Under-canopy lighting, tech for cultivation efficiency, perfect facility planning, and more!

Welcome back to Office Hours Live! Today, we’re exploring how environmental tweaks can shift your plants’ growth in surprising ways – like how substrate EC levels and CO2 affect crops, or how under canopy lighting can help where you least expect it. We also dig into crop registration and how technology fits into the cultivation puzzle. Whether you’re grappling with ever-changing conditions, mapping out a new facility, or just looking to fine-tune your grow, you’ll find plenty of useful cultivation science here. 

Here are some of our favorite quotes from the week:

Why substrate sensing matters

“A good comparison here would be trying to diagnose your plants’ deficiencies based on only symptoms that you see. In that case, sure, we have known symptoms that are associated with certain deficiencies, certain types of spotting, marginal leaf edge necrosis, pale green growth, yellow growth, those are all indicative of certain things. But if we look at, for instance, the ph variable – if that ph is too, too low, out of range, we're going to see deficiency across all inputs. 

So at that point, the comparison I would make is that your runoff is like looking at symptoms and trying to diagnose, whereas your substrate sensor is similar to just getting a tissue analysis and seeing what's actually deficient there. And while that's not a direct comparison, the point is that we're looking for the most direct representation of what's actually affecting the plant.”

— Seth

On the need for economical data

“Yeah, and using technology to capture it because like I tell clients all the time, ‘rewind life.’ Ten, 12 years ago I had a job that was just to collect data in Spreadsheet format, build graphs at the end of a growing season, and present it to people. Ten or 12 years ago, it took a person to do all that. Now you can get some technology to keep logging it for you, and not have to dedicate a huge portion of your company's budget to just data collection.”

— Seth

Staying organized is critical when experimenting

“For me, that’s one of the reasons that I enjoyed building out the AROYA product as much as I have over the years – to really give people a robust place to do crop registration, to do crop journaling, to try and tie results, photographic evidence, you know, sensor data haul into one spot. It’s a little bit easier for them to keep organized, store, share and, and make comparisons to help them make those small tweaks as they're experimenting.”

— Jason