In the modern, year-round cannabis industry, there really is no “planting season” or “harvest season,” but continuous cycles of iteration and growth. Because of that, there is constant opportunity for innovation and discovery and always new ideas and new trends on the cultivation side as growers look to become more efficient and more productive.
Marijuana Venture checked in with four growers from around the country to find out what’s new in cannabis cultivation for 2023.
Item 9 Labs Corp, Arizona
Located between Phoenix and Tucson in Coolidge, Arizona, Item 9 Labs’ cultivation and processing facilities are housed in two 10,000-square-foot buildings where the company grows in coco coir under ceramic metal halides for vegetation and high-pressure sodium lights for flowering in seven rooms that provide weekly harvests.
“Our greatest advantage is our custom fertilizer blends,” says Cory Carter, senior vice president of cultivation. “These are a result of many successful years of operations, coupled with continued education and an immense amount of data gathered from these experiences.”
According to Carter, his operations are focused this year on continuing the company’s positive momentum that so far has seen a 25% increase in units sold. This year, the company is growing an “O.G.” lineup that will highlight some of the best strains from the 1990s and early 2000s, with plans to release the limited-edition products mid-to-end-of year.
On the technology side, Carter says Item 9 Labs will be employing new HVAC tech designed to increase efficiency and output in part by helping to counter the unique heat and humidity situations found in Arizona. He says the company also plans to expand usage of LED technology, though ultimately that decision will come based on observations from the cultivation team, which he called “plant-centric.”
“Their opinions are based on the plants’ feedback, not the technology alongside it,” he says. “The plants never lie.”
4Front Ventures, Massachusetts
4Front Ventures operates three production facilities in Massachusetts totaling about 40,000 square feet. According to cultivation manager Armando Delgado, the three facilities all grow in rockwool, but each site varies a bit “in its own special way,” which allows the company to share information on what works and what doesn’t in order for each facility to tweak its process to be more efficient and produce higher yields.
“Each facility kind of carries its own weight in a different way,” Delgado says.
For example, while the company’s Worcester facility stays focused on producing biomass, the building in Halston is focused on pheno hunting to allow the company to offer new genetics, and Delgado’s building in Georgetown is focused on optimization of grow style, particularly at scale, because while he jokes that there are “only two ways to grow corn,” he notes “cannabis is very different” and currently an “open playing field” on best practices.
Currently, he says, the facilities are running side-by-side trials on feed inputs and pruning styles, and while cost and efficiency, along with yield, are a focus, it is not the only one as the company has recently increased the sensitivity of is terpene testing because it is a “big factor” among consumer purchasing trends at the company’s stores.
“Is the stressor that we’re adding a positive or a negative for that terpene profile that we’re going to produce on the back end?” he asks. “So it really is just trying out different little inputs and seeing what we get out.”
StateHouse, California
A conglomerate of four companies that merged over the past year, StateHouse grows about 230,000 square feet of canopy, split across two greenhouse facilities (23,000 square feet in Greenfield and 205,000 square feet in Salinas), for distribution across all of California.
According to vice president of cultivation Travis Higginbotham, in Greenfield the company has a negative pressure greenhouse controlled through an Argus controller while the Salinas facility is a hybrid Venlo positive-pressure house controlled with a Priva controller. The Salinas facility also uses supplemental carbon dioxide and supplemental LED lighting that provides an additional 500 to 700 micromoles, all on a perpetual system that plants and harvests 8,000 to 10,000 plants per week.
“My background is from ornamental crop production at scale,” says Higginbotham. “So I bring a lot of traditional commercial greenhouse horticulture to cannabis.”
Higginbotham says this year StateHouse is taking an “aggressive approach,” and is actually cultivating a smaller canopy than last year by more than an acre. However, the company has increased crop density, as well as light intensity and added CO2 in order to boost production in a smaller area.
“Going into 2023, not only have we reduced square footage, we’re looking to increase yields 40% over last year by optimizing the existing square footage, which will help us better manage our cost per pound in 2023 and be more competitive,” he says.
In addition, Higginbotham says StateHouse has implemented “pretty aggressive pinching and topping strategies to help the plants branch better” and optimize the ratios of premium buds to small buds, as well as flower to trim.
Higginbotham says last year’s California market was a “roller coaster” that forced the cultivators to review their price-per-pound cost, which incentivized trimming the overall square footage of canopy; the extreme rain the state experienced also forced them to look into other ways to provide to light they needed, such as inter-canopy lighting, which produced a 14% increase in yield in tests using a product from Grow Light Design.
“The more I can optimize our environment to compensate for the poor times of the year, the better off we’re going to be, and therefore the more I can dilute our cost per pound, with our fixed cost with better performing plants,” Higginbotham says.
Fluent Cannabis Care, Florida
Fluent Cannabis Care has approximately 92,000 square feet of canopy space, spread across different types of greenhouses and indoor growing environments that utilize both a six-level vertical rack system that Marco Malatrasi, the company’s director of production, says is one of the few in the country and world that go that high, as well as more “craft-style” production with dedicated flowering rooms.
According to Malatrasi, the company’s cultivation philosophy is “everything has a chronology,” with the final SKU output for the plants kept in mind from the very beginning and its entire growth strategy is “designed from the plant out” to meet that purpose.
“You have goals, you need to meet those goals,” says Malatrasi, who was a strawberry grower in traditional agriculture before moving into cannabis. “So you’ve got to design with that in mind.”
Converted from an old lettuce grow, Malatrasi says the vertical rack system allows Fluent growers the ability to study factors like plant size and spacing, which are standardized in traditional agriculture, but not in cannabis. Fluent, for example, has some plants at what Malatrasi calls an “industry standard” distance of 57 inches between each tier, and others in racks closer together as the company figures out what works best for its plants. Malatrasi also says the company has been collecting data for two years and has begun using that data to implement changes, such as determining the best time or place to plant a certain cultivar.
“What we have in Tampa, for instance, where we’ve got all these different types of racks, is to allow us the ultimate amount of flexibility to mitigate risk,” he says. “You need to give yourself the flexibility to trust in your team to start saying, ‘Hey, on that 27-inch rack, let’s grow that Granddaddy Purple, because she is always small.’”
In 2023, Malatrasi says the goal is to double the company’s canopy space, which will require additional automation, as well as some operational changes. He says production is also working closely with sales to ensure not only a collection of legacy flower, but to ensure that Fluent is keeping up with changes in customer preference and taste.
As far as industry trends, Malatrasi is seeing a lot more Internet of Things devices being marketed to cannabis growers and is always looking at new lights, since light is “the macronutrient,” though on the grow side he says it is mostly about iteration of understood principles to get the most out of any plant. He also says “amino acids” and “phytohormones” are becoming buzzwords in the industry as more traditional horticulturalists come into the business and bring with them the things that worked in the production of, say, strawberries.
“I’ve been using aloe, I’ve been using kelp on strawberries for phytohormonal results for years, and I think you’re seeing that become more common,” he says. “And again, I would attribute that to the science being a part of the conversation a lot more now.”