Welcome! In this episode of the Canna Cribs Podcast, Nick Morin sits down with George Murray of Ventana Plant Science to discuss some of the important chemistry that goes into formulating a nutrient line. Ventana Plant Science are nutrients born of chemists with decades of history formulating nutrients for for specialty crops around the world. Designed to be complete, but not wasteful. With Additives built to be complimentary and focused.
Links:
GH Pro Desk: https://growershouse.com/commercial-division-large-scale-growing-operations
Ventana Plant Science: https://ventanaplant.science/
Shop Ventana Plant Science: https://growershouse.com/ventana-plant-science/?aff=2
Commercial Nutrient Consultations: https://growers.typeform.com/to/cNa0dXPP
George's Blog:https://www.foliarpak.com/category/blog/
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Table of Contents
00:00 Opening
00:27 Nick Morin Intro
01:56 George’s Origin Story with Ventana Plant Sciences
08:21 How would you categorize your main area of expertise?
12:20 Approaches to different grow styles (row crop, greenhouse, indoor)
18:20 What is unique to cannabis growing?
21:27 The state of cannabis nutrients currently
25:50 Impact of nutrient runoff in communities
30:10 Growers House Pro Desk
31:12 Mitigating environmental concerns
34:20 Problems with some other nutrients on the market
45:05 DIY nutrient advice
48:10 George’s work with Amino Acids
55:14 Research & Results
59:00 Actionable lessons for growers
01:00:40 Important info for growers
01:08:06 Getting growers comfortable with science
01:12:55 Innovations in plant nutrition
01:24:22 Step by step guide to developing a plant nutrition program
01:32:43 Nutrient spend based on three different models
01:50:10 Best place to find Ventana Plant Science products
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Questions from the Interview
1. How did you get interested in plant nutrition?
2. How long have you been working in the agrochemical industry?
3. What are your main areas of expertise?
4. How much of your work is in the cannabis space versus other areas of agriculture?
5. Can you talk about some of the different grow styles you’ve worked in?
6. How are the nutrient concerns similar/different in these different styles?
Requirements?
7. Runoff/pollution concerns?
8. Can you say how much these different styles might impact the local environment?
9. How to mitigate?
10. What kind of problems do you see with existing nutrients?
11. What kinds of mistakes do people make mixing their own nutrients?
12. I’m interested in your work with different amino acids and mineral interaction. Can you explain this for the layman?
13. What kind of metabolic processes are you looking at?
14. What are some interesting results in this type of work?
15. What lessons can growers take from this information?
16. What is the most important thing any grower might need to know/practice with regard to nutritional programs for plants?
17. Are there any novel or innovative nutritional programs specifically affecting the cannabis industry?
18. What other kinds of innovations are we seeing in plant nutrition as a whole?
19. What can you tell us about ammonium-based nutrients?
20. What are the biggest challenges for growers in your experience?
What could they be doing better?
21. What considerations should be made by growers when developing a plant nutrition program?
22.Do you see a lot of problems with nutrient lock-out? How can a grower avoid nutrient lock-out?
23. How would you alleviate their concerns with regard to your work and agricultural science as a whole?
24. Can you take us through, step by step, how a grower should approach developing their own plant nutrition program?
25. I’ve been reading about this phenomenon of growers wanting “white ash” from smoking their flower. Why is that and what does it indicate, if anything?
26. Are there any new projects you’re working on that you’d like to talk about?
- Hey, I'm Nick creator of Cannacribs and Growers Network, where we have educated millions of people on how to elevate their craft. I have toured some of the largest cooperation, befriended the best growers and built-in network of the top cannabis companies. Join me on this next adventure, where I document this group with the pioneer shaking this global cannabis industry in real time. Welcome to the Cannacribs Podcast. Welcome back to another Cannacribs Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Morin and today's interview is with George Murray, the formulation chemist at Ventana Plant Science, a new up and coming nutrient company in the cannabis industry. And in this interview, we kick it off with George's renaissance background and all three business, law, and plans. We go into the most common problems when it comes to plant nutrition, all the way to George's step-by-step guide for building out your own plant nutrition program for all shapes and sizes from hobbyists, caregivers, all the way to commercial growers enjoy. This interview at George was made possible by my good friends over at growershouse.com. You're a first time grower or one of the largest growers in the country that we filmed for Cannacribs. You're gonna wanna head on over to Growershouse for all your cultivation needs, your lights, your nutrients, your soil, your grow tent, your trellis netting, you name it. They most likely got it. So I'll link to them in description below, head on over to growershouse.com. Show him some love now without further ado, let's dive in. George thank you so much for joining me today on the Cannacribs Podcast.
- Thank you, pleasure is all mine. It's great to be here.
- Yeah, and you are the formulation chemist for Ventana Plant Sciences. Walk me through how you got into this industry. How'd you get to Ventana Plant Sciences.
- It's a fair question. It's an interesting story. I think when you think back about how you got anywhere, there are steps that they go along in your life, right? And reflecting on this question how I'm here today. I think you could dial back probably all the way into youth, and I think about a third grade leaf collection as an example.
- Okay.
- My mother was really good about getting out and getting us out on the environment and picking fruit and going out in the woods. And so third grade leaf collection, it was serious business, I still have it. I don't know, I'd have to count how many leafs I had, but it was just traversing around the countryside picking up leaves, identifying em, I don't know, there was something about it that kind of stuck with me, and we'd go fruit picking during the summers and make jam on the back end. And I'm one of five siblings, so I'm second youngest. And as we got older, the older siblings didn't go fruit picking anymore.
- They were too cool for school.
- Yeah, they had better things to do, right. They wanted to read books or play Nintendo or hang out with their friends or whatever. And I was the one that I think just, I just always enjoyed being out in it. And in the government class, in high school we had to shadow one of these, one of the official positions in the city. And I shadowed the city arborist. So it was one of those things where I knew I wanted to work with plants. I wasn't quite sure how I was gonna get there. And so when I went off to school I eventually switched into, I started meteorology and switched into urban forestry in the Ag department of the university. But I really always kind of charted on my own course. I took a lot of different classes when I was at Purdue and anything from plant physiology to soil ecology but I mixed in Greek mythology, baroque music. for me it was the education process, as being well-rounded not only in sciences, but also in life that idea of classic education. And so I actually finished up in the school of business, knowing that at the end of the day, everything is going to be related to the business and dollars and cents. So I kind of had this hard science passion. My mother's family is a family full of chemical engineers. So I don't think I was able to get away from that. It took a lot of chemistry, a lot of biology, plant metabelomic physiology. And so kind of figured out how am I gonna make good on this? What am I gonna do? And one thing led to another and I eventually landed in the agrochemical industry. And from there I'm not sure how deep you want to go into it, but it was one of-
- Lets go deep, let's go, we're gonna go down a lot of rabbit holes in this interview. I'm so excited.
- No, no worries. So I kinda had this background of sciences, I spent time in law school as well. I clerked in the law farm, went to law school.
- Renaissance man.
- Even while I did that, I worked for an arborist part-time as well. So half the week, I'd clerk at a law firm and the other half of the week, I'd get my chainsaw on hand and climb trees and prepared to get my certified arborist designation. So I actually became an ISA certified arborist before I went to law school. And when I came out of law school, I was working as a certified arborist. I'm still reading as much as possible. I think for me the education process never stopped. I think the education process was very much alive, with my parents and their philosophies going to school, post school. I knew that the path to victory would be read and read as much as possible. So finding out which publications to get, right? Good Fruit Grower was one of the first ones I think I started getting out of of Washington state and really an expose on the specialty fruit industry. And then books and things along those lines. I think there's a picture of me and my first born. I think I'm probably asleep. The first borns asleep and I've got one of these books propped up on me where I'm taking it in. So I eventually found my way into the agrochemical industry with a company called Brant Consolidated. And they did a lot of everything really, but they did a lot with nutrition that was kind of their deal and using micronutrients as physiological tools at different stages in a crops life cycle. So then you're looking at boron flowering in soybeans, along with fungicides, or you're looking at great programs, and this is when you need to apply magnesium or potassium at certain physiological stages, knowing that the nutrients might be there in the soil, they might be there in a plant, but you know, maybe they're not physiologically right there where you need it. When you look at the mobility of nutrients in plants. And eventually one of my customers, they had their own company, their own nutritional company. And so they said, "Hey, look like what you're doing. "Would you come on board and run this?" And it was really kind of a hands-off deal off theirs. And so I took that over and was able to run that. And now I'm here and I'm in the industry, I'm the formulation chemist with Ventana Plant Science. So it's been a real journey. And I think what's fascinating about plant nutrition is that it really is the intersection. A lot of sciences may plant nutrition, doesn't operate in a vacuum. You had diseases, you have insects, you have some pathology entomology. There's all these different sciences that intersect, phyllo sphere microbiology, which is microbiology of the leaf surface, or the rhizo sphere microbiology, which is microbiology at the roots, all these things intersect. And it's this intersection of chemistry, biology, and physiology, and metabelomics. And you can effectuate some terrific changes in plants by doing this plant nutrition. And I think even though I've spent a fair amount of time around entomology, my brother certainly spends a fair amount of it. And I think that's where that passion came from. And I've spent a fair amount of time around pathology, I think I landed with plant nutrition, just because, like I said, it's the intersection of all those things. It's dynamic, there's so many things happening.
- You have a background, you said academically in of course the plant nutrition world, but business, law, how would you categorize your main area of expertise today?
- I think the main area of expertise is what I've been doing. In the last 10 years I've been doing this. And I think all the education that I have had, which is the law school, the business school, all the hard sciences, I've had, all the liberal arts that I've had, all those things, it's this intersection of how do you think creatively, and then how do you approach self-education because all these things kind of value this idea of free thinking and self-education, and so, really today I think what I specialize most in is kind of the confluence of chemistry which really is a lot of formulation chemistry, which is both an art and a science in my estimation, plant physiology, how to plants grow soil ecology, because certainly everything that we talked about with nutrients in, at the rhizo sphere, there's this communication with the soil and the micro flora and microfauna thereof and plant metabolomics. So a lot of work with the metabelomics facility at my Alma mater, which is Purdue. Looking at how can we factually rate this metabolic shift in plants and reach our goals, and you're talking about starting out with glucose in the plant, and then going down to the primary metabolites and then secondary metabolites, which are defined as anything that doesn't have to do with vegetative or reproductive growth, which in our world, in the cannabis world, that's when we start to get into the terpenoids, cannabinoids and things like that, those are your secondary metabolic products. So that's kind of the world favors people that specialize. And I think for me, the trick to me has been understand the big picture and be a generalist in that way, but then also figure out where can I specialize and where can I synthesize all these things from a Venn diagram perspective? And what's that overlap? So where do I add value at the end of the day?
- Amazing.
- It's that confluence of all those things.
- You're exactly right. And it seems like the business school, the law school and those classes you don't have to be an expert in either of those, but they have provided a fundamental appreciation and understanding of how to teach yourself, how to learn, and then applying that to your specialty and what you're most passionate about it. I think you are extremely well-rounded and have done pretty well for yourself it sounds like
- And how to approach things. And I appreciate that. I think that was the idea of going down this kind of this path, it was a lonely path at the time because it wasn't quite sure, "Hey, where are you gonna end up, "what are you gonna do?" But how do you approach things? How do you appraise things? How do you measure things? And I think it's done me well so far.
- That's awesome. So how much of your work George is actually in the cannabis space versus let's say other areas of agriculture.
- I think more and more over the last five years, I've always known the space was out there of course. And I've spent a lot of my years working in the greenhouse nursery industry, setting up nutritional and pesticidal programs and very large indoor spaces. I think Metroline is probably the largest one I was in. And you're talking about, I don't know how many tens of acres are under one roof, but you're talking it's-
- And that's like greenhouse or?
- It's a greenhouse. So I took kind of that with the ad. So with the advent of legalization, I had this kind of underpinning of running big scale nutritional programs, pesticidal programs. And then being able to take that and being able to have opportunities now, as that legalization space starts to open up working with more focus in cannabis. Today probably takes up probably 50% of my time. And honestly, I don't really see that decreasing. I think that as the space continues to legalize and become more legitimate, you have more and more people that are coming in and asking the right questions. How do we improve? How do we use technology to get where we wanna be? And that's kind of where I come in.
- Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the different growth styles that you've worked in. So let's say row crop more traditional agriculture versus specialty agriculture, maybe greenhouses, landscape, then golf courses.
- Yeah, for sure. It's funny to say this but I spend a lot of time around golf and sport turf as an example, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, they run an entire foliar program based on our technologies.
- Really?
- Yeah, we've worked with a lot of professional sports teams, Cincinnati Reds, things along those lines, you name it. it's out there and a lot of really high end golf courses all the way down to mom and pops who just really wanna do better. And I think it's weird to say this. And I think, I don't know how many people in the cannabis industry would look at it this way, but there are some interesting overlaps between the cannabis industry and these other types of industries where you wouldn't really see it. And to me, it comes down to finding people who demand excellence and can afford to pay for it.
- Its a good way to put it.
- It's the people that really want the absolute best and see that value in it. And when we talk about value to me, it's perceived benefits minus price. So a lot of this process when we're talking about technologies and how we can offer value it's discussing the technical merits of what we're doing in our philosophies. But to get back to your question yeah. I've row crops. So I live in and around row crops, I own 27 acres myself. It's where we run a lot of trials we do on row crops. So corn, soybeans, wheat, but also I go out to Idaho every now and then where they grow a plethora of potatoes and sugar beets. So row crop will change a little bit, depending on where you are in the country or in the world, especially Ag to me, is everything kind of outside of row crops. So it's usually a higher dollar. So you could do especially fruits, especially vegetables. So taking to the extreme, you've got artichokes, you got avocados, but then you also have like blueberries, cherries, raspberries. I spent a lot of time around specialty fruits just 'cause that was kinda my passion growing up.
- What is a specialty fruit compared to fruit?
- Specialty fruits, they all fall to the specialty outside of row crop. Fruits and especially fruits is probably synonymous, and then to a layman, but certainly anything from avocado ranches down in San Diego, up into apple orchards in Eastern Washington, to blueberry fields up there in Michigan. And I even worked with a group of date palm growers down there in Yuma once.
- Interesting, in Arizona?
- Yeah, exactly. Talk about doing injection work. So some of my background is actually in tree injection, which is an interesting overlap, and we start getting into that with our cultural services, but also looking into an agricultural world what can we do with tree injection? And so in avocados, for example, Phytophthora is a big disease in the avocado world. And so we're looking at injecting phosphates to combat that. And the interesting thing about using a phosphite, which has phosphorous acid, which is a form of phosphorus. The phosphorous acid itself doesn't kill the Phytophthora. What it does is the plant accumulates it in the vacuole and then stimulates specific downstream metabolic products that will then fight against that Phytophthora. So even that is kind of a discussion about effectuating change in a metabolic process and plants and how we do it in that case, we were doing it with tree injection, but yeah, you name it. I've probably been out and have done it and there are key learnings to take away from all of that. And as an example, so I can remember one research article that I read about exogenous applications of calcium on apples. And you think about it, apples can get bitter pit, which is a calcium deficiency. So if you'd cut into the apple, it's got browning inside of it. And that's because the cell walls weren't able to fully develop because they had a calcium deficiency. And so calcium is immobile on the plant. Once it deposits this calcium spectate is not going to then solubilize itself and then re mobilize itself to the vascular system to move again. And so when you talk about an apple and how it grows in diameter there's a certain subset of growers that believe that they can do a foliar application of calcium. And so this research article was talking about how many cells deep could the calcium actually travel through the apple when it's sprayed on there and how often you would need to apply a foliar application of calcium and even those types of articles. It really gets you thinking about nutrient translocation and how nutrients move through the vascular system. And then what are the organic acids are peptides of proteins that the plants use to move nutrients from a source to a sink and why are certain nutrients immobile and why are they not immobile? And I think being, and having all these different sorts of varied challenges, whether you're talking about row crops, or you're talking about having a boron deficiency and your pollen tube is enabled to grow enough. What flowering all the way down to a calcium deficiency or even applying zinc in the spring. So you can have even flowering on your peach crop as an example all those things really disciplines you to think about the big picture and the challenges, and you can bring that experience. And it's not directly translatable. Again, we're not growing peaches in the cannabis industry here, but there's some real sciences and ideas that you bring and you start to reflect on. And I think that's the biggest thing for me working all these different spaces.
- So let's dive into that. In my head, I see a Venn diagram where we have all these different gross styles that you've worked in and we have cannabis. So what would you say from let's say nutrient concerns what's the similarities between all these different growth styles and what's unique to cannabis? What's the most different compared to row crops, golf courses, et cetera?
- Well I think for the most part, and those are all great questions I think that, cannabis and most of my work is with indoor cannabis. Certainly outdoor cannabis is a little bit different where you're growing in the native soil. Speaking from an indoor canvas perspective, which is where most of my work is. We're supplying everything, right? And take it to the extreme. A lot of our growers are in reverse osmosis water. So your palette is exactly blank. They're growing in soil thats media, you're buffering capacity of soiless media isn't that high. So getting one thing wrong, getting one nutrient too high, it's an incredibly efficient way to grow, but it's also incredibly dangerous where one miscue can lead to a lost crop.
- Volatility and the swing that could happen.
- Bingo, yeah. And so in these other types of growing environments, where you're growing like in golf courses where it's a sand base green, or maybe it's clay-based fairways or out in the landscape or out there in row crop, you've got native soil as a buffer, right? And so then we're talking about surgically going in there and effectuating change in very specific ways from a foliar perspectives, a lot of work that we do there. So, hey, you need zinc. This is how we're gonna get the zinc in there. This is how we're gonna key late to zinc but cannabis is really unique because it's all encompassing and it's the same thing with the greenhouse environment. But this is mental ask to put it to mean cannabis is really the only crop, but we're focused on these cannabinoids and terpenes from a plant production perspective at the end of the day. So we're really interested. I've worked with crops where we harvest, they're like leafy greens, we're harvesting their leafy structures. I've worked with crops where we're selling flowers, like in caliper or petunias in greenhouses. But those flowers are still attached to the plant. It works at crops where we're very concerned about the flowering process, but we want the fruit that comes afterwards, whether that's soybeans or corn or whether it's apples, but in this case here we're focused in on this flowering process and then boom, cutting it off. And then how clean can that crop be at the end of the day? And it's just the measuring process, I think they go through, that cannabis growers go through and I'm impressed by all of the stringent regulations that are attached to that. I think that that is unique. And so we look at where are our nutrients coming from? What are our starting materials when we're using nutrients for this? There's a little bit more leeway when you're growing in, these soils that have all this buffering capacity versus what we're doing here in cannabis, if we're putting it into the soil, it could move into the plant and those are challenges. Those are some real challenges.
- So where is the state of nutrients for the cannabis industry right now? Is it extremely nascent or are we pretty far ahead because of these other types of growing that we've been able to learn from?
- Well I suddenly not nascent, we've been growing in this, and cannabis growers have been doing this for decades, right? And there are brands that have been around that long as well. I think some of the philosophies of growing are more, tribal knowledge and this is what I think works versus is it based on science, is it based on peer reviewed literature, just because we haven't had it out there. And I think that's what I look forward to seeing more, as we move forward as a total group, is that with that vendor legalization, we're gonna be able to get more peer reviewed research. Not that I think that the scientific community has a monopoly on innovation and research. That's certainly not the case. The industry has been leading in the industry at all, in my estimation in row crops and specialty Ag in golf course. And the industry has been leading the research and the R and D, but that still doesn't say that the academia doesn't have a role to play in this as well.
- It's tied to regulations, right? I mean, if they don't allow us to research it, develop and publish what you've learned, how can we get that out? In my head, it's Cannacribs, it's Deep Roots, it's the podcast, but also your blog I'm definitely going to include a link to your blog in this episode description. So people can read your research over the years. You are cutting edge teaching people, everything that you've learned. So more power to you, but I want to drive traffic over there so people can read what you've learned up to this point.
- And that was the kind the point entering into this industry is that this isn't a family business, right? My mother was a music theory and history. She was an organist by trade. My father has master's in German literature. My mother's family, of course, are the chemical engineers, but even they went into different things. Ones in venture capital, neither is a pulmonologist. And my grandfather now passed away worked in oil, actually, many, many moons ago. But so to me, it's like, why am I in this space? And why am I spending this time? And I think to me, it's adding value through education, through research, through bringing these learnings that we've had in these different industries and bringing that to the growers. And it's the education process, I think at the end of the day, that's the value that persists when everything else is gone.
- And that's what inspires me. Cannacribs, Deep Roots, the podcast, everything that we do is to educate growers around the world. And it doesn't matter if you're new to the space or you're growing one plant or a couple plants because your state just went recreational. Or if you're the largest commercial grower in the world, you still need access to knowledge. And we're so far behind in that space. So we're really just trying to create and provide a safe platform for people to learn at the end of the day.
- And are we doing the right thing? As a group are we growing correctly? Are we doing right by the environment? You know what I mean? These are all things that an educated a growing base, we'll be able to see these challenges and anticipate them and be at the forefront rather than lagging. And I think that we're getting there in other industries, I think the agricultural industry is really starting to stop and say, "Hey, you know what, "we've done whatever we want with impunity, "but now we, yeah. "Let's really look at it. "You know, how do we decrease this phosphate runoff? "How do we decrease this nitrogen runoff?" And the technologies that they're putting into there now, it's real. it's moving, we're getting there. And I think the cannabis community from my perspective is there already, it has been there a long time from an intent perspective, but intent is one thing and knowledge is another so how do we pair this intent with, I want to do well with a knowledge of, this is how I do well.
- That leads to action. There's this amazing Gandhi quote. I'm not going to be able to repeat it. I can't remember exactly, but it's essentially what you're believing leads to your actions. But you brought up the environment, so I wanna talk about that. So let's get into what you've seen from nutrient runoff and how that's impacting potentially the environment in those local communities. Are there pollution concerns in the cannabis industry right now from a nutrient perspective?
- Well I don't know about the cannabis industry I think that there are concerns, have we tied pollution from the cannabis industry to anything major? I don't think that that's true. We could take a leaf from that from the row crop book though. Certainly when you look at the number of acres, the county that I live in here in central Indiana, we've got 200,000 acres of row crop that's out there, that's farmed every year. So if you put that in perspective and that's just one county in Indiana. So you start to stack that out and you start to realize the magnitude of pounds of product that are applied. You think about Toledo up there on the lake that starting to say, "Hey, we got boil water advisories, we've got algae blooms. "We can't use the water." You think about-
- I have not heard that.
- That's reoccurring now and I think when you look at the watersheds, a lot of what we've done when you talk about the environment as we've taken away, we used to have thousands and thousands of acres up in Northwest Indiana that were wetland as an example, and these are kind of your buffers, right? And so over a hundred years ago, we started to drain these wetlands and put in agricultural fields, right? So we removed the buffers, we're putting out synthetic nutrients. And where it started was after World War II we had a surplus of nitrogen and they said, "Hey, look, we've got a surplus of nitrogen. "We're not using it for bombs. "Let's put it out there in the fields." And that got everyone to thinking, "Hey, we put out this synthetic nitrogen "and is working so much better. "Why don't we mine up some phosphorus?" Let's put that out there when we might have some potassium, let's put that out there. And I think there wasn't really any regulations tied to it. And so it took that row crop community a long time to realize, and you're talking about what are the effects of your local community? A lot of times this runoff is so far away, there's a disconnect between the local community and the community it's actually affecting. If you look at the Delta down there in Louisiana, which is where the Mississippi River dumps out, you look at the amount of pollution that's happening down there and amount of fish that are dying because of all the nitrogen that's out there that we're creating those are examples of all this downstream that's affecting other communities. And so what are they doing about the day? They're using technologies that are increasing nutrient uptake. And we'll talk about that later, about where we're gonna do on that front and what our philosophies are. But they're looking harder and harder. And that industrial biotechnology where they're talking about, "Hey, look, instead of applying 20 pounds "of synthetic nitrogen, "maybe we can create a microbial organism, "that's going to be able to compete out there "in an ecological environment. "And it's gonna be able to fix this nitrogen." And there are natural species of microbial organisms that do but there's feedback mechanisms to where, if you're applying a lot of nitrogen in the environment, those organisms start to go more dormant. So there's all these things that go into it in a fully functioning ecological environment. But the science is there and the big players in the agricultural industry that you could argue, cause some of these issues.
- Right.
- Now they're making investments that they really see it. And for the longest time, I think biodegradability was the big buzzword too. So is this product biodegradable? And there are standards about biodegradability by the way. But you know, the other thing about biodegradability now is is it sustainable, right? So where are these technologies coming from? Are they coming from carbon based petroleum feed stocks that we're using and you know, where they going from there? So what I see now in the industry and in the world at large is it bio gradable? Is it's sustainable? And what are we doing to combat some of these environmental issues that we're having. And that's exciting.
- Yeah, it really is. And so George, we're gonna take our first break here. And when we get back, we're gonna talk about how growers can mitigate these concerns when it comes to environment.
- Sure, yeah.
- The Grower's House pro-desk helps enable the highest yielding cannabis growers in the game. How do they do that? Well, they actually have real commercial growers helping you on the phone. They have advanced product expertise because they've been growing themselves and they've been doing it for a while and they have a customer centric procurement process. So they help you get what you need, when you need it, check it out on growershouse.com. And if you're not familiar with Growershouse, they really work with some of the largest nationwide MSOs multi-state operators, all the way to international players, helping them within their importing needs on top of customized payment terms and help with recurring consumable orders. So for all of our commercial growers out there, check out the Grower's House pro desk at growershouse.com. So we're back from our first break, George, can you teach all of us how a grower can mitigate some of these concerns when it comes to the environment.
- Yeah, I think to me, I think that running a balanced program that doesn't include too many one nutrients is a good start. Plants need a certain amount of a certain nutrient, a certain physiological stage, right? And I think that maybe we think that if we apply a certain amount then an excess, that we're going to get some sort of physiological change in a plant. But I don't know, there's a lot of research that justifies that. And I think we've got people that are overplaying nutrients and then flushing and then over-applying nutrients and flushing. So I think for me, it's run a balanced program and feed what the plant needs. You could talk about raising wastewater would certainly we could borrow that from other industries, but in what we're doing, I've never recommended that. And I think the reason is is that plants are selectively taking up certain nutrients and not taking by others. So if you're reusing wastewater you're gonna start to accumulate certain nutrients and get into nutrient imbalances, that you might not see right away, but could be really detrimental. And also from a cleanliness perspective, is are we recycling potential pathogenic organisms like Phytophthora, Rhizoctonia. So overall I think the real trick is deliver the nutrients the plant needs and deliver the appropriate amount of water and look at it in that way. And I work with growers that they're measuring and I think a lot of growers are, they're measuring their water content in their soil, they're measuring their runoff percentage that they're having. So I think a lot of growers out there are really trying to do the right thing from that expected. But I think the biggest thing that I see is artificially loading the soil with nutrients and hoping that that kind of shocks the plant into doing something you wanna do. I just don't think that that's necessary.
- Okay, and just being on set, filming Cannacribs and Deep Roots, I've seen some pretty innovative ways to grow and also reclaim water. So one of the ways that I've seen is actually reclaiming the water from the dehus in the rooms, is that inclusive in the wastewater? Is that completely separate?
- I think that's separate where you're actually just trying to save water that's coming off of certain environments, like the dehumidifiers example. that's probably pretty well close to distilled water almost as a probably pretty clean water, but I'm thinking about more of the water that's flowing, filling the nutrients is being applied, flowing through the soil. And then you're recycling that, I've seen that in other industries and I just don't think that's something that's going to scale. There's way too much risk with that. So I think for me, it comes down to, Hey, let's control the nutrients that we're putting in the first place. And let's recognize that the plant only needs a certain amount of certain nutrients in that right ratio and a certain time. And let's watch what's actually coming out of the soil, looking at the electrical conductivity, what's being put in, look in electrical conductivity, what's in the soil, then looking at electrical conductivity what's coming out and that will help guide you am I doing, am I doing the right thing here? Because at the end of the day, it can be a win-win between what's best for the environment. What's best for the growers bottom line.
- You always have to balance that, right? And what's best for the consumer, what they're consuming.
- [George] Bingo.
- So you always have to balance that. And just diving in deeper to cannabis nutrients in particular, what kind of problems do you see with other nutrients out in the market that are competing with Ventana Plant Science, for example?
- Well, there's an old saying that you never talk bad about someone else's product line, because you never know, you never know who you're gonna be working for. So there's more than one way to successfully grow a crop. And certain folks have certain belief systems, that likely work for them. I would say that it seems, in some cases it might be over applying nutrients, like we talked about before. I think there's a better way to supply the appropriate amount of nutrients no more, no less than you need. And then think about other carbon based nutrients and molecules and compounds that we could apply that allow us to reach our goals. I'm obviously partial about amino acids. Amino acid polymers, the polymerization of those amino acids, but there are other organic acids, I think there are beneficial and help to play and play big roles in the plant and metabolic function and this communication at the rhizo sphere. You gotta think that plants release up to 40% of their photosynthetic product at the rhizo sphere. So they're fixing the CO2 and they're turning it into glucose and then these other downstream metabolic products, and they're communicating with the soil organisms by releasing these things in the soil. So to me I think that at certain lines are over-applying nutrients, they're not applying the right amount of nutrients in the right ratios. They're leaning too much just on on the mineral nutrition. And it's certainly a part of it, but so much of what we're doing to grow an effective crop, I think falls outside of the of minerals. And so looking at the bigger picture I think is what we try to do at Ventana Plant Sciences.
- There are problems in the grow tied to a nutrient line. You're almost categorizing it more of a user error and less of a product error.
- I think that a lot of the products that are out there I've been out there for a while. So if they didn't work in some capacity they probably aren't gonna survive very long.
- That's a great point.
- And that's especially true for anything new that hits the industry today. It's very hard to enter the industry today. It's a crowded space so I think, yeah, I think it works to an extent now there's the difference between something working and something working optimally. and for the value, right? So we go back to what kind of value do you have for the product line that you're using. What are your perceived benefits minus the price? So do I think there's no matter what someone's using, could they be doing it better? Probably, I think that's probably a safe call.
- What does better include? I'm sure there's, like we talked about, overfeeding. But what is that best nutrient regimen look like to you?
- Well, I think it's something that's going to, something that I look at in data is the reduction of your vegetative growth and the increase in your flowering growth. So when I look at clipping yields, as an example, or trimming yields, I want those trimming yields to be down because that's indicating that now your vegetative sites or your reproductive sites rather are increasing. So I'm looking at yield per cubic foot here at the end of the day. And then you're also looking at obviously what's the cannabinoid content, what's the terpene content especially when you look at on the per strain, what's that supposed to be and what are we obtaining? And then there's also those other quality parameters. Like, I'm sure we'll talk about which includes the white ash and things like that. So are we growing a quality crop quote unquote, and then there's parameters around that. And then there's maybe some qualitative parameters around that as well, that you're not exactly measuring, but you just sense and feel. Those are the types of things I look at. It's not just about raw yield, but it's about total yield, cannabinoid content, terpene content, and then all those, organic septic qualitative factors as well.
- Going into types of nutrients, liquid base, mixing your own salts, when we dive into growers mixing their own nutrients, instead of buying something that's already pre-mixed or pre-built, what are some common mistakes that you see?
- Well dilution, right? Some of these nutrients, you only need in single parts per million. So it can be challenging to get the measurements right, number one. And if you're off by a factor, you can have a nutrient toxicities pretty quickly. So there are those issues what's the purity and quality of the source that you have, right? So a lot of these, to sell products in many states, finished products, that you're talking about, you've gotta do heavy metal tests on those, right?
- In Massachusetts, for example, they are extremely stringent on the heavy metal residuals in the final product.
- Bingo and so I think to me some of these raw materials that you might be able to buy, are they vetted? Are they not vetted? If you just go down the street and buy in potassium nitrate, where did that come from? Is it registered in your state? You start to get into raw material versus the finished product. To me, there's a vetting process that goes through with that finished product when someone has a brand on it versus, "Hey, I'm just buying magnesium sulfate." Well, where did that come from? Has it been tested? Has it been approved? You don't know, and I think that's, so I think those measuring pitfalls that you have and then the other thing too, is that with finished products and you're running a program approach, you have to believe at least, and I know this is the way with Ventana Plant Sciences, that you have a whole team of people that in a whole group of scientists and that have vetted out this program and this philosophy.
- With other types of growing as their background. it seems like a pretty good team to be working with. You're not just cannabis nutrient experts.
- That's exactly right. And so you have to ask yourself, do I wanna be a part of this team and I think choosing a brand and choosing a product line, I think that's part of the discussion, right? Is that you're not just saying, "Okay, well, it's gonna cost me two more cents "of per gallon if I'm going to do this, "maybe it will, maybe it won't," but you're getting a team and a support network at that point in time. And I think honestly, to be able to pick up the phone and be able to say, "Hey, George, or, Hey Nick, "I'm running through this and I'm seeing this," because every grow is a little bit different, right? It just is, your humidity could change a little bit, the strands that you get in could be a little bit different. There's a lot of variables that go into this.
- SRPS and crew members adhering to them.
- [George] Exactly.
- So many variables. I've never seen a replica grow even in a multi-state operator, but there's always gonna be a difference.
- Bingo and so having that team on board, again, that's part of the value proposition. It has to be whether it's just calling up and saying, "Hey, I'm seeing this, "I'm not sure about this." Or whether you have ideas or you don't want to run something by somebody, you have call and you're on that team. So it's just, you know, just part of it.
- So let's say a commercial grower listening to this interview says, "Wow, like George is extremely knowledgeable. "I wanna hire him. "I wanna contract George to develop our own regimen "or plant nutrition program." A is that possible? I'm actually not sure. And B you know, would you advise them to use a pre-mixed formula, like something from Ventana Plant Science, or would there ever be a use case where you would advise them to mix their own nutrients?
- My first answer would be is that, we did a lot of work and I did a lot with the Ventana Plant Science program. So number one is that if I felt like I could have done it better, I would have done it better, right? So we kind of put our best foot forward with that. And so, if you're asking me to redesign it or look at, "Hey, we want you to look at this." I would say, "Hey, at least give that a shot "before we go down that path." But I do know of some growers that are just the way the irrigation systems are set up as an example, they can be really challenging with how the nutrients are applied. And you do have to tip the cap that not every grow is exactly the same. And you may have to advise the grower and come up with another tool that allows them to get there. But the philosophy and the base program to me it doesn't change depending on the CO2 and the light and humidity and the water and all that. There's going to be some variables with the rates you're running it. But again, the philosophies I think are very much the same. We have people that say, "Hey, look, I'm putting together my own nutrients here. "It looks like our PPMS are very similar." And in that case, I would say, "Hey, look, all right, "then user technological additive," which is an amino acid monomers and amino acid polymers to help make that program better. At that point in time, we're not trying to sell you the gasoline, we're trying to sell you the additive, that's gonna make that gasoline work a little better. That's the other thing too, in the Ventana Plant Science program, it's not an all or nothing approach either. We work with a bunch of different growers, that again say, "Hey, yeah, I want it all soup to nuts." And then the other growers say, "Hey, look, I'm gonna use "these little basic inputs that I have and it's working, "if you can make it better "and you can increase our yields "and there's value there, let's look at that."
- Excellent, and you would pretty much advise the same thing for our hobbyist community the one to six plant.
- For sure, it's just getting on a program, being part of the team, and all that synthesizing all those years of experience and formulation and raw material sourcing. I mean and going through the process of certifying it from a heavy metal perspective and having that knowledge when you're using the product line, "Hey, this is vetted, this is supported. "This is back from years of research and work "that they're doing here, "I'm gonna be able to use this program and find success," to me, you can build your own car, I guess, plus or minus, but it's a lot easier to go out there and do the research and buy one from reputable manufacturer.
- And economies of scale to do that, right? So one last question, I am curious you are a Renaissance man. So if you're comfortable talking about other categories in a grow, what are some areas that a grower could DIY, do it themselves? If mixing nutrients is probably too volatile and could have too severe of an impact if they do it wrong. Are there any other areas in a grow that maybe you have seen, or you do recommend that they could save a couple points on their costs by doing it in-house?
- Boy, that's a really great question. I think it comes down to where do they have access to some of these raw materials I've known some really good growers that have really good construction backgrounds. So they didn't think there weren't always a grower, but they became a grower, but they started out in the world as, building houses and doing commercial facility.
- I see that a lot.
- Yeah, so those guys, they're super valuable. So they have a good electrical background or a good plumbing background and these are the guys that, "Hey, I'm gonna get the parts "and I'm gonna build this thing out myself, "and it's going to function just fine." You know what I mean? But again, these are guys that have that skillset and have that background. So I think it comes down to what's the grower scope, knowledge, skills, and abilities. What can they do? I've seen that. And it's worked out really well. And there's some exceptional value there too. If you're able to do some of that stuff.
- Shout out to Chris Wren, the VP of operations at Planet 13, we recently filmed Planet 13 for a Cannacribs episode. And that's exactly his background more or less. And when they launched their first grow operation, he was able to go in there and lay out a blueprint, go into each room design, and he's not building the entire thing, but he's able to direct and advise and also know the cost like, is this fair? It might be overcharged. That's the word I was looking for. So I've seen that a lot. And also there's a point for all the OG growers out there. Like I would definitely put Chris in that category where they almost had to be kind of a tool or a Jack of all trades because they couldn't call an electrician to go to a basement grow. They couldn't hire an HVAC specialist. They had to take to the forums and learn themselves. This industry was really built out of kind of that DIY mindset. It makes sense why growers would want to mix their own nutrients from a price standpoint or believing in themselves to be able to do it. But ultimately to your advice, it makes sense to trust a partner like yourself and Ventana Plant Science to do it, right?
- Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. And definitely double down on what you've said, I've seen some pretty impressive guys that are able to do exactly what you said and hats off to those guys. I think that's what the industry needs and that's what it was built on. And it's exciting to see that.
- It's exciting to see their evolution and Planet 13 is crushing it. That episode is gonna be dropping soon. I don't know when we're dropping this interview, but go check it out on YouTube in Cannacribs.org. It's a fun episode. So George, you brought up amino acids earlier. So could you tell me a little bit more about your work with different amino acids and their mineral interaction? And maybe just explain that for the layman.
- Yeah so an amino acid is anything that has an amine and a carboxylic acid group. So glycine is the most simple form amino acid where it literally just has an amine group, which is NH2. And then it has a carboxylic acid group, which is COH. And so what happens with amino acids is that depending on the pH of their surroundings, they can either carry a positive charge or they can carry a negative charge, right? And so what happens is that you can use these, you can use those values and those properties as formulation aids when you're looking at nutrients. And so like I talked about earlier, when you talk about how nutrients are moving through the vascular system they're moving through the vascular system, they're first of all being acquired by organic acids that the plants are releasing at the rhizo sphere and they're acquiring these nutrients, especially when you talk about transition metals, not so much with nitrogen or potassium or phosphate as example, but with your D3 transition metals, which are copper, are iron, magnesium, zinc. They're being acquired with organic acids, they're being brought in the vascular system. And then they're being key laded with peptides and proteins, which peptides are longer chain amino acids and proteins are even longer chain amino acids. And so for me, it's how can we increase the mobility of these nutrients in the translocation of these nutrients? And then how can we key late and react to these different minerals with amino acids? So that's the work that we're doing there from an amino acid monomer perspective, or we're picking out glutamic acid as an example, and we're reacting it with magnesium hydroxide to form magnesium glutamate. So unique structures. And then on the other side of that is polymerization. We talked about amino acids having the capability of being, positively or negatively charged and something can spark acid has one amine group in the middle, and then two carboxylic acid groups, one on either end. And so at a physiological pH those carboxylic acid groups are negatively charged, which are great, 'cause they want a complex, positively charged nutrients. The problem with it is, and that in a soil, these amino acid monomers are metabolized very quickly by biology. So we wanna have those complex properties. We don't want it to disappear from the soil and very shortly with microbial. So what we've done is we've created a way to polymerize this amino acid into a long chain polymer that will persist, fully biodegradable, but persist for like two to three months. And so at that point in time, we have kind of this helical structure of these negative charges in the soil that's grabbing onto these positively charged nutrients, holding them in solution longer to be taken up by the plant. Because at the end of the day, everything is taken up into the plant, has to be in solution. And so the plants working with organic acids to make this happen, their microbial organism results in organic acids, the solubiomix these compounds in the soil that might not be soluble. And then with our introduction and invention of this amino acid polymer, this aspartic acid polymer. Now we have this polymer in there that's persisting, grabbing all of these positive charge nutrients preventing some of these classic interactions you have, like calcium phosphate, where these things precipitate, holding and solution longer and increasing their uptake into plant. So it's really two fold. One is with using amino acid monomers like a single amino acid or two amino acids to key late certain specific minerals like calcium, or magnesium, or iron manganese, zinc, copper is another one. And then the other one is how can we effectuate change in soil ecology and increased nutrient uptake overall? And that's what the polymerization and so, the interesting thing is that part of this is a discussion about minerals, but the other part is the discussion about amino acids on their own, right? And so when you look at what we're trying to do in the cannabis industry, it's all about secondary metabolites, right? And secondary metabolites are defined as compounds that are not directly related to the vegetative or reproductive growth in a plant. These are often defense structures that the plants creating, alkaloids of some sort antibiotics is another example, waxes, things along those lines that the plants using is for some sort of defense, against some sort of pathogen or insect or creating a cuticle at the leaf services, in example. And so in our case these cannabinoids and terpenes, they're all secondary compounds, right? Secondary metabolic products. And so I always use this analogy that we're swimming uphill or downhill from metabolic perspective. And so when a plant goes through photosynthesis, it captures carbon dioxide. And then that carbon dioxide is hooked up and turned into glucose within the plant. And so that glucose then is turned into a plethora of different metabolic products. And some of those shift into downstream primary metabolic products and amino acids are some of your heavy lifters in that process. And so a lot of people think, "Well I'm gonna apply sugars to a plant "and I'm going to get some sort of metabolic change." And the problem with that is that how are you going to effectuate a metabolic shift in a plant when you start that far up on a metabolic process? You're starting all the way up at the beginning of the river, how do you expect that through all the tributaries and everything else you're going to get where you want to be, at the end of the day. And so starting with primary metabolic products, like amino acids that are naturally lower concentrations within the plant, which we've identified, which amino acids drive which metabolic functions in the plant. So what we do is load the plant up with specific metabolic immuno acids in this primary metabolic sector to effectuate specific downstream secondary metabolic processes. As an example aspartic acid is crucial to nitrogen assimilation. A lot of people think, "Well, we've got to get nitrogen "into the plant and then the job's done," but that's when the job starts. How can we turn that nitrogen into a usable compound within a plant? And the aspartic acid is crucial for that. Glutamic acid, a lot of people don't realize this, but glutamic acid is a starting material for chlorophyll, And most people know that you need an iron based enzyme to make chlorophyll. And those people know that magnesium is essential mineral ion in chlorophyll, but the carbon backbone is glutamic acid. Proline, I assume later on we'll talk about nutrient lockout, but proline to me regulates cellular homeostasis by loading up into the vacuole so there's all these things that amino acids can do metabolically. And I think that's where a lot of our research is when we look at what we're doing.
- Wow, I always love talking with a subject matter expert like yourself. You are just teaching me so much and hopefully hundreds of thousands of growers that will ultimately listen to this interview. And I'm definitely going to direct people to ask questions on the Growers Network forum, we'll put a link to your profile so people can write you a message. You might not be able to respond to everyone, but I'm sure a lot of growers are gonna have questions after this interview. And I would love to learn more about your results from this research. Can you share with me some interesting results that you found?
- I think we're learning quite a bit still, and to be fair, this is most of our work has been on theoretical level thus far. What we do is we use amino acid isotopes that contain an extra neutron on each nitrogen atom on an each carbon atom. And then this allows us to apply the amino acid, harvest the tissue in a set time intervals. And the first time we did, it was 15 minutes, one hour, four hour, 24 hours, 48 hours, and then track where that amino acid goes in the plant over time. And having that extra neutron and the nitrogen group in the carbon group, even if it gets broken apart, we can still see where did it go and what did it turn into? And I think for our trial we harvested what we found is that even within 15 minutes from an exogenous application of this amino acid the plants metabolize it very quickly. So I think a lot of things that we are giving the plant, we think of metabolism and we think of time in a very human way, right? So it takes me half an hour to eat lunch, or it takes me 20 minutes to walk a mile or whatever we're doing, but metabolically things happen very, very quickly, and we learned that. And so we started the harvest even sooner, just we could see that initial spike.
- Wow, that's so cool.
- Within minutes the plants taking this and the plants using it, right? And yeah, I think that was a big one for me is just how quickly this metabolism is turning. We started harvesting a lot sooner and I think for me, what we've seen is we've been able to increase chlorophyll content as an example, we've done work with proline where you get from this cutting stage into the transplant stage and how do you reduce this wilting. And that comes down to osmosis and increasing turgor pressure as an example, and doing foliar applications of proline, in that sensitive area there. But I think frankly again, there's still a lot to be learned and I think that's the exciting thing for me, there's a lot to be learned from this work about what we can do and how we can do it. And I mean something simple like lysine, for instance, it donates carbon during photo respiration and people say, well, what's photo respiration and in C3 plants, which is what we have in cannabis when that's the model pore opens up you're letting in carbon dioxide, but you're also letting in oxygen. Because oxygen is part of the environment. And so that oxygen that it's taking in is wasted unless we can put a carbon on that and make it carbon dioxide which allows us to go in to create glucose. And so glycine will donate a carbon to take oxygen and turn it into carbon dioxide. So we can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis, in cannabis, as an example. Arginine is the primary storage form of nitrogen in plants. A lot of people don't realize it up to 90% of your nitrogen is stored in plants and vegetative tissue is stored in the form of arginine. We're kind of taking this theoretical metabolic work that we're doing and then overlaying it with what are we seeing from an application perspective out there in the field, and then the industry at large, and from the polymer perspective in the soil, we're getting data back that shows that we're able to increase nutrient uptake by up to 30%, depending on the individual mineral. Whether its nitrogen, or phosphorous, or potassium. And it's fascinating to see, really, at the end of the day that we're able to take this concept and this theory and then turn it into two results and say, "Hey, it's working and it's doing something "in a way that's different than anybody else's has been able "to do it."
- So are there actionable lessons that growers, whether they're using Ventana Plant Science or not, are there actual lessons that they can bring back to their garden and how they feed their plants, whether that's timing or type of nutrients?
- I think as a grower, I think it's important to think about one's goals and then work their way back on how they want to get there. And understanding what are the tools available to me to help me actually reach my goals. In the old days we used to just apply nitrogen and just say, "Hey, I hope that the plant does the right thing "with this nitrogen." And it's analogous to us eating a Snickers bar and then hoping that, "Hey, can you turn this "into some muscle building stuff for me?" Your body could do that. It could put it towards muscle production, but there's a lot of things the body could do with it. It gets stored as fat there's all these other things. And I think from a growing perspective, we're in the same way, what can they apply and not apply into the soil and into the foliage that will really effectuate the metabolic shifts that will allow them to consistently reach their goals. Do I want higher yield? Do I want more THC, more CBD, more turpines, what do I really want? It's important to be specific with your goals. I think too many folks get wrapped up in this tribal knowledge without really understanding the underlying science and how and why an application might be working and not working. It's our job at Ventana Plant Science to talk about the why's of what we wanna do.
- And your work is just giving you such an interesting and unique perspective on plant nutrition, but also cannabis plant nutrition. What would you say is really the most important thing any grower needs to know in order to practice the best possible nutritional program for their plants?
- That's a good question. For me, I think the most important thing is if a little we'll do a little good, increasing it usually does not produce better results.
- So their mention returns.
- Absolutely up to and including toxicities, right? So with nutritional programs, it's all about finding a good balance between the anion and cations. There are specific uptake sites at the roots and people don't realize this, but the roots aren't just like these open PVC pipes were just anything can go into it. There are specialized uptake sites along these routes and certain nutrients will overlap and have the same uptake site. And so like iron and manganese is a good example of that. They have the same uptake sites at roots. Zinc and nickel is another one. I used to work with pecan orchards. And what happens is that they would apply zinc over and over to the orchard every year. And so when they had to cut down their trees, 'cause they got older disease and they had to replant, there's a lot of zinc in the soil and that would prevent nickel from being taken up into the pecans. And so nickel is a part of an enzyme that allows you to metabolize urea which pecan trees can take up nitrogen in the form of urea. There's several trees and plants that can. Realizing these implications of doing something, but it's going to effectuate changes and differences about nutrient uptake in other ways. And there's nutrient antagonisms like a classic one is potassium magnesium, where when you increase your potassium load, it can be difficult for magnesium to be taken up into the plant. So there's a plethora of interactions in the soil, many of them having negative implications. I think it's likely that many growers are currently over-applying certain nutrients. We've talked about that because that's what they've always done, but what's actually happening is that the electrical conductivity is probably increasing, it's building up. You're creating these plant stresses and nutrients are being wasted and ultimately it's gonna increase your costs and reduce your yield. You got to see where that, you know, you've got to understand those interactions and if you don't understand those interactions and you don't care to understand them, that's where you team up and you've got a program that recognizes what those interactions are, but that's pretty much for me, it's little do a little good. It doesn't mean that it's going to do better when you ramp it up.
- And going back to the commercial application of nutrients, liquid-based nutrients does not always mean you're spending more, if you have it dialed in, and if you're using the exact precise amount, doesn't always mean you're going to be spending more and vice versa. Mixing your own nutrients again, you might be overfeeding, you might be spending more money on raw output, or sorry, inputs, because you're out putting too much.
- Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, this drivers is liquid. Some of these technologies is just not available as a dry, it's just not possible or affordable to spray dry them or use fluidized bed dryers to dry them. There's an entire or use crystallization to do it. So there's a lot out there where you see something that's liquid and think why can't that be a dry there's reasons why a lot of times there's reasons why it isn't depending on the technology that's out there. So just an aside.
- Yeah, definitely. So tell me about novel or innovative nutritional programs affecting the cannabis industry that maybe you've seen, perhaps inside of Ventana Plant Science and outside.
- Well, I think there's quite a bit of innovation. I think when I think of the cannabis industry, I think of people that that, again, they're demanding expecting excellence and they're willing to take chances and try things where other people might not be.
- And have the money to. Going back to kind of golf courses and cannabis grow operations. Many times they have the budget given that the cash crop or the expensive golf course.
- Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think there are some more innovative inputs that's around technologies that work with the nutrients whether it's chemical or biological and other inputs are going to effectuate certain shifts in metabolism. And I think industrial biotechnology is a big one right now. So corn syrup they say is going to become the new petroleum. When you look at the-
- Oh my Gosh I hate to hear that, who says that?
- It's out there and you know, to me, I don't think that's necessarily a negative thing. If we get away from oil and we're using plant-based, carbon sources versus oil-based petroleum where you're mining and out of the soil I think that we're fixing the carbon and that's a great thing.
- I'm hearing that as like a human consumer.
- Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
- So you're talking to completely industrial.
- This is a feedstock, that's exactly right. So if you look at chemistry and you look at how a lot of organic acids are made right now, the feedstock, the carbon-based feedstock is a lot of times, most of the times coming from petroleum. So you could think, Hey, this is a really clean product. And it's all these other sorts of things, but the feedstock is petroleum. So like, I dunno, like let's talk about monosodium glutamate. Which is a sodium salt of glutamic acid that use in flavorings. You see that in different, if you look at your steak seasoning as an example the carbons source for that glutamic acid is coming from petroleum. That's the beginning source. Again, vast majority of our stuff right now is doing that. There was a movement back in 2004 that looked at 300 and something different chemical compounds and talked about, can we make this from a renewable carbon feedstock? And a lot of times it's corn syrup as a starting material, but it could be another plant-based material. You could use soybeans stuff as well. I'm only picking those crops because they're produced in abundance and they got to figure out something to do with them. But I'm starting to see now people really ramping up with CRISPR and this knowledge of how you can effectuate change in an organisms metabolic function. Turning up, regulating this function. Down-regulating this function modifying enzymes, putting those modified enzymes in there, you can get this microbial organisms to take corn syrup and spit out X product. And I think I'm seeing more of that. I'm seeing more actually using microbial organisms in the environment, again, how do we fix nitrogen out of the air and how do we get that? How do we get the microbial organism to do that in a competitive ecological environment? I'm seeing a lot more of that. And I think that's interesting. Frankly, I think the work that we're doing at Ventana Plant Sciences with immuno acid polymer and with amino acid monomers, I think is to me, is really exciting to be able to take a program and increase its productivity by putting in this amino acid polymer, and then seeing the yield results that come from that, seeing that the additional flowering sites and a reduction in your trimming that you have from a vegetated perspective. So those are some of the things that I see and I think it's a crowded space. And I think growers are kind of bombarded with a lot of this stuff. And some of it I think for the longest time, some that might've been snake oil. And I think that it left a bad taste in a lot of growers mouth, but I think the work that's being done today and the things that are finding their way to the industry now, I think we're in a lot better place.
- Yeah, and outside the early adopters George, there are quite a few growers, whether I've seen it in a YouTube comment or on set filming with them, they have an aversion to anything that sounds too science-y, CRISPR, GMO. Those are there's a lot of science behind that, but how do you alleviate some of their concerns with regard to your work and really agricultural sciences as a whole?
- I think my goal is to not really dumbed down the science and the work that we do. I always say that growth comes during challenging conversations. So our goal is to talk to the science. I think if growers are gonna improve the growing price in yields, that will come through conversations, discussions that necessarily involve scientific concepts. And then not everyone will be able to understand all those scientific concepts, but everyone can appreciate them. They'll know who, remember how they feel, the value to growers in the process through education. My parents were both educators, they were teachers. So perhaps that's why my first inclination is to teach.
- And my father as well. I share that very much.
- Being around teachers, you know this, your first inclination is to teach because that's what you grew up with. And I think to me, the aversion for growers surrounds more of the sales process rather than educational process. No one likes being sold to, so when things flip over from science-y from pure science to sciencey, I think you've gone from education to sales, and is it a technical data sheet that we're actually talking about science? Or is it a brochure of some sort, my job has always been to explain the science behind what we do from there, if I've done my job correctly, I leave it to grower to make an informed decision whether they want incorporate our products and program or not, so that's always been mine and it's done well. I think people have appreciated that.
- Yeah, and actually reminds me a lot, Polly who's Nate's father, Nate of Grower's House. I went to one of Polly's grow courses years ago, and this was an internal at Grower's House. And really what he preached is education. If you can teach a grower, every single option, the best options on the table and just empower them to make the best purchasing decision for what nutrients they should buy, what light they should buy. That's the position of a reseller of hydroponic equipment and in the context of Grower's House, but it sounds like that's tied back all the way back to Ventana is just educate, teach people the pros, the cons, why it might be cheaper, but might not be worth it, or how it's more effective to be used this way, then that way, I really appreciate it and resonate with that process from your team.
- Yeah, and to be able to explain the science behind it, always and even from a microbiological perspective, from a cellular perspective what are we doing and how are we doing it? You know, and I think there's a lot of folks that are doing something out there and they get pressed with, well, how's it working? A lot of times they're not quite sure. And I think we've gone down the path from a scientific perspective where we're working with the hard sciences. With a metal belonged facility with the crystallography lab. So you could say, well, George, when you're reacting nutrients with amino acids, how do you know what you're creating? And what we do is we get we get crystals. So we do super concentrated solutions. And it's like making Kool-Aid where you're dumping in a whole lot of Kool-Aid in a very warm bath of water. And then later on you can make crystals. And so we take a crystal and it's about the size of a pen tip and they put it on an x-ray crystallography, a diffractor. And then in real time, crystallographer, is taking pictures three-dimensionally of the structure and able to draw out, well, here's the carbon, here's the nitrogen, here's your iron. and it's able to show you, three-dimensionally what you've created. And I think that's kind of the commitment. I think a lot of people will release a product and say, Hey, it turned to plant greener, or you got better yield, man. And it's awesome. And we like to start way, way back before that process and yeah, we're going to show you data that says, yeah, this increases your yield, but then we're going to be able to go back to this, very beginning of this research and show you, cellularly or show you from an atom perspective, this is what we're creating and this is how we're doing it. And I think that's where the education comes into. And that's the value.
- That's very reassuring as a grower goes to figure out what nutrients to buy. So getting back to kind of the innovative and novel nutritional programs out there, what about plant nutrition as a whole? What other kinds of innovation are you seeing.
- That's a good question. I think after a while when you look at mineral nutrition, mineral nutrition is mineral nutrition. The plant needs a certain amount of nitrate, plant needs a certain amount of phosphate in the peel, plant needs a certain amount of potassium. So it's really more of a question of how do we protect these nutrients? How do we make sure these nutrients are getting in the plant? And how do we make sure these plants, or these nutrients are getting where they need to be within the plant. And then on the back end, is what are we doing to effectuate the change in the metabolic function of that plant? I think those are really, that's kind of where they, where a lot of people are spending most of their time now. And then I think also in the purification of these nutrients as well. So as an example we source our nutrients or raw materials from a variety of different places from across the world. And the reason being is that we're finding these specialty manufacturers of these base minerals that are mining them out of the ground, and then purifying them to give us the best possible chance of creating a reactive product that is as clean as possible. And I think those are of those other steps that I don't know if everyone's taking them, but certainly we are this says, how do we get the purest cleanest product that we can have here?
- Yeah, it reminds me of this conversation I had in a previous interview where the cannabis industry, given the money that's floating around, it's really shaping the technology. I think we were talking about lighting in that context, but technology across the board is evolving much faster when it comes to agricultural applications because the cannabis industry is there to push it forward.
- Yeah.
- So it might be a company that's created initially for cannabis, but now that technology could be spun off to do vertical farming or tomato production. That, to me, from just a global standpoint, regardless of the dollars and cannabis, that's exciting. We are a groundbreaking new technology. It seems like every year going to MJ biz con like, holy shit, I did not know that existed.
- Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. And that's being able to take that technology and effectuate change in other markets, I think that's exciting. And I think that comes back to legitimizing this industry and that process its going through, I think it's going to continue that direction.
- In my initial research for this interview, George, I came across some work you're doing with ammonium based nutrients. Can you teach me a little bit more about that?
- Yeah, I think that's a discussion of what forms the plants are taken up of, and we can talk about nitrogen. So there's a few different forms of plants can take up nitrogen. They can take up nitrogen in the form of amino acid nitrogen, where you had that aiming group and it's hooked to a carboxylic acid group, or multiple complex OIC acid groups, or multiple amine groups. That's kind of one, two is that, you could take up in the form of urea, depending on the plant that we're dealing with, not so much cannabis. And then the other two common forms that we see all the time are ammonium and are on nitrate. And this is a discussion about what's convenient to formulate with versus what's not convenient to formulate with. And so there were a lot of ammonium salts that are highly soluble that are high analysis that you could formulate with. The problem with it with ammonium is that you don't need an enzyme to make ammonium usable in the plant. It's hard for the plant to kind of regulate how that nitrogen is used. And a lot of times you get into stretching what happens is that whether you take up nitrogen in the form of nitrate, or whether you take nitrogen in form of ammonium, there's a molybdenum based enzyme that will turn nitrate. Eventually there's another couple enzymes down the process, eventually turn it into ammonia. And same thing with ammonium. You deprotonate it, and it turns into ammonia. And the issue is that ammonia is toxic to the cell. It will damage the cell and will kill the cell. And so the plant has to be able to fix that ammonia as quickly as possible. And that's where glutamic acid comes into. That's where aspartic acid comes into. You're taking glutamic acid incarnate, turning into glutamine, and you're taking aspartic acid and it turning into asparagine. And so when you're applying, programs in high urea which will turn to ammonium in the soil or ammonium based nitrogen, and then it's being taken up into plant you've got an opportunity there, where one, the plant can't really control that process that well, because boom, it's this chemical, the hydrogen comes off of the ammonium and turns into ammonia, and then you've got this build up of toxicity. And then two is again, it's just usable to the plant. It's not regulated by these enzymes. So you get this stretching as well. And so for us when we look at formulating you can see that we don't use a lot of ammonium based nitrogen for that reason. We wanna control growth. We don't want stretching. We want to reduce the cellular stress as much as possible with what we're doing. And it's not to say that we're not trying to effectuate metabolic change. It's just that our belief system is that we don't try to stress the plan out by producing metabolic change. We want to give the plant the tools to be able to go down and do these metabolic shifts that they're doing. So a little bit, it's just philosophy. And I think that's probably our philosophy.
- Well, that's great. You guys are constantly pushing new boundaries within nutrient formulation. So let's talk about challenges. A lot of growers listening to this can learn from others, from other failures and not have to repeat it. So what are some biggest challenges? What are some of the biggest challenges that you've seen for growers in your experience and really what could they be doing better when it comes to plant nutrition?
- Yeah, these are good questions. we talked about it, not all nitrogen sources have the same and you use by the same and effectuate the same sort of metabolic shifts in the plants, so that's number one. Is what we're applying really effectuating, metabolic shifts? And I get comments from growers, we'll does it have sugars in it or whatever. And it's like, it's really, are we really what's that really doing for us? Are we able to measure that compatibility is a big issue that I see again and again again, we want all these nutrients to be in solution because these compounds they gotta be in solution when they get up to the roots that allows them to be taken up into the plant. And so you have these interactions between these nutrients and calcium and phosphate are classic examples where you create calcium phosphate, which is highly insoluble compound. And that precipitates out a solution. It's usually a chalky white substance. Calcium sulfate is another interaction where the sulfate ions are connecting with the calcium and creating calcium sulfate. Calcium sulfate is what's on your walls. It's gypsum. So it's not water-soluble either. So and as you're mixing your programs together and do you have technologies that are inhibiting these interactions because that's what the amino acid polymer does. That's why we built it inhibits these interactions. It will keep them in solution longer. And certainly there's concentration limitations thereof. But I would say that compatibility issues. I see that again and again nitrogen sources, you've got to check that and watch that where we are, which nation are we applying and where especially indoors, hydroponically, that's another really big one. And are we really effectuating metabolic shifts in the plant? I think those are the big ones.
- So for all those growers out there that are developing a plant nutrition program right now, what considerations should they be making?
- Well you gotta ask yourself too, how many products do I want to use? Some of these product lines have, in my estimation way too many products.
- So they might be canceling each other out, you're spending too much money. Is that kind of where you're going with that?
- Yeah, and creating your own problems too by using so much you're increasing your electrical conductivity, you're putting that stress. Nutrient lockout that's another one that's really common. And what is nutrient lockout? It's literally what it sounds like, right? My nutrients are locked out from my plant or why, and what happens is that it's all about a function of osmosis. And I always ask people when I'm just talking with them. I'm like, "Does anyone "here remember their ninth grade biology class?" Are we talking-
- I do, it's all coming back to me now,
- It's all coming back, right? We're talking about osmosis and what is osmosis? It's where water will wanna flow from a concentration of low salts to a concentration of high salt. So wherever the salt concentration is highest, whether that's your cell or whether that's in your soil, that's where the water is going to flow. So as you're building up this electric conductivity, and you're putting all of these nutrients into the soil, and you're increasing your salt content in there, what happens is that your water starts to flow from your cells to your soil. So it's going the wrong direction. So of course it's not taking anything up. And it's people talk about lockout. Like it's some sort of alien thing or some sort of disease. It's really a biotic and it just comes down to applying to many nutrients. And so once the water starts to flow out of the cells your vacuum will start to shrink and your cell walls will actually break and that's when your cell dies. And so like I've always asked people like, have you ever like applied fertilizer on a bush outside or done something and notice it the leaves start to brown up on the margins. Where where you've over applied the fertilize. And a lot of people, especially if they spending time in landscaping, it's like, yeah I've done it before. And that's all it is water leaving the cells and your cells are starting to die there. And it's just osmosis 101. So that's, again, that's why I'm saying you got to get the balance right. It's like the old Depeche mode song I'm probably probably showing my age here, but get the balance right. Don't over apply, you're creating your own problems. And then you get into this nutrient lockout unquote, and it's it's avoidable and a lot of ways.
- Such a great philosophy for everything in life balance and moderation.
- Absolutely, my friend, one of my favorite songs.
- But we're going to take our final break, George. But when we get back, we're gonna go through your step-by-step guide on how to develop your own plant nutrition program.
- Perfect, looking forward to it.
- Grower's House has now partnered with precision irrigation leader, Netafim you might've seen and heard of Netafim on past Cannacribs episodes like Los Suenos farms, one of the largest farms at that time, growing outdoor built on Netafim irrigation. So Grower's House is now partnered with Netafim to bring to you right now, listening to this free irrigation design layouts for your commercial cannabis facility. You can submit your request at growershouse.com. All you got to do is just click on pro-desk and I'll definitely link in the description below. We're back from our last break, George. And I would love, and I know a lot of growers out there, would absolutely love a step-by-step guide on how to approach developing their own plant nutrition program.
- Boy, I mean, you know, I don't know if we have enough time in a day to really go through all that. There's a ton of variables, right? And I think we talked about it before, let's discuss your goals and work your way back from there. We're trying to maximize cannabinoid production, at the end of the day, right? And from there you look at strain selection some strengths of certain nutritional proclivities regarding their nutritional needs. It's subtle, but it's definitely there. As an example, I've seen magnesium some strains, like a little higher magnesium than others. What's your soil media, soil less media selection. There's a lot of variable, CO2, light levels, temperature, air movement, humidity. Then we start getting into vapor pressure deficit, things like that. And how about a nutritional program, right? You want something that's gonna give you balance. You want something that's going to work for you, but depending on how big your scale is, it needs to be scalable.
- Yeah.
- And you know, again, a lot of folks are focusing on the MPKs, you get nitrogen, you get phosphorus, potassium, but you know, the micronutrients are just as important. You're talking about all the enzymes that are doing all the heavy lifting for you. Those are micronutrient based. So you can't grow cells and you can't do cell replication without zinc. Well, you're not going to get any rooting without zinc. Calcium is a big one. But you're not going to deposit that calcium pectate without boron there to cross-link your calcium. And so I think to me, we talked about molybdenum and nitrate. The nitrate is not usable without molybdenum, so there's a lot of things to consider there, building it out step-by-step, that's why we built out Ventana Plant Science. Whether you're on the retail side or whether they're on the commercial side, it's certainly a little different playbook there, depending on what you're doing. One, I think leans a little more heavy on the ease of use, but we like to build up ease of use. We like to build up performance and we like to have that fit into a certain budget.
- Right.
- When I'm building out a nutritional program I'm using myself as the guinea pig. What would I want in that? So that's ease of use, performance, budget, does all those things come together? And if so do I agree with the philosophy of the team? And I think that's at the end of the day, is do I want to be a part of that team? And in some ways.
- That's such an empathetic way to develop new product lines. It's putting yourself in the shoes of your ultimate customer. That's definitely the way to do it. And kind of going back to how we create content, we want to create content for growers. This is not a Hollywood production, we're growers, we're consumers. We've been growing and smoking for a better part of our half of our lives. So we want to create content for us, for our people.
- [George] Yeah, exactly right.
- It sounds like you're doing exactly the same on the nutrient formulation side. So is there a simple guide that maybe you've shared in the past of just kind of a high level that people could follow or is it really a case by case basis?
- It is a case by case basis. I did a blog once it explains in very simple terms, but also there's a little bit of details in there where most people wouldn't realize it about what each nutrient does in the plant, that did really well in certain spaces where we put it out. And I think that's something that I would definitely welcome people to look at and we can get, I can get with you and we can rehash that and get it to folks just as a starting point to appreciate why each nutrient is there. When you start talking about building it out step by step, you're gonna want to have all the elements, you're gonna want to have some technology that draws all those mineral elements together that pulls them together and makes them work more efficiently. You're gonna want to have some inputs that are in there that are going to help you reach your metabolic goals. How do I increase my reproductive growth, decrease my vegetative growth, and then how do I maximize my cannabinoid content? It really is that simple. And then of course, the tools that go into that, how those programs and how those things are all synthesized together. And how do you do that in as few of products as possible at the end of the day, that still allows flexibility, whether you're growing six plants or whether you're growing 6,000. That's where the science and arguably where the art comes into.
- If you are dialed in and you are growing to your point, kind maximizing the nutrients and not overfeeding, underfeeding, or mixing things wrong, in your opinion what percentage of your operating expenses should be for plant growth, sorry, for plant food, rather, outside of lights and dehus and everything else, where do nutrients really sit on a budget for commercial growth.
- Boy, that's a really good question. I've seen ranges that frankly have blown me away, where you're talking about cents per gallon, and you're talking about a lot more cents per gallon. And then you talk about how many gallons are flowing through that facility. If you're using a million gallons in a 30,000 square foot area of actual growing space, you can start to understand, what your nutritional spending is gonna be. And I think it's possible that some of these guys are under spending right now, and it's very likely some of these guys are overspending. And for us, we have an idea and an understanding that this industry doesn't operate in a vacuum, right?
- Not at all.
- And certainly with my background coming from agriculture, where you're pounding, you're counting, dollars per acre as far as your application costs. Well, this is $5 per acre and what's my return gonna be. And I think are we gonna get there as a cannabis industry? I don't think so. I don't think that we're gonna be losing money in our crops, like other industries are doing.
- Subsidizing with federal government.
- Exactly, like, I really hope we never get there. And I don't think that we will, but so the point here is that we've built this program out, that cost area and that budget area in a way that I think is legitimate and is gonna be a value to people as our industry continues to current, to turn and grow and look at, okay, what about real costs here? Because again, yeah, from a business background, looking at spreadsheets, looking at balance sheets, looking at profit and loss statements running through all those sorts of things, I get it. I get that there's line items for every bit of expense. What percentage the nutritional expenses for the facility? Well it depends on their overhead, right? It depends on their labor. I think labor is probably a pretty big component of what most people are doing as well. So I think there's a lot of things that go into it when you look, start talking about profit and loss and balance sheets and whatnot. And all I can say is that I think there's an acceptable amount that people should be spending, but I think that also depends on what's the dollar that you're getting per crop. And just because something might be more expensive, what you're using right now, there may be some serious validity to using that input, but again, the data and metrics have to be there and that's the one thing that I always really appreciated about agriculture and the cannabis industry versus something like golf courses or sports turf where you're looking at it. It says, "Hey, yeah, this looks great. "I like this." Versus, "Hey, we're getting down to the nitty-gritty here. "We're understanding the pounds of bud that we're getting." And then at the end of the day what that THC level is, what the CBD levels are, what the terpin levels are. Yeah, exactly. And so that's the exciting part for me, is to be able to sit down and have a real conversation about, "Hey, here are the inputs you're using. "Here's what you're spending ," and have a conversation about what does that return on investment look like at the end of the day,
- Could you throw out maybe a couple models, maybe a 10,000 square foot greenhouse, 10,000 square foot indoor, maybe a 10,000 square foot, or however many acres that is outdoor. Could you throw out some models of maybe in the cannabis industry, what you're looking to spend for nutrients, if you could dial in, and it was George's grow operation, what would you be looking to spend in those three different models?
- That's a really good question. And then the outdoor model, you're starting with a base set of nutrients. Now when you're taking a soil test, there's a difference between the nutrients that are there, that's called the exchangeable levels versus the nutrients that's in the solution and available to the plants called the available levels. And a lot of people, when they take a soil test, they don't spend the extra money to get the available paste extract analysis of that test. But you do have a bank of nutrients you're starting with from an outdoor perspective. So when you're running an outdoor perspective and I do work with some people that are doing outdoor stuff, that they might be doing hemp, as an example, from there our discussion about what they're gonna spend is different because then we're talking about prescriptively, putting out what's not in the soil or what might not be immediately available from the indoor perspective. When you're talking about this, I think from a commercial perspective, I think something in a 15 to 20 cents a gallon range, to me is very appropriate. I think when you're getting up on a commercial level now, and you're getting up to 50, 60, 70, 80 cents, I think that I would ask, is there a better way that we could more efficient way that we could be running the program to get the results that we're getting, but that's just from the hip, it's going to depend on the facility. And I always run it per gallon because it's a really easy way to scale up from there. When you look at well, how many gallons do you think you're gonna run? How many plans are you gonna have? How many gallons do you deliver per day? Or how many fraction of a gallon, rather, usually depending on the type of gallon, type of growing environment. But you know, that to me, when you really look at it in those terms I know the nutritional costs are looked at, and it's a line item. And the bean counters are going to say, "Oh, are we spending too much on this nutrient?" But when you look at what that does, you look at the ROI of what a great nutrient line could do for you, to me with where the product is being sold, it's an absolute no-brainer that even if you had an additive that was going to cost 10 cents a gallon, that might sound like a lot, but if that addicate can take you and increase your yields by 15% and then increase your THC by 15% on top of that-
- It's no brainer.
- It's an absolute no-brainer. And I think those are the things that I look at more along the lines of what's the face value and the cost of the program per gallon, and more along the lines of, again, looking at it as a ratio. That was one of the things in finance that we always looked at things as a ratio. So what's my yield and what's my cost. And what's that ratio look like. So your yield should increase, your costs should decrease. That ratio should go up and get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think when you start looking at things as a ratio and start to understand the return on investment, then that's really where the conversation starts.
- So going into that step-by-step guide, I know it's not a one size fits all by any means for hobbyists, caregivers, all the way up to commercial growers, but what are some considerations that oftentimes might be overlooked in kind of developing your own plant nutrition program?
- That's a good question. A lot of these growers are pretty savvy now I don't know if a lot of them are necessarily overlooking something. I think a lot of them get comfortable you know, using a certain program or a certain product. And that's what they know and they're scared about, I don't know if scared is the right word. It might be a little extreme, but they're concerned. Because you get used to growing in a certain way and changing a product or changing a technology or changing a whole program can be nerve wracking deal. So I think that's that's to me is that I think people, they get comfortable and they might not want to change, but I would welcome anyone looking to learn more about it, certainly learn more about the sciences like we're talking about what are the nutrients used for? What sort of ratios are our plants taking up? What about the uptake sites and have look for real, there's resources out there for this base science. Understand the base science and then applying it to cannabis again, it might not say cannabis in the article, but that doesn't mean that you can't apply it to what we're doing in cannabis. It's a plan at the end of the day. There's a little bit differences about how this plant grows or some proclivities about it, but learn about the sciences and that's going to get you more comfortable with looking at how you can build out a program and how you can't, and something like Ventana Plant Sciences. The heavy lifting is done. You know what I mean? And the programs are put together, the feed charts are there, so you're not jumping off and having to do it without having a team or not having the resources or the support and that's what I would look at when you're building out a program or the resources there, the support there. Do you agree with the philosophies of this program, does it fit in your budget and is it given do you think it's going to give you the yield that you want?
- Right, well I'm really hoping that this interview serves as a launching pad for first-time growers or even commercial growers looking to kind of sharpen their resources when it comes to nutrient formulation, nutrient plans, plant nutrition, all that. But in addition to this interview what are some other resources that you might share? Are there any articles, are there any books, anything that you really use to get as smart as you are now about plant nutrition?
- We joke, I've got a couple books propping up my microphone here next to me. And one is "Amino Acids and Higher Plants." People probably aren't going to start there. But it's a good read. It's about kind of the foundational science and I might still have my original botany book from one of my first 200 level courses at Purdue, as an example. And I think that you've got to start with wherever you need to start in your foundational science and you have to kind of work your way up from there. And there's Phyllis fear microbiology was a great read, the microbiology of the leaf surface it said that we've been to the moon and back, but we still don't understand the microbiology, that leaf surface as well as we could and I think "Mineral Nutrition and Plant Disease" was another great book. Growers have problem with powdery mildew as an example, it's super common. So what are the things that we can do from mineral nutrition perspective that are gonna mitigate some of those pattern mildew issues that we have, right? It's hard for me to say because there's so much foundational science that underlies a lot of these principles. If people are wondering where to start, my question is where are you on that foundational spectrum? Did you take biology? Did you take chemistry? Did you take organic chemistry? Did you take plant physiology? And then where do we build up from there? And honestly, I think that's where you're developing the team. That's the value that's in it. I might be the only one on this discussion that think about plant nutrients every day, all day. You're paying for that for that service, basically, you're paying for me to go through all these functions and answer a lot of these hard questions and it just comes down to a level of trust, do you trust what that individual is saying? So I'm happy. I don't know, like right now, I gotta look at my library here. I'm looking up, I've got bookshelves on the wall and bookshelves in the other room bookshelves on every room.
- Read, read, read.
- You know, exactly, whether you want to read peer reviewed literature, whether you want to crack open books, but you know, anything with chemistry and biology plant mineral, nutrition, mineral nutrition, and how those mineral nutrition intersects with diseases like mineral nutrition and plant disease was a great read. It was that it was outstanding. The intersection of entomology with mineral nutrition. So it just, like I said, I may never pay most people that do the research and do the education that I've done, but that's where the trade off comes into. Everyone's got a part to play. I've been ton of plant sciences and the team that we have and the role that I play, it's one small part in a growers world.
- And you're as the customer, you're buying your experience, every single bottle, every single product you're buying your brain trust and your trials and errors, your research and development in all these different crops. And it makes a lot of sense to work with a company like you guys, for sure.
- And I would say find that expert in soil less media, find that expert in irrigation. Build your team. And a good friend of mine, a mentor, now passed away. I always talked about tribes. That we find our tribe of people and I think that's very true. Find your tribe of people, figure out where you want to be on that education process personally. And those people that you work with can help you get there. If you want books suggestions, I can send you a list of books. I have to give it some thought, but I can send you a list of books that got me close to where I am. Of course you overlay that with years of experience and you synthesize all that stuff, and then the synapses are firing and you need to get this creative mindset too. But I think that's the exciting part for me, the educated process is helping people get where they want to go.
- Get a good mentor as you put it.
- Mentors.
- Mentors, different areas of your life. Doesn't have to just be growing cannabis the power of mentorship and you can't quantify that vaccine for the rest of your life.
- Absolutely, that's how I've gotten, where I've gotten. There's some outstanding people that have helped me, they've told me things at times that I didn't wanna hear. They've done it in ways, maybe I didn't want to, maybe I didn't appreciate the time, but yeah, for sure. And I think that's part of it as well. It's hard to kind of replicate those types of experiences, but yet find the people that can add value in your life and grab hold of them. And I think the other thing that I would say, and pseudo closing, I think we're getting there is that this is my thoughts and methodologies. It doesn't mean that it's the only way. It doesn't mean that I'm always right. I would say right now that I certainly don't have all the answers. I probably don't have all the questions, but there's a commitment on this end to see that through that that's the best way that I can, the best way that we can. So I know there's going to be people out there that disagree with what I say and I'm okay with that. This was part of the community and that's part of the culture, you know what I mean? You know, we're all in this to learn and I look forward to discourse and conversations and learning together.
- Yeah, we'll definitely have you set up on the Growers' Network forum so people can ask their questions and we can do an AMA on there as well. I have this question just out of curiosity we were on set filming in Nevada most recently, and you know, someone on our team brought up the concept of white ash from smoking their flower and how that is better. And I'm curious, does that have anything to do with nutrients? Like why is there white ash and does it indicate quality or anything at all?
- Well, I smile and kind of chuckle a little bit, because you know, this is, again, I'm fairly a neophyte in the scene, I've been around for a couple of years, but certainly not a couple of decades. And so this is unique that did it cannabis industry, but it isn't this lore originally came, as I understand it, and again, this could also be part of the story as well, but this lower originally came from the cigar industry. And so when we had the issue with Cuba and there was an embargo, and then we couldn't get Cuban cigars anymore, at least legally, the perception was, is that the Cuban cigars came from Cuban tobacco that was higher in a mineral content than the tobacco you could get outside of Cuba or extensively grown here in the US. And so the Cuban cigars would burn with a whiter ash because of the higher mineral content, then the domestic, or tobacco grown in other places. So I think that's where it came from originally, if you kind of research the lore surrounding it, but we're really talking about chemistry of fire at this point in time. And the technical perspective fire is burning and there's a combustion and combustion is an oxidative reaction. So what happens is that while it's burning, you're stripping out these chemical elements and compounds and the precipitates are going through, this precipitates a chemical change and once it's complete your leftover with a lot of minerals. So potassium, calcium, magnesium as examples, and these are all white in their compound form. But you could also theoretically be leftover with stuff that didn't go through the combustion process completely that may have carbon in it. And carbon of course, is black. And so is white ash about flushing? Is it about a nutritional program? Is it about a lot of stuff? I think it's all of that to a certain extent. I think it's also about the curing process. How quickly did you bring down that moisture content? How long are you holding it for? There's a lot of research on that level. There's a lot of variables to it. I do think at the heart of it, again, we're going back to balance, we're going back to, is your nutritional program, correct? Is your mineral program correct? Are you spraying a lot of stuff that you shouldn't be spraying? I mean this is where you get into, is it crackling and is there a lot of black leftover and there's a lot of impurities outside of the minerals that are in there, these are all good questions. There are people with an incredible amount of experience on this end. I don't purport to be an expert when it comes to this, but certainly from a chemical perspective, I gave a little bit of an overview of I hope a little better understanding of what might be going on when when that fire's burning.
- Yeah, well I think we just came up with our new series, "the Cannabis Myth Busters." We have a dedicated episode with an expert like yourself, where you can dispel or support some of the folk lore out there. And that's our pilot episode one, white ash.
- There you go, there you go, I'm all for it. Do we get the blow some stuff up?
- Oh, definitely. We get a smoke, we get to blow some shit up. And yeah, that's the beauty of content creation. You can do whatever you want.
- There you go, brother. I'm for it, I'm here.
- So I'd love to hear some things that you're working on, maybe some product lines at Ventana Plant Science that a grower can buy at a store near them.
- Yeah, absolutely. So I think the retail and then this nascent commercial line here that we've talked about in passing I think, again, the overlap here is simplicity performance and budget. Does it fit in all those? And I think what we've done is we've synthesized a lot of these techniques and a lot of these ideas and really boiled them down to as few of products as possible. And it it's exciting because you know, again, you've got your grow and you've got your bloom, you've got your calcium, magnesium supplements. And they're different a little bit between retail and commercial to a certain extent, but you also have these options to kind of be creative and say, "Hey what do I do? "I wanna put in silicon here," and that's exciting and it's not just silicon, potassium silicate, it's a nano particle silicon that's gonna be compatible with the other nutrients that's in there and it won't precipitate out. Like you'd get issues with potassium silicate as an example. And that's just, we probably need to put another call together to really go deeper into that science about what is a nano particle and what does that really mean? But you've got the flexibility to say, "Hey what do I do I wanna use "a finishing product and what does that look like?" Certainly the amino acid polymer that's coming on to the retail market and also the commercial market for the first time. And that's I can't say enough about what I think this amino acid polymer, this poly aspartate is gonna do for the growing community as a whole, because as we've talked about before, the way it functions and how it keeps nutrients into solution and how it eliminates and reduces some of these negative impacts we get between these elements will, they'll precipitate out and form that chalky material we talked about. And that's exciting and to be able to see the research and the data that shows how we're moving the needle with that type of deal and stacked into that immuno acid polymer, these amino acid monomers that we've put in there to help with these kinds of metabolic shifts and increasing your flowering sites and increasing your THC. And you're increasing your nutritional uptake. There's a lot to be excited about there. So both lion's going to have these base grow blooms calcium, magnesium supplements to make sure, "Hey, are we checking the boxes? "Are the nutrients in the right form?" Are they gonna able to be playing together very well? We stacked the polymer in there. Do you want to add silicon, do you want to add some biology? There's all sorts of these different options that growers can come into and kind of customize a little bit too, but the base program gets them in the right place and it gives them a really good opportunity to have some success.
- Where's the best place to buy these products.
- The retail line, I think there's anywhere that Grower's House that hangs out online and other areas. I think it's all surround the Grower's House there. And then the commercial line is, hey talk to us.
- That's great.
- Reach out to us because no matter what industry that I'm in, one of the most important pieces of this puzzle when it comes to formulating and creating products, is sitting down with the end users, talking to the end users about their pain points, about what they're going through, what they're seeing in real time, and hearing that feedback in real time and working with them directly, that's the most exciting part. And that's where we've gotten with this line. And that's how this line has been created by working with growers. And so our intent is to continue to work with commercial growers and then with Grower's House, through the retail side as well.
- For growers by growers.
- [George] Absolutely, my friend, is there any other way to do it?
- Not at all, that's the best way to do it. Everything in balance. I have absolutely learned so much from you today. So thank you for joining me. We will definitely link the blog, everything will be on the Cannacribs.org website. We'll get you set up on the Growers Network forum, so people can ask questions directly, but thank you so much, George. And for everything that you're doing for our industry and really at a high level for our world, you're pushing us all forward.
- Yeah, well thank you, Nick. It's been an honor and a pleasure, and I'm going to look forward to talking with the folks that listen through here. And that's some most important part for me and most exciting part is moving us all forward and helping. And like I said, playing a very small part in that, but trying to play my part as well as that I can.
- That's awesome. Most likely I will see you on a future set of Cannacribs and Deep Roots as your nutrients start taking over the industry by storm. So I'll see you then.
- Awesome, we'll plan on that at least the Myth Busters, if not.
- Awesome, take care.
- Thanks Nick.
- [Nick] Thanks again to growershouse.com for not only making this interview possible, but supplying growers worldwide with the tools they need to elevate their craft, check them out at growershouse.com or across the social at Growershouse. They have an awesome YouTube channel and a great Instagram as well. And while you're there, check out Cannacribs, check out Growers Network, give us a follow show us some love, and I'll see you on the next one.