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Seth Baumgartner and Jason Van Leuven open the mics for your crop steering and cultivation questions.
Kaisha [00:00:03]:
What's up, grummies? Welcome to AROYA office hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. I'm your moderator, Kaisha. This is episode 123. Shout out to everybody who is all of our live viewers on YouTube and Instagram. To everyone tapping in on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcast, thank you for your support. And if you like the pod, drop us a review. We appreciate the feedback. See that QR code on screen? Scan that to join a riot.
Kaisha [00:00:30]:
MJ Bizcon. We're going to be in the north hall hall in the cultivation pavilion from December 3rd through the 6th. Booth number 35023. That QR code is your way in. We're dropping some major news this year, so whether you sign up to meet up with us in person or to get email updates, you do not want to miss out. All right, with that, we got Jason, Seth, and scene in the house. How are you guys doing?
Cian [00:00:52]:
Great.
Seth [00:00:52]:
Pretty good.
Kaisha [00:00:53]:
Yeah, Amazing. Good, good. Well, let's get going. We got a great question here posted on Instagram by the gardener. They wrote. Hi there. The show. You guys have helped me so much thus far.
Kaisha [00:01:06]:
I've got a question that hopefully someone can help me with. We are growing in 3.5 liter pot coco perlite 7030 feeding 3.5 EC, 5.8 pH. Our runoff EC has been rising over the last few days. I'm almost at the end of week three. We've been gen steering up to this point. Our ph range is 5.8 to 6.0. Our substrate EC range is about 3 at the end of our P1. But I'm not sure sure how accurate our sensor is.
Kaisha [00:01:37]:
Should I worry about the high runoff ec? It slowly creeped up to just over 7 today. Our runoff percentage is slightly high as I've tried to keep the runoff EC from going too high. All strains are super happy. Also, you mentioned in one episode about treating coco perlite mixes differently. Could you explain this, please? Hopefully this message reaches you guys. Left from Bangkok, Thailand.
Seth [00:02:00]:
Awesome.
Kaisha [00:02:00]:
Thanks Grammy for writing in. All right, gentlemen.
Jason [00:02:03]:
Hey, the gardener. Great question. Sounds like pretty much everything is winning. You're doing a great job of stacking. When we talk about generative stacking, you know, those first anywhere from two to four weeks depending on the strain. Usually that's exactly what you want, right? Your PH is on on point there. 5.8, 6.0 for perlite coco feeding at 3.5. That's awesome.
Jason [00:02:30]:
And you know, getting runoffs up towards seven is kind of means that you are stacking. Right. And we should be seeing a morphological response from the plants that's indicating that you have been able to, you know, change that hormone balance into a more reproductive type of, type of growth. And that's exactly what you want to be doing right now. You know, when we think about a runoff reading at say 7, well, when you're irrigating at 3, 5, it's going to drop that back down. Right. So that 7 is going to be one of the higher numbers that you'd see if you had time series data like AROYA. You know, that that would be up towards the top of that.
Jason [00:03:05]:
And, and usually, you know, sometimes we're comfortable going even a little bit higher for certain strains. So nailing it.
Seth [00:03:14]:
Yeah, I mean, seeing 3,500 plus ppm in your runoff is not weird. When you've correctly stacked some plants up, especially if your ph is in range, I wouldn't worry about it. And just keep watching your plants and watching your ph, that ph starts to creep down, then you might have a problem on your hands. But most likely it's probably not. As far as treating that coco perlite mix different than coco, I mean, one of the biggest things we'll see is like, you can't necessarily put as big of a shot on quite as quickly and not have any channeling issues with the perlite. And typically we're not seeing the perlite hit quite as high of saturation values. So whereas we might see a Coke, you know, straight coco blend come in at like 60 to 70% at VWC at fuel capacity, with the perlite blend, we're probably going to see low 40s to low 50s at fuel capacity. And if you're in a 3.5 liter pot, you know, a little under one gallon, the most difficult thing we'll typically see there is because you're not holding much water, it might be difficult to ripen those plants and go generatively at the end.
Seth [00:04:20]:
Other than that, as long as you're paying attention to those kind of key parameters. What's, what's your runoff ph and are your plants happy and do you have enough fertilizer? You're doing pretty good.
Cian [00:04:31]:
I was just kind of thinking before I got AROYA, you know, I probably would have been asking a pretty similar question. Man, am I getting a little bit too high up in my stacked EC ranges here? And I think just kind of like what Jason said, once you have time series data on this and you're able to really break that down a little bit and start understanding the effects of The EC that you're stacking in your substrate, just like Jason said, you're going to see that that's moreover, a positive set of numbers that you're looking at right there and that that represents a positive stack in your EC and you're doing exactly what we tell you to do.
Jason [00:05:07]:
Yeah. And you know, Seth just talked about that perlite mix. You know, basically the perlite mixture is just going to decrease your field capacity number that volumetric water content field capacity. So for some of the chunkier coco. Yeah, we might see it down as 45 with straight coco. With perlite mix, it's going to drop it down a little bit. Same with the fine coco, just like Seth said, up to 60 to 70. You know, Perlite blend in there is going to drop that VWC field capacity just a little bit.
Kaisha [00:05:38]:
Amazing, you guys. That's so good. Thank you so much for that overview. And to the gardener out in Thailand, good luck. Keep us posted on what you're doing. All right. We're going to keep it moving. We got this question here from Mana Seeds.
Kaisha [00:05:51]:
They wrote in what if theoretically the dry back hit 10% water content and the plants showed no signs of wilting, still rigid and praying, would this be damaging to the plant?
Jason [00:06:04]:
Probably not. So when we're looking at wilting points, you have both temporary wilting point, which means that, hey, the plants start wilting and they will bounce back given the conditions turn more favorable. And then there's permanent wilting point. So if we hear permanent wilting point, usually that is damaging to the plant. Temporary wilting point. Not necessarily. If you're hitting 10%, you might be in something like Rockwell. Right.
Jason [00:06:29]:
So when we think about how do we know when we're going to start to be in a temporary wilting point or permanent wilting point range? And that's looking at matrix potentials in the substrate. So how much vacuum does the root zone or does the roots have to apply to the root zone to the substrate in order to get water out of it? Right. And for something like Rockwell, that number is extraordinarily low. For coco, we usually see it about, you know, somewhere about 15%. We'll start to see that matrix potential. Cause a little bit of temporary wilting could be a little bit lower, a little bit higher, just depending on all the conditions involved. The thing about, you know, if you are hitting 10% and you're not seeing any temporary wilting point, it, you know, sounds like there's a chance that you're in Rockwell and. And yes, rockwool is not going to hurt the plant when it's that low.
Jason [00:07:23]:
Like, because that matrix potential is very linear. That water is extremely available until the Rockwell is almost completely out. And we don't really want to go that low with rockwool in general though, simply because it's going to start to cause some of those hydrophobic pockets. The properties of the rock wool that are beneficial will start to be lost if we're running, you know, 10% or lower very long. Right. We typically like to Keep Rockwell above 30, 35% water volumetric water content to maintain the capillary consistency throughout that fiber.
Seth [00:08:00]:
Yeah. So like Jason said, a lot of it comes down to what meteor you're running. Obviously in rock wall. The plants will not die at that point. But you know, when we look at Rockwell, that's one of the other dangers of it. The difference between temporary wilting point and permanent wilting point is very, very low. You know, we're talking down to what, like the 3% or less range where we'll finally see those plants start to wilt. And at that point, I don't know if you could really get water on fast enough to save them from that 1%.
Seth [00:08:26]:
I'm sure someone has. Certainly not optimal. Another thing to look out for if you're seeing some low water content readings is just sensor placement in your pot. So if you have a sensor, you know, up too high, for instance, just because of the effect of gravity, we're going to see that higher up, we've got a lower water content. And then if you've got a short, wide pot, like a lot of the modern 2 gallon open tops, especially with a mesh side, what can happen is as that plant strike back, we also get evaporation on the outside of the media pretty much everywhere except for the bottom. And that can lead to a bit of a dry crust going in. Like if you've grown in two or three gallon pots, quite a bit. And you see that, like, hey, once I dump that root ball out, I don't see those roots squeezing against the edge of the pot quite as hard as I would in my 1 gallon.
Seth [00:09:11]:
Sometimes part of that's because the outer inch or two of that media does dry up more. And if your sensor is placed into that, if it's reading 3/4 of the length of the probe, a much drier media than what's going on, you know, an inch in which is much more representative, it's going to give us a lower value. So there's a few things to look out for and at the end of the day, we're never, as Jason said, trying to push these plants all the way close to per potential wilting point at all. We're trying to stress them in a sense that we're not depriving them of water to the point where we're seeing damage. We're depriving them of watering events over time. That's going to give us a certain response to that stimulus. So 10% risky established again, you know, you said, didn't say what media we're in. If it was in Rockwool, very possible to plan that's not going to be damaged.
Seth [00:10:02]:
But your irrigation strategy might, and so might your yield.
Jason [00:10:06]:
Yeah, that, you know, depends how long you're at that 10%. That's going to be a critical factor. I've seen plants go quite a bit lower than that in Rockwool. And as long as they're not there very long, they're not going to necessarily reach that wilting point or permanent wilting point especially. So, you know, if you're 10% just before your irrigations in the next day. Yeah, that might explain why you're not seeing any wilting. Uh, if you're running it, say 10% or lower for 10 hours, 12 hours, more than that, more than probably three hours, then, you know, the plants might start to indicate some, some levels of wilting.
Cian [00:10:54]:
Just because you're not. Oh, yeah, I was just gonna add, just because you're not seeing temporary wilting point on that plant doesn't mean that you aren't still flirting with a really fine line like Seth said there. So, you know, in an ideal world, do try to trend away from getting quite so close to your temporary wilting point because as you do start to get close to that line, you are flirting with, you know, potentially damaging some parts of that. And it may not necessarily be that you see, you know, the physical sign of damaging that plant in permanent wilting, but you may end up damaging your total potential for yield or some potential for quality. So, you know, definitely watch just how close you get to that line.
Kaisha [00:11:43]:
Walking that fine line. Awesome, you guys, thank you so much for that. Thank you, Mana Seeds, for your question. All right, you referenced in your answers sensor placement. And so it's a perfect segue into this question which we got posted on YouTube. If I'm using 15 gallon pots, where would be the best place to put the sensor?
Jason [00:12:02]:
Yeah, so 11 liter volume of influence is kind of, kind of the standard quoted number for the Teros 12s and the Teros ones so when we think about it's not just reading the information between the prongs, but in a spatial volume around the prong. And you know, that works really well in slabs 1 gallon, 2 gallon medias to be inserted from the outside. When I'm in a larger media like that, I'm going to see some pretty substantial BWC and EC gradients. And so insertion from the outside isn't necessarily going to give us the most representative number. Right. That's going to draw us a great diagram here. That's probably a good graphical representation of what I'm trying to explain. But basically I would try and place it within a quadrant in that 15 gallon pot.
Jason [00:12:51]:
So if you think about. All right, let's, let's be halfway between the center of the pot and the outside of the pot. You know, bury that sensor in typically, you know, a quarter of the way up and then a quarter of the way in. So if we set the diameter of that pot is, you know, 20 inches, then you know, we would want to be at 5 inches in and if it's 20 inches high, then we'd want to be at 5 inches up.
Seth [00:13:18]:
Yeah. Kind of our crayon drying here is if you were going to dig a hole and drop like a 1 gallon veg plant into say a 15 gallon pot. What we're trying to do is make sure you're isolating any variables. Like we talked just a few minutes ago about having, you know, more dry and more dry parts of the pot along the edge and possibly towards the bottom where sometimes it might be too dry. Depending how you painted your planted your pot, it might be extra wet. But we really want to see what that reading is in the zone where the roots are actually uptaking water and being active so that we know we're not over watering that huge pot. When you dry that pot down, we do want oxygen to come all the way down deep into the pot. And if you're not getting a dry back at the appropriate level, then we're not going to see the best.
Seth [00:14:00]:
Plant health can certainly be a little frustrating. One thing over time, especially in a pot that big. I know that both of us have played with plenty of people in the past, is planting them at varying heights and then also understanding that what we're looking for is primarily in a pot this big. Since our volume of influence, or actually sample volume is so small compared to the average actual pot volume, we're really looking for a delta in basically the wettest point in the substrate. So that's why, you know, when we get out to field agriculture or raised beds, a lot of times we look at soil moisture potentiometers because we're not talking about milliliters or known volumes at that point. We're talking about a delta and pressure which is more abstract but also very actionable. And what we're really looking for here is at least a 10% dryback delta, whether your pot is hitting 40% or 60%. And if you're in a 15 gallon pot, I would hope that most likely you have a good amount of perlite mixed in there, maybe a few other things to loosen it up and get you some good porosity so that you're able to achieve, you know, hopefully a at least a 10%, but even an 8 to 10% dry back inside of a 24 hour period.
Seth [00:15:10]:
And if you're not achieving that much of a dry back in that time period, um, it might be time to like look at a slightly smaller pot for your plant size. You know, you, you might be surprised at how big of a plant you can get out of a certain pot size. And oftentimes we'll see more vigorous growth out of that smaller pot just cuz we can steer it. And in the case of a 15 gallon pot, you know, starting out by going down to like a 10 might be a good idea. And a good way to measure that is after your plants are totally finished, go tear apart that root ball, flip that sucker over, rip it up, see how far down those roots are. Do you have good thick roots at the bottom of the pot and the edge of the pot or is it like, hey, I've got some roots but does it look quite like if I ran a plant in a 1 gallon coco pot in a plastic bag which should just have yeah, massive white roots all over the inside of the pot, right up to the edge of it.
Jason [00:16:11]:
I don't know if Sienn's on the slow connection today or if he's just being quiet.
Cian [00:16:19]:
A little bit of both. It's jumping back and forth every time I, I go to answer something.
Kaisha [00:16:25]:
Yeah, we got atmospheric weather in Northern California right now. It's getting a little weird. Go for it.
Cian [00:16:33]:
I was just going to say, you know, the dangers that I've run into and bigger pot sizes like that kind of what Seth is saying is, you know, really just looking for that delta rather than expecting the numbers that I'm going to see on the graph to match to what I'm used to seeing in smaller, you know, smaller cultivars or sorry, smaller pot sizes. There. And the first time I think I saw my arroyo sensors in one of the larger pots, I very nearly over watered them to death the first two days because I just did not in my mind grasp the concept at the time that I was really looking more for a delta percentage like what Seth is talking about, rather than expecting my field capacity numbers and my overnight dryback totals to match up to the maybe like a 2 gallon pot or something. And that revelation was, you know, one of those key things I took away from that run being like, oh, you're going to have a different proportion or a different range depending on what type of substrate you're using, and especially when you start getting into those larger volumes and depending on how much perlite you've packed in there, you're just going to see a very different number value on that graph than what you're used to. And so like Seth said, instead of steering specifically by that percentage, you're going to want to go by that overnight delta and realize that, you know, if you're only getting up to 40%, well, if you dragged back 10 percentage points, that's a 25% total dry back of the amount of water you've applied for that and been able to hold in the substrate. So, you know, it's just kind of adjusting your strategy to those numbers and those values.
Jason [00:18:25]:
Yeah. And you know, the reason that we, you know, we're talking about the appropriate sized root zone or the appropriate sized substrate so often is because that's what's going to help us manipulate some of those steering cues that we talk about so much on this show. You know, if we're in a 15 gallon pot and we are only irrigating once every three or four days, you know, that's just going to be a generative strategy, a very generative strategy. We try to do some types of vegetative manipulation to our irrigation strategy. At least there's a good chance we're just going to end up over watering, see some root stagnation, that type of stuff. And so I don't know if a producer, Chris, can let me share the screen here, but I can walk us through kind of how we would want to start evaluating what the appropriate size substrate is. So in this case, we've got some plants down hanging out right by CN and he's doing a great job growing them. And these are the water.
Jason [00:19:28]:
This is a water content line from one of his zones. Yeah, we can see his irrigation strategies. But what I wanted to point out was this inflection point right there. And right there. So basically, maybe I'll change my color here so that it's easier to see my, my drawings. All right, so this inflection point.
Seth [00:19:52]:
Nope, it's the left box.
Jason [00:19:56]:
This inflection point right there. Right here. You know, it's happening with, with lights off. So basically we're seeing that water content loss, the slope or the derivative of that water content line decreasing. When we no longer have photosynthesis, the transpiration is not having us lose water. So this section here and here, that slope is going to indicate our lights on evaporation and the transpiration of the plant. Right. So it's always good to see an inflection point here because the bigger that inflection point, the more transpiration is causing water loss.
Jason [00:20:37]:
Right. And so then this section here is. Oh yeah, I'm not real great without a mouse, guys. The section there and there are going to be just lights off evaporation. Right. So in order to hit those achieved drybacks, we can just make the one either the plant bigger, which isn't necessarily always a great thing. Typically you have a ideal sized plant based on the constraints of your facility and market. But we can manipulate the size of that substrate so that those evaporation plus transpiration or total water content loss from irrigation to, to the irrigation the next day has, has some amount of value that allows us to play with those different steering strategies.
Seth [00:21:23]:
Yeah, if we're not able to get a good enough dry back, that's a proportion of that total. Like for instance, in a 15 gallon pot, if I've got a 6 foot tall plant, that plant better be, you know, I don't know, eight feet around more and more to be able to take advantage of that much water availability. When you think about, you know, the quantity of water it takes in a 15 gallon pot to remove, let's say 10% PwC, it turns out being quite a lot. And one thing we find working with, you know, hundreds of different growers across, well, the world at this point. There are a lot of different ways you can successfully grow, but one thing that's very easy to switch up in your production cycle oftentimes is the pot size. And sometimes, you know, this is an extreme example. This is, we're saying a 15 gallon pot and oftentimes we're talking about a one gallon pot. But for a lot of growers to be able to maximize their plant size in their space and really push it, sometimes landing on just a one gallon pot, for instance, might not give them the most optimal results.
Seth [00:22:20]:
We not Be might not be able to bulk that particular strain up as not as much or rather more most likely ripen it at the end. And sometimes a small adjustment like going from a one to one and a half gallon or a one to a two gallon, usually we recommend going to a one and a half gallon first can give you a little bit more gas in the tank to drive your plant. Basically so that after we're going through this bulking period, we've built up all this biomass, we've got an aggressively drinking plant, we can go back to that generative irrigation strategy and actually ripen it up. And that's one of the tough things to dial in. Sometimes when you're working in a new to you facility, a bigger facility, you're trying to get a handle on things like humidity day and night or late in the run. Sometimes you're battling a lot of different things. And one thing that's usually a little bit easier to do is go slightly bigger on your pot size. You know, instead of a one gallon again a one and a half or two, just until you're getting that dialed because you'll have some forgiveness in case you have like really dry nights or some issue like that that's going to cause over transpiration.
Seth [00:23:25]:
That being said, man, looking around, unless you've got some really massive plants, that 1 to 2 gallon range is right where we see the most success. Being able to pull off an indoor crop in eight to nine weeks. Part of the equation here too, you know, it's certainly there are situations where we have growers that are limited in plant count but not necessarily their square footage. Okay, that's a special situation. Even then, rarely do we see a 15 gallon being necessary, typically going smaller. And part of the other part of this or part of the other reason that 11 1/2 2 gallon and become popular is we're also trying to reduce that veg time. You know, if I'm trying to get in a even a three gallon pot, a six foot tall plant, I might be flipping one strain at 36 inches tall to two exit on the stretch because I'm in this big pot that I'm only watering every other day and I'm going super generative now, the quality is going to be great. But if we blow that up to like a 5 gallon pot even I might be looking at a 6 plus week veg.
Seth [00:24:25]:
And that's just a lot of production time to have one plant in your facility burning through power with lights and dehu and heat and AC and all the Other expenses that go along with it. The faster we can turn and burn these crops in a given situation, the more money you stand to make as long as you can still produce that quality crop in the timeframe.
Jason [00:24:46]:
Yeah, you know, usually the only time that I'd end up in a 10, 15, 20 gallon pot would be if I'm organic outside and maybe even hand watering. Right. So you know that that volume is going to help us play with our organics. Our amendments might give me enough space to stick the shovel in there and mix it up and around. And you know, I don't want to be hand watering maybe twice a day, three times a day. If I, if I get to it every other day or something, then that's where your 15 gallon can can definitely work into that. But for indoor or mixed light greenhouse production, it's definitely pretty nice to be in a more hydroponic situation for the long run as far as manufacturing goes.
Seth [00:25:29]:
Yeah. And I guess one thing I'll bring up too is, you know, in other crops, like grapes specifically, they do crop steer in raised beds and in the ground primarily. And one way to look at that is that's where we go back to soil moisture potential and sometimes leaf barometer readings, trying to optimize that level of moisture in the soil that gives us the transpiration rate we're looking for, for the desired outcome from the plant. And in that big of a volume that might be, you know, long term, a good option is to look at it at 15 gallons. You're in a raised bed more than you're in a pot. So the dynamics of how that water moves through the soil are going to be on a conceptual level the same, but on a practical level, much more slow acting and well, for lack of a better term, not a. It doesn't make your, your growing situation steerable any way other than generative.
Cian [00:26:23]:
I was just going to add that these days you really just don't see kind of like what Jason is saying, very many commercially scaled facilities running with that style of a large substrate. And I mean, to what Seth was saying, you know, your timeline stretches out when you use such a big substrate. And in the competitive world that we're at these days, I mean, I hear people all around California tossing around the concept that if you're not getting your production price below $200 a pound, that within the next few years you're going to be missing it. And I mean, while that might sound like a harsh reality, the other side of that coin is that, well, if you do manage to get yourself down in that range of efficiency, you're going to capitalize on what you're putting into your equation. We've seen the prices on the actual product that we create go down pretty steadily over the last few years and I wouldn't expect to see them rise rapidly anytime soon, or at least not in any meaningful way. That is going to turn that table around and give you a lot more room to be able to be experimenting with those larger pot sizes.
Seth [00:27:46]:
It all depends too, on what you're, you know, what kind of business you're running, what's your overhead like, what's your position in the market. We certainly work with boutique and niche growers that utilize, you know, quote unquote legacy or traditional techniques to produce a certain quality of what we call a connoisseur grade flour. And that's the selling point. One thing I'll always remind people about that is brand development is a whole other animal that you also have to put a lot of work into. I know a huge amount of amazing cultivators out there that, you know, they, they, to be completely honest, don't have the time for brand development. And it's a really big project to figure out how to make that happen. If you're already busy, you know, you're already full time producing this great product, okay, you have to either find people to partner with, find your selling point, and that's, that's a whole other part of the equation that certainly, I think, I don't want to say is overlooked, but is very difficult and time consuming and requires. That's, that's just another investment and risk to take.
Seth [00:28:51]:
But ultimately that is part of protecting your price point and actually staying relevant in the market. Because just as CN said, it's getting more and more competitive, but also the market's diversifying, you know, as we see quality become more and more the forefront of customer choices, which right now it may not necessarily be the case broadly, but it's going to happen over time. You know, it just takes time for new consumers to go in and shop around and start to figure out what they like and don't like. And as we all know, most places, there's not a lot of places in the country where you can go get deli style weed and smell it or really get much reference until you open the package. You know, much like the alcohol industry or soda or cheese, whatever, if you can't sample it, it makes the buying process and customer education experience take a lot longer. And we're getting there. I think you guys could Agree. We're seeing more and more of these boutique shops pop up and part of it's just trying to do it at a scalable size.
Seth [00:29:53]:
I think that's where it becomes very difficult to say, hey, I'm going to go put up a thousand lights and grow at the same quality that I could do in 20 light rooms. And boy, that's a, that's a big gamble to take. And sometimes accepting that, accepting your place in the industry and accepting a sustainable rate of growth for your company is probably one of the most important things. You know, as we hit commodity price, this is, it's agriculture and we're in an agriculture without any kind of government subsidy, unlike many other crops that are currently grown all over the US So being pragmatic and growing your business at a rate that the market supports is ultimately probably one of the most important aspects to experimenting and exploring some of these alternative growing styles that can all yield great results. It's just at the end of the day, it has to make sense from a business perspective to keep your business going.
Kaisha [00:30:50]:
Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to share with you guys a comment our Gromy Gorski dropped in YouTube. They wrote, there's nothing quite like lifting up your pot when you're hand watering. I understand modern tech and using sensors, but if you get a good, if you get a hands on feel for what is a good amount, it is invaluable. And I agree. Look, I'm a consumer that just loves cannabis and this is a brand new industry. It's easy for us to forget about that in its infancy. It's going to evolve and change and there's room for everyone.
Kaisha [00:31:21]:
I love more of the craft energy and then I also have had some amazing indoor flower as well. So some of us are fans of all of it. Yeah. Sienna, did you want to add anything else?
Cian [00:31:32]:
Yeah, I was just gonna say I love picking up the pots and you know, one of the nice things is the modern tech doesn't prevent you from doing that. I still go in there all the time and pick up the pots just to make sure that I am correlating those values that I'm seeing on my graphs to that same methodology we all learned on, you know, how heavy is this? And does it feel like it needs water?
Seth [00:31:54]:
Yeah, we, we have several, let's say boutique growers that we work with that, you know, like experimenting, they're trying to grow strains that are, you know, no one else is growing. Some of them are weird, wacky things are going 75 and 85 days and you know, they're saying, hey, I get the best expression this way. My response is usually, okay, let's plug some sensors in and track that so you can repeat it once you can start repeating that run. Even if you're doing something that I wouldn't necessarily recommend as a baseline strategy, if you can repeat it, we can at least understand. Start to understand what about that growth strategy got you the results that you arrived on. And you know, for some growers, one of the fun journeys about that is, hey, we, we track it. And then they actually repeat that run again and go, oh, well, this is great. I actually did fine and I actually can plan a business on this.
Seth [00:32:46]:
I just needed to get the same result every time and, you know, sometimes upgrade something little like, hey, yeah, you have a small enough space that hand watering is not a huge issue. But just switching up to any sort of irrigation timer quickly made it so that you did it exactly the same every time. Even though you, you know, your chart wise couldn't tell the difference really between hand watering and automated watering unless you really zoomed in.
Jason [00:33:13]:
Yeah. And that, that projectability, it's, it's going to allow your cultivators and your sales or your retail partnerships to like get along and be happy with each other and then your business people will be happy because you have steady revenue. So it's, it's fairly essential to build that level of stable projectability.
Seth [00:33:35]:
Yeah. Especially going into, you know, the boutique market. I think there is certain element of competitiveness there. And the more that you pin the pride point of your product or your brand premium on premium, high quality flour, the more damaging it is when you pull off a run and suddenly you might find yourself in a position where you're like, hey, I gotta explain to people why we're not gonna put this brand on the shelves this month. We're gonna white label it out. That's not a good spot to end up in. And it's usually avoidable, even if it just means consistency and not necessarily reinventing the wheel and completely changing how you grow. Man, a lot of us, if you've been able to successfully grow and make money, especially before going into the legal market, there's a good chance you can absolutely do it in the legal market.
Seth [00:34:23]:
It's just a lot more business planning and the margin for error, as we all know, has gotten very, very tight. So small investments in repeatability are oftentimes way more valuable than huge investments in massive facility upgrades, for instance.
Jason [00:34:41]:
Yeah. You know, when we think about it, you go into a dispensary and unless you're looking for a very unique or specific strain, you know, there's probably going to be a dozen brands on there of something that you're going to choose. And so honestly, I attribute this. One of the reasons that THC percentage has become such an important number for sales, and that's just because if there's 12 of them out there and I don't know anything about any of them, then all right, let's just get the one that gets us the most stoned. My personal perspective not always related directly to THC percentage, but that's nailing on that aspect that Seth was talking about where, hey, you need to have a consistently high quality product. Because if I know of a brand that's good, you know, in a strain that I like, I'm going to buy that brand. If I have one bad experience, there's a good chance that I'll pick brand number 10 or number 11 or number 9 rather than that one I'm used to. And maybe it's better now I've switched brands.
Cian [00:35:42]:
That repeatability is huge. And I mean, that's the. One of the big takeaways from the array system is really that you're able to, like Seth said, get those changes that you've made tracked in a way that allows you to say, this gave me this result that I was looking for, and here's how we get it again. And, you know, years ago, people thought it was a hilarious idea to start putting, you know, clone bar lights lower down in your canopy. And, well, look where we are today. We have, you know, 10 companies competing currently for under canopy lights. And that market has just exploded in the past two years. So being able to prove that you have caught onto something that no one else has may well, you know, be a huge revolution to the industry.
Cian [00:36:30]:
And if you are finding some new way of doing things that we aren't recommending, track it. Let's figure it out. Because the better that this whole thing gets tracked, the more we're going to learn. And the more we're going to learn, the better we're going to grow.
Seth [00:36:43]:
Yeah. And you know, don't forget, like so much of plant science is experimental. We have, we have guiding principles that have been established. Those were all established through experimentation and observation. And at the end of the day, what that equates to, to me is that in these production facilities, sometimes we get to have happy accidents. We look back and go, oh, no. Oh wait, didn't plan on doing that. But we recorded it.
Seth [00:37:07]:
We know what happened?
Jason [00:37:08]:
That's the golden run. Yep, seen it many a times.
Seth [00:37:12]:
Oh, especially with some of these candies and weird strains that like, oh, hey, I forgot to switch my irrigation strategy for four days. This was the best run we've had yet. Like, well, let's, let's try it again and see if that made the difference.
Kaisha [00:37:23]:
Gotta leave room for those happy accidents. Awesome. You guys, you gave some great considerations. We really appreciate this question too. Thank you to the gromy that dropped that. All right, we're getting, getting some live questions in, so I want to, I want to get to as many of these as we can. Our grummy Nick March dropped this. They're actually looking for details on the difference between the atmos and our climate one.
Kaisha [00:37:42]:
Can you guys break it down?
Jason [00:37:46]:
Climate one is aspirated and has CO2 measurements.
Seth [00:37:51]:
That's. That's it, really? That's the primary difference the ATMOS has? Yeah. No provision for CO2.
Cian [00:38:00]:
And for those of you who don't know, aspiration is basically just a little fan inside the unit that's pulling air past that hygrometer sensor at a consistent rate. So that's going to be a big thing. If you look underneath that unit, you will see a little fan running inside the new Climate One sensors.
Seth [00:38:19]:
Yep. And as far as readings go, I mean, the only difference is you expect to see a faster change. Typically if you're to zoom into a point of granularity where you're really looking at the reading to reading level, possibly.
Jason [00:38:31]:
A little bit more resistance to solar gain to long wave radiation temperature increases on the surface of the body of a sensor shroud.
Kaisha [00:38:43]:
Awesome. Thank you guys for that. Nick March, good luck. Let us know if you have any more questions about the Climate One. All right, going to keep it moving. We got this question from Jacob. They wrote. Hey guys.
Kaisha [00:38:55]:
Switching from coco to rockwool. Now algae is growing crazy on the tops of the blocks. Any chance to get rid of them? I'm afraid that it will mold after a while.
Jason [00:39:05]:
You know, while algae is kind of unsightly and it can use a little bit of, little bit of water, you know, it's not the worst thing that can be happening in there. There's, you know, a few ways to prevent it. Probably the most common is just this silly block covers either, you know, plastic flaps or whatever that, that's going to keep the light off of there, which will keep the algae from growing.
Seth [00:39:30]:
Yeah, you know, in my experience, if you got the algae on there, I wouldn't worry about it. That Run. Can it mold? Well, if you go spray it with Xero Tall or something and try to kill it, the dead algae definitely will mold. So watch out for that. As it dries back and crunches up, you shouldn't see a whole lot of mold. In my personal experience, once I start seeing algae on top of my rock wool blocks, that means I need to do a better job cleaning my reservoir and lines and make sure that I'm not housing any fertigation water in a space that's Getting typically above 70 degrees, slightly low oxygen content in the water and has exposure to light. And one of the big things that, you know, we see across a lot of facilities is, well, having a translucent tank does make it easy to see from the outside. When you have sediment and filth buildup, you do actually need to go clean that and not only clean, but sanitize.
Seth [00:40:23]:
So like if I'm on top of my game, keeping my reservoir clean, that means basically I'm shutting off a valve. I've got an alternate valve to drain out my res and every time I empty that res, I'm going to go scrub it out or pressure wash it and then hit it with a little bit of that good old bleach or sanitators, Uritol, some sort of sanitizing agent to flush out, rinse out the walls, rinse out the lines in the tank because usually that's where it's happening and then you know, developing long term. You know, in my experience, if I've got a particularly bad water quality issue, it's going to be more often, but usually trying to do a low pressure sanitizing on most of my lines, even up to the tables, just not pushing any sanitizing fluid onto the plants and keeping those lines clean. And then finally, once you've kind of gone through all that, make sure you sanitize your actual drippers, you know, your drip steaks. Basically that algae has to live somewhere. And if you're letting it survive somewhere in your irrigation system and dumping out on it out onto your plants, it's going to grow. So my $0.02 facilities that I see where they do a good job keeping up on like irrigation line sanitation, usually we don't see a whole lot of algae because they're using hypochlorous, they're keeping everything clean and just not really giving it an opportunity to get a foothold. And once it's in the room, while we should be keeping it dry enough and if we're not introducing it, it won't grow.
Jason [00:41:47]:
Yeah, this Is this is one reason that we see more and more cone bottom reservoir tanks in there. Just because you can empty those kind of all the way out a little bit easier to clean. You know, there's no, no leftover residual that you might have to vacuum out or figure out how to get out of there before you really do a deep sanitization on it.
Seth [00:42:06]:
Yeah. And then, you know, I mean, a lot of places we're seeing now are putting more effort. You know, if you rewind the cannabis game 5, 10 years, everyone's building it out with the mindset that the flower room is where you make money. Your fruit room is also very important. If you don't have a place to hold and condition your water that keeps it clean and isn't blasting light on it all the time, you're probably going to have issues with this. And that's why, you know, initially we see a lot of facilities that want to get built out with just a direct injection skid, because then you're not holding this water around and having to deal with those sanitation issues on top of already pushing nutrient soup through your lines in hot environments all day. One thing that I have seen also help out with algae and pretty much all other contaminants is nano bubble systems like the Moliere machines. They can help get that ORP up.
Seth [00:42:57]:
That being said, you do also want to try to get those water temps down. So water equality is an input that man, it's hard because you're always out there looking for like, let's say real estate or a place to rent that's got the right price point, the right building, and then you throw water quality on top of that. And that might be where, depending where you're looking, that might be like asking for a unicorn. You know, it's just not gonna happen. But if that's the case, you know, we've worked with plenty of facilities that have like incoming fusarium other issues. And that's a technological and elbow grease problem more than anything at that point.
Jason [00:43:33]:
So you saved enough on real estate to invest in an expensive RO machine and some UV sanitization or something.
Seth [00:43:40]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's. That's. Well, that's the kind of balancing you got to do that water is a very important input. And I have seen quite a few grows at this point. That, man, they got a great deal on some industrial space that, you know, may happen to be next to some ag land or just have a pretty poor local water system. And it starts to break the bank pretty quickly because the Water coming out of the ground. I mean, I don't know.
Seth [00:44:02]:
If you can't drink it, your plants generally can't either. There's a good way I'll put it. Or you shouldn't in controlled agriculture, anyways.
Jason [00:44:11]:
Yeah, I mean, even if you enjoy drinking the water, you still should do a test on it and get a little more detailed than the tone.
Cian [00:44:22]:
I was just going to say pay a lot of attention to those preventative steps, like what Seth was saying. You know, seen a lot of places where you see that algae build up and then you talk to them a little bit and, oh, well, that one mixing chamber in this skid didn't get sanitized this last round. Well, what do you know?
Seth [00:44:41]:
Or has a clear housing and no sock on it.
Cian [00:44:43]:
Yep, exactly.
Seth [00:44:44]:
That's one of my favorite ones. Like, wow, that thing is green.
Jason [00:44:46]:
Yeah, I was gonna say green film built up. Yeah.
Cian [00:44:49]:
Or deep water cultured. A propagation for houseplant will be familiar with this. If you leave it in there too long, you're going to see algae build up on that thing. Same concept applies inside any of those mixing chambers, any of those translucent tubs, anything that's going to have light passing through it, especially when we're adding nutrients into the solution. And so, I mean, take really good care and really a lot of time to make sure that those things are cleaned properly and that it's not going to come back to bite you in the end.
Seth [00:45:19]:
Yeah. Another big one, too, is proper tank sizing. So if you've got a tank that you can empty out pretty much every day and refill number one, you have the opportunity to clean it a lot more often without dumping, you know, hundreds of gallons of fertigation solution. Also, if it's empty and not sitting there that wa. It's not full of water that's building up. It's not. It's not turning into a big thermal mass that can slowly build up heat and start to culture things. A dry tank doesn't grow algae the same way as a wet tank does, so definitely keep that in mind.
Seth [00:45:51]:
Just like. Like when we're talking about irrigation lines being plugged from basically, you know, having stagnant water in a hot environment for a long time. If you can find a way to empty those lines for mo. You know, if you're irrigating for two hours in the morning and that line going back to the fruit room can be empty the rest of the day, you're eliminating most of the time that that bacteria has to grow in there and the same thing exists for your fertigation tank. So on a small grow, like, for me, you know, I might be mixing up 15, 20 gallons and letting that ride for several days. What do I expect? Well, it's not optimum. My ph is going to drift. I'm gonna have to keep rep ing that.
Seth [00:46:28]:
It's probably going to get a little warm, and it's going to open up the opportunity to grow a little bit of algae or other bacteria in there. And if I don't clean my tank for two refills, I expect it to look a little sludgy. You know, I know it's not in a perfect environment. And my best solution, and not having algae in that situation, because I don't have a separate room, which certainly is not ideal, is to run an opaque tank so that I know for a fact there's no light getting in there. And when I see things growing in it now that it's opaque, yeah, maybe my water temp might get up into the upper 70s sometimes, and I'm not happy about that. But I see bacterial sludge, not algae, when I remove the light from the equation.
Kaisha [00:47:10]:
Dang, y'all broke it down. I love. I love being on this call with so many plant nerds. So good. Okay, Jacob, you heard it. Good luck. All right, we're going to keep it moving. We.
Kaisha [00:47:21]:
This hour is flying by. We've got some great questions here. This one came in from Gandalf screens on Instagram. They wrote, have you noticed that the rate of change in water activity changes in dry when you're pushing humidity down to finish a strain? Thoughts?
Jason [00:47:40]:
I'm not quite sure what we're asking here.
Seth [00:47:42]:
If we're pushing humidity down at the end of the grow cycle, that's not gonna have a huge impact on water activity once we get it in the dry room. Unless you push that plant to, like, actual wilting, the water content in the plant tissue itself is gonna be the same whether the media is fully hydrated or at a low water percentage or whether the humidity is high or low in the room. It would take more time than you can actually observe in a dry plant or in a living plant to do that. As far as removing moisture from the dry room. Yeah. The quicker you remove it, the quicker we're gonna drop that water activity to some degree.
Jason [00:48:18]:
Yeah. And there's the one caveat that is we try to dry much too quickly. We can build what's called a moisture barrier in there in which the outside of the bud, you know, gets dry and crispy. And then the hydraulic conductivity doesn't necessarily allow the moisture to transfer from the inside of the bud to the outside of the bud. So you can dry too quickly and then cause some issues.
Seth [00:48:42]:
Yeah, even down on the cellular level where we're drying out the water unevenly and it's causing small, almost like a reverse bubble, but tiny balloons inside of your cell walls that are not releasing the water because they're coated in lipids and it couldn't evenly release out. So glad you're looking at water activity, though. Mapping that on the way down is definitely a good way to make sure you're staying safe. And there's well established isotherm models to figure out where you need to be at a given time and temperature to avoid molding out your drying weed and also not over dry it. I mean, that's one thing I found when playing with water activity was you really can put a number on when. When your product is the most smokable and the best. I mean, it's. If you have a machine play around with it, it's pretty surprising what, you know, 0.45 to 0.5 to 0.55 is and where you end up liking it.
Jason [00:49:38]:
Yeah. You know, and kind of one of the things that isn't necessarily, as always, as obvious, but so water activity directly related to the amount of humidity that we're looking at. And if your product is staying in a cure room or you have prolonged durations of processing times, think about some climate control in there and keeping the humidity at the water activity that you want. So you want a 0.55 activity water activity level. Try to keep your processing rooms at 55% humidity.
Seth [00:50:13]:
Right. Which is where the challenge comes in. Because when we first move those plants and we get a huge load, you might set that room down at 45 for dry room for dry rooms to achieve like 62. So that's the balance. Right. It's starting to get not only that range consistent, but then also build that room out so it's not going to operate within a really wide dead band in that dry room. Just like, you know, the whole time in our flowering room, we want good averages, but we also want tight dead bands. And that's really hard.
Seth [00:50:43]:
It's. I would actually say it's easier with living plants than drying plants because those are continuing to pump out a predictable amount of humidity into the air that drying plants. But three days in about you really have to start looking at not pulling too much out quickly. And that's where actually investing in A little bit more dynamic controls than the floor dehumidifier I have in my closet that I dry in is probably worth it because I got to go in there every day and adjust that a little bit so I don't just like crisp everything up too quick if I don't have a lot of weight in there. And that can certainly happen at all scales. I've definitely seen, you know, especially if you've grown a business and been through early days of getting like 30 to 40 grams a square foot and now you're putting out 80 or 90. Sometimes a tendency is like, all right, this is, this is generation three of our dry room. We're building this thing out to handle as much biomass as absolutely possible.
Seth [00:51:38]:
And now just like, just like in the flower room, oversizing your de hues, it's just really hard to keep a narrow dead band. You're going up and down 15 or 20% after like three days in the dry room. And now you've got to deal with all kinds of other set point options.
Jason [00:51:53]:
Yeah, I guess kind of the basis of what we're talking about is your first step to start to really dial in the drying process is stepping up from a cheap hygrometer to at least a cheap data logging system, or any data logging system for that matter. And even the better systems like AROYA allow you to annotate and or add manual readings to your charts. So one of the first things that I like to do when helping people master their target water activity is get them to start attributing the graph with those water activity samples. You know, especially as we start to get closer towards when we expect the product to be done in dry, you know, if we're on like say 10 day, 14 day dry cycle, say day five, I'll take a water activity reading. Day seven, day eight, day nine, maybe towards those ends I'll take a few a day and then we can start to graph how quickly that it's dropping based on our environmental parameters and some of those strain H VAC configurations as well.
Cian [00:53:08]:
Love you mentioned that Jason. That's one of the things that I think have been really helpful for a lot of the growers out there that are using our Aqualab water activity meters to track their post production is just being able to kind of understand the link between those running relative humidities and temperatures in their dry room and being able to correlate that to a water activity into what they're going to expect to get as that crop keeps going through its post production in the dry room.
Seth [00:53:42]:
I got a fun little drawing here because I like graphs. But if that water content is going to be in black, I'll do humidity in red. But we'll look at this water content going down over time and then humidity. So that goes in, starts up high, and a lot of times we see it crash. And what the real challenge is, is when this humidity, we're bringing it down, it's a real challenge the first few days because there's so much water load in the air. And naturally, if you have a fairly unregulated room, it's going to look something like this. We want to have the control to maintain a dead band right here the entire time. And that's very challenging, but also very important because if this humidity continues to drop, there is a finite point in which we see massive gassing off of terps, oftentimes due to ruptured trichomes.
Seth [00:54:54]:
But there's no recovery past that point. So once you've over dried your product, not only have you missed a quality mark, you're losing weight and just overall dropping your price. I have seen very, I really haven't seen a successful way to bring product that was not dried properly into a good curing process to like, try to recover some of that nose the same way where. In the same way that, you know, it's heartbreaking to talk to cultivators who don't get to ensure that their product gets dried and cured properly because time is a factor in developing this nose in quality. I know we've, many of us have seen a lot of good product kind of really have a price reduction because it's not handled properly post production. And ultimately the sad part about that is those inefficiencies, not only do they, you know, contribute to just poor product quality and nose, but ultimately price. You know, if you're making the decision to cut corners in your drying and curing process, man, you could, you could be taking a product that you could be getting, let's say, $1,300 a pound for and turning that into $600 a pound just by cutting a few corners. And that's, that's one of the strange caveats to this business, right? Like there's enough of a price premium that cultivators can get on different strains, whether it's purple, whether it hits a certain terp or THC mark, that it's, it's really, really disappointing to see all that hard work fall through on just this little part of the process.
Seth [00:56:32]:
And that's kind of, you know, one of the things I think we, we focus on here is like we're talking about quantities of a commodity where when we pick up small gains, it's actually quite impactful. You know, if you can get 5 or 10% more on every pack you sell because you consistently have a louder nose on it compared to the competitor next to you on the shelf, just because your curing process is on point, way better than they are. Right Back to what Jason said. Well, you know, they might lose a customer and you might gain a customer even if you're just both growing lemon cherry gelato, for instance. And the difference, sadly might be that like, hey, the one that doesn't smell as good might on paper actually be better. It just didn't get handled and delivered well. So nuanced.
Jason [00:57:17]:
Yeah. And you know, you, you really want to avoid trying to rehydrate it once. Once you've tried it, you, you really don't want to go back. Well, you know, first reason being you've lost some of the volatile compounds that you cannot recover. Um, the other, if we want to get a little bit nerdy, is that our hydration and dehydration isotherms are actually different curves. So when we're measuring. I don't know if Chris wants to share up the screen here. One of my favorite resources, Research Gate, looked like frontiers in another one of my favorite resources for reading scientific cultivation articles.
Jason [00:57:55]:
Yeah, so obviously in this case we're talking about desorption for drying and we can see, hey, that the relationship between water saturation or water content and water activity down here, basically they're different curves. So we're not going to expect to be able to get the same amount of weight onto it and still have a safe product for the shelf as we will if we just get the right amount on the way down.
Seth [00:58:22]:
Yeah. There's nothing in the physiology of the plant that really allows it to rehydrate in the same way that your coco brick does, for instance, after it's been dried. So even though you are, you know, number one, we did lose some of those volatile compounds. And also, even when you are trying to add water back to that, there's only so much you can get in comparison to going the other way, I guess is the best way to put it. Like you're never going to get all that weight back and still have. Well, we talk about things like black ash, for instance, if you encapsulate some of the water inside of those cells and you're not going to get an even burn down the road well, that's kind of really against what we're trying to do. And unfortunately, sometimes that comes from missing the mark by just a day or two on drying or not having climate control, let's say, later in your drying, so that, hey, it just got way too dry in the dry room and you actually couldn't even get it out of there fast enough to save it. That if you're not tracking that, you're not logging it.
Seth [00:59:19]:
You wouldn't. Wouldn't really. I mean, if I don't keep track of that, I'm blind to it. If I just hang it in the room and go back and give it a little snap every few days and see where it's at, I'm gonna miss the mark because I can't be in there, you know, 10 times a day, every single day of my life, snapping buds off the stems.
Kaisha [00:59:39]:
Well, all right, you guys, that was. That's our hour. Amazing. Thank you all so much for all the questions that you dropped. If anybody asked some questions, we didn't get to it. Don't worry, we got a little bank. We'll come back to it. Or you can resubmit it for another time.
Kaisha [00:59:51]:
But I want to thank you, Seth, Jason and Sian and producer Chris for another great session. Thank you all for joining us for this week's Aurora office hours. Just a reminder, we are bringing precision substrate irrigation management to MJ bizcon. That is what that little QR code on screen is all about. So scan it. Sign up to join us. Meet us there, everybody you see on screen. We're all going to be in Vegas, so meet us in Vegas.
Kaisha [01:00:12]:
All right, to learn more about AROYA, book a demo at Arroya 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, drop them anytime in the Arroya app. Email us at salesaroya IO. Send us a DM. We are on Instagram, Facebook, and 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.
Kaisha [01:00:39]:
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. Thanks, y'all. We'll see you at episode 124 and also we'll see you in Vegas. Thanks, Grace.