A Fork in the Grow : Automation vs Farm to Table Growing & How to Know Which is Best For You
Do you have any perspective or opinion on grows that are really technical? The grows that are picking up a lot of data points and using that data to adjust vs more old school, hands on growing approaches? I have two very interesting opinions about that that are very dichotomous from each other, very opposite from each other.
My first one is from a cannabis business owner’s perspective. I’m a CEO of a cannabis grow, and my primary focus is to make money because it's a business and I have a fuck ton of bills and debt to pay, and shareholders to split everything with. So from an owner's perspective, I need to make money.
From that perspective, anything that's going to automate and regulate and give me consistency, I’ll take 85% consistent quality all day long. If a technology or a system can guarantee me 85 across the board versus a 90-90-95-20-95-60-80, I'll take the 85 consistency.
By that I mean quality - how good is the tool, how much yield I got from it and how much money was spent on it, and rating that from 1 to 100. If I can consistently get an 85, meaning I got a decent yield and product with whatever technology or automation, and I didn't have to spend too much money on it, that’s a win. If a new tool or system can guarantee me a consistent outcome, I will take that all day versus fluctuation.
Fluctuation like going from 90%-95% where we got an awesome yield, some amazing flower, with great THC levels, and it cost us virtually nothing to grow, but then the next time we only get 60%, it's shit, or we lost most of the grow, that’s not acceptable to me. When results are all over the place, it's scary and unpredictable.
For example, you're waiting for lab tests to come back and praying for no mold. If one lab test comes back with mold, you lose 10 pounds out the door. You could lose entire rooms that way, just because there's a mold you can't see or didn't even know was there. But if the labs come back and say mold, it's all toasted, you have to destroy it. Your margins just disintegrate.
If you can implement a new technology that guarantees that mold is never going to happen to you and you're always going to have something decent to sell, then yeah having those crazy ass lamps is great. It's going to protect the business and give a much steadier source of reliability, which is what the entire company runs on.
The other side of me, which is unfortunately for me the more dominant side of the decision, believes by operating in that way, you are completely destroying the relationship that the people have with the plant.
That is really weird for me to say, because I'm not a hippie at all. However, after working with cannabis and growing it and being around it for so long, now I have a very strong appreciation of the plant-person relationship.
From its entire cycle of when it's a clone and we call them babies, then it's the mom who makes the babies, and we go from there. When you're growing, you care about these plants and it's not because of the money, it’s a pride thing. It's that I'm in charge of this plant's life cycle and if it’s bombing out, you feel bad.
It's kind of like cooking. If someone really loves that product or the process, it comes out better in the end. They put much more attention to detail and they really focus on the little things that make the plant grow a lot better. In the end, you wind up with product that shows that dedication, and you have patients that really appreciate it.
If you put all that time and attention in from the beginning, all the way through until the person actually smokes it, it comes back full circle. They're happy and appreciative and it makes you want to do even better the next time.
I think that cycle is the whole reason that cannabis exists in the way that it does. If people didn't care that much, it would still be like the stuff in the 1970s - that 7%-8% THC garbage that everyone smoked. It's not like that anymore because people are out there trying to improve it, because they care.
No machine is going to say, we need to make this one better, how can we make this how we make this better? Machines and automation just follows these rules and I don't think that's how the industry should be run. It's like industrialized farming versus farm to table. There's a place for both.
Like I said, I'm still a businessman, there’s still the masses that need product and that can't afford the higher prices. So that's where automation and data comes in, to find ways to lower the margins and lower the overall costs for the masses who can't afford "farm to table” type cannabis. Someone's got to provide that.
If someone were to have an automated data driven grow, it would make sense to dedicate that to extracted products. And conversely, a more hand-crafted, farm to table grow can be dedicated to flower that's going to be smoked, it just makes sense. You do what I do - both!
Most of my rooms are the hands-on, high quality, focused on producing the best that we can out of every inch of that room. Then I have other rooms where they're just set it and forget it rooms, with really crappy nutrients and barely any attention. Just a couple of spot checks here and there, and consistent lighting and air.
Those rooms are grown for the sole purpose of flipping it into oil and going into manufacturing. We can also sell them as lows that'll be the $8/gram flower. There are people out there who only want to buy lows, and they don't care if it’s the Popov vodka of weed. There's more Popov sold than Belvedere, let’s just be real.
If you're in business, it doesn't matter how much you care about your vodka, if no one is going to buy it, you’re not in business very long, especially if there's not a large demographic. With cannabis, your demographic is only your state. That's it. Legally you can't sell to the whole country.
You just put in millions of investment to get this business going, so you can't only sell the good stuff because "you care". You're going to go bankrupt, so you've got to be able to play within the boundaries.
Having those larger commercial grows purely for manufacturing grows allows you to do both, to have the more connoisseur grow. Having that balance is important, one supports the other.
We will be posting more questions, answers, and industry tips regularly, so be sure to sign up for our email list to be notified to your inbox! Also, we will be releasing the full length version of the podcast on these talks at the end of the week as a wrap up for those that prefer to just listen to the full podcast in one sitting.
Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO