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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, Gromies? Welcome to AROYA Office Hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. I'm your moderator, Kaisha, and this is episode 120. Happy Halloween, y'all. Shout out to our live viewers on YouTube and Instagram and to everyone tapping in on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Thank you so much for your support. And if you like the pod, be sure to drop us a review because we really appreciate your feedback. Just real quick before we dive in, we're going to be making a special announcement at the end of today's session, so be sure to stick around for that. Seth, Jason, Cian are in the house, and it looks like we have a special guest over there.
Kaisha [00:00:36]:
Yeah, yeah.
Seth [00:00:38]:
Got a little friend in the background here. He's having a good time.
Jason [00:00:40]:
Yep.
Kaisha [00:00:40]:
Yeah, he looks lit. Amazing. Ready to burn out?
Seth [00:00:45]:
Yeah.
Jason [00:00:46]:
Awesome.
Kaisha [00:00:47]:
You guys ready to dive in? Our first question?
Seth [00:00:49]:
Yeah, go for it.
Kaisha [00:00:51]:
Awesome. All right, let's do it. Okay, so MCK dropped us over to us. They wrote I dropped my feed EC from 3.5 to 3 on day 40 going into week 6. It's day 47. I have start using fade in the beginning of week 7 with the variety being so resilient today. Day 45, I noticed my runoff EC has gone from a consistent 6 to 6.5 after P1 and 6.5 to 7 after P2 with around 6% runoff at the end of both events. I'm about to transition to fade, but I noticed Today my substrates ppm has gone from about 1200 to 3000 ec has gone from 7.6 P1 to 7.8 P2, but the substrate pH is is steady at 5.5 to 5.6 in coco.
Kaisha [00:01:37]:
I'm not so much concerned should I be, as I am curious about what the plant is telling me. I did push about 15% runoff on my P2 event today, but with no changes to an input of 3.0 EC 6.0 pH. What do you all think?
Seth [00:01:53]:
So when we start to see that that EC build up in both the runoff and the substrate, especially going into those last few weeks into senescence without knowing the particular strain that would be helpful here. But that being said, there's not like a great definitive list on how long each strain wants to flower for. But typically once you get a plant into that 1212 life cycle or light cycle, they move into a determinate growth pattern. So depending on the strain, you've got X amount of days until any of us would consider that strain ripe under Optimal growing conditions. And then going into that senescence phase, the plant actually enters a point where it's going, going to eventually naturally die. You can't keep it in 1212 forever and expect it to continue living and continue thriving. And as a part of that process, that plant is shifting its energy focus on what it's doing throughout the life cycle. So for part of the life cycle, it's building structure foliage, and then we're switching over to a reproductive growth pattern where it's building flower mass in an attempt to build more flowers and produce seeds eventually, because it will be dying in the next, you know, 40 to 60 days, depending on how long you were able to actually run that strain out.
Seth [00:03:01]:
That being said, once it enters that senescence phase of its life cycle, it's starting to die back. Essentially, different parts of the plant are starting to shut down in metabolic processes. That's when we see the plant stop feeding. So with the exception of nitrate, especially with certain strains that are more or less susceptible to unregulated nitrate uptake, we see a reduction in feed across the board. So with the same input eclipse, we would expect to see it rise slightly over time, just as you're seeing that plant's not pulling out nearly as many ppm as you're putting in every day. So now the substrate you see is stacking up. And there's a few caveats to that. Number one, you don't want to continue to stack it up really high.
Seth [00:03:42]:
Number two, the question of fertilizer efficiency enters the equation. So at a certain point, if that plant has stopped feeding, what we want to do is maintain slightly lower eclipse and maintain ph. If the plant's not feeding, we're not really worried about giving it a lot of new nutrients. We're just worried about maintaining that rootstone ph and EC stability that way. That way, the plant that's adapted to this high level of salinity throughout this whole run doesn't immediately have that reversed. And that's why we see, depending on the situation that your fertigation solution offers, the ability to, for instance, bring in the fade and maintain a higher EC with no problems. That being said, that there, there is a little bit of an efficiency trade off there. I personally wouldn't be worried about it.
Seth [00:04:27]:
Especially if you're ditching your calcium nitrate and going with a calcium chloride type solution, you're eliminating at least the chemical part that's going to push that plant to produce newer foliage. Any thoughts, Jason?
Jason [00:04:43]:
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of just the end part. There Where I was thinking, well, you know, about the same time, if I was dropping my EC from 3.5 to3.0, I probably would have just started suppl complimenting with the fade rather than even dropping that EC right at the same point. Yeah.
Seth [00:04:57]:
And that's, you know, once you can start identifying that about certain strains as well, that's where, you know, especially larger scale, you can start to see some benefits to really dialing in. Like, hey, when can we actually pull back on spending as much money on fertilizer? You know, if I can identify that, hey, a plant has senesce, it's starting to enter senescence, it stopped feeding. Okay, I know I need to maintain EC and pH, but I don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money doing it because the plant's not pulling out nearly as much as I'm putting in. And that's why sometimes we'll drop from a 3.5 early on to a 3.0, down to even a 2.0 or 1.8 during that last week. Just because we know the plant doesn't necessarily need all the salt we're putting in. There's a certain amount needed to maintain physical and that's it. You know, and that's part of why, from a cost perspective, sometimes getting customers we've worked with in the past off of like a one or two week straight RO flush is also another challenge. Right.
Seth [00:05:58]:
Because suddenly you have to pay for fertilizer for another week or two on each run and that becomes a cost, an input cost that, well, the yield's got to pay off to justify putting that in. Right?
Jason [00:06:11]:
Yeah. You know, another kind of thing that's just a rule of thumb when I'm looking at substrate EC during ripening is there's some significant dynamics as far as how, how what that EC looks like in the root zone when we irrigate and then what it looks like, you know, 24 hours or 22 hours whatever, right before we irrigate again. You know, traditionally we don't necessarily do much for P2s when we are in that ripening phase. And so we'll see, you know, very significant drybacks and kind of get a little bit w there towards the end, if you will.
Seth [00:06:44]:
Yeah. One thing to remember too, towards the end, you know, if you're pushing, like, especially if you're pushing P2 irrigations, latent bulking, you're not necessarily going to get the Same kind of EC&PH correction that you would when accumulating that water up through your P1s and then pushing that runoff. So pushing runoff and P2s, if you're going for ultimate efficiency and then eventually ultimate control of your substrate is not necessarily ideal. That being said, one of the best things that you can do and we always go back to, is crop registration. So take some notes, record all this data, run and run again on the same strain, and then you have a better idea as you eliminate variables, what's actually making the difference? I know, like in the last week I was working with a client who was running the same strain in different rooms and the same rooms. So we're able to pull apart. Like, hey, some of these rooms have, you know, humidity control issues, so we can't get it quite as dry. We're not able to drive as much transpiration.
Seth [00:07:40]:
But because we had enough data across different rooms and different runs and some runs in the same rooms, we're able to look at it and say, hey, this particular strain really requires a little bit higher ec. In the examples that we were looking at with a lower EC from the beginning that wasn't able to achieve as high of an EC mid flower. And later on, you know, we saw a 10 to 20 gram difference between runs that were able to achieve a slightly higher EC and maintain that. And you know, it's easy to try to draw conclusions, run to run to run. But in that case, you know, if we have like four different runs to draw data off of, we can look at these trends and actually identify what might be the actual difference without saying like, hey, just that these rooms are different. And here's the limitations. Right?
Jason [00:08:26]:
Yeah. When we're thinking about crop registration, run to run to run. You know, one of the nice things about system like Arroy is just how it helps you organize a lot of this data. One of the really cool things that I've been playing with in AROYA is looking at strange pictures across different growth cycles. So if we go into the cultivars page and look at cultivar performance, there's a gallery in there that grabs any of the photos of a plant that was grown in the selected zone or that cultivars zone from all of the runs in AROYA. So when we're thinking about crop registration towards the end, and I've seen lots of people enter data in different ways. One of one of my favorite ways was, was some clients that used a clipboard with some rulers taped to it and they would just hold up the clipboard right behind their, their colas and take a picture in there. And what, what a great way to see how a Cultivar was performing right towards the end of the cycle or throughout the cycle.
Jason [00:09:25]:
And you go back, you know, six months, a year. If you're able to run a strain that long, what an awesome way to see what that comparison is. Are we getting better at that strain as far as a quality and a look yield? Are we getting bigger nugs? Is our node spacing appropriate from run to run to run? All that starts to become more visual and obvious when you're able to keep your data organized and have great crop registration.
Seth [00:09:54]:
Yeah, I find even if you're only able to grow a strain 6, 8, 10 times right away in those first three runs, there are certain things that you can identify by combining, you know, all the data we get on the graph with some of those visual aids. Like, hey, we're seeing plants yellowing, we're seeing signs of lockout. If we have the data. I've. I've personally noticed there's a lot of strains that we'll see that feed very heavily. Okay. A lot of times in our efforts to get the EC up, we're limiting runoff, potentially driving that PH down over the first three weeks. Hey, every time with this strain, we're seeing that we have a physical imbalance.
Seth [00:10:27]:
It's going low at the end of week three, and that seems to happen every single time with this strain. Okay. Now we have the data to say that this strain's probably a heavy feeder, and we need to be able to hit it with that 3.5, 4.0 early on to keep ahead of its nutritional demands while also maintaining that ph. And sometimes, if you can pull apart that or if you can collect that data easily and later pull it apart, you can find very simple tweaks in the sop, like if I have to change nothing else other than feeding a 3.5 versus a 3.0. Yes, there may be some logistical challenges to that, but any upgrade I make that's going to allow me to do that is going to give me greater control for any strain I'm going to run in the future. So part of that is saying, hey, long term, got to put money into building our facilities in a way that allows the producer, the cultivator, to pivot to accommodate whatever strain that people want to buy three months from today. That's just the reality of the market we live in and operate in.
Kaisha [00:11:28]:
Seeing you got anything you want to add?
Cian [00:11:32]:
Yeah, I was kind of thinking along the lines of his question, just the. Should I be worried about this? Part of it really kind of grabbed me out of that And I think to sum it up, no, you're in a situation I wouldn't sweat too hard. You've got options like both Seth and Jason were saying in terms of either slightly lowering that feedc a little bit or maintaining and starting to just you starting to use your fade a little bit earlier. And you're not necessarily in a bad position seeing those numbers, especially with that study ph that you're seeing. But all of what you guys have been saying, I mean, you know, it's really strain dependent what you're going to be seeing. And there's different tolerances for different strains. And not just tolerances, but I think preferred ranges that they grow in. And so like Seth was alluding to, depending on what you're growing, you know, you might even have some different numbers on there that you might start to feel really comfortable with with specific strains.
Seth [00:12:33]:
Yeah, I think seeing you could come out to that really well, not, you know, flushing a lot of things over the years and seeing like, hey, there's sometimes some surprisingly high ECs, especially in the deep dry backs. We'll see some spikes when you're drying back real far that the plants can actually tolerate pretty well if you can maintain the rest of your parameters. Right, Yep.
Cian [00:12:54]:
I would say that's absolutely true. There's just a wide range out there of situations that plants will tolerate that I have been surprised about over the years and especially when it comes to what I'm seeing out of my runoff ec.
Seth [00:13:11]:
Yeah, there isn't necessarily a direct correlation between a high EC at the end of the run and black ash, for instance, which is one of the topics that always comes up. Right.
Kaisha [00:13:23]:
Fantastic. Great conversation. You guys really appreciate your insights into that. McK, we appreciate your question. Good luck. And we always love it when people report back. So keep us posted on what's going on over there. I also want to point out I didn't say this at the beginning.
Kaisha [00:13:36]:
These pumpkins were from Jason's garden, y'all. So, you know, there it is. Amazing. All right, we've got a couple of live questions that have come in here. We're going to start with this. This one from Anthony posted on YouTube. Hey fellas. Happy Halloween.
Kaisha [00:13:53]:
I recently switched to coco from soil with soil I'd looks like get ph 6.5 with coco. I'm trying to get lower but going lower than 6.5 and coco even is causing leaf clawing. Any suggestions and I do want to share. Danny, our grummy Danny dropped this reply. Anthony, water your coco like hydro, not soil. You're probably getting severe drybacks. I sure did when I made the switch. What's yalls take?
Jason [00:14:22]:
There could be a lot of things going on here. My guess is the clawing is not directly related to the ph that you're seeing. Most cocos were running around six for pH, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, just depending on what's going on in there. So my guess is it's related to something else. Either the amount of nutrients that you're running, possibly if you're hitting the. Is it a low water contents? Really low. Typically I don't see temporary wilting point in coco until we're lower than about 20%. You know, 15 to 20% is typically where we'll start to see temporary wilting point caused by, you know, very low matrix potentials in the substrate.
Jason [00:15:04]:
So my guess is there's, there's something else that's causing that and you're just going to have to analyze the rest of the parameters to get an idea.
Seth [00:15:13]:
Yeah, you know, start with the baseline. Like one thing I always advocate, if you're switching to coco especially, you know, you haven't been in a situation where you've been able to run thousands and thousands and thousands of pots through and test a bunch of different brands. One of the best things you can do really is take a volume of that coco. Roughly one gallon is my favorite because that's enough to easily hydrate well and get a sample. But hydrate it with the ro, get some of that initial runoff and make sure that you're not dealing with a potential high EC situation in your incoming coco. If you're dealing with local distributors and stuff like that and you get kind of some off brand coco, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a lot of times we might find that hey, it's good to buffer that coco with a little bit of cal mag or calcium nitrate and rinse that native like 1.2 ec sometimes of pretty much straight sodium down to much lower in that, you know, 0.1 to 0.3 range and then charge it with actual nutrition. One thing too, you'll find if you were using, depending on what kind of soil or soilless mix you're using, if at any kind of cation exchange capacity it also likely had a little bit of something like gypsum or lime in it to buffer your input water either way.
Seth [00:16:23]:
And now with the straight coco, that incoming ph is very, very important because if you're using straight coco, you don't have any buffering capacity inside that media. The other thing about that is you also have pretty complete control on what the media holds onto and doesn't hold on to, right back to that kind of exchange capacity. So if your media is holding on to a lot of salt at different points, that's dynamically changing the EC that's right around your roots throughout that dry back, much more so than in a straight controlled scenario. So a lot of times in a. Even though we're growing in coco, which looks like dirt, it's essentially a sponge and we're controlling absolutely everything through our inputs. So one thing I found in the switch, generally for the same size pot, watering a little more, depending on what that mix was like and how much perlite or big chunks of mulch I had in it, and giving it more fertilizer than what we generally would be used to in a soil or even an organic soilless mix, like a living soil. The other thing we're operating off of there is you have a bioavailability arc over time of all those organic inputs. So while I might mix up, say, some sort of manure or other nitrogen input into my soilless mix, give it a month to cook and then plant into it, part of that arc is that I'm planting into just before optimum nitrogen availability.
Seth [00:17:54]:
That nitrogen availability is there when my plants need it. And then naturally it starts to taper off over a period of time. And that can work if you have a good mix and good timing and you're very good at following directions over, you know, 30 to 60 days, mixing a really good soil, organic soilless mix. The that mix is doing all of the work for you. And now at this point, there is a little more of an art to pushing more or less runoff and maintaining that. And a great place for a lot of coco growers to start, especially making the transition, is going with, you know, a slightly smaller pot. You know, if we're in a. Depending on the actual grow room situation, if we're in a small indoor growing, we're not running the plants really, really hard.
Seth [00:18:37]:
Probably better to go with as counterintuitive intuitive as it might seem, if you're growing a three to five gallon pot, go with a one gallon and then push a lot of runoff. Don't run super high light intensity. Keep it at that 800 PPFD. And in that first run, just get used to pushing more runoff and having the ability to directly control what's going on in that root zone rather than trusting biology to do the work for you. I think that's where it gets really, really tough making that transition.
Jason [00:19:04]:
The bioavailability arc. I like that terminology. I kind of wanted to break down a little bit of what's going on there. So when Seth says that he's talking about when we're working with organics, basically what's happening is the microbes and the bacteria in there are breaking down the complex organic feeds, whether it be bat guano, worm castings, all of those types of amendments are going to have to be processed by the bacteria and the microbes in there. And that takes a certain amount of time. So when he talks about that arc, it's talking about, all right, how long does those specific compounds need to. Or how long does it take for those microbes and those bacteria to break down into available chemicals for the plant? Right. So when we think about those complex compounds, the plant can't necessarily process it.
Jason [00:19:53]:
It can't uptake it. It needs to break it down into nitrogens, potassiums, phosphoruses, and other simple elements that it can uptake. And I think Seth's going to draw us at a bioavailability arc, and we might even call it a biochemical availability arc, if you will, since we're thinking about how it breaks it down into digestible nutrients for the plant.
Seth [00:20:16]:
Yeah. In that direct rhizosphere right around the root zone. What that biology is doing for you in more of a natural or controlled soil environment, is it's slowly breaking down and making bioavailable. Basically, some of the chemicals we're trying to supply to the plant for through hydroponics, those microbes are making available right on the root zone surface. So, number one, that is. That is a little more difficult to measure. If we're looking at actually, how hot of an EC do we have in bulk pour water? Because some of these conversions are happening just on that very, very little bit of water that's around the root zone and not in the whole media. But if you have a good mix, and there's quite a few different ones out there that people have spec'd over the years, the science behind this is very well established.
Seth [00:21:02]:
And we know breakdown rates and bioavailability break rates of different products over time. But if done correctly, you're starting out with a little bit of low nitrogen. And actually my. My ramp would be a little steeper here. But we're trying to time that time between when we mix that, let it cook or compost over time and increase that bioavailability so that we hit it with a high nitrogen ratio, and then it's going to taper off a little towards the end. And that's where we'd also see, like, hey, that's when we traditionally start supplementing with things like guano or other high PK elements, because we know we need that as that nitrogen is tapering off. And there's definitely a lot of successful ways to do it. But if you're, again, good at following directions and mixing up those things, luckily that soil biology is doing a lot of the work for you.
Seth [00:21:51]:
And right now, if you're making that transition, it's just a learning curve where you have to get comfortable with what the plants like and learn some of these values, because they're not necessarily the same KPI values that you were used to looking for in a more traditional soil grow.
Jason [00:22:08]:
The zoot zone. Is that where we're at today?
Kaisha [00:22:11]:
Yeah.
Seth [00:22:11]:
To zoot it. Yeah.
Jason [00:22:12]:
Yeah.
Kaisha [00:22:13]:
I love the zit zone.
Cian [00:22:15]:
That's awesome. Yeah, I was just kind of thinking, you know, the few times that I had tried growing in soil and then went back to a coco substrate, I underwatered the crap out of them for a little bit. And it was a really bad misconception on my part just in terms of how much quicker that coco substrate would transpire and dry back. And so I was over drying my media really hard and seeing that similar, you know, the leaf curling that you're talking about. And just I was surprised about a few things that happened when I jumped back into that coco substrate from soil. And one of the most basic ones, how much water I was actually giving my plant, turned out to be, you know, one of the key factors in my equation that I was, at the time, pretty sure wasn't the thing. But then when I inspected that a little bit closer, sure enough. And of course, this was back before I had gotten AROYA.
Cian [00:23:25]:
Well, I didn't have the sensors and awareness around this to be able to tell me no, I surely am over drying this.
Seth [00:23:35]:
Yeah. One thing, too, seeing as you're talking about that I just thought of, especially most modern cocos, we're looking at a blend of pith and husk. And basically that husk looks more like chips in the media. Right. And usually when we're talking about soil, to most horticultural growers, we're looking at a peat moss base. And all the peat moss I've seen over the years. Well, number one, it doesn't really grow in a way that makes it easy to chip up. You get a nice, even grind on it.
Seth [00:24:03]:
So there is that factor, too. We're dealing with a Media that although it absorbs a lot of water similar to peat moss, it does have different size pores inside of it in comparison, not nearly as uniform. And that can contribute to drying out more quickly despite the fact that you have a sensor in the same spot in both media. So right to what you said. Seeing, you know, over drying is one thing for sure and it's when you're switching medias. That's one of the reasons we always advocate obviously from our company using sensors. And even if you don't have sensors doing that hydration test with a known volume of media, hydrate it to field capacity, weigh it again, get your grams of water, just get an idea of where it actually sits. Because the key to success in all this isn't necessarily, I mean, having a good media is definitely important that it can hit certain, you know, VWC parameters and not have a super high cec.
Seth [00:24:57]:
That being said, as growers you can adapt quite a bit to some of these different medias. Like that's one thing I love about seeing grow there. He's been through all of these different media choices over the years from, you know, peat moss based Promix to Rockwell to a bunch of different brands of coco. And as long as you can measure where your field capacity is, where you might run into some temporary wilting issues with matrix potential, because that's going to vary a little bit, you can adjust your processes to stay in those parameters. You know, we see great results out of all different types of media. It's the ability to adjust your small irrigation decisions on a day to day basis to actually deal with those differences. That is the real sauce.
Kaisha [00:25:45]:
That's the real sauce. Awesome. Great overview again you guys. Anthony, we appreciate your question. Danny Gromy, thank you for engaging in the dialogue. We love the converse. Keep the conversation going in the chats, you guys. Awesome.
Kaisha [00:25:57]:
All right, we're going to keep it moving. We got this question from Boxwood Farmer120. They wrote on the subject of heavy feeding plants. Does the AROYA irrigation calculator calculate for plants that have dense roots and drink more water with the same pot size later in the cycle?
Jason [00:26:15]:
So, irrigation calculator, I guess I could bring it up here if we want. It's really, there's not much that's taking account for any plant aspects there. Really what we're doing is we're, you know, analyzing or making fairly simple calculations based on irrigation rates and equipment in your facility right there. So what you need to be doing is looking at your dry back curves using some type of substrate Sensor or load cell in order to est what those water contents look like. And then use the irrigation calculator to project what you should be irrigating like tomorrow or a week from now.
Seth [00:26:50]:
Yeah, we're generally looking at, you know, replacing and slightly exceeding that dry back delta. And the irrigation calculator makes it very simple to plug in the, you know, calculated or observed difference between fuel capacity and dry back on your graph and figure out how much water you need to put on to do that. But right now it does not predict, like, how much runoff you would need to add, for instance, to bring your EC down a certain point. And that I think we're. You can do some base calculations to get somewhat close. But it's so variable for different media and different situations, especially being that it's variable based on how you've built that EC up and the composition of that EC and what pH it makes at the end of it. This is where you get a little bit of that artisan touch in and use your own brain predictability from run after run to say, hey, I know that it usually takes me three days to get from a 5.3 back up to a 5.5 or 5.6 runoff pH, for instance.
Jason [00:27:50]:
Yeah. Like you said, I mean, the best way to do that is used some of the previous data so that, you know, it's taken into account all of the, all of the specifics of your setup. You know, mostly that plants preferences and subtra substrate type, nutrient composition. Those, I guess, would be the top three. You know, if you want to just start doing some rough math, you could always, you know, assume that, hey, if, if I have a substrate EC at 8 and I'm feeding it 4, depending on that amount of runoff, it's going to change it that much back down to your feed.
Seth [00:28:22]:
Yeah. And I think one of the important things here is as long as we're staying inside of what actually honestly are fairly wide ranges, we're not expecting to see any catastrophic results. So the learning curve, as long as you're making small adjustments and generally not just cutting runoff, you're pushing enough runoff, you can actually play around in there. And it's kind of a slow motion video game. Make adjustments one day, cross your fingers and wait till the next. But after, you know, a few runs, you'll stop crossing your fingers and know that, hey, I made this adjustment and no matter what, my plants are going to look fine tomorrow. What I'm really looking for is a response in these data trends.
Kaisha [00:29:03]:
All right, y'all, irrigation calculator is on our website. If you head over to irrigation-calculator.arroya IO. We dropped it in the chat here. Get up in there and start playing around. Let us know what you think about it. Seeing I think I might have interrupted you. Did you have something you wanted to add?
Cian [00:29:20]:
I was just kind of thinking, you know, like, man, I hope that we get one day to a point where we can have our calculator be sophisticated enough that we can have it account for variable factors like that. And if you ever figure out how to write the algorithm, give us a call because there might be another conversation to be had.
Kaisha [00:29:43]:
Opportunities everywhere. Awesome. Okay, we're going to keep it going. We got a couple questions from Mitchell, our gromy here. I'm going to start with this first one they wrote. Hey guys, I've been hearing a lot of hype around far red light four to eight minutes after lights off. Any thoughts on that? And our grooming? Nick confirmed that. We talked about that last week.
Kaisha [00:30:04]:
Nick replied, science hasn't been able to prove that adding far red after lights out to put plants to sleep doesn't support the hypothesis in the cannabis plant. Is there anything else you all want to add to that conversation?
Jason [00:30:17]:
Well, you know me, there's certain words that I always like to avoid. Stress being one of them, flush being another one. I think at this point maybe we're going to have to add sleep to my list here just simply because it's a generic term that's not necessarily specifying bio biological response in the plant. Right. So, you know, sure. When, when the lights go out, you could say, oh, we sleep well with plants. They're nest. They're not necessarily sleeping, if you will.
Jason [00:30:46]:
They're, they're going into a different chemical reaction, different biological reaction. Where in lights on we're transpiring and lights off, we're respiring. Right. So basically, you know, the plant's still growing, it's just going through a much different breakdown.
Seth [00:31:04]:
Yeah, it's burning energy rather than storing it. Burning sugar rather than building it.
Jason [00:31:09]:
Yes, burning it rather than building it.
Seth [00:31:11]:
And as far as like running that, you know, a few minutes after lights off, boy, you would need a lot of different runs worth of data and eliminating every other variable that we've, you know, over the years shown is definitely incremental in that buildup of potency and terp expression. So let's say you had one run where you really maxed out. You hit your, your, your best yield, best thc, best terp profile on this particular Strain. To prove that that's gonna work, your number one are gonna have to repeat that run enough times that you can pull it off easily and show that that truly is the variable. Um, and when it comes to only a few minutes afterward, we look at the plant response time to things like photo. Uh, ten minutes probably isn't a lot. You know, you might, you might, for instance, not notice an insanely huge difference other than flowering period being slightly longer by a day or two if you ran 1311 instead of 1212. So while it may have some merit and if you want to do it, do it because you're probably not burning a whole lot of power on it.
Seth [00:32:20]:
I don't think that necessarily you're going to be able to prove without hundreds of runs worth of data and eliminating other variables that that actually increased very much. I mean, it's, it kind of goes back to something I've heard pop up recently, which is, you know, 24 to 36 or 24 to 72 hours of dark before harvest. While, you know, maybe, maybe there is some merit to that, you know, in other parts of, well, in floriculture, other parts of horticulture, they do employ interrupted light schedules and some things like that to do that. However, if I've got, for instance, a commercial flower room, three days of lights off is three days that I have equipment that is supposed to be growing plants that's not actively growing biomass for me. So if I look at that projected over the next few years, pretty soon the opportunity cost of not being able to put a fresh crop in that room for an extra three days, pushing everything back might exceed any kind of increase. If that increase is going to be substantial, maybe I can get something out of that. Step one on testing whether that dark period might be beneficial is, for instance, you know, turn your lights off the last day before harvest, just put up fluorescence for harvest. Don't turn your grow lights actually on in the morning and really drive the plants into super active photosynthesis.
Jason [00:33:42]:
Yeah, it's in. I don't, I don't know if we've specifically touched on it a couple weeks ago when we were talking about it, but you know, for me, at least, you know, later and most of the flower cycle, having red and far red, depending on exactly how you define those, is going to activate your phytochromes. So there's basically two pigments, phytochrome, what is it? FR and phytochrome R. And these are both going to help increase some of the chemical profiles in the plant. So when we're talking about those, those are secondary metabolites and there's a decent list of them. Obviously chlorophyll A and chlorophyll B are the primary recept, are responsible for photosynthesis. Well, for certain spectrums we can enable those secondary metabolites and there is chemical advantages, benefits to doing that, you know, including increased terpene profiles, increased THC and also better anthocyanin production. So you know, might be one of those things where, you know, if you're getting real crazy about it, compare running Far red through the, you know, through the whole 12 hour light cycle versus just towards the end.
Jason [00:34:53]:
Um, my guess is if you're running it through the whole life cycle, you'll even see better benefits and it has almost nothing to do with sleeping.
Seth [00:35:01]:
That's what I was going to say. I know for some growers, I know that have had to make the switch from HPS to led if they can have a lot of Far Red and UV supplementation, the UV seems to be a little, little bit extra kick above the hps. But that far red is critical. You know, if you've been growing with HPS for years. We're used to a spectrum that's actually really optimal during ripening, but running that the entire flowering period. So while there may be some growth trade offs to running that particular spectrum early on, it is actually really great for ripening terpenes, ripening cannabinoids, really driving that ripening process through spectrum. That being said, you know, LED technology has made leaps and bounds over the last 10 years and it's technically more difficult to get that fine tuned spectrum that you want out of an LED product. And often obviously the cost is a little higher.
Seth [00:35:56]:
So that is a challenge that growers definitely have to approach. And one of the bummers is, you know, HPS technology, your bulbs wear out, you have to replace them. But much like our discussion about soil, the light does a lot of that fine tuning for you. When we found that technology, we got lucky in terms of stumbling across the spectrum that gave us the best expression that we like in cannabis. And honestly probably some of our opinions are highly jaded. By smoking weed that's been grown under HPS for the last 30 years. I know that like seems to be the case for me. You know, my, my, my opinion and palate's jaded by what I have been conditioned to think is top of the line for a long time and that technology has only recently changed and gotten competitive.
Seth [00:36:41]:
And you know, you can see it. Some of the earlier LEDs we saw, the blurples and the pinks were super popular and getting to a point where they're actually able to produce enough different wavelength spectrum or wavelengths of diodes to produce a light that we can just visibly see easily and also has the wavelengths that we're looking for for plant growth.
Kaisha [00:37:05]:
Amazing. Thank you, guys. I didn't know. Jason, I don't know if you're about to pull up a graph.
Jason [00:37:09]:
I don't know. I was just trying to dig into something that is digestible as far as explaining how. How phytochrome works, but I didn't necessarily. I. I think most of these documents might actually be over my head, so I'm not going to try and explain them.
Seth [00:37:26]:
Yeah, and that's one thing to, I think, focus on. You know, there are a lot, there's a lot of research out there about specific plant processes that can be improved on. You know, if we look at, like applying certain different hormonal treatments to plants, we can get some interesting results and expressions. At the end of the day, though, this is still farming, still agriculture. We're all in this to make money. Most of almost everyone, I assume, listening to this show, you might be growing for yourself or likely you are growing as a commercial producer. And hey, great, if I can produce a plant that gave me 38% THC reliably, and I say reliably, talking about California labs here, and that was just the most amazing thing ever had. 3.5 milligrams of terps, did everything I wanted it to.
Seth [00:38:13]:
What did that hormonal treatment do? Does it apply evenly throughout the plant? Is there obviously any health effects on humans that we need to know about later? That's always up for debate. And then at the end of the day, even if I could grow a plant that was hit all of those numbers except for yield, what if it only gave me 1 1/2 pounds per light under optimum conditions? Because it. That's genetically a dwarf plant and just will not pack on weight. It's adapted in certain ways that are not beneficial for commercial production. Well, I better get like 3500 bucks a pound for that plant. Otherwise why would I grow a plant that yields a third of everything else.
Jason [00:38:50]:
You know, unless you can grow it three times faster.
Seth [00:38:55]:
Triple stacks. Yeah, but that's the thing, you know, we're always trying to balance that. Like. Like, what is some of the coolest plants out there? Or what are some of the coolest plants out there? The weirdest things to grow with. What can we actually put into production and make money on? And I guess it just all depends on where your position in the market is. There are places and there are producers that are able to, you know, through a lot of branding effort, capitalize on the rareness of what they're growing. But that, that's a whole other amount of effort on top of already growing this, this really hard, fickle strain to produce. That is tough, especially if you're a small business and don't have $2 million to go launch a brand with.
Jason [00:39:41]:
Reminds me of growing pinksicle outdoors.
Cian [00:39:47]:
I was just going to say, if you're going to experiment with the far red light after lights off, get a sense of what those effects are going to be on the specific genetics or cultivars that you're going to be growing. Because I think that's going to really strain dependent what you're going to get out of it at the end of the day. And some of them are going to respond better or more noticeably potentially than others. And some of them kind of like what Seth was saying will trend towards better expression under hps. Or maybe that's my bias. I'm also a little bit on that HPS bias side.
Seth [00:40:24]:
What is better, right?
Jason [00:40:25]:
Yeah. I guess one of the things that you also need to record when you're doing these trials is what's the intensity of the far right that, that you're exposing these plants to. Not necessarily all par sensors are going to be able to capture those far reds. And depending on how far red that you're talking about, we might require a little bit of special equipment to register what exact intensity that far red spectrum is being exposed onto the plants.
Seth [00:40:54]:
Yeah, I mean that's an important thing to remember. Like for my own setup, I could turn on far red for extra time after it's off. But the actual amount of intensity that I'm getting out of that far red with just those diodes on is actually really, really low at the canopy. Low, low to the point where it probably is driving a little bit of a reaction, but not the same as if I was able to supply. I mean the difference would be if I have a Farad sensor in there, I can get 250 micromoles with only the far red on versus, you know, 12, 1300 at full blast. So arguably, is that enough input energy to drive the processes I'm looking for? Really, really tough to say. But that's where pictures, documentation, note taking, and then also responsibly. You're not saying like hey, what if I had turned on these lights for an hour during the middle of the dark part of my photo period? We're not doing that.
Seth [00:41:49]:
And that's where I think as this whole industry moves forward, there are ways producers can play with small boutique tweaks that you don't have to claim are your secrets. But like, hey, we're more hands on, we take care of certain things trying to mimic the natural environment. And that's where some of that branding comes in to say to really get a return on some of those efforts. Because I think, as we all know, with the hype market that goes on out there, between strains, producers, who's endorsing who and all that, and the fact that in most places you can't go to a store and just crack a jar and smell it before you buy it. Unfortunately, we all have to really embrace that marketing to try to drive home. And it exists in the alcohol industry too. For instance, you've got organic wine and regular wine. Same with beer.
Seth [00:42:41]:
I mean, Whole Foods is a whole chain that exists on, hey, we provide slightly nicer, slightly nicer, more organic, more environmentally friendly, more connoisseur, whatever you want to say. But that, that is a whole aspect to this industry because there are certain parameters that this plant needs to live in. And whether any of us are growing in soil, soilless, full, hydroponic, you know, there, there are commonalities in what everyone is doing, even, even outdoor growers, we're all still playing with the same plant science principles, just going about it in a different control manner.
Kaisha [00:43:21]:
Awesome, you guys, thank you for that conversation, Mitchell. We appreciate you bringing the topic back up. And Mitchell actually dropped a couple other questions. Looks like they're looking for some irrigation guidance. So let me ask these. They wrote, I'm on day 11, flour, one gallon coco, quick fills and everything is pretty dialed in. But I'm only able to put on P1s to get that 50% dry back. Is this normal? And then they posted earlier this week, irrigation question.
Kaisha [00:43:50]:
Growing in 1 gallon coco, 60% water content for the first time in flower from week one and on. Could you tell me the ideal drybacks in between shots and overnight dry back? Thank you. So what do we want to say to Mitchell?
Seth [00:44:03]:
So let's start the day11.1. Yeah, you should only be putting on P1s until about day 21. That's, that's the goal. We want to put on only P1s, reach field capacity, then dry back till the next one morning. So that's right on point one. Thing I would suggest if you're in a one gallon quick fill and you're growing any plant that's taller than about 2 1/2ft at finish, do go pick up a solas or use a scale or something to actually get what your VWC is somewhat accurately. Because if you're operating off of saturation, which I'm guessing with the 50% dry back, it's going to be really difficult to tell the difference by hand between 35% VWC and 25% V. Is it possible? Sure.
Seth [00:44:45]:
But I sure as hell no, I can't do it. I don't know about you, Jason, that's a, you know, not, not a whole lot of grams of difference.
Jason [00:44:52]:
Yeah, I mean, and that's just it, you know, in a one gallon. And he did provide some more information that we're going to get into here too. You know, I like the 65% field capacity 1 gallon just because it gives me a little bit more to work with. If we were at a 50% dry back, we would be down to that, you know, probably a little less than 15% water capacity or volumetric water content in there.
Seth [00:45:12]:
Yeah, exactly. And that's, it's hard to do. Do that direct weight translation in your hands now.
Jason [00:45:16]:
Now we're playing with, you know, temporary wilting point. Um, and it looks like we got, we got Nick March in here that's talking about. Yeah, 50% is incredibly hard drive back. 30% is really good if your plants can take it. Um, and Mitchell talked about being. Hey, he gets up to 60, 63%. Um, guessing that's probably about field capacity for that coco that you're seeing. And then just his drybacks are down to 30, 35% which is actually kind of just perfect.
Jason [00:45:42]:
Goes right, goes right in line with the generative type, um, that, that we would recommend for a generic strain and then that, that part of the cycle.
Kaisha [00:45:51]:
Yeah.
Seth [00:45:51]:
Then when we get into bulking, we're still looking to hit fuel capacity in a pretty short window. That's just because we want to, I'll use the term wrangle but like herd all of our plants right up to fuel capacity at the same time. So we know they're all getting runoff that we want. And generally we're looking at about an hour to an hour and a half dry back before hitting those P2s. And then that next part is a little bit strain dependent. So some strains we'll go with a dry back 1% replace 1%. If you really are trying to push that bulking Behavior really hard. Uh, certain strains, like lemon cherry gelato, is a big one we've been seeing, like, hey, let's go with more like a 3 to 5% dry back in between those P2s and replace that and go with a little less bulking signal to that plant because we're seeing better expression and that goes right back to that crop registration.
Seth [00:46:35]:
Take those weekly pictures anytime you're experimenting with any of these irrigation changes. Because on some strains, the difference just if you change nothing else and only these irrigation patterns is going to be pretty dramatic. And there's certain tells like leaf formation, leaf positioning. I've seen some strands that like to do a fun leaf roll where the vein kind of wraps up the outer parts of the leaf almost like a blanket. But you can start to find some of those tells that'll tell you, like, hey, I'm pushing some stressed and weird growth growth. And when we're really playing with pushing some of these vegetative cues hard, that's when we can push a plant back towards stretch and into more loose bud formation. And blowing it out, I guess, is what some people would call it. And usually we want to approach everything with a more conservative, like, hey, let's, let's employ these strategies at a less intense level.
Seth [00:47:30]:
And then we'll crank up the drive, you know, crank up those generative drybacks. We'll go deeper as we can see, these plants can take them. And we're actually getting the response that we want, want. Because in cannabis, there's enough. Oh, this is a good one. There's enough genetic variability and expression that we find examples of strains that are all over the place and where they actually land in response to these strategies. And like, that's. That's one thing I think, see, and you can comment too.
Seth [00:47:54]:
You've grown several strains that are very related and some that are very, very not. And you start to see after a few runs trying to dial it in. Very, very visual indicators on the same strain. That's quite different between run to run and anyone who's grown a fair amount of cannabis, especially different strains like this is these are things you notice. It's just sometimes hard to track it all actually as close as you want been.
Cian [00:48:20]:
One of the ways that I've had some of the most visual feedback is growing similar strains over and over again and seeing these visual cues of how the plants are developing or ways in which I may have overstressed them, or ways in which they seem to be doing better than they did in previous rounds and kind of like what you were saying before that crop registration, being able to have pictures on a regular basis that kind of show me the development of what those plants are maybe supposed to look like or maybe not supposed to look like has been really valuable in my ability to learn from those experiences and kind of start to identify what those markers mean.
Seth [00:48:56]:
Oh yeah. One of my favorite ones is pistols that start to form full curls like the hair on my neck. You're like, what, what is going on? Oh, wait, when I don't push that one quite as deep on the dry back, it doesn't do that. That's. That's probably an indicator that maybe I'm pushing that particular strain a little hard.
Jason [00:49:13]:
Yeah. And I, I'm gonna probably get a little crazy here, but I just drew as kind of a diagram to explain, you know, that generative and vegetative strategies obviously have an intensity. Right. And so, so, you know, if, let's say if we were doing a, you know, five or six hour, you know, five hour irrigation window through the day, we'd probably be sitting more balanced. You know, let's say we were at six irrigations or something. You know, it's obviously as if we do more or less irrigations, greater or smaller irrigation windows. That's a lot of times we, you know what's going to take us on different parts of the scale. And honestly, that's probably one of the reasons that the three of us get super excited about actually looking at data, utilizing data and crop registration.
Jason [00:49:59]:
I think we're, I might be more of a like a technical nerd I'll see in this technical nerds, but we're all plant. We're all really just plant nerds when.
Seth [00:50:08]:
It comes down to differences and the fact that sometimes you make a small programming change on your keyboard, the end result is a completely different expression. But I like this visual that Jason put up because that really is how you need to visualize when we're looking at crop steering. The more smaller irrigation events we're putting on and the higher you see we're running, the harder we're driving those plants. And a lot of plants respond in different ways. And one of the things that is pretty awesome actually about commercial cultivation with multiple rooms going at the same time. If you have eight or nine rooms going, you can see what's happening. Especially if they're all populated with the same strains or similar. Close to.
Seth [00:50:50]:
I can go, hey, I hit this, I hit this PH downswing with this strain at the end of week three seems to keep happening. I Can make an adjustment on the one that's in week two now and have a really quick learning curve and figure out if that actually solved this problem or not. And as long as you can start thinking of these things in terms of intensity and then utilizing enough data. And that's where it's really tough. You know, even with the array sensor suite, we're getting substrate data, we're getting runoff data. If you've got the ES2, we're getting environmental data. Um, we really want to pull apart whether, hey, was it just these irrigation changes we made or you know, we have plenty of clients where it's like, hey, why did we, why did we jump up 30 grams in yield? Well, like, hey, let's look at your humidity and VPD in the last three weeks. We see some of your strains are ones that are pretty known to pack on like 20% of their bulk in the last week and a half of flower.
Seth [00:51:41]:
You were struggling to maintain a VPD above like let's say a 0.9 or a 1.0. We just didn't get enough growth during that time period. So now that's something we can modify. But once that parameter is fixed because that VPD was too low, we know we're outside of that range. Now we can evaluate whether it was actually the irrigation strategy or was it a failure in the room. And we just corrected that. That actually resulted in that massive increase in yield because there's a lot of small parts where optimum, you know, with certain strains, optimum environment, suboptimal irrigation and media and nutrients not going to be good. Some strains I always love using, especially lately Oreos as an example because sometimes that's coming back up, but that's what you could give me and throw in a six by six by six and let's just veg it pretty much all the way through and it's going to turn out fine.
Seth [00:52:31]:
Right? Well, there's a reason Jason went. No one wants to grow Oreos anymore. It's not a big seller, it's not the most popular strain. And at least in cannabis, you know, there, there are great efforts being put in in genetics right now for sure. But you know, just for reference, like coming out of traditional plant breeding and field crops, we'd be looking at six plus years from that first cross to the stabilized selected variety that we're putting out to commercial market and right now between licensing limitations. So how much canopy can I actually put at hunts? Like can I really afford to go, go plant 5,000 seeds to hopefully find one keeper in that whole crop. That's not exactly practical. So instead of being constantly provided with genetics that are awesome for growers, we as growers have to constantly adapt with being provided the genetics that are what consumers want.
Seth [00:53:27]:
And I think we have a good amount of time before those two things are going to perfectly align, especially with the fact that right now, now if you're in the cannabis breeding game again, you can only put so much space towards that legally and easily and cost effectively. So it is a huge challenge that breeders in other crops just don't have to face. Their only KPI output is purely on their IP that they're producing those genetics, and they're allowed to have federal legal rights over ownership of those genetics, which in cannabis we don't quite have yet. So kind of a bummer a little bit. But also it means it's a little bit of the wild west too, where people don't necessarily have the same kind of ownership and ability to harbor genetics that you do in other industries and crops.
Jason [00:54:21]:
Yeah, and what I was getting at. So, you know, the reason we do get excited here, we'll show Seth what I'm going to talk about so he can think about it too. You know, when we talk about crop restoration and using cultivar analysis in a data system, you know, documenting your harvest groups, getting pictures, all that stuff is really to figure out, all right, for a specific strain, how long and how much intensity of these steering strategies do I want to apply for the best output? Right. And, you know, depending on your yield and. Or versus quality constraints on your market, sometimes you can push these even, you know, even a little bit harder. For example, certain strains just don't perform quite as well when we do push them hard. And so we have to think about, all right, for how long and for how much, you know, how much intensity do we want to apply these strategies for the best output of each. Each cultivar.
Jason [00:55:17]:
Each strain.
Seth [00:55:18]:
Yeah, and that's. That's something, you know, we've probably not on here, talked about in the past, but I love that Jason brought up was putting a score on vegetative versus generative for some of your strains. Because a lot of these strains, if we can actually group them according to flower time, that's one of the biggest differences we're going to see is, hey, how much more generatively and by generatively, like, is this a strain that puts less effort into growing structure and more effort into growing flower, or is this one that's like a, you know, you name a classic pineapple cut that just Wants to grow into a big tree full of sticks and not a whole lot of bud. And then once you can start classifying that, that you can really start adjusting your system to push those different parameters. And then, you know, just based on the scale, like, we can put something as simple as if we made it a 1 to 5. How generative is this plant? And how generative are we going to run this irrigation strategy now? We can just put a number on even every bench in the room and simplify it that way.
Jason [00:56:17]:
I love the way pineapple smells.
Seth [00:56:20]:
Just not looks well.
Jason [00:56:22]:
Yeah.
Kaisha [00:56:24]:
You guys rock. Thank you so much for that. I wanted to share the results of a poll we just conducted. Folks were asked to choose between three different options. Blueberry, Count Chocula, Frankenberry. It is 50, 50 split between booberry and Count Chocula. I got to process that a little bit. I'm a little surprised with that.
Kaisha [00:56:46]:
We have a few more minutes. I've got some very important announcements to make, y'all, so we're just gonna go ahead and wrap up and. And go with that. So first, Arroya is bringing precision substrate irrigation management to MJ Bizcon. Catch us in the north hall in the cultivation pavilion, December 3rd through the 6th, booth number 35023. We're going to be serving up coffee and a whole lot of solutions. So to learn more, sign up to meet with us. Drop.
Kaisha [00:57:13]:
We just dropped a link in the chats coming up. We would love to see you in Vegas if you're going to be there. These guys will be there, so you can say hi to them. And then don't forget, we are nominated for Cultivation Software of the year with the MJ Awards. Vote for us once a day over the next few weeks. And we really, really appreciate your support. But, yeah, that's everything. We got a lot going on the next couple of few weeks.
Kaisha [00:57:36]:
We're excited to. We have a lot of things we're going to be revealing, but yeah. Any final words before we wrap up today's Halloween episode, guys?
Seth [00:57:45]:
Oh. Enjoy the holiday. Hopefully all your outdoor growers got your crops in or very close to it. I know around here that would. That would be terrible if I still had weed outside. It's getting frigid.
Kaisha [00:57:57]:
It's cold.
Jason [00:57:59]:
Frostiest plants you grew.
Seth [00:58:00]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be also, everyone, Happy Halloween.
Kaisha [00:58:05]:
And also, it looks like blueberry is the winner today. So there it is, y'all. All right, thank you so much, Seth, Jason, and Sian and producer Chris for another great session. Thank you all for joining us for this recent week AROYA office hours I can't talk distracted. To learn more about AROYA, book a demo at AROYA I.O. and our team will show you the ins and outs of the ultimate cannabis cultivation platform. If you have any crops during or cultivation questions you want us to cover if we did not get to your question today, don't worry, we're going to get it. Drop your questions anytime in the Arroy app.
Kaisha [00:58:37]:
Email us@salesaroyaio send us a DM. We're on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. We definitely want to hear from you. And if you're a fan of the pod, please leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast. We appreciate your feedback and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube so you never miss an episode. Thanks y'all. See you at episode 121. Happy Halloween.