![[AUDIO Only] Office Hours LIVE Ep 38: Genetics, Sensor Density, Fox-tailing, Crop Steering - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/podcast/artwork/9vAcwW2l)
All right. Thursday, 4:20 PM. Eastern. That means it's time for office hours. AROYA's weekly session for cultivators to hear from the experts and talk to each other about what they're seeing with their grows. My name is Kaisha. I'm your co coming at you from what Pullman, Washington. And I'm not the only one. Welcome back from vacation.
Oh my gosh. Hey Kaisha. Hey everyone. So it's like to be here in person for episode 38. Can you guys believe it? So yeah, we're also going live over on YouTube pretty soon. So I'll be monitoring for those questions as they roll in just a couple more reminders to check out our Instagram and our TikTok. Make sure you're following us over there for all new. Yeah, so we have a bunch of questions that came in. So I'll just go ahead and pass back to the team
in the podcast room. Yay. Thanks Mandy. As always, if you're live with us here, we have a question type it in the chat at any time we will, if it gets picked, we'll go ahead and ask it for you. If you're, we're also feeling questions from you too, live, as Mandy told you, and don't forget to like, and subscribe while you're there. If your first time question, ask or drop your email address in the chat, we'll enter you in a drawing to some limited edition AUR swag.
Like what you see here today, Seth and Jason. Up guys. How are you? Good, good to see you in person. This is weird. This is weird, but in a really, really good way. All right. Are you ready for our first question from Instagram? Yeah. Okay. It comes from CA Randy. They wrote in struggling to hit runoff percentage in P one. And they're looking for the best strategy to increase shot duration, number of shots or both. That's what the question is.
Yeah. So. Typically the way I would approach that, you know, if I'm trying to increase how much I'm applying in P one, I first start with the I mean, obviously too, this depends on whether you're in generative or vegetative, but I would potentially not potentially for sure start with increasing my shot volume before jumping to an increase in number of shots.
But if you hit that point where, you know, in cocoa, we're looking at up to 10% rockwool, usually up to six, seven at a certain point, that shot becomes so big that we'll actually push runoff before we hit field capacity. That's why we're breaking it up into, you know, 3, 4, 5 smaller shots rather than one big one.
Yeah. Anything to add to that? Jason, look at that. Seth. Got it down. Sweet. All right, let's move on to the next one. Thank you for that question. CACO Randy. All right. Bigsby has is asking also along the lines of P one P one irrigation shot size Coco versus rockwool, more smaller shots in rockwool versus less larger shots in Coco. That is all they posted.
Yeah, it kind of follows with the last one, you know, typically cocoa, it depends on the chop. Depends on the mix. Can take a bit larger shot size than rockwool before creating that early runoff. So, you know, what we're looking at seeing is in generative. Up to a 5, 6, 7, typically in rockwool, you know, eight to 10 in Coco is about as big as we go.
Like I said, after that, if you go out and actually watch your plants water, you're gonna see runoff before your volumetric water content actually hits field capacity.
Yeah. A little bit of this is actually, it's gonna be depend on how old the plant is, how much rip bound is in that subject. Obviously, when we think about how much material is actually. The root zone. When we start to get later in flour, there's a lot of rats in there, especially if we're in appropriate size media, we're taking advantage of pretty much every, every inch or every cubic volume of that substrate.
Yeah, that's a good point. Jason, compared to you know, ripening compared to early flower generative. When I said 10, we might be looking at more like a four or five, you know, if we've got a really root bound plant, that's, that's a great thing to bring up. if you wanna visualize it, it totally makes sense if you pull it outta that pot and you see there's almost no cocoa left, at the end of that run that's those are always fun. And,
you know, I, I think, you know, traditionally we always think about being bound as a bad thing for the plant. Like we're choking out the, the roots and sure. If you're, if you're hitting way, way too, too rebound, you can start to do that. In this industry where we're running hydroponics, we don't necessarily need the root zone for volume. We just want to create somewhere where we can get nutrients something for infrastructure for those roots.
So most of the time, I'm not too concerned about getting root bound. But definitely if you're your substrate's too small, you're more likely to have issues with crop steering as far as being able to stay enough irrigation in the substrate when you're running generative just with the P.
Yeah. And you know, some of that too will come back to like deciding what you want to do with your substrate size. You know, are you a person that likes to veg my plants up more and top 'em back before I go in or am I gonna veg as little as possible? And then just decide which battle you wanna pick more? You know, are you gonna be battling root, binding more, or you gonna be battling? Okay. Now I might have to grow more plants cuz they're a little smaller and veggie and quicker.
choosing that battle, right? The life of a cultivator. All right, we're gonna move on to EC. We've gotten a couple questions on that. French flare wrote in, they had a question about electrical conductivity. What is the difference between runoff C and substrate EC?
Sure. So we'll just start off with the physical difference. Obviously, runoff EC is when we're got catch cup underneath the substrate or multiple substrates for trying to, to get an average over a few plants use them typically just to. In, in solution TDS probe for electro connectivity of the nutrients in, in that that runoff, it's a great time to check for pH two. When we're looking at substrate EC that's usually something that's a little bit, you know, more complex.
There's a lot less sensors on the market in order to do that, obvious would see arterials got three prongs that we're going right into the side of the substrate. Typically, you know, the, the reference of the two values is gonna depend on how much runoff you have and how, how long you're catching that. So, you know, if we look at right off the bat, sometimes we'll see that that runoff see a little bit higher than the substrate EC is.
It's pushed in some of the the concentrated nutrients out of the bottom of the, the plant. And then usually, you know, later through runoff, we'll actually see. Runoff EC being lower than the substrate EC. So, Both good values. I like substrate EC because we're looking at time series data chart. And so we can see the dynamics when we are irrigating, especially if we're doing, you know, 12, 15 shots a day through some of the vegetative steering techniques. You get an idea of all.
When we apply this biggest shot, it changes my substrate EC to this amount. And you know, one thing also to think about in the substrate. There is variation of water content and EC throughout there. That's why it's really important to use our Terra 12 installation template tools, because we've done quite a bit of testing on where at, in the substrate we can get the best measurement.
Yeah. And I think, I think you nailed Jason that time series data is what's really important there with runoff EC. All we're getting is that little snippet. And really, if we wanted to compare that to how we were gonna approach this and. You know, a soil analytics lab or something, getting that number using, you know, a diluted nutrient. Solution's not gonna give us a very accurate result, right?
Like you, or I would probably want to use deionized water, go in and say, what's actually coming out. That's a good analytical sample. Well, that's not practical in production. So we want to see, okay. Not just that lowest point of EC at full saturation, but we wanna see that range. You know, if we're trying to push drive back. And also push a little higher EC if I can't see that actual range, what my highest point in EC is, I might think I've got a nutrient deficiency.
I might chase all kinds of other problems that might just be because I'm over drying a few percent.
Yep. Yeah. You're. Exactly right. And kinda one of the practices that we usually recommend for people that have just gotten their array system is continue to use both since you're used to doing that runoff data and you know, log it in the system in Aurora right next to your EC.
So put the time in, when, you know, when you captured that information and put the value in, and then you can compare that into your substrate, you see and say, Hey, now that I have a lot more resolution to my data, this is how it compares to, to how I had been. You know, and typically by the end of a run or maybe two runs, you can transfer away, save some labor and stop taking runoff rings and just get used to trusting your substrate sensors.
Mm-hmm yeah. And you know, here's another reality too, unless you're running the same strain with the same media and the same nutrients for time. Amor immor you do want to go out and take runoff samples to look at your pH, especially when you're dialing a new strain. So it's one of those just, you know, best gardening practices to be out there collecting that. And then learning how to compare it and learning which values should concern you.
What shouldn't like if I'm taking runoff samples and I look at PPM, I'm not gonna say I totally ignore that, but unless I see something crazy, unbelievable, you know, 5,000 plus or something on the PPM scale, I'm not really gonna look that hearted and I'm gonna say what's going on in the root zone. And then if those two things don't, you know, come close to lining up during runoff. Alright. Maybe I might go take my solos and check some other pots. Am I stabbed into an abnormal?
, you know, first, the first thing to always do is trust that the sensor's not lying to you, but the reasons that you might think it could be lying are sometimes pretty simple, dry pocket. You're getting a salty pocket in the block. I mean, these are pretty precise instruments. And I would say just having a background in using a lot of scientific instruments, we have probably the most simple installation protocol. just about any kind of precise instrument on the market.
And. It's not entirely easy to mess up, but you also count on human error every once in a while, as.
And kind of just, you know, when we're thinking about in application, how are some of the best ways to log this? Well, definitely use your manual readings on your AROYA mobile app. It's super easy. You know, you just stay, it can be stayed, logged in, just hit the, the app button and then there's a little plus and the bottom left and it's gonna snap those manual readings. So just get those put in there. Another thing to kind of keep in mind is.
You know, like how I started this question was talking about how many plants are we capturing, right. The sample size. So if we are doing it by strain, are we picking enough samples to represent what's going on in that area? If you have good drain systems where you've got like a trap, that's a great spot to put in a time series, you know, in ES two and start kind of get an idea of all. When I look at the entire population, you know, the, the systematic EUC of the runoff.
Have that against the system compared to your input, you see, and your substrate sees,
I gotta say it's really cool to experience the nuggets of wisdom being dropped in person in real time. Extremely excited to be here. Okay. So thank you so much for that question. One of our live attendees had he raised his hand here, Johnny, can you unmute yourself and ask your question? Mm-hmm we can't hear you, Johnny. So Johnny do us a favor. If you could just type your question in the chat, I'm gonna go ahead and speak to it. In the meantime, let me go ahead and take Michael's question here.
Michael wants to know what EC and PPF would you recommend running moms?
Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Sure. You weren't doing something. Yeah. Oh, typically a two to three C and at least 600 PFD. I mean, you don't want your clones to be incredibly stretched out. We want robust, well, hardened off clones. So pretty similar to coming outta bed, you know, not encouraging you to put your moms right next to your output bench on your bedroom, but we're not looking at anything terribly special.
And honestly, probably one of the biggest things to look at is how much internet space you're getting on your clients. and then, you know, looking at your training strategies and okay. Do we need to uplight intensity to shorten that internet space? Do we want uplight intensity to get a little faster growth? Personally? I like running 'em in a little higher light intensity, cuz that means the clones I'm pulling off of those can take more light. They're a little more hardened off.
They have a higher chlorophyll content, more chloro plus in their individual cells. That's what I want to do typically.
Yeah, just to, to add to that, you know, when we're talking about some of those parameters, also keep in mind the CO2 impact in there. Mm-hmm you definitely wanna be running supplemental CO2 with your moms. It's gonna be absolutely worth it. When we look at your cutting health and that the cutting count that you can get off those moms they're gonna grow nice and fast. So I was always, you know, just kind of a, a rule thumb. It's not exact there's, there's lots of charts up there that tell.
Relationship between the appropriate CO2 PPM levels and the amount of PF D that you're putting into there with light. And but usually, you know, I talk about having you know, what was it CO2 about 200 points off of your PPF D yeah,
PF D plus 200 to two 50. And that's usually a nice cushion and. you know, luckily, so far CO2 usually isn't that expensive. So that 200 PPM isn't gonna break the bank.
Well, you know, when we think about improving processes, if we are getting a fast. It's gonna translate all the way throughout that plant lifecycle. I, you know, I definitely think that cloning is an area where SOPs are extremely important. You know, if you can keep a similar cloning staff that is used to the way that you're doing it, you're gonna have much less problems down the road.
And, you know, as, as we know, the, if you do run into problems, they're way easier to correct when these plants are.
Michael. Thank you so much for your question. Good to see you. Glad you joined us today. All right, Johnny. Thank you for typing your question in the chat here. Here is Johnny's question. I'm asking about Fox tailing. Why does it happen? What can we do to mitigate? Is there any way to help control via crop steering or more so or more? So a strained nutrient issue. Thanks. Thank you.
Yeah. So typically when I've seen Fox tailing in the past, it's generally a heat related issue. And what that is is certain strains. It's just a genetic trait, right? In the presence of high heat, they will stretch out and produce Foxtails that's to help dissipate heat within the plant. That's why we see, you know, if we look back at some like land, race varieties from equatorial areas, a lot of times they don't have little tight NUS. Like we like. Pretty blown out in Fox taily.
Typically it's a heat problem combined with that genetic trigger. So if a strain's gonna do it and you run that thing above 85 to 90 degrees, you're most likely gonna get some Fox tailing and a big place. I actually see it is when people are really trying to crank that PPF D with their H I D lights. As they're starting to lower that sometimes the top, those top colas top layer NUS will start to see some Fox tailing.
Because if you take your thermometer and go shine it at it, your room might be 77, but that top just a foot under the light might be like 95. Yeah.
This is where, you know, tracking your. crop recipes is so important. If you can detail a harvest group and be like, well, we saw foxtail and two out of the three strains in this room. Well, now we know that the one strain is, is probably better suited for how you ran that environment and some of those irrigation parameters and. The answer of mitigating with crop steering. Absolutely.
When we, we talk about crop steering in here, a lot of times we are focused on irrigation just simply because it is a major factor and, and we kind of are, are compounding on, what's kind of known in environment about crop steering, but it's all of those parameters combined, right? And typically we want some type of balance between all of those. You know, if we're running an extremely generative type of irrigation system, sometimes we want to be a little bit.
In our, our humidity and and temperatures in those rooms. So just kind of keep in mind how all of those are playing on, on the plant physiology.
Yeah, absolutely. We're talking about a dynamic environment. You know, if we want the dry backs, we need the VPD. If we want the VPD, we've gotta have the environmental control to achieve it. So it, it isn't, it's never just any of those one, one factor such as irrigation or nutrients, that's for sure. And, you know, on the foxtail topic, one thing that I like to point out to people, and they're real concerned about.
Man, unless you're trying to shove that top nugget into a single jar as long as the rest of the, Nugget's fine. If you just got a few, Foxtails usually that's an easy problem to trim out. And then, like Jason said, look at, look at your holistic approach next time. And if you are seeing Foxtails honestly, one of the biggest things is have that patience to finish that run and look at the whole run day by day. At the end of it, don't look at what happened last week.
Don't look at what happened yesterday. Look at what happened two months ago, and then everything in between. Cuz sometimes it's easy to miss, you know, a big mistake just because you see all these little issues that are popping up and you're dealing with every day. Take a bunch
of pictures. If you can do a picture of each strain in the room every day, that's gonna give you an idea of. Stage those things really started developing the wrong morphology that you ideally were shooting for. And sometimes it's, you know, maybe in the last week, maybe it started doing that three weeks in and that'll also help you identify some of the environmental irrigation based parameters that that led up to that response.
Hmm. I love that. Just reminding everybody that your, your data is your, those are those metrics are valuable. Finding the trends in, in what's going on with your cultivation, being able to track it and being able to identify stuff. That's so cool. Okay. I've got another question from Instagram. Oh, wait. I think we had some shout outs from YouTube, right? Mandy? Yeah. So
we got a couple shout outs over on YouTube. Some people. Saying, Hey, we got some people from Hawaii giving us shoutouts. That's from Greg. We have couple of cultivators out in Oklahoma city. So yeah, just saying how to you guys if you have any questions, make sure you submit 'em and I'll make sure I get 'em to the team.
Yeah. Thanks Mandy. Hey, what's up to everybody out there so glad to have y'all on. All right, we're gonna keep it moving berserk. Or 10 15 wrote in what do you want the EC substrate to be at, during.
So we, we go over this quite a few, quite a few times. And when we are looking at time series data there could be a massive discrepancy in our irrigation. Well, our, our substrate EC at irrigation. Versus just before irrigation. So I full, dry back and probably the biggest dynamics that we are gonna see is at harvest.
So, you know, if we've dropped our, our feed EC maybe to, you know, three quarters or half strength, nutrients we could be going in at say, you know, one and a half or two EC in the feed levels. And that substrate EC is gonna drop down quite a bit. When we irrigate with that a little, slightly less nutrient rich water than we're used to.
The thing is, is we're pushing massive dry backs during this riping phase, because one we're, you know, trying to, to signal this plant to finish up as best as possible. And two, we have huge plants that are transpiring a lot.
And so, you know, we could see a range spike of, you know, anywhere between say, On the low end at two, if you've got a lot of runoff and at the high end 1520 you know, this is one stage where I don't necessarily get too worried about really high ECS because we're, we're taking these plants down soon, and we're not gonna necessarily risk any detrimental effects. So yeah, it's gonna depend on when you're taking that substrate EC during between irrigations.
Yeah, I think there's. One big thing to remember about all this. When you're looking at EC in the root zone, is that interaction that salt water actually has with the plant. So when we're talking about a nutrient solution, a big part that we're talking about is osmotic stress on the plant. And not that we're always stressing the plant hard, but the plant has to adapt to that changing osmotic environment.
. So when we come into the end, you know, there is no hard, fast rule on what EC we want to be at. Like Jason said, some plants might be up at that 14, 15. I've seen some that are finishing and 10 on the low end and 22, 23 on the upper end at the dry side. And guess what? They looked great. You know what happened though? That particular person got their EC up early on. They maintained a relatively high EC and.
Realize that if they were to drop that right out, they were really gonna change that root zone environment, probably at the detriment to the plant's roots. So when we're talking about root zone EC, you know, number one, tapering off feed like Jason was talking about, we do want to taper that down, but we don't wanna drop it out. We don't wanna hit two weeks before and just start flushing everything out of there. We want to gently bring that down. If we're going.
and then also think about what you're actually putting in, you know, I'm not gonna name any specifically, but I do know a lot of people that will fish to switch to a finishing product so that they can maintain EC in their feed. Say it that 1.5 to 2.0, but they're pulling back nitrogen, they're pulling back other elements that they know the plant's not gonna use during that time period.
And there are products out there that do kind of give you a one stop solution for that and make it easier rather than you trying to worry about, okay. Do I pull. Part a part, you know, what am I pulling out here to make sure I'm not messing it up? And if you're not gonna take it super far, I would highly recommend just what Jason said, you know, taper down your PDC and slowly ride it out. Yeah. And
I talked about this already here today. It's if you can document what worked well, that's gonna get you so far ahead on each of these strains and you won't be chasing your. Try not to modify too many variables. So if, you know, if you say, Hey, this, this nutrient level was good for this strain type during that run, well, then keep it there for a few runs and maybe try and play with something else that you're looking to optimize at your facility.
All right. I think we're moving over to YouTube. We've got some questions over there, right? Mandy? Yeah, we did
have a couple questions rolling. John Simone wants to know. my plants had tight nuggets until three weeks before harvest. Then they loosened up. I believe it was because I didn't know about crop steering. I was running 20% dry back. I increased dry back to 40% and a little bit of clarification. I'm in five gallon cloth pots with cocoa per light mix and 800 wa LEDs. Any advice?
It's hard to say, you know, without having some detailed graphs of all the inputs in their relationship to your plants. I would probably, yeah. Look at irrigation, timing changes and runoffs and nutrient concentrations to think about you know, that plant might be running a little bit more generative or excuse me, I'm a little bit more vegetative and you didn't run your generat. Steering quite long enough.
You know, obviously if you didn't know about crop steering, then you're probably somewhere in the, the balance. If you're in five gallon, soft pots, there's a chance you're also hand watering. And so kind of, kind of hard for us to just nail it down to, to one, one factor here.
Yeah. I mean, personally, I, I would have to guess that if you're using it per light mix, you probably don't have a very high water holding capacity in your media, which means there's a good chance that you're not able to achieve a full 22 hour drive back in. That's been my experience in running, you know, a 50, 50 or a 30, 70 per light cocoa mix.
You know, as you're moving forward and learning to grow with sensors and actually stop leaning on, like, let's say per light as a crutch, there's a lot better possibility that you can run generatively at the end, because that would typically be a classic sign of like, we see this all the time with people running in the hug. They flip a plant too big. Everything's going good. Then we get to that last three weeks and it's like, wow.
If we go two hours without watering, we have a pretty much a wilting plant and I I'm not there. So I can't know if that's exactly what you're experiencing, but it really, it sounds a lot like that to me. Yeah,
he might just be on the other end of that. And if I have gallon soft pot we could be growing some seriously massive plants. Yeah.
Yeah. And you know, one thing I remember too, if you have that high per like concentration in there, even if we're not giving it a lot of water, we do have a bigger, poor space. We are able to introduce more oxygen into that root zone. So even though we're not pulsing it quite as much in totality, we're putting more oxygen into the root zone and that per light's holding it there longer. So not intentional. Unintentionally vegetative. Yeah.
You'll have to let us know John, if that answered your question and yeah. Stick with us so we can learn more about craft sharing and we can get to the bottom of this. We also got a shout out from I believe the cultivated in Oklahoma city. Happy to be here, been using AROYA for a year, and it's very
helpful. Great to hear. Oh, we love to hear that. So welcome. Welcome. So glad to have y'all here. All right. We back to Instagram. Question from Kevin's greens. How do you humidify your room without calcifying everything
first best step would be running your humidifier water through your RO. So, that's gonna. Be the, probably the easiest factor to, to try and help, help out with that. And then also have, you know, high quality humidifier in there. So, you know, if you can use something that does vaporize that water as best as possible, it's less likely to build up any minerals on
your surfaces. Yep. You know, a lot of girls will know if I joke about smaller bubbles. In things smaller droplets are, are better just like smaller bubbles at dispersing. What we wanna disperse here.
And then obviously it's always good to do a good, good room clean afterwards mm-hmm but so obviously as usual, prevention's the best thing, but maintenance is usually what it's gonna take. Yep. Hard
water issues are never fun. That's for sure. I imagine if we're talking about this, you might have, you know, some interesting irrigation issues and stuff that you deal with from time to time and. Like Jason said our as much as a lot of us don't wanna pay for it, going back to a highly filtered water source sometimes is the easiest, easiest solution to dealing with, you know, clogging equipment and hard water issues. Mm-hmm
wonderful. Thank you all for that, that answer. Keeping it moving here. Drunk, drunk nomad, 40 ounce wants to know and great handle by the way. They're looking for tips on how to control the three week stretch. Any thoughts on that?
Generative steering. Yep.
Long dry backs, higher humidity, not high, high humidity, but you know, we're looking at that 1.9 to 1.1, 1.2 VP. That way we're not, you know, we always wanna think of the air, like a person sucking up through a straw. If they're sucking really, really hard suddenly we, you know, get that nice empty sound at the bottom with the ice. Yeah. If we suck a little slower, we can draw that out. It's a great
analogy. Thank you. All right. Gonna keep it going. And just a reminder to those of us who are those of you all who are on with us, live type your questions into the chat. So we can get you to talk to the experts. This is the best chance. All right. King green beast. These handles love them, wants to know what result differences have been recorded on 6% dry back versus 4% on P two waterings.
any thoughts on, as far as like results require, I would say that the frequency of P two, two waterings and their effects are highly strained dependent. So some strains that naturally grow more generatively. We can hit that with you know, say as many P two S as we want. And at that point, we're looking at more like a 1% drive back between P two S if we're looking at four versus. The reality is not so much that that four to 6% affects anything on the plant.
It's about the time between the two irrigation. So we're talking about going two thirds as long, or the whole way. If we're talking about four versus six and plant to plant, that's actually gonna vary a lot in how it affects it. Like I said, some plants that grow more generatively, they're gonna respond to this bulking by just swelling up. If we look at some plants that classically grow a lot more vegetatively. Always talk about it.
You know, the classic diesels, some of the hazes, anything that we always thought was a sativa that ran 10 weeks. Typically what we're gonna look at is like, yeah, we probably aren't gonna hit those super hard with the P two S cuz we're not trying to get 'em to stretch up into the ceiling.
You know, we might run something like that generatively most of the way through, just because, you know, after a few times running, it tried bulking and we always suffer a quality loss and then we're looking at a strain. you know, may not be worth your time to try to grow in your particular facility. Mm-hmm . If you're trying to plan a business, you've gotta keep everything lined up so that you've got reliable income.
If I'm switching from eight weeks to 10 weeks to nine weeks, different strains every time, and I'm making constant sacrifices for my other plans, cuz I've got these finicky ones. Well, I'm leaving a lot on the table and I've gotta decide whether I want to, you know, focus on that one stream. That's really hard to grow because it doesn't play happy in the same room as the others.
or throw that out and keep moving on, you know, there's a whole world of genetics out there and fortunately it just keeps getting better all the time. That's been my experience. yeah,
kind of, I absolutely agree with you and it may not make that big, a difference between, you know, say a 4% and 6%, especially considering the time spacing what it might make a difference on is how you can operate your facility. Do you have appropriate pump sizing that you can time these irrigations correctly you know, are your emitter sizes so that you can get those shots in there fast enough or slow? In order to, to hit the timing across all your rooms and then those sorts of things.
So kind of probably more operationally focused than necessarily plant physiology when you're, when you're that close
together. Oh yeah. Certainly at a big facility, you know, when we're talking about a pump that can only operate, let's say two zones at a time and I've got 20 in that room. I've gotta plan that into my planning. If it's not possible for me to start back. Inside of that time period, then obviously we're not gonna be able to do that. So we'll have to go to the six. And so the four sometimes you're absolutely right, Jason.
Yeah. And if you, you know, if you're in a wonderful spot where you have the luxury to do whatever you want, keep track of your EC modulation. So look at that time series EC and decide is the 4% or the 6% achieving me a little bit better dynamics with my nutrient content in the substrate. Mm-hmm
great. All right, keeping them moving. Our next question from Instagram comes from Sergio JN 12. They're looking for tips on growing in six by six rock wall. Any recommendations for that
Chrome fast,
keep 'em short. Do you know the people I know that are still trying to rock that in a commercial level? Some of 'em are getting back to like a seven to eight day edge, flipping them small. That way they can still finish the plant. My advice in that is, I, I really hope you didn't buy too many of those. And I would look at investing in a little bit different rockwool media slabs aren't the only solution.
But one thing to think about is that six by six by six has, you know, only a six by six footprint. Most of our waters and the bottom two inches of that. That's why slabs are bigger on the bottom. And we have that small block on top. So realize the limits of your media size, I guess, would be the biggest tip. You know,
if, if you've got like a two or three tier facility in each room where you don't have necessarily as much head space as possible, sometimes six by six, isn't a bad option, simply because you're gonna push more generatively throughout that plant cycle. And and try to optimize the shorter space that you have with the number of plants. Usually that means that yeah, shorter VE times. And definitely trying, trying, not run into a situation where you.
Run generatively because you've run out of substrate capacity. Yeah.
It's, it's important to know your facility and realize what you're actually gonna be able to accomplish in there. If before you were growing in three and a half gallon cocoa pots and growing five, six foot tall plants, and you want the same kind of plant density planting with Hugos the six by six by six S your strategy's gonna have to be vastly different. Everything's gonna change all at.
and if you're not aware of those limitations that you put yourself into, you're gonna have a really rough first run. If you can look at it and look at some of the parameters Jason was talking about, like, instead of saying, how do I adapt this big or this rockwool block to my facility? It's more like, what's the optimum facility for this to be growing in. And is that me and yeah, for like a lot of double tiered customers, for sure.
You know, if you're running double tier and you've got four and a half feet of overhead, well, yeah, you probably should be saving some money with your media, you know? And then beyond that, we'll start looking at like, all right. Plant counts and what, you know, state to state LA law, there's different facility designs that, you know, work better from a financial standpoint. Mm-hmm so it's yeah. There's no huge tips on that. Just know what you're doing know know you're growing in a small pot.
There we go. That sounds
like a pretty solid tip to. All right. I think we've got a question from YouTube. What's going on over there, Mandy? Hey
guys. Yeah, we did get another question over on YouTube. LBC two OKC wants to know, do nighttime temperature drops or increases have major effects on plant stretching during early flower generative stage.
That's a great question is can be fairly extreme dependent. And how much of a nighttime temperature differential that you're pushing? Yeah, it, it probably is gonna have an effect on, on how much they're stretching or, or not stretching. Is it. The only thing that's gonna affect that. Absolutely not. You know, we're looking at nutrient contents, irrigation numbers, light intensities. Those are all factors that are gonna have a huge play. Are you ramping your temperature differential?
Are you hitting it as a, you know, one set point to lower set point on a instantaneous, if you will transition, those are, those are all gonna come into play. so I wish I could give you the exact answer or tell you how much it plays a part, but that's, that's more variables than, than we can can deal
with. Yeah. If, if everything else was given the same, we know that heat plays a role in plant metabolism and growth. So if we're slowing it down for part of the day, we can expect to see growth slowed. to me, the bigger question is why would I wanna slow that down? Because if I've got my plant veg, if I've got my veg down, I'm coming in with the appropriate plant size, I actually do want vigorous growth during that stretch.
But when I say vigorous growth, I'm growing vigorously toward the morphology that I want, that I desired. So, if we're feeling like, you know, our plants are coming in too big at the end of stretch, we really should be looking at our, how are we treating those in veg coming? , you know, what are we doing? And, and on that range, like that could go anywhere from like, are we low light intensity in veg?
So we're stretching like crazy when we get in, you know, there's a lot of factors to look at there besides just that temperature differential. Overall though, that's why we don't recommend running much of a differential during stretch. You know, if you naturally have a couple degree swing, just because, Hey, the sun went down and I've got this retrofitted building. That's not freezer panels. Well, that's. Typically though we wanna see that fairly stable.
And another part of that too, is, you know, during stretch, we also kind of wanna minimize that VPD ranging throughout the day. We want to keep that at a pretty steady rate. That way our drive backs are predictable. You know, cuz at first during stretch, they're gonna be, it's gonna be hard to get that huge drive back by week three. Sometimes we might be hitting that point where we're putting a maintenance shot on.
So we want a really predictable environment because if we can get through that first stretch, maintaining. Not having to necessarily put on maintenance shots. We can really push it generatively and then also nail that transition into veg and set ourselves up for success there.
Yeah. That's, that's a really good point that you have about the, the plant metabolism and using other factor variables to, to hit that. Because definitely when we're in that stage of plant life, we want to be creating as much sugars and energy for storage. In that plant as we possibly can, as fast as we can. And if there's something that we can do to minimize our internet spacing without modifying the temperature, that's probably a better course of action.
Awesome. Yeah. You'll have to let us know if you have any follow ups to that question. We got a couple others around you too. Marlon wants to know. Can you guys talk about PGRs
plant growth regulators. So. They're becoming more and more of a hot topic. They're I don't know about the legality of using all of them on different cannabis crops in the us personally. I don't really advocate for 'em mostly because it's just another thing to spray on your plants. you know, we've got another humidity issue and if you're at all familiar with actually using PGS to manipulate plant growth, I would highly suggest you start doing tissue.
And start there and see what kind of effects you have. You know, if I take a spray that is the wrong ratio of oxen to cytokinin or has jasmonic acid, I mean, we can go down the line of all these different PGR compounds that act as PGS. But I would say that if you're inexperienced, it's a really good way to ruin a crop right off the top. And I personally going out there haven't seen the greatest results using them. And by ruin, I'm saying you could spray a plant and suddenly.
Trying to get this plant, you know, closer to ripening or to pack on buds size. Well, if my ratios off, I might just foxtail it out, might blow that nugget up. It might overdrive it in growth. I mean, here's a good thing to remember if we're gonna talk about PGS two 40 D one of the most popular herbicides of all time is a plant growth regulator that causes plants to grow itself to death. So , it's a dangerous game.
And personally, I don't think it's one that cannabis producers need to be playing right now. If you think that's what you need. I guess you've realized that you can't afford to put the money into your facility and acquire the genetics that you actually need to make your business successful.
That's what that's, what I was gonna go with is, is maybe try and source some better genetics that you don't need to, to modify. Awesome. You'll
have to let us know Marlin, if you have any follow up questions with that. We got another question over on YouTube. The oil farmer's wife wants to know what's the ideal height at the end of stretch.
What strain are we talking about? Yeah.
How much height are you trying to get into power?
How high are your lights off the bench? I wanna put it right there. I'm gonna say, depending on your light, about 12 to 18 inches below the light , but that even that range is a bunch. No, there is no ideal hype for stretch. And that's why, you know, we keep talking about a lot of these crop steering tools being something just that a tool that you as an operator need to know how to use.
There is no it's the old saying there's a thousand ways to skin a cat and while that's not a hundred percent true, there are a lot of ways to do this. Just like we talked depending on your state by state place. If I have square footage, my strategy's gonna be different than if it's plant count in a given building. You know, there's a lot of aspects to look at, but again, they are tools and we wanna dial all of our actions to the strain.
That's, that's the whole point in driving, you know, these really complicated, expensive growing.
If we didn't need that, we wouldn't, if all you needed was a hoop house out in the back to produce quality cannabis, mm-hmm , everyone would be doing it, but it turns out it takes more input and it doesn't have to be indoor necessarily that, you know, I don't wanna offend our outdoor growers out there, but everyone knows it's a lot harder than just throwing some seeds on the ground and coming back in a few months. Yeah. And it's always gonna be that way.
Yeah. And. The reality is, is these are tools that you wanna learn how to use. Our industry is obviously getting into a very wide genetic range and what is popular for genetic? As far as shelf product goes changes month to month mm-hmm . We can see massive swings in preferences on the on the consumer side of this.
And so if you learn how to use those tools, They put yourself in a much more competitive position for the future, because you're, you're able to maybe run strains that have a big difference in them, in different rooms, you know, and optimize for each of those that you have better purchasing power or better selling power to, to the shelving. You know, obviously if you're just running everything, that's middle of the line, there's less chance that you're gonna have a wide consumer basis.
Yeah. And you know, one thing I like to always remember is a lot of these, these tools were developed not necessarily just for cannabis. They came from industries where people were focused on a much smaller profit margin. So if we look at, you know, horticulture as a whole more and more just knowing these types of skills as necessary to survive in the workplace and be, you know, a competitive.
It's, it's just kind of the nature of our world becoming more efficient and utilizing technology to do all of our jobs a little better all the time. It's about the bigger
picture. Mm-hmm it's
so true. It's so true. The oil farmer's wife wanted to say, thank you. Got it. Awesome answer. We did get a couple more questions in that time. Marlon wants to know ETA on Aurea for the home and small facility growers, anything in the works.
It is in the works. Absolute ETA. I'm not comfortable putting it out there at this point in the stage of the. Top secret.
You guys. Sorry. You're
gonna have to check back. Yeah, I'll tell you'all there's there's too many home growers out there. We're scared.
can you
imagine I'm one of 'em we, we don't want the launch to be kind of like, you know, all the, like, what was it like the Bronco and all the new cars that come out or like the Tesla track you sign up and years later, you know, we're trying to avoid that kind of thing. Cuz I think if we open that can of worms, our order list would be so long that we. Just kind of quit and go do something else. Cause it's overwhelming. Yeah. We
wanna dial in it and get it right. Yeah. Get it right for y'all
awesome. Love. It's just it's kinda like the, the markets you, when we look at California market oversaturated really fast the, the growers could over keep up with it. Places like maybe on the east coast, they were much more limited and people. Couldn't get products for, for a long, long time. You know, shelves were, were empty. Places would blow out every time that they got restocked.
So yeah, we wanna take more like the Washington approach where it's a fairly steady launch and release and, and we can provide a great experience for anyone in that that projectable timeline.
Awesome. Thank you for that Marlin. And then Hoffman's choice wants. do you have any general guidelines for sensor height in a grow medium? I'm running two gallon at the moment.
Two gallon, I think for sensor height. We're at one and a quarter as well. Yeah, exactly. Or is that the, the one gallon?
That's one to two gallon. One to two gallon? Yeah. Okay. Blocks and bags. And then when we go to like a three to five, we'll scoot it up and, you know, probably one of the biggest keys there is use that tool. So you're co. mm-hmm I mean, in, in realistically, I could scoot that sensor up or down and I'm gonna get a different reading. But what I want is to compare the same reading between two plants. If I'm taking two different data points, I can't compare 'em.
So you know that sensor's gonna give you a really accurate measurement. And remember that just a little bit up and down is not gonna affect. Oh, saw a really good definition or really good explanation. The other day of the difference between precision and accuracy. Mm-hmm but we wanna be precise and accurate. Yeah.
Precisions. How close are our readings to each other? Exactly. Accuracy is how close are those readings to the actual reading, right? And, you know, one thing that if you want to check on how well you're doing with that installation, you can always run a, a manual water content test as well. I know, I think a while ago, Ramsey did a video telling you how to, you know, measure the weight of dry substrate, measure it at saturation and have your sensor in that place.
And does that that weight match what the water content says. From the sensor. So that's, that's a great way. If you are changing media types, mm-hmm, get used to that. And you're sure you're, you're welcome to modify those Heights a little bit. We've tested them with, with quite a few medias, and that's why we do send out that installation template tools just to kind of help the clients unify across the industry. The volume of influence is basically the amount of volume that, that sensor.
Is taking a measurement for and on the tariffs, 12 it's about one liter. And so, you know, that, that one leader we're trying to take a sample that represents as much of the substrate as possible. Mm-hmm
cool. Thank you so much to our YouTube folks. Keep those questions coming. We're gonna move on to our Hangouts chat here. Johnny asked a couple questions. First one, here. He would love to know any, we would love to hear any irrigation strategies for tips on maximizing ter. It's that's there.
Yeah. So, you know, when we approach crop steering, it's a balance. How much product and how quality a product. Yes, you can absolutely get both, but it takes the perfect crop steering to, to optimize both of those together at the same time. So yeah, irrigation strategies would be documenting how you crop steered for that run. What were the documented test results for terpene profiles on it and, you know, start making one modification as time for that strain specifically.
. Seth Baumgartner: Yeah, I've got a pretty direct one, honestly. If we're looking at maximizing terpenes and we still wanna be crop steering, there's a really important thing to remember.
A lot of people are coming out of, you know, gray market, home and medical growing, having run an extremely generative steering strategy all the way through, you know, back in the days of using, say a five gallon pot I'm watering once a day, maybe once every other day that's pushing that as generative as possible. So when we're looking at using crop. To maximize terpenes. We gotta look at, okay, how much do we want to bulk this out?
And when are we willing to pull back from bulking into a generative steer? So if mm-hmm, and, and it's, again, gonna be strain dependent, some strains are gonna do great running a vegetative steer right up till have only one week of ripening. Let's say, you know, but some of 'em I've found kind of want to start pulling back that ripening at maybe three weeks in and start really focusing on that.
And. You know, just start to, like Jason said, document it, figure out how those, you know, different irrigation strategies affected that. And then also look at your other, your other variables. You know, once you've got everything down to a streamline process where you're like, Hey, this is what works for me. The only thing I'm changing is my settings on when I'm watering really document that, cuz it's gonna, like I said, it's just really gonna range on screens.
And the one thing we do know is that generative stress is how we. really bulk up, not so much flower production, but reproductive production. So those, you know, terpenes, cannabinoids, that's how we really mature those resin glands mm-hmm and being patient, you know, some plants it's a 10 week plant. It's a 10 week plant. You're never gonna harvest it in 56 days and have the same quality, no matter what you do.
Awesome. I love that question. Okay. And then Johnny has a second question here. Is there an optimal number of plants per sensor?
our
recommendation is, is one sensor per a hundred square foot of canopy. Basically what we're doing there is just trying to optimize the cost of installation and getting enough sensors in there for quality sampling. I, I did a, a growth behavior video. I think it's up on our YouTube. I think about a year ago now, and it's kind of just talking about the statistics of, of population.
And that's why we go with that one per hundred square foot, just to minimize the costs upfront, to getting installed, but maximizing the reliability of that data, the chance that all of your crop is is doing well. So obviously if we're crop steering, we typically get a crop steer on. We wanna do it on the average, across all of those sensors. If we have a very wide average, we're gonna see a very wide result, it's gonna be quite a bit more varied.
So, also kind of one of the strategies when someone starts using a ROI is focus first on the consistency of your plants and then focus on your, your modulating, your goals.
Yep. That's what I was gonna touch on. Jason. I would say, show me a picture of your table and let's see how. Variation we've got in your plants.
If you've got ver you know, if one plant harvests out at 900 grams wet and the one next to it's hitting four 50 or five we, we gotta work on that consistency before we can even really crop steer within that zone, because if that's at that point, you know, if we stick the most average plant, we can assume if we got a hundred plants, 48 or above and 49 or below, right. Or 50? Yeah, 48, 50 52 52. Yeah, whatever. , we're gonna be slightly above and slightly below.
The best we can hope for is an average. So we've gotta make that average range, that standard deviation from what we want to be perfect as small as possible. Mm-hmm yeah.
I was, I was stunned by the number of clients that I worked with, especially early on that had been talking about their experience with much, much more expensive water content EC sensor that was available in the market before AROYA. And they would say, Hey, the, the plant that I had the sensor in, in that one room. Or the cuz they'd have like one sensor in a room and they'd be like that plant grew well. And the rest of the, the room didn't do well.
So, that was obviously a great way for them to learn about uniformity versus consistency. Mm-hmm mm-hmm
and really, you know, I mean, I always say at horticultures, an art and a science, and you're not really an Artis so much as an artisan, you need to be able to make produce quality work repeatedly every time when we're talking about cloning vegging. So yes, there's art, but that skill level's very, very important in maintaining consistency. You know, the technology helps us increase that consistency, but if we're not willing to put in the work and have quality work at every stage, then.
The technology's not gonna help you either. You've gotta actually be able to act on
it. That's that's very well said. I mean, if I was a painter and I had really good paint brushes sometimes, and really poor paint brushes, sometimes I might not always be as as good as my skills or if you know, I have different levels of clay and I've been firing coffee mugs and pots and plant then obviously some clay would
crack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's part of your, part of your art is making sure that, you know, if you're really approaching it with a passion, you're trying to do it at the best level. You can at every stage of production mm-hmm , but we also gotta make money. So , we all end up making, you know, some little compromises here and there and that's just farming, getting that
balance in. It's just farming.
it's just farming. Hey, at least we don't. Well, nevermind. I was about to say something about diesel, but some people have to pay for that too in the campus industry. So. All
right, Mandy, I think we have a YouTube. Yeah, we did have a
couple more comments come over on YouTube. Hoffman's choice. Wanted to say the tool has been great. Thanks team. Awesome. Thank you so much. And then Casey wants to know this is a fun one. What's the backstory on AROYA and Ramsey with our company and they love the
Soli. sure. So if we go way, way back think Ramsey actually purchased one of the largest systems that we'd done at the time. Back when I was out doing research on getting the product out there. So we had some, some prototype equipment for aro and, and Ramsey ended up being you know, a big purchasing factor at the company he was working with. And Did some awesome things with the product.
And so, you know, after I think his interest was in, you know, really in applying some of the technology that he was learning about his background with crop steering and, and substrate information just simple love for plant physiology brought him to us. And so we connected up and. Can only say, you know, the best things about our relationship with Ramsey still works with us on our advisory board.
I like just calling him up to talk with the guy and see how his tomatoes are doing and his family and his kids. So, now that's the backstory is we gained a ton of ton of knowledge. I have to credit Ramsey with quite a bit about what I know. When it comes to crop steering. And so yeah, we, I miss him. We miss him, but we're, we're, you know, we're happy to meet with him pretty regularly as a, as an advisor for,
for our products.
I know I'm dying to meet him. I haven't met him yet. Yeah, same, but I learned
so much through its videos. You guys can find all those over on aur.io or on our YouTube channel. But yeah, that's the final
question over on YouTube. All right. Well, in these last few minutes, I think we'll go with Daniel's question last year. Daniel wants to know when trying out cocoa in a room instead of slabs, which pot size or pot style and cocoa will give me dry back, similar to S.
Just do some volume calculations. You know, if we wanna say, yeah, similar drive backs, we're probably gonna look at, you know, water content times volume itself. So if you were doing four by four S on a slab, just add up the four by four S and the slab divided by the number of plants that you. Time's that by your water content and then do the same thing for, for your Coco bags. And I, I don't know exactly what it works out too off
the top of my head for, for most people that aren't double stacked, either one and a half or two gallon it's strain dependent. And some of the people I find having the most success with Coco that. If you looked at their charts, you might guess it was rockwool. Typically. That's what they do for their bigger strains. They've got a two gallon pot that they pick a brand.
I try to be brand agnostic, but there are several brands out there that will hit, you know, that 55 to 65% volumetric water content. That's really what you gotta look for. Just make sure that that matches up. If that's, if that's what you're trying to run is rockwool, like volumetric water, content numbers. That's where you start is making sure you can hit that same field capacity. And then as Jason said, make sure you've got the appropriate volume.
Now, when you go out in the world and actually try to translate that there's so many options that you're gonna get kind of close. And then we talk about, you know, well, if the company is Canadian a gallon's a little closer to four liters or more, and , if they're in the us, it's 3.78. So just make sure you get all the information you can when you're trying to make those media choices and make sure you're comparing apples to apples, and you always have plant size to pop volume as a reference.
Yeah. I'm,
I'm really glad that you say that because you know, here, here in the states we are always talking about, you know, some slabs being. Or some cubes being six by sixes or four by fours. Most of the suppliers on these, especially traditional ones that we're used to actually have those cut to a metric measurement. And so if you want to be exactly accurate, which you might as well be, cuz it's just as easy look up the size specs or measuring them yourselves.
You know, a lot of these products were coming out of Europe. A lot of 'em right now come outta Canada and they are using metric numbers, which aren't exactly at that six by six per se. Cool. It's it's what number in metric is close to six by six and as. Being Americans. We just say, what's easy to say what we're used to in size. So keep that in mind.
You know, it's not gonna be a huge difference, but if you're times that by, you know, three plants in a substrate, and you're trying to correlate that to another substrate that maybe did come from the us or was using slightly different measuring standards, then it can exaggerate so well. Here's
might as well be accurate. Here's something I like to bring up too. We use in, in the way that we crop steering calculate. We use SA units. We use milliliters and leters. So instead of converting from gallons to leters and then milliliters, guess what? You can just get all the specs from the manufacturer in milliliters. And like Jason said, it's just as easy to plug the right numbers into your equation, as it is to plug close to right numbers into your equation.
You know, the information's out there, you just gotta grab it.
Amazing Mandy. Any other final words from our YouTube friends?
I believe that's it. Verde did join Verde Claro, join late. Sorry. I'm late. I'm always late because I'm high. We
get it. I, we get it. Yeah, it happens to us. We will be later. Yeah. I think everyone over there for that's the final question on my end, Seth and Jason, first time doing this in person. I hope it wasn't too weird. No, it was fun. It was great for me. I loved it. I hope you all loved it. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Any final words before we.
yeah. Keep coming back up here and we'll get
to get you your own mic. That's what I gonna say? Get you a mic. Watch out. We didn't bump heads. No, no, we did
pretty good. Watch out folks. I might be an expert on crop steering very soon with my two little plants in the backyard. Rehydrating those I was overwatering you guys. I realized that now. All right, on that note, everybody. Thank you all for joining us for this week's AO office hours. We do this every Thursday and the best way to get answers from the experts is to join us live.
If you have any questions about AYA book a demo, our experts will talk you through all the features and tell you how it can help be used to improve your cultivation production process. But as always let us know if there's a topic you want covered in a future office hours session posted in the chat. Send us an email at support.aroya@metergroup.com. or drop us a DM over Instagram. We wanna hear from you. We record every session.
We'll email everybody in attendance and link to the video from today, and then it'll live on the Aurora YouTube channel, like subscribe and share while you're there. And if this is useful, please do spread the word. Thank you all so much. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Thanks guys.