Scott:
Great. So this is the first version of AROYA Office Hours. Welcome to everyone. This is going to be a relatively informal discussion where we talk about the platform and cannabis cultivation in general, and it's something that fascinates us and is the reason why we made the product in the first place, but through talking with growers, we hope to understand more about how the platform is being used, the specific challenges that you're seeing, share some of our own experiences and generally just have a discussion around the purpose of the platform which is to help growers to succeed. If you do have questions to start out with, please at any time and beginning now, just drop them into chat and we will get to them as they come up. I'm here with Jason. Jason is right here next to me-

Jason:
Hey everybody.

Scott:
... in the studio, and we are going to be doing these every week. So if we don't get to a topic, we will cover it in future versions of this and it's just a time to get together for everybody who uses AROYA or is interested in AROYA and get into the growing and existing cannabis industry.

Scott:
So we will talk about some of the product features and tips and I'll start out kind of with my own story today because it's relevant to I think what we're talking about, but as we do that, please drop your questions and thoughts into the chat as we go. So to start out with, I decided to... After many months of having talked to customers and visited facilities and seeing them using the platform, I decided to try and get some experience using the platform myself. So I got some hemp seeds and I got a tent and I started to try to grow plants and I did it with an AROYA system, and the things that I've learned along the way really help me understand how difficult it is to grow plants properly, but in sharing that information, we can start out with probably the worst example of a cannabis grow and talk about all the silly and dumb things that I'm doing wrong and then hopefully get to some better examples as other people drop their thoughts and observations in.

Scott:
So without any further ado, I will jump in and share my screen. So I can do that here and we'll go into AROYA and let me do also picture in picture on. Yes, thank you. So I set this up as a growth facility, I call it the four-by-four tent mostly because it is a four-by-four tent and I'm going to go through some of the data here and have Jason look at it as well and start off with some really basic things. So if I go in here and look at what I'm doing, I just have one zone. I like to think that this is the most technologically advanced AROYA install in the world because I have four plants and three sensors. So when I go in here and look at that at that zone, I can see some of the things that are going on.

Scott:
Basically the situation is that I planted these plants a couple of months ago. Let's turn off light VPD, actually let's turn off the air temperature as well, and started watering them. Ran into a bunch of issues. The very first issue that I ran into was that I didn't completely saturate the growth media, and maybe Jason you can tell me what you think from looking at these data but one of the issues with just one of my sensors is that's in like 11% water content, and the EC is reading super high.

Scott:
So the way that you would know this in AROYA is by clicking on this and looking for individual sensor readings instead of having them aggregate as an average in the zone, and you can see that a couple of the sensors are giving us reasonable water EC readings and one of them really isn't. So is this something you see very often at customer sites, Jason?

Jason:
Yeah, we can see this every once in a while at customer sites and obviously the higher sensor density you have, the more likely it'll catch plants that may not have been soaked out well in that media. Also sometimes you'll have issues with your drippers, irrigation system failures, that type of stuff. So when we do see that it's easy way to know that some of the uniformity in that facility needs to be addressed before we really jump into crop steering.

Scott:
Yeah. Okay. So that's really where I want to start off with. A lot of these issues that I'm facing are ones that people who are newer to growing face. And another example of that was just the temperature. So if I go back here, let's see, well, let me just put my temperatures up for a minute. One thing that was a problem, when I started growing it was kind of toward the end of summer, and my garage was really hot. So I didn't need to heat anything. Just within the last couple of weeks, it started to get a lot colder here. And I started to heat... I put a heater in the tent to keep it warm. You can see that the temperatures are a little higher, but I'm having trouble maintaining and keeping that temperature regular, which doesn't necessarily happen in a lot of indoor facilities. But speak to that. That point you just made, Jason, about getting consistency and kind of a homogeneous atmospheric state, homogeneous substrate, controllability before trying to do things like crop steering. Why is it so important?

Jason:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm kind of excited the way that you approach this, because a lot of our clients get really excited about looking at the water content, and you see data right off the bat. Obviously, the [inaudible 00:06:25] has been an incredible change in how a lot of our cultivators are analyzing their systems, not necessarily as common as environment sensors. But you're exactly right, we do want to typically evaluate that environment, how consistent it is, is it doing the things that we expect it to do before we really begin trying to crop steer.

Jason:
So by getting that consistency in your environment, making sure that your temperatures are in the right area, that you're achieving the humidity that you need to match that temperature for appropriate VPD. All these things are going to be how you can have repeatable cycles. The end goal, if we can limit the number of variables that are changing, especially variables that are changing on accident, then that's where you get to projectability, and you can start making those crop steering changes for improvement.

Scott:
Yeah, yeah, I like how you address that. So let's actually look at the entirety of the data and maybe zoom in on some of these things. I mean, what's going on here is a little bit crazy. So I'll go back to here. Yeah, thank you, Chris. So I'll go back to our original slide here. If you had a customer, if you're talking to a customer whose data looked this bad, and then just saying, "Well, you do have to have consistency." I mean, one of the big problems I had was that I couldn't even consistently water the plants. I got an open sprinkler partway through like in, I think it was around September timeframe. But before that, I was just using a switch on the wall and plugging in a pump and then just turning the pump on every once in a while and watering the plants. You can see that there are waterings happening on a frequent basis. Then after I got that open sprinkler pumped in, but what are some other things you would say to a customer whose data looked this bad, Jason? And don't hold back.

Jason:
We would definitely start off by talking about facility operations, exactly like you said, a open sprinkler, or do we have an irrigation system that's keeping regular irrigations happening every single day? Do we have control variables or control equipment in there to keep your environment in the ranges that we want? And are all those operating appropriately?

Jason:
So typically, when we see some data like this, it comes down to operating infrastructure of what's going on in the facility. That's the first step before we really even start making any decisions based on this data. We want some control variable data or control data that gives us an idea of how stable it is. And if we haven't achieved some stability, let's kind of take a step back and start working on improving facility resources to get those things where we want to be.

Scott:
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Kaisha:
Scott and Jason, we have a couple questions that have been submitted. I wanted to let you know about John's. The first one. He wants to know how is AROYA different from a crop steering app like GroSens?

Scott:
Yeah, that is an excellent question. I mean, some of it has to do with the sensors themselves. So GroSens is a system that METER Group makes. So we make that sensor and we are partnered with GroSens to sell it. So the sensing technology is similar. One of the first things that you get with an approach like this is, in AROYA, is that the sensors cost a little bit less so you can afford to deploy more of them and get a representative sample. But the the key difference is the way that AROYA is set up to be a production platform.

Scott:
So let me show my screen again and talk about this. Because the key piece of AROYA, first of all, is that it's set up to help growers broadly and not just specifically with what the pore water ECM water content readings are. And that starts with these recipes. So you say these recipes are how you grow your plants. So we just have a basic Veg/Flower/Cure Recipe in here. You're saying this is what I want to do in each phase of growth. Here are the targets and alerts, here are the tasks, here's the lighting schedule for each of these phases of growth. Once you have those setup in the system, then you can execute that by creating a harvest group. So you come back to harvest groups, and you create those groups in here. By saying, what time or what date the harvest group is starting, what recipe you're using, what the harvest group name is, where all of those plants are going to be in the different phases of growth. By doing this, you get the data.

Scott:
So we look back here at the data. Sorry, we look back here at the data and we say, well, this is room data. So that's what you would get from AROYA or GroSense or anybody, is room data, but the room data is being applied to this harvest group up here. So what that means is that each time you grow it, the room data is written to the harvest group and cultivar record, and then you use the software system to help make adjustments during the cultivation phase.

Scott:
Then after that is done, because all that data is written to the cultivar record, you can go in here... And I don't have any cultivar profile. Well, I do have one grow in here, because I just put one cultivar in here, but each of the cultivars that you grow is listed in the cultivar profiles, and then you can analyze those cultivars. Essentially, that's what we've tried to build is a system that helps you understand what you're doing with each cultivar that you're growing, maximize the yield on that cultivars using techniques like crop steering, but then continually improving that over time. In your facility dashboard, you can see, "Hey, in terms of our grams per square foot per harvest, are we getting better? Or are we getting worse?" Because that's the representation of everything that you're doing on the cultivation and post harvest side.

Scott:
So that's how we see AROYA as being different. It's a production platform. You drive accountability using analytics like this, because all of the cultivation and post harvest processing data, including things like water activity, are written to the cloud provider records. So that's how those two systems are different.

Kaisha:
Got another question for you, Scott. Phillip, is asking your WC readings are spanning a wide range, can you explain why that is? And was this expected?

Scott:
Yeah. How should I say this? It was expected just because... Let me put it this way. Every person who starts out using the AROYA system has a different goal. My goal in this first phase was just to understand how stupid I was. So from that perspective, seeing such different water content readings, does help me understand the things I don't know yet. And one of the things that I didn't know was how to make sure that my substrate was consistent. So yeah, knowing what I know now, it does make sense that the water content readings are that different. I know I'm not going to get good data and be able to move on to things like doing crop steering properly until I solve the problem with my substrate.

Scott:
So I would say the answer is yes, it does make sense that my water content readings are that different. If you were to see water content readings that were this different in your grow though, that would at the very least be an indication that the particular plant that the sensor is in is not getting watered properly. This one that has 21% water content, for example. The reason that we would be concerned about 21% is that we know that stone wool which is what I'm growing in, in my little four by four tent, that whenever the water content... if the water content ever gets below 35%, you're going to have the stone wool itself turn hydrophobic, and you won't be able to wet it up again properly. What that means is you'll get channeling of the fertigation water and that just means that you're going to get lower quality crop. So it's a really basic problem.

Kaisha:
Got another question from Chris. This is for you Scott, but it's also for everyone, all of our attendees. What topics would you like to see covered in the future?

Scott:
I mean, yes, so topics that I want to see, there's lots of topics I want to see. But I mean, one of the things that interests me the most is, how to use AROYA data to dial in my irrigation strategy. How to use that information in a closed loop way to adjust every day. I mean, one of the things I noticed with my plants is that as they grew, each day, as they were growing, their dry backs were changing, just based on the size of the plant, for example. So the EC that I was reaching each day would change. So using the data in a closed loop way to improve growing is something I hope that I would like to talk to about as a subject in the future. Other attendees, what are your thoughts?

Philip:
I don't know if we're supposed to chat or talk, I was going to talk. I would love to hear more, maybe now, maybe in the future, but I know that AROYA is capable of a lot of things, including crop steering, but also things like task management, like how would a company benefit from using AROYA's task management features and tie that into their success? Is something I would like to hear about.

Scott:
Yeah, and I haven't used tasks a lot in my home grow, because mainly, I'm just assigning stuff to myself that I know I need to be doing anyway. But why don't you talk about that for a minute Jason, what do you see customers or clients doing with task management that is effective?

Jason:
Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of ways that task management can really help cultivators improve what's going on at their site. One of the things is the tasks are documented on the data record. So when we look at harvest groups, we can see the number of tasks, what was getting done, at what time, and for some types of tasks, it's going to affect the output, the yield of that crop. So we talked about how much deleafing occurred, or when it occurred. To kind of keep an eye on the yields of a harvest group, we can start to understand what times would be best and how much defoliation per strain type is optimal for the most photosynthesis that we can get out of those plants. The other approach is...

Scott:
Sorry, Jason, just to say it really quick, that is one thing I actually did here. So if you go into your batch, and you go to analytics, I did take a few plant heights as we went along here. And you can see in the growth phase when the plants actually stopped stretching. So that's when I actually flipped it to bulking phase to the second phase of flower is when the plants essentially stopped growing. So yeah, I agree that setting up a task to do something like recording a plant height in the system is a really great way to get a good dataset of information about the cultivar.

Philip:
How tall were your plants?

Scott:
Yeah, that was another problem. They were a little over just like two and a half feet. So they were very, very small. Now growing in a tent, you guys know that there's not a ton of room. So I didn't really mind it that much, this being the first batch. But if you go back to the data, you can see that there was a time... I'm going to have to go way back, but there was a time when I was actually gone on a business trip, and my emitters got plugged and the plants didn't get watered for three days. So that in a very critical phase of growth, the plants didn't get watered.

Scott:
Let's see. So that would have been right around this time. Let's see if I can pull it up. Yeah. Yeah, see this phase right here. There was actually no plant watering going on at all during these days. I even called my wife and I said, "The plants aren't getting watered." And so she went out and tried to open the valve manually to make sure they got watered. But as you guys know, that doesn't help much when your emitters are plugged. A common problem that definitely hurt me. So sorry Jason, keep going.

Jason:
Yeah. So one other thing I want to talk about with task management, obviously, having shared platform where we're seeing notes, we're seeing data, we've got analytical outputs for continuous improvement. But yeah, if we do tasking through our recipes, we can start to outline what our plan is, and get that information to our employees on a daily basis, on an outline. So when we look at the scope of a three month flower cycle, for example, we're going to have pesticide applications, we're going to have lots of tasks as far as checking certain types of runoff for data, doing deleafing, maybe trelliswork, really it comes down to each individual facility's approach to how they're growing.

Jason:
So when we build that in a recipe, it's a template for every growth cycle. I always encourage people to have separate recipes for strains that grow drastically different. So we can do tasks at times when we're flipping from one... Excuse me, switching from one steering approach to another. So maybe when we're going from that stacking phase to a bulking phase, we'll talk about checking our irrigation. Create tasks to have the first day of bulking so that we know we went to a wider irrigation window.

Kaisha:
Can I also just pose this question to Scott at ripple effect? If you're down to chime in, we'd love to hear from you what topics you'd like to see covered in the future if you have any other thoughts.

Eddie:
Are you speaking to me?

Kaisha:
I am. Oh Eddie. I'm sorry.

Eddie:
No worries. Basically, one of my questions is that I'm currently doing a lot of work creating plant schedules and timelines for facilities, is there potentially any interest in creating a feature where you could input the number of flower rooms for any facility, you upload your AROYA recipe for your clone timeline, your veg timeline, your flower timeline, harvest timeline, cure timeline, and then it would autofill automatically the facilities plant flow schedule. Because that seems to be... It's not really an issue, but it would be really nice to see something like that live within, if that's not interesting you guys, I'll continue to use other means to generate that. But it's a lot of work on my end. I feel like most of the information already lives within the recipe. So if you just already add the number of flowering rooms you have, it'd be able to go through a formula and generate that information for me automatically.

Scott:
Yeah, I think that's an excellent suggestion. It's something that exists in our backlog, Eddie, to look at, essentially, each room as a capacity. I mean, it's almost like a hotel, right? Where the rooms have to give... they have to house all the plants for a certain amount of time. Just taking all that capacity and then using it in a smart way to say this is how the harvest group should be scheduled in each room as they flow through it. Am I understanding your suggestion, right?

Eddie:
Yeah, basically, like, let's say I have, I just know this off the top of my head, if I have a 63 day plant schedule, that means I would have the plant live within a flowering room for 61 days. And on a 62nd day, I would clean, on the 63rd day, I would flip the room. I cannot input the veg timeline of 14 days, 24 days, whatever you're running, I'm not going to judge. And then you would have your clone timeline as well, that you would figure out through collecting this data per cultivar. It can live in each recipe. And then it doesn't matter what cultivar as you've harvested this data from your platform, you put it in, and now I can just don't even have to think about it. It's telling me when to do these things.

Scott:
Yeah. So there's a couple things I really like about that suggestion. The first is that it just makes it dead easy for doing things that growers have to do all the time. Growers or consultants have to do all the time anyway. The second thing I really like about it is that how well that is done determines how efficiently you're using [inaudible 00:24:38] asset, which is, in manufacturing we call that overall equipment effectiveness, which is your availability times up time, times quality, times these things. A lot of people a lot of facilities aren't focused on that. They they look at yields per harvest, and then they don't look at how much grams per square foot per year. But if you turn five and a half harvests into six harvests in a year, at the exact same yield, your profitability is going to go up because you're spreading that rent cost or that lighting cost or labor costs over more output. So I think it's a great suggestion.

Eddie:
Yeah, I sell the idea to facility owners that were going to have 5.79 harvest per room per year. I make sure that I achieve that. And I would like to see if this is interesting other people, is very interesting to me to put If This Then That rules and it like if the harvest on this schedule falls on a Sunday, then we move the harvest to a Friday and the flip to a Monday. Things like that. So we have Monday through Friday, people not showing up sick on Sunday, that kind of stuff.

Scott:
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. Because the schedule has to conform to the limitations in terms of labor or schedule or other things that may not just appear in, "Hey, this is a room that's x feet, x square feet and can handle this many plants." Another thing that we could show, is timing available on the App, Jason? Or is it only on the kiosk?

Jason:
Timing?

Scott:
The timing of tasks, like how long a task takes?

Jason:
Yeah, no, it's available in here. If you jump into journal or if you just build a new task, we can check that up.

Scott:
So I should do this, just click Add Task. Okay, and I'll go deleaf. I'll schedule it for today. Actually, if you saw all my plant pictures, you probably would say I do need to deleaf so. This task type by the way is just it's a task versus applying a pesticide which is a special kind of task, and you can choose to zone, I only have one zone. You can put a priority on it. The other thing some people don't know is that tasks can be not related to a particular room, it just generalized tasks. We'll go ahead and save this one. So here's deleaf. What would I do now, Jason?

Jason:
Let's just click on that task, it'll give us some options on timing your tasks, pausing the timing, completing it, adding comments. So if you wanted to reach out to Bob and see if he could help you deleaf, because you did last time, then you can do that by saying add comment put a add symbol and get Bob in there. And it'll send him a text notification or a push notification to his mobile app.

Scott:
Yes, yes. Perfect. So I just started the task and now I'm going to go ahead and finish it. Look at this, my deleaf task only took 15 seconds, which just makes me definitely a top tier worker. And it's finished now. So this information is saved in the system. We don't do anything with it yet, except just save how long the tasks took. But we are working on an analytics and dashboard page that would show everyone what they want to see, like how long does each task take typically, and who does the tasks at the right quality and with the fastest time, for example. So this is something that we built to be able to time the tasks in the system. So we do save these in the database, and we're working on an analytics piece that would make that valuable as well. Okay.

Kaisha:
I have a new question here. And I hope... I apologize if I get the pronunciation wrong, from Takuya. He wants to know what kind of grams per square foot are good AROYA customers getting? Can you give us a range?

Scott:
Okay. Yes. Lots of people are interested in this question. I think there are all different types of cultivation facilities out there. And so I think this depends on what type of facility you're running because there are indoor facilities where they have control over everything, where they've been running a long time, and where they have great SOPs in place, and they're really just out there out front drilling it and doing a great job. What would you say for like a top tier facility is a good yield for indoor? Jason, any thoughts on that?

Jason:
Yeah. So I would say 90 grams per square foot, it's probably a real decent, that would be a B plus or an A type of operating facility. Starting off using AROYA I've seen people down in the 35-40 grams per square foot, and that's those specific ones we usually typically get them up into, say, 60 grams, 70 grams per square foot within six months. So that's a really fun increase for us, it's a great increase for their shareholders, for their workers. For everybody there. We've got a couple of facilities that have done even better than that on their improvements. We hear back that their employees are getting raises, taking more vacations, really getting some structure behind planning the operation.

Scott:
Sure. What about... I mean, as we go down in terms of the input cost being less, what about like a greenhouse, but with some supplemental lighting? What might be a good yield for an operation like that? Would you expect if they have enough supplemental lighting, the greenhouse yields should be the same as indoor? I know that industry wide that it's not really there yet, but what are your thoughts?

Jason:
Yeah, that's a great question. So anytime that we're working to combat the environment that you are in a greenhouse, so we've got a couple of types of greenhouses too when we talk about there's probably three levels of greenhouses. We've got some closed loop greenhouses. So people actually put HVAC humidifiers into their greenhouses, they're really doing this basically capturing as much solar energy as they can running exactly like an indoor. A great way to cut costs, get nice full spectrum from that big ball of fire in the sky.

Jason:
Other type would be vented greenhouses. So we're talking about having pad pumps to control humidity and temperature, having shutters, having fans, all that types of stuff, good controls in those types of facilities. Theoretically, they could achieve the same type as an indoor especially since you've got lots of light intensity. Obviously that comes down to making sure that that the greenhouse is very dynamic in the way that it's controlling your relative humidity and temperature and your light, like you said, making sure that the light controller's basically supplementing at the right times we get a cloudy day and need those lights on for longer duration to achieve the same DLI. One of the reasons that that daily lighting integral being consistent is it's going to help you drive your irrigation schedules keep everything much more like an indoor.

Jason:
Then the last would be things like hoop houses. So less controls, a lot less energy outputs, we see these up in the hills of humble, that type of stuff. So, yeah, there's a big range. When we talk about those closed and well controlled greenhouses, they should be able to achieve pretty close to what we see in indoor simply because the plant doesn't know the difference if our environment is well controlled and we're getting the inputs that we need.

Scott:
Yeah. We did get an awesome question from cultivation team here that I want to get to in just a second. But, what I've seen on greenhouse is roughly it'll depend on the season too, summer to winter, but maybe an average, down around 40 to 45 in a greenhouse with supplemental lighting. I've heard of yields without supplemental lighting would be even lower than that, because then you're completely dependent on whatever natural light you're going to get. I even know that there are some, you mentioned hoop house, so it kind of runs the full gamut from indoor, you control absolutely everything, to kind of greenhouse, you're controlling things but you have less control for a lower cost. You go hoop house, where you're only controlling like a couple of things, then you go to full outdoor, which is it's just whatever light you can get from the sun, whatever weather you can get, and all you're really deciding is IPM and irrigation strategies at that point, but then the operating costs are lower.

Scott:
So I think everything from outdoor, if you said 15 grams a square foot outdoor, even without their prices being low you could still make money to being like 90 to 100 grams per square foot indoor per harvest is the full range that I've heard of, in talking with people.

Scott:
So let's see. So I think the question from cultivation team is, this is a great one. Having just installed the system, he's wondering, is it better to start making changes right away? Or in your opinion, Jason, is it good then to just keep doing what you're doing for the first harvest instead of baseline? What would your advice be?

Jason:
Yeah, so this is a great one, because we're also excited to make improvements. As a lot of people we work with have been cultivating for many, many years, and they might have a great grasp of their facility. Sometimes they want to make changes fairly quickly to get to that improvement. My suggestion is always to do at least one harvest cycle without making any significant changes. That way, you've got a control dataset, you get an understanding of what your variability is before you start to pull in strings around the facility. Obviously, if there are some serious complications that arise quickly in the datasets, sometimes you can go in and start making some changes. But for any facility that is operating at a good capacity to start with, when you first implement AROYA, I would recommend the first harvest group be your typical operating schedule.

Scott:
Yeah, that's some great advice. I also know from our own continuous improvements, efforts that a great methodology is to change one thing, changing a bunch of things at once is going to make it hard to determine what the impact of each of those things. So if you get that good baseline, and then change one thing, for example, like say, "During the first three weeks of flower, I'm going to push more generative, try and get drybacks up to 25% and hit a particular EC," and that's all you're changing, then you can see the effect that that's having. Is that reasonable, Jason?

Jason:
Yeah, that's a great explanation. This is where facilities that have more rooms and as fewer strains as possible, have major advantages. Because they've got faster repetition. They can change one variable in one room, maybe a different variable in a different room, and they get those results fairly quickly. Obviously, when we've got multiple cultivars, different types of strains, different genetics, the response to those changes can be drastic. So that's a compounding variable when we talk about the complexity of continuous improvement.

Scott:
Yeah, I'm interested in knowing from some of the growers that are on today, how many different cultivars are you working with right now? What's your count of strains, if you want to drop it in the message box?

Kaisha:
Scott and Jason, I've got our next question. Just a reminder to everybody in attendance, please put your questions in the chat, in addition to sharing what Scott just asked for, got another one from Eddie. Going back to your example, your EC plummeted to zero in that graph as the water content fell to zero, I see this trend occur where the EC and VWC rise and fall together. Can you explain this occurrence to the group?

Scott:
I'm actually not smart enough to explain this one. But it is true that this does happen. But my understanding is this only happens at extremes in water content, which is why I'm thinking that my sensors are not working properly. Is that right Jason?

Jason:
Yeah, so it's just kind of a side effect of when our EC gets that high. Sometimes we get a negative value from the hardware, and that software is displaying that fact. So right here on the left side of your screen right now about 4:30 or 5pm on November 9th, we can see it went from top flatline at 30 EC. Went down to zero. So it's just the way that that graph is showing the values coming out of the system.

Scott:
Yeah, I mean, if my math is right, if your feed EC is higher than your substrate EC, you will see increasing water contents increase your EC, is that right?

Jason:
Correct.

Scott:
I mean, it's not common, but it does happen. I mean, it will happen in specific situations. If you look at these and also these spikes here, this is just happening. So this spike here is on the sensor 627. And if we go down to the bottom, we can also see this as the sensor that has a water content of 12%. So this is never a water content that you would want to see in any reasonable production environment in Stonewall, but occasionally in a garage grow, you can see crazy stuff like this.

Jason:
Yeah, and that kind of comes back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier is when some of the data is not necessarily real stable or consistent. It's probably not worth the time to dig too deep into it. It's really worth the time to say, "Hey, what's going on in the facility that caused such erratic behavior?"

Scott:
Yep. Yep. Yeah, I think, Eddie dropped in 50 Plus. Yeah. 10 strains was the answer from cultivation team. A real common number that I hear from reasonably sized growers is 15, 18 different strains, and when to ask them, how often they're introducing new strains, they essentially say every month they're looking at introducing something new. A lot of it comes from sales, their salespeople go out, either to distribution or to retail, and get these people saying, "Well, that's nice that you made this, whatever it is, Wedding Cake, or Blue Dream or something for us. But we want something different, we want something new." So tell us some of the challenges involved with introducing new strain, Jason. I'm interested in that subject.

Jason:
Yeah, absolutely. So when you've got a new strain, you don't necessarily have any historical data to build projectability out of it. When I was working with our sales team, as a cultivator, I did my best to give a very reasonable projectability on that plant, and so the more runs I had, the stronger that projectability was. So new strain, obviously, you're starting from scratch, you don't necessarily know what type of recipe you want to be growing. So we'll take your Blue Dream as a great example. When we're running a Blue Dream, it's a very sativa type of plant, you're typically going to push that with a much longer generative type of that stacking. What that's going to do is help reduce your stretch, get your node spacing nice, really encourage that plant to become more reproductive, so build full flowering sites.

Jason:
Now, we're on the other side of the spectrum and we're looking something like a Mac One. A lot of times we can run that almost vegetative entire cycle simply because it's a stubbier type of plant. Then going back to kind of how that process is difficult to really decide how many strains we want. Obviously on the sales side, people love variety, they like the new stuff from the cultivation side. That introduces one of the challenges that we were just talking about, so a good collaboration with the sales team and the cultivation team to say, this is our most valuable type of product, but it's also the most popular. So that's where it kind of comes down to, how does it grow? How much of it can we grow? How fast? And then needs to be determined by how fast does a sales team, move it. What's the demand in the market? Etc. And those have to really meet in the middle for optimization of seed to sale, if you will.

Scott:
Yep. Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned that, because we do want to take that task data we were just showing, how long it takes to do tasks. We do intend to write back to the cultivator record. So that after the fixed costs, really, the biggest determinant of how much each strain cost to make isn't going to be that stuff that's the same, the lighting bill, the substrate bill, it's going to be how many times was the plant touched, and those plant touches get to be really expensive.

Scott:
If we can create a way to... I mean, we have created a way to time those tasks. We can already write them back to the cultivar record, but then to look at that over time, how much time does it take the [Grotex 00:43:22], or even on the trimming side, how much time does it take to get this product out? How does that cost of goods sold compare with the different strains? And then how marketable are each of those strains we want to get to, like, "Hey, this is the strain that we're doing awesome at producing and selling." Rather than just, "Hey, this is what the highest price is in the marketplace."

Kaisha:
I've got our next question from John, we have about five more minutes. So anybody out there who has any burning questions for AROYA please do put them in the chat so we can get them answered. John wants to know, why is grams per square foot per year the Holy Grail of metrics?

Scott:
Yeah, well, it is. I think it's the Holy Grail right now because that's what we can give you guys. That's what we can actually show you on our screen. So when we go in here, and we look at on AROYA. I don't even think I have any data on this in my system yet in the home grow, because I've... Actually I do, I have some fake data that I put in in terms of yield. So if you don't have metric running, you're basically putting in manual yield numbers, and then you can calculate grams per square foot. So the first reason is that this is the number that we can get you right now, the second reason that it's the Holy Grail is that right now the cannabis industry is very focused on production.

Scott:
Of course, different things are happening with pricing in different states, like California, as many people have seen this fall. But still, in most cases, the market is growing quickly and most producers are worried about being able to give supply to the market, not so much worried about their efficiency. So right now, because they're focused on top line, grams per square foot per year really is a top line number, because you multiply that by your wholesale price and that's what your revenue is going to be. I think the real Holy Grail metric though, is going to be profit per square foot per year, which takes into account how expensive it is to prove produce each of these cultivars, and then that puts a handicap on the revenue number that you can get by saying, "Well, this is how much it costs us to produce." So I think we can, at some point, we can get to profit per square foot per year. Right now, the Holy Grail is grams per square foot per year, because that's what we can show you. Sorry, go ahead.

Eddie:
I was just going to squeeze this one in, because I think it's really important. I run into capacity issues at some client facilities. And they are having an issue collecting all the data sets that are inside of AROYA. So I basically have them focus on runoff to make sure I'm not over saturating substrate and basically wasting nutrients. But with capacity being an issue for collecting data, coming and engaging with these new client facilities, what would be the most important data to collect? That you would collect if possible, if your capacity is limited to collect all the data sets.

Scott:
I have an opinion, I mean, I would say is really critical manually to get plant height, but I don't know what you'd say, Jason, what's the first one you would get manually?

Jason:
Yeah, I mean, this is why the more sensor types that you have, the more capacity you have to start looking at that other stuff, obviously time series, it's nice to have a running scope of what this looks like, day to day or every other day as far as taking those datasets, runoff volume. Absolutely, that's a huge one. That's going to be something that you can't necessarily completely evaluate from your water content. Obviously, once we reach saturation, that sensor is not telling us specifically how much more you're pushing out, we can kind of get some idea by how much your EC has changed during that run off time, but that's kind of an inferred value rather than having a specific runoff reading for volume. Plant height, I love plant height for determining when we actually should change our steering schedule. I think as Scott mentioned earlier, good time to kind of plan for more vegetative growth is when your stretching has mostly stopped.

Kaisha:
Wonderful.

Scott:
One other. A couple of points on that one is just, we do want to make it easier to collect data in the future, and we're working on ways to automatically collect things like plant height or runoff just from the datasets that we have or using new sensor types. So please stay tuned for that. Maybe it's premature to talk about it except to say we know we want to make it easier for everybody to get critical data like plant height, or like runoff into the system. We're developing ways of doing that because we started off with the science, that's where we started off as a company. So why don't we get to Rosie's question as the last one? Kaisha would that be good?

Kaisha:
Yep. Perfect. So Rosie wants to know, wondering when you start your feed from when you plug a four by four by four block at full saturation, EC, moisture?

Jason:
I'll take this one.

Scott:
Please.

Jason:
So yeah, that's a great question, I'm not going to get into the exact specifics of your EC, of your moisture content, it's going to depend a little bit on the brand of Rockwell that you're using for that moisture content, brand of nutrients and additives for that exact EC. But as far as when you start to feed, when you do begin fertigation in that four by four, I'd typically say within at least two to three days to start with. No longer than that. You do want to make sure that you're stimulating small shots to the top of that block. Obviously, that plug doesn't necessarily have much root growth. So if we go too long, the top of that block is going to be a little bit drier than the bottom. So keep in mind the water content do conceptualize the physical makeup of that substrate in respect to the volume that the roots are being able to tap at that plant growth size.

Scott:
Yeah, and just before we log off. One thing, Eddie mentioned that in talking about runoff and avoiding fertilizer, everything that's going on this crazy world right now, and supply chain, by the way is starting to affect the fertilizer prices as well. I've always heard cannabis growers say fertilizer is super cheap. So why [inaudible 00:50:17] fertilizer, but if it hasn't already, fertilizer is about to get a lot more expensive. It's just another reason to dial in your irrigation strategies that run off that fertigation that doesn't get used by the planet is going to get a little bit more expensive here in the future. So with that, I think we will sign off for today. Okay, Kaisha anything else?

Kaisha:
Nothing else. Thank you all so much for submitting your questions.

Scott:
Yeah, yeah. Great point on the zero run off to Eddie. Thanks, everyone. We will see you in the future. Thanks for your questions and see you next time.

Jason:
Thanks, guys.

Eddie:
Thanks, Scott, Phil, Kaisha, Philip, and Josh. See you guys.

Scott:
Bye bye.