Episode 166: Debunking Cannabis Cultivation Myths with Dr. Deron Caplan

Welcome to the Cannabis Cultivation and Science Podcast. I'm your host, Tad Hussey of KISS Organics. This is the podcast where we discuss the cutting edge of growing from a science-based perspective and draw on top experts from around the industry to share their wisdom and knowledge. My guest this week is Dr. Darren Kaplan. Darren is a senior consultant with CannaCribbs Consulting, where he's designed more than 50 cannabis facilities over the past decade and supported many more cultivators already in operation. He earned North America's first PhD focused on indoor cannabis production before leading operations at the Kelowna Research Station, the world's first facility dedicated to advancing cannabis cultivation techniques and systems. He later served as director of research and development at the Flower Corporation, managing a team of scientists and operators. Darin has been cited more than 500 times in scientific literature, has provided expert commentary on cannabis production to major media outlets and the Government of Canada, and also serves as an expert witness in cannabis-related court cases. And just a friendly reminder that if you like the podcast, we are hosting our second annual Cannabis Cultivation and Science Conference at Collective Elevation in Bozeman, Montana on August 28th through the 30th. This year we have a bunch of amazing speakers lined up as well as a full facility tour of the largest living soil grow in Montana and possibly the United States. We've rented out a local 1,200-person concert hall in downtown for a 5-hour networking and sensory event where you'll be able to sample and appreciate some of the best cannabis flower and cannabis products that Montana has to offer. And that's all included in the conference ticket. You can still purchase tickets and learn more at kisorganics.com. Now on to the show. Hey, Dr. Kaplan, thanks for coming back on the show today.

Hey, Tad, good to be here again.

Yeah, it was wonderful to get to meet you in person in Minneapolis. That was a lot of fun and I was excited to reconnect and I wanted to go back and talk about your research now that it's been out for a little while, particularly the paper around controlled drought stress. Can you touch a little bit on what that study was? And I know we're just diving right in here, but can you tell me a little bit about that?

Let's do it. Yeah. So when I was doing my PhD at University of Guelph, a couple of my trials were looking at the effects of controlled drought stress on indoor cannabis production. So the idea was, can we, can we apply controlled drought in a way that's not gonna overly affect yield, but will still increase secondary metabolites like cannabinoids, terpenes? We've seen it in other crops. It's, it's doable. But it can be challenging. And the tricky bit is the not losing yield. It's very easy to drought stress your plants in general. Every grower knows that. And so applying drought in a very specific way to see if we can elicit a positive response.

So when we talk about drought stress, we're talking about drybacks. It's another term for it, but essentially this idea that as the plant becomes stressed from a lack of water, it's, it, it's gonna put more energy into secondary metabolite production potentially, but it may do so at the cost of yield, right?

Yeah.

I think there's a balance there. What does that, what does that look like? And do we know where the optimal triggers are for, you know, that dance during a, the whole stage of a plant's life?

Yeah.

The flower cycle.

So we tried a lot of different approaches, timings, ways to apply drought stress, ways to detect drought stress. But actually, if we take just a quick step back, you mentioned that drybacks are the same as drought stress, and it's actually something I hear a lot, but I would like to separate the two.

Oh, please do. Yeah. Push back on that.

So drybacks are really important because I would say maybe because they, they have a certain effect on applying very small amount of stress, but I would say they're more important because they allow root zone oxygenation. They allow the substrate really to pull up oxygen and then having those cyclical events where oxygen can increase and then you irrigate cannabis really likes a highly oxygenated root zone. And so I think a lot of the benefits that we see from dry backs are due to that and not from drought stress.

So you're distinguishing that both of those are a lack of water in the rhizosphere, but, but you're saying like drought stress would be a more severe expression of that in the sense that like, are, are you waiting until the plant is actually showing some wilting to be considered drought stress versus a dryback is much, a much smaller irrigation change where it's just the media's dry, the plant's not really too stressed out yet.

Exactly. So dry, dryback, I, I would say it, you're, you're working within the realm of water is available to the plant, but maybe slightly less available. So it's, there's, there's a big window in which plants can still take up water from the growing media. But, and so you're, you're kind of working within that window and maybe you touch the bottom of it depending on how push, how hard you push the dryback. But when I was doing drought stress trials in my PhD, we had to go quite a bit farther than that. So we were going for way past what you would do on a dryback to, it took that long before we would see the plant show any drought stress responses.

Hmm. That makes sense. That makes sense. I want to dive in a little bit, a little bit, but you did go back and touch on the fact that plants, well, cannabis specifically, if we're talking about watering, when we, when we water, we're, we're pushing oxygen down into the media, right through, through this watering event. And Canabis likes this. My initial thought went to sub-irrigated planters. People are running things like AutoPots, particularly with organic production, living soil stuff, and getting pretty good results. I've always been a fan of top watering for, you know, some of that gas exchange interaction that you talked about there, but what are your thoughts on it?

So with the AutoPots, you're not constantly watering, right? It's still intermittent watering, or is it, or are you, are you talking constant irrigation?

I guess, okay, let me, let me say earthboxes or sub-irrigated planters. Those are probably things I'm more familiar with. This idea of just a reservoir of water sitting underneath the plant that's being wicked up through capillary action. So you don't really have any top watering occurring.

Yeah. Constant. It's constant, I guess. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. So your moisture level, I mean, same with Bluemats, you're getting more of a consistent moisture level, but at least with Bluemats, you are getting somewhat of a moisture curve.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the key difference there is if you're looking at a conventional or an organic approach with conventional, the focus is much more on the plant, right? Where you, you know, the drybacks, they do elicit a positive response for the plant, but what they're doing to the microbiome, I'm not sure. Do the microbes appreciate having those drybacks? I don't know. That's maybe more your world. I think that in a living soil approach, having a more consistent moisture content is probably conducive to a stronger microbial community, and that might deliver benefits to the plants as well.

So yeah, I mean, I would hypothesize with top watering, we get the best of both worlds because we do need to keep microbes cycling, which means there has to be a certain amount of moisture in the soil at any given time.

Yeah.

Using your distinction of a dry back versus, you know, a drought, I do see, I do see that there, there could be some benefits to drybacks with living soils or organic production without letting it get so dry that we're actually impacting nutrient cycling.

Yeah.

So that's, that's interesting.

Yeah. My preference, like you, is also to have drybacks and top watering because you get more even moisture distribution through the soil. You can add nutrients as you water, which is nice, to the entire substrate volume instead of just from the bottom. You don't get salt accumulations at the top as you do with subirrigation, nearly as much. But we all, like, if, if anyone's grown deep water culture, they know that cannabis thrives in that condition as well, right? And that's continuous moisture availability. Mhm. And so I think from a yield perspective, cannabis also likes to have that readily available water and nutrients all the time, but maybe for more of some of the quality aspects, it likes to have the drybacks.

Yeah. I, I wonder if we'd get more secondary metabolite production through top watering versus sub-irrigated or consistent water. That would be a really interesting study.

I would love to.

So let's talk about your research. So you found this huge bump in THC and CBD. By incorporating drought stress during the final weeks of flower. Um, can you, can you talk a little bit about what that looked like?

Yeah. So we did two trials. The first trial we looked at, we tried to guess when applying drought stress would be most effective. And then when I say effective, it's again, not trying to minimize yield losses while maximizing secondary metabolite increases. We, we thought week 7 would be a good time, week 7 of flowering. So most of the biomass has already been put on. The yield increases mostly to the flower, like the inflorescences themselves and not the, the plants not growing as much. And so we attached a whole suite of sensors to the plants. We looked at water potential in the actual xylem of the plant using some equipment that one of my advisors invented back in his PhD. I believe that's when he did that. And we looked at photosynthetic rate and all these different parameters that we can track drought stress. And we wanted to see how far we had to push the plant in terms of withholding water before we saw any physiological response. And it took quite a bit. We were using a big pot, we were using 11-liter, an 11-liter pot, and we're using organic nutrients as well. And we found that in that trial that yeah, there was that increase of, of cannabinoid content. So we had like, the yield was pretty much consistent. Let me just pull up my results here cuz it's been a little bit since we've done this. We had, yeah, we had, I think it was almost like a 30 or 40% THC, total THC increase. Yield was consistent. And so there were very positive results in there. And, and what we wanted to do next was look at timing. So if we apply drought, during weeks 4, 5, or 7? Would that have an impact? So if we apply it earlier, are we eliciting some kind of response in the plant that's going to have a downstream effect? Or is it better to wait until the biomass has been put on the plant and then apply the drought stress? Is it better to do intermittent drought? So apply drought, wait, and then apply it again. So we looked at all those different kind of methods for trying to get the same response we found in the first trial. And in this trial, we actually had to, we had more plants, so we were using smaller pots. We're using 6-liter pots. And we, in this trial, kind of across the board, we didn't find any positive results. Hmm. Like nothing meaningful. There were maybe some minor improvements, but what it kind of showed us was that the way in which you apply the drought stress and how long it takes for the drought stress to realize itself has a likely has a big impact. So we, again, we're using 6-liter pots in the second trial, 11-liter pots in the first trial. It took a lot longer for us to get the drought response in the first trial, cuz there was just more water available. It took longer for the dryback to happen.

Right.

Makes sense. Yeah. So, so we were getting to those same kind of levels of drought stress response in the, in terms of how the plant was perceiving it, but it took, it happened much faster in the second trial.. And so we didn't see any of the benefit that way. And what that told me was that there's just so much nuance to applying this and it's so challenging to apply it and try and get a specific result under even this very controlled settings that, that we were using it at the time.

Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, that's kind of, kind of the point. I think it's fairly well established and correct me again if I'm wrong, that plant stress in general will increase secondary metabolite production, typically at the expense of yield. The plant only has so much photosynthetic energy that it can put into growth, and it can put that growth into, you know, like I said, biomass production, or it can put that growth into like survival, you know, producing these other metabolites that are in theory help, you know, either to protect it or help it with its, you know, the future generations with, you know, reproduction. So I like the, I think, and again, this is, you know, like you said, it's— I don't, I don't know that anything is completely firmed up. I, I like the idea of drought stress or, you know, stronger drybacks towards the end of a flower cycle, those last week or two, for a couple— for a few reasons. One, we're trying to increase secondary metabolite production. Two, like you said, we've gotten most of the yield. And then three, it just makes harvesting easier because our, our water activity is lower going into harvest if we've done a dryback or if we've reduced water activity going into harvest.

Yeah.

Okay. If we do a drought stress or dryback right at the end of the cycle, the plant's gonna be a little bit drier going into the drying and curing phase. Yeah. That's my logic behind it. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, all of that makes sense. I'm not sure about the water activity thing though. I'm not sure if the, unless you're going to a point where it's like a pretty severe drought stress where the plant starts wilting, then you start, yeah, your, your water activity would be lower. But I would imagine that in the buds it would first, you'd first lose moisture in the leaves and then it would go to the inflorescences, right? And that, that'd be a quick thing to check to, to, to, to trial. But I don't know if that would actually change the water activity in the, in the, in the buds.

Yeah, I may, I, I, that's a very valid point. Inflorescence in the bud itself, we may not see an actual change in moisture content, but I would expect there to be lower water activity in the leaves and the stem and those sorts of things. But that, that's a very valid point and that's why we need science to look at this stuff. Do you think there's gonna be much difference across genetics in terms of how they may respond to drought stress or drybacks?

Yeah, I think definitely, you know, we did a whole suite of trials, horticultural trials on cannabis, and I, I continue to do that working, working at the Hawthorne Research Facility in, in BC after graduating and, and also in my role as an R&D manager at various facilities. Cultivar has a huge effect. Cannabis, the, the genetics are so variable compared to any horticultural crop that we look at. So if you're doing trials and you're not incorporating different morphologies and different, even terpene profiles, there's still no standard for like, there's no like representative genetic for different types of one that's maybe takes a lot of water, one that doesn't, things like that. So we're just gonna have to grab a bunch that we think makes sense to fit the application. So in a drought trial, maybe you look at one that's one that has a, you know, that feeds heavier or, or feeds less or takes up more water or takes up less water generally. But yes, we constantly find that there's huge differences between cultivars for any kind of trial we do, lighting or nutrients or IPM. It's a huge factor.

Yeah, I think that that's the primary reason I think every cannabis facility or even home grower needs to be sort of an amateur scientist in the sense that we can take work like research like you've done. And then we can try to apply it to our environment, to our grow, but we need to do it with a grain of salt, with the idea being like, hey, maybe we set this up with, you know, a control and that doesn't have to be large. You know, we don't have to pass statistical significance necessarily for our experiments, but, you know, looking at it like maybe I try with half my crop, a drought stress at 2 weeks, like kind of like what you did and see if I, you know, compare maybe qualitatively, you know, trying the flower to see if it seems like it smells more, is more potent. And then I can maybe make a decision for myself. But again, like you said, genetics are gonna change things. Lighting, CO2, environment, humidity, like VPD, all of those things are gonna have an impact on how the plant expresses itself. So it's, it's super complicated. And I just think we need to always keep that in the back of our heads.

I agree. Yeah. The, the amount of energy in one of these trials, the amount of effort that I would put into controlling all those variables that you, you you mentioned, you know, having stable VPD, having stable light, same nutrition, irrigation volumes, things like that. Those, uh, it was more energy and more effort than actually doing the trial. And, and the reason why that's so important is that if you're in an uncontrolled setting, if you're in any grow, like, there's— I don't— I haven't seen any grows that are, you know, built to the point where they can control these things to like a rigorous academic setting, yeah, lighting is gonna have a bigger impact than nutrition in general. You know, so if you're, if one of your bulbs is dimmer than the other one, your trial's ruined because that's already gonna outshine whatever treatment you're applying. And usually the treatments that we're applying are nutrition-based or irrigation strategy-based, and they're very, you're working at that last 5% of yield and quality. Where there's so many things in your growing environment that will have a bigger impact that if those aren't perfect, then you, whatever results you find are probably skewed based off of that lighting being different or your HVAC or your airflow being different in over that plant compared to the other control plant. That's the hardest thing in doing all this.

Yeah, I know people jump straight to fertility a lot of times as the main lever. But like you said, lighting plays a huge role. I think VPD is really, really important. I mean, obviously they're all important, but like that's the one where I see people make a lot of mistakes. And then the biggest one is irrigation. So I know you're intentionally doing drought stress here, but I find just proper watering is one of the most challenging and underrated aspects of cultivation just in general.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It actually is an interesting topic because like What you say, what you said is completely right. Irrigation timing frequency is so impactful on cannabis crops. Like we talked about Dryvax. So if you're looking at doing a fertilizer trial and let's say you have 10 plants and 5 plants are, are one fertilizer and 5 plants are another, if, if you're watering them all at the same time, then you are not necessarily responding to to any effects that the fertilizer is having on how fast the plant's growing. So if, if the fertilizer is making the plant grow faster and it's pulling up, which means that's taking up more water, you would have to irrigate it more frequently. But if you're doing a trial like this, you might think we have to water everything at the same time, otherwise we're skewing the results of the trial. But in doing that, you're also reducing any benefit that you're seeing from the product that you're using. Because you're irrigating too much, right? And that's gonna have a bigger impact. And so you often see these like null results because in trying to control for one thing, you're, you're losing out on another. And so like the, the proper way to do that is to treat each plant as an experimental unit and measure the water content or the water activity or the weight of the plant with the pot and irrigate it at a certain threshold, like at 30% volumetric moisture content or something. It's very hard to do. And it's hard to, especially if you're like, it's your own grow, you're not in a research setting, but that's how you would still see those little changes that you would see in with fertility, for example.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Speaking of organics here, yeah, you did some work. I had forgotten because I, like you, it's been a while since you did this work. But I hear people cite it all the time, you know, this idea of controlled drought stress because of your paper, because it was really one of the very first bits of research we actually had coming outta university for cannabis. Mm-hmm. So, so thank you for that. You know, you, you have a big piece of history that you get to be pretty proud of. Talking about organic fertilizers, you did this work on like optimal rates of organics versus salt-based fertilizers. Can we talk a little bit about what that research found and also how your perspective may have changed since you did that years ago?

Yeah, yeah, that was, that was a, that takes me back. Those are the first trials that I did on cannabis. And so we were looking at two things. We looked at developing cannabis-specific coco substrates and we looked at among those formulations we made of substrates. So there were, we were mixing different types of coco pith and fiber and coir to get certain water holding capacity and air porosity, things like that, to see what cannabis likes in terms of tho— that condition. And we also—

physical properties.

Physical properties.

That's right.

Yeah. And we also looked at applying organic fertilizer. So it was, it was, we, we didn't lo— we didn't compare it to conventional. It was just applying organic, but we, we did an optimal rate of organic liquid fertilizer for veg, for the vegetative stage. And then one for the flowering stage, and it was a premixed organic fertilizer that we used. And what we tried to figure out was how, how much fertilizer does cannabis like, like how high can the EC go in the substrate before there's a negative effect? Is more better? Is less, you know, basic things. 'Cause there, there was no research on this in the past, so anything we did was new and interesting and it would just create opportunities for future research. So we, we did find an optimum for both the veg, both the vegetative and the flowering stage crops. So we basically found that obviously not applying enough fertilizer was bad and applying too much fertilizer was bad. So we found kind of that, yeah, curve and we, we picked an optimum point. I think it was interesting because it showed how salt tolerant cannabis can be for the cultivars that we used. So the EC in the substrate got really high. It was organic, it's not conventional, it's different, but it got higher than I would've expected. To be as an optimal, but it's very much worth noting that the, you know, compared to what I would grow these days or what we would do or any like solid cannabis grower would grow it, these plants were not super happy. You know, the organic fertilizer at the time was not optimized. I, I, at that time I felt like I got burnt on organic fertilizer. It was, it was, it, yeah, it didn't perform well versus anything that I had grown even personally at home at the time. Right. So we found an optimum, but you know, it wasn't a good optimum, I would say. There's a lot of, a lot more that needs to be done on the organic side, which a lot of, you've been doing quite a bit of that as well, which I appreciate and I've been learning from. But yeah, that's kind of what we found.

So the, you found an optimal rate. It was, the EC was higher than you thought.

Yeah.

But the quality of the plants and the way the plants, their appearance was still really poor compared to what you were doing at the time with chemical fertilizers.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, I wasn't directly comparing in those trials to conventional or chemical, but I just, I know what I knew what good looked like.

Yeah. Yeah. And just because we had this conversation offline, I want to just throw this out there and you feel free to correct me too, but you did say that you think like what you just said on air that you think organics has come a long way. And if you were to redo it, you would probably use different methodology than these liquids that you used at the time of the trial.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. I would— I, for one, being an organic grower, just want to push back a little bit and say that, uh, your study does not definitively say that organics is not as good as chemical growing, but we, we have to start somewhere, you know, and there's so little research around organic cannabis cultivation that I'm just grateful that there's something out there, even if it's not particularly positive towards organics.

Yeah. Yeah. And actually in the paper, I don't, I don't think that there was no comparison again against conventional and it was just compared the different rates to each other. So there, there was nothing really to say that it was bad or, or good. It was just my opinion at the time that there was a, there was a long way to grow, go on, on organic. So yeah, I hope that people didn't get pushed away from organic from that either.

No, it's good. So, all right. So many craft growers swear by living soil, you know, organics, but large-scale facilities like a lot of the ones you've worked at or worked with prefer salt-based hydroponics or chemicals for consistency and yield. Where do you land in all of this?

Yeah, I'm, so I'm, I'm in between my, I support growers around the world. That's my job, right? We have a consulting company, Kenny Cripps Consulting, and, and we design facilities, we build facilities, we help people set up every aspect of the cultivation. And then after that, we support them on IPM, yield improvements, everything, right? And so this is my day-to-day is dealing with that. I would say most of my projects are focused on the larger-scale facilities. We work with growers of every scale, but usually when there's a budget for consulting, you get, it's usually in the slightly larger facilities. And most of that's conventional. So we're not looking at organic. We do have maybe 5 or 10 organic projects that we work on. And we often work with partners. I like your style for with David Perron as well. Organic, great organic cannabis grower. I, I'm seeing now more and more the potential of a scalable organic system, much more than 5 years ago, let's say. I've seen good examples of, of scaled facilities. I think it was a CannaKurbs episode on one recently actually, where they're using living soil. They're taking a more, more thoughtful, evidence-based approach to living soil rather than kind of the kind of set and forget or not taking any measurements during your process. You have to, it's more work to go organic, right? You're taking more measurements, more things. There's more data to collect and interpret it. I think it's more complicated and it just takes, I think it takes a more educated grower to do that at scale than it does for conventional. It's a challenge.

Yeah. So if people haven't seen the Cannacribs episode with Collective Elevation, Adam Arnold out there and his team is phenomenal. Uh, the quick plug where if you want to come tour it yourself, you can come to the Cannabis Cultivation and Science Conference last weekend of August this year. Really excited for it. But like you said, there is this range in organics that, you know, we do have people that are mixing their own nutrients and not testing. That's not necessarily the only way people— you can do organics nowadays though. Like, we can take a very, like, strong agronomic approach, evidence-based approach to cultivation, even though we're organics. We're just not all starting from the same spot. That is the advantage of mineral salt production, is every cycle you're starting from the exact same starting point. Whereas with organics, you know, we may have some organic nitrogen left over, we may have phosphorus reserves that are carrying to the next cycle. We're gonna have different biology in the soil. Every run. So you're right in the sense we aren't starting from the same spot, but I don't necessarily think it's harder. I just think we have to utilize soil testing and be consistent with that approach. But I'm glad to hear that you are seeing it on scale. Will, I will give you a little plug that I did see your presentation in Minneapolis and your, the uniformity and health of the crop that you were growing with salts was, was very impressive. They looked they looked great. I don't, I haven't seen that same level of uniformity reproduced with living soil, just to be totally frank.

Appreciate that. Yeah. Now you've seen a lot more living soil than I have, but maybe we'll get there. I think the tricky bit, I think with, in my line of work also is that we do a lot of facilities that are producing medical cannabis for export. And so we're servicing, so these are Canadian facilities, North Macedonia and South Africa, Thailand, Colombia, there's quite a few countries that are producing exclusively for export, or they have both local markets and export. And the microbial requirements are, are so tight where if using a more sterile system, I, I've had, I've seen better results in keeping those microbial levels lower. I think you can still do it in organics, but it's more challenging, especially at scale. And having to, like, one of our most important processes is completely sterilizing or cleaning and disinfecting a flowering room before before planting it, right? Between every crop or the turnover. And to do that with a living soil bed, it just leaves this effectively a point of contamination in the middle of the room every time. So it's, you can't really do a complete disinfection, which is, you wouldn't want to with organic, with living soil, right? And so finding a way to make that fit into the pharmaceutical kind of lens is interesting as well. And I, yeah, I would like to figure that out. I'd like to see, you know, the, like, I don't know if you, have you seen anything on that, on the, the kind of fail rate, pass/fail rates? 'Cause there's a lot of states that also have tight tolerances for organic versus conventional.

Yeah. So, well, two things. So one, on the pharmaceutical side, I got to be on an advisory board for a facility in Australia that it's really phenomenal facility and they are able to grow and export to a pharmaceutical standard. In fact, the, the people that, the owners of it are really wonderful people who their background was in pharmaceutical production. So like if Bayer wanted to come into a country and build a facility, his con, you know, their consulting company would be someone they hire. And they brought that experience over to cannabis, but wanted to do organics and living soil and this sort of thing. And that's how we connected and they're passing and they're doing it. So I think, I know it's possible, but I would agree with you. It is harder. To those specific standards. But if we're talking about just the standards that we see traditionally in most regulated markets in the United States, I'm not seeing a huge difference between conventional and organics on microbial fails. The growers we're working with are passing on microbials. Heavy metals tends to be more of a challenge, but even then, I think we've got— come a long ways, and I think we've figured that out for the most part too. But the ones that are most successful are cleaning, like you said, disinfecting, but not disinfecting the soil that's staying in the room. Everything else though is getting that same level of disinfectant, you know, hygienic treatment.

To be fair on that, it's, I would say that in terms of the cleaning disinfecting, it's humans that are the major vector for contaminating these products unless you're doing some, some, making some serious mistakes on the cultivation side and post-harvest. And so like if, if you're sanitizing your, your trimming rooms, your, your trimming equipment and that's cleaned and disinfected properly, you can mitigate a lot of the microbial loads just in doing that.

Yeah, for sure. And then where we see it is where if you're kicking up, like if your watering practices or kicking up, you know, peat moss and then, you know, dust into the air, then yeah, you, you're more likely to have microbial fail. But if you're able to keep that, you know, keep it outta the phyllosphere, you know, down on the soil level, then you don't have that issue. Also, what we're seeing is that growers that are using living soil, I think that living soil provides a certain level of pathogen protection. And this is, this is something that I was talking with Dr. Punja about, this idea that of probiotics, like we see with humans. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he believes that, that it does offer some level of protection too that we may not be getting in a more sterile environment.

We see that with things like Trichoderma and, you know, there's, there's, there's a product that we use in conventional as well, but there, there's, the problem is there's, you know, these billions of different options of things you can put in there. And, and what we're, if we find the, the exact one and it becomes a product that can be used in conventional production, that's, it's not easy to do. So we have a few products that we use, you know, even when we're doing hydroponics, we're putting, we're inoculating with microbes to get that response. But it's definitely not that whole suite of potential things that you're seeing in, in a living soil environment.

Yeah, you can absolutely rely on microbes too. I mean, it's just, you have more tools in the toolbox than we do. And one of the things that Dr. Pooja did that I just wanna highlight is when he did tissue culture to remove hop latent viroid, what they found, what, what he found was that after the plants were cleaned up, the first thing back in was Fusarium. Now, when you have a sterile environment, these pathogens then can get back in. And since Fusarium is so ubiquitous, it was really easy for it to reinoculate the plants and actually cause damage. So what the research that he did found that by incorporating Trichoderma immediately after tissue culture, they were able to get much better resiliency against pathogens. So this idea of bringing back in specific microbes to protect the plants. And I, you know, I think with living soil, we already have a little bit of that just in the soil itself. So yeah. Yeah, it's, it's an interesting conversation for sure.

Yeah. Well, yeah, that's, uh, it makes complete sense.

All right. I'm going to change topics here. I want to talk to you about this. You were one of the very first, I think you were North America's first cannabis PhD, which is really cool. When you, when you were going into this, what were you, what's the biggest myth from the legacy market or the biggest topic that you were most excited to apply scientific method to?

Yeah, it was a, it was a very interesting position to be in because there was no research. I'm a young scientist and I could kind of do whatever I, I wanted. Like, I had the, uh, anything would be interesting, let's say, to the, to the, um, to the growing community, to the academic community, and to myself too, right? Yeah. So I got to, and I, I had the freedom, my advisor is very good, uh, Dr. Yubinzeng, to kind of take what I thought was interesting and explore that. That's how you get the best results is you do something that you find interesting, right? So one of the trials I did was on propagation. This was such an easy trial to do, and it was one that I've seen everywhere. No, there's no one way to clone cannabis, right? We've seen people, if you go into any grow, there's especially if you go 5 years ago, every single facility was different. What number of leaves, how the density of the cuttings, how big the cuttings are, how, like how long the stems are. And the one thing that I saw everywhere was people were cut tip, cutting the tips off their leaves of the, of the, of clones. And I wanted to see if that was worthwhile. Like, why are people doing that? Because from a horticultural perspective, it's not very, you don't see that in, in other plants that are propagated by clones. And so that was one trial that we did to see if, if cutting the tips off leaves, the number of leaves, type of rooting hormone, and I think that's all we looked at, but various fat levels in each factor to see if which one drove the best rooting, and we found that all things aside, cutting the leaf tips reduced rooting success.

So everybody was doing it almost ubiquitously, but I remember doing it back in the day. Yeah. One question I wanted to ask you about that was when you did this trial, cuz I, I don't remember, did you still push the plants together? Because one of the reasons I would think for cutting the leaves was just to get more density between the clones. You can fit more into a tray without the leaves touching and then creating like microclimates where you might get pathogen growth?

Yeah, it, it was definitely, it was a standard kind of rooting tray. I have to look back at some photos to see how dense they were, but it wasn't like they were individually spaced apart. It was a rooting tray and they were randomized throughout the rooting tray by treatment, by factor. And so it was kind of that more standard rooting environment for cannabis. That's again, one of those things you try and when you're doing these trials, try and make it as applicable as possible. Yeah. But I still think that there is a place for cutting leaf tips because, and it depends on the congestion in the root tray, just like you, you said, if you have, if you're doing a 98-cell tray, Rockwool tray, for example, of clones, the plants are really close together. And sometimes depending on the morphology of the leaf of that cultivar, the leaves are so big that if you didn't cut them, then it would be this very dense canopy. And you start having a shading effect. And going back to what I said earlier on about lighting having more of an effect than other factors, that comes into play here. So if you're— the shade response is a much bigger factor than the leaf cutting response. So like I said, all else being equal, cutting leaves was not good. But if you are cutting leaves, if you're not cutting leaves but then shading the plants, the adjoining plants, then that's bad. You're going to have a worse, less uniform kind of cloning tray if you do it that way. So in that case, I would still cut, cut the leaf tips. We did a bit of a YouTube video through Canicrypts, through, uh, I can send you the link to it after if you want to share, but showing some of those examples because, because I get this a lot where people say, oh, we still cut the leaves as a benefit. Well, yeah, but if there's a, there's a place for it. There's a place for cutting the leaves and there's a place or not. I do it sometimes. It's, it's kind of meh.

I love that. That's a great example of how nuanced a lot of research is and a lot of cultivation is, you know, it's very case specific. So thank you for highlighting that. Not, yeah, if you send me the link, I will put it on the podcast page so people can find it. That would be great. Awesome. Um, where do you think the biggest gap right now is in cannabis horticultural research, our understanding of this plant? Genetics, lighting, microbiome.

There's, there's so much to be done everywhere. My focus is very much on, or interest, let's say, is on just creating cultivation systems that are scalable, that are efficient, low cost, produce the, the highest quality. And so figuring out what aspects of all the things that everyone's doing, what aspects of living soil, what aspects of lighting spectrum intensity, under canopy lighting, all those things, how they play well together and how they interact with each other, which is, I think, the most complicated part of all of this is it's really the interaction between all these little individual factors that we talk about and that we study and all the dials we turn as growers and how you can combine those in a way that makes an efficient cultivation system that can be scaled and turned it into something that you can produce the same product every time at the highest quality, at that craft quality. You know, if people are saying, people say living soil is the best quality, well, can we make it as efficient as hydroponics? Like, that's a, that's a passion of mine to be able to figure that out. And yeah, we work on that kind of stuff.

Yeah. I was, I was just having this conversation right before our interview. And so that really is the question. Like, people say that living soil is cannabis is better, commands a higher price point in the market. That's pushed by consumers saying, that we'd like the effects of it. You know, maybe there's something unique about the way it's produced. Now it's less— I think there's— I think consistency goes down and some people will argue that they can still produce consistency. But I think because we're not starting from the same spot and because we have all these different microbial interactions have this microbiome is so in flux, we are going to get slightly different phenotypic expression. Every cycle. That was what Jeremy Plumb was working on so diligently, this idea of how do we create the exact same phytochemical chemo response in organics, knowing that, you know, if we're reusing our media, it's gonna, it's gonna change. And so that to me is a really interesting topic, but I do think we are able to get a level of consistency that consumers appreciate. And I do think it can scale. And I do think that we can do it affordably, even more affordably than salt-based production if we're doing it correctly. But it's an interesting discussion at the very least. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, the uniformity thing, it's, I guess we gotta figure out, get to a point where are we striving towards that same level of uniformity? 'Cause that will be very challenging. Or do we want to maintain it as kind of a craft, slightly variable product? And that's some of the beauty of it, right? And it's still scalable. You can still hit the yields, but maybe the, you know, the, from batch to batch, the consistency is slightly less. It's not all that desirable for a pharmaceutical product, but maybe that's what people want. Maybe people want variability. They want that kind of like terroir-specific almost effect or, or product. Or do we really wanna push for that consistency? I don't know if, if the people that really like or care about organic cannabis, do they care that much about the consistency in the same way? As like a pharmaceutical patient would?

I mean, I think it's different. It's similar to how someone would approach, you know, wines. This idea that we have different vintages, you know, every cycle being slightly different, unique, special, having a slightly different effect. I've heard people comment about how the effects of organic living soil cannabis seem to last longer than some of the, some of the conventional product that's coming out. But you know, this idea— here's the other thing too, is like, is uniformity necessarily superior? I mean, it visually, aesthetically, yes. But if we're able to achieve the same yields and we're able to achieve similar or potentially even better quality, I guess how much does uniformity really, really matter?

Yeah. Where it's important from a production perspective is is plants taking up the same amount of moisture at the same time, growing at the same rates to the same heights, same size of plants so that they can intercept the same light. And so that a bud from one section of the crop is gonna have a similar THC content, terpene content with one in another, right? And, and that's important. That's important for like a CPG type product. You know, if you're producing a brand and you get, your customer expects a certain experience, certain product, that is like an ultimate goal is consistency. But when you look at the— if you look at more of that, like the vintage kind of perspective and or terroirs or wines, it's different. So there's a nuance there. And I don't know if it's worth splitting that up or kind of pushing. I wouldn't want to push living soil into that conventional kind of framework. I don't know if that's the way to go.

Yeah, I will say as you lose crop uniformity, you are opening yourself up to microclimates, you know, greater, less uniformity in the final flower. So those, those are, I think, valid points. I'm glad you brought that up. I don't know that I have a whole lot more to add on that topic. Yeah, I think it's fun. I would like to have a, a salts versus organics, not debate, but conversation at some point, cuz I think there's a lot of nuance there that's really interesting. And I'm not, while I, I personally choose to grow using organics, not not just because of the ethical or ecological impacts, but because of, I think that there's actually some science and strong logic for why to do it. I'm not like anti-mineral salts. I know, I think they have a place in cultivation, you know, and in agriculture. I just think it's overstated currently, but yeah, I'd love to dive into that at some point.

Yeah.

All right. Well, let's jump over to Let's jump over to scaling. I have a question here. So from your time doing R&D at, I think it was Flower Corporation, is that right? What were the challenges of taking small-scale university research and facility to applying that and running, you know, essentially, or working in a 50,000-square-foot commercial facility?

Yeah, that's a great question. There's different kinds of research. There's, you know, you can go from kind of the lab scale to field scale. To, or to controlled environment scale, then to field scale, and then to practice. That's kind of the, the trajectory of most research, how it becomes research to practice. My field is very much in the field scale and controlled environment scale, so most of what I did was tried to have readily available results quickly, especially when I was working in R&D at, at private companies or, or public companies, whatever um, goal is to be able to do research that can be immediately or very quickly used in production. And in doing that, you have to have a certain scale, you have to have a certain number of replications, your growing environment has to be similar to what you're going to be applying it to afterwards. And so I was growing in almost all my trials, even during my PhD, I was growing at a commercial cannabis facility. It wasn't in a lab or anything like that, or in, in a, in a research chamber. I was growing inside of a crop of a well-designed indoor growing facility. Yeah. So it was, it allows you to kind of skip a step, but it means that you are taking up valuable production space in an otherwise productive, you know, flowering room. So that's a cost to the company. But then it means that the results are readily usable after, which can have more broadly beneficial results for the company as a whole.

Yeah, it makes sense. Like by giving you a small space in there, those results are gonna be directly applicable to that facility, but they may be sacrificing yield if something that you're testing doesn't pan out to be, you know, a yield increase or metabolite increase. Yeah, that's a really good point. But I love, I love it, you know, applied science. And I think that's one issue. Like, I know we did some applied science at a facility and then sent it into a journal and it got denied because it was done in a research phys— it wasn't done in a in a growth chamber or in a research facility. But I think the implications of the research was more applicable because it was done in a working facility.

Yeah. Oh, I'd love to look at that. I'm curious why they, 'cause all of my research was done in the, in prac, like cultivation facilities inside of it.

Yeah. So this one, I'll just give you a little more information about it 'cause I think it's interesting. So we compared Blue Mats, which is automated irrigation where for people who aren't familiar with blue mats, it maintains a moisture level in soil. And we compared that with what the facility was doing, which was hand watering. And so we couldn't change our control of hand watering, which I realize presents a lot of variability, but that was what the facility was doing. So when we, when we did the, the te— the trial, what we found was the blue mat beds outperformed the hand watering beds. And that's the big elephant in the room is how good were these employees, you know, these workers at, at watering. And one could argue they were pretty good at it cuz they've been doing this for a long time. This wasn't like a new help. These were people who had been cultivating for over a decade growing in this style. That being said, I think that's the biggest reason why the research was, yeah, that makes sense actually denied.

Yeah. That, that, it goes back to that irrigation that what I mentioned before, right? If you're irrigating in a slightly uncontrolled way, it's gonna have such impacts on the overall outcome. So you have to, if you're doing that, it just has to be super well recorded. You have to know exactly how you did it. So you have to control your control, right? In those settings. So it's, it's, you can just compare to the rest of the crop in the room, but if you weren't the one applying the treatment or irrigation or whatever to the control plants, then it's not really a control plant. It's, that's kind of what you would do as the next step is more of like the field trials. And that wouldn't be something that you publish. That'd be something that you do as a grower, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So interesting though, nonetheless. Well, let's talk about this. So you're setting up, you're currently setting up a research facility. First of all, tell me a little bit about what that process looks like of setting up a new facility for you. And then we'll get into a little more about the research itself.

Yeah. So with Canacribbs Horticulture Consulting, we Again, we support growers in all types of systems and all across the world. And one of the biggest challenges we face is that we can't always be there with them to demonstrate something, to show how under-canopy lights work with this type of pruning practice, anything, how things interact or how individual factors will impact their grow. We can, we do our best. We work over video and we, we do go in person, but what we'd like to do is to be able to make that information more broadly available. And something that we can direct people to, or just like, you know, video call from the grow room and say, hey, this is how we do it, take a look. So we've been actively on the hunt and we have a site now, an indoor facility in Canada where we will be growing. It's a commercial facility, but we're designing it and setting up in a way where we can demonstrate our practices. We can run trials, we can create content there that's helpful for growers. And we're just trying to fill that gap of being able to support growers with less barriers.

Oh, it makes sense. And being able to show that your methodology works and scales, I think, is important for a consultant. That's great. The research that you want to do there, as you know, private research moves much faster, but it has less guardrails. It doesn't have the same level of peer review. What are your thoughts around the validity of private research and white papers? Is it better or worse because you have something that's, you know, you could say is more like applied science?

Yeah, people trash peer-reviewed research and the process and how long it takes and how bureaucratic and whatever, but there's a lot of value in it. That's the foundation of our body of knowledge. In any field, right? And it is hard to publish something and, and it's hard to publish something for good reason. It depends on which paper you're working with and there's all sorts of nuance there. But you know, when I was submitting things for publication, they would find things that, that I hadn't thought about. It's experts in the field that are reviewing your paper. And if you're not presenting something in a way that's accurate in terms of the results, like if you're, if you're saying, if you're putting a conclusion that's not representative of the results you actually found, or your trial is slightly not controlled in the right way, like if for any reason, you shouldn't be able to share that as, as, as valid research because what happens is that people who don't necessarily understand every single detail of how to do this work will take that and they'll run with it and it can do more harm than good. And so the, the concern with white papers and private research is that there are no framework or standard review process for this work, and you kind of have to take the people doing it and trust that they're doing it properly. And so there's more of an aspect, I would say, if you're looking at a white paper or private research, it's just, it's largely reputational. Is the person doing it someone who understands the process? Would they've done their own proper kind of internal peer review. Is that, do they talk about that? Are they open about exactly how they did the trial? That it, it kind of skips a step and it's, it requires a bit more trust. But if you, it allows you to do research a lot faster and put out results more quickly. So it's not a, it's not a very clear answer.

Sorry, but. Well, on the flip side, a lot of university research is funded by large-scale corporations that a lot of smaller companies, you know, like myself, for example, I can't afford to pay for university research on living soil. I just, I don't have the funding for that. And they're not going to do the research without funding because it's expensive to do research. So a lot of our research is directed by private enterprise. I agree with everything you said. I just want to throw that out there as another piece of the puzzle.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. The degree to which the funder impacts the research, I would say it's probably less than most people think that the professors have to, and like the people overseeing the research have to, they don't have a good reputation if they're not protecting the integrity of their research. That's why they're there. Right. And the peer reviewers also have nothing to do with whoever's investing in the product. They can just reject the paper if it seems like there's a conflict of interest or or that something has been done in a way that's used their results. So there are guardrails for that, but it is too hard, I would say, for smaller companies to access that rigorous research. Like, and so there's no, there's no good solution for it. I would say that if, if there are reputable groups, I know like the CRC, the Cannabis Research Coalition, does private research and they, they're probably le— I'm not sure if they're less expensive or more expensive than working with the university, but I would, I would guess that they're a little less expensive. And they're also, they have a strong reputation to withhold. They're unlikely to be, it's run by PhDs and scientists who have done this, who have to protect their reputations. So likewise, how I would run a research facility, like you, you couldn't pay me to skew the results because my reputation is on the line. And so it depends who's doing it, I would say, how much you trust them.

I guess my point is not necessarily that the data is going to be bad. It could be, it could be bad, but more just the direction of the research and what topics are being researched is brutally driven by private enterprise a lot of times because a company will come to you and say, hey, I want you to, I want you to test this media out or this product or this methodology because it's going to directly impact my ability to create revenue or release a new product and things like that. And so that is driven by private enterprise. However, the actual research that gets done that maybe supports that product might still be peer-reviewable and accurate and there might be a lot of benefit to it, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. That what a byproduct of that I would say is, and if you've like in any lab, you'll have a funder that comes in and they'll say, can we research this product? And then you'll give it to a student or you professor and the professor kind of looks at it from a lens of, okay, let's support the goals of this funder to try out their product. But what foundational kind of thing can we figure out along the way? So their job is to understand what everyone needs, what the growers need, what, what people are at, the questions people are asking. And if they can find a way to do both at the same time, satisfy the private company, but also along the way learn something else, that's a, that's an interesting way to go about it. And it's kind of, that's how I think about it. Best of both worlds.

Yeah, that's a really good point. And then eventually if the research gets published at some point in time, the rest of us, the general public, will get access to that research, which further increases our body of knowledge around a topic. But yeah, it is, it is, it's a tricky subject. And I do think, like you said, there is, there are some advantages to, to private research or even white papers. Just we have to take it all with a grain of salt. And if the framework and methodology of any scientific experiment is done correctly, then it's replicable by anyone anywhere in the world. And that's the beauty of science is if it's done right, the whole idea is that someone else could repeat that experiment somewhere else and get a similar or different result. And that furthers our knowledge of whether or not that original result was accurate or not.

Yeah, that's right.

So you touched on under canopy lighting. You mentioned it. I want to hear your thoughts on it, cuz I've been having some really good results with it. Myself. What are you experiencing with under canopy lighting?

Yeah, I think a lot of growers are in the same position as you. It, I, I'm a, I'm a big advocate for under canopy lighting. It used to be maybe 5 years ago that it was prohibitively expensive to put in under canopy lights. The unit price of the lights was really high and they weren't as efficient and, and people were already, they weren't, they haven't optimized their top lighting situation yet. Right. So that's maybe more low-hanging fruit. But at this point where we have pretty solid top lighting options, we're seeing that if you've, if you set everything up well in terms of irrigation, top lighting, canopy management strategy, HVAC, then adding under canopy lights can increase yield 15 to 20%. And not just yield, but also uniformity of the, the, the, like the bag appeal, the color of buds, secondary metabolites of buds underneath the canopy, top of the canopy. So. Any facility that we design now, or if there's an opportunity to retrofit a facility, if there's a budget for that, I'll recommend putting it under canopy. And there's things to consider. It changes the way you do your canopy management. It changes the way you maybe have your— it changes your top lighting strategy a little bit. But overall, it's very positive and it's a great tool for growers.

Yeah, we had this approach in cannabis. It was like more light, more light. The research from Dr. Bugbee was showing that like cannabis is a high light plant. And so we kept, people just kept blasting with more light from above. What we're finding, the research is finding is that if we apply the light from below, we're getting less photo bleaching and less lower quality buds. So we have more A bud, less B and C bud. And so we get more uniformity in the, in the bud structure too. So yeah, I'm with you. I think it's, I think it's phenomenal. And the cost of building out more square footage or going vertical, which is so challenging, just adding, increasing the yield that we have in the footprint we already have is phenomenal.

I agree. Yeah, it kind of, it's, when possible, I try and avoid going multi-tier for flowering when possible, right? And there's many benefits to it. But if land is not, like, if the facility size is not a limitation, I'd prefer to do more single-tier rooms. But now that you can do single-tier with slightly taller canopies with under canopy, because you have more canopy volume that you can actually illuminate, it bridges the gap a little bit to multi-tier where you might be, have smaller canopies. And unless you do also under canopy with multi-tier, it's a whole other thing. So it allows single-tier growers to do a lot more with light and to maximize their space.

You mentioned canopy management. That's something that I'm still figuring out with under-canopy lights and living soil, at least on my own personal grow, because when I prune, the two things I always thought about that's been drilled in my head from my botany professor is light and air. So the whole time I'm pruning in my head, I'm thinking light and air, light and air. With top lighting, and some of this goes back to the, you know, Cannabis Research Coalition and the initial work by Dr. Allison Justice. Over a decade ago now, I think, this idea that certain leaves are nutrient sinks if they're not getting enough light. I think it was somewhere around 200 PPFD off the top of my head.

Yeah, I think so.

Basically for top lighting, it was very easy to prune a plant because beyond a certain distance depth of canopy, we're just taking everything off because it's not really— the buds aren't getting enough light, the leaves aren't getting enough light to really provide any nutrient value. So with under canopy, how are you approaching it since now we have light coming from two different directions? It's just a totally different scenario.

Yeah, I think you can use the same approach that Allison Justice came up with, with that 200 PPFD or maybe 150 as a, as a low threshold. You just turn your, turn your parameter upside down, right? And see, there's still gonna be shading. And so you'll still have to find where that, center of the canopy is and see what, where, how much leaf needs to be removed from there. But it just gives you more canopy area that is intercepting that 200+ PPFD. So you can have a larger volume of canopy and that translates into higher yields.

Yeah, I'm still figuring that out, but I, at least for me right now, I'm not removing— my strategy is I'm not removing bud sites, so I'm just leaving all the flower sites, even the ones in the middle of that canopy. And I'm finding there isn't— there's so much more uniformity, more than I would've expected in that middle canopy that has to be getting less intercepted light just because of there's dense foliage on both sides of it. And then I'm primarily just removing fan leaves all around there to try and open up the middle of the canopy.

Yeah, right.

I also find I struggle personally with keeping that canopy from getting too tall. So the actual, like, I guess we'll call it depth of that canopy, the height of the canopy sometimes gets too big depending on the cultivar. 'Cause I'm, I'm typically growing a new cultivar every cycle that I don't know exactly how much it's gonna stretch and how large it's gonna get. How do you deal with these challenges on a commercial scale when you have all, you know, a bunch of different cultivars in a room and you're running these different under canopy and top canopy. Are you taking like a different pruning or canopy management strategy to every different genetic cultivar?

Yeah. So there's a process that I recommend for integrating a cultivar into your growing environment. And this is a very grower-specific practice where you have your phenotyping process, which could be either from seed or from a a bunch of cuttings you got from a nursery, whatever that is, and that's in its own environment. You're doing that, um, we can go into depth in that too. That's a whole thing where it's a small scale but it's in, it's in the right growing environment and you have plants at different heights and things like that. And you just got to do your best to, to just to see if the plants are going to meet basic criteria. You're not going to optimize your canopy in those situations. You're going to figure out if it's a heavy feeder, maybe You're gonna figure out the yield roughly, you're gonna figure out THC content, things like that, and bag appeal. And then when you get to the next step, once you picked your winners in there, we do kind of a in-process phenotyping, I call it, or where you're growing whole tables of a, of a plant. And that's, you're not putting it into the room yet. It's not in production, but it's a whole table. So you, you can treat it as a crop, as a canopy, right? And in doing that, you can start to evaluate different different planting densities if you want. Within that table, you can evaluate different pruning or canopy management techniques. One tool that we like to use a lot is leaf area index, which is basically just using a PAR meter. It's a really simple tool. There's a formula that you can use. I can share it with you as well, but you— it's also in our canopy, our Eubanks textbook, The Handbook for Cannabis Production in Controlled Environment. So we did the canopy management section in there. Myself and my business partners. And so you take a PAR meter and you put it on top of the canopy, you see what kind of light you're getting, you put it underneath the canopy and you see how much is being— is going through the canopy. And that gives you a value that you can use. And so if you are growing a new cultivar and you want to standardize a little bit of light hitting the table effectively is what it is. So there's enough airflow and light is penetrating deeper into the canopy. You can set that value as you're, as you're applying, as you're doing your canopy management for that cultivar. So you take a little bit more leaf off to get to the certain value or a little bit less depending on the morphology, the size of the leaves, things like that. And it gives you like a number that you can strive towards rather than just a rough, it should look like this or, yeah. Yeah.

No, that's, that's, that's great that you're quantifying it. So basically what you're saying is every facility should have an R&D space prior to bringing a cultivar into production to have a better idea of exactly how to manage that.

Yeah, you can do it in your, in your flower rooms as well, but it's like, it could be a table, a dedicated table. I don't mind doing it in a production space because having it, having a dedicated R&D room is usually prohibitively expensive and also is not super representative of the larger flowering rooms. So the difference is that you have to have people who are managing that. You can't just have your production workers also irrigating those plants or fertilizing those plants. You have to have like an R&D person or someone who's responsible for treating each one individually and taking measurements and things like that. So you don't need to spend money on the space, but you gotta spend money on the practices and the people to record things properly, to set things up properly and interpret.

In a perfect world, I love the idea of an R&D room. And when I say room, I mean significantly smaller. And you're right, you're going to have variability in environment between different room sizes. But I like the idea of a room that can double as R&D and quarantine. Yeah. To be able to bring stuff into a facility and let it sit for a while. And then if you know, you're not doing any experiments at the time, then that could just be another tiny production room. I know it doesn't fit into everyone's facility design, but at the very least, if you have to have a quarantine space anyway, I don't know, why not have it wear a few hats, I guess. I don't know.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah. We often will put in R&D space. We always, almost always put in quarantine space in our facility designs. Sometimes it's like we have, we'll have like a backup mother room and that can be effectively a half quarantine, half backup mother room. But having a, having a, cause the problem with the quarantine is that you're on a different, you're in a different photo period than flowering.. So you have to have a room that you can either use as quarantine. So you can't use them at the same time.

No. Yeah, it would have to, you'd have to be very like, uh, thoughtful, I guess, or intentional about how you want to use the space, but having a room that you can, you know, like, oh, I just got access to these genetics. Where do I put them? You know, first and foremost, but then if you're not bringing in plants into that space, how can we re— how can we utilize that space for something else, I guess. So it's not just sitting there.

Yeah, ideally that first step can be done by the breeder, but we're not there yet for cannabis. That, that first kind of like screening, let's say if you get a breeder that you trust, we have in Canada, we're, we are, we're a little bit spoiled in that it's a mature market. We have some solid breeders that they're been established for a long time and they do that work. And if you get to know them and you trust them, you can avoid that step. But nowhere else in the world really. Maybe California, maybe some places in the States and Oregon, but I don't even know, man.

I just heard too many horror stories. I mean, even myself, if you get root aphids, if you get HLVD, if you get root-knot nematode, like there's so many different things that can come in on a plant. I mean, even thrips that pupate in the leaf, you won't even see them. The plant will look clean and then a few days later you could be in trouble. So that, yeah, I hear you, but it makes me nervous.

Yeah. I feel the same way. Yeah. Because it doesn't exist. Like I, I don't get to recommend that to people because it's not a, it's not, I don't know all the breeders and I don't trust all the breeders. And so for my facility, for the research facility, I have a breeder that I'm working with that I trust their phenotyping process and that they're going to send me something clean. Took a long time to build that trust, but that, you know, that doesn't translate everywhere. So. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, I really enjoyed talking to you today. This was a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing more about what, you know, research you do in this new facility. And, uh, yeah, I— CannaCribs has been a really fun thing to check out on YouTube, and I love seeing all the different facilities they show there. And it's really cool to see that you're working with them on, uh, the consulting side.

Yeah, maybe it's worth noting we're doing, uh, the product together, Stash Blend.

That's right. Yeah. So yeah, so for those that are listening to this show, I, you know, I talked to Nate over Grower's House and he said, yeah, go ahead, we can let people know that we, KISS Organics helped in the formulation of the Bloom and I think it's Stash Base.

Yeah.

Base.

Yeah.

I think you're calling it Base.

Yeah.

But essentially the grow formulation side too. So yeah, that's been fun. It's been really great working with Grower's House and CannaKribs on that formulation and, and yeah, it's, it's fun to see it now in production. I, I hear some of the facilities are starting to use it and certainly a lot of home growers, so.

Yeah, we're getting good feedback, which is great. So kudos to you on that. And hopefully we'll be trying it in the R&D facility as well. Now there are things that, that practices that, that, anything you hear of that's interesting, let, let me know because we're going to be wanting to try all sorts of different things and see if we can communicate that to growers and help, help our growers.

Yeah, I just want to say like, I love that you and I come from totally different backgrounds and totally different sides of the industry. You know, me being on the organic side, primarily as a supplier, you on the research side coming into consulting and scaling with Mineral Salts. But we both love science, we both love research and growing this plant, you know, and the opportunities to discover new research with a relatively, you know, unresearched crop compared to every other crop out there. And so I love that passion and the fact that we can collaborate and find ways to connect on something that, you know, even though we have very different backgrounds, that's what I think science really does. And this plant really brings people together on.

So thank you. Yeah, no problem. No, it's, it's, um, yeah, it's a pleasure.

That was Dr. Darren Kaplan, and you are listening to the Cannabis Cultivation and Science Podcast. If you like the podcast, please leave us a rating and review and give us a follow on Instagram and YouTube. And don't forget, at Kiss Organics, we have a wide array of products we offer on our website, ranging from soils, amendments, and beneficial insects to soil test analysis and commercial consulting. We carefully research all the products we offer and manufacture to make sure they are science-based and meet our highest standards of quality. Thanks for listening.