What Happens When You Find Mold in Your Grow?
What kind of situations might come up that would force you to take down the whole grow room? Mold.
Mold is the one that will kill the whole room very quickly. Pests are a pain in the ass, like spider mites but you can generally contain them. Using pesticides that are organic and clean and approved by the regulatory boards, you can get rid of spider mites even though they're a pain in the ass. You hear you have spider mites and that’s gut wrenching, but you know you can get rid of them.
Mold is a whole different thing because mold just goes everywhere. If there's mold on a plant leaf, even if you just brush against it, it shoots millions of spores into the air. Then all your fans and your HVAC system starts blowing it around and it lands on other plants.
If you have a mold outbreak, it's bad. It's really not good. I lost a whole room to a bad mold outbreak once and that sucks. If it’s in a grow room, depending on what you're harvesting out of that room, you could be losing $5,000 or you could be losing $150,000.
On top of that, you lost two or three months of time. You've got two months of the growth cycle, then you find out at the end that it's not salvageable because of mold, and you kill it and bring it down. Then you have to clean that room, you have to bleach everything.
It's a complete gutting of the room if you find mold. There’s a special technique to get the contaminated product out without cross contaminating. You put a garbage bag over the plant, then you cut it and then flip it upside down and haul it out gently.
Basically, when you're dealing with mold, you do everything really, really slowly. If you shake a plant with mold, those spores spew out into the air and you're screwed.
Many times though, you won't have to lose a whole room just because of mold. That's why you have to be proactive and look through your plants every single day. Look for mites, look for outbreak, look for nutrient deficiencies.
Our protocol is this: if one of our grow assistants sees a plant that they think has mold or a bug on it, they get one of our head growers. The head grower takes a look and they make the decision if it’s mold or not. If they think it's mold, even if they only think it is and aren’t 100% sure, we take action immediately. We never give it a day or come back later to see if it got worse. We don't take that chance.
You take a garbage bag and you very slowly put it over top of the plant, tie it off at the base and then you garbage bag every plant around it. If you're growing in rows, the infected plant has eight plants around it, generally. You're going to throw away nine plants because you think one might have mold.
Each plant is worth about $2500 per year, so that’s a heartbreaking situation. That means we willingly throw out over $22,000 worth of plants due to a potential mold situation. It’s very serious.
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