Weed has come a long way since it evolved from whatever Cannabaceae preceded it. In agriculture, it produces more cannabinoids, more yield, more and different flavor and smell expressions, upgraded structure, better pathogen resistance, on and on. But the science that made it grow at that time was pretty much exactly the same as that which exists today. The most important difference commercially is that we can control a lot of the steps now – the genetic selections and the nutrition and the water content and the environments and the pest control and the light intensity and direction and spectrum…. You cannot imagine a parameter that we cannot control with easily-available equipment. Of course, you better bring your wallet.
There’s a hell of a long way between the crack in the sidewalk where your middle school buddy saw some five-finger leaves and the completely-controlled cleanroom with precision fertigation you’ll see on CannaCribs. And the landscape in between is open for your interpretation and, if you’re willing to experiment and ruin some plants and produce some bad flower for a while, you can find some really good compromises. Believe it or not, you don’t need a moisture sensor in every pot, in any pots, to grow good weed. You don’t need to check your runoff EC. You don’t need to generate extra CO2. You don’t need more dehumidification. You don’t need the newest, most-tuned light. You don’t need permanent rooms. You don’t need elite clones. You don’t need fifty grand to get some plants going.
You should have seen my original grow space. My first grow was in a crawl space underneath a split-level house with like four feet of clearance in the middle of winter. I had a cheap 2x2 and a 100W light. The lung space (the room around the grow tent) was around 60F and 25RH. The weed was ok. I kept growing in that area for years, mostly autos, and it was mostly ok. The last couple years I was growing in my garage (sorry neighbors; I didn’t have a choice). It has a heater and a little A/C unit that could not keep up in the summer. The tents would regularly get over 90F. Over 2 VPD all the time. The weed was mostly ok. Some of it was actually really good.
The scientific community has defined all the best ways to grow great weed. We know what the best conditions are and how to produce them and it’s not a technical challenge at all, just a financial one. We also know that 1.4 VPD at 78F and ambient CO2 is not the absolute best conditions to grow weed, but it’s pretty fuckin good. And, more importantly, you can figure out a way to produce those conditions in a regular warehouse. Trust me, we know, we figured it out, you can figure it out. In our commercial grow space, we have cheap LED lights, we grow in 10x10 tents, and we have a once-daily basic irrigation system on the flowering plants. We hand water the rest for now. It sucks. But we’re about to turn a harvest and then we’ll have some money to make it better. And then another harvest and it will continue. It will literally never stop.
I don’t know if that’s a cultural thing or a process thing but, to me, the real value in this space for businesses is not in those who can produce massive capital to erect beautiful, immaculate spaces and then staff them with a bunch of people who have never seen a weed plant. There is value inside your own skull if you can find the most important conditions between the sidewalk crack and the cleanroom. And the beauty of that is that you can only find those answers if you get your head in the plants and pay attention to them for a long time. You can’t get this knowledge without spending a lot of time growing, and that protects the craft.
It also protects the uniqueness of your product. Nobody will produce what you produce and, if it’s good, people will appreciate that. I assume nobody uses the same fertilizer ratios as me because I found the EC number that worked best for me and then applied them and refined them in the new space. And now we have a whole system of environments and watering and it’s uniquely ours. But since we made it up ourselves, we’ve also created something that uniquely works with us. As our team becomes trained, they all have their own perspectives and backgrounds to add their own touches and feedback and it refines it even more. Our weed will be genuinely ours in a way that cannot be replicated.
I know such a tiny amount relative to what is actually possible with this craft. I have never used supplemental CO2 in my entire life. I have never really been able to make my drybacks look how the nerds say they’re supposed to. My own clones are definitely not massive field-hunted proven winners. I hunted the seed packs in those same shitty garage environments. But I can’t believe how much we’re learning as a team already and I’m so excited for where that will take us.
All I’m saying is you can absolutely grow commercially-viable cannabis in a regular ass warehouse. Don’t ignore the regular ass warehouse for now. It’s ok to use some 10x10s for a bit. Or just grow in open air. They’ll grow. Get some light on them, move some air, add some humidity in veg, get the humidity out in flower, keep the coco wet, and defoliate a bunch of the fan leaves in flower. This is an exceptionally simple problem to solve and the only limiting factor is your own defined limits. Give yourself room to learn inside those limits! The sooner you can get plants in the proverbial ground, the sooner you can start refining your own unique craft and the sooner Minnesota’s market will get to enjoy local, truly crafted products.
Thanks for reading!
Randy