Which cannabis cultivation data should
you track when crop steering?

Any time a cultivator manipulates the environment to achieve certain outcomes with their plants, they’re crop steering. But knowing what data must be tracked by a cannabis grower in order to achieve their desired results comes down to the cannabis cultivation data collecting process known as crop registration. Without habitually tracking and monitoring cannabis grow data, your plants, the cultivation team, and more broadly your business may not be achieving the best results possible. Understanding which cannabis cultivation data to collect and taking the time to log it on an ongoing basis can provide a wealth of information that will ultimately strengthen your steering strategy. Then when growers review the run as a whole, the data creates a blueprint to inform their cultivation strategy – which can also serve as a model for standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the team and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the company. In this post, we dig into how growers can incorporate cannabis grow data into their crop steering strategy to maximize the potential of their crops at the cultivar level – consistently and repeatably.

Using cannabis grow data to set and achieve your goals

Crop registration is the process of measuring a plant’s productivity by logging critical data about the main parts of a crop – including stem diameter, plant height, and weekly growth. The market demands growers being able to deliver a consistent yield, quality, and experience with each product drop as a minimum requirement for profitability.

Whether you’re cultivating in-house flower or growing on behalf of another company’s extraction brand, for example, there’s an expectation from corporate to consumer that the product is the same every single time. But unless commercial cultivators dedicate time and discipline to recording the required data for crop registration every day, the roadmap to consistent results will be murky at best. Without tracking and monitoring factors like EC, growers will not only have a difficult time identifying optimal substrate and environment parameters for their plants – they’ll struggle with replicating what worked and avoiding what didn’t when the time comes for their next run.

Crop registration with AROYA

Putting time and effort into crop registration is one step; applying the data behind it is another. But after growers record the manual readings in Excel, on a whiteboard, or in a notebook or binder, how can they integrate those learnings with their sensor data? That’s where AROYA can help – by serving as their digital Grow Journal so growers can capture the plant’s productivity in a timeline, enabling them to correlate back and learn from their own historical data.

AROYA supports the following manual reading types: dry back, moisture content, spot EC, spot water content, spot pH, runoff EC, runoff pH, runoff volume, feed EC, feed pH, feed volume, flower diameter, stem diameter, node spacing, plant height, temperature, spot temperature, water activity, stomatal conductance, CO2, daily average V P D, light, lighting indicator, relative humidity, and air temperature spot. After a run ends growers can review the data, then use their learnings to set room parameters for the next run by attributing the data directly into a Harvest Group recipe. From there, getting the results you want is just a matter of repeating what worked.

Check out this segment from Episode 35 of Office Hours to hear Seth's overview of crop registration and AROYA’s Harvest Group feature.