🍃 AMA with Joel Perkins of Key Grow Solutions Wednesday, August 7th at 11 AM PST

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This week we will be discussing getting the max out of your crops with Joel Perkins of Key Grow Solutions. Joel will bring his 20+ years of industry expertise to the Growers Network Private Community.

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  • Who: Joel Perkins , Business Manager at Key Grow Solutions
  • What: Maximizing ROI of your crops and shortening your grow cycles
  • Where: The GNET private forum
  • When: Wednesday, August 7th at 11 AM PST

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Joel is going to be here live with us to discuss how to maximize the weight of your yields in shorter growth intervals. Joel has been involved in the evolving cannabis industry for several years, having acted as the Operations Manager for the original Sespe Creek Collective in California, Chief Operations Officer of Primordial Solutions, opened Las Vegas recreational sales as the General Manager of Oasis Cannabis, and has worked with various other cultivation and production facilities throughout Nevada such as Qualcan, Silver State Trading, and others.

Key Grow Solutions offers cannabis growers a collection of innovative nutritional products that are specifically designed to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and balance of cannabis biological systems – contributing to faster growth, exceptional yields, and an increase in craft quality, all while simplifying the plant feeding process.

Check out https://www.keygrowsolutions.com/ to learn more. Get those questions lined up now folks. Joel is going to enlighten the community on how to get bigger yields in less time.

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I’ll fire this AMA off: thanks for being here with us today, @joel_keygrow!

Can you share a little about your background and how your life’s journey has brought you to Key Grow Solutions?

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Hello GrowersNetwork! I am looking forward to discussing how we can be a benefit for our cultivation partners, and the science behind how we accomplish shorter harvest cycles and simplified feeding.

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Sure! It’s a very long story but I’ll do my best to consolidate. Growing up in SoCal, cannabis was always a part of my life and our culture and I planted my first cannabis plant at the age of 16. It wasn’t always the focal point of my life as I worked in the film and entertainment industries, but I agreed to fill in at a cannabis delivery service for a musician friend while he went on tour. After meeting and working with cancer patients and people with debilitating diseases, etc., I realized that helping people attain clean medicine was my new life’s calling and that everything else was somewhat trivial. So from that point on I have dedicated my life to learning as much about the plant and its effects on people as possible.

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As long as there are not currently any other questions I suppose I can get a bit more specific on the cannabis journey. My first real “industry” job was to take over the operations of Sespe Creek Collective in California, where we served approximately 5,000 patients under the medical system. As part of this, I also worked closely with our growers and over time became more educated and concerned with the safety and cleanliness of the products that were used to grow the plant itself.
This eventually led me to my interest in microbiology and I sort of “fell into” the position of COO at the biologically-based nutrient company Primordial Solutions, which is by any measure a quality line itself. While we were very fortunate to have success with that line, we lacked the scientific abilities to research and answer some of the questions and ideas that were forming in my head about ideas such as consistently speeding up the harvest cycle.
I have done some projects inbetween, such as managing Oasis Cannabis in Las Vegas and working with cultivation and production facilities around the Nevada area.
But I was very fortunate to receive an opportunity to work with some of the most talented biochemists I have ever met, who have access to 73 years worth of proprietary research on basically every type of crop. So that’s where the basis of this project began.

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That experience stoked some serious passion in you, didn’t it?

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You and I have talked about this a little bit in the past, and it’s one reason we wanted you to come onboard for an AMA. How are you able to speed up grow cycles? Aren’t many attributes of growth cycles genetically coded into the plants DNA?

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Honestly I never realized I was that compassionate of a person or that I had the temperament to be there for people in their final moments. You learn a lot about yourself when you are faced with reality.

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In the intro, “discuss how to maximize the weight of your yields in shorter growth intervals”. Are the methodologies referenced input/nutrient based or environmental?

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Being around people when they are dying has a powerful ability to impact the way you view your world. It’s a privilege people allowed you to be there for their last moments. It made you refocus your whole life!

Powerful stuff. Thanks for sharing that, @joel_keygrow

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Calling @memberdirectory to participate in today’s AMA with @joel_keygrow. Get in on this event!

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Hi, with which grow methods (aeroponics/soil/dwc/rdwc/…) indoor/outdoor have you seen the best results and shortest grow cycles?

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Why is shortening the life cycle so important? I get the economic impact, but what other areas benefit? Also, what sacrifices are made in the “shortening” life-span?

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For obvious reasons, the faster harvest cycles are one of my favorite topics, and I am happy to explain as much as I understand about how we make this consistent.

First off, the plant definitely has its genetic inclinations, and the speed of its harvest cycle is encoded into it. So if we say, anything in the range of 1-3 weeks faster grow cycles, that is still going to be based on the average flowering time of said plant. So while we may sometimes pull down a 10 week strain at 7 weeks, we will probably never pull down a 12-week plant at 7 weeks, but we have done it at 9 weeks.

The shortcuts have to do with internal processes of the plant. There are a couple of different factors that I believe play heavily into what we are accomplishing.

The biggest game changer, in this regard, I would believe to be our proprietary Potassium Acetate formulation. Acetate is a natural plant metabolite that enters the plant as a direct source of Acytal CoenzymeA. This molecule is what then decides to take a pathway that either turns it into a carbohydrate or a resinous oil (cannabinoids, terpenes, esters, phenols, lactones, aldehydes, etc etc we can go on about this later). Usually, the plant produces this molecule by converting light and nutrients, and is a multi step process. So by cutting out the plant’s need to perform glycolysis to produce this molecule, you have already sped up the plant’s internal production cycle, and are providing a source that really pushes the genetic expression of the plant. Instead of using its energy to produce these precursors, it’s receiving a signal that it can put more effort into its transitional and production phases.

A second contributor, would be the polyamine orthophosphate technology, which is also a proprietary version of this tech. It chelates amino acids directly to the orthophosphate molecules and preventing them from locking out with agitants or from carrying large amounts of toxic metals such as cadmium that burn up the plant. This way you can get more phosphorus into the plant early (which I personally recommend to build up more cells, and more DNA and RNA for the plant’s explosive growth through the vegetative and transitional phases when it needs it most) in consistent amounts without harming the plant’s leaves, which serve as solar panels, water reserves, etc.

In short, both the rhizosphere and the plant have a lot less work to do to achieve the same results. We provide shortcuts and, when the plant is maturing that much faster, we’ve seen that it is pretty safe to assume that you are getting everything out of that plant that it is genetically inclined to produce in oil production and overall yield.

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Our methodologies are input / nutrient based, though I have heard of some lighting and environmental related tricks that can accomplish similar things as well. I’m not sure how much more can happen by combining these things, but it sure would be fun to experiment.

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The biggest changes I have seen were in outdoor crops planted in soil, I actually saw plants harvest over a month ahead of the controls.

With indoors, a controlled environment and non-soil mediums (coco, rockwool, etc) are already leading to some pretty explosive development so I think even 1 week shorter is pretty impressive. Our last indoor harvest in coco was 2 weeks ahead of schedule.

We have done some experiments in recirculating aquaponics and DWC, and we have learned quite a bit about how to adjust our feeding program for these, but I just don’t really have the data on these comparisons as they’ve only been done as runs instead of vs. a control.

I know that we can work in aeroponics, but I just don’t really know anyone doing it and would love to find a place to run some comparisons here.

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Under what lights were you growing with that increased finish time?

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Very intriguing and would like to learn more. Are there any studies/links that you can reference by chance? After buying so many snake oils over the last 15 years or so, I like to see something empirical these days. Thank you

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… this area is fascinating to me - trichome maturation. Does your proprietary Potassium Acetate help the maturation of trichomes? Will that process occur faster? Also, will a sick or adversely effected plant speed up or slow down its trichome maturation process? I"m really curious about what signaling goes on to tell the plant to start dying, i.e. senescence

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No kidding! This is soooo true! Data please, always these days

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