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Seth Baumgartner and Jason Van Leuven open the mics for your crop steering and cultivation questions.
Kaisha [00:00:04]:
What's up, grummies? Welcome to AROYA office hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. I am your moderator, Kaisha. We are on episode 105. Shout out to all of our live viewers on the hangout, on YouTube and on Instagram, and to everyone tapping in on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for your support. If you like the pod, drop us a review. We appreciate the feedback. Seth and Jason.
Kaisha [00:00:28]:
What's up, guys?
Seth [00:00:30]:
Hey, Kaisha, how you doing? Pretty good. We actually finally have some good weather here in the northwest. I think it was over 70 when I went to lunch, which is pretty wild.
Kaisha [00:00:40]:
We might have to take the show outside one of these days. Amazing. All right, well, who's in the studio with us today?
Seth [00:00:47]:
We got Jordan Zaggar, founder of Dewey Scientific here, local grower, also genetics pioneer in the cannabis industry. So we thought it'd be fun to bring him in and kind of talk about that journey a little bit, what it's been like to enter the cannabis market from the perspective of trying to, you know, be a genetics company and what that journey's been like a little bit. You know, I think it's pretty relatable and also unique in its own way, and there's some fun things to touch on.
Kaisha [00:01:16]:
Amazing. Jordan, welcome to the pod. How are you?
Jordan Zager [00:01:19]:
Hey, thanks, Kaisha. Thanks, Seth. I'm doing really well. Like Seth said, it's finally nice here in the Pacific Northwest. I think our hybrid greenhouse has been hitting dlis in the low forties. So when we see that, we are happy campers here already talking our language.
Seth [00:01:34]:
Yep.
Kaisha [00:01:35]:
Jordan, tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your background?
Jordan Zager [00:01:38]:
Yeah, so I'm like Seth mentioned, I'm the founder of Dewey Scientific. We also have a consumer brand here in Washington, Dewey Cannabis company. But my background, I'm a biochemist by training. I, as part of my education, studied how terpenes are made in special cell structures and plants such as trichomes. When I got started on that, that was sort of before cannabis research was really, at least in my field, vision, but, you know, started out investigating tomatoes, mint, various mint species, pine trees. You know, these are other plants that make a lot of terpenes that we use industrially. So I was just sort of investigating how the plants are making this on a genetic and biochemical level. And then as I progressed through my scientific career, cannabis caught my attention.
Jordan Zager [00:02:26]:
You know, first off, as a user, I was sort of getting fed up with a lot of the, um. I'm going to just say it the. The bro science that was on, you know, grass city and roll it up forums of. Of. Of what terpenes are and how they. They might interact with the body. Um, definitely, you know, I am a staunch believer in the entourage effect. So, as a scientist and a cannabis consumer, was very drawn into, okay, how are.
Jordan Zager [00:02:50]:
How is cannabis making these unique compounds that sort of differentiate strains from one another? Um, and how can we. We sort of turn our knowledge of terpenes into something that can benefit the cannabis industry? So that really led to the launch of Dewey Scientific. We were founded by three PhD scientists with the goal of producing cannabis genetics that satisfy, first off, the cultivator, you know, yields matter. The bottom line matters more than anything for those folks, but also have a product that sells well in the marketplace that checks many boxes, you know, whether it's bag appeal, unique aromas, potency, what have you. We've been pretty focused on that. Some of the early wins coming out of our genetics program. We were the first group to at least report on powdery mildew resistance and identified the gene responsible. We do think there's a couple different loci in cannabis, but we discovered one of them, and these genetic loci being responsible for powdery mildew resistance, and we've been very focused on breeding that into as many cultivars as possible, and then we take a very unique approach to breeding for aromas.
Seth [00:04:01]:
Yeah. Part of the reason I wanted to bring Jordan onto this podcast was to talk a little bit about how, I don't want to say traditional, but basically, plant breeding theory is being applied to cannabis now, and we're starting to work on breeding projects towards a certain goal. Not so much just making some crosses, see what smells good, what doesn't, but progressing and finding, like, hey, for a lot of growers out there, powdery mildew resistance and botrytis resistance are huge. Um, aspergillus resistance, that'd be cool. That's usually more of an environmental problem. But when we look at, like, the rest of agriculture, we have a lot of time put into basically taking very specific genes, crossing them into a line, and then back crossing. And one of the challenges, I think, that comes about is that that process takes time. You know, when Jordan's talking about, let's say, introducing a gene for powdery mildew resistance into a specific line.
Seth [00:04:52]:
And I know you can come on to this a little more. We've got a lot of back crossing selection. You know, there might be thousands of plants we go through to find that one that we were able to introduce this one gene into, while still maintaining the characteristics that we want from that line, and not necessarily turning it into something that we didn't want to. So, yeah, if you could speak to that a little bit. How was that journey in finding this powdery, mildly resistance gene? And I think giving viewers an idea of how long it actually does take to introduce that into a line.
Jordan Zager [00:05:21]:
Yeah, the discovery process was a little bit of happenstance, coincidental luck, and then a lot of sort of relying on the methods that we knew what to do because of our experience in other crops. But really, it was a really damp winter out in Pullman, the winter of 2018 to 2019, and we were operating in some older greenhouses, didn't quite have the environmental control that we needed. So we had huge humidity swings between day and night. Of course, great breeding ground for powdery mildew to inoculate and colonize our plants. But we had this one lineage that just, it didn't matter how powdery the room got, this one variety just kept maintaining resistance. So our breeder made the crosses, made an initial f one cross. We raised those progeny and we saw segregating population. About a quarter of the new varieties were, were resistant.
Jordan Zager [00:06:28]:
So at that point, we started doing a little bit of genotyping, genotype, those original parents genotyped those progeny and then just started looking for differences. What did that resistant parent have that the other parent didn't? And was there a good correlation? And luckily for us, we found that it's a homozygous dominant, or, sorry, heterozygous dominant trait. So you really just need one copy of that resistance gene to pass it on and be expressed in its progeny. So that whole process took us about eleven months to discovery. And then over the last three years, we've really just been working towards developing homozygous parents. So where each allele is powdery, mildew resistant, and using that as breeding stock. So at this stage, you know, at Dewey cannabis, our commercial brand, we've got about 16 commercial varieties that we put into products. All of those harbor that PM one allele, they are resistant.
Jordan Zager [00:07:36]:
And then with our breeding program, you know, really trying to get that resistance into as many aroma backgrounds as possible, because as we've seen over the last, call it three to four years, rather than this, you know, Indica sativa hybrid classification, you know, everyone is moving towards, or has moved towards aroma classification for varieties, either in competitions like the Emerald cup and even at the retail level, you know, you're starting to see shelf segregation by aroma class. So for us, it's having that wide array of aroma options for cultivators while guaranteeing that powdery mildew resistance remains.
Seth [00:08:17]:
Yeah.
Kaisha [00:08:17]:
And it's eleven months to develop. That is wild.
Jordan Zager [00:08:21]:
To discover.
Seth [00:08:21]:
To discover. Step one. You know, we're talking, you know, we're three years later, it sometimes takes that many generations and that much selection to find, you know, even. And luckily for this, we found a dom or, well, we, Jordan and company found a dominant gene that they can actually work with. If we were talking about something that was recessive and we had to make a homozygous recessive cross to be able to achieve this, we might bump double the time.
Jordan Zager [00:08:47]:
That's absolutely correct. I think had it not been a dominant mutation discovery, probably would have taken closer to three years and those eleven months. And then everything after that is validating, or I shouldn't say validating, but after that is, can we more quickly develop a test to detect powdery mildew resistance rather than just throwing powdery mildew on plants? And so then that took a number of years, about two years, just to develop a quick PCR test. Very similar to how we're testing for Covid. We can test for powdery milder resistance with a quick PCR.
Seth [00:09:24]:
Oh, absolutely. I think one thing that's cool about where we live, if you don't have a nice greenhouse, which you guys start out with a little older ones that were a little more compromised, you have a great screening ground, and then you guys have to ride this balance where you're not able to fully fund the company based off of just research. Right. So you have to have Dewey Cannabis company, a production brand. So, like, there's a nice balance to run because I know from years of doing, you know, agronomic research and plant breeding research and greenhouses, that is one nice thing. Like, we used to actually inoculate powdery mildew and, like, how can we destroy these crops? You have to pull data on trying to maintain a healthy environment, and then how do we evaluate them from there? Right. Which is an interesting challenge, because some growers have great environments. Um, you guys are a little more specialized in helping out the ones that don't, and you ostensibly have a nice environment now.
Jordan Zager [00:10:15]:
Yeah, that's right. So, as Seth had mentioned, our older greenhouses. Yeah. Our cultivation facility is sort of split between the old facility and the new facility. The old facility was previously used for breeding wheat, so they were definitely not purpose built for cannabis. They. I think they were built in 1999. We moved into those things in 2018.
Jordan Zager [00:10:41]:
So just dialing an environment in there was next to impossible. So we've sort of approached cannabis cultivation of, oh, man, there are huge issues that every cultivator must be dealing with, right? In retrospect, we were a little naive with that. It was because we were dealing with a big old retrofitted greenhouse complex. Since then, we've built more hybrid greenhouses. These are more of the semi sealed, much better environmentally controlled structures that you're seeing throughout the west. But really, it's just that approach of, okay, you can't grow a good cannabis product if your environment is terrible. You also can't do it if your genetics can't really work with the environment that you have. So that was sort of our approach there.
Jordan Zager [00:11:32]:
But at the end of the day, this is an agricultural business, and the bottom line matters in agriculture more than almost any other industry. Right? Margins are super slim for wheat farmers, for soy farmers, and not to mention cannabis farmers. And like Seth said, you know, we had to find ways to make money. When we launched cannabis or Dewey scientific, we needed, you know, we were a service business. We were doing genetic work for folks. We were doing a lot of consulting, doing a lot of, you know, what we call bioinformatics. But sort of the data analysis of gene sequencing data. And as 2020, 2021 came around, our client just started drying up.
Jordan Zager [00:12:12]:
Margins compressed for west coast cultivators. So did our client book. So we sort of asked ourselves, okay, what else can we do? How can we sustain our R and D program through what we have? And that was we developed the consumer brand, Dewey Cannabis company. So at this stage, the brand's about four years old, and it's able to support our R and D process. We're currently not doing any client work any longer, so we are able to focus on genetics that sell in the market place that impact a cultivator's bottom line, like ourselves. And then we're looking at partners on the genetic side to, you know, let's get these, these great cultivars, strains, whatever you want to call them, out into the market.
Seth [00:12:56]:
Yeah. And I think one of the. One of the big things to highlight, and I think that, you know, growers and, you know, this is, this is something that probably doesn't ever communicate to consumers, but we're looking at, you know, developing a strain that is optimal for growers and gives us the no's, the yield, plant structure, uh, the disease resistance, everything we want. I think it's really important to understand how much time that takes, because one thing we're seeing across the country, right now, and honestly, across the world is we're dealing with a lot of, uh, you know, we have a lot of f one hybrid selection from that. And while you can yield some great moms out of that, uh, we're not really necessarily looking at genetic stability or the ability to, like, fix certain traits. And as a result, a lot of growers are having to go to extreme lengths for certain varieties. You know, on this show we've talked ad nauseam about, you know, candies and like, lemon cherry gelato is a huge one on the west coast that's like notoriously kind of finicky, tough to get to yield. And really the dream is, you know, to take some of this, these qualities of flour, qualities of terpenes, everything else like that, and, you know, basically eventually package them into a plant that is more commercially viable.
Seth [00:13:59]:
You know, as growers, especially if you crank through a lot of strains, we've all seen some that, you know, we like to say, don't, don't play well with others. You can't grow them in the same room, which is a bummer. But ultimately, you know, when we're looking at plant science and the optimal conditions for growing plants quickly and at a high yield rate and with high quality, were looking at a similar set of conditions. So when we encounter a specific plant that only performs outside of those conditions, the challenge becomes, okay, how can we take that special nose and special look, everything about it, and then translate that into a plant that actually grows nicely with our other plants and works into the production system? You know, for so long in cannabis, were looking at that very, very niche boutique kind of grows where someone could say, hey, I'm growing this very special eleven week strain and hey, I'm getting a premium for it. This all works out. And then these days, that's just becoming less and less of a viable business option. So as we make steps forward, companies like Dewey are really taking some of the first steps into bringing all of these genetics into the modern age and making them a commercially viable product. That's something you can take and grow in Washington, California, main, you know, you name it, wherever.
Seth [00:15:14]:
What are your challenges? Let's talk about what kind of resistances we need to deal with. Do you have, you know, control issues? You can't get your VPD down or up. Like, we can look at all of these different things and say, okay, maybe we need to look at growing certain strains that are going to work for you. So, you know, at the end of the end of the process here, we're not throwing away 20% to 30% of our crop to powdery mildew or botrytis or something like that. Because as a grower, by the time you are looking at genetics that work in these types of situations, you already know that youve got a problem. You know, if youre, like, in the northwest, if youre in a greenhouse, theres ive grown probably about 85 strains in this area. And pretty quickly you figure out the ones that you just cannot grow at certain times of the year because you lack control. But we dont all have a couple million right away.
Seth [00:16:02]:
Like you guys were in that boat a few years ago where its like, hey, we would love to have a state of the art greenhouse. What we don't have is cash to make that happen tomorrow. What's more practical, I can look at my plant population and say, hey, I've got some plants that I can grow very well, grow easily. I'm going to work with those until maybe I build up enough cash to actually upgrade the facility. But that all takes time, and you have to have something to do in the meantime. And that's where I think disease resistant genetics and also just reliable genetics really come into play, because I've run into a lot of strains over the years that, I mean, they're just not stable. You know, we see a lot of somatic mutations in them. Cloning reliability is not good.
Seth [00:16:47]:
And a lot of it's because, hey, we selected from an f one cross, and that was the end of the line, never went any further. So we never really got to see what little secrets that cross held and where we can really diversify and find something that works for us. And the bummer, because you can attest to it, might be one in 10,000, might be one in 100,000. When we look at recombination rates, and that's where I think a lot of cannabis growers, especially commercially, need to look at going, okay, where am I sourcing these genetics? How honest are they about, you know, not only lineage, but, like, what filial generation is this? How did you select it? What were your criteria? Because, you know, we see a lot of situations right now where we have breeders that are working, let's say, you know, under what I'd call traditional growing systems, basically thousand watt hps, super old school setup, which is great. But hey, they're selecting all of those plants to grow under those conditions. Sometimes that's really hard to translate. I mean, I'm sure you've seen it when you take something that you, let's say you got a cut from someone that was selected under HPS for like ten generations or something, or several crosses. When you go to throw those into your greenhouse with modern leds and everything else, the spectrum is different.
Seth [00:18:01]:
Usually, like with that old school hps and many generations, we can count on a certain consistency. When you change all that up, that's where we see some plants, like, hey, why am I getting full blown hermaphroditic plants? Like, I'm getting pollen sacs, not late flower, you know, little bananas, as we say. And sometimes that's the difference, is you've selected for something that hasn't even been identified yet.
Jordan Zager [00:18:23]:
Yeah, no, you're spot on there. You know, one of the issues that we have dealt with, you know, when we. When we got started, we were. Yeah, and mixed, like greenhouses, but heavy on the hps. We were growing in soil in ten gallon cloth pots. Um, wasn't because we thought this was the way it was. We, you know, our initial grower, this is how he did things. He's a legacy grower.
Jordan Zager [00:18:42]:
Um, and this is what he did. So. So we leaned into that, and we do have a handful of genetics that we inherited from him. Um, that when we made that transition into these, you know, first off into coco, then under led lights, and now with our generative steering program and really boosting substrate ecs, some of these older strains that were definitely developed in someone's basement 10, 15, 20 years ago, they don't perform the way they used to, and not necessarily in a bad sense. We've had some varieties. All of a sudden we made this switch and they've got just that much sweeter of an aroma profile, or they yield just that much more now that they're in coco, but at the same time, some of these things in later flower. This was a. We have one strain in particular that we've used a lot to breed with.
Jordan Zager [00:19:28]:
Um, but early on, when we made the transition to the newer facility, um, you know, right about day 40, every single cycle, bananas were coming out. We could not figure out why. Um, you know, we thought maybe it's just because it's old. Um, but. But we. We did some experimentation. We played with substrate Ec. That was one of the big ones we played with.
Jordan Zager [00:19:52]:
And, well, we found that that plant won't develop those. Those mid flowers stamen and pollen parts. If we're keeping that substrate Ec under six, which makes it then tough to generatively steer. If you're not getting that high salt stress in the early days of flour, it's definitely plays a huge role now in how we're selecting commercial varieties. We know the industry has moved far away from big soil, cloth pots, hand watering, even HPS lights these days. So it's about adapting to where we think things should go and what is ultimately going to be the cannabis of 510 years from now. So, making sure we've got the genetics that match those environments.
Seth [00:20:42]:
Yeah, I think one thing people really need to understand about this whole process is all of this is experimentally determined. So, like, when Jard and company are working with this huge variety of different genetics, sure, they can genotype them, look at it, and say, hey, we've found a few locations that are going to indicate a few things to us. But there's so much unknown in that whole, all those genetics that it takes a lot, a lot of plants to pull it out in a lot, a lot of time. So I think that's one thing that gets a little missed in our current market, where we have a lot of hype around, let's say, crossing runts with literally everything in my library and saying that all of this is now a candy. Now, while that can produce some cool results, it's not really long term thinking. It's short term for your business, and then long term looking like, hey, what is my capability? I work with a lot of clients that really love to do fino hunts, want to do their own crossing. But then inevitably, the conversation comes down to, hey, what you're looking for. If we start looking at, like, hey, you're at.
Seth [00:21:46]:
You're supposedly at f six with this cross. Let's go look at some recombination rates. You might be looking for one in 10,000. Dude, how long does it take you at your, you know, 20 plants or so? Or maybe, you know, luckily, you might have a whole bench, like a hundred plants of searching. Can you actually do. And then compound that with, like, hey, do you want to deal with popping seeds and changing up your production strategy that much? So, for a lot of growers, once they kind of go through some of those pains and realize, like, hey, it's actually kind of expensive to get to these results. And our business isn't crossing its or feno hunting because we send it all to distillate, but it turns into, you know, you lose more money trying to package 50 different finos than you would just pushing it to distill it. You know, once you get that point, I think there's kind of a realization like, hey, there might be more, more investment opportunity for us to approach this more like standard AG and work with some breeding companies and say, hey, what we're willing to do is you're going to give us a selection that we'll trial and we'll take out that female hunting, crossing and selection process.
Seth [00:22:50]:
So like, there's still ample opportunities for growers everywhere to participate in the breeding process. But I think it's really valuable to find a breeding company that you can work with that, you know, number one, hopefully, especially if you're an established person that's been running this stuff for a while in a commercial setting, they're going to take you more seriously, which is huge because you have great feedback. If youve got a 2000 to 10,000 square foot room and you say, hey, lets blow some stuff up, thats an insane research opportunity. And when youre working with someone, they can give you, they might have searched through 5000 plants to get this one selection. So you are essentially way farther ahead by participating in these processes than trying to bootstrap it and do it on your own. Were just now hitting the point in legal and commercial cannabis cultivation where you can actually work with people, drop contracts and say, hey, I have this thing, I'd love for you guys to work with it. Like, let's say you do have something special. You can do paperwork about it and make agreements and say, hey, I'm giving you this.
Seth [00:23:55]:
Here's our agreement about how you're allowed to use it, how not what you're going to do with it, and then you can take advantage of some of those resources that really haven't been available in cannabis until recently. Working with Jordan here, he can take so many different genetics, warehouse them, essentially build a library. And then hes one of the few growers that has some optimized research space and that built into the business plan now were in eastern Washington, not downtown LA or any big metro area. So Jordans here doing this. He probably could be somewhere down in California, potentially trying to blow up up on social media, blow up as a small celebrity. But the part of the price of being able to do this economically and actually make it realistic is being outside of some of that expensive production space. Jordan's facility is surrounded by wheat fields.
Jordan Zager [00:24:48]:
Our cost of electricity, I think we're the third lowest industrial rate in the country. It's an 8th of what it would be if we were in Sonoma county or like Santa Rosa. And that really enables us to be able to use some of our space for either these large f, one Fino hunts like you mentioned, um, or, you know, when we're, we're you know, making, you know, stabilizing family if we're, you know, a couple feed all crosses deep and they're making a back cross to make sure that whatever trait we're trying to fix gets fixed, and then we can, you know, make the riskier gamble of putting things into production space. But you're absolutely right. Like, our cost of production here in eastern Washington is very low relative to, say, downtown La or, you know, in the Bay Area.
Seth [00:25:30]:
Yeah, or the east coast. Absolutely. I've actually been really amazed by some of the facilities I've seen go up on the east coast, despite what I would consider very high financial barriers to meet. And some of that's investment, obviously. Some of it's also just better business planning because we've seen how the market matures on the west coast, and they can actually, they're planning for that $1,300 pound price or $1,000 pound price right off the bat, rather than thinking they're going to get three or 4000 coming in. But thats a price you pay. Like I said, you might have a whole different life if you live down in the Bay Area or something, but you probably wouldnt be able to do nearly as much work as youre doing.
Jordan Zager [00:26:09]:
Yeah, absolutely. Our approach to that, sure, we could chase hype. We could go partner with, pick your metro area, go partner with the growers there. Ultimately, we want to have something. We say it all the time, the proof to be in our pudding. We want our genetics to be the hype. We don't want it to be because we partnered with some grower. Not only that, we approach this business and cannabis as if it were traditional horticulture and sort of the genetic work that goes in there.
Jordan Zager [00:26:46]:
Most consumers of raspberries don't think about the raspberry breeding process like cannabis consumers do. And so I'm not saying that's our goal is to get, we don't want customers thinking about what genetics are, but we recognize, like, a lot of work needs to go into this for this to be something that is a, repeatable regardless of location, and b, is going to withstand the call to $1,300 pound, which, man, I wish we were getting that in Washington. But what is going to enable, you know, compress prices to still have an economically viable product? And for us, it's genetic stability.
Kaisha [00:27:29]:
Jordan, I got a question for you. You have experience with cultivation. You came into this with a PhD. So you have an interesting mix of the traditional knowledge with the more like the science. And I would love to hear a little bit more about your journey, especially with Dewey, and incorporating AROYA into your world. Like, what is that journey been like for you? Kind of getting that bro science a little bit minimized so that you can use actual science.
Jordan Zager [00:27:55]:
Yes. Our journey with AROYA, it began when we were still growing in big cloth pots. And I think Jason and Seth had been out to our facility and were like, what are you doing? There's so much better ways where I was like, hey, we're just doing our grower wants to do. But we first got plugged in with AROYA. We did some trials with Rockwool, got a, you know, be able to see the control that you can actually have in a different substrate, but also by having the data at your fingertips and as commercial cultivators. When we started really leaning into AROYA, we saw our yields jump depending on the month, but as high as 70% month over month or same month different year. But in essence, we're getting the same amount of external light for the most part, leading to a much, much larger yield. And, you know, it really is just having that data at your fingertips, being able to look at, you know, what your baseline is on field capacity, look at the dryback for a genetic over the first 22 hours.
Jordan Zager [00:29:03]:
But being able to see that time and time again, and then what that has enabled us to do is, like Seth had mentioned, like, growing genetics that may not make sense to get with genetics that do make sense. So what we've done is we've sort of classified things. We grow commercially into their own little buckets. We grow those together on the same bench and give them the same watering strategies. And so for the most part, we've got our, I think you guys like to use the term short and squatty, maybe that's adjacent term. But these, these short internal distance plants, they're generally, you know, they're not getting that high dry back. They're not necessarily getting a super high substrate Ec either on the other hand, or on the, on the other side. You've got, you know, your long internode plants that are generally, can handle higher ecs.
Jordan Zager [00:30:01]:
They're generally getting p two s much earlier in the cycle than these other genetics are. So really, it's enabled us to make smart economic decisions while still having the genetic diversity that our end consumers want.
Seth [00:30:16]:
Yeah, I wish we had a picture of one of your, one of your flower rooms right now, just because the height difference on some of the different strains is pretty epic. And what, what they've been able to do is really start looking at like, hey, what are the feeding habits of these plants, like Jordan said, characterizing them. Here's ones that we consider possible to grow on the same irrigation valve, here's ones we don't. And, uh, the other thing I think is really cool about it is when Jordan now, you know, like you said, you're trying to do a lot of consulting, help people understand how to grow some of these genetics. And part of your company's goal is to make them easier to grow, but it's a lot easier when you can give them instructions. You're like, hey, here's exactly what I did. Here's all the data to back it up, and here's the end product, if you can copy this. And for a lot of growers, you know, that's way easier said than done, obviously.
Seth [00:31:02]:
But when you can give someone, like, time series data of a whole run and say, hey, look, here's where we maintained our environment. Here's what our temperature and humidity did the entire time, you know, and it goes both ways. Like, if you guys hadnt got the upgraded greenhouses, you could at least give someone like, hey, in these conditions, heres what we could do. Heres how you replicate this result. And I think that makes it so much easier for breeders and genetics companies in general to be able to translate like, hey, heres whats going on. And then also once you get it to other growers, they can at least look at that and understand the difference between, like, hey, heres how your company grows and heres how we grow, you know, because at different points in time, like, you guys using a little larger pots, okay, you can explain to someone, hey, man, look at your drybacks. Look at this water content. You're in a bigger pot or in a smaller pot a lot of times, right? Like, you throw it to someone, they're going just straight clone into one gallon coco, but you at least have the data to look at them and say, okay, so here's what you're doing that's going on.
Seth [00:32:00]:
Here's what we do. Here's how to get this result. But also, hey, let's look at what you're doing. And how can we optimize your results inside of the system? Because now we have the data to look at it rather than just like, hey, you know, I ran that in a one gallon versus a two gallon, and here was the result. We can, we can accurately replicate, like, Jordan's results in a little bit, you know, just under two gallons, like one and three quarters something. You guys fill pots, I think.
Jordan Zager [00:32:25]:
Yeah, that's right.
Seth [00:32:26]:
Yeah, so we can say, hey, yeah, this is growing with a little bit bigger, you know, a little more media, but, hey, you're in a one gallon. Let's just flip it a little earlier, let's keep it a little smaller, and we'll maintain that same plant to pot size ratio and kind of take the mystery out of, like, what does this strain like, what doesn't it like? Because the reality is there, you know, there's subtle differences in all of these. But, you know, on this podcast, we always go back to like, hey, you've got basically, you know, VPD is one really, really guiding rule, but we've got a pretty strict set of parameters that plants grow the best in and that are, you know, not necessarily easily achievable, but definitely technologically achievable on a commercial growing, you know, setup. So, like, when we have the data and we can just do basic math and translate, like, hey, what do we have to do to replicate this? Despite a slightly different setup, it makes things a lot easier for the growers on the ground who are actually doing this. Because, like, you know, for Dewey, I mean, eventually you want way more people to grow your genetics. That's the whole idea of putting all this work into that. If you guys just wanted to grow weed, you could absolutely do that there. You could source other genetics.
Seth [00:33:31]:
But the whole goal is to develop something. You put in this work, you get a satisfying result, you get it out there and other people are happy with it. That's like, that's a huge part of the thing. And then also, you know, for people like Jordan and I, genetics, nerds, it's fun, too. You know, you gotta. You gotta keep some passion alive, right? And for some people, the passion is, you know, there's a lot of work that grows into growing and maintaining a good commercial system. I don't want to understate that, but for some people, that's enough fun. Once you start stacking on too many things in one spot, that's when you're starting to head for disaster, potentially.
Jordan Zager [00:34:04]:
Yeah. No, I think you're exactly right, Seth. And, you know, you had mentioned sort of having this recipe, and that is really what we are aiming to do. You know, if you have an Ikea table without that recipe or that instruction book, you're not going to end up with a table. Just like if you don't have the recipe book for.
Seth [00:34:24]:
Dude, a cake, whatever.
Jordan Zager [00:34:25]:
Yeah, for making a cake. Or in this case, you know, the grow recipe for strain wine. You know, if you. If you don't know the parameters of, what is that higher end of substrate ec this plant can take? What is the higher parameters of, you know, what, what can you expect on drybacks? You're not going to end up with that same end use quality. And so when we're, you know, we're working with a plant that, I mean, you change the light spectrum slightly, and all of a sudden you have a dramatically different terpene profile. Well, as a genetics company, if we're going to be selling, you know, clones to folks in Massachusetts, where it's predominantly indoor, and we don't have that right exact recipe, well, they're not going to end up with that end product that they thought they're getting. Now, of course, that is the reality of the cannabis industry today. And so really, we are just trying to foster in the era of more consistency for the end consumer, while still protecting that bottom line of the farmer.
Kaisha [00:35:24]:
Jordan, you were talking earlier about the challenges of dialing in environmental parameters, but also irrigation is so important. We obviously, sensors are the cornerstone of what we do here, and we get a lot of questions on office hours around irrigation. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your irrigation strategy, especially when you're grouping certain genetics together, trying to have a consistency among similar traded plants. But yeah, I'd love to hear more about that.
Seth [00:35:52]:
That.
Jordan Zager [00:35:55]:
Our overall irrigation strategy is very in line with, call the short recipe book that comes with AROYA. Right. We have our generative steering at the beginning of the flower time, and then depending on the genetic, that generative steering time will either be longer or shorter. But for the most part, when does that EC really start to spike up? And then we can move over to vegetative steering to make sure all those new flower sites bulk up. And so that's really what we're doing, is we're looking at benchmarks from variety to variety. How long, how many days into the flower cycle until we're hitting a dry back of ten to 12%? Or some genetics, they're just not going to dry back more than six to eight. So those are sort of the benchmarks we look at, and then that's how we group things from a genetic standpoint. And other than that, our irrigation strategies are we use ro water, we use our custom mix of fertilizers, and from there, each irrigation valve is getting a slightly different treatment, that all plants are getting the same input ec, but they are not necessarily getting the exact same fert schedule.
Jordan Zager [00:37:12]:
Some varieties need p two s all afternoon just to stay happy. Others are, they might get a couple of p two s, you know, late into week six of flower, and that's it fit. So it really is just highly dependent.
Seth [00:37:27]:
Yeah, I think that's what's one fun thing to look at when you're growing all these different varieties in one spot with data is you can really start to look at what the different plants like, what they don't like. And then one thing that's fun about, you know, working with Dewey is the whole goal is to make this as easy as possible, right? So there's kind of a strict set of parameters that like, hey, we're going to pull the lever on, you know, for instance, how long we're going to go generative and irrigation. That's a small lever. We're not pulling. The big lever is like, hey, we're going to run out 2.1 vpd this whole run at 86 degrees, because this one strain likes it. The whole goal is to evaluate, like, what do these strains do and how do they perform in realistic production environments. And I think that's one of the, you know, traditionally has been one of the biggest roadblocks to cannabis genetic development, is just not having the space. And then, you know, like, for me, for instance, when I, I do some female hunts, do some selections at home, it's all fun, but my basement's got like a 15 degree diff every day just because the lights turn off, you know, like, it's, it's underground.
Seth [00:38:34]:
It's 62 degrees year round if I'm not running heat. So that's, that's not a good selection environment for trying to take something and say, hey, this is a banger. I'm going to put it into full production at your facility. Like, cool. You could buy a cup for me and throw it into a big greenhouse, and it might turn out terrible. Even though I'm yielding 3.8 pounds of light and 29% thc, like three milligrams of terps. It could be amazing in that. Then I give it to Jordan.
Seth [00:39:01]:
He's like, yeah, that's not going to work.
Jordan Zager [00:39:04]:
Yeah. In our approach to that, for the most part. I don't know if this is a unique in Washington thing, but cannabis industry sales just really slow down right after thanksgiving. They don't really pick up until March. So what this enables us to do is take some of that, that commercial space and turn that into, like, large, you know, pheno hunts just like anybody else is doing. This is not necessarily unique to us, but is the only time we're really looking at these f one crosses. And so, you know, each winter we're looking at about 5000 different seeds usually spread across six to ten crosses. And from there we sort of pick the winners out of those.
Jordan Zager [00:39:40]:
So, you know, if we're starting at 1000 we're usually picking between five and eight plants to move forward. We'll then go test those initial f one s in indoor room. We do have indoor rooms out. Dewey, just to compare, how did this look from seed versus clone versus clone in an indoor room? And then from there we can then compare the indoor quality or the indoor metrics to back into the hybrid greenhouse metrics. If they're close. Well, then we know we've got something that can work in multiple environments leading to that same end product. But it really is test those f one s in a greenhouse when the stakes are low, move those over into the indoor rooms because we're running those all of the time. And then validate how does it from indoor to outdoor to hybrid greenhouse?
Seth [00:40:34]:
Yeah, I think that really highlights. You have to build a business strategy around it. I think that is the hardest part. And depending on your overhead, initial setup costs, all that. How many bills do you have to pay? How many investors do you have to pay off? Can you afford to take some of that time out of your regular production schedule to do this? Because just as Jordan said, five, six cross 5000 seeds. That's right on par for what you want to do to get results. And actually, like, you guys are probably wishing you had ten times the green south space frequently.
Jordan Zager [00:41:05]:
Absolutely. Yeah. More greenhouse space, the better.
Seth [00:41:07]:
Yeah. The amount of times that you guys run across a gene where you're like, hey, a little bit of math tells us this is like a 100,000 plant. Like it's actually pretty awesome when you're trying to do that recombination calculation. And like, that's just what it takes. So, you know, it's, I think it's, it's a, it's definitely a unique challenge. But I think growers out there really, really need to realize like, hey, and that's not to say that I haven't met other breeders that do have the business plan in space. I've just overwhelmingly met a lot that really want to have something unique. And I think we're just, we really, really are just getting to the point where you can work with a breeder and actually be like, hey, you know, in, in agriculture, contract breeding is a thing where, you know, a large company goes to a breeding company and says this is what we want.
Seth [00:41:55]:
And the breeding company says, okay, we're going to do a little bit of research on this. We'll talk to you in, like, three months, and then we're going to have an idea of like, hey, this is going to be a five year contract that's going to cost us this amount of money. Here's about the resources we think it'll take. And that that's been a standard in greater agriculture and horticulture for a long time. And, you know, we're just getting to that point in cannabis where that's possible. And also just hitting some of these bigger businesses. You know, if you have 20 to 30,000 sqft in flour and you can economize that and keep it rolling, you actually do have a revenue stream that would support your ability to work with another company and actually do that. Whereas, you know, rewind the clock even five years.
Seth [00:42:37]:
And a hundred thousand square foot facility was massive, insanely massive. 20,000 was still pretty damn big, and 10,000 was like, hey, we all, that's the goal right now. We're just going to get ten to 15,000. We'll be rich. And now business has stabilized, and I think some of the more successful people that I talk to really just work that into their business model. Whether it's like, one of the best things I've seen is just take a look at your revenue and say, we want at least 100 grand to just talk to people throughout a year. We may not listen to everything every consultant we talk to says, but let's invest some money into staying current with the industry and talking to as many people as we possibly can who have seen as many facilities, because it's not totally easy if you're just a business owner to call up a bunch of other businesses and say, hey, let me come in there and copy what you're doing. That's not exactly there.
Seth [00:43:29]:
And then on the genetic side, I've talked to a lot of people that they start out trying to do the pheno hunts and stuff, and then between the time and the effort and then the lack of results, because they're popping at Max, let's say 100 seeds at a time, they're just not getting what they want out of it. You know, they, they talk to some other grower that says, hey, I got these seeds, and like, look at, here's this amazing selection, and then they go pop 50 seeds and they don't find anything that's even close to that. And unfortunately, that's a reality. You know, we're all conditioned to buying, like, 510, you know, 50 if you're wild seeds at a time, get the breeders packed and that's just nowhere near enough to really see a good genetic variation.
Jordan Zager [00:44:05]:
Yeah. And I would say, you know, our, our goal with our breeding program is, you know, if you have a pack of ten seeds rather than one or two keepers, there's seven or eight keepers. Um, and it really is, it's just this iterative process making sure your breeding pedigrees are set up in a way that when you find a trait that you want that you can pull it from your germ plasm and you, there's no guessing, you know, you don't need that original, uh, blue dream to, you know, pass on that haze, right. You just got to make sure that haze is fixed in whatever seed lot you have. And then when you breed, you know, if, if the goal is you want something with that aroma profile, that terpenelline rich profile file, that, that it is fixed in that seed lot or at least, you know, at least 75% fixed.
Seth [00:44:48]:
Yeah.
Jordan Zager [00:44:48]:
Um, so, yeah, you know, if you're pulling seeds from Dewey, um, you know, hopefully there's a higher chance of success. You don't need to be popping the 5000 that we do every winter. But, um, I want to highlight too.
Seth [00:45:01]:
I think some people think plant breeding is like this wild thing where we dump like pounds of seeds and do a genetic sequencing machine and like that's how you get results. And like, no, really like 5000 plants to go out and try to find. Hopefully you got recombination on one or ten or whatever it is. But like, hopefully you got that trait and it's, it's all hopeful and that's something that I think I like to try to be more transparent about and that's in any kind of scientific research, especially agriculture in general. All of this is determined experimentally.
Kaisha [00:45:34]:
Well, we have the incredible benefit of having three experts on the show today. Jason here is here as well. How do you guys feel about getting into some viewer questions?
Jordan Zager [00:45:46]:
Yeah, let's do it.
Kaisha [00:45:46]:
Ready? Okay. We've gotten a couple on the hangout. I'm gonna start with those. We'll get to as many as we can, but our gromy Seth dropped this question. They wrote, you've mentioned daytime nighttime differential a few times on the show and I'm wondering if you can give a little overview or general recommendation of when and how to use it to our advantage.
Seth [00:46:09]:
Go ahead, Jason.
Jason [00:46:11]:
I was going to start a little bit with the goals of the plant and some of the genetic tendencies of it typically kind of, as a general recommendation, we like to just step it up about five degrees twice throughout the cycle. So early on, say 1st third of the cycle, when we're stacking, we'll go with almost zero, zero to five degree nighttime daytime differential differential. The second third of the flower cycle will go about five degree differential and towards the end we'll go to about a ten degree differential. Now, if we have a plant that doesn't exhibit nearly as much anthocyanin as we were trying to, a lot of times we'll increase how long we're doing that nighttime daytime differential or even increase a little bit of how much we're doing that. So, you know, typical tendencies are when we increase our, our nighttime daytime diff will be increasing the amount of anthocyanin production. A lot of times it also increase the generative type of queuing that we're doing on the plant. So if that's a plant that's extremely stretching, it's a tall plant and we are trying to curb that. We might start with that nighttime daytime differential earlier in the cycle as well.
Jordan Zager [00:47:19]:
Yeah.
Seth [00:47:19]:
And one thing to highlight there, you know, with the recommendations that Jason just said, these are general recommendations based on ambient room temperature temp. Because not just your arroyo sensor, but any sensor hanging in your room, that's what it's going to read. So, you know, to take the next step, you really want to go in and get a leaf temp, get some leaf temperatures. Ideally get some average leaf temperatures and see what your room is doing. Because we see, you know, situations where you're growing in under HPS. And we got a plus four differential compared to ambient air diff or ambient air temperature. So like, let's say the room's at 75, plants are at 78, you know, and with leds that the traditional rule is HPS plus led minus, like what are your plants versus the ambient room temp. However, across hundreds of facilities across the country, we've seen about every example of where that can be exactly the opposite.
Seth [00:48:10]:
So it's really important to go in there and actually get like what's going on with your actual plants and read them. You know, like, all of these recommendations are based on that one to 2 mm around the plant surface.
Kaisha [00:48:24]:
Amazing, guys. Yeah.
Jason [00:48:26]:
If Jordan doesn't have anything to say here as well, there's also another variable that we can control in here when we're looking at nighttime daytime differential. And that would be how quickly we ramp or decrease to that other temperature typical tendencies is the fast we ramp, the more generative that we're queuing that plant. And so, you know, really kind of the goals here are, is let's, let's try and probably not change it as quickly as we could just because we don't want to induce some of those, those changes extremely fast. And so I really like to do ramping in general. You know, I'll ramp anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours, depending on my goals with the plan.
Seth [00:49:09]:
Yeah. And I think Jordan could probably speak to dew point problems if we do try to, you know, change that temperature too fast, especially in a greenhouse situation.
Jordan Zager [00:49:17]:
Yeah, you know, it really, in a greenhouse situation, sure, you can control temperature pretty well. It's the humidity that's a little bit more difficult to control. And this is very important. As nighttime temps, you know, get colder, water falls out of the air that much easier. You know, think of your, a glass of, you know, ice cold Coca Cola. There is going to be condensation. That's what can happen in your greenhouse. And it really is just that, you know, cold temperature hitting moist air.
Jordan Zager [00:49:46]:
Um, so, yeah, I like Jason's suggestion. Rampant. We, we ramp our stuff over 90 minutes. Um, and, you know, just on that, that sort of schedule, you know, you guys like to do it in, in five degree steps a couple times through flower. We, we, we hold pretty steady until about week six, and then we get progressively colder at night as those plants mature off.
Seth [00:50:06]:
Yeah, and like for you guys, that's a good point, too. You know, we talk a lot about, uh, you know, not making that change too fast. So, Jordan, for instance, in the winter here, like, if you can do that in 90 minutes without any problems, that's, that's a good example because it might be 25 degrees outside, you know, on your greenhouse roof. And in 90 minutes, you still don't necessarily have to pull curtains fully to avoid your plants getting rained on. So, you know, what may seem like a big challenge sometimes is a pretty small programming task. And, like, one of the challenges is maybe sometimes getting a controller that can actually do that for you. A lot of the cheaper solutions on the market or older solutions just don't have any ramping, and they don't have the factory programming available to let you program that in.
Kaisha [00:50:51]:
Amazing. You guys, to our grummy Seth. Thank you for dropping that question in the chat. Good luck. Let us know if you have any follow ups. We're going to keep it moving. We actually got a first time gromy dropping a question. Shout out to Chet on the hangout.
Kaisha [00:51:04]:
Chet, I'm going to read your first question. If you want to unmute and chime in, you're welcome to. I've been managing a facility for the past year now and a few rooms have been producing small white immature seeds on us. They seem to not pop up in the other rooms while growing the same strains. We are growing in six inch Cuto's under fluent spider two eye using jacks 321 on a direct inject fertigator. We are growing in double tiers and only have about 4ft of grow height to work with. EC is three, 3.5, ph 5.7. Usually start a heavy defold around day 21 and try to get some big drybacks.
Kaisha [00:51:42]:
And then to reduce, stretch and promote pre flowers a bit, the plants usually start to flower. Start and flower around 800 ppfd and daily bump the lights up to 90% to 100%, which when the plants grow up to the led bar two inches away, we're at 2700 ppfd. Again because we're in a double tier setup with very limited headroom. All right, that's the background.
Seth [00:52:10]:
I mean, there's a few things I'd be looking at, you know, number one, potentially, you know, especially if you have arroyo getting that time series EC. Like Jordan was saying, some plants at high ecs will tend to throw, uh, stamens, start to pollinate the room. And sometimes that doesn't happen at a rate that's high enough to be immediately obvious. We might have a few buds throwing it. And then especially if that happens around week six, that's when we're seeing those, uh, white, hollow immature seeds towards the end. And I think, you know, one of the keys there is like really track that and start to get in there and look for when those statements happen. Um, you know, number one. Number two, if you're getting 2700 ppfd at the light, you're probably really, really driving those plants really hard.
Seth [00:52:51]:
I would expect that you actually have some small buds at the end of your tips. Tips are your branches right up close to those lights and some potential bleaching. So, you know, something to look at is like, hey, flipping a smaller plant plant, especially if you're in a hugo, you know, it might sound strange, but we're talking about transplanting a very, very small plant into a hugo. Basically seeing a root at the bottom of the block and flipping it like, you know, especially in a double tiered situation, we don't. You gotta go with a small plant so it doesn't get huge, right? And then, you know, if it's only one strain in one room, get the data, start looking at like, hey, you know, we might have a feed problem with this particular room. Like, hey, it's the farthest away from the pump station and we thought we were getting 2.8 on every other room. And now we're getting, getting 1.4ft ec on this room for some as yet to be determined problem. That's one thing to look at.
Seth [00:53:39]:
Um, so one thing I would do is definitely test your feed EC coming into the room and then also try to identify like, hey, do we have some odd outside behavior going on in this room that none of our other rooms experience? Like, is it getting too cold, too hot, too low a humidity? Um, you're not talking about mold, so it's probably not a high humidity situation, but really just document and try to figure out. And then, you know, at the end of the day, sometimes we look at like the lineage of that strain and like we were talking earlier, a lot of our strains out there have been selected for 2030 years under HPS. You might be dealing with a reaction to the spectrum that makes that strain completely non viable in your production system. You know, if you have to bend your production system too far, are to be able to even get a plant to not herm out on you, hey, that's risking the rest of your crop. And it might be like, hey, what, what premium do we get on that strain that makes it worth it to keep growing with this risk? And if we do get a premium and we have to treat the room really, really weird in order to get it, not to herm, if you can't monocrop it in its own room, it's probably still too much of a risk to the rest of your crop.
Jordan Zager [00:54:49]:
Yeah. And I just, you know, I think a couple things you can test know, go in there when it's dark, make sure you're not getting any inadvertent light leaks. Um, and then, you know, if this, it sounds like this is only happening in a couple of your rooms specifically, it could be other things like airflow. Um, you know, stress will lead to, um, perms. And now, of course, we want some level of stress to increase flower sites during that generative stage. Um, but, you know, if your lights are putting off a lot of heat, putting off a lot of light, um, and there's not good circulation in these, you know, call it two of your eight rooms, um, that you're going to have these little microclimates that can, can lead to some hermaphrodism. And that's sort of what it sounds like with these, these small, you know, immature white, white seeds you're experiencing is, it's probably like a little microclimate stress. Um, that's what I'd look at, yeah.
Seth [00:55:35]:
I think you got to remember, you know, over the last 10,000 years, people have made this plant dioecious. Uh, the fact that it can, Herm, tells us it's really not that special compared to other plants in terms of sex determinants. And with cannabis, its not just xy, thats why you can have an xx plant still throw stamens. That genetic sexism is not stored on just one chromosome in cannabis. Its actually several copies of the same gene. And whats the frequency that you have those copies on various chromosomes? So I think thats one important thing to remember when were really bashing our head against some of these plants, herming out, like, you will encounter some that Wilhelm almost no matter what it. And hey, that's the reality, you know, and sometimes, like, if I grew ten pounds of it in my basement, wasn't as big of a deal as if I grew 300 pounds of it in a commercial room, and I had to deal with it. Right.
Kaisha [00:56:26]:
Yeah, Chet actually just dropped in the chat. We do have a problem where a few times a week, in the morning, the H vac system starts throwing out hot air when it should be cooling. It lasts for about an hour, and will be between 80 to 85 degrees.
Seth [00:56:39]:
That'll do it.
Kaisha [00:56:40]:
That'll do it.
Seth [00:56:41]:
Oh, yeah. If your bud temp, you know, especially later in flowers, starts to go up, mid flower aunt starts to go above about 85, 86 degrees, we're going to see foxtailing and oftentimes bananas, just because that's the plant's response to being that really hot environment. It wants to, it senses that it could die, essentially, if the plant had a brain. Therefore, it's going to try to reproduce. Right. It's trying to go to seed every site, and we're just stopping that because we're people and we want the best flower to smoke.
Kaisha [00:57:11]:
All right, so what I'm hearing in that diagnosis is we've got some crop registration that probably should be happening, checking some equipment out, and kind of comparing some results. Yeah, yeah.
Jason [00:57:24]:
You know, if we combine that morning hot air with being close enough to an led, to see 20, I mean, even at an led, there's going to be quite a, quite a bit of temperature that close to the fixture. So, you know, we might see leaf service temps, bud temps that are substantial.
Seth [00:57:48]:
Yeah. In this, in this situation, I wouldn't be surprised, like 92 to 95 degrees on those top buds, right, Jason?
Kaisha [00:57:57]:
Amazing. Yeah. Chat that writes, thank you so much. Appreciate you too, chat. We have it on the list to get the h vac fixed. Keep us posted. Good luck over there. And I'm going to move on to this question.
Kaisha [00:58:11]:
We have a couple minutes left, but it really seems appropriate considering Jordan is all about those terpenes. Midnight starter posted on a recent well known cannabis podcast I listened to, they mentioned bringing THC numbers up on the same cultivar run to run by using certain practices that were not given in the legal market. Unfortunately, THC lab results is one of the largest driving factors buyers look for when purchasing flour. What kind of practices can a cultivar cultivator implement in order to maximize THC in their final product? This does not include sprinkling keef onto dry flour before testing. Lol. All right. Got some advice for Midnight's gardener?
Jordan Zager [00:58:52]:
Yeah. You know what we've seen time and time again, potency comes down to genetics. You know, you can't expect a Subaru to compete with a Ferrari in a zero to 60 race. Well, maybe some subarus, but not, you know, not an outback. Yeah. First and foremost, genetics. There are some other tricks. Definitely not as sneaky as, as throwing keef onto dry flour.
Jordan Zager [00:59:22]:
Maybe you just want to dry that flower a little bit more. Um, you know, there, there's. And generally in, like, in. Not even just in pharma, but in like, the nutraceutical world, most of these compounds are these plant derived products before they go to a testing lab. They're what's called lyophilized or freeze dried. So you're in essence, you know, freezing everything, removing every bit of water, um, that might be in there, that might be adding that weight. So it's a less background weight, the higher the percentage of THC is going to be in there. And then I have heard a couple things.
Jordan Zager [00:59:53]:
It's mostly on the terpene side of things, but some growers have had success by adding, in essence, antioxidants into their feed. Things like things. We might take supplements like melatonin. So in essence, these things are their chemical structures, very similar to the same thing that's in sunscreen. So it's reducing the oxidative stress a little bit as at least with terpene biochemistry, and not all that different from cannabinoid biochemistry during its production is these enzymes that are responsible for these chemical reactions that produce terpenes and cannabinoids. They have what's called an iron sulfur cluster at the center of these enzymes and iron sulfur is, they are very, they like to exchange electrons incredibly easily. So when you have a high oxidative environment, those electrons want to get taken away. So if that core of that terpene enzyme is not intact, well, you're not going to get terpene production.
Jordan Zager [01:01:00]:
I think the same theory can relate over into cannabinoids, but this is all just sort of anecdotal at this stage. I don't have any true proof.
Seth [01:01:13]:
Jasmine acid spraying stuff.
Jordan Zager [01:01:16]:
Yeah, jasmine acid, although I think that gets you get your license suspended in many states. So yeah, I don't want to mess with pgrs too much.
Seth [01:01:24]:
I think one of the big things is focusing on that biosynthetic pathway. Right. Like THC is an end product of a lot of different reactions leading up to that point. So a lot of that has to do with plant maturity and working with the plants lifecycle. So like, what Jordan's talking about is like, hey, where can we come in and offer like something that might help this process along? What a lot of growers are still doing that's very, very difficult to get past is um, you know, one of the biggest things I see is a late nitrate application. They're going with a single mix all the way through flour. So some of their strains just do not want to finish. They're getting that nitrate push, which means like, hey, we harvested this plant at eight weeks.
Seth [01:02:02]:
The numbers look great, but I have 31% THCA and 0.1% THc. Two things. One, thats legally hemp and if you grew that in California, go sell it in like Kentucky or something, make some money. But number two, thats a sign that we didnt actually like end that biosynthesis pathway. So were missing out not only on THC, but like on several other cannabinoids that that genetic might be able to express that we didnt. So nailing, you know, your nutrient composition and your nutrient plan, so youre not necessarily forcing that strain to do something, that it to do something to not express what you want it to express. Uh, looking at like, you know, here in Washington, I can only think of very few companies that sell like super lemon haze or really any hazes because it's a ten to twelve week strain usually. So that doesn't fit in their production cycle.
Seth [01:02:51]:
So like, in my experience, like trying to grow sour diesel here on the palouse, eight weeks wasn't enough. It never was great. You know, we never even released it commercially because it wasn't, it wouldn't grow to satisfaction inside the time, the time cycle that we had said, here's what we need to do to produce a crop. So there's a lot of factors in that maturity, but at the end, it's really focusing on like, hey, what is the amount of time and what are the inputs needed for this strain to actually complete that biosynthetic pathway? And, you know, for different strains, some of them just will not play in our typical commercial production. You know, we, we joke a lot about like GMO and Mac as being, you know, two of the polar opposite ends, but it really is true. There's that much of a difference in some of these strains between what they're able to achieve in a given time span with given inputs. The cool thing for growers is, hey, if we look at the levers we pull, there's, how long do we flower, how long do we stay in different irrigation strategies? What ec do we running it? Run it at? Do we have enough CO2? Do we have enough light? And are we maintaining ph with our irrigation strategies? And that sounds like a lot of things to keep in order, but there's some great, great techs out there that help you keep it, you know, keep it in line. And, and usually, like, if you're working with a fertilizer company, for instance, typically they're not going to give you bad recommendations.
Seth [01:04:10]:
You know, start, start there on top of this one.
Jason [01:04:14]:
So I was at a really cool seminar that one of the speakers was actually talking about the effects of predation on terpene content, trichome production, and so actually, how much you deleafe and when you deleafe can impact how much trichomes that you see on the plant. So, as a natural defense, when predation is, is impacting the plant, it produces more trichomes in order to protect itself as a natural defense. So one of those that maybe we not, we might not think a lot about when we're correlating our THC and terpene profiles to our cultivation records, but it scientifically has shown impact on the end result.
Kaisha [01:04:59]:
Great insights, you guys. And I mean, I'll just say this. As a consumer, I look forward to more consumers understanding the greatness of terpenes because that's really, it's all about that entourage effect, right?
Seth [01:05:12]:
Oh, yeah. We gotta get away from the indica sativa labeling and get more awareness around, like, hey, what is the, what chemical profiles actually do? What, right.
Kaisha [01:05:21]:
Yeah.
Seth [01:05:21]:
And we have so much variety that, like, you actually can characterize things by, you know, not just aroma. But, like, what, what unique cannabinoids do they have? Do they have a lot of CBG? Do they have a lot of CBN, THCV, like, all these rare compounds? And I'll go back to it without growers focusing on quality. And that's the tough thing with the market and having that high THc percentage, right. That, like, I always pick on California, but it's, like, the forefront of where I see a lot of, like, really high ThCA, low THC weed, and the market's eating it up, which is you, you know, causing growers to go more and more down that route. Like, hey, we're gonna industrialize this more and more. But if you really are focusing on quality, at the end of the day, you still have to, like, do a lot of crop registration, look at the final product, and have the patience to say, hey, we're gonna. We're gonna run a three month life cycle on these plants. We're gonna do it the way we normally do it, and, uh, then we'll evaluate from there.
Seth [01:06:14]:
And I think that's one of the hardest things for people to accept sometimes, is that, you know, hey, my eight week cycle just will not finish this plant. Or I have one main injection line for my whole facility, so I can't actually, like, pull back on the nitrate or lower my EC feed for this one room. So there's little challenges that, you know, or big in that case, if you only have one feed line for your entire, you know, flowering part of your facility, that are a limitation, and it's way better to recognize that and then start to, you know, like I said, just do as much crop registration and start to work inside of that box because it might not be something that you can afford to fix tomorrow.
Kaisha [01:06:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. Also, consumers, there's so much more of the plant than THC, so I will leave it like that on a high note. Went a little long today, but, oh, my gosh, what a great show. Jordan from Dewey Cannabis Company, thank you so much for joining us today. Really great to have you. And, of course, absolutely. And of course, Seth, Jason, and producer Chris couldn't do this without you.
Kaisha [01:07:16]:
Thank you so much for another great session. Thank you all for joining us for this week's AROYA office hours. To learn more about Arroya, book a demo at AROYA IO and our team will show you the ins and outs of the ultimate cannabis cultivation platform. If you have any crop steering or cultivation questions you want us to cover, we didn't get to it today. Don't worry. Drop your question anytime in the AROYA app, email us at salessroya IO. Send us a DM on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. We want to hear from you, and if you're a fan of the plot the pod, please leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Kaisha [01:07:49]:
We appreciate your feedback. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. Thanks, y'all. See at episode 106. Bye.