AROYA Office Hours Episode Twelve (3/10): There's No Such Thing as 'Free Rent' Inside Your Farm

Our cultivators and hosts, Jason and Seth, brought the knowledge this week, covering all types of topics—from how to choose substrate size to why data is so important for effective crop steering.

If you missed this meetup, we'll be back this week with another one (Thursday at 4:20 ET). In the meantime, take in some of the highlights and watch episode twelve below.

Time to collect that check aka profitable yields.

"All those plants gotta pay their rent. Nothing's free inside your farm. So anytime we have to fight the plant, we're losing money . . . and time." -- Seth Baumgartner

Take changes one step at a time.

"It comes down to trying to only play with one variable at a time to make comparisons." -- Jason Van Leuven

If the substrate fits . . .

"This is one of the challenges steering with a substrate that's not appropriately sized or the perfect size. Because now—rather than irrigating based on how you're trying to control it—you’re just trying to keep up with that plant, you're irrigating just to keep up water levels." -- Jason Van Leuven

Give your buds the infrastructure to tower.

". . . So get that plant set up with the infrastructure that it needs to build as many buds as possible . . . get those reproductive sites, those buds, those flowers established, and then bulk them out as much as possible through the remainder of the cycle." -- Jason Van Leuven

Don't fight your plants.

Every action you've put on that plant costs time and luck. So we want to maximize growth at every point, minimize work we put in and not fight the plant. -- Seth Baumgartner

There's learning in your data, even runoff pH.

"Runoff pH is very important. Especially if you're having any water quality issues or anything like that, having that runoff test and data to look back at . . . it's just one more metric to see everything that happened. And while you aren't going to be steering your whole crop based off runoff, it's still very valuable data." -- Seth Baumgartner

Improve yields cycle to cycle.

"Give yourself references. Give yourself basically a very complete digital grow journal of as many inputs as you can. So that's really the reason that we’ve worked to combine sensor data with manual entries with notes . . . is because most of those items affect the plant growth. And so sure we can be looking at sensor data. But it really takes as much metadata attributing each cycle as possible to replicate productivity, to eliminate all unintended variables, cycle to cycle. And to get an idea of how you can make incremental steps for continuous improvement." -- Jason Van Leuven