Howdy GN growers. Nate here. As many of you know we collaborated with one of the preeminent nutrient formulation scientists and metabolomics researchers (George Murray) to create Ventana Plant Science nutrients. The process of launching a completely new nutrient line is definitely an endeavor. A lot of testing, testing some more, submitting label registration to 30+ states, more testing, building awareness, send it to labs to get it cleared for heavy metals, testing, sending it to a research facility for side by side testing, etc…
I wanted to share a bit of our journey along with some of the cool things that are coming out of launching this line.
Firstly, this nutrient line has been two years in the making. Most nutrient lines are just slight changes from the 16 element formula that scientists discovered in the last century, segmenting them into macro nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium) and micro nutrients (calcium, magnesium, sulphur, boron, chlorine, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc).
Ventana Plant Science did that as well, but also launched the nutrient line with a particular focus around three unique products: FlaVUH, our silica (Structure) and our microbes product. Today I’m just going to touch base on FlaVUH, but I’ll try to also post separately in the future about our studies on our silica and microbes.
I’m starting with FlaVUH because without it I’m not 100% confident we would have launched a nutrient line. We initially found out about it when we met George through some industry contacts. This was years ago. He told us about this new formulation his laboratory derived that is a polyaspartic acid polymer backwards engineered from the shells of mollusks. It turns out mollusks create this polyaspartic acid that helps them carry elements, particularly calcium, without interacting with other elements, onto their shells exactly where they want them.
How does this relate to plants? When you mix nutrients together, especially by mixing multiple brands at once, you get some small chemical reactions in the solution that make certain elements harder to absorb by your plant when they need them. Think of FlaVUH as a way to main-line nutrients to your plant when your plant is asking for them, when otherwise your plant would only get a fraction of what it’s asking for.
How does this affect your plants? It helps them perform better in almost every scenario. We particularly focus on the yield, terpene and cannabinoid aspect, because those are the areas where we saw a statistically significant increase in their production. Those tests are attached below. They both tested for overall dry weight yield increase (one showing 12% increase and another 14%), and one of them tested for cannabinoid and terpene percentages.
One of the studies I’m attaching below was done at a commercial cannabis operation in Michigan. The second was done in a Canadian government licensed cannabis research facility by three scientists.
In the second study done in Canada, we tested a control and then FlaVUH at three different application rates: 4ml/gal, 8ml/gal and 12ml/gal. The 12ml/gal was the clear winner having the greatest effect on the plants with a 14% yield increase.
Full disclosure to everyone, based on this new scientific data we’re actually going to be reformulating FlaVUH to be more concentrated. For those using it now, bump up the usage rate to 12ml/gal. The new FlaVUH is our at 4x the concentration, so you’ll be using it at 3ml/gal.
I’m going to have both Mike our CannaCribs Consulting Staff Agronomist and George Murray hop into this thread if any other technical questions or comments come up.
We’re trying to let people know about what this formulation does, and get people to see it for themselves in their own garden. You don’t have to change up what nutrient brand you’re using now, whether you’re using Advanced, House & Garden, Botanicare, General Hydropoincs, etc… you can add FlaVUH along with it.
To help people try it out for themselves, I’d like to offer a free 4oz bottles of FlaVUH to the first 10 people who are interested. If you are, post below noting your interest
flavuh-white-paper-sostanza-17-jun-2022_3.pdf (514.1 KB)
FlaVUH Pleasantrees Efficacy Report.pdf (466.5 KB)