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Seth Baumgartner and Jason Van Leuven open the mics for your crop steering and cultivation questions.
Kaisha [00:00:00]:
You. 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 95. We missed y'all been dark a couple weeks. If you're on the hangout checking us out live on YouTube or Instagram, drop your question in the chat, and if it gets picked, we will cover it during the show. Seth, Jason, welcome back to the studio, guys.
Jason [00:00:23]:
Thanks.
Kaisha [00:00:24]:
Yeah, we were ready to go. All right, so before we get into Q-A-I understand we have a new feature we're dropping.
Jason [00:00:32]:
Yeah, go for it. Absolutely. So long waited feature. Super excited to announce this. And that is the option to set specific day and nighttime alerts and target ranges for aroya. So I'm just going to jump right in here. We'll share my screen and show you how it works, what it looks like. Can't share your screen.
Jason [00:00:59]:
Sorry, an errors occurred. Screen sharing.
Seth [00:01:01]:
Great.
Jason [00:01:01]:
Let's try it again here. I'll just keep telling you about basically the advantages of it are going to be, historically, a lot of times we'll set our. There it goes. Perfect. All right, so we can see here typical aroya graph. I've got temperature selected, and we've got our show range option on. And we can see these shaded areas, which is the target range that we've set for the temperature in this harvest group. And so we can see specifically here is our day frame.
Jason [00:01:33]:
Obviously, a little bit of shading there. Here's our night frame. We've got our temperatures set a little bit high. For the daytime, we can see our ranges are mostly within that target range space that we're looking at here. So anytime that we're in that shaded area, we're going to be hitting that daytime target range. And then for the nighttime, we've got a specific range. So, historically, when we've been setting up this type of target, we would say this high point would be about 83, and the low point would be, say, 70. And obviously, if we're in a different photo period than our set points are, we don't really have a good description of where we're supposed to be for that photo period.
Jason [00:02:13]:
In this case, obviously, we talk about when we're crop staring, we're going to be using day night temperature differentials. So this is a great application of looking at. All right, during this phase, we have five degree or eight degree or ten degree nighttime daytime differential. And we can specifically see that here our daytime target temperature is high and nighttime target temperature is low. So we can go ahead and I'll give you an idea of what it looks like to set that up from the harvest group. As always, I encourage people do use harvest groups because then you can have different target set points for the different phases of growth. Right now, we're in this early flower generative we're doing for two weeks. And we can see here, I've got five target alerts set or targets and alerts set.
Jason [00:02:59]:
And we can see one of the most important things is making sure you do have a light schedule set up here in Aroya, because that's what's going to define the ranges of having a specific target for lights off and lights on. This will also work for your 18, six veg period. So in here, we can see cool. I've got my temperature ranges set here. And here we've got this little moon icon indicating the lights off period. So we can see, here's our target range for lights on. Here's our target range for lights off. And as always, we're welcome to set up alerts as well.
Jason [00:03:38]:
Those alerts can be quite a bit tighter than they had been, specifically because now we've got that tight range that is accounting for nighttime, daytime differentials that you might be deploying.
Seth [00:03:51]:
Yeah, it makes it easier to set an alert that you'll actually get if you're not achieving that overnight differential. Historically, we're set between, let's say, 80 and 65. For instance. I'd want an alert if that room goes over 70 at night. And before, we didn't have that capability. Now it's a lot more granular, easy to use, and it's also really easy to now communicate those target ranges to other people, since you can project them in day and night time ranges separately.
Jason [00:04:20]:
Absolutely. And I use temperature as an example here just because it's kind of one of the most obvious that we're going to be manipulating with our photo period. You can be doing this for VPD relative humidity. I believe you might also be able to do it for your soil conditions. So let's look at water content. Yeah, absolutely. So get wild with it, give it a shot, and give us some feedback on how much you like it and what we could do to make it better.
Kaisha [00:04:50]:
Very cool. Thank you, guys. Yeah. This feature update is a direct result of grower feedback, right?
Seth [00:04:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've always known growers are operating off of overnight differentials, especially when it comes to temperature. So we've been kicking around this, developing it for a while and pretty stoked to actually have it out. It's another grower focused feature that I think is quite convenient.
Kaisha [00:05:17]:
That's right. All about those continuous improvements. All right, thank you, guys. Day night, target ranges, aroya users, get up in there and let us know how it goes. Okay, ready to get to our first question? All right, this one, let's just get into it. Somebody wants to know what are the primary differences between Aroya go and the full platform version?
Jason [00:05:39]:
Yeah, so let's just kind of start off with talking about hardware wise. Hardware is going to be very similar, actually identical. So you're going to be getting the array gateway, which is supporting that wireless mesh network and piping your data to the cloud. You're going to be getting the terrace one, a dual nose sensor standard in the box, and you can have up to ten terrace one sensors for substrate sensors in the Orego platform, and then the climate one as well. So same as the core version limitation there at five climate stations that you can use in one go setup. So hardware wise, identical. Just a little bit of limitations on there as far as how much you can set up. And that's just encouraging.
Jason [00:06:23]:
Production facilities, people, after they've gotten a trial run with their go, to be getting the full version, taking advantage of all of the features that are in the Aroya core system. Software side, just a few changes there as well, not necessarily have the feature of harvest groups task management. The IPM module is not in the Aroya Go, and then Aroya Go is only going to give you 60 days of data to be accessible from that system. So that's kind of the main differences there in software side. I do want to mention that if you get Neuroi go, you're having great success with it, which you probably will. You're welcome to upgrade to the core system. So give us a shout out, get that subscription going, and we'll get the full feature set turned on.
Seth [00:07:15]:
Yeah, and with the core setup, you get a host of features like Harvest groups, IPM facility analytics, task management, things that are a little more applicable and useful for people doing at scale cultivation. The other part of the course subscription is you do get to talk to our agronomic team and get the full onboarding suite, whereas with go, self set up, self education, and not the same ergonomic support that you get with Aroya core. But that being said, it's all the same hardware. So it's like, you know, if you have been curious about the sensing technology, it's a great way to get into it, see if you like it, and then upgrade from there. And part of why we decided to strip down certain features is we did intend this to be roughly 1500 under type of system, understanding that usually when we're going above that, that's when some of these other features start to become very important for bigger commercial cultivators.
Jason [00:08:12]:
Yeah, it's kind of just an easy way to get your hands on. Aroya some of our clients have just had a little bit of skepticism, dropping the big change to get fully outfitted. They're like, hey, let's do one room. I've had many, many clients over the year that they'll get one room up and rolling and then two months later they'll add on three rooms or five rooms or go full facility after they've experienced the success of using crop steering and getting an idea of what is in our substrate as far as water contents and ecs go. So it's just a great way to get started. Obviously the price point is set. You can just go online, get it purchased, get shipped to your door, and you can get rocking and rolling with the system.
Seth [00:08:55]:
Yeah, it just makes it also a lot more accessible for growers that don't necessarily want to go through traditional commercial sales channels or like you said, just dipping your toes in. Either way, there's a web store you can just get online, place your order, use a credit card, whatever variety you choose, and go from there. We're recognizing that we're not in every growth store right now, so this is a way to connect more growers to being able to use aroya.
Jason [00:09:22]:
Yeah, and it's a pretty cool thing. Obviously, this setup, since it is prepackaged, kind of just set features, set hardware, you will be able to get it at some local growth stores here soon.
Seth [00:09:37]:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that, Jason. It's coming.
Kaisha [00:09:43]:
That's it. Aroya go is coming. Awesome. Thank you guys for that overview. If y'all have any questions about either the system or go or the full platform, hit us up anytime if you want to get a demo. Aroya IO, go ahead and sign up and we'll walk you through everything. So awesome. Thank you guys.
Kaisha [00:09:59]:
Okay, we're going to get into, we got a lot of questions. I know we're going to get some live questions going. I'm going to do my best to answer as many as possible. But on our last episode we talked about ph at length and this is a question received in response. Seth mentions a bit of ph drop is good and means your plants are feeding. But the Athena Handbook says lower ph runoff is an indication of problems in the root zone due to typically medium to wet and or rot. Which one is it?
Seth [00:10:28]:
I think we got to focus on what ph ranges we're talking about here. So a healthy drop is looking at feeding at a 5.9 to a 6.0 and getting your runoff at anywhere from a five five to a five seven. So that's what we want to see. A couple of point shift down.
Jason [00:10:44]:
Now.
Seth [00:10:44]:
Coco in coco.
Jason [00:10:45]:
Yeah.
Seth [00:10:46]:
Specifically, and even in Rockwool, we should see a slight shift down. If we have successful feeding. A slight shift up isn't the hugest worry, but when we start to see those numbers come in excessively lower high, that's when we're looking at problems. So if your runoff is coming in below like a 5.25.0, then we know we've got a serious problem that's either created by an imbalance assault in the media. In other cases where we've got root rot, we're probably pushing that down through various means and experiencing some ph drift due to bacterial action in the media.
Kaisha [00:11:21]:
Great, you guys, thank you.
Jason [00:11:27]:
Fortunate enough, obviously, if root rot is one of the issues, it's pretty easy to identify. And some of the corrections are going to be a lot more simple than identifying nutrient imbalances and working on dealing with that ph drift for other reasons. So obviously, if you are experiencing root rot, take a look at your tarot sensors. What are they telling you as far as your water contents? Are they always high? Do you see the specific dynamics that you're shooting for? With drybacks, we always want to be hitting usually ten plus percent at the very lowest for our drybacks. And what that does is allows us to get from fresh nutrients, fresh oxygen in there, and do irrigation events that encourage a plant growth response. If fruit rot is the issue, you might be in good luck.
Seth [00:12:18]:
Yeah, and something else to kind of stress here is like, for instance, I know how my water comes out where I grow, right. It's pretty consistent year round. I know how to mix it. I'm at a point now where I have everything measured out. Sometimes I'll validate my fertigation. But generally speaking, when I mix a batch, I know pretty well exactly where the ph is going to be. Unless something's radically changed. Now what that means is as long as I stick to my sops and I follow everything to a t, including pushing enough runoff every day, usually I'm not going to see much ph drift, to the point that a lot of us, if you've spent a few rounds really watching that ph super tight, you might actually build quite a bit of confidence in saying, hey, I know about how much runoff I'm going to push off, 5% to 10% a day.
Seth [00:13:04]:
And really, I don't have to worry much about a huge ph fluctuation unless something radically changes in my either inputs environment, or I have a major strain shift and I'm growing a new strain that seems to either feed more aggressively or less aggressively than a strain I used to grow. So, as a baseline, when we're looking at some of these, like Athena's recommendations, for instance, if I'm writing from a fertilizer's company's perspective, I've got to give you the most broad and easily identified. I want to give you as many different ways to identify potential problems as possible and not assume that you have bought a bunch of other equipment from other people. That's not my company. Right. So when we're looking at some of the recommendations and information out there, especially with hydroponic grow guides, we're just now hitting a point, not only in the cannabis industry, but in greater horticulture at large, where people have more affordable access to a lot of these sensors to actually be able to get this data. If we rewind it ten, even 15 years, the price of just a ph and EC pen was quite a bit higher than it is now. So if I'm looking at general recommendations, that's kind of the way I'm going to approach it and say, hey, we're going to look at plant health as an indicator, we're going to look at the roots, because we might not quite have access to as much data to put definitions.
Seth [00:14:27]:
So we've still got to use a lot of observational science, for lack of a better term. And unfortunately, in that situation, by the time you see plant health suffering from, let's say, root rot, you're not necessarily going to be able to optimize that run. You might be able to get that plant to harvest, but there is no fixing it or healing it and getting back onto your regular potency and yield track.
Jason [00:14:50]:
Yeah, and just kind of a reminder, as far as keeping an eye on ph, most people and everybody should always be having continuous ph monitoring in their batch tank or in their inline fertigation systems when we are looking at ph in the actual grow room. I love having a catch cup with just two drippers in it, if that's what you got, two drippers for each plant. That catch cup is going to tell you what the ph coming out at the plants is going to be like every once in a while you see a little bit of drift in the lines, if you see that drift increasing, it's probably time to diagnose maybe some biofilm build up in the lines or temperature changes as that fertigation is traveling through the facility to get to the room and then obviously taking a look at the ph of the runoff as well. So getting a full picture of there, because if we're just looking at runoff and batch tank, it might not be the plant that's affecting that ph downstream.
Seth [00:15:46]:
Yeah. Your validation of every point in your inputs is really important. So if we've got a ph drop or rise between either our batch tank or our injection system and what's actually coming out at the plants, we really want to monitor that. So if I know that I've got to mix a little higher or a little lower to achieve my desired result at the dripper. At the dripper is what actually matters. So we always want to make sure we're validating at that point. And then, yeah, just keeping eyes on it. And above everything else, like we always say, crop registration, take notes.
Seth [00:16:16]:
There's such a variety out there in terms of strains and what they'll tolerate. I've been in a room and looking at runoff samples and you go like, wow, this one looks really bad, but that plant looks fine. I've got a completely unrelated strain on the bench next to it, and that one looks terrible at, let's say, a 5.2 ph. So that's another part of crop steering in general, is really being dedicated to your crop registration and understanding that depending on who you got information from about that strain, how they grow, a lot of it may not be applicable to what you're doing and maybe we'll get there someday. But there's always a lot of little caveats. Know, if we say, like, oh, I grew this under hps and you grew it under led. Okay, what leds, what spectrum? There's all these different factors that affect plant expression. And if you're not keeping track, know, even these tiny, tiny little experiments, let's say, like, hey, we changed the strain and now here's how it's reacting.
Seth [00:17:16]:
It's really hard to get a gauge on what is actually affecting that plant health.
Jason [00:17:21]:
Yeah. Another thing to kind of keep in mind is when you're taking the ph of that runoff as well. Ideally, we're getting that as early in the runoff as possible because that's going to give us an idea of, hey, what's coming out of the substrate. If we're taking that ph measurement towards the end, it's going to be closer to our ferrigation ph regardless of what the substrate looks at.
Seth [00:17:44]:
And that's another thing to talk about too, when we're looking at your p one irrigations. If you are able to collect too much runoff very quickly, we do want to see that nutrient solution saturate the substrate. So basically, if I've got four p one irrigations, but I've achieved runoff at every single one, I've effectively pushed some of that nutrient solution straight through the media. That's part of why we space out our irrigations as well. So we actually get time for that nutrient solution to homogenize in the media and have a chance to pull out what we want it to pull out and replace what we want it to replace. And so that's another thing that, especially with Rockwell growers, can be very frustrating. Towards the end of the run, we've dried this Rockwell down, it's fairly dry, and now we're seeing sometimes low ph situations, high spiking ecs, and sometimes it can be frustrating because the initial instinct is to put a lot of water on and flush it out. Right.
Seth [00:18:37]:
Well, at that point, since the integrity of that media to evenly hold water is not there, a lot of times we've created some channels right below our stakes. So moving stakes help, but you got to remember that we've got to let that water wick around across that whole slab before it can actually have the change we want it to have. So fight your instincts to dump water on it to get a sample. And remember that in drain to waste, there is that 5% to 10% irrigation volume we're going to waste every day. And if we're not doing that, we're probably not keeping everything in check in an optimal way.
Jason [00:19:12]:
Yeah, and I'm glad that you mentioned that. Ideally we're not really going to see any runoff until our last p one irrigation event because, well, there's really no reason to. Right. We want to get that slab or that coco bag fully saturated before we are pushing any out. So ideally, if we are seeing some runoff in our p one events, we need to shorten the duration, increase the number of those events to get up to field capacity. Then once we're at field capacity, we can expect that runoff.
Seth [00:19:44]:
Yeah, pay attention. That's the biggest thing. Oh, sorry, k, I was going to say it sounds boring, but honestly, when you make irrigation changes, sometimes it's good to just go be in the room and watch what's happening, especially if you're pushing like, let's say you're running coco and you're pushing some really deep drybacks into the 17% to 20% range, and you can certainly get away with that in some coco. However, you probably want to go in and look and see if you've got some channeling or just water beating off the top of your coco issues on your first one or two p two s. It's not quite as bad as watching paint dry, but sometimes there's no replacement for being in the room and getting your eyes on the plants to have a visual to go with what you're seeing on the graph.
Kaisha [00:20:28]:
I mean, maybe I'm a weirdo, but I can sit and watch cannabis plants grow all mean it won't pay my bills, but I would love to do that. Amazing advice, you guys. Thank you so much for. And like, one of the really important points, I think, for what you're talking about, it's the importance of crop registration and figuring out your own benchmarks. We got a comment from Danny on YouTube also related to this topic he wrote, confusing because it seems like when you take away negative, leaving more positive ions, ph should rise. Also, always read on forums, et cetera, that ph should rise a little bit when feeding properly, or is that only for recirculating systems?
Seth [00:21:05]:
So let's just talk about ph for a second. PH is the negative log of the positive ion concentration. So as the ion concentration goes up and we plug into the negative log formula, it's spitting out a lower and lower number. That's why that is the way it is. We could probably go deeper if we want to, but that's the short and skinny of it. So just a little bit of reversal of where you're at with that definition. And then when we're looking at ph rising. Okay, why would it do that? Well, we've got a greater concentration of negative ions building up.
Seth [00:21:39]:
We want the plant to take those out, and that's just kind of where we're at with it. If we see that ph rising, usually it's due to us loading it up with something that the plant's not taking up and potentially gassing off some of that hydrogen in the solution to braise that ph.
Jason [00:21:55]:
So I kind of read up on a pretty interesting reason on why it's the negative log. And really, basically, scientists just got tired of writing negative in front of it.
Seth [00:22:06]:
Yeah.
Jason [00:22:06]:
So all the pH numbers would be negative, and that's why they inverted that scale. So if we think of it naturally as a negative scale, it makes a little bit more sense as far as the relationship of hydrogen ions, it's not.
Seth [00:22:19]:
Intuitive, but that's because the other way people did it previously was less intuitive.
Kaisha [00:22:29]:
Awesome, you guys. Thank you so much for that. All right, we're going to keep it moving. We got a couple of questions in on Instagram, and they're related to just in general, crop steering advice. So let me start with this first one. I was gifted some Mac one clones, enough for a couple of trays. Since this particular strain is short in stature, what crop steering program can I use? Any advice?
Jason [00:22:49]:
I would probably start with like five days or a week of generative steering when you go into flower. As long as you're transplanted and you've seen the rooting end practices that you expect, see how that goes. Like I said, run five to seven days of generative and then run vegetative bulking, rest the cycle. See how things turn out sometimes. Mac one, you don't even need any generative.
Seth [00:23:15]:
Yeah, I was going to say I've seen some various strategies from a lot of people that veg their Mac one, one to two weeks longer than everything else they grow trying to get that height up going in. Depending on how big your plants are when you flip them, just grow it a few times and learn to expect how much it's going to stretch. Start to base your plant size off that and then, yeah, usually five to ten days max on straight generative steering and a lot of times hitting it with a little bit of a hybrid where we're generative steering in the beginning, but actually adding one or two p two s in the afternoon to open that up a little bit, especially if we're in a situation where, number one, we want to get that plant to grow up a little bit so we don't have to lower the lights compared to the last strain we had in there. But you're a good chance you're going to have to end up doing that anyways with the Mac one. Then number two, this is one of those strains where we kind of want to stretch out that internotal spacing a little bit to help avoid mold problems late in flower, especially if we're already riding on the line of being a little too humid in the last two weeks, that Mac one can form some pretty condensed large colas, and those can be really difficult to keep a handle on avoiding mold. So those are a few considerations. I know I've grown a few strands where that was the case. I was like, hey, we really got to try to get this thing to stretch out because without that interdal space, we don't have airflow, and then it just rots at the end.
Jason [00:24:35]:
Yeah. And one thing that's really important to consider is that we talk about vegetative or generative, like they're just two discreetly different options. Right. We can always change the intensity of that as well. So most of the time we're talking about, all right, well, what's the duration of a specific strategy? And we're just going on one side or the other of the balance, one of those things where you grow it. And if you are seeing that you have plenty of node spacing and you're keeping a good size Mac one, you might just try to reduce the intensity of that vegetative bulking just slightly. Right. So maybe we just decrease the number of p two s or we manipulate our environment slightly less vegetatively, so it's not always one or the other.
Jason [00:25:23]:
A lot of times we can get strains that are just happy with a balance. We're leaning just slightly one way or the other the entire cycle.
Seth [00:25:30]:
That's why I'd say something like Mac one is actually kind of frustrating to learn about crop steering on, because you're going to be dealing with a little shorter, a little taller, a little more, a little less yield. But it's a pretty robust, I don't want to say super easy, but pretty easy to grow plant that you typically have to abuse. Pretty hard to see really negative results coming out of that one.
Jason [00:25:53]:
Definitely the kind of plant that two or three tiered grow rooms can take advantage of.
Seth [00:25:58]:
Yes.
Kaisha [00:26:02]:
All right, good luck with that Mac one. I think I've tried that one. I recall it was good. Anyway, thank you for your question. Okay, moving on. We got this question. How do you figure out shot size versus frequency of total milliliters given for the day?
Jason [00:26:19]:
So it adds up. Obviously, for shot size in milliliters, it's just going to be shot. Duration, times, flow rate. Always good to validate this with a catch cup on those drippers like I was talking about earlier, run your irrigation system for three minutes and figure out how much is in there. So you can either do the math or you can just test it. Obviously, like I was talking, catch cup is the best way. Doing the math is nice because then if you're making any adjustments to what you know is accurate, then rather than assuming the flow rates that are on our spec sheets are exactly accurate, we know for that facility. All right, any pressure changes or any irrigation setup that would cause that to not meet the exact math that we're looking at as far as total milliliters for the day.
Jason [00:27:13]:
That's just going to be adding up each individual shot size and milliliters, and that's going to be your total amount of irrigation volume.
Seth [00:27:21]:
Yeah, if we had a 3% shot each time, eight shots, that's 24%. And then just convert that to your milliliters versus 1%, and you've got your total volume. However, I love to do both anytime I'm thinking about it, because I've run into too many situations where our flow rate at the table is not exactly what we would calculate based on the emitters. And in each of those situations, we could spend a lot of time banging our heads against why that's the issue and then probably figure out that we're not going to spend the money this afternoon to fix it. So it's better to just constantly record that differential and see what I'm working with and then keep eyes on whether it's getting worse over time, indicating plugging or, hey, I just set this place up. We've been running the irrigation for three to five months now. My flow rates are staying pretty consistent. We're looking good because sometimes, like Jason said, just pressure over distance, we'll see pressure drops that can affect flow rates.
Seth [00:28:17]:
Sometimes when you cycle through a room, depending on how your irrigation system is set up, we've got a minimum runtime to pressurize the lines. So sometimes the first table, or initially just on any irrigation event, if we've got drain off valves, it takes, let's say 5 seconds, maybe sometimes more, sometimes less to pressurize that line. And sometimes we've got kind of a minimum runtime where it's like, hey, if we go anything under a 32nd shot, our irrigation volumes are all over the place because the line isn't holding enough pressure.
Jason [00:28:46]:
Yeah, and I do want to answer this question kind of on a higher level as well. So obviously, that's the specific of determining shot size. Maybe a little bit of this question was asking, how do we determine what they should be? Right. And a lot of that's going to go down to one reading what your irrigation graphs go. So if we have a 20% dryback, then usually the next day we're going to want to irrigate 25% to 30% to replenish and get a slight amount of runoff. Right. And next up, we're also going to think about, okay, well, what's the longest irrigation duration that we want to be hitting? Right? And so usually for generative, we never want to be larger than a 5% shot of the substrate size. And then for vegetative.
Jason [00:29:31]:
So for p ones, we'll be anywhere between three and 5% as a baseline. And for p two s, usually we'll be between one and 3%. So calculate those out and then obviously divide up the total volume needed by those percentages. So if we need 30%, we might be at say five p ones at 5% each. And then we might do repeated p two s throughout the day to get that total volume required.
Seth [00:30:04]:
Yeah, and you spoke a little bit, Jason, earlier about intensity in running vegetative and even generative. Each shot that we put on is sending a signal to the plant. And even when we're looking at generative growth, like back to the Mac one, for instance, we're looking at the difference between some strains. We can also see even in generative strains that perform better or worse, grow faster or slower based on how many shots we're even administering in that p one. So something like that Mac one. Hey, a strategy might be like, yeah, we want to run a little generative. We don't want to stretch it out too much because we want to promote more bud or more node site development on the plant. So we're going to shorten up that watering window, but we do want to get it to grow up a little more.
Seth [00:30:44]:
We might be looking at putting on a lot more shots in more of a vegetative shot size range, even though we're in generative steering, whereas some other plants, we might actually bump that up. Maybe we'll go a little higher than five, even maybe up to 8%, depending on what media we're in that can take it and try to see if we need to stimulate this particular strain less or more during generative growth and start to find that balance.
Jason [00:31:07]:
Yeah. And this is really why quite a few years ago, I started talking about irrigation window as one of the biggest influences as far as what type of plant response that we're seeing. So anytime that we're irrigating, so for say an hour from first irrigation to last irrigation, that's that irrigation window, not irrigation duration. That's the window being the first irrigation to last irrigation for generative, that might be 1 hour. If we're doing it 3 hours. Obviously that's a little bit less generative, but still probably on the generative side of the spectrum. Now, if we're irrigating, say, for an irrigation window of 6 hours or 8 hours, most likely going to be quite a bit farther on the vegetative side.
Seth [00:31:50]:
Yeah, a lot of we're talking about here is that once we're stimulating the plant during that irrigation window, we're pushing transpiration, pushing upward growth in the plant. The longer window we have that we don't have irrigation. So our dryback window, that's what's really affecting this plant morphology. And helping us get that generative steer that we're looking for also is part of the reason why we see different dryback ranges for these two types of steering. If we cut water 6 hours earlier in generative versus vegetative, we're starting that dryback at a much earlier point in the day. Therefore, it's going to run longer and go deeper.
Kaisha [00:32:29]:
Thank you guys so much for that. Our grow me Gerardo just joined the chat. He had a question on the topic of irrigation and drybacks. He wants to know how much dryback would I require before I start my p two s? What does he need to keep in mind?
Seth [00:32:46]:
This is a little bit of a variable question. So one thing I like to do is look at the distribution of water contents across the room and go, okay, how similar are all my pots? What kind of a range are we looking for? Because I want to get a little dry back. I want to put those p two s on, but I don't want to accidentally push runoff on some pots and not others, and then have my Ec start to get less and less consistent across the room because I'm accidentally flushing out some of these pots all afternoon. So if everything's in line, usually we're looking at anywhere from like a 3% to a 5% dryback before hitting those p two s. The closer in line your room is, the more consistent it is, the closer you can get and the less time you can allow for that dryback. But again, we'll always point to it. We see such a variety in how different strains react to adding these p two s that I always think it's good anytime you start to change the slightest, like, hey, I'm going to go with eight p two s versus I used to do four, take a lot of notes on it, and then also evaluate, like, hey, when I went to do that, let's say I did 1% and I pulled it off, but I could only pull it off three days in a row until suddenly everything was too inconsistent to continue to pull that off. Take note of that, because there's always that line between maximum performance and practicality.
Seth [00:34:03]:
And since we've got this dynamic population of plants where none of them are ever going to be exactly the same, as the one next to them. We've really got to look at that little bit of variation and account for it when we're looking at that. Because in an ideal world, with one plant, you could hit field capacity, dry back 1%. And if you've got a nicely aerated media that doesn't soak up too much water, we could write it at 2% dryback, then replace 1% or dry back 1%, give it a half a percent shot and replace that. We can really push it. But once we spread it across the whole room, looking at that three to five is a lot more reasonable if you've got a pretty wide range in plants and also how fast they're drinking. So, like, if on the graph, we look at the negative slope of that dryback line, and some plants would have a much more negative slope than other plants, then we're also going to want to say, hey, we probably better open that up a little bit because we're going to have a pretty big variance. Some are going to have dried back 2%, while maybe others have dried back five or six.
Seth [00:35:00]:
And then if we're seeing that, okay, we're going to go towards a little less dryback. Potentially, if it's wider and wider, we'll probably go back to more so we're not accidentally flushing out. And then once we see that variation across the room, that's where products like the solace that we sell come in handy. You can go start spot checking and just see what is my variation. And then just make sure that when you do those spot checks, you're trying to do them at roughly the same time every day, every time you take them. So you get used to the values that you should expect to see, and you're not having to account for the fact that, hey, today I took them at 10:00 a.m. Tomorrow or yesterday I took them at four. And I've got a little bit of dryback that I don't have eyes on that I need to account for.
Jason [00:35:42]:
Yeah. Anecdotally, this was kind of one of the very first things I was doing with the terrace twelve s when I was cultivating was trying to determine what my ideal irrigation sizes should be. When we're looking at time series data, like from the aria core or the Aroya go systems, we can basically just subtract the water loss over an hour. And we know that's our evaporate transpiration rate. As long as we've already hit runoff or drain, that line is going to indicate our evaporation. And transpiration rates. Those are the two places that our irrigation water is going to. It's going up into the plant and transpiring, and it's evaporating from the substrate itself.
Jason [00:36:22]:
Right. And so if we see that that water loss is, say, 1% an hour, then we know if we do a p two irrigation every hour at 2%, then we're going to have about 1% runoff. Yeah.
Seth [00:36:37]:
My favorite little trick is to use a handy dandy tool we have in Aroya called the dryback calculator. I'll zoom into a 24 hours period, turn on my dryback calculator, highlight a 1 hour period during the time of day that I want to be able to have eyes on that and calculate it, and give me. I can start to forecast what my daily drybacks are going to look like inside of an hour as the plant grows, especially if I'm doing that day over day and logging it. I wish you slugged your computer open, because I don't know if we've ever showed that feature, the tryback. Yeah, it's actually pretty fun. If we had 20 sensors in a room, I could go just highlight a period of time and just have it spit out a list of how far each of those sensors dried back in the given time period. In this case, an hour. And that really makes doing some of these calculations a lot quicker and easier, especially because you're not looking at spreadsheets, trying to do same calculations over and over and over or dragging your mouse back and forth.
Seth [00:37:33]:
You can just have it spit out in front of you in a list, and it's really easy to make those quick decisions.
Kaisha [00:37:39]:
Gerardo dropped a little bit of clarification for what he's dealing with. Floral flex, 60% water holding capacity. Quick fill is my media.
Seth [00:37:47]:
Yeah. As a rule of thumb, I would probably say to make sure you're letting it dry back about 5%.
Kaisha [00:37:55]:
I love it when we show a feature.
Seth [00:37:56]:
All right, coming right up.
Jason [00:37:58]:
Yeah, pull it up real quick here for us. And let's look at water content, because that's what we're talking about. Also, did want to mention we've got tools in here to do averages. So, like Seth was saying, we've got a dynamic population. Our water contents are never going to be laying perfectly on top of each other in a good grow room. Plus or -3% on a water contents would be a pretty nice place to be sitting, as far as room uniformity goes. Yeah.
Seth [00:38:26]:
I want to interrupt you and stress that the amount of facilities I see out there that are within 3% are extremely low. Not many rooms can achieve that. By the time we're dealing with the environment, plant, factories, everything else, that would be really tight room.
Jason [00:38:42]:
I should give them some range for people to shoot for. But don't feel bad. Don't feel bad.
Seth [00:38:48]:
This would be a pretty expected distribution that we'd see in either Coco or rockwool.
Jason [00:38:53]:
Yeah. And one of the things I like to do is use the zone or the room average for those irrigation decisions that I'm making. Right. Like we're trying to address all this population. We're not going to base it off the ones that are drying back the fastest or the highest water contents. We're trying to make the most of all of the plants in the room. And obviously, the more sensors that you have in an irrigation zone or in a room, the better that that average is going to represent the population. So let's jump in and we're going to look at this select mode for dryback.
Jason [00:39:27]:
And in this case, what I'm going to do is click on the highest water content or where I last irrigated. And then we'll go down to just before the first irrigation of the next day. And this is going to quickly pipe out the calculation for water content lost over that period. So that's going to be kind of the typical dryback that we talk about. And we can log this in the system as well, which is kind of a great way to compare drybacks over time. So if we log these at specific points in the chart, we can see here, it's going to represent those as manual readings and we could log those on a daily basis to see if our drybacks are increasing or decreasing. Kind of wrapping back around to the question about how to size p two irrigations. I wanted to do an example of how I can use this dryback tool to look at my transpiration rates.
Jason [00:40:23]:
Right. So like I was talking about for p two s, typically as a baseline, I'll do a p two irrigation on an hour based frequency. So about an hour after my last p one, I'll start my first p two hour later, I'll do my second p two. And so to calculate that, we might take a look and say, all right, well, what is my water content loss for a period of an hour. Right. And so I can just drag this across 1 hour. I'm going from seven to eight in this case. And so we can see, all right, well, I'm losing during this time frame at about 5%.
Jason [00:41:01]:
Well, let's do the room average. And it'll give us exactly what I was preaching. Practice what you preach. So we'll go from six or, excuse me, seven to eight there. And room average of 4.6%. Right. So it might be a case where I actually drop my p two frequency to 30 minutes just to have a little bit smaller shot sizes and not overwhelm that media. So in that case, I might be doing a 3% shot every 30 minutes if I've got that dryback rate consistently.
Kaisha [00:41:46]:
Love an overview. Thank you, guys. So good. Gerardo, thank you so much for your question. Nice to meet you, too. I don't think we've seen you on the hangout before. All right, we're going to keep going. We have so many great questions.
Kaisha [00:41:59]:
We got this one from rocketbuds. They write, I veg my plant for two weeks and grow 67 plants per light and manage to fill it up quite nicely. I see industry standard is usually nine plants. Am I missing something with smaller plant count? Is there an advantage to shorter one week veg but more plants? Would there be a big defoliation difference?
Jason [00:42:21]:
Thanks.
Seth [00:42:23]:
I mean, you nailed it. Once we get into a big commercial production facility, shaving a week off of a whole production cycle is super advantageous. And then some of the dynamics of that come down to, hey, smaller plants are easier to move. We can move them quicker, not only less veg time. Also with nine to twelve is usually where we see pretty easy defoliation in the commercial scale, with raised benches that roll around and people have to reach in across a five foot bench, let's say. And then that's right about where we see the best performance on an untopped plant. That's part of it as well. We can veg a little longer.
Seth [00:43:02]:
We can top plants, do different training techniques to get them to fill out. Usually in our commercial production, we're looking at trying to minimize plant touches, minimize the physical handling of the plants in general, while also maximizing what we're getting out of them. And if we go with an Untopped plant, and obviously this also depends on genetics, pot size, veg time. But that seems to be the sweet spot that we're seeing on most strains in commercial production. And part of that too, is we could always go more. Right. We could go shorter of edge times, flip a tinier and tinier plant down to having flowering plants and a four x four x four that are only this tall. But then we got to produce a lot of those plants.
Seth [00:43:41]:
So the cost on basically total overhead cloning, all your media starts to go up so that number know where we kind of land, generally in commercial production. That being said, I don't know about you, Jason. I do see plenty of people out there running anywhere from six to seven, eight, especially in, like, a two gallon coco pot with three week veg or so. It works out just fine.
Jason [00:44:07]:
A lot of it just kind of comes down to considering the restrictions you have at your facility. Right? I mean, if we don't have perfect conditions in there, maybe we're a little bit low on our lighting supply in the bedroom. Those are all options. Maybe we're a little bit low on staff. Let's take some advantages to reduce or match the level of reduced inputs that we have to optimize plant growth.
Seth [00:44:31]:
Yeah. Or if I'm in a plant count state, I've got a plant count license, but I have the space in my facility, enough power and everything to have more square footage than that kind of density would allow for. That's where I might optimize and say, hey, I'm going to go with a little longer veg, spread them out a little bit, and take advantage of this space, because my limiting factor is my plant count license, not my space or power.
Kaisha [00:44:56]:
Great advice, you guys. Thank you. All right, moving on to the next question. This came from the godmother's garden. They want to know what would be the best ripening additives to add the last two weeks of flour. Right now, we add a 6% soluble potash k 20 with some calciums. Not sure the amount. It's not listed.
Kaisha [00:45:16]:
Was thinking of adding more calcium sulfate. As anecdotally. A few growers we respect swear by it. What do you guys think?
Seth [00:45:23]:
So the main thing we're looking to do there is really reduce that nitrate load without getting rid of the calcium and a lot of our commercial mixes that nitrate is, or that calcium is coming in as calcium nitrate. Right. So what we're trying to do is replace that calcium. There's a bunch of different things to do out there. There's calcium silicate and calcium chloride, calcium sulfate. There's all kinds of calcium products we can put in there, but that's the main thing we're looking for. Personally, I've seen great results using finished products. I've seen great results lowering the EC, although that can be a little more difficult and a lot more strain dependent on how they're going to react.
Seth [00:45:59]:
And, of course, any fertilizer recommendation we talk about is going to be somewhat strain specific. You can ask anyone out there that runs athena that had it before and after they had their cleanse product. And hey, it works great for some plants. Other plants don't seem to care. Some plants show a lot of improvement. Some plants, you couldn't tell whether they used it or not. And in some rare cases, we see that some of those plants actually needed that nitrogen later in this growth cycle than we thought they did. And that could be for a few different things having to do with that plant's specific determinant life cycle.
Seth [00:46:32]:
If we're trying to harvest a plant that would traditionally grow for ten or twelve weeks and eight, that one's not going to be in line in terms of the fertilizer program needs as what the rest of the strains we typically run, coming in at 55 to 60 days, are going to need.
Jason [00:46:46]:
Yeah, you nailed it. As far as additives, I kind of like to look at it as the other way around towards the end, right? Sure, we might be doing an additive, but really it's just supplementing something that we're taking out. That's exactly what you see with the thena fade product that you're talking about. Where they are, if they're reducing the amount of nitrogen, going in. Other ways that we can do that is just by lowering the EC and staying with our stock blend and or modifying our two part salt ratio. So there are a few things there as a starting point. Usually I just try to work with the nutrient manufacturer and see what their recommendations are and then start playing with things if I want to push the envelope past that.
Seth [00:47:31]:
Yeah, I got to hand it to every nutrient company I've ever talked to and worked with. Actually, these days, they're all pretty good about trying to help you find the optimum way to mix up their products to achieve the results that you're looking for. Part of the goal in commercial anything, right, is simplicity. But they also understand that there's not one cut and dry nutrient solution for every strain out there in every situation. And, yeah, like I said, I've been pleasantly surprised by how many of them will work with you on either getting you a custom mix if you want to pay enough money, or helping you adjust your formulations and feed schedule to fit your goals.
Jason [00:48:10]:
Yeah, many of them are a lot like us, where we have to help our clients be as competitive in the industry as possible so we can maintain them as clients and keep them in business as profitable as they can be.
Seth [00:48:23]:
Yeah, and when it comes to varying water qualities, all kinds of different issues that you experience in different grow facilities. Like I said, usually water quality, but they're generally some of the more knowledgeable and helpful people on that.
Kaisha [00:48:41]:
All right, thank you, guys. Ok, moving on. We've got this question from Harry Hussles on instagram. They write, I'm having red stems come in every time around the transition from flower stretch to bulk. My substrate EC is roughly five to seven ec with a 6.0 ph. What are your thoughts about this?
Seth [00:49:00]:
We could be looking at a strain specific deficiency, potentially. Some strains also tend to produce anthocyanin in their pettyoles and parts of the stem naturally. So there's kind of two different things I'd look at and then number. The last one is, does this strain do it every time? Does it just do it for you? What more do you know about it? Because I've certainly seen situations where, yeah, this plant produces a fairly red stem almost every time. But hey, guess what? It still yields great. The potency is fine. Plant health is great. It just seems to be a trait of this plant a lot of times that is attributed to specific plant deficiencies.
Seth [00:49:40]:
In that case, one of the things you can start to play around with, a lot of times with fertilizer, we always have this disappointing recommendation that's.
Jason [00:49:49]:
Add.
Seth [00:49:50]:
More and feed harder. And sometimes that's all it is. But I would really look at it. And another thing I like to go do if I'm seeing those red stems specifically, if it's on the pettyle early on like that is go cut one of those petty oils with my thumbnail and see what color the SAP coming out of there is. If I'm already getting some almost grape juice like SAP, that a lot of times is going to correspond with plants that tend to purple up super easy for me. So try to determine whether it's an actual deficiency or just a genetic trait we're seeing and not something you need to worry about. And that's another important thing to remember. Man, I wish I had a picture today.
Seth [00:50:26]:
I used to grow this train called grand Hindu that would have the weirdest mutant leaves every once. Well, not every once in a while. Every time in like 60% of the plants, it produced a situation where the leaf kind of curled and the vein looked like it was rolled over inside the leaf. And it drove me nuts for a while until I was just like, well, we're yielding great off of this. The potency is there. Almost all of them do it every time. I don't think we have to change anything. This is just a strange selection.
Seth [00:50:54]:
And also, the more I think about it, I didn't select that cut whenever someone was pheno hunting it. All we did was take it in and it's always done this. So economically, it makes no sense to try to really change production practices because as a grower, I walk in and see a leaf. That is weird. Yeah. And also objectively healthy. It's green, flip it over. The stomata look great and stuff.
Seth [00:51:21]:
It's just growing kind of funky. And as a cultivator, a lot of times how much money are we going to spend and how much lab access do we have to determine whether that is like a somatic mutation, a deficiency, or is it really even a mutation based off of the original selection? Do we even know that? Not sure.
Kaisha [00:51:44]:
Christoph, got you testing these? These gentlemen are really, truly plant whispers over here. I love that advice. Thank you so much for that. All right, we got a question here from someone named Q. They shared their data with us. They write fluoroflex running in at three to 3.25.9 ph. I'm running a greenhouse, so my co2 levels and temps flex hit 5.2 ph. The other day on my runoff, I dropped my nutrients just a little bit and upped my volume.
Kaisha [00:52:18]:
Should I go up in EC if most of my plants look amazing? I have about ten plants with some discoloration, but my ph is still low on a few different sections strains.
Jason [00:52:29]:
What do you guys think?
Seth [00:52:30]:
Yeah, I'd probably go up to a 35 in that case and continue to push a little more runoff and try to reset that ionic balance in there. And really what going into the three, five and even sometimes up to a four allows you to do is push that extra runoff without unintentionally lowering the EC too much in the pot, a small EC dip is not too bad. But if the amount it's going to take, and also remember too, some of these ph corrections, they're not going to happen in one day. When we look at, say, replacing 15% to 25% of the volume of this pot with water every day, that's not 100%. We're not fully resetting all of the nutrient content in that block. So just like you're watching your ph drift down over a few days, it's going to take a few days for it to get washed back up.
Jason [00:53:16]:
Yeah. And obviously being kind of a data nerd myself, I always like to try and make relationships there as well. So historically, is this something that you see all the time? Is it related to when you've gotten higher lighting intensities from the outside? Maybe you've got a little bit lower co2 because you're pushing more exhaust. What other influence factors are related to this when you see it? And try to keep in mind, all right, well, if it's always happening with that, that doesn't necessarily mean causality. It just means that, hey, this is causing something in the plant that might be altering this.
Seth [00:53:58]:
Yeah, especially with greenhouses. I think one thing that's really important to keep in mind is there's a lot of data that you can collect that you can't act on that day. It's really easy to look at something like this time series data, and immediately, as cultivators, we go in, we start to find problems and then react to them and change things. When we're looking at a greenhouse, we've got such a fluctuating, I don't say mode of operation, I guess, but your strategy is changing throughout the year. You're a little bit more exposed in terms of like, you don't have as much insulation, you don't have as much control of when clouds go by. I don't know what your supplemental lighting situation is. CO2 is very difficult because hey, if it's the summertime and it's really hot and we have to vent a lot, it's going to be hard to get that co2 up. But we might not have a problem getting our light intensity up, which is going to end up affecting things like that ph, our daily drybacks.
Seth [00:54:49]:
So over time, the more data you can collect and then go back and analyze. So one of my favorite things to do with greenhouses is look at like, hey, do I have my environmental data, including DLI for the whole last year? And then if I'm in there another year, were there any differences between the two years? Am I starting to see some common themes, whether it be changes in ph or something as simple as like, hey, every fall, right around October, November, whatever crop we're going to harvest in, or whatever two crops we're harvesting, November, those ones mold the worst. Okay, now we've established that November seems to be the most difficult month of the year to control humidity, wherever that greenhouse is at. And then you can start forecasting and making some expectations and saying, hey, as a business, we need to know that we have these risks that are present at different times of the year. We have x amount of ability to react to them. And then at the end of the day, our yields are going to reflect some of those limitations. So for your overall business model, it's important to understand that, hey, maybe I can't quite actually grow as much in the summer, hey, it's really sunny, but I've got to have my vents open, my wet walls on just to keep this place under 90 degrees during the daytime. Okay.
Seth [00:56:03]:
I can't get an ambient co2 above 600 ppm at that point. All right. I'm probably going to have a little bit of yield depression as a result compared to maybe when it's a little more temperate, like hitting 55, 60 in the daytime and staying in the nighttime in that range, I've got a lot more control. I'm not forced to exhaust the greenhouse nearly as much. I can close my vents a little more, get that co2 up, start running my supplemental lighting, because, hey, that heat load is not going to hurt me as much, especially as it gets colder. I'm not pushing nearly as much exhaust, but that's just an example of where with the greenhouse, it's so dynamic. I think it's cool because we're using the sun. We're using, in certain ways, a little lower cost production method than full indoor.
Seth [00:56:49]:
But it does come with its own set of dynamic challenges that you have to put up with throughout the year. And, yeah, a lot of them will become cyclical. And you can start to learn when, hey, there's certain rules on this greenhouse that we have to follow because, hey, we can't control dew point at certain times of the year, et cetera.
Kaisha [00:57:08]:
Awesome, you guys. Thank you so much. All right, I think we have time for one last question, and then we've got a bunch of announcements towards the end. Let me go ahead and ask this for croctober. They want to know for four x four coco cubes, where do you guys recommend putting the sensor? Is it the same placement for rock wall or a little different?
Seth [00:57:27]:
Yes. One and a quarter inches up using your sensor alignment tool.
Kaisha [00:57:34]:
Bam. Okay. With that, Christian just joined the chat. Christian, you have an announcement you want to make.
Christian [00:57:40]:
Yeah.
Christian [00:57:41]:
Hey, everyone.
Christian [00:57:41]:
Oh, by the way, I was intrigued actually, by the tryback module. Never seen it before. All right, I'm Christian Aroya. You can hit me up on instagram with Christian underscore Aroya. And I'm going to attend spanner this.
Christian [00:57:54]:
Next week, which is actually super exciting.
Christian [00:57:57]:
So make sure you guys connect with me.
Christian [00:57:59]:
You will see me walking the floor.
Christian [00:58:01]:
I'm wearing a big leather aroya shirt, and I'm excited to talk to the Europeans.
Kaisha [00:58:08]:
Yay. Aroya is going international. You all watch out. But that's not the only thing that's going to be happening. We've also got Aroya team members Seth and Haley, they're going to be at indoor Adcon in Vegas next Monday and Tuesday the 11th and twelveth. And then Francis and Noah are going to be at hall of Flowers and Ventura next Thursday, March 14. Then later this month, Haley and Noah will be at NE can in Boston March 22 and 23rd. We love every opportunity we get to have some person to person, one on one time and connect with you.
Kaisha [00:58:40]:
So be sure to hit us up and say, hi, Jason, you're going to be at hall of Flowers.
Kaisha [00:58:47]:
Yay.
Kaisha [00:58:48]:
I'm not going to make it this time, you all. It's hard for me to miss it, but well represented. It's going to be a good group out there, so be sure you talk to our team when you see them on any of these conference floors. And then last but not least, we are running a 420 special. Book a demo or contact your account manager for more details on that, but tap in. All right, you guys, Jason, Seth, producer Chris Christian, my boss, thank you so much for another great session. Thank you all for joining us for this week's Aroya office hours. To learn more about aroya, book a demo at aroya IO and our team will show you the ins and outs of the ultimate cannabis cultivation platform.
Kaisha [00:59:26]:
Got any crop steering or cultivation questions you want us to cover? Drop them anytime in the Aroya app. Email us at sales at aroya IO. Send us a DM on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. We definitely want to hear from you. And if you're a fan of the pod, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. See you at the next session and see out in these streets, y'all. Bye.