Cannabis is a plant that typically thrives in warm and sunny conditions. If you live somewhere cannabis can thrive year-round outdoors, count yourself as very fortunate! For the rest of us, high-quality cannabis comes with a price tag that’s relative to the cost of production, whether growing your own at home or supporting any number of professional producers. A large percentage of this cannabis is grown indoors under grow lights in carefully controlled environments. These methods are capable of producing potent and clean flowers consistently. Growers have spent the last several decades perfecting the craft of indoor bud production and are reaching new heights for yields, THC and terpene levels, hitting numbers once thought to be only mythical.
However, the cost of producing cannabis like this can be very high. Both for the required expense and the potential waste stream created when factoring in power, water, fertilizer, growth mediums, carbon dioxide, transport and everything else needed to grow modern top-shelf flowers.
Coupled with competitive pressures in the marketplace for producers, savvy growers are looking to reduce their bills and environmental impact while continuing to raise the bar for harvest weights and quality. In a technology treadmill, early adopters of game-changing technologies stand to benefit the most, so keeping an eye on emerging technologies that help improve efficiency can pay back big.
Let’s take a look at some of the technologies that are making a difference.
Typically, one of the greatest expenses associated with growing high-quality craft cannabis indoors is power consumption. The majority of the power used is associated with grow lighting and managing the heat they produce in a closed environment. Here are some ways that are proving to make a positive impact in lowering power bills while potentially improving crop quality and yields.
Sun-Grown Indoor & Dynamic LED Grow Lighting
Greenhouses are capable of producing high-quality cannabis efficiently; however, the harvest quality has historically been related to variable conditions that occur in the external environment–something growers have very little control over. Basically, the greenhouse acted as an added layer of protection while still relying largely on outside conditions.
This has changed.
The environment in a modern greenhouse can be tightly controlled, similar to growing indoors. While clearly there are some expenses and power use associated with this, the savings in lighting costs and potential increases in crop quality can be tremendous. Strong natural light is very tough to beat when it comes to growing high-quality, healthy cannabis plants. However, the sun doesn’t shine bright every day and seasonal light conditions can vary greatly.
Dynamic LED grow lighting installed in a climate-controlled greenhouse answers the call when it comes to producing big yields of consistent, high-quality cannabis while reducing power use.
Here’s how it works:
Quantum light sensors are strategically installed throughout the greenhouse, creating a number of zones, addressing the fact that the sun moves overhead throughout the course of the day, creating variable lighting conditions in the growing space.
These sensors are connected to a computer that constantly keeps track of the lighting conditions in real time–the data is processed and is used to adjust supplemental LED grow lighting if required in real time on a zone-by-zone basis.
The end result is a perfectly even lighting grid over the entire greenhouse area, regardless of where the sun is situated in the sky, the seasonal intensity, cloud cover, etc. This technology helps produce crops of buds as consistent as indoor grow-light-only crops, with the added benefit of potentially improving crop quality with natural light while using a fraction of the power. A little supplemental light can go a long way versus artificial lighting only crops of buds.
Additionally, dynamic LED grow lights can allow the operator to apply custom “lighting recipes” that use spectral photo-biology to influence different crop characteristics through the growth cycle for traits like growth habit, root development, potency and terpene profiles. In short, lighting spectrums can be used to steer crop development without chemicals.
Medium-less Crop Production
A big ongoing expense for many cannabis producers relates to growth mediums. Zero-till organic medium-based gardens have gained attention for quality and perceived sustainability, but may not always be practical or doable in a regulated commercial marketplace (and they may not be as “sustainable” as you think).
A significant percentage of the cannabis produced is cultivated in mediums like rockwool, coco coir and peat mix. These mediums are well proven and established; however, are they really the best choice?
Consider the capital outlay, handling, transport, conditioning and disposal required for each new crop planted. This is not insignificant in terms of the bottom line for the grower, the waste stream generated and the potential environmental impact.
What if you didn’t need any growing medium at all, or just a starter pellet for your seed or cutting? You guessed it, “medium-less” cultivation is an increasingly well-proven option for growers looking to eliminate the expense and impact that comes with each crop turn when using traditional growth mediums.
Typically, growth mediums like rockwool, coco coir and peat mix really don’t supply any nutrients to the crops they grow–they simply support the plant and act like a sponge for the roots to absorb the fertilizers supplied in the nutrient solution.
Medium-less growing methods like Deep Water Culture (DWC), ReCirculating Deep Water Culture (RDWC), Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) and Aeroponics grow exceptionally healthy and productive cannabis plants with virtually no growing medium required. Reusable support collars keep plants upright in the cultivation system and bare plant roots feed directly from nutrient solution applications. Not only does this eliminate the need for growth mediums, but it can also significantly improve growth rates and yields by delivering oxygen levels to roots that would otherwise be very difficult to achieve utilizing conventional growth mediums.
Additionally, medium-less cultivation methods assist with our next area of discussion in efficient cannabis cultivation and that’s irrigation efficiency and water loss.
In conventional growing methods, a lot of the water applied to plants is lost to the air through evaporation out of the exposed growing medium–these losses can be significant and may also contribute unwanted humidity to the growing environment that is typically managed with energy-intensive dehumidification equipment.
In medium-less methods, the root environment is closed from the external environment, keeping moisture at the root zone where it belongs. In this way, the vast majority of water that is applied to the crop as nutrient solutions is used entirely by the plant. This also allows the grower to monitor crop water consumption as a diagnostic tool by knowing how much water is actually being used by plants at any particular growth phase, versus guessing what evaporated and what was used by plants.
Friendlier CO2 Supplementation
Cannabis plants respond well to supplemental carbon dioxide levels in the growing environment. Supplementing CO2 is widely accepted to improve growth rates and improve yields of buds when managed correctly. However, fossil-fuel-fired CO2 generators and bottled CO2 are not always safe, environmentally friendly or inexpensive options to capitalize on boosted CO2 levels.
For commercial growers, Direct Air Capture technologies help avoid the environmental impact and potential risks associated with burning fossil fuels, and may cost considerably less than bottled CO2. DAC technology takes the existing available CO2 in the air and concentrates it so it can be applied as required to boost CO2 levels in the crop production environment.
For smaller-scale cultivators, organic sources of carbon dioxide enrichment show promise as an alternative to conventional CO2 supplementation for grow tents and smaller grow rooms.
OK, So How Can I Improve MY Grow at Home for Better Efficiency?
- Using modern LED grow lighting technologies that allow you to dial in intensity and spectral output can provide tremendous savings over traditional HPS lighting sources or even early-generation LED grow lights. The improvements in your power bill and crops can be well worth the investment, especially if you take the time to do the research. Eliminating the need to replace or swap out lamps like HPS offers big cost and environmental savings potential, too.
- Medium-less production methods can help save ongoing growth medium costs and headaches. Consider that you might only need to pick up a few new starter pellets with each crop, versus copious amounts of materials. The same holds for disposal and tidy-up between crops.
- If you prefer to use organic-based growing mediums like coco coir or peat mix, there ARE ways you can improve their efficiency and sustainability. For example, dried banana plant fiber (a natural by-product of the banana industry) can be used to amend coco or peat. This has shown to improve characteristics like water retention, capillary movement, reduce compaction, insulate roots against heat and may also provide anti-fungal properties. Basically, a good quality amendment will improve your watering efficiency and deliver healthier plants. Mulches or cover crops can help reduce evaporation from the growing medium, too, while still allowing the roots to breathe.
- Instead of running lights for propagation or veg at 18/6 or continuous ON, try delivering your veg photoperiod at 16/8. Most strains will respond very favorably, and the savings in electricity can really start to add up over the course of time. Additionally, running your lights at night can help reduce the amount of electricity needed to cool the growing area in some situations.
Condensate water captured from dehumidification or air conditioning equipment that is typically drained away can be stored and treated for use as irrigation water. This can be an extremely pure source of water to use, ie, 0 PPM. It’s also free. However, exercise caution that water is not contaminated by dirty AC or dehumidification equipment. Pretreating captured condensate water for several hours with hydrogen peroxide several hours before adding nutrients and using it for irrigation can help reduce any unwanted microbial loads in the source water.
