Some pretty epic viewer questions led to lively conversations this week, and Jason and Seth covered all the topics – from adding mycorrhizae to media and using air pumps in nutrient reservoirs, to troubleshooting pH fluctuations and finding the balance between humidity, temperature, and VPD for optimal plant growth, and so much more!
Here are a few of our favorite quotes from the show:
“I think every one of us has made some assumptions based on too small of data picture, if you will…We're doing everything we can to capture a bunch of data. It takes time, takes investment. But when we're working with thousands and thousands of plants, if we only have a handful of samples, we could be led in a wrong direction.” – Jason
“Influencing factors on leaf temperature are going to be obviously ambient room temperature. We're going to be looking at radiation, so long wave light photons that are heating up the surface, we're going to be looking at transpiration rates, airflow, and then to some degree, irrigation or substrate temperatures.” – Jason
“I don't know anyone in commercial production that's out there trying to grow a business that's only running six plants on one irrigation zone. So there's a certain level of precision, we have to chase it different ways when we get to at-scale production. And also if we're focusing on those far outliers on the table as our sample size, it can do a lot of damage to the other plants that might be healthy, especially if we don't have that long of a production run. Plants grow fast, but if we're catering too much to one specific problem we might believe is there, it's pretty easy to do more damage to the crop than good.” – Seth