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[00:00:00] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: All right, folks. Welcome to AROYA Office Hours. This is a chance for all of you, whether you're a AROYA customers or you're curious, or just super into growing and existing it in this exciting industry, to share your stories and get all your burning cultivation questions answered each week, we'll spend an hour sharing our findings, walking you through some interesting features and having a lively conversation about what you're doing, what you want to know, and even help you share your own stories and connect with other people who are passionate about this plant.

[00:00:27] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: And it splits. My name is Kaisha. I'll be your moderator for today's discussion, which is about to drying. If you have any questions for us, go ahead and submit them in the chat at any time. We'll do our best to answer them during the broadcast. But our Instagram community has submitted a bunch of questions for this week's topic.

[00:00:44] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: So Scott and Jason let's get started.

[00:00:51] Scott Campbell: Okay. Thank you, Kaisha. It's great to be back after the holiday. And I hope everyone had a great one. We're this is the [00:01:00] week after the holiday break ended and we're just getting pounded with snow here in in Eastern Washington. It's going to be inside and not cold. And I want to just start off with talking about drying and set the table for it.

[00:01:12] Scott Campbell: A few of my thoughts about drying the. First and foremost, one thing I'll say is that we are constantly frustrated in working with producers who do an amazing job on the cultivation side, but then miss turning that into the best saleable product that they can on the on the drying side.

[00:01:32] Scott Campbell: One phrase I've always liked from, I'm a terrible golfer, but a one phrase I always liked from golf is a drive for show putt for dough. And then, so driving is like the cultivation and we focus on that so much. It's just like just nailing it on a crop steering and the environmentals and VPDs and IPM and all that stuff.

[00:01:50] Scott Campbell: And then. The putting is like the drying. It's you gotta, you still gotta get the ball in the cup or else, or you're going to lose. And so I see it as like the putting it's [00:02:00] the type of thing that some people don't focus on because they see it as being, maybe that's somebody else's job or that it's because it's not plant growing.

[00:02:08] Scott Campbell: Cause it's not cultivation that is not valuable, but it is really bad. And just a basic metric would be if you don't do drying correctly, and if you don't drag consistently, you're going to miss a one to 3% of your finished dry weight of product. And you don't get paid based on how much your plants weigh.

[00:02:29] Scott Campbell: When they get cut down, you get paid based on how much they weigh when you actually put them in a package and sell them to somebody. And just a word on our history as a company, the two biggest areas that we see for improvement in the cannabis industry are number one, cultivating properly and getting the most grams per square foot per year out of the cultivation side, and then taking that and drying that properly.

[00:02:52] Scott Campbell: So that you actually get paid for that and you don't harm the. So the interesting thing about that to me is that [00:03:00] a and where METER Group, which is the parent company of AROYA, where we've been as a company, is that we see crop steering as critical to getting the most out of the cultivation side.

[00:03:10] Scott Campbell: And we see something called water activity as being key to getting everything that you can out of the drying side. And we make the terrorist 12 sensor or a crop steering, and we make a, what's called the Aqua lab, which is a water activity. And we were making both of those devices before we ever made a Roy and got into the cannabis industry, which I think is just a crazy coincidence.

[00:03:33] Scott Campbell: Jason, you've been on the cultivators side before and have I have a lot of experience with both the cultivation and the drying side. What are some what was your experience with drying? Is it, does that ring true to you at all? The idea that like, cultivate grow plants, get super geeky in environmental biophysics and all this stuff.

[00:03:51] Scott Campbell: And then just add just dry it and get it out the door. Does that resonate with your experience at all or not? Yeah, a

[00:03:58] Jason Van Leuven: little bit. And I think [00:04:00] some of it might just be oversimplified, right? So when we think about drying a cannabis product, we have a couple of parameters, temperature, humidity, and time.

[00:04:08] Jason Van Leuven: Those are really what we're looking at when we were drying a product. And so I think some of it gets oversimplified and overlooked because there's not necessarily the complexities of of the cultivation cycle, which was really too bad because, we will take a look at the total amount of drying time versus the total amount of time to cultivate the product.

[00:04:27] Jason Van Leuven: And you're looking at probably 10% or less of the time going into it and obviously quite a bit less energy. So you're exactly right. We do a ton of energy cultivating the absolute best plants you can. And so with just a little bit more standardization through that drying process, it protects all of the.

[00:04:47] Jason Van Leuven: All those resources, all that input energy to get to

[00:04:49] Scott Campbell: that point. Yep. Yeah, I agree. And I think also, one of the things, when we talk about drying the product consistently is there's a couple of sources of harm [00:05:00] that that come into play when drying the process. The product one is that if it's not dried enough you could get mold growth.

[00:05:06] Scott Campbell: So that would cause your. It could fail lab testing. It could be unsaleable or, or you'd have to blow it out. So send it to extract if you have that mold. But the other thing is that over-dried products, it actually hurts the terpene profile of the product. And anybody would know this who as been into say a like Oregon cannabis retail, where they have bud tenders and they have buds in jars.

[00:05:27] Scott Campbell: They're the product that's been there for a long time. When the jar has been opened and closed and open and closed, it doesn't smell like anything anymore. It's just completely lost. It's nose. And drying consistently, we'll get you higher dry weight yields for your product, but it also protects turpines and it it also protect the product from mold growth.

[00:05:47] Scott Campbell: Another thing I want to say about this is we don't want to be a. Super prescriptive in this process. We don't want to come in hard and say, everybody has to do things a certain way. [00:06:00] There is a water activity number, which is which is 0.7. Okay. And some people who are listening might say what does that number mean?

[00:06:07] Scott Campbell: 0.7 just means that and this again, a little technical on what our activity, but it just means that if you take. Cannabis bud, and you put it into a water activity meter in it measures 0.7. What that means is it has 30% less energy in that water than if you had a, just a cup of distilled water sitting there.

[00:06:28] Scott Campbell: So the energy of the water in the cup of distilled water, that's a hundred percent. So that would be a water activity. And if you dry that cannabis plant, it takes that energy level down to, to 30% less than that, which is a 0.7. Okay. So some people ask us, what are the units on water activity? So it would be, we have units of four concentration of fertilizer units for F for light intensity and stuff like that.

[00:06:52] Scott Campbell: But what our activities unit most cause it's a ratio of. The energy of that water in the cannabis divided by the energy [00:07:00] of the water in that cup of distilled water. And so it's a vapor pressure divided by a vapor pressure. So it's just a ratio it's unitless. So when we say 0.7, that means it has energy of it has 30% less energy than that cup of distilled water.

[00:07:14] Scott Campbell: So that's a little bit technical. The, what that actually means is that if you get. Water activity through drying. If you get that down to 0.7, there's almost nothing that can grow on it at that point. And so some people ask us, like after we get the plants in what should we be doing? H w how should we think about drying the plants in the drying room?

[00:07:34] Scott Campbell: And the answer is that you need to remove as much moisture as you can, as quickly as you can to protect them without overdrying them. And so getting all the way back to being prescriptive, we can tell you for sure, if you dry your cannabis plants down below 0.6 water activity, nothing can ever grow in them anywhere.

[00:07:51] Scott Campbell: It's it's just science. You cannot have mold growth or any type of microbial growth below 0.6. And but we're not saying 0.6 is the right [00:08:00] water activity. We're just saying how you like to dry product, but you need a way to measure that. You need a way to say to say how dry is dry enough.

[00:08:09] Scott Campbell: If you find out through science and through your own like testing and what the product looked like, what it feels like. How it's used, if you feel like 0.5, five is the best water activity. Great. If you feel at 0.5, it's the best water activity. Great. You know that we're not telling you what the right number is, but we are telling you how to find that number out.

[00:08:26] Scott Campbell: So Jason, when you were doing the drying of the product before, I don't think you guys had a water activity meter, did you? We did not. Okay. So how did you find out if the product was.

[00:08:35] Jason Van Leuven: The old bend

[00:08:35] Scott Campbell: and snap test. Okay. So the snap test. Tell me about the snap test.

[00:08:39] Jason Van Leuven: All the snap test is and you think you're getting close and we were running about a 10, 12 day dry cycle.

[00:08:44] Jason Van Leuven: Going in at day 8, 9, 10 go in there, take some product, give it a snap. And. If it does snap, then you hear ready. You ready? And good. And so you go through and sample a couple of different cultivars. And [00:09:00] sometimes if we were doing a great job on understanding which cultivars dried faster, maybe they had smaller buds in size.

[00:09:06] Jason Van Leuven: I take those down first and then that other product can get closer. Yeah. It's ideal snap. Obviously the real trouble with it is what snap means to me might not mean what snap means to you. And it's something that is very touchy, feely does the judgmental based decision. And so if we have some turnover of staff, it's difficult to maintain that same quality.

[00:09:30] Jason Van Leuven: It's hard to. Monetize what that level is without using the measurement and that's where standardization comes into play. And I think there's some other things that I did want to talk about with operationally, how does this play into your growth cycles? So when we think about tracking data all the way throughout, we could grow an extremely great product.

[00:09:51] Jason Van Leuven: And if we didn't necessarily have controls in. drying cycle. We may not be able to actually get the true [00:10:00] representation of how well it was grown. And so that kind of comes down to our harvest groups, how you compare cycle to cycle. And that drying part is a critical piece because maybe we grew a lot more wet weight when we crop stairs specific way, but it was lost due to lack of standardization in that drying process.

[00:10:17] Jason Van Leuven: Now you're on a different one-to-one basis to evaluate, and it may not be going in the right direction for continuous improvement. And another operational impact is obviously the stuff needs to go out for a testing. So having that internal control on what the numbers should be, keeps you in check of not sending.

[00:10:36] Jason Van Leuven: Pale lap searched. So you can internally get an idea of are we going to have to recall that product because it's failing a lab cert or it won't build a hit market right now because we're a little bit too wet and then obviously standing in that tight range where you said where we don't want to lose money.

[00:10:50] Jason Van Leuven: And then also keeping into consideration how you're taking those measurements as far as throughout the processing cycle as well. So if we look at that [00:11:00] the dry product, it has a specific. Water activity and it may continue to lose water activity in a dry room or in a processing room. That's 40% humidity, for example.

[00:11:10] Scott Campbell: Yeah. And you mentioned a lot of really critical things there that I want to touch on. The first one is like the snap test to me. It's actually, I think it's a great way to start. It's like you're doing something you're trying to figure out when is driving. It's qualitative. You're not going to get consistent results, but you're doing something to determine when you're drying should be done.

[00:11:29] Scott Campbell: It is the right thing to do. If you have nothing. One thing I'll say that is a complete waste of money. And I've heard this used in lots of places is to go and get a wood moisture meter from home Depot, which has the two prongs on it. And try and in a jenky sort of way. Stick it into a bud. Sorry.

[00:11:48] Scott Campbell: That's a complete waste of time that will get you into. I, and just mentoring moisture. A lot of people do think of moisture content and they say what is water activity versus [00:12:00] moisture content they are related. Okay. So if your moisture content goes down in your cannabis, your water activity is going to go down to, and if it goes up, it's going to go up, but there are different things.

[00:12:11] Scott Campbell: Moisture content measures how much water there is, what our activity measures, the energy of that water. One of them is a quantitative measurement and the other one is is a ratio that, that leads us to an energy number. So they are different. Typically cannabis is between 10 and 14% moisture when it's dried.

[00:12:28] Scott Campbell: Okay. So if you're looking at a dried product, you're buying it in a store, it'll typically be between 10 and 14% more. But the moisture level is, if you have all of your cannabis at the exact same water activity, the moisture level is going to be a little bit different for each of those buds.

[00:12:43] Scott Campbell: So that's an important thing to say. Yes, moisture content is important by controlling water activity. You do control moisture content, but they are fundamentally different measurements. And the other problem with moisture. And the reason why we don't recommend it besides the fact that we make water [00:13:00] activity meters and we would love to have people use them.

[00:13:02] Scott Campbell: The reason we don't recommend moisture is that in a dry product like cannabis, you get a tiny change in moisture content. You get a huge change in water activity. So when activity, not only is it much more scientifically relevant, it's also way more precise. About 10 times more precise than you can get.

[00:13:18] Scott Campbell: Loss on drying moisture analyzer. So that was something that that you mentioned. Another thing you said that I think is really important is this idea that the product is not totally homogeneous. Every bud, every plane is going to be different if you got super big dense, but those are going to dry, slower than like a small.

[00:13:38] Scott Campbell: Kind of Sharifi product that that's going to dry pretty quickly. And in the drying room, you might have places that are where the air circulation isn't quite as good. And all those things are going to dry at different rates. One best practice that we always tell people.

[00:13:53] Scott Campbell: If you have a water activity meter is to take a sample and try and at least [00:14:00] cut that bud in half and have part of the inside of the bud and the outside of the bud together in the sample cup. When you put it into the machine to test. So that you can account for the fact that the insight is going to dry slower than the outside the water has to come out in it, it takes a while for it to migrate to the outside of the bud.

[00:14:17] Scott Campbell: And it sounds like you guys saw that in your drying that the big dense butts, sometimes weren't ready to go when the the smaller ones had already dried. Is that true? Yes.

[00:14:26] Jason Van Leuven: Yep, absolutely. And it, comes into a challenge as well when. Very successful in cultivating.

[00:14:32] Jason Van Leuven: Typically you are getting those yield increases by growing large colas. And so some of that needs to have a representation or represented change in your drying process. So as we coach people to cop the crops, deer better, a lot of times they'll need to also change their drying procedures and, or. Ability to compare those drain procedures so that they can keep up with the increasing.

[00:14:56] Scott Campbell: Yup. Yup. Yup. That's really true. One of the [00:15:00] questions that we got from the Instagram community was what are the benchmarks for moisture in the room versus moisture in the buds and can arise tell the difference. That's a little a little bit of a it's a little bit of a hard question to, to answer because Just the science of how the blood dries is that if you let's say that you're running your drying rooms at 60% relative humidity and the buds, when you take them in there, essentially add a water activity of 0.9, nine.

[00:15:28] Scott Campbell: It's a green plant it's has extremely high water activity at that point. Every grade. Between the plant and the room. If the room is at a lower humidity than the than that plant material, water's going to flow out of the plant and it's going to dry. So that will always be true. When do they actually, when does the plant stop drying?

[00:15:47] Scott Campbell: It stops drying when the water activity of the plant is equal to the relative humidity of the room. So once your water activity hits 0.6 and if your relative humidity in your drying room is 60%, [00:16:00] they will stop. It will stop exchanging moisture. So that's something really important to know is that's how moisture in the room relates to moisture in the bud.

[00:16:08] Scott Campbell: And that's why, like you just say what is let's say my moisture content is 13% in my bud. Cause I have some loss on drying method for tests. Will it continue to lose water in the room? We don't know. Because we don't know if there's a difference in what activity and relative humidity it, they will, the moisture content will change.

[00:16:27] Scott Campbell: But moisture doesn't tell us that. So it's that's important to to know yeah we did talk about this question already, how much moisture content is considered. Perfect. Did was that. Did you ever get a lab moisture from your products? Did you send them out to a lab?

[00:16:39] Scott Campbell: We did. Yup. Not a water activity. We didn't get

[00:16:42] Jason Van Leuven: water activity at the time.

[00:16:43] Scott Campbell: Okay. And how did you decide how you set up the room? In other words, I've seen lots of different approaches for drying rooms. And by the way, we do have Susan on the call today. Has seen a lot of drying, setups at cannabis companies and is part of our team [00:17:00] here.

[00:17:00] Scott Campbell: So Susan, feel free to chime in but how do you how what's a typical drying room setup and how did you guys do it? How did you make sure you have enough room between the plants that they dried quickly enough, but not so much that you had to take extra space for joining me today.

[00:17:17] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah, that's a great question. We didn't necessarily have the most technological setup. It was in a feat rocked room which obviously any places that have good investment in freezer type dry rooms where they are Wells. Metal walls or a fiberglass paneling on the walls. All that type of thing is going to really help because you don't have other variables in play and you can focus on the product, as far as the spacing goes I think we were a little bit tight in there and we didn't necessarily run as much ventilation as we probably would like to have.

[00:17:46] Jason Van Leuven: And that could also contribute to a little bit longer drying. Most of the time it's on racks. All right. So we've seen people use Trollys, I'm just hanging up Trello shirt and get the little cutoff stems hanging in there. We've seen [00:18:00] some people do whole plant, which is can be a little bit more of a challenge simply because your biomass is closer together.

[00:18:06] Jason Van Leuven: Realistically you need enough space before. The size of those nugs to get proper air flow, to make sure that you're not building a localized, humid environment around the nugs. And that's, that's how you're going to use your broom relative humidity as a benchmark for how long it needs to be dried.

[00:18:23] Jason Van Leuven: Obviously if our rooms that say 60% humidity, but we've got our nugs in such tight relationship that the water coming out of the nug is actually building a local. Environment then you're not necessarily taking good data on how that, that change can happen.

[00:18:40] Scott Campbell: Yeah. Yeah. I like what you said also about the different approaches people take.

[00:18:46] Scott Campbell: I, the most common approach that I've taken is, or the IC taken at customer sites is dragging the whole plant. Even though it does take up more space, they cut it down and they dry the whole. Then I see people dry parts of plants. So they cut [00:19:00] off anything that has has buds on it. And then they hang each of those individual portions and they throw away the main stem.

[00:19:05] Scott Campbell: You have seen that as well. And I see people buck the whole plant fresh, put them on perforated trays, like cookie trays, and then wheel those trays into drying locations. That last one. The only major downside besides the idea that it's just not the right move. Some people have these ideas about they're still, sugars that have to migrate out of the bud and into the stem and things like that.

[00:19:27] Scott Campbell: I've heard lots of, interesting theories on that. But that last one really the downside that I've heard is that if you lay them out on trays, it could make a flat spot on the bud. And then that just looks bad. Is that right? Yeah,

[00:19:39] Jason Van Leuven: I'm absolutely heard that multiple times, obviously the less touching of that, bud, the more pristine and easier it is to maintain that A-plus quality.

[00:19:48] Scott Campbell: Sure. Yeah. I, from a, an efficiency perspective it is a little bit easier to roll around these, cookie carts with trays on them, that it is. To deal with the whole plant, which is, you [00:20:00] said can be a bit unwieldy. So we see lots of different approaches. There I would say the consistent rule that that I endorse on this is just to not pack the plant so tightly that you are interfere interfering with with air flow.

[00:20:14] Scott Campbell: If you've stopped in a location in the room, if you've, you're preventing air from flow that you've packed it too tightly at that point. I don't know. Susan, do you have opinions on this and what have your experience has been at customer?

[00:20:27] Susan Newman: Hey guys, we'll, I'm just sitting here smiling, because this is making my heart really happy right now.

[00:20:31] Susan Newman: What I love to do is like what you guys have been talking about is, science and looking at other industries too. So if we look at, meter has been working in the fruit industry for so long, we have a lot of best practices from jerky and salami. And one thing that they always do is they profile a room.

[00:20:47] Susan Newman: So they look at directional wind speeds throughout the. And that's something I love to do with our cannabis clients as well. We've got ways to measure that at most 22 is a great tool for that. But looking at [00:21:00] what does a loaded room look like? What does that airflow within the, not really canopy, but within that, those hanging plants.

[00:21:05] Susan Newman: And is there enough airflow, just like Jason said, are you creating a microclimate in a back corner? Do you need to baffle to get better airflow stone taking some of those lessons from food is a great one. Surely make sure

[00:21:18] Scott Campbell: you're nailing it. Oh yeah, actually that's great point. And you reminded me Susan, of something that we've done for clients and other industries who wheel trays into places for example, is that we've actually done tests.

[00:21:31] Scott Campbell: We've taken samples from different locations after the drying process. And then we tag each one. So we know what the spatial, the 3d placement of that sample. Wasn't the. And after dry, for a cannabis operation that might be yeah, 10 days or 12 days. And if we tag all those samples appropriately, we can say the ones in this corner don't really seem to be drying as fast.

[00:21:52] Scott Campbell: Is that approach you sometimes use Susan?

[00:21:59] Susan Newman: Absolutely. [00:22:00] Yep. So that's what my team has been working on. With our clients is doing exactly that. And the cool thing about it is, the testing that we do is not destructive. So if you're falling in GMPs, those buds can go right back into a

[00:22:12] Scott Campbell: room. Yeah. Yeah. Actually that's it. Some people might be aware that loss on drying moisture analyzers, they actually cook the sample at a high temperature and then look for a weight change in that, that burns it up.

[00:22:26] Scott Campbell: Whereas a at what activity meter doesn't do that. Do and I'm wondering Jason or Susan what what do clients do in terms of selecting temperatures and humidities for different phases of drying? Are they typically dragging at one temp and humidity for the entire time with cannabis or do they change it based on.

[00:22:44] Scott Campbell: Trying to get a bunch of moisture out in the beginning and then reaching equilibrium at the end.

[00:22:49] Jason Van Leuven: That's a great question. So sometimes we'll see, first in, first out dry rooms actually, where it's a continuous and they're, they've got racks where they're pushing product through the [00:23:00] room and they're just emptying it out at the end of the room.

[00:23:03] Jason Van Leuven: That cycle plants from back to front takes. No seven days, 10 days, 12 days, whatever the dry cycle is prescriptive to. And obviously in those types of rooms, they're going to keep it at a consistent relative humidity and temperature simply because they don't necessarily have that ability.

[00:23:20] Jason Van Leuven: There they've got plants that are fresh cut and plants that are ready to come out of that room at the same

[00:23:25] Scott Campbell: time. Yeah, that's true. That's a good

[00:23:27] Jason Van Leuven: point. And it is great to monitor those relative humidities and temperatures as well, because obviously when we put a fresh. Product in the air that relative humidity is typically going to go quite a bit.

[00:23:37] Jason Van Leuven: Oh. And so keeping an eye on those swings can really help set each bag settings to account for how much products coming in. Same kind of thing with a. A dedicated room where it's got one batch going in, that's going to come out in 10 days. You'll see that humidity usually go way up right in the beginning.

[00:23:55] Jason Van Leuven: So sometimes they'll combat that with some increased HVAC [00:24:00] parameters. And maybe Susan, do you want to jump in about how they change humidity over time in those drank cycles?

[00:24:08] Susan Newman: Yeah. I've seen it all. And I don't know that there's. Right or wrong answer looking at all the different types of containers or spaces that people are drying in.

[00:24:19] Susan Newman: I think the biggest one is to understand that when you're loading that amount of biomass into a dry room, it's coming in at 0.98 water activity 0.99 water activity. You have an HVAC set at 60% humidity. What's really going on that HVAC really can't maintain that without some sort of a high turnover or a desiccant, so you've got that factor going in the beginning.

[00:24:40] Susan Newman: So those first three days would we wanted to dry down. So I don't know that the settings for humidity are as critical in the beginning part because we have so much biomass in that room. But then towards the end is really where I see for humidity, where we want to hit for sure that 60%, because that's so closely related to that target.

[00:24:58] Susan Newman: We want for canvas. [00:25:00] Yeah. And then temperature wise, I S I've seen people going from 55 to 80 and then I go back to my, biochemistry and you start looking at lock reductions of pathogens at different temperatures too. So I do like it a little bit cooler in there. I don't know that we need to hit 55, but yeah, I think there's a lot to be studied in this area.

[00:25:22] Scott Campbell: Yeah, I do see people dragging a little cooler typically 55, 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's pretty common in my experience, but I would drying it 80 Fahrenheit. Yeah, to me sounds a little bit too high. But but yes, I it's a lot of people I've seen dry. Cool. I do want to mention before I forget that when we're talking about drying, there actually is a question in here about about curing the product as well, which we consider an extent, an extension of the drying process.

[00:25:54] Scott Campbell: Even if you are drying to that 0.6 water activity, let's say you decide that's [00:26:00] the right number. And we're just gonna stop drying once we've measured the material. And it's at a 0.6 you have to remember that you are going to be doing some curing after that, which you can still get some moisture loss there.

[00:26:12] Scott Campbell: And you're also going to be doing some product touching activities, namely trimming as well. And some people do a great job, but they're drying. And then they forget that they're going to lose some moisture in the trim process. If the humidity in those term rooms are are too low. So if you take out the product at, and especially a dry product and your humidity is 20 to 25% in the trim room, you're going to lose hundreds of dollars just while that product is SIM sitting there.

[00:26:41] Scott Campbell: Have you ever seen that happened at a customer site?

[00:26:45] Susan Newman: Yeah. I actually measured that. I had a client in Arizona that they had obviously super low humidity around 20% humidity. And the rate of moisture loss in that study that we did was 1% moisture loss in one hour. [00:27:00] So it's very significant. I If you look at the average company at 1%, Moisture loss even for a midsize is a $2 million problem.

[00:27:09] Susan Newman: Yeah.

[00:27:09] Scott Campbell: And it's incredible to think that it, if they were losing 1% of revenue in some other area let's say, I don't know their lighting bill or, or or their internet service provider or something, they would, they'd be like, oh, this is, this is bleeding us dry.

[00:27:23] Scott Campbell: But 1%. Thinking about let's say that you have, let me try and do some math here really quick. Let's say you have 20 pounds of product sitting out and that a product is worth so 20 pounds of product might be worth. What, $30,000 right there. 30 or 40. Yeah. So 40,000, 30, $40,000. And you got a 1% reduction in.

[00:27:45] Scott Campbell: Then that's just a $500,000. That's that's just evaporated, in the term room. And some people have asked us about that and where we say One way would be to reduce that time that it's exposed as much as possible, but you can't really do that.

[00:27:57] Scott Campbell: You do have to get the product out and trim it. [00:28:00] And the other is just to, to introduce some basic humidity control in the trim room as well. You should treat it as an extension of the dry room. Jason any thoughts on that?

[00:28:08] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah. Working with a client maybe three weeks ago and same kind of discussion where they actually.

[00:28:14] Jason Van Leuven: Some some climate stations in their processing room and decided to add humidifiers to the room. And a couple of the people on the team were just really excited there. We make it a little bit more comfortable environment for people working in there.

[00:28:26] Scott Campbell: So yeah. Yeah. They don't have to use so much moisturizer, yeah, exactly.

[00:28:30] Scott Campbell: Okay. And I think that is a pro tip that I see everywhere is like, Hey think about that, that trim room and what's going on in there. As a. Potential loss of of revenue. Let's see. What should the humidity percentage be relative to the number of days you dried the plant? This is actually, Susan mentioned this in the number really sh should be, you could do a 60%, 65% humidity, whatever you're you're wanting to do that.

[00:28:55] Scott Campbell: The one thing that I have seen as unsuccessful as trying to really speed up the drying [00:29:00] process, because it has a negative impact on quality. Have you ever heard of somebody trying to speed up that drying process, Jason, and I dunno, what were their results?

[00:29:09] Jason Van Leuven: Absolutely. And on the side where someone would be.

[00:29:12] Jason Van Leuven: Much too quickly. They can actually build a moisture barrier in the larger butts, so that outside of that blood dries way too quickly, it can actually trap moisture on the inside, which then talks to that gradient that we were mentioning earlier. The fact that we need that process to be homogeneous throughout the nug, the product.

[00:29:33] Jason Van Leuven: And that's going to obviously depend on the size of the. Cola's. Yeah. Yeah. So if we're going into a room, let's say 20% humidity, there's a good chance that you're going to run into some very inconsistent issues. And that, that plays into parts where you could feel lab SIRS later. Just the consistency of quality of your product is is lacking.

[00:29:54] Jason Van Leuven: So that would be definitely on the extreme side of trying to dry too quickly.

[00:29:58] Scott Campbell: Yup. Yup. [00:30:00] And as Susan, I just remembered this word. From you're mentioning the jerkier salami word, I think world before. And I think it's called case hardening. Is that right? What Jason's talking about?

[00:30:10] Susan Newman: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:30:11] Susan Newman: And not to mention just, you can dry wheat in an hour if you want, and it's going to have the worst taste and the harshest smoke that you can imagine. So it's really an art. The drying part is really an art. And I'm passionate about it. I hope other people are too, but that's really your quality, what do you want your brand promise to be?

[00:30:30] Susan Newman: Are you looking for a top shelf product or are you going really for a quantity? And we've got cases for both. You've got a lower value product that you need to push through at a higher quantity. And maybe you do need to trim your dry down to, six to nine days. But if you really want a beautiful product, I love that 10 to 12 days in that dry.

[00:30:50] Scott Campbell: Yeah. Some, everybody has a different approach and everybody has you mentioned that brand promise what are you trying to achieve? And how can [00:31:00] we use science to help you get there? That's really what we're focused on. Let's see, let's talk about caring a little bit when we talk about curing it's so interesting.

[00:31:08] Scott Campbell: Cause there's everybody has. Idea about this the idea that the product gets trimmed and it's in final form, but it's, but you put it, a lot of people use these Turkey bags. Some people have specifically container specifically made for this. But we got a question.

[00:31:24] Scott Campbell: What are the burp times after cutting buds into bins and how many times a day should it be done? I see most people doing once or twice a day that they burp these packages. But I don't know that there's any, I don't know that there's has been a lot of science or a lot of research done into this curing phase of the product.

[00:31:42] Scott Campbell: Do you guys wanna Jason, maybe you wanna talk about hearing about. Sure.

[00:31:47] Jason Van Leuven: So I work with a combination of clients, some that are caring for a desired effect that like you said, I don't know that there's a lot of science developed yet behind the chemical alterations in the product during that [00:32:00] phase. And then some people also just call it, cure the stage of where the product is dried, but needs to be stored until it's ready for processing.

[00:32:08] Jason Van Leuven: And so there are two. Distinct determinations of what the purpose is of the cure phase in that one obviously for the supposedly affects to the product and then the other, just being instrument, state when it's ready for them to process or until they have the capacity to do I know as far as bourbon goes to the point of that, Inside of the cure tube or the tote that the product is in.

[00:32:32] Jason Van Leuven: That's the humidity of that Stickley going to be trying to match that of the water activity of the product inside of it. And so burping that would be introducing typically a less humid air which, needs to have some caution because that will alter the water activity of the product during that stage.

[00:32:51] Jason Van Leuven: Yup.

[00:32:53] Scott Campbell: Yeah, exactly. Susan, what do your customers think they're doing when they burp, when they I'm talking about burping [00:33:00] cannabis totes or tubes here? Not babies or themselves, or, yeah, the

[00:33:06] Susan Newman: biggest thing that I get is people think that they are conditioning for CO2 when they burp I don't know if that's right.

[00:33:13] Susan Newman: I think there's a lot of research to be done here. I'm actually working on a project right now where maybe I shouldn't talk about here, but I'm interested in looking at what happens to vapor pressure inside of some of these different totes. So that's something that, that I'm doing right now. With a couple of our clients too.

[00:33:29] Susan Newman: So just retrofitting some, home Depot, totes, and Turkey bags to, to get those sensors in there. But I'm hoping that we can have some real answers on the, your process and why we do that and why it's important. And when. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe there's no

[00:33:44] Scott Campbell: that well, and I do, I want to point out that we are doing that research so that we can research projects like this so that we can have a better idea of of what people are actually doing it at each step in the process.

[00:33:56] Scott Campbell: And we would, I think most people's processes [00:34:00] are an outgrowth of the thing that's that they've done for a long time and things that work. So w we don't recommend that. That they abandon approaches that are working for them but we encourage them to think about what they're doing in each part of the process and whether it can be measured and standardized better.

[00:34:14] Scott Campbell: The burping thing when one important one important aspect of that is that if you're dealing with, if you have. A drag term product that you have in a completely sealed container, meaning that there's water vapor cannot get in and out, whatever that water activity is when you put that product in, it's still going to be at that water activity when you get out.

[00:34:35] Scott Campbell: So really in the curing phase, the most critical part of that is. Completely eliminate any moisture migration. So in some people don't have good vapor seals on their caring systems. And th that's another important thing to say. I am wondering what questions we haven't got to Kaisha,

[00:34:55] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: let's see here. Someone was asking to explain the ideal storage while [00:35:00] drying, and I know we touched on that a little bit with caring

[00:35:03] Scott Campbell: Yeah, I think we've worked on that one.

[00:35:05] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Someone asked here, how should I remove hotspots in the room without directly fanning the, buds,

[00:35:09] Jason Van Leuven: sure. So I don't know specifically if this is about in the dry room or in the cultivation room either or some of the best ways to do this are floor plans and or diffusing.

[00:35:20] Jason Van Leuven: Oh, diffusing socks are a very inexpensive, an excellent way to reduce the airspeed of that airflow, but also make sure it is consistent over a large large area or large volume. So those would be my two biggest recommendations. If you're not using air socks, check them out.

[00:35:38] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: air socks, just a reminder for our folks. Who've joined us today. If you have any questions, please do add them to the chat. We would love to get to them today. I have another one here from our Instagram community. Why does somebody seem to get less tight during dry?

[00:35:49] Scott Campbell: I'm going to guess here and say that it's a strain specific, but I think that.

[00:35:54] Scott Campbell: Cultivar is going to have a different morphology and and shape to it. And [00:36:00] I think that, mechanically as the product shrinks, because it will strengthen that process that if that if the genetics are different, it could affect how dense that gets during the drying process.

[00:36:11] Scott Campbell: Is that anything you've ever seen? Not necessarily

[00:36:13] Jason Van Leuven: specifically. Okay. It's a little bit of a new one to me, but I would agree that it probably has to be something about the genetics and the way that the composition, maybe the physical or chemical composition within that specific.

[00:36:26] Scott Campbell: Yup. Yup.

[00:36:27] Scott Campbell: And so the last thing, and Kaisha, why don't we do this as maybe the last question is this the algorithm for the dehumidifiers humidifier turning off we don't integrate an algorithm for that specifically, but one thing Susan's team is working on I'll make a couple of announcements here that we one thing that we already have, and one thing that we're integrating into a Roy, right?

[00:36:48] Scott Campbell: Is is the ability to take that data from the dry room and tell you when the product is going to be finished drag, when it's going to hit that number that you want it to hit. And I think that's a really exciting development because [00:37:00] that dry room is essentially, it's like a hotel room. And if you're not, if you don't have if you haven't mapped out everything perfectly you might have plants that are staying in that hotel room, that call up and say, Hey, I want to leave.

[00:37:12] Scott Campbell: And you have new plants that need to go in there and they're not, and you don't have any space for them. So it's critical to use that space as, as well as you possibly can. And having that forward visibility saying this is one of these plants are going to be done, can be really helpful from an operational perspective.

[00:37:26] Scott Campbell: Susan, any comments on.

[00:37:27] Susan Newman: No, I think you're nailing it. Just making sure that you're optimizing and there's a lot of things that you can do too by cultivar. So I love that we're talking about that. There's definitely changes in that and understanding what that looks like. So we know which of those cultivars need to check out early in, which actually do need to leave.

[00:37:43] Scott Campbell: Yeah, actually, that, that is a great point. Is, Hey, in a lot of places for simplicity sake, you just get, we are drying for 10 days. It doesn't matter what it is but if you're not hitting that water activity yet, that's the wrong approach to take. You're going to have mold problems. So it's really good to do that.

[00:37:59] Scott Campbell: The other piece [00:38:00] of that is that we have worked really hard to integrate this AQUALAB world and the AROYA world. And we'll be shortly launching the capability for each of your post-harvest packages to have that water activity number on it. So every time you test it, it's getting updated in the system and you can drive....

[00:38:15] Scott Campbell: accountability around that with your whole team and say, "Hey, we over-dried this batch and it cost us. Let's make sure that doesn't happen again." So putting those two worlds together is something that we will be launching shortly. And so you can look for that as well. And I think that's about it.

[00:38:32] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Awesome. Everybody. You heard it here first. That's great. Scott and Jason, thank you so much. And thanks to everyone who joined us for this week's office hours. It's our first one at a year. We do these every week. This is your time. Do you have any questions about it, Roy? How it can be used to improve your cultivation production process or any other topics you'd covered in a future office hour session?

[00:38:50] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: We definitely would love to hear from you. So feel free to let us know that. Shoot us an email at support.aroya@metergroup.com or send us an Instagram DM. We record every [00:39:00] session. We're going to email everyone in attendance, a link to the video from today's discussion. It will also live on the AROYA YouTube channel, please and subscribe while you're there.

[00:39:08] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: And if these conversations are helpful, please feel free to forward. Thank you again, and we will see you next week.