness um another thing to remember when we were talking about ripeness is uh all of these plants once we put them under a 12-12 photo period they have a clock that starts ticking essentially in terms of maturity and ripeness so not everything is going to come down at 56 or 63 days there are some plants out there that yep they just aren't finished at 63. and that old school outdoor rule of uh if you think it's done try to wait a week and harvest if you can still applies if you're trying to really dial what ripe is on some strains and i think we actually talked about this before a good rule of thumb is if you're testing and you've got way higher thca and almost no thc that's a good way to look at it and then you know that should correspond a little bit to the trichome coloration at harvest one of my favorite ways to kind of keep tabs on how ripe each strain was for each different cycles was have a getting a usb microscope and take snapshots of what it looks like in there upload it to your harvest group in arraya and then you can keep track hey when we run it at 63 days this is the amount of amber that we get in those trichomes when we stretch it out another three days is that a more preferred thc composition is it giving it a little bit nice color is is that what we prefer as well so do some good documentation on on what you're doing in the different variables as far as going into good density and ripeness um and then dial it in there from each strain

it's all about continuous improvement and learning from uh from the past right um husky you'll have to let us know if that answered your question and uh we do have a lot of resources over on our site i'll drop a link in the chat for you here in a second but we do have a couple more questions that have come in so i'm going to go ahead and move on down to those two juice hydro wants to know what's the best unit of cues for weeks of flour and water content percentage in two it says gl dutch plantain does that make sense to you guys two gallon dutch plant cocoa what was the beginning of that question again

what's the best generative cues for weeks of flower and water content percentage in two a gallon dutch planting sorry yeah so i guess we'll kind of just address the two gallon dutch plant um two gallon cocoa is a great size media for some of the larger plants uh you know we're stretching a five and a half six foot plant and we're definitely trying to get as much mass off that as possible we're gonna have a pretty serious red zone and a two gallon cocoa is is a good choice for that sometimes if we're growing a little bit small smaller media i'll go with the smaller smaller than two gallon but for most indoor i think two gallons can be about the biggest size that i prefer to grow in as far as generative cues and weeks very strain dependent obviously if we're looking to see that our generative cues to a plant are successful we'll see that the stretching decreases during that time and uh most of the time we're just running p1 irrigations until that stretching is mostly seized and then we'll uh we'll go back into some vegetative growing yeah and you know um a big important part of that is crop registration and then also recognizing that like when we did you have stretch that doesn't mean the plant completely stopped or when you excuse me when stretch ends and we're going to end generative that doesn't mean the plant has 100 stopped growing vertically it's just that our rate of growth has slowed down very significantly in the fast few days and we're noticing you know more small pistols and bracks forming we're starting to watch the plant switch over into that generative phase and like jason said that is quite variable you know strain to strain some strains it's all the way down at 15 17 days some strains you're pushing up into the 30s even close to 40. so you've really just got to watch your plants read them and you know like we keep hammering on pictures pictures pictures notes registration get it in one spot so you can actually use that data i know there's thousands and thousands of growers out there like me who have binders and notebooks that are never gonna get entered into the computer just sitting around so yeah stay on it i'm glad you uh you're nailing it there man as far as talking about crop registration stuff when we talk about you know the end of stretch it's a very vague thing when we just talk about it but when you actually take a manual reading every day or every other day on those plant heights it's pretty easy to see the slope of that uh plant growth change and so definitely take note of the plant size coming out of uh out of 186 and keep track of that from run to run and then look at the duration of of plant growth from there and compare it to get the ideal plant size and shape that you're looking for yeah you know and remember there's a few other variables to look at like with something kind of like dutch plant we're operating that 55 to 70 percent top end range for field capacity which is highly useful and that gives us you know down to about 25 to 30 that we want to safely work with in terms of dry bag but if i were on that same plant the same size in a one or one and a half gallon versus the two my generative irrigation strategy might look a little different because that plant's drying fast back faster maybe i have to put a maintenance shot on starting halfway through my generative steer if that's the case i can't really compare those two runs side by side with a different pot when we're talking about how long stretch is because we're not putting as much generative stress on one plant compared to the other so you want to really try to minimize variables when you're establishing those cues for your plants and just be as consistent as possible yeah exactly right make sure that your environment's dialed in as well because those variables can play if you change a room say hey we're going to try out some leds that's definitely going to change those timelines and growth parameters so it's a very proactive approach to be reducing the variables that you're comparing between cycles

awesome thank you for that i love these tips and actually while we're on the topic of coco smooth cl submitted a question um they were wondering are any tips for a coco beginner with drip irrigation if you're only every three to four days at your plants thoughts on that um great choice coco's a little bit more forgiving than uh than rockwool and if you're only there every three to four days you can use an automated drip system to make sure that those plants are probably going to be getting the water that they need on a daily basis uh if you're beginning with with cocoa it's probably the best first step into you know a soilless media from from where you have been yeah watch some more episodes of this stuff i think we've gone over a lot of of starting with uh with coco and how to approach it for general irrigation strategies get arroya it's probably one of the easiest ways to get from the beginner to intermediate grower level is using sensor data and applying uh some of the knowledge that we share with you all yeah and i know you mentioned you know three or four days are you talking about you know irrigation frequency like are we talking about a big cocoa pot that we're waiting a long time to water on and if so uh you know i'd probably look at a smaller pot yeah i think he means physically there physically there yeah okay then yeah you're good to go uh i agree with jason it's great one thing i'll always warn people when you buy from a particular manufacturer they have instructions that come for a reason so certain manufacturers may recommend you know rinsing the media at least once or twice before planting in it others may say rinse and then use your nutrient solution to hydrate make sure you follow that that's in place and you know especially if you're new in cocoa stick to a basic recipe buy a pre-made nutrient line you know don't go too wild unless you're already familiar with mixing up your own nutrients that's not another variable you want to throw in and uh otherwise just have fun with the cocoa it's pretty nice yeah and if you know if you are there only in person every three or four days just have enough sensors and types of systems to just validate that the irrigations are occurring that your environmental parameters are staying within check do as much manual readings that you have time for while you're on the site for every three or four days um yeah and if just to back up what seth was saying if you're talking about only irrigating every three or four days then that's a whole different story so um have fun

it is so fun um we do want to remind everyone who's on the show today if you guys have questions please do drop us in the chat we'll make sure that we ask those to seth and jason uh we have some more questions rolling in so we're gonna go ahead and get to those um bmg 389 wants to know um they're looking for guidelines for a dry back aggressiveness on a first run with the new strain you guys have any tips for that uh so basically depending on your media you've got a certain bottom line that we want to drive back to you know with rockwool we call that 40 with uh coco typically about 25 percent hold steady to those lines don't get too aggressive when you've got a new strain um if you really want to push that aggressive dryback you know that's okay maybe go a little further but really it depends on the media type if in rockwool you know you're not watching it really close and we have an over drying event now we've created a lot of problems for the rest of flower you know once we've lost that field capacity if you're in coco you could push it a little more just because if we over dry we don't necessarily lose that media integrity so honestly i would say don't push it too hard but if you did make sure you're in coco yeah another couple options that might be good is contact your supplier of that new strain and see if they have any ideas on what it might grow like as well uh you know if they've already tested it out like i know a lot of clone and seed supply houses do then uh chat with them see if they have any ideas on if this is going to be a short and stubby plant or a tall stretchy plant and go from there obviously each amount of aggressiveness is dependent on on what the plant is doing with it so yeah and i will say i've also found it very useful if i can source most of my genetics like not necessarily most of my genetics but multiple strains from the same nursery or breeder that is using a lot of the same parents to cross with generally they have a pretty good idea about certain characteristics like you know lately we're seeing a lot of mac crosses out there and they have that as a dominant trait shorter structure so a lot of times if you talk to someone knowledgeable who's been selling the same strains at least for a while as jason said they will have a few tips at least you know say they'll at least be able to tell you hey everyone's harvesting this at 60 days 56 63. here's here's kind of what kind of bud we've noticed off it this one's fatter and chunkier this one's a little more elongated you know not quite as tight of a bud structure all that stuff is good info because you can start to watch how your plants grow and then compare it to what they said should happen and if it didn't happen for you well you can start figuring out why what did they do different

great man we're having a lot of questions coming through the chat right now um bilbo baggins do you want to go ahead and take yourself off mute and ask seth and jason directly just to give a little more context i can definitely ask for you though okay sure yeah go ahead um okay so in terms of implementation and rolling out an aroya platform i know that adoption curves range in different organizations in terms of their you know technical aptitude or just workflow in general and i'm wondering what sort of learning modules royal is they're thinking of supplying or is already supplying to ensure that this adoption is sustainable and it's not just i'm not saying it is but it doesn't erupt as a platform that gets installed and then only certain people are using it and it's really not adopted a couple ways that we do our best to help facilities and facilities that have high turnover we always struggle with just because they they're always training people faster than the people can get used to a system like this but we do initial onboarding so that's awesome with these i've done hundreds of them so every facility we get into do some walk-throughs make sure equipment gets installed it gets installed appropriately it's functioning online you basically do a personalized system tutorial which is asking the questions about what your goals are and how your facility operates and then dig in to understand the best it can work for you in the long term we've always got our our help center right there in the app with walkthrough tutorials videos i think we're working on faq i know there's a quick start in there that goes over some of the frequently answered asked questions and then we've got our support teams if you run into you know technical issues and other types of stuff like that yeah we usually consider an onboarding period a little over two months so you'll have a few meetings where we just talk about sensor installation and software and then rolling through that whole first crop you know helping you interpret the data implement crop steering strategies and making sure you understand how to use the system that being said you know jason just mentioned some of these facilities do have high turnover it's probably a good investment on any grower owner's part to invest in their employees a little bit and try to find someone that can be their aroya champion and stick around and then also realize that once you do that that's now on their resume and that's turning into a marketable skill in the industry so protect your investment keep that aroya champion around

awesome thanks

that's such a good question um bilbo baggins did you want to go ahead and ask your next question okay it has to do with task management within the aurora architecture and i'm wondering if i think it's i mean this may be very subjective if you think it's enforceable from a management perspective that the tasks

are adhered to and completed in the task management tool being that it is connected to the hardest group so that's generally the question so yeah you have the ability to see if people have actually completed those tasks or not and time them as well

and then i can still can i still connect that time-bound information to the is it available through the api and then tracked on a user it's currently not available to the api right now we've only got sensor data on our opening okay cool and then i might as well just roll out my last question do you have a crop registration rollout planned for the platform so that we could just do all of this inside one system instead of you know right now our crop registrations are being done in uh basically a google form

yes so our our manual readings uh system is kind of what we consider the crop registration parts i don't know if that covers all of what you guys are doing uh in our next release we've got some pretty cool stuff where you can just template the manual readings that you want an employee to take at a specific time in the harvest group and then they can just go through and fill out the ones that are required yep and you can also display most your manual readings on the graph too so those will be attached to your harvest group and let's say like you're in there you know pulling a ph reading every day you would have those single point readings displayed on your graph if you if you chose to to look back at for the whole run or you know any period of time you wanted to look at okay

most of my questions always center around how can i get the data would be produced in the system and quantify it outside of the system so thanks for your answers and look forward to any updates that lead us down that path for sure and just so you know too you can also always export like all of your graph data on a csv to store locally if you want to i know if i was in business that's something i would certainly consider is downloading you know every runs worth of information into a csv file and having it just in case uh for whatever reason i didn't have internet or i wanted to run some analytics on it that weren't available in aurora yeah like okay makes sense

thanks yeah thank you for your questions uh we always love having uh our repeat attendees so it's great seeing you again we have some questions coming in through our youtube though so i'm going to ask those um jay wants to know before you mentioned when runoff ph goes up or down it's using before you mention when runoff ph goes up or down it's using certain nutrients more than others can you elaborate more on specifics if possible i understand there are more variables to it though typically off a ph you're not going to get a very good read on which exact plant nutrients are being uptaken but what we can look at is the fact that most plant essential elements are a cation that's the form we put them into solution and that's the form the plant can uptake because a cation's negative we're pulling those out we're leaving positive ions in the form of hydrogen that's driving the ph up so it's not necessarily telling us whether it's nitrogen calcium or any particular nutrient but what it is telling us is how aggressively the plant is uptaking the nutrients we're trying to supply to it so if we had a situation where the plants taking up so much that it throws that ph balance off sometimes we might have to say raise the ec so we have enough of what we want that we're putting in every day in order to you know overcome the fact that the plants pulling that out faster than we can flush out all the ions we don't want in there

i hope that sums it up awesome yeah i i hope that it did too um but if we get a follow-up question i will definitely shoot that y'all's way um yeah so we're going to keep rolling down our list i'll pass it to kaisha awesome thank you we love hearing from all these live these live attendees so good okay we have a question from instagram this is from flavorchaser420 is about sensors they want to know when using your substrate water content electrical conductivity meter would proper use be to insert the three prong meter into the substrate and then leave it there for repeated testing that's a good way to do it i mean if you've got a few i'm guessing this is related to blue um or solas excuse me our solar system yeah with that solace obviously if you're trying to check a whole bunch of plants that's not a very realistic option but one of the things i guess that is most important is that we're avoiding going back into the same holes that we've already created when testing and so if you are testing the same plant throughout over time it is nice just to leave it in there and go in there and and write down what those readings look like over time uh obviously if we're gonna be prong pronging a whole bunch of plants then uh then that substrate might get a little bit aerated over time and we might have to switch to a few different plans depending on how many samples we've taken yeah and i think one thing that's important to remember is if you do that you know in-situ measurements are not always totally equatable to spot measurements because when you install that sensor and leave it in there for let's say the duration of the flowering period that plant's rooting in around it a little harder we've got constant contact with the media there's a few small variables that mean that if i plug a taros 12 and a nose into a block and leave it there for two months i might get a slightly different reading off of the solace that i stabbed in there because that hasn't been in contact with that media while it settled for the past two months so both are great ways to look at your crop health and see where it's going one thing to really remember about it especially with the spa checks is we are looking at a world of averages you know if you want to do you know say spot check with the solas to the point that you could have the kind of data that you get with arroya you need an army of full-time people out there just walking around with their phone grabbing readings so it's important to realize like how much data you can get with a certain amount of financial and labor input i guess

all really important things to keep in mind uh you guys it's popping over on our youtube channel right now so we're getting more questions and a little bit of shout outs that they said solid explanation on the ph increase and runoff question so uh yeah uh but we have another question so raymond wants to know when's the best time to read accurate ec in cocoa is it full saturation

a little bit tricky to answer that question and this is why we like time series data uh because you don't know what the best time to check the ec and the substrate is if you want to know what it is at field capacity then take it at field capacity if you want to know what it is when it's peaking just before you irrigate it again then take it at that point but you know without that time series data you're just gonna have to guess what it is in between those two uh two reading points yeah and i mean i guess it depends on what your goals are for that are you trying to really hard keep your crop inside of a certain range or are we trying to look for signs of ec spiking too high in which case we might want to do that right before irrigation and say okay our driest point in the day how dry are we and how high is the ec going like for me that's what's going to drive my irrigation choices for the coming day is if i overdried last night i need to put more on in my p1's today in order to make up for that extra volume so that i don't end up in a downward trend with my peak volume every day however if you're looking at you know okay how well am i stacking well what you know what do we look like at the lowest and what do we look like at the highest we kind of want to see that range and see what's happening so at the lowest we're at you know three right at feed ec but at the highest we're at 15. it's probably a strong sign we are severely over drying and pushing that dry back way too hard

you gotta watch it um yeah we're keep getting questions over there on youtube so we're gonna go on down our list uh sir dirty uh can't can't say it without laughing sorry sir dirty wants to know would you all recommend a coco and peat mix or only coco coco noir or coco coir sorry or only pete what's gail's recommendation it can be a little bit of personal choice what's available what what's the highest quality of type of product that you can get i like cocoa personally straight coco for me has been extremely predictable it's very forgiving and i it's what i know how to run uh yeah coco and pete have very similar characteristics honestly they work fine alone they work fine in a blend it really comes down to how you feel about it politically whether you want to pay to ship coconut husk over here from sri lanka or india buy a diesel boat or you want to strip mine some peat bogs in canada so

it i would say as far as crop performance goes they're pretty equal a lot of the time coco is a little more cheap and accessible just because pete already has the popularity in horticulture outside of cannabis that's already supporting that market so anytime a grower is buying pete we're competing with a whole uh a whole other existing industry whereas with coco we do have a lot of companies that are designed primarily around supplying cannabis producers so it is nice to take advantage of that and ensure you know that we have a supply of cocoid if anyone was ordering large amounts of it through uh you know the whole koben epidemic right when the supply chain broke down things got very difficult so if we had to i was working compete with other producers for pete that weren't just cannabis we probably would have maybe not been able to get it for a few crabs

awesome yeah this is great loving all these life questions coming in thank you so much everybody on youtube we have a few minutes left but i just want to point out anybody came on late anybody who's checking us out for the first time we have a raffle every week we give away our limited edition of our t-shirts and we give an aroya a hat to first-time question askers who are located here in the u.s and that stands for you guys in youtube too so definitely share your email addresses with us if you want to be entered into the drawing and be contacted to get an aroya hat so with that said i have one last question from instagram our live attendees there's still a little time for you to drop yours in the chat let us know what questions you have but uh abd flying zone asks i have a group of plants that dry back from 40 45 at 20 to 25 in 24 hours in soil should i water every day

i like to water every day at those dry back rates i would think you're gonna be watering a good number of times a day and and that's if that's during your vegetative then those are some seriously hungry plants especially if you're in the right size media if it's a you know generative steering that you're doing then it's probably right on to do you know just p1 every day yeah and i mean that's something to remember if you don't embrace the art of matching a smaller pot size then what might have been previously intuitive to your system um you're not going to be able to crop steer we have to be able to get you know at least a 10 to 20 percent dry back within a given day in order to apply some of these irrigation strategies and have them produce the effects on the plant we want if the pots too big and we can only water every other day or every third day we effectively can't go vegetative because we don't have a media that's drying out fast enough to keep putting those irrigations on and if we switched over to try to veg um we would just drown the plant it wouldn't dry back enough we'd have other symptoms of over watering that were an issue and potentially some root pathogens

awesome thank you guys we have had so many great questions this week um so mandy any other live questions come in at the next in the last couple minutes um you know there's a lot of chatter um our community is sharing a lot of cultivation education with each other but that was the final question we had over on youtube so yeah thank you thanks everyone for your for the questions today yeah keep the conversation going folks and uh we do this every week um reminder everybody who asked a question live please type your email address in the chat we want to put you in a raffle to win one of our t-shirts they're awesome and maybe send you a hat if you haven't gotten one already seth and jason before we wrap up anything else you want to say to the folks before we go just keep growing the good stuff everybody yeah stay interested yeah you're in a good place if you enjoy what you do for work it's always good oh my goodness what a great way to end it i love it thank you seth and jason for such a great conversation thank you to everybody who submitted questions this is what the show is about we are all about uh putting you in touch with the experts that's right bilbo for science we want to keep keep you in touch with the experts and we want to help you uh improve your cultivation production process so if you have any questions about aroya feel free to book a demo we're happy to talk to you about your cultivation and then for everybody else who's just uh looking for a topic that they want to cover in a future office hours please feel free to post it in the chat um send us an email at support.org metergroup.com or send us a dm over instagram we want to hear from you we record every session we'll email everyone in attendance a link to the video from today's discussion it'll also be on the youtube aroya youtube channel like subscribe and share while you're there and if you find these conversations helpful please feel free to share with your network and spread the word thank you so much mandy for being with me every week thank you seth and jason thank you to our team and we'll see you all next week see ya bye everyone bye thanks everyone all right i will

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