OHL48_TX
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[00:00:00] Kaisha: All right. It's Thursday at 4:20 PM Eastern. That means it's time for office hours. AROYA is 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 Kaisha. I am your co-moderator. I'm not alone. What's up Mandy? How are you?

[00:00:15] Mandy: Hey there, Kaisha.

[00:00:16] Mandy: We're here for episode 48. We're also going live over on YouTube. So if you're watching us over there, make sure you send us your questions and I'll make sure I get those to the team. We do have a few announcements before we go ahead and jump into our crop steering questions that we got from [00:00:30] you guys this week.

[00:00:31] Mandy: If you're gonna go to the Emerald Cup this weekend, be sure you catch up with Kaisha and Seth. They're gonna be representing AROYA. And also be sure you're following us on all the platforms. That's Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and now Social club. We have a ton of questions from this week, so I'm gonna go ahead and throw it back over to you,

[00:00:47] Kaisha: Kaisha.

[00:00:47] Kaisha: Awesome. Mandy, thank you so much. Yeah, we are out here Seth. Jason, how you guys doing today? Good to see ya.

[00:00:54] Seth: Doing good. Kesha . Okay,

[00:00:57] Kaisha: good. Awesome. Yeah, no. So before we get started with [00:01:00] Instagram questions, you guys are out in the field talking to clients all the time or reaching the end of the year. Why don't you give us a little scoop on what's, what are you seeing out in the field?

[00:01:07] Kaisha: Why don't we start there?

[00:01:09] Seth: Well, Kesha, I know talking to a lot of my customers lately, we're getting deeper and deeper into the, you know, legal and recreational cannabis market in a lot of places. And we're starting to see, you know, a lot of market saturation. And that means that a lot of people are kinda changing their business strategies from bulk production to start to f focus more on quality and ensuring their brand [00:01:30] longevity in the marketplace.

[00:01:32] Seth: Would you agree you've been seeing some of that Jason as well?

[00:01:35] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely a refocusing on how much product they can get out the door compared to where they can get. out the door too. And obviously the big road to that is quality. We have seen quite a bit of people refocusing on their data systems as well, trying to just eek out some efficiencies that help them stay above water.

[00:01:55] Seth: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one thing we kind of wanted to talk about today was how much [00:02:00] AROYA can help cultivators in just increasing their consistency and their overall quality. You know, it's good to remind people that, you know, any irrigation strategy you're applying is crop steering.

[00:02:11] Seth: Are we steering it the way we wanna be all the time? Maybe not necessarily, but whether or not you're using AROYA, you're steering your crop. So, you know, I think that's one thing that's really been overlooked in the last probably few years with this, you know, green explosion across the country. It's not just about weight.

[00:02:27] Seth: You know, we can steer for more quality [00:02:30] implants. We can steer to help increase terpene production and also use AROYA to look at, you know, the grow holistically and identify, you know, where maybe we can make some improvements in either the irrigation strategy or the environment to help improve quality.

[00:02:46] Seth: Yeah,

[00:02:46] Jason: That's exactly right. I mean, when we think about the irrigation patterns that people have used, you know, a lot of times they don't necess. Use the term crop steering when they're doing that. Crop steering, when we apply it, it is, [00:03:00] it's just a specific set of irrigations and environmental parameters that are encouraging a specific plant response.

[00:03:08] Jason: If that plant response is more yield, then we can tailor it a little bit different. If it is yield and quality, which is usually what we're trying to focus on, then then timing the irrigations is one of the easiest ways to increase the response in that plant for the type of chemotype or chemical composition and weight that we're looking

[00:03:28] Seth: for.

[00:03:29] Seth: Yeah. And one of [00:03:30] the key things I think a lot of cultivators have been struggling with is that reliable terpene consistency and potency. So, you know, when you know you've got some really good genetics, they give you all the expression you want, but you're struggling to get that consistent chemotype.

[00:03:44] Seth: You know, like let's say we're growing for extraction. We've got a product label and name attached to that product. We want it to be the same time, same way every time it hits the cart. What we're seeing is a lot of people, if they're not using. , some sort of crop registration and crop steering. They're really having [00:04:00] difficulty hitting that mark time and time again.

[00:04:02] Seth: And that's where I think a system like AROYA comes in and really helps you stay consistent, run to run, and also identify some of those key factors that make a difference. You know, if we're looking at well like TURP expression, you know, if we can't really monitor our EC we can't maintain that, we can't hold everything inside of a certain range.

[00:04:21] Seth: It's difficult for the plant to produce consistent results. We might get, you know, a poor yielding, really great run in terms of quality, [00:04:30] but then replicating it might be a problem cuz we don't know which stress we applied actually gave us that morphological or biochemical change in the plant that we're looking for.

[00:04:40] Jason: Yeah. And you know, I don't wanna get us too started backwards, but when I think about any of the volatiles though, terpenes are a great example of a volatile compound that's in there. They can increase to a certain point, and then once they've reached the max potential of that plant, then they're only ever gonna decrease from that point.

[00:04:59] Jason: And so [00:05:00] when we talk. Differences during cultivation. So one cycle producing better than the other, we always have to think about. All right is the timeline that we're harvesting on need to be exactly the same even though there are some environmental or irrigation changes here. And for terpene profile specifically, this is.

[00:05:17] Jason: Extraordinarily important that you're tracking things, you know, actually on the plant rather than just through the life cycle, unless it's absolutely consistent a life cycle run or harvest group run. And so, [00:05:30] you know, when I think about how do we maintain those terpenes, obviously capturing them at the exact right time is one of the most beneficial things that you can do.

[00:05:38] Jason: And then obviously preserving them through standards in your drying cycles, using analytical measurements to make sure that we haven't lost more than we can, or lost more than we have to lose, or you know, just not necessarily a safe product to, to be capturing at that point in time. So, those are a couple things that maybe we'll touch into later as well or we can

[00:05:59] Seth: jump [00:06:00] into 'em right now.

[00:06:01] Seth: You know, one of the things I'd like to focus on real quick, and I'm gonna share a graph, is how you can use, you know, crop steering or just crop registration in general. Two. Can you guys see my screen on there? Not yet. Not yet. Okay. We'll give it a minute. But , how growers can use that to increase their, you know, consistency, whether it's oh, an error occurred.

[00:06:23] Seth: Let me try this again and actually Jason, maybe it'll work better for you.

[00:06:29] Seth: [00:06:30] But we have a host of tools in AROYA that, you know, although can be used to increase yield. The real thing that they're being used to is used to do is analyze the data so we can go back and look. You know, a simple one I like to look at here is target ranges. So I can actually take this back. I can look at my entire run, and this would be just a demo run.

[00:06:52] Seth: This isn't perfectly ideal graph data, but when we look back, we can easily display this target range. [00:07:00] May change throughout the cycle. Again, these aren't necessarily the best ranges to display, they're just for an example. But I can really quickly look and see where I came outta range and start to identify, well, what was the issue we were facing?

[00:07:14] Seth: You know, if we're looking back at this area here as an example this, although is not a good again, representation of irrigation strategy. If we were trying to bulk and had a much narrower bar up here, for instance, we'd go, okay, why are we letting it dry back so far? We should be applying more irrigations throughout the [00:07:30] day to keep that water available and easy for the plant to uptake and bulk.

[00:07:35] Seth: So that's, yeah, I don't know if you

[00:07:36] Jason: wanna show like air temperature, it might be a little less busy.

[00:07:40] Seth: Yeah, that's a good deal and maybe I'll just zoom in on a on a few days here to kind of show you, I just like to show this because I like to get people into the habit of looking back at at their entire run.

[00:07:52] Seth: You know, let's just zoom in on this whole section here. About a week a little over. [00:08:00] So if we're looking at, hey, we're having problems, you know, maintaining temperature inside of the range we want. And then it also looks like when we wanted to say switch from bulking into ripening, where we would generally lower the temperature a fair bit hey, look, we're still not able to maintain that.

[00:08:15] Seth: Therefore we're struggling at consistency in this part of the cycle. So we know where to focus our efforts rather than looking at the sum of all the variables and trying to pick it apart. You know, we can use quick references rather than pouring over [00:08:30] spreadsheets or looking at just. graphs with a lot of values on it and no easy way to sort it.

[00:08:37] Jason: Yeah, and you know, one of the things that we definitely realized early on was that a lot of systems have alerts and a lot of times people set their alerts too tight. So what we do here is we actually allow you to set specific alert ranges and specific target ranges. So I like to have a dead band in between those where a target range is what I'm trying to communicate to the [00:09:00] team as the most ideal parameters.

[00:09:03] Jason: Maybe they're a little bit tighter than we can actually achieve based on some HVAC engineering constraints or irrigation constraints. Or every once in a while just. You know, we just can't be perfect. So I like to think that the target is like the golden parameter where's the absolute best areas that we're trying to achieve with these different data types.

[00:09:22] Jason: And then I like to have some dead band, you know, say, this is how, you know, life works. We can operate within these ranges. And the [00:09:30] alerts I like to have at a point where I looked over historical data and said, we can almost always operate within these parameters if we aren't operating within these parameters either, you know, some set point got got set wrong or possibly equipment failure.

[00:09:45] Jason: Things that really we do need to get a text notification and go check out why we aren't in the realistic ranges that we're used to operating. .

[00:09:56] Seth: Yeah. And to add to that, Jason, I just like to use water content. And you see [00:10:00] here is a great example. Sometimes, you know, like if I was running this early flower generative strategy in rockwool, for instance I'm gonna look at saying, okay rarely does my irrigation get stuck on in a way where it actually gets on the plants unless a pipe breaks and floods the table somehow, which that would catch.

[00:10:16] Seth: And then, you know, on my EC range, okay, if I look, can look back at historical harvest and say, okay, I've got a little bit of range. Also, I know that when I over dry just a little bit, I'm gonna pass my analytical target range on the high side. And [00:10:30] if I over water. I'm gonna pass it on the low side, but I also know that, you know, this is a game of averages.

[00:10:36] Seth: I can only have so many sensors in the room. So if I do have one that is a slightly bigger plant and overdrives a little bit, I'm actually gonna set this EC range fairly high, because there's probably a good chance it'll get caught over here on the water content range first. And again, we always want those to be action items, so I don't want to get texts at four in the.

[00:10:56] Seth: If I have plants going 1% under where my range was because my [00:11:00] analytical range is tight. But if it's 10% under that means either I had an equipment failure or a scheduling failure. I e I need to go in and make sure I program either another feed, increased feed volume, or doctor up my feed schedule in a way that is not gonna let me fall outta range too far.

[00:11:19] Seth: And in certain medium, you know, like rockwool, that's a make or break it for yield for people. And quality. You know, if we hit the point where we've taken that rockwool down to like, let's say [00:11:30] 8% repeatedly in early flower. We're gonna have to put a lot of water on it to keep it alive, or accept that plant is not gonna be able to get as big because we've functionally reduced the water holding capacity of that rock wall by roughly half at that point, and, you know, plants need light, CO2, and water to build mass and to build structure.

[00:11:50] Seth: So if we're lacking any of those things, we don't get the growth we want. Yep.

[00:11:57] Jason: You know what I, I know some clients. . [00:12:00] Well, most of our real great clients are pretty serious about holding tight parameters. And so that's kind of why we've built it this way, is one, to help them communicate with their teams, where their expectations lie, those target ranges.

[00:12:14] Jason: And then also, you know, two, to avoid any type of alerting fatigue, anytime that I've gotten my alerts set too tight, I usually get so many messages that I begin ignoring them. And you know, it's kind of like a, you know, call wolf type of scenario where if [00:12:30] you're alert fatigued, then you might miss some very important alerts that you know, would've been a highlighted if you weren't setting your ranges too

[00:12:38] Seth: tight.

[00:12:40] Seth: Let's see if I can add a fake phone number here to to try to enable these alerts. I do wanna show people

[00:12:45] Seth: There we go. So one thing in array that you can do, and actually I think this hugely plays into quality, is go in and take off a lot of these alerts that, you know, are not action items. It's like just, or Jason said, my apologies, Jason, [00:13:00] I'll never do that again. alert fatigue is real. If you learn to ignore, you know, something like, let's say you've been having some power outage issues and your light timer's not working, right?

[00:13:10] Seth: Okay. Light schedule might be one you want on, but if you learn to ignore things, you know, problems are gonna go unfixed for a long period of time. And that is, you know, lack of consistency. Run to run is one of the biggest things that contributes, I think, to loss and quality. You know, just not having all your bases covered and.

[00:13:29] Seth: Working [00:13:30] reactively all the time, rather than proactively if we're still stuck in that phase to where we're not looking at data from, you know, the past weeks, the past runs and all we're doing is going, got a little too dry today or it was too wet, you know, we're not gonna make the conceptual progress to get there in terms of, you know, building a complete crop schedule, building a plan, and then following it, you know?

[00:13:53] Jason: Yeah, and I'm really glad you said that. I personally, almost anytime that I start to, to look at crop data and make decisions, [00:14:00] I actually look at the whole hard script. I wanna know what has this plan gone through and , I'm gonna look at that way before I ever make a decision for something that's happening today.

[00:14:09] Jason: You know, a good example is like Seth said if I had over dried my substrate and lost some of the water qualities in that, the water holding qualities in that rockwool, then I can't expect to, you know, meet today's. Today's targets and I know, okay, here's the mitigation options that I have when it comes down to that.

[00:14:27] Jason: Whereas if I only look at today and I don't have a [00:14:30] recognition of some of the past, the plant's gone through, I, you know, I might just be making

[00:14:34] Seth: bad choices. Absolutely. And I think you know, one thing after years of being in the cannabis industry and seeing operate, you know, none of these, well, very few are operating on a high enough profit margin where they're underemployed in terms of having too many employees.

[00:14:51] Seth: You know, the most profitable business is one that isn't over full on employees and isn't underemployed. You know, it's got that nice balance. Well, [00:15:00] sometimes that doesn't leave quite as much time for cultivators to sit down and analyze whole runs or historical data. So utilizing software to make that process dynamic and easy is really important to stand competitive in today's market.

[00:15:17] Kaisha: man, you guys really broke it down. Jason, did you have something else you wanted to add to that?

[00:15:21] Seth: Yeah, I

[00:15:22] Jason: was just thinking maybe when we're, since we are talking about target ranges, Seth, if you wanna jump into the harvest analytics page, [00:15:30] just like one of those harvest groups, and then let's go jump into the.

[00:15:33] Jason: The analytics, and we do actually track the time outside of your target ranges. And so if, we'll scroll down here in the analytics page just a little bit, we can see how much time we spent outside of that range. So here there you go. Target ranges. We can select what type of range that we're looking at.

[00:15:53] Jason: And this is gonna be a nice breakdown for the whole cycle. Anytime I'm comparing you know, cycles that[00:16:00] have a really high quality, I wanna say, all right, well, my, was my time outside of these ranges really low? Or do my ranges need to be slightly altered to match my golden recipe, if you will.

[00:16:11] Jason: Sometimes you'll hear us say a golden recipe, and that's just the recipe. The parameters throughout the cycle, the time in those parameters that that achieve the best results for a specific cult. I've actually seen it occasionally when somebody made a mistake and they found their golden recipe.

[00:16:26] Jason: Kind of an ironic thing that they would have a hell of a time [00:16:30] reproducing unless they had their data all documented in a harsh group like this. And so, it's one of those things where, you know, it's not necessarily a specific action type of analytics at this point, but it does give you a great idea of how tightly you're achieving what you want to achieve with those target.

[00:16:48] Seth: Absolutely. And you can start to notice certain trends. You know, like I love looking at the water content range here. Again, these aren't necessarily perfect ranges, but if I was to look at this round and say, wow, we were [00:17:00] you know, if this was supposed to be Rockwall and we were this low very early on, and we continued to struggle, okay, there we go.

[00:17:06] Seth: We can start to quantify like, Hey, if we kill that field cap in the first week, first two weeks doesn't seem like when we can recover to meet any of our goals. So we need to solve that problem before we can even approach how anything down the down this far is affecting the plant. Yep. And then, you know, while we're here, Jason, we should look at a few other things.

[00:17:27] Seth: You know, I think one thing, and again, this [00:17:30] shouldn't line could look a little different but it's not too bad. One thing that's important though is to start tracking, you know, some of those other metrics to evaluate plant health and growth rates and things like that. If I was to go ahead and look at this and say, okay say we had a more realistic waterline and we were not achieving a very good dry back.

[00:17:48] Seth: I look back we're, we've actually got P two s on in the day, and then I go down here and I start to say, oh my stretch rate was pretty crazy, pretty long compared to previous runs. That watering strategy didn't seem to [00:18:00] really achieve the results I wanted despite like, Hey, we got fire product in the end.

[00:18:06] Seth: But yeah, maybe we got some fine tuning to do an early flower to try to keep this height down and make our lives as cultivators a little bit easier, or hopefully still chase that like, well, we achieved a lot more stretch than we wanted to. Did we leave some quality or yield on the table? Just because we prolonged that stretch time and we didn't get as much time focusing on flower development as we wanted.

[00:18:29] Seth: [00:18:30] So it's important to look back at that holistic run and use, use all the tools you have available. You know, don't jump to something more complicated just because you feel like it's gonna be a lot better. You gotta start with the foundations and collecting as much data as possible before you can really capture everything going on in a facility or growing environment.

[00:18:51] Jason: And this is really important and that is the fact that if we don't have a full picture or you don't have a full picture because of the lack of data, a lot of [00:19:00] times your fine tuning actually isn't gonna be fine tuning, and you're gonna over tune things. And we're gonna go from one, maybe slightly successful technique and maybe we'll be thinking we're fine tuning it, but we don't have the data to support how the plant response actually was.

[00:19:15] Jason: When we turn our dial, we might turn that dial too far and say, all right, well man, we, we really kind of didn't make any headway. We've actually gone backwards in our process of improving how we can achieve awesome results within

[00:19:26] Seth: specific. . Absolutely. I run into that [00:19:30] pretty frequently with peop and not, this isn't a generalization, but I do run into clients who have not had, you know, any substrate monitoring equipment before, and they're very excited about the possibility of pushing higher ec in the root zone just because they haven't been able to see in there before and they know that they can now do it much more safely.

[00:19:47] Seth: You know, if they're just going off of runoff before it's, you can certainly make some predictions. You can certainly make some decisions, but now that you can see what's directly going on in there, we wanna push that high ec. Okay. Well the plant's only gonna take so [00:20:00] much of that salt. Cannabis can actually take fairly high levels of EC compared to some other plants I've seen grown, especially vegetables.

[00:20:08] Seth: However if we can't see what's going on and we accidentally over dry and spike it way too high or flush it all out way too quick, that's when playing with that high EC gets really dangerous. And at that point, if we didn't have this monitoring equipment would go. Hey, it's locked out. Okay. What does that mean?

[00:20:26] Seth: Does it have low pH that's why it can't take up nutrients or the sea Way [00:20:30] too high. Now we can make an educated choice on that and actually, you know, consistently put out more potent product.

[00:20:41] Kaisha: this is awesome you guys. Yeah, just really talking about changing business strategies. We have, you know, an industry that is really dictated by multiple states, which can be challenging. There's no set standards. But new markets seem to have the same challenges every time, which is just like an over abundance of cannabis and dropping [00:21:00] wholesale prices.

[00:21:00] Kaisha: So finding ways to really strengthen our own business practices in the long run is really what it's about. So really appreciating that walkthrough. Navajo is on with us today. He posted a question in the chat. I'll send it to you guys as your way. He wrote, I'd like to hear about some of the curing post-harvest strategies you guys recommend to maximize ter maximize terpenes on the final product.

[00:21:21] Kaisha: Navajo. You wanna unmute yourself and add anything to that.

[00:21:25] Guest: Yeah. There's not much to add. I was just kinda like when you guys were talking about it [00:21:30] initially I figured if there's anything like you guys wanted to share, maybe like, you guys obviously have like a massive data set. If

[00:21:36] Seth: you guys have

[00:21:37] Guest: seen anything correlates really well to maximizing terpenes.

[00:21:40] Guest: Just cuz that's just a problem I've been having for

[00:21:43] Room: sure. Yeah.

[00:21:47] Jason: Yeah, abs absolutely. And then, and kind of one of the things that comes to mind that. First off, as far as you know, when you harvest, is taking good documentation on the color of your [00:22:00] chirping or your tricone. So, you know, go ahead and I actually find it really fun on relaxing to take pictures of your plants towards the end of harvest and actually build a little timeline.

[00:22:11] Jason: Here's what my ripening process results in and the color of my terpenes. You know, if you are trying to hit something like fresh frozen and you want those nice, clear terpenes, now you have a good idea on exactly what date you should be breaking that harvest down. You know, if you're trying to absolutely maximize the spectrum of the terpenes, [00:22:30] sometimes you'll wanna wait a little bit longer, so those , slower mature terpenes actually get a chance to mature and present themselves once the trichomes are amber.

[00:22:38] Jason: So that, that's kind of one of my favorite things to do is get it at USB microscope. Stick, stick your buds in there. When you start getting in towards the later stages of the flower, take a picture on that usb, upload it to AROYA. Now you've got it locked in. You can always go back and look at the Harvest group.

[00:22:55] Jason: You understand, did we hit our targets? And is this an expected [00:23:00] process that we can follow again? That just really helps your team. You know, when it comes down to managing what supplies you need to harvest, what types of employees that you need staffed a lot of that can trickle down into making your operation run a lot smoother.

[00:23:13] Jason: On the other side here, I am just trying to jump into our our drying page where we talk about making sure that you've maximized some of the ways that you capture how dry your product is. You know, historically, a lot of times we talk about. The SNAP [00:23:30] test. And the snap test is very effective for certain people in the industry that have been around forever.

[00:23:36] Jason: But it doesn't necessarily take an account when you have different employees or when an employee is sick or if you need to scale your business. Or maybe there's just some strains that don't necessarily. Quantify is easy with your SNAP test as you're used to, and that's where using equipment like water activity is vital.

[00:23:55] Jason: And it's one of the things that one can help protect [00:24:00] all that investment that you have in during the cultivation cycle by maintaining the highest amount of terpenes and THC that you can contain in that product. But a lot of times it can also help you cut down your turn times on that room because you realize that, hey, maybe we're over during this product by a day.

[00:24:15] Jason: Well, let's cut a day off. We're gonna have better product, we're gonna a little bit more weight out of it, and we get a whole day back in our cycle. So, one of the things that always recommend people do is they check out some of our pre references available. [00:24:30] AROYA dot io and they just talk about here are the scientific techniques behind drying cannabis.

[00:24:37] Jason: You know, we sell the Aqua Lab, which is a fantastic piece of equipment for very high precision monitoring. And take some samples, you know, every day. And then start to characterize what your dry co Bye. Jump in here. Watch these water activity microbial growth series that, that we've released and kinda start to familiarize yourself, excuse me, with[00:25:00] how water activity and moisture content are related.

[00:25:04] Jason: And why water activity is a little bit more precise. So when we think about, all right, here's our target range right here in red. And when we look at the yield you know, it's definitely on a much larger scale than the water activity. So by using water activity, we can guarantee that our product is going to have a much more precise range.

[00:25:25] Jason: So we were using moisture content only and we said, Hey, we knew our product [00:25:30] to be between 10 and 12%. Here's how much range that we would actually be hitting. Now if we're using water activity, and we're saying, all right, we wanna be a. Point six two in water activity. Here's the range that we can hit.

[00:25:44] Jason: And these are based on very standardized air bars. So plus, or one plus or minus 1% moisture content is pretty common for lower and mid-grade loss on drying type of equipment. And when we start to look at something like the [00:26:00] Aqua Lab, we're accurate to plus or. Point zero zero three, and that's why we can achieve so much tighter results.

[00:26:08] Jason: Now, applying those results isn't always as easy in application as it is in this white paper. The things that you're gonna have to do is make sure that the airflow in your drying room is very consistent. Make sure that the size of your buds are being sampled appropriately. So if we wanna make sure that, hey, you know, we want the best product [00:26:30] for the entire group of plant, then some of your buds are gonna be bigger.

[00:26:34] Jason: Some of your buds are gonna be smaller. Make sure that you're sampling both of those and getting an idea of what the standard deviation on your samples looks like coming.

[00:26:44] Seth: Yeah, I think you nailed a lot of the important points there, Jason. The biggest thing I'd like to add is, you know, post-production handling, you know, number one, don't beat up your buds a bunch.

[00:26:52] Seth: Try to be as gentle as you can, but when you're hanging, when you're pulling down, when you're bucking, you know, one way we lose some of those volatile terpenes is actually breaking [00:27:00] those track homes. You know, that was part of old school hash pressing. You got this keef that doesn't really smell that much.

[00:27:05] Seth: You smash it in a press break, all those track homes, and suddenly you get that terpene release. So physically you want to take care of 'em, patients in the drying process. So, you know, basically just like Jason mentioned, those water activity samples, take them and map out that progress and find what is your optimum drying rate and how long it needs to be.

[00:27:24] Seth: Because I've definitely found situations where we And this had to do at the time of the year, but dried too fast. [00:27:30] So we dried the outside of the bud too quick. The inside was still pretty wet, especially in the larger buds, and that's where size sampling comes in. Get a sample of a wide range of sizes.

[00:27:39] Seth: That way you know what you're dealing with. And then also, you know, I find that on a lot of Gen one buildouts for customers. Sometimes the dry room's kind of the last thought when we're putting all this together and you know, don't cheap out on your dry room. You want to have walls that you can like clean very easily.

[00:27:58] Seth: You can sanitize, you wanna [00:28:00] have access in and out very well. You want as much ceiling as possible. You don't want a lot of outside air influence. You wanna be able to really control that environment. And then when we get to curing, you know, another thing I've seen in the industry, and this is definitely starting to shift as quality takes a bigger front seat.

[00:28:16] Seth: Be patient. You know, the whole idea that you're gonna cut down a plant and get it on the shelf in less than a month is possible. Yeah. Is it maybe the best the best choice for your brand quality and image over time? [00:28:30] I don't think so. Most growers I've worked with have found that a two to four week cure really is what gives them the best results.

[00:28:37] Seth: Investing in decent curing equipment in terms of, again, HVAC in whatever room you cure in, maybe that's your dry room, but you wanna be able to hold a consistent environment and have a dedicated post-production team that's in there burping appropriately and constantly measuring the water activity on a regular basis so you can keep it within range, cuz.

[00:28:58] Seth: On the same end, you know, if [00:29:00] we over dry accidentally during curing, during the burping process, we can kind of halt that cure. You know, if we haven't waited long enough for some of those nice, volatile terpenes to come out and get rid of that hay smell, if we over dry it while it still smells like hay, essentially it's gonna be hard to bring that, the rest of those terpenes out with the fa the following cure.

[00:29:21] Seth: Yeah,

[00:29:21] Jason: and one of the things as well, I think it's overlooked is how the product changes during the processing stages as well. So, water activity as [00:29:30] ironically, actually just the humidity in the product and we can maintain the water activity by altering the humidity in the room. And I've got a lot of clients who are focused on retaining that and having a projectable output weight and.

[00:29:45] Jason: Put humidifiers in their processing rooms, or dehumidifiers in their processing rooms. So as they're, you know, trimming that product up or turned in joints, et cetera water's not leaving the product and water's not entering the product either. .

[00:29:59] Seth: [00:30:00] Absolutely. And then, you know, carrying that onto out the door, if you can be moisture testing or water activity, testing your product right up to packaging, you're ensuring that the best possible representation of your work is going into that jar.

[00:30:13] Seth: There's nothing worse than someone saying, Hey, I bought some of your bud the other day at the store. And it was really dry. You know, like I, it just tasted awful. It was over dry, it seemed like it was old. And, you know, maybe at the end of the day they actually just got something from b a bin that was [00:30:30] unsealed or the HVAC in the store or processing area was not doing well that day.

[00:30:34] Seth: But people remember that bad product experience just as strongly, if not more so as a good product experience. So making sure that your product going out the door is consistent and at the quality you want it to be is really important for brand image. Cuz, I mean, a any of us that are in states with dispensaries, we've all seen it, you know, the progression of brands through the dispensary.

[00:30:55] Seth: Well, a big part of that, and especially what I've noticed with say outdoor growers, [00:31:00] there's some great outdoor growers out there. Well, they have a bad year and they get some moldy bud. They've gotta make the choice to not try to put that out, you know, and send it, either send it to a processing facility that can make distillate or whatever.

[00:31:13] Seth: But they know that they definitely can't have their name on that. And that's super key, I think, to just staying relevant in the industry and protecting your reputation and not losing all the work. You know, building a, there's I don't wanna put a number on how many cannabis brands are in the United States, cuz I [00:31:30] haven't tried to look that up at all recently, , but you know, it, everyone's putting work into developing this brand.

[00:31:35] Seth: No one wants to spend time and money to go, oh, we gotta start a new one next year. Cuz we put out a bad batch.

[00:31:42] Kaisha: So it all comes down to that big picture thinking. Thank y'all both so much for that ex very helpful overview. Navajo, thank you for your question. If there's anything else you wanna follow up on, please do drop it in the chat.

[00:31:53] Kaisha: We also dropped a link to the AROYA drying guide in the chat. That has come up a few times recently. So yeah, it's an [00:32:00] excellent resource. People really get a lot out of it. So definitely check that out. Moving on to my next question here we have from Diane, who's on with us today.

[00:32:08] Kaisha: Diane wrote in what's causing the hollow stocks. Is that good or bad? And Seth specifically directing it to you, so your thoughts on that?

[00:32:16] Seth: So sis can be caused by a few different things. Sometimes it's diseased. When you see that you're gonna probably see, you know, basically a rotten inside of the stem at some point lower on the plant.

[00:32:26] Seth: A lot of the times, unfortunately, it's genetic. [00:32:30] It's something that if you encountered while you were breeding Two different lineages together. You would probably wanna start doing some math, going backwards and trying to identify if that is a recessive or dominant trait, if it's displaying any linkage.

[00:32:43] Seth: And decide if you wanna just throw that out. Cuz in my experience, like I've had moms that have that issue, they don't produce good decent size clones. I can only get a clone that big off of 'em before I hit that hollow part of the stem. And I can't get good rooting out of it because it's already hardened up in [00:33:00] comparison to a regular branch that would be more pliable and easier to work with when cloning.

[00:33:04] Seth: So is it bad in a world where we trellis all of our plants, maybe not necessarily in an outdoor plant where that stock's gonna break over a lot easier? Yes, it's definitely not good. How attached are you to the strain is what it's at the end of the day. And if you're having problems with branches breaking over.

[00:33:23] Seth: That's why it's happening. If not, hey, that's just one of those weird traits that comes along with certain cannabis [00:33:30] strains.

[00:33:34] Kaisha: Awesome. Thank you for that. And learned a new phrase today, the tallest sis learning some. I'm about to be an expert. I'm so excited. . Mandy, we have some questions on YouTube, right? I'm gonna send it over to you now.

[00:33:49] Mandy: Oh man. It's really popping over there. We got a lot of shoutouts. Thank you guys. Dr. J Nice to see you again.

[00:33:55] Mandy: Gabe. Nice to see you. I'm gonna start with Dr. J 3 0 3 s. Question, [00:34:00] what irrigation do you recommend for producing more nodes during

[00:34:03] Seth: veg? Generative. I, we're probably in agreeance on that, huh? Jason?

[00:34:10] Jason: More node. more generative. Yep. You know, typically you're gonna see, you know, the harder generative we run, the tighter that our node spacing goes and means that we're just building more of them faster.

[00:34:21] Jason: . So if we have an appropriate sized plant and we're ready to have a lot of node, then make sure we hit at the right time. Obviously if [00:34:30] we're trying to do a shorter stock here, plant optimize the number of galaxies that we create, then we're gonna do it a little bit earlier than we would on a plant when we're shooting for say, five or six feet towards the end of harvest.

[00:34:43] Seth: Yep. The earlier we create that hormonal condition and the plant, the more we're gonna drive that type of growth, and the longer we can sustain that early grout, early flower, generative style of irrigation. The more consistent results we're gonna get with it compared to going super vegetative during [00:35:00] veg and trying to get some tall, skinny plants and then flipping 'em to a generative style.

[00:35:04] Seth: We've got to a little bit of a lag before that plant. The PGRs have kicked in essentially.

[00:35:12] Mandy: Perfect. We also got a question from Gabe. He says, thanks for the awesome videos. I was wondering to what extent is it normal to see loss of field capacity in gin steering? And have you ever put drip stakes in the slabs? Not blocks. I run three x deltas on

[00:35:28] Seth: slabs. [00:35:30] I mean, in that case, you're just driving back too far in Jen.

[00:35:34] Seth: You know, you're letting, if you go below, you know, the rule of thumb that we go by is 40%. If you go down to 35%, you're definitely gonna start losing field capacity. So always keep that in mind when we're working with rockwool. You know, it has a limitation on how deep of a dry back you can get without, you know, damaging that integrity to hold water.

[00:35:53] Jason: Yep. And you know, one of the things that I always try to not forget, which I do sometimes is just talk about the [00:36:00] initial wet up. The initial wet up of that rock will is absolutely critical in order to avoid over dry downs. So, you know, make sure that when you are doing your slabs that you let those slabs get fully saturated.

[00:36:12] Jason: I like to do it at least over. Before I even make slits into that slab. And so you can put 'em in the room, put your drip stakes in there for irrigation, and do that, you know, even before you're putting your plants on top, make sure that plant is, or that sub slab, that substrate, that slab substrate is fully saturated.

[00:36:29] Jason: [00:36:30] You've washed out any of the wedding agents in there and then go ahead and slip

[00:36:33] Seth: and. . Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of your best tools when hydrating media, whether it be cocoa, rockwool, is some sort of water content meter, you know, something to spot check with and say, Hey, you know, like if you're in cocoa, it's very important because even in the same brand, different batches are gonna have different water contents or different field capacities actually.

[00:36:54] Seth: And you know, even in rockwool, we're gonna, we see a slight bit of variation, and that's a good confirmation that [00:37:00] you can do to know you're doing a good job wetting up your rockwool, go out test it, Hey, I've hit 70 to 80%, done a good job, I stab it and immediately hit a dry pocket and hit 40%. Well, I know we probably didn't do it.

[00:37:13] Seth: Well then, you know, we didn't, we haven't waited long.

[00:37:18] Mandy: You heard it, it starts with testing. We have one more question over on YouTube. Ry wants to know, do you think there'd be an appreciable amount of quality gained if the crop was steered strictly generatively without the usual flip [00:37:30] back to vegetative after stretch?

[00:37:32] Mandy: What do you guys think?

[00:37:35] Jason: I mean, possibly it's really gonna depend on the strain. And it's almost always gonna come at some. Amount of quantity loss. So that's usually why we wouldn't go that way. However, kind of re wrap how we started this conversation today is everyone is crop steering in some way or another.

[00:37:54] Jason: A lot of historical grows were, you know, one irrigation a day, and that would be, as [00:38:00] you know, about, as generative as we can get for a plant. And so, you know, I think a lot of times those are the people that might have been resistant to going to drip irrigation systems and getting a little bit fancier with their irrigation schedules.

[00:38:12] Jason: It's just because they came from a very high quality product. What do you

[00:38:15] Seth: think, Seth? Yeah. You know, I think you nailed it there, the classic way. I mean, I first started cultivating, I know you did two, three and a half gallon pots, one irrigation a day, and then halfway through, we might get to the point where we can give them two, but we're going very [00:38:30] generative.

[00:38:30] Seth: And one of the key problems, well there are a few problems with that style. You know, number one, not getting reliable yield. Some plants just would not put out much yield, but despite having good quality, . The other problem with that style of growing is the huge pot size really promotes root borne soil-borne pathogens.

[00:38:47] Seth: So we would end up with a lot of root rot and actually quite a bit of variation on any given bench because, you know, we'd have some plants that were just rock stars and then two plants away. That [00:39:00] one's got root rot and it just doesn't look very good by the time we get to the end. Or it's stunted, it's two-thirds as big as the ones around it.

[00:39:06] Seth: So again, a yield problem you can go generative all the way through. But as Jason said, strains play a part too. Some stuff develops very much the similar quality and almost no matter how you steer it, if it's a super generative leaning plant, as we like to say in terms of genetics. However, , I find that quantifying everything, it's all gonna go back to it.

[00:39:28] Seth: But quantifying and tracking, [00:39:30] you know, typically my customers, I find that get the best quality. Do some sort of bulking. Do they do it as aggressively as some of us do? Searching for huge yields? No. Are they doing it for very long? No. And. are most of these people, are these growers in a financial situation that's make or break it right now also, no.

[00:39:52] Seth: A lot of these people have been able to pay off a lot of their debts and they have some freedom to pursue a more boutique market and it [00:40:00] happens to be strong in their area. Some areas it's hard to, it's just hard to get the boutique price right now. And that's a reality.

[00:40:09] Mandy: That's so true. Thank you guys for that.

[00:40:11] Mandy: We also had some context for Gabe's question about loss of field capacity and gin steering. Gabe came back with it says even in a 12 inch plant, I'm having trouble maintaining capacity with just P one s over two weeks. Do you guys have any.

[00:40:27] Seth: Get AROYA so you can see how low your water content's [00:40:30] getting throughout the day. I mean, that, that's the biggest thing. It's if you don't have the time series data with Rockwall it's very easy to over dry and ruin the yield on your run. Awesome.

[00:40:41] Mandy: Thank you. Yeah, that's it. Over on YouTube for now, so I'm gonna pass it back over to you, Kaisha.

[00:40:46] Kaisha: Thank you, Manny. Yeah. On and popping with the live questions. All right. Diane had a little bit of a follow up here on the hollow stems. They're wondering height, boron, and calcium. Will that stop the hollow stocks?[00:41:00]

[00:41:01] Seth: No. Nope. It's. Mostly genetic. You know, some plants might respond to a deficiency in that way. But if they have that gene it's gonna happen. And if it happens, running it through your standard fertilizer and crop steering program, there's no point in changing your whole program. I'm sure it's a strain that you love, and I don't want a dog on it too hard.

[00:41:24] Seth: But maybe it isn't the best to put into commercial production.

[00:41:28] Kaisha: Might not be yielding the [00:41:30] returns that you need. Or

[00:41:31] Seth: look at your e i t, your economic injury threshold. Does that strain have a lot of waste associated with it in terms of broken branches? Is it yielding lower or is it just bothering you and if you've eliminated all else and it's just bothering you?

[00:41:45] Seth: I mean, there's a plan I used to grow that Usually around week five every time it had a weird thing where the leaf would almost invert and it would curl around the leaf stem. We tried growing that a bunch of different ways. I think Jason knows what I'm talking about. At the end of the day it's just a weird mutation that [00:42:00] plant has.

[00:42:00] Seth: There wasn't, you know, it happens to every plant and that strain as far as I know, they're still growing that and doing just fine with it. But I just had to stop staring at it and letting it bother me. , you know, there's only so much I can do. It's, I don't even, didn't even have that straight isolated to one irrigation zone.

[00:42:17] Seth: What all can I feasibly do to help that? And the yield was still great on that plant, so let it go. Sometimes

[00:42:27] Kaisha: you gotta just walk away and let it. All [00:42:30] right. Thank you for that question Diane. Navajo posted a follow up here. I think actually just separate from this previous question, but you wrote, I'm having a lot of issues with my drippers clogging.

[00:42:39] Kaisha: I started adding zero tall to my mixes, but it seems to still be accruing. Any thoughts on that?

[00:42:46] Jason: Yeah, I mean, obviously. Avoid organic additives or anything with a elk powder in your systems. Make sure that you have lots of 120 mesh plus a little bit finer than that if you can in your filters.

[00:42:59] Jason: And that you're [00:43:00] changing them at the very least every other day, cleaning them out. You know, obviously you've got some back flush systems. It decreases the ventilator you have doing your filters. If you've had clogging problems in the past, sometimes the only way to get past that is to install new drip systems.

[00:43:16] Jason: You know, especially at the emitters. The emitters are typically the most picky part of the system. That being said, if there's been particles in the system that caused clogging in the past, there's a good chance they still might be in the system. Yeah,

[00:43:29] Seth: There's a [00:43:30] few good things to remember.

[00:43:30] Seth: You know, number one, Like Jason said, if you put any kind of organics in there, you put something in there to eat the nutrient soup. Number two, we are feeding a little bit of nutrient soup, so anything living that gets in your res, it's gonna go sit for several hours on a, you know, 75 degree to 80 degree line in your nice warm, grow room.

[00:43:50] Seth: So we only have so much control over to that part. Another thing I noticed is that you mentioned xol. You know, one thing to remember about Xol, it's actually a weak acid and a disinfection [00:44:00] agent. It's not actually gonna break up much in your system. It might do a little bit to kill biofilm, however, that biofilm still has to go somewhere.

[00:44:10] Seth: So basically if you run a zero tall, you almost wanna run it as a flush and try to blast that out of the drain valves on the end of your line. But right back to what Jason said, you know, if I start to get clogging issues, this stuff's not that expensive. Rip it out and replace it. You're gonna spend more hours in there messing with emitters [00:44:30] and trying to do all these re remedial flushes.

[00:44:32] Seth: Then you would if you just ripped it back out and tried to start over as clean as possible. And then, you know, don't be afraid to look upstream from your drippers and your basic tubing. Do you have a white pipe thin pipe that's going from there all the way out to your res? Are you getting light contamination in there?

[00:44:49] Seth: So we've got some algae or other nasties growing farther upstream in there. Where's your res at? Is that in a dark room? Is it nice and cool? You know, don't like overlook [00:45:00] any portion of your irrigation system when you're dealing with these clogs. Go all the way back to the source and then start to look at, you know, For most of these companies, if we look back at the basic emitter technology, we're running way too high of salinity,

[00:45:15] Seth: Most of us are running way too high of total dissolved solids. So at the end of the day, we expect them to fail. They have a lifespan. And once I'm more than, you know, 15 per 20% variation in the room I can't expect to make irrigation decisions and actually see [00:45:30] consistent results in my graph. Therefore, I'm scrapping it and starting over.

[00:45:37] Guest: Yeah. To follow up to that it's just like, I think, like you said, Like, if I want the ec, I want, then I kind of get clogs, , if that makes sense. You know, like it's hard to push the ec and then I see like my drippers are

[00:45:50] Seth: all like, there's salt all over them. Yeah. Three, three to five runs is about all I like to get out of a set of emitters.

[00:45:56] Seth: And then also, you know, lately a lot of programs are pushing hypochlorous [00:46:00] on a, you know, almost everyday routine that does help keep some of those salts in solution and let 'em come out of your irrigation system. Is it called Hypochlorous? Yep. It's Athena Cleanse is a good reference product for that.

[00:46:14] Seth: However you can get it from a lot of other sources. Zero to also hypochlorous. Is it just very dilute? Yep.

[00:46:22] Jason: Okay. Yeah, I

[00:46:23] Guest: was worried I was even putting left hand doses just cause it seems so toxic, but I guess it's good to go.

[00:46:28] Seth: Yeah. And you know, that's a [00:46:30] good thing to remember. Anything that's a sanitizing agent and not labeled, you know, directly as an acid for a flush.

[00:46:35] Seth: The other thing you can do, especially if you do get ahold of some hypochlorous you can do that low pH soak and don't push any on your drippers. You know, once we go in, fill your lines up, let 'em soak for 20 minutes, half hour at least, maybe even up to an hour in the afternoon, and then go push some straight water through and blast those lines out.

[00:46:56] Seth: It is possible to do maintenance on your system while you're still [00:47:00] growing. ,

[00:47:02] Jason: sorry, I have to correct myself. I was thinking ate, but zero tall looks like hydrogen peroxide and oxic acid. So little bit different steam type thing that it's trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. I had read that

[00:47:14] Guest: Ate was for the lines only, but zero tall was safe for the mix.

[00:47:18] Guest: That's why I had been running a little bit of zero in the mix.

[00:47:21] Seth: Yep. And that's definitely okay. I would possibly look at, you know, one thing I've even had luck with is just straight up using phosphoric acid and making like a [00:47:30] 3.0 solution, soaking the lines in it and then dumping that out. It just depends on how bad it is.

[00:47:35] Seth: If you've got, you know, are you just getting biofilm out of the line or are you getting what looks like gravel after a good flush outta your lines?

[00:47:44] Guest: Honestly, like it's never during the flush. It's during my run. Like I'll see like a. One, one drippers like wet, one side of the drip's wet, and the other one's like dry bone dry.

[00:47:54] Guest: So it's like, I have no idea. Like I, I replaced seven drippers today, like in a out of 140 drips. [00:48:00] So it's yeah, it's interesting. You know, like you could see the plants are bad, so it's weird. But you don't, I don't really see the breakup. I just see like there's strippers not

[00:48:08] Seth: working. Right. I would try the hypochlorous and I mean, when was the last time you replaced everything?

[00:48:14] Seth: Excuse me.

[00:48:17] Jason: These are

[00:48:17] Guest: actually brand new. This is like a six week okay. What's it called? I think it's my mix. I think like I have too much organic shit in that, and that's probably what's

[00:48:24] Seth: causing it. That'll definitely do it. I've noticed, like when I was running any kind of organics through those drippers, I'd pull [00:48:30] 'em out and there'd be like, Almost a horsetail of biofilm stuck to the bottom of the actual drip itself.

[00:48:36] Seth: And that was a mixture of bacteria and TC powder cuz we were putting in a product that was 98% tout powder along with those beneficial bacteria. So, makes sense. Yeah, I think that's,

[00:48:50] Guest: I look into the Dina cleanse. I think

[00:48:51] Seth: That, yeah. And then, you know, another thing I've really had luck with is running disc filters.

[00:48:56] Seth: If I can get some pretty tight micron disc filters that they [00:49:00] just seem to do a little bit better job than the mesh and you're still gonna be cleaning 'em, you know, almost daily. That's a unfortunate reality.

[00:49:12] Kaisha: Amazing. Thank you so much for this question. What a great conversation. We do have a few more live questions we wanna get to. Let me move on to Diane, who actually submitted a couple more. So he's looking for a couple recommendations. First, what do you recommend for root aphids? And second, what's the best way to keep this SMA [00:49:30] open?

[00:49:30] Kaisha: And if you have any specifics with V P T relative humidity and temperature, he would love that. So what do you guys think root aphids keeping that SMA open?

[00:49:41] Seth: I'll start on the roof. Af or aphids there for sure. Procedurally. number one, don't bring in any cuts in dirt or cocoa. Bring in preferably unrooted cuttings or only from a clone cube.

[00:49:52] Seth: But the longer those cuts spend in someone else's facility, it's a better chance you got Ru afis. Number two, if your [00:50:00] moms are in your bedroom, get 'em out of there. They're harboring your Ru afis. If you got Ru afis in your flower room, destroy everything in your bedroom, nuke it out, destroy all your mom's and start over.

[00:50:09] Seth: What they do is continue to live in any media that's continuing to stay in the facility. Generally, if you've got Ru day, its, they came in at some point, number one, because they hitched a ride on some media that had a plant growing in it. And then number two, we don't have enough separation and rotation in the system to be able to isolate [00:50:30] parts of the process enough to get rid of a pest like that.

[00:50:33] Seth: You can do root drenches as well. You know, there's products like Top 22, WP and several others, zero tall. We could go down the line, there's plenty of drenches, but at the end of the day, you want to kill it at the source. And generally that's early on in the process. They're in the bedroom or the mom room.

[00:50:52] Jason: And I'll jump in on the keeping your stone mates open. Yeah, so sto model conductance, which is talking about how [00:51:00] much exchange comes, goes on through the stone mates, how open they're that's gonna be directly related with how much photosynthesis is going on. There is one caveat. So as long as we don't change the CO2 concentration in the room, then a more open still mate is gonna mean a more productive plant usually.

[00:51:18] Jason: Ways that you can optimize that. Obviously having your co2 at the right settings for your light settings, making sure that light settings are high enough to produce as much. Photosynthesis as possible. And [00:51:30] then, you know, with your V P D making sure that you're kind of matching the range of that plant as far as relative humidity, temperature, and V P D, obviously they are all related to each other.

[00:51:40] Jason: They're things that are slightly specific to strain and they're definitely specific to the age of that plant. And our plants are a little bit younger. We're gonna wanna have a slightly lower P D. So that's gonna be either a. Usually it's gonna be a little bit of higher humidity in the room, and then towards the end of the cycle we can taper that off.

[00:51:59] Jason: A lot of times [00:52:00] we're actually tapering to avoid things like molds and mildews as well. But you know, in order to protect the product, that's what we need to do. Specific numbers, I mean, when plants are in young flour, Say 0.8 to one is gonna be usually ideal. Then we'll wanna be up into the, you know, one to 1.2 range, and then typically towards flower to say 1.4.

[00:52:24] Jason: Is a good place to be for relative temperature. I usually don't like to throw those out. I [00:52:30] only like to have extremes just because I don't want you to go the wrong direction with a specific strain that might like warmer environments or cooler

[00:52:37] Seth: environments. Yeah, and one thing I always like to remind people to do as well, when we're talking about leaf surface dams, feet or leaf surface, p d in particular, cuz what we're using is room p d or just general air p d is a way to approximate what's happening at that leaf surface.

[00:52:52] Seth: So, personally I think a great idea to look at is, or not a great idea, a great thing to always be keeping track of is that leaf surface temp. [00:53:00] You know, if you've got a fairly accurate laser thermometer, you can go around and say, okay, here's my room V P D according to that, I still want to see, and all the time, we usually wanna see 78 to 82 roughly on the lease surface temp.

[00:53:12] Seth: Sometimes we'll go a little higher with certain strains, or if we've got, you know, the p d appropriate, we can go a little higher. But if I go ahead and say, Hey, my room Vpd is looking good, but my leaf temperature is way too low. I'm not getting enough radiant energy hitting that leaf to get the amount of p photosynthesis and [00:53:30] production that I want.

[00:53:31] Seth: And that ties back in. You know what Jason said, we don't want to have extreme ranges in anything. We want our CO2 to be pretty stable. We want our light to be pretty stable. And then from there we can start to adjust our environmental parameters like temperature and humidity to really dial in that leaf surface V P D, cuz that's what the plant cares about, is that micro client, that microenvironment that's happening within a few millimeters of the surface of the leaf.

[00:53:58] Seth: And unfortunately we don't have a sensor [00:54:00] that we can just clamp onto your leaf. Tell you everything about it right now, we do have the Leaf Barometer , which can tell you if the plant's transpiring as much as you expect it to, but at the end of the day, we have to look at also the values that we can easily monitor and act on.

[00:54:18] Kaisha: Awesome. Diane, that was a great question. Thank you for that. We wanna try to tackle these last two live questions. Billbo posted one, I'm gonna read it. Bill Bone, if you wanna add to it, feel free to unmute yourself. But he writes, given the peak [00:54:30] transpiration period that exists during a diurnal phase, do you think that with this high value crop, there's an advantage to initiating or acknowledging another irrigation window?

[00:54:40] Kaisha: For example, P one lights onto to FC P two, most aggressive Phase P. Maintenance shots, P four overnight, dry back.

[00:54:53] Jason: I'm gonna start off the first part of this and I'd love to see where we are given peak trans [00:55:00] transpiration periods. In respect to D phase, I have seen some information coming from Dr. Justice using some licor equipment on this. It's actually the only publication that I've seen specific to cannabis.

[00:55:12] Jason: Yes, for other crops, we do see peak transpiration periods throughout the day, depending on how long the life cycle is and some of the other parameters that, that we're meeting. So I guess for me to make a great decision on this I would have to see some more professional publications on what those peak [00:55:30] transpiration

[00:55:30] Seth: periods.

[00:55:31] Seth: Absolutely. I mean, I think also one thing we can look at just as a kind of way to indirectly confirm what Jason's talking about. I mean, if you're watching volumetric water content, we can look at the, we can zoom in and look at the rate of drive back over a very short period of time, you know, within an hour, no problem.

[00:55:48] Seth: So we can kind of, you know, see where those peak transpiration periods are. But at the, you know, where the rubber meets the road, if we let's see, for example, P one lights onto. Field capacity. [00:56:00] So if we P one, when the lights come on, the plants don't fully have their stamato open. That whole process of really warming up in the morning and getting things flowing hasn't happened yet.

[00:56:10] Seth: And by inundating the plant right away, we're gonna kind of actually slow that down. We're cooling down the roots. There's not as much air in there. And then P two, as far as most aggressive You know, one thing to think about too, remember when we're bulking, we're looking at the total number of shots throughout the day and how quickly we can line 'em up.

[00:56:29] Seth: So when [00:56:30] we use P one to get up to field capacity with a lot of shots rapidly, you know, that's a function of getting up to field capacity, which in our steering strategy is a lot easier to get up to field capacity in the morning rather than try to modulate it throughout the day and hit it later.

[00:56:44] Seth: Certain strains may perform better, but typically we still always want that two hours after lights on just to get those stamato open and get transpiration going. Unless, you know, our plants are about to wilt, then that's again, now we're into reactive strategies, which are not [00:57:00] ideal. And then P three typically would be, you know, after your P two s that's pushing into the night already.

[00:57:07] Seth: So, we could tailor it to p transpiration windows, but. Inside the grow room peak transpiration windows, the lights don't dim throughout the day. Typically some people step on over a few hours, but typically we don't have clouds going overhead. The temperature's not raising and lowering throughout the day when we have static conditions or as close to static as we can achieve in the grow room.

[00:57:29] Seth: That's [00:57:30] what gives us the ability to really go over this. If we went to a greenhouse where we're dealing with varying dli every day, different times of peak transpiration, cuz let's say we've got cloudy, midday sometimes and really sunny afternoons, then it changes. But that's kind of outside of what most cannabis growers are trying to do right now.

[00:57:52] Kaisha: Awesome. Bilbo as always, it's so good to hear from you. Thank you for that excellent question. We're gonna take it over to YouTube cuz I think we have one more over there, right? Mandy? That's

[00:57:59] Mandy: [00:58:00] right. Yeah. Thanks everyone for the questions on YouTube. Dr. Jay Rodin what week of flower does the plant put on the most weight?

[00:58:09] Seth: Depends on the strain.

[00:58:12] Kaisha: I was gonna say that awesome. Yeah.

[00:58:16] Mandy: Dr. Jay thank you for your questions and thanks everyone over there. Awesome. What a great show. I'll pass it back over to you, Kaisha.

[00:58:22] Kaisha: For real. So good. Thank you to everybody for all of your questions, Seth and Jason, just breaking down the science.

[00:58:28] Kaisha: Always appreciate you guys. [00:58:30] Seth, looking forward to walking Emerald Cup with you this weekend. If anybody out, there's gonna be there. Keep an eye out for the folks who are wearing the AROYA outfits. Yeah. All right, well on that note. Any last words, Seth and Jason before we wrap it up?

[00:58:44] Jason: Next

[00:58:44] Seth: week.

[00:58:45] Seth: Yeah. Hit up me and Case on Instagram. We'll both be watching for dms and stuff on the AROYA Instagram. So we should be pretty accessible down there. That's the whole point. We're there to talk to growers and have a good time. That is

[00:58:57] Kaisha: it, that is the whole point. Excited to be there. [00:59:00] All right, we're gonna wrap it up.

[00:59:01] Kaisha: Mandy, thank you for co moderating with me. Thank you for everybody joining AROYA Office Hours this week. We do this every Thursday, and the best way to get answers from the experts, if you couldn't tell, is to join us live. You're looking to learn more about AROYA. Feel free to book a demo with us, and the experts can walk you through all the ways that it can be used to improve your cultivation production process.

[00:59:20] Kaisha: But as always, if there's a topic you'd like cover on a future episode of Office Hours post your questions anytime via the AROYA. You can feel free to drop them in the chat. Shoot us an email [00:59:30] at support.aroya@metergroup.com. Send us a DM over Instagram and all of the social channels that we're on, cuz we definitely wanna hear from you.

[00:59:38] Kaisha: We record every session. We'll email everyone in attendance a link to the video from today's conversation. It'll also live on the AROYA YouTube channel, like subscribe and share while you're there. And if you find these conversations helpful, feel free to spread the word with your network. Thanks everybody.

[00:59:52] Kaisha: See you next time. Bye.

[00:59:57] Seth: All right.

[00:59:58] Kaisha: Stopping the [01:00:00] recording. Great show team. Thank you so much.

[01:00:05] Seth: Yep.