The serious producers both big and small are going to take sanitation and post harvest handling more seriously. With products like yours Oxine wt we have a chance to treat cannabis just like any other horticultural crop from a food handling standpoint.
The grow and processing pictures would fail just on sanitation in my mind. If you cant eat off the floor of your post harvest room there is a problem.
We also have people smoking TOBACCO in our operations. I donāt have any problem with tobacco use. It is a choice. But, TMV in tobacco products is a real threat in growing operations. and we know TMV affect cannabis.
Hemp also has a virus that I am surprised that we donāt see in the cannabis we grow. Hemp Stunt Virus.
The market will have big Wallymart and Home Despot growers and a number of smaller boutique growers. The boutique growers who do it nicely are going to make good money for a long period of time.
The boutique growers who figure out branding and vertical marketing are going to be filthy rich.
The genetics people who can give us reliable seed are going to win that segment. Vegetative propagation is only going to be viable for a tiny group of boutique growers.
The biggest question is what is Hemp production going to do the cannabis market? Hemp is going to be commodity priced by fiber quality.
Cannabis as a rec product has some challenges. We donāt have a good language to talk about cultivars on the production side nor do we have a good language to talk about the consumer side.
On the consumer side we need to define a language that does not mention any fruit flavors or candy flavors. We should describe the sweetness of purple kushs as having a pernod like flavor with a hint of Angostura Bitters
The light like @GrowFlux has end user control of the light spectrum.
What I know what is the Thin Film Chromatography to know the exact absorption spectrum of the cultivar I am growing.
I also think we are lighting the wrong part of the plant. We know in cannabis only the top 1/3 of the axial flowering branch is production 80% of the food at flowering. The older leaves are used a sinks for things the plant does not want. Plus the plant is stealing Copper from the older leaves and moving to newer leaves.
I also think we are solarizing are plants. This is that the excess light not used in photosynthesis is going is wasted and is causing problems in maximizing our output. I want some realignment of chloroplasts in the leaves but not past the compensation point of maximum carbohydrate production.
We can dictate the nomenclature as an industry and only talk in those terms. We should take the wine approach to talking about flavors. I donāt have a clue how we talk about the effects. The flavors is a real and present danger to us as an industry and we need to take the lead.
I donāt every want to see a verity called cotton candy!
The future is very bright. And it is a young enough industry that the growers of today are going to be the big players of the next generation of growers.
Our generation has to teach the next generation what it is to be a good grower.
But we also need to document our history, the way the old floriculturist did.
Read Geo Ball, or Atlas Burpees or Nelson Coonās books.
Nelson coon noted in 1925 that most bad mites glow under black light, I have seen this with my own eyes, in both two spotted mite and russet mites. but the predator mites donāt glow! cool so how do we apply this knowledge?
Oh what a beauty? Was he talking about girls. My grandfather would say walking across the Yale campus at the coeds. Oy, vas zain goof. or Oh!, What a beautiful body.
My father would call him an alter cocker. Old Fart.
The biggest thing is that Suppliers are not listening to growers. The second thing is growers donāt want white papers. They want hard science when making mission critical decisions. The professional are hard core floriculturist.
There is no fantasy at SDI. Direct control of Environmental Vapor Pressure, Temperature combined with an energy efficient design. And yes we use a sensor that is very efficient.
I was not just talking about marijuana strictly as a brand, but about the entire industry involved in it. Should rather use the term hemp.
The law is too restrictive on what the entire industry loses and its respect in practice is really killing the property of hemp.
I think in North America Hemp will be in reference to fiber production.
Cannabis will be in reference to the high THC producers.
The problem is that they are the same plant. I think Cannabis sativa is the dominant plant. Cannabis indica is really just sativa. Cannabis afghani is its own spieces, but can cross witn C. sativa. Cannabis afghani is a high THC producer and has long internodle fibers, but is very short. Maybe a meter tall. I think we get the Hemp we grow from a cross between cannabis sativa and Cannabis afghani as a byproduct of First Anglo-Afghan War, because we see the first modern Hemp post 1842 in India. It made its way very quickly to Europe and North America. I also think that this is Cannabis indica as a name originates in India. The herbarum specimen I first see are collected in India in the 1850ās. Prior to this we see Hemp reference as oil Hemp. The seeds made a good lubricant and lamp oil. The fiber was of an ok quality kinda like flax. One the Indian Hemp made it to North America it became the dominant fiber crop. But, was not an abondent seed producer like the older seed varieties.
Verities like cannabis sativa āFinoliā was breed in Finland first between WW1 and WW2 as a good fiber crop in Northern climates. It is not very good in hot Tempatures. The dominate verities in the USA for fiber production is very heat tolerant and has a propensity to produce high THC children.
The Finoli verity does not have big THC producers in the children. But, does produce good fiber and seed oil.
We mostly want good THC producer, I think the terpintines are closely linked to color pigments in cannabis. So if you want flavor you breed for color. And if you want a drug you breed for THC.
Now funny is the heavy pigmented varieties are some of the highest THC varietes.
We need a good geneticist. THC seems to be the number of copies of a DNA perticular sequence. But, the more THC the less CBDāS. Hum. There is something important here. Also the varieties with the most resin leaks are also colored. Humm.
@FarmerK wrote the following. What do I think about osmocote?
I would think your cal mag feed would be a better choice than the osmocote I like osmocote. But, you have to wait. I use it in my house plants.
Your have a feed in your inventory that is the ratio of 1:1:1:1 plus traces N:P:K:CA plus traces. I would use this in your soiless mix of choice. Feed CLF at 200 PPM up until two weeks before flowering. If they are hungry up to 300ppm.
Two weeks before flowering switch to your bloom booster it has a ratio of 1:3:2:1 plus micros. Do this through flower induction. 200 ppm N
Then switch back to your regular feed 1:1:1:1 tapped your feed during flower. Finish the last two weeks with clear water. This should give you the hight THC and the best color.
Also warm roots cool tops expecially post flower induction. This will give you the best plants.
The low pH is something I am going to have to try. I see advantages and disadvantages. I just have to do.
Just a quick note for your Kansas water problem. Do you have a water softener on the line? They essentially replace the calcium with sodium, which is far easier for RO membranes to strip out, so your membranes live much longer.
We do dead-res flood and drain hydro, and since Iām one of the nerds who reads whitepapers, I found one about chlorine injection in hyroponic tomato farms. The tomato farmers found their best yields at 65ppm free chlorine, over controls, 35 ppm and 100ppm tests. Cannabis is remarkably tolerant of chlorine levels in hydro systems, up to 100ppm causes no adverse effects. We use small chlorine tablets to slowly release 40-60ppm of chlorine in our aerated reservoirs, which also acidifies the solution.
When used with RO and acidic nutes, itās common to see pH ranges dip into the low 3ās. We use silica as an effective pH up until late flower, when we switch back to AN pH Up so as not to have too much silica in the medium and tissue post harvest.
When we ran the operation in Kansas we where forced to inject phosphoric acid into the irrigation lines. This caused us to adjust all our feeds to compensate for the phosphate. J R Peterās finally produced three custom blends to meet our needs. They had a one pallet minum on custom blends.
I would never as sodium to soften the water lots of what we grew was sodium sensitive plus it just through all the numbers off.
We joking priced out reverse osmosis for the greenhouses, but between water storage and RO tanks we would have spent about as much money as on structures.
We used a four head Anderson injector in the greenhouse 1 acid head two feed heads and one head for other uses.
We also had an Anderson gas injection head in the 3 inch water supply room. We added some additional chlorine into our water. We didnāt like the chlorine levels in our water supply from the city. It caused problem in our drip lines.
Today, I know we would handle the water issues differently. But, I donāt live in that climate any more.
But, every grower needs to spend more time thinking about there water.
Next, place I will grow will be Bellingham, WA and that will be for recreation.
And the plants I most want to grow are flowers. So, ideally a glasshouse for sweet peas and maybe a grow room and a full lab. Even though I am a terrible chemist. I only managed organic because it was all memory. Whereās the carbon! Analytic chemistry was my down fall.
Want to do some big data analysis with a friend at IBM. I want to look a different stistical methods in DNA analysis of cannabis since we now have over 600 fully sequenced plants. Plus, 800 RNA sequence. And they are all publicly available for free! I think IBM will pay for the computer time. I think it is just a giant math problem and some testing of root hair for the compounds we want.
Thanks to everyone for inviting me to give my ideas. Old people have good idea not all the innovations will come from the bottom up some will come from the top down.
