[AUDIO Only] Office Hours LIVE Ep 37: Deep Dive into Harvest Group Analytics, Cultivars, Wet v Dry Weights

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Seth and Jason. How's it going?

It's, it's really important to look back at a whole run, not just focus on your day to day decisions.

If we jump into our production, we can go into the analytics of, of currently growing ones for talking about all the features here, we're gonna go into some that are finished up and take a look at the data that we summarize for those harvest groups. So let's just jump into some banana O. Looks like we've got pineapple express and Jenny's test in here.

So one of the most important things to get harvest group analytics, when you're building your harvest group, make sure that you've got the cultivars outlined on the benches or the, the zones. So when we look at this flower room, we can see our banana OGs in zone one, by now express the zone two in Jenny's test zone three and four. This is what's going to populate your substrate data into the specific cultivars.

And what we're doing that for is just to make sure that we can separate any of the, the performance that we might see in, in the different genetics in the room. So make sure that we get those all populated when we're building our harvest. One of the easiest ways to know that you haven't done that is you may or may not see water content and EC data right here in our environment tab. If if we didn't populate what zones or detail, what zones those cold fires are running.

So for today's topic, let's jump into this analytics page and we'll take a look and see what information is provided after we've done the grow cycle. So if we just start off at the top, it gives us a little bit of a summary of our recipe talking about how long we ran each of the stages of. And then if we go down here, we can see our, our wet weights and our dry weights. And we can go jump in just to the, the yield analytics, which we'll see down here at the bottom of this page in just a minute.

And then there's also the gallery, which. Looks like someone's been putting some stock photography in this harvest script, not, not the best representative of, of what our plants look like for that. But yeah, this is obviously in our, our demo facility where we do a little bit of plan around on the software side. So when we're looking at this cultivation schedule, we can break it down and get an idea of how many tasks and when these tasks are getting done.

So this is kind of a good way you can visually see. How much, you know, labor is going on specific days. Hopefully y'all are using the tasking feature for any of the transplanting, any of the IPM events, any pruning type of strategies, tagging strategies, really, whatever that whatever you wanna benchmark as a point in time that work needs to get done. The next up is the alert. So this alerts overview is a really nice way to think about.

When you do struggle to stay within the parameters of your environment and or irrigation behaviors. So, you know, maybe when, you know, after we do a pruning, it's hard for us to keep our humidity high enough in the room. Any of those types of things. And obviously when you're looking from harvest group to harvest groups, it's nice to, to recognize any specific points in time that you do typically see alerts go off and.

That that'll kind of give you an idea of when we need to dig in and understand what what we can improve upon. Obviously this one doesn't have any alerts, so that's really nice to see we made it the whole cycle without getting an emergency text message telling us we're out range. The sticks. One said the target ranges and here we have EC display.

You can go ahead and select any of the parameters, the data parameters that are being captured from the AOR system there and, and take a look and see how close to those target ranges that you state. Throughout that harvest group. So the yellow box in this case and the outside is gonna be the target ranges. We can see that adjust throughout the different phases of the grow cycle. And then we can see the average for the room is the, the data line in the middle.

And this one, we did a pretty good job towards the end. We looks like we forgot to drop the EC, like we had intended to do to satisfy our recipe targets. And then one of the most important things here as well is it tells us how long we were outside of that range. So in this case, our UC spent 15 days outside a range, right? If we jump into something like air temperature, This is 64 days. So we, we really struggled with our, our air temp.

On this one, we can see, obviously our, our target ranges were quite a bit tighter than we could actually run with the equipment in that room. And so that's, what's going collaborate to that that time outside of range. Ideally, you're gonna have zero time outside of your target ranges. And I guess this is a great time to talk about the difference between alerts and target ranges. So, target range is the ideal. Parameter that we're trying to keep any of our variables within.

So that's like the golden standard, whereas an alert range is, needs to be set with a little bit of bandwidth so that you know, if, if something's just a little bit screwy, you're not getting text messages, but if equipment failure happens or someone does a set point incorrectly, then you'll definitely get notified.

I might go ahead and say, all right, I'm definitely gonna set that alert range. Well, outside of my analytical range, because I do not want to start ignoring those alerts.

That's one of the key fundamental things that a plant needs to grow. If we've limited that over, you know, if we've spent 64 days below our water content goals, for instance, we can start to expect to see a pretty quantifiable reduction in yield. So we can actually look, you know, backward in time and start to quantify how much we might expect to gain from making certain adjustments.

Especially if we have the data of a good run versus a bad run to compare it to, we can really parse out like, okay, we've eliminated most of the variables that time outside range for EC or water content seems to be the biggest variable we're working with. Let's attack that next.

Definitely weighed off right there about, you know, looks like April 29th. It kind of started slowing down. And that's usually when we'll flip back to vegetative bulking. So, notes, pacing, another good good metric to take in there and then stem diameter kind of just a good idea to keep track of that and see what it looks like in relationship to the, the steering parameters that you're pushing onto that. And then our past, go ahead, Kaisha.

These analytics are really what I'm looking at to determine what works and what I can, what I need to be doing, going forward. What I need to adjust going forward is that.

And you can make adjustments to stay within projectability of your, your crop yields coming

Because again, we say it all the time, everything is so cyclical, you know, at pretty much any cannabis growth facility and you're growing the same strains over and over. It just gets to be a lot of really specific information to keep track of. And if you've got an easy way to organize it, you can quickly go back and look and. Validate your decisions or decide you're gonna make a different one.

So nice way to just break out a, a harvest group and then take a look at anything specifically that you'd like to take a look at, and we can also zoom into a. These parameters. And what we'll notice is we've got a solid line in the middle, which is gonna be the room average for the sensors that are getting displayed. And then we've got kind of a shaded band talking about the, the variation from, from low to, to highest sensor data points.

And then, Hey, look, we can quantify each runt. We're getting it that much closer to being very, you know, perfectly consistent and nothing's ever gonna be perfect. you're never, if we zoomed in far enough, there would still be that shaded line there outside of the solid line. But. Again, quick glance. You can really start to tone in on, okay, what am I struggling the most with in this room? Cuz sometimes it's not always what people think. You know?

I mean, sometimes you've got a lot of things nailed down and you're like, wow, my environment's wonderful. Now we're just looking at plant size and pruning, you know, trying to get consistency in the structure. Otherwise everything else might be really, really nice.

So. Exactly. Like Seth said, the, the more we can shrink that the more uniform our crop is, is performing in that cycle. And then next up just to yield breakdown. So this is kind of cool because we can look at different options yield by plant yield by square foot, total yield. And then we get to take a look and see how much moisture loss we had in this cycle. How much dry weight. Came out of that product and how much waste comes out there as well.

So obviously efficiency is a great way to keep track of how much biomass that you create as fast as possible. So if we are able to cut our cycle down a little bit, we're gonna see greater yield per square foot per day. So obviously the constraints of any manufacturing here is the facility size and the time that we're growing it. So if we can get more yield, we can grow things faster or increase our density of, of, of planting so that we get more weight

Absolutely. And if you could, Jason, could you go over, I guess on this version of the demo, we don't have the yield section, but I would like to do a quick preview of the non metric integrated yield section in production, because that is one thing that it's kind of tough, you know, you're usually you get your wet weight when you harvest, that's easy to put in and then two weeks later you get your dry weights or more, depending on how you buck down and how you weigh your finished product.

If you're going on the stem off the stem. So a lot of times it's really easy to pass that. And I just wanna note that for all of our customers that aren't using metric, it's absolutely critical to record at least your wet weight and ideally your dry weight, even to populate some of the production group analytics, you know, and that yield entry is actually really easy. We're just going in for a basic wet and dry weight.

And typically what we wanna look at wet weight, that's gonna be your harvest weight. And it's pretty self-explanatory we got dry weight, flower, weight, and trim rate, put trim weight. One thing to remember is aro is taking wet versus dry for your wet to dry ratio. So if you want your dry weight in analytics to represent, let's say bucked bud, or finished bud, that's where you want that value to go. And then otherwise as with everything, more data, more power in the future.

So log as much as you can over. You know, you want as complete of a picture of what happened during that grow cycle as possible. And if we don't have the yield, we don't really have the results to compare side to.

Did we lose more weight because maybe our plants weren't quite as dense as far as the, the bud structures go. What you know, what point did we have increase in performance or, or a decrease in, in yield amount? And obviously the sales goal is to have as much a, a class. Flower as we can get out of there. If we're doing a little bit different crop steering, we end up with a higher trim weight and a lower flower weight.

Maybe that's not quite the, the route that we wanted to go with those crop steering. So always think about every stage of the cycle and you know, how the different parameters in crop steering affect

And that's really what matters in the end. You know, I can sit here and tell you what I think your graph should look like all day. But if that did not produce the kind of product that you were looking for, then it's kind of. All for not, you know, there was no reason to really approach it if we lost quality and, you know, potentially lost market share, for instance,

We could jump into our run analytics, or if we're trying to take a look at cultivar specific type of information, we can go into our cultivar profiles, our cultivars tab here. So right now I'm looking at the run analytics and this one, we have some options up to, to the top where we can sort each run by how it yielded per plant per square foot, how long it ran and. Then we can also categorize it by recipes.

So maybe if I had a little bit different crop steering recipe that I've tried a few times, we can compare those and say, all right, well, when we're running in our, our heart steering you know, let's say it's like, we, we can name these, you know, the Ferrari recipe versus the Jeep recipe. Well we know, Hey. We're running there for your recipe. Maybe it takes a little bit more work for our part, but every time we run that we get 20% more yield.

So yeah, this list here is all the harvest groups and we can take a look and we know what what we were running in there. How many plants, what recipes we used, how many alerts? Anytime we did IPM event, the duration. Really just trying to give us an overview of what happened in order to, to hit that wet weight. So if I've got a whole list of this and I want to check in there and I can sort by our wet weight, let's get the, the run with the highest wet weight.

And then take a look and see what type of parameters that we ran in order to get that weight. Was it the great, great genetics? Well then let's jump into C our profiles. Was it something that we did specific on purpose or is a mistake in this harvest group to, to get that different yield and let's take a look and see, you know, what happened? Why, why did we get more, more out of that? So that's where I like to dig in and say, all right, let's pick out specifically.

Good runs specifically bad runs. And understand what effects made that such a successful or unsuccessful run.

Record as much as you can. That's how we can look back and really quantify this and evaluate it without that little bit of information. It may seem small on a daily basis, cuz you're just, it's 10 seconds or 30 seconds of your time to enter some of these readings. But cumulatively, after you have failed to enter, let's say 60 of them or 63 throughout a growth phase, suddenly you're blind to a certain point that you had and all you have then is kind of going well. We, we did take some points.

We can make some basic assumptions on that, but. Unless we really capture that we don't, we can't responsibly make certain assumptions based on a lack of data. . Jason: Yeah, that's a great point. Some of our best clients are going in there every single day, taking a picture. And it's really fun to go back and look at the growth cycle and they could say, Hey, this is, you know, a specific spot maybe where we started seeing Herms going on.

Let's compare to the data and understand what might have induced that maybe we see some Fox ceiling going on towards the end. Let's check out our EC, our irrigation patterns that that might have been making. That growth behavior, the way it was. So we always encourage people, you know, have, have a team that when they're in the room every day, take some, some notes on, you know, could even just be a check mark where you're saying, Hey, everything looks good. Let's take a picture.

And the wonderful thing about having that database of pictures is when you go to run that cold fire again, and you kind of. Visually what your expectations are, and if you aren't running a cultivar very often, you can go back and make sure and say, Hey, our, our purple punch is is doing that weird thing. Did it do it last time as well? Is that just how this genetic expresses itself or is something something goofy going on that we need to correct in order to avoid that that visual appeal of the.

Oh, absolutely. And even for continuity in your organization, you know, I've definitely grown some strains that were in the facility when I came in that behave strangely and it's first instinct is kind of freak out. You're like, what is this plant doing? Well, if I have a repository of information about that particular culture, where I can look back and go, oh, This has done that regularly.

I don't need to freak out about that or this has happened, but also, you know, this, like we have one strain that Foxtails, let's say, okay, well every run that it's foxtail, man, we can't keep the temperature under like 85 at the end of flower. Like, okay, well there we go. Or, Hey, everything was great. And this thing still Fox tailed like, oh, well maybe it's got kind of some undesirable traits then that we don't like.

And instead of wasting time trying to manipulate different variables, we might just decide that's not a strain for us to.

We just know that it's the properties of that genetic cuz we've seen it historically as well. So all this information going into to detail that the different cult bars brings a ton of value to what you're doing on a daily basis.

If you know that that's happening, just like Jason said, you can kind of prepare for it and also go, okay, well, it, it does that and we've accepted it. We're moving on. Does that bother us as growers or does that bother the consumer?

And you can really start to narrow in, on some of those, those things, especially just because again, cyclically so much happens that I don't, I don't wanna say anyone has a bad memory, but it's really, really quick in a commercial situation where almost anyone in this conversation here, you know, growing 50, 60, a hundred thousand. 10 years in. That was a long time ago. that you hit that number, you know, so it's, it's all about that registration.

The range on 'em is quite wide and. At the end of the day, I'll say it, they call it weed for a reason. It's very adaptable. I can take the same strain and actually grow it at two different EC levels. And as long as I apply that EC in the right manner, I'm gonna get a really similar result. It's about adapting the plant to that. And that's where we can start to kind of catalog this stuff. We can say, okay, here was the graph we had. Here's some pictures. Here's the yield. Here's our quality.

What, what can I deduce from that? The higher EC run gave me better quality. Cool. I'm gonna go with higher EC the lower EC run gave me better yield. And the same quality. Cool. We're gonna go at the lower EC run. There are no hard, fast rules on EC, other than, you know, there, there are some definite upward limits where you start to get to a point where a plant can't actually live in that salty water.

But as far as basic ranges go, I mean, it's, it's very, very wide and it has a lot more to do again about application of that EC over time and how well you're adapting your plant to live in that environment.

It does our dry weight include trim. And that's something that we haven't necessarily made a clear definition in the software. It's and there's a good reason why, because we want you guys to keep doing it the way that you have been tracking it. So your, your yield information is consistently comparable throughout, throughout the. And so obviously when you do go in here, keep in mind with your staff, how, how are they, they tracking this?

What, what, what is the reason that you're looking at that specific group of

And then as far as wet versus dry retention, that's straight up that ratio we're looking at at 102. 10 20, 30, whatever it ends up being. That's, that's where that is being pulled from. As far as drying goes, though, we do always try to point towards, and it's a manual entry right now, water activity, as a marker of when your plant is actually ready to come down.

And, you know, I mean also when we're talking about dry weight, when important thing to remember is although we're using a water activity meter to really determine when that plant is done. That doesn't mean it's always done curing. And part of that curing process is homogenization of moisture inside the bud. So we're gonna have parts of the bud that are dryer parts of the bud that are less dry that's partially.

Why. Okay. Maybe if we hit that 0.6 water activity, someone goes and tries to smoke that bud part of it burns in the inside. Doesn't very well while it's water on the inside. So. That's a very dynamic measurement that you want to take over time. And although there might not be a lot of variation in it, we might wanna expect it to stay at 0.6 over a long period of time, not return to it and retest it and go, okay. Now I've only got 0.5 after we've even out the content in this material.

So. dry weight is very important. Looking at your ratio as Jason saying earlier of, you know, flower to trim, that's huge. We're looking at that. That's gonna make a lot of steering decisions for us and potentially genetic decisions as well.

Well, if we've got a higher wet weight, then we had projected for now, we can rerun those numbers and, and kind of get closer and closer to the exact amount that we're gonna be pulling down.

How successful are we being? Cause yeah, at the end of the day, it all comes down to that. Not just the yield and weight, obviously the quality, but the final product. If that's not what we need to sell it, wasn't worth it to grow it. And that's where we've really gotta kind of narrow that in and make sure we're, we're creating a product that your company is able to sell and is the product that you wanna sell

And, you know, kind of looks like that, that confidence in a role, our confidence band, I was talking about where the, the more data that we've captured, the, the tighter that we, we know we're gonna hit with with that product coming.

I was just wondering if there's a. Feature within the harvest group analytics that you guys wish more clients took advantage of. Maybe they're not aware of it or forget about it, but yeah. What would you like, what would you like to see more clients really utilize and, and embrace in their business practices?

It's not time consuming and it's skipping that step of like, I, I used to take notes, but they didn't always make it into the computer. Now we're dumping it right. All into one spot where we can access it later. That's, that's a huge thing I found, right, right up there with not taking pictures and not keeping just general track of cultivation processes.

I, but personally I would love to see more of my customers use those manual readings, cuz that gives us, that's all the things we can't see with AUR and they're all there for a reason. They're all important. And if you want a holistic look at what's going on, we need to see all those variables.

And then as always, if there's a topic you'd like us to cover in a future office hours episode, posted in the chat, shoot us an email at support.aroya@metergroup.com or send us a DM of our Instagram. We definitely wanna hear from you. We record every session. We'll email everybody in attendance, a link to the video from today's conversation. It'll also be on the AROYA YouTube channel, like subscribe and share while you are there. And if these conversations are helpful, do spread the word.

Thank you all so much. Seth and Jason, I look forward to seeing you next week in person. I'll be in Pullman, Washington.