Welcome @greenbroz! Looking forward to running a fun contest with you guys.
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Thanks Hunter!
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I like that “a couple of projects.” Next time Sean and Ray come down I’d love to tag along.
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My screen name here-The Farmer in the Sky–was the name of the column I had in Sinsemilla Tips: Domestic Marijuana Journal from the early- '80s until Operation Green Merchant forced the magazine out of business in 1989 and sent me away for what would prove out to be 13 1/2 years of involuntary sabbatical.
You could say I’m the Forrest Gump of Ganja. I have been consuming it since literally before I was born as my mom was a reefer puffing beatnik in Greenwich Village the whole time I was aboard, in 1955.
It would be 12 years after I entered the world before I would consume cannabis voluntarily and the rest as they say, is history.
In 1970, at 14, I was one of the biggest pot dealers in Bellingham, Washington–a notoriously liberal college town. One afternoon that summer I read Bill Drake’s groundbreaking book, The Cultivator’s Handbook of Marijuana. Later that day I went out and went, as many of us did back then, on a pharmaceutical vision quest. While in a state of expanded consciousness I experienced the presence of my spirit-guide-The Goddess Ganja–who showed me what the course of my life would be. (Much of which has only become clear in retrospect).
For the rest, including how I came to invent Sea of Green (per Cervantes, Tom Alexander, Nevil and Adam Dunn) and TRUE Screen Of Green, brought the Japanese company now called Hortilux into horticultural lighting for the very first time in their corporate history, was part of the design team which came up with the very first octangular paraboloid reflectors, was the person with the highest plant count of anyone taken in Green Merchant (12,000 + plants), was the last person Jack Herer ever consciously consumed cannabis with and a bunch more, go to Time4hemp.com/farmerintheskyradiohour. That’s the page for my podcast named after my column. It is heard on all the apps.
I now do consulting in just about every area of the cannabis industry. I don’t know nearly all there is to know about cannabis but what I don’t know, that someone else does, I have no problem acknowledging and do know who it is that knows more about it, so my clients can benefit from their knowledge as well. I am probably the best known of the folks in cannabiculture who are pushing for a reexamination of how we measure lights for plant growth and how we display the information thus gathered.
In a nut shell, we need to stop allowing science to get in the way of common sense. Wave mechanics applies to ALL waves. This means that there exists, as yet unidentified, luminal chords which extend the duration of availability of the energy from incoming photons as acoustic chords extend the availability of the energy used to propagate sound waves. One necessary consequence of this is that we need to move beyond PAR. As PBAR still doesn’t include the action spectra for UVR8 we need to go even further than the proposed PBAR of 350-800.
We should look instead at a scale which gives total energy available from 280nm to the bottom of near infrared at 1400nm. This should also be broken out and given for each color, including the non-colors UVA, UVB and near infrared because we should have a clear picture of both what potentially beneficial frequencies and what potentially detrimental frequencies are present in a light sources spectrum.
Anyway, I describe myself as a pot geek and a lighting freak and hope to be making contributions to my field until the day I die.
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May you live to 120!
I am put some citations list on light together. Some are what we know. Some are papers on what we should be studying. Some are best practices for lighting.
Will you message me the papers, books and other gems that you think should be included? The urls or book names with ISBN what ever you have. History must be preserved.
Have you seen the new post on a lighting short course from greenhouse management magazine? Lighting seminar
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Sure thing, no problem. have you seen those new Plasma lights out of Germany? Ray and Shane were showing me,
All the best
Sjoerd
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Do you have links to plasma lighting?
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Yes, I have seen them. I hooked the Germans up with Jon, at Indo Expo Denver. There appears to be some other players in “High Energy Plasma” Lighting as well. I’ve reached out to a couple of the other companies. One is already aligned with Chris Peiser at Chameleon. The key in this is that no one seems to be acknowledging that green is photosynthetically active as a component of the green:orange-far red interaction, as the pigment we find down in the mesophyll, photosynthesizing the green which is both getting past the “Seive Effect” and benefiting from the “Detour Effect” discussed in the quote below from Terashima.
_…Because green light can penetrate further into the leaf than red or blue light, in strong white light, any additional green light absorbed by the lower chloroplasts would increase leaf photosynthesis to a greater extent than would additional red or blue light…for green light, loss in the efficiency of absorptance by the sieve effect is small [Seive Effect: the light which doesn’t continue to pass through the plants’ tissues because it has been absorbed], while gain in absorptance by the détour effect is large.[Detour Effect: light bouncing around on the inside of the space inside the leaves.] Consequently, green leaves absorb much green light…it has been clearly shown that the quantum yield of photosynthesis based on absorbed photosynthetically active photon flux density (PPFD), measured at low PPFDs, was comparable between green and red light…the quantum yield of green light is considerably greater than that of blue light…we have detailed so far, red or blue light is preferentially absorbed by the chloroplasts in the upper part of the leaf. Then, when PPFD is high, the energy of these wavelengths tends to be dissipated as heat by the upper chloroplasts, while green light drives photosynthesis in the lower chloroplasts that are not light saturated…
red light is more effective than green light in white light at low PPFDs, but as PPFD increases, light energy absorbed by the uppermost chloroplasts tends to be dissipated as heat, while penetrating green light increases photo-synthesis by exciting chloroplasts located deep in the mesophyll…
There is also that, lo and behold, there is a photosynthetically active, between 500 and 600 nm,
pigment called anthocyanin and another closely related group called anthocyaninids.
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Welcome FarmerintheSky! Amazing introduction and background. 
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Are anthocyanin’s photosyntheticly active? I always remember them as protective of chloroplasts from solarization.
Who is our plant physiologist? @Hunter
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that was the impression I came away from this or another with. I’m on the fly. Will dig deeper later. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2576631/
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Thank You I feel blessed to have been at the times and places I have.
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Cool paper. But, two points from the paper
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Anthocionyn where not shown to greatly increase carbohydrates synthesis. It did show that during the re-absorbtion phase in fall more CO2 is fixed. Does this account form the re-absorbtion process chlorophyll components? We know from one of the studies citations, that plants deprived of CO2 that chlorophyll re-absorption stops.
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The paper show why in seedlings we see a movement towards all light expecially in with a strong red light component.
Again cool paper. Definitely will add to library.
The question i am left puzzling, is what is the cost of more red light? Upto the point of solarization? Does, this begin to explain the red shift phenomena for flower promotion?
As usual a good paper makes me ask new questions.
Thank you!
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Hi Everyone-
I love the information shared here on this website - very informative - Thank You to everyone.
I’m also very excited to introduce Morganic Concentrates! We utilize 100% organic non-gmo corn alcohol as our exclusive solvent, and our extraction method is low temperature, low pressure for ultimate terpene retention. We have just recently received our licensing this last week, and are now actively pursuing mutually beneficial relationships with growers in the state of Colorado, as we are located in Aurora. Please reach out if you would like to see our facility and/or discuss what services we might be able to offer.
Thanks, Kris Gehrholz and Joy Huskinson
Proprietors Morganic Concentrates
P.S. We are available for Remediation.
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@Morganicconcentrates welcome to Growers Network!
You can network directly with other cannabis processors in our community here.
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Are you working with Q. Gumby’s Company?
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Generally speaking, anthocyanins aren’t used for a whole lot of photosynthesis. Even plants with purple/red leaves, like red cauliflower and certain pitcher plants use them more like humans and animals use melanin. That said, they do absorb in the green part of the spectrum where the chlorophylls don’t.
Part of the reason that they’re not too useful for photosynthesis is because they aren’t contained in the chloroplasts… where the energy is made. As a result, their use is primarily protective in nature.
A fun genetics experiment might involve trying to graft bacteriorhodopsin into plants (which absorbs primarily in the green spectrum for Archaea), but I doubt it would be successful, because the mechanism of action is radically different from chloroplasts (and way less efficient). Bacteriorhodopsin is a proton pump, which uses light to create a chemical gradient, which is then later converted into stored chemical energy (an indirect energy conversion), whereas chlorophyll uses photons to excite electrons, and the excited electrons are used to create stored chemical energy (a direct energy conversion). As far as I know, I haven’t heard of any similar processes for anthocyanins.
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The above analysis shows that AnC pigments compete strongly with Chl for light absorption in the green range and with Chl b and Car for absorption at shorter wavelengths. In Chl-free leaves, when the AnC content became as high as 40–50 nmol cm−2, absorptance at 550 nm and in the 500–600 nm band reached 95%. Furthermore, at high AnC content their contribution to light absorption was profound even in the 600–650 nm band. It is remarkable that AnC pigments absorb strongly in the 500–600 nm region, close to the solar energy maximum in the gap between the region of strong absorption by Chl and Car at one end of the visible spectrum (400–500 nm) and the other, red end, where Chl captures the light that penetrates deep into plant tissue (Merzlyak and Gitelson, 1995; Sun et al., 1998; Nishio, 2000) and efficiently drives CO2 fixation (Sun et al., 1998; Nishio, 2000). The characterization of AnC absorption in leaves is consistent with and indirectly supports the hypothesis about the important role of green light in photosynthesis.
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Referenced in the article:
The anthocyanins are acting like melanin pigments do for humans – to protect the plant from harmful levels of light.
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