The Sesh - Welcomes Rooted Leaf

I'm Brandon. And I'm Jesse. We're. Cannabis school having cannabis infused conversations. With everyday. People, Cannabis companies. Celebrities. And your mom. Welcome to the Sesh. All right, welcome back everybody. For the SESH, we have got a very good friend of ours on the

podcast. Now we look for things that are going to be able to enhance you in many different ways, from it more of the plant medicine side to the spiritual side and understanding exactly when you have cannabis, is it being grown with the best products available for the. Best way, Yeah. I mean, we learned, yeah, we learned a. Lot we We got to learn a lot through. Terrible investment. A good learning opportunity. It was very expensive A. Very expensive education. For me, but for him.

The most expensive education I've had to date. Oh yeah, dude, I'm still paying back on my student loans, and that shit still is. That's. Yours is way more scary than that. But. Without further ado, we want to be able to introduce our friend. Now, Nick, how do you pronounce your last name? I don't want to butcher it. Nikolayev. Nicolaya OK, that's easy enough. Yeah. So Nick Nicolaya from Rooted Rooted Leaf. Rooted Leaf, These guys are I I mean, I I really want to go into the product.

But I got to say, Nick, we really want to get a little bit to know you and our audience know you. So first thing, when I looked over everything, you and your wife, martial artists, what system did you guys have studied? We studied a Japanese style of karate, which is pretty old school and hardcore, you know, more traditional style. So it was not what you see nowadays with people just kind of playing tag. It was very much so a rough and full contact kind of martial

arts. So it developed a good character, you know, in both myself and her. I started when I was 8 years old and I met her when I was 19. And you know, initially I was her sense again, she was a student, but over a couple of years we got to know each other really well and that kind of led to us developing a really strong relationship outside of the Dojo and and now we're married so. I was reading you just six months now. Congrats. Thank you.

I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. We got married last September and had a chance to fly to Hawaii for our honey movement. Spend a lot of time there. Nice. Yeah, it was great. So with the system that you study, is that Kyukshin? It's related to Kyukushin. It's a brother art of Kyukushin, it's called Quay Con and the founder of Kyukushin studied directly with the founder of our style. They were effectively, they had the same sensei. So yeah, it's very, very closely

related to that. And then there's a couple of other martial arts styles that are also very closely related. But it's like a family or a group of very small number of martial arts and then everything else is kind of a derivative or an offshoot of those. Yeah, I'm, I'm. You're speaking to another. I've been studying martial arts since I was seven years old. I'm 45 lifelong.

I mean, I've studied from. I did a bastardized version of Kempo Karate when I was growing up and then did Taekwondo, did Wing Chun for about 9 years and then got into MMA styles like Muay Thai and all that one. But I did get to practice with a lot of Shura Khan and Kyukshin Karate stylist and I it's exactly that like looking into your style. I I know that style too. So hard, so brutal, but so like

actually usable. It's not flash, it's just the body is hardened and it just gives you such amazing character. I mean, I could see that from the amount of of detail that you put into your work and that's just a direct correlation to that one I would imagine so. Absolutely, yeah. And I don't think I would be able to do the work I'm doing today if it wasn't for, you know, the life's worth of learning experiences that I had from the Dojo and just learning how to overcome challenges and

obstacles. I mean, my black belt test, you know, it takes about nine years or so to get a black belt in our style. And my black belt test was 14 hours long and it was spread across three days and all three days that we trained. I ended up losing 10 lbs. Most of it was water rate obviously, but I was still drinking 2 to 3 gallons of water and still losing 10 lbs of

weight. So just to give you some context here, this is an opportunity to actually demonstrate and showcase how the will of an individual can can go a lot further than the physical body wants to go. And so the goal or the purpose in that exam is to break you down to the point where you can't physically go on and the only thing that you can do is keep believing in yourself and keep pushing yourself and mind over matter type of thing.

You eventually breakthrough to the other side and you realize that you're a lot stronger than you thought you were in all the moments leading up to that point of physical failure. The goal is to encourage that point of physical failure so you can dig really deep and try to find what is beyond that point, man. That's amazing. That's. No, I I one. Hell of a journey, it sounds like. Yeah, I I I can completely relate. You know when I, I grew up during an era where martial arts

was truly martial arts. Like the padding on the floor that I had was a concrete floor that was just painted on that was smooth and the protection is you don't want to get hit in the groin, then don't get hit in the groin. It was truly to train you to utilize the martial art. And I and I agree with you, A lot of martial arts these days, you don't see a lot of martial artists. Their younger generation, it's more of just steered towards MMA, which is great in its own sense.

But when you look at it, the traditional, very, very structured systems that are based on a lot of respect, not only for your instructors but for yourself and for the system and for those around you like it is is there something to be said with it? It builds character. I wish that there were more schools that built character like that instead of being MC Dojos pumping out black belts every September when you signed up in March.

It's just like truly like that. Like you said, I mean, it took nine years to get up to even test to that. The goal wasn't to sign up going mom, dad, you know, I'm going to have my black belt and we'll have some cool display cases and you can brag to your friends. It's not that at all. It was truly about you and it defined who you are. So, and I remember those times where, I mean, you'd be training for it, it just seemed like forever.

And they're like, hey, cool. And then twice a year we'd have a camp and that's three days straight. It's just not like roasting marshmallows and finding some cool lizards out there. It's like you're going to train for morning until we can't see. And even by the sea it's going to be by the fire. So man, a lot of respect for that. That's says a lot about your character. That's amazing. And I was super excited. I see. And it's like a family of martial arts.

I can imagine when you guys, if you guys have children, it's going to be just it's it's just part of your culture now. Is that something you and your wife still practice together? We do occasionally. I mean, it's not as much as we used to practice anymore. I'm really busy. She's really busy. But we still make time for, you know, it's really important for us to kind of keep that connection, you know, alive and strong.

One of the things that I find follows me regardless of what I do is that development of character. You know, the things that I learned in the way that I discipline myself and really the respect that I developed not only for people surrounding me, but also for the style that I practiced and realizing how much hard work it actually takes. It kind of softens you as an individual at the same time that it strengthens you. So you become a lot more

well-rounded. And I find that thing is something that is integrated into me in all walks of life. And how I do anything is how I do everything. And it's that kind of approach that I think was really forged into me as a young child to make sure it doesn't matter if you're, you know, unloading the dishwasher or if this is like the make or break kind of, you know, opportunity in life. You have to give it your all in every single moment of your

life. Anything that you do and everything that you do should be done with passion, and it should be done with the kind of vigor that you know defines what a black belt really is, that you know at the core of what it means to be, you know, the heart and soul or black belt. Amen. It sounds like you take that heart and soul and passion into every part and every aspect of your life at this point. What led you? Or like what was the initial passion that found like that you

found in rooted leaf? Well, you know, there's an interesting story to be told about tea, I guess. You know, I'm a big tea connoisseur. Yeah, I was hearing. That some like 30 like $30 a gram teas, 20 to $30 a gram teas, do you actually. Drink. That. Yeah, yeah. You know, in some cases they do get very expensive. I think the most expensive tea that I have tried thus far is, is about $8 a gram. And it comes from a very limited production region. The total quantity produced is very small.

And these are typically teas that are reserved for dignitaries that are traveling, like presidents, I think, I think Richard Nixon and all the way up to Barack Obama. You know, they would get tea when they visited China for their political trips. They would get teas that come out of this particular garden and some of the surrounding

regions as well. But you know the the types of teas that I prefer to drink on a daily basis, these are Phoenix Oolong. So it's a type of oolong tea coming from a very small geographic region called the Phoenix Mountain range and they happen to have the oldest standing history of oolong production that's also remarkably complex and intricate.

I feel like the manufacturing techniques associated with making these teas represent 1000 plus your journey that humans have been having, you know, in conjunction direct conjunction with nature. Part of it is informed by their breeding practices, which takes 20 to 30 years to select for the corrected genotypes and the correct phenotypes. And then there's also this fine tuning of processing techniques

that are applied. And in some cases the teas may take upwards of one year just to finish making and then they rest for another two to three years before they're actually ready to be consumed. So. Isn't even the curing process. That's just like because the resting I'm guessing is the curing stage then that you're talking about or is that a separate like is that kind of inclusive all together in the curing stage? Yeah. You know, there's various phases

to the manufacturing process. Initially the, the initial stages could take anywhere from a few months up to maybe 8 to 12 months at most. And then that you know, additional two or three years could just be a curing process to allow the tea leaves to kind of mature into the techniques applied to them. Because a lot of times we'll you'll apply these techniques and then for the next six months the constituents of the leaf will continue to transform and

change. And really what you're looking for is a particular spot along the progression of the the transformation where you can drink the tea and you get kind of the maximum of, you know, all of its potentials. Yeah, I just barely started roasting my own coffee beans and it's kind of very similar in that stage of like like all the

degassing stage. And after that, there's like perfect stages of within the developing flavors of when to drink That and every day is almost like different flavors as it develops and changes and progresses. So I can imagine with teas, I worked for Teavana for a few months in a really rough time period years and years ago, and that was like my first introduction to loose leaf teas.

And I was just like, Oh my gosh, this is a whole nother world instead of just like cheap little tea bags from the store. Like way different level of. Yeah. Do you ever go slumming on those types of teas or you're like no, my my appreciation and and level of consumption is a little bit higher. Yeah. Do you ever go like poor kid chips with rum and break it up, you know, and it's, it's tea bag tea, you know? Not, not really. Not these days.

And you know, I try to maintain a fine balance between being a snob and being a connoisseur. I guess it's like a really fine line between the two of them. But you know, as far as the overall price points, I mean I drink teas that are inexpensive, that are affordable for daily consumption. But I also try to seek out teas that are relatively unique. One example would be like in in the Phoenix Mountain region, in general, there's mother trees that are several 100 years old.

And the way that they're propagated is farmers will come in and take cuts, very limited number of cuts get propagated forward. But when you take those cuts and you populate, you know, another garden full of those cuts, you may have to wait 20 to 30 years before the tea tree is old enough for it to be harvested and processed and picked. So you know if you can get the mother trees, those are very expensive because there's only one tree of those in the entire

world. They happen to be several 100 years old and the total amount of tea produced from them oftentimes is less than £10 per year. And I would say you know unless you know somebody in the innermost region and who has a very strong network with multi generational farmers, it's very difficult to access authentic mother tree productions and they can cost upwards of $5 a gram if not more. I think the oldest if I recall correctly back in I think it was 2006 or maybe it was 2016.

But the oldest tree on Phoenix Mountain, which is around 700 to 800 years old, the tea leaves were auctioned off and I I think they sold for $500 a gram. Holy cow. Have you experienced any of that before? Nothing like that. And to give you guys some context, I need about 7 grams to make one pot of tea. So 500 bucks times 7g. You know, it's a little bit too that's. An expected. Product. That's right.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, it's something that you have to kind of become soft wired for. You got to drink a lot of tea in order to appreciate the kind of nuances and subtleties that really old trees can convey. Because it's not. Some of the flavor profiles aren't quite in your face. I mean, for some of these teas, don't be wrong. You can smell the tea from 1520 feet away and it's like this explosive bouquet of, like, flowers and fruits and it's just the most amazing thing.

But a lot of the old trees, they're they're a lot more subtle. They won't punch you in the face, but they'll creep up on you like an edible you weren't feeling an hour and a half ago, and then all of a sudden you're just like, whoa, this is crazy. It definitely has that kind of psychedelic aspect to it. So with that said I mean you know on our show we we we completely understand what

you're talking about. You know after years of consuming cannabis on a very, on a on a level of not like let's get highbrow like it's very about what what's the intent that we really have for this plant and the respect we have for it. And over the years like it's not just burning plant to us just like it's not just Gray Earl tea for you. It's you can taste the nuances and and you can really understand even through the quality of it like what that growth cycle must have been.

Like what kind of care went in and the nutrients that were given to the plant in order to produce the highest quality that you're getting at that moment 'cause now like we were just joking around about slumming and having some ramen style you know tea bag which it means affordable is totally you know you're you're using affordable tea. But I'm saying like over there it's in a box. We don't know how long that's been sitting on a shelf or in a

warehouse. Like all these things take into account like I found cannabis in a little tube that I'll put even its airtight. It'll be there for over a year, it'll be OK, but it's still not appreciated as when you really know the steps that have gone through. And so when you talk about I can pick up on subtle tones with like these really older Tees that are very complex and it it creeps up on you like like an edible. When you said that I just started, I'd started laughing at

my ass. That's like you know we know that feeling and to experience that through tea that is very, very unique and in that way where you just have to know and and I mean from we have so many different people that listen to us from cultivars to your end consumer and it's appreciated.

It really is appreciated and that's where you know I think about what you are doing now and and the complexity of going into it. Brandon, you know what are some of the things as I mean I know you got but so our audience knows a lot about Brandon's past as far as getting into the cultivar side of cannabis and understanding that. But I know you got a lot of questions based on that.

Yeah, I'm just curious, explain to the audience a little bit about rooted leaf, what it is that rooted leaf is what it is that they do? OK, so rooted leaf Agrotech is a manufacturer. We make carbon based fertilizers. We've been in business since April of 2019. And the idea, the idea for rooted leaf initially came around as kind of a combination of a variety of different experiences that I had in life. The first was obviously tea like we just talked about.

Then I started fermenting tea and making kombucha and I realized that during this fermentation stage or process, there was a remarkable amount of change that occurred, you know, between the parent material being tea leaves and perhaps cane sugar and water. You combine the three of those, let the microbes do their thing, come back 10 to 14 days later and it's a completely different product altogether, got different physical properties, different chemical properties.

So I became really intrigued by this process of transformation. How microbes in particular are capable of changing things around. So at that time probably, you know, 2010, 2012, I had a small kombucha brewery and I was exploring this. And then I ended up getting hired at a company, chemical manufacturing Company here in Washington state. And I worked there for maybe a year or just over a year. And my job there was to help them do some formulations work. So I went in and I kind of took

a look at some of the recipes. I didn't have much experience in industrial chemistry at this time, but I had a deep passion for it and an underlying understanding on on the fermentation side at least, of how transformations in chemical systems can occur. So I was really intrigued to explore this. Ended up spending a little bit of time there and realizing in in terms of synthesis, chemistry and making stuff. Order of operations is just

remarkably critical. You can take 10 different ingredients, combine them 100 different ways, and 99 of those waves will break. And the one final way that actually works, you know correctly who produces a product that's stable. That is a combination of some very detailed steps. You know, like some of these steps can involve particular temperatures. You know, you have to add this product into that product. You can't go the other way around.

Sometimes it's the temperature thing and it's a time in terms of rate of addition thing. So there's all of these different steps in the process than most people would overlook, right? It's just as simple as adding ingredient A into ingredient B, but that couldn't be further from the truth. You have to understand all of the physical properties of what is A and what is B, and then try to figure out how did they interact with each other.

Do you want that reaction to happen very slowly so that you can create a very consistent product? Or do you want it to happen very quickly, in which case it might break entirely and the formula's no good anymore? And I think that kind of. Experience. Like at the different temperature you know is it, Then you have a whole different compound you're working with too. Exactly, exactly.

So time, temperature, rate of addition, pH, there's so many different properties to measure that ultimately have an impact on the creation of this product. So I did that. I became really inspired. And then in 2014, Washington State legalized the recreational cannabis industry. And so, you know, at this time now I have experience with fermentation chemistry and I've got experience in industrial chemistry, synthesizing compounds and doing a little bit

of synthesis work. And I just felt like it was a natural fit for me to transition into the cannabis side of things because I've been a passionate cannabis enthusiast for a very long time. Initially going back to the medical days here in Washington about 2008 or 2009, I started to get involved a little bit on the cultivation side, although it

was never really a big grower. And you know, I just started meeting people kind of exploring the plant a little bit more and realizing that everything that I was passionate about with fermentation chemistry was mirrored in the cannabis plant. And I always had this burning underlying passion kind of explore, you know, how did the plant get here?

How did we end up to, you know, in a spot where the profile of terpenes and cannabinoids is what it is and looking some at some of the underlying mechanisms behind that. So that, you know, led me about 2014, two, 1015 to start looking at plant nutrition. And ever since then, you know we've been doing this work which we now described as a carbon based fertilizer. Obviously, when we initially started, it was more difficult for us to characterize what

exactly we were doing. And fortunately, we've learned a lot along the way. And now we're in a position where we have a pretty good understanding of how this technology works, what exactly sets it apart and I'm super excited to talk to you guys about that. That's amazing. Yeah. So take us through say like your carbon based fertilizer, say we have a plant, say we have Blue Dream for those growers at home, very simple to grow, very high yielding.

A lot of those beginner growers might start with something like that introducing say your carbon based fertilizer versus a normal fertilizer. What would you see as far as like structure changes or growth or even like massive benefits from the carbon birth based versus that understand?

From what I understand you have a great analogy by using the, the a car all the way down to its chassis of how your actual like take take us through that because that's it's probably by far the best explanation of it because it's really easy to break it down and you understand that it's everything comes from the nutrients and how it's actually going to build a very strong platform if you will, right. So real strong yielding, high yielding plant take it, take us

through that. Yeah. And I guess the underlying premise of a carbon based fertilizer and the reason that works so well specifically for cannabis is because most of the compounds that growers are seeking to produce, the monoterpenes and the cesspoterpenes and obviously the cannabinoids, those are roughly 80 to 90% carbon by weight. In fact, all of the monoterpenes like Mercene, pionine, limonene, they're 90% carbon by weight and all of the cannabinoids are 80% carbon.

So in reality, if you want to get more cannabinoids, as you want to get more terpenes out of your plants, you really have to try to figure out a way to feed them more carbon. And now traditionally the way that this this has been done is to inject CO2 gas into a room that's sealed. And growers who have done this before, all of them will attest to this. As soon as you increase the CO2 concentration to the plants, they start responding much better. They they increase their yield,

they increase quality. There are morphological differences that change, such as the surface area of the leaf becomes a lot bigger, the plants just grow faster. They seem to transition between the various stages a lot faster. And the thing that I want to point out here is that carbon is a macro nutrient for crops. In terms of how much is taken up, we often times just look at nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, the Calmac, micronutrients, so on and so forth.

But these elements actually represent a very tiny percentage of what plants will ultimately accumulate. In fact, you could take all of the NPK Cal mag. So you can take all 17 elements that you'll find in a conventional salt based fertilizer, take that number, add them all together, multiply that number by 5 and the plant still has accumulated more carbon than all of those.

So it really cast things into a different light to say well the thing that plants are trying to do more than anything is utilize all of these elements like nitrogen for example as a means through which they can capture more carbon. And as I've built out this analogy of a car engine over the past couple of years, it's it's something we've been working on

for a few years now. And I feel like the analogy is at a really good place now where we can kind of blow it up a little bit, take a look under the hood and see what exact exactly is going on. One of the high level examples I'll give you guys is that 90% of the nitrogen that you apply to your plants, actually more than 90% of the nitrogen becomes either chlorophyll which is that green pigment or becomes an enzyme called Rubisco. And Rubisco has one job and

that's to take CO2 out of the air and convert it into a a plant available form of sugar effectively. So it's the very first enzyme involved in this dedicated step, and it's a little bit ironic in my perspective how most of the nitrogen you apply towards your plants actually goes towards capturing carbon, right? Because chlorophyll takes light energy. What's that light energy used for photosynthesis? Rubisco operates to take CO2 out of the air, using that light energy to create sugars.

And if you become deficient in nitrogen, one of the first places that you can look is towards the leaf surface and see if it's yellow, for example. It's an indication that the plants are deficient in chlorophyll. They don't have enough of that green pigment, so it's ironic that a deficiency in nitrogen is actually the exact same thing as a deficiency in carbon. The plants have a bottleneck in

that carbon. So this is a high level, easy to understand type of example, specifically as it relates to Nitrogen. That's incredible. Yeah, 'cause even. I mean, like we joked at the beginning, I made this horrible investment or expensive education. And in that I read the Oakster Dam University's growers handbook from front to back, just because it was like, oh shit. You just invested a bunch of money, yeah. Like I need to really like, I know at least.

OK, I in my mind I felt like I knew nothing about cannabis in relation to a lot of people. I probably knew a lot about cannabis, but that wasn't anything for me in relation to Ki just dropped $100,000. I need to figure out what the hell I'm putting this money like into and really understand it on

every level that I can. And so I sat down with that and I read it and it was like even just that discussion of like nitrogen and like all the oxygen, every every mineral, every like thing that goes into that plant. But when you're understanding that the real like end goal and that really is just changing a lot of that to carbon or really

pulling in more carbon. And even on understanding on a basic level like looking at trees and then looking at the cannabis plant and cannabis pulls out like four times more carbon than like trees, isn't it. So you like that little plant is reducing or pulling in massive amounts of carbon. So wouldn't like that sounds like it is its end goal like feeding it more carbon.

So having a fertilizer that is based or you know in that has more of the nutrients that it's actually looking for that seems like a supercharged soil almost. Yeah, yeah. And it's a little bit, there are some differences which we'll get

into a little bit. But the idea is that, you know, we understand plants, all of the activities that that the plants participate and revolve around capturing carbon or storing carbon or somehow utilizing carbon, whether it's taking in energy from the sun to make sugars or doing something as specific and nuanced as making a mono terpene out of the accumulated pools of carbon. And you're right when you say that there's some reduction that has to happen because CO2 in the

air is in an oxidized form. It's got the oxygen molecules is attached to it. The plants don't really care about that. Really what they're trying to do is break the oxygen apart from the carbon and then use that carbon. And in this process of converting the oxidized forms of carbon that are in the air into the reduced forms of carbon that are perhaps the mono terpenes, Right. Because mono terpenes are just carbon and just hydrogen. They have no oxygen inside of

their structure. Some of the oxygenated ones do obviously. But you know the the, the, the thing I want to try to convey at large is that plants use the power, the reduction power generated through photosynthesis to capture that carbon and then to store it and then to utilize it for certain things like the biosynthesis of secondary

metabolites. So really what we've done is take a carbon centric approach to creating fertilizers to say, look, every element that we have in our product line has to be fundamentally connected to carbon because then when it's delivered into the plants, there's no energy expenditure

that's required. We're doing the chemical reduction of that carbon through fermentation chemistry and then creating chelates and complexes that deliver those minerals like the NPK, calcium and magnesium in the most ideal forms. And one of the examples I can give you guys for that is when we manufacture our calcium chelate, we're fermenting orange peels because as everybody knows and most growers will tell you, calcium is component of thick cell walls.

So if you have more calcium, the plants form thicker cellular structures. Well, if you look at an orange peel, it's just basically a really, really thick cell wall and it's full of pectic acid residues which as it turns out all plants utilize pectic acid to complex calcium. Shove that into the cell wall and then that's their that's one of the basis for their cell cell wall components.

By fermenting the orange peels, what we're doing is taking those pectic acid residues that are naturally present in very high concentrations and then running a chelation reaction with calcium so that when we're delivering that calcium chelate to the plants, the plants are taking up something that they recognize it's biologically relevant for them.

They look at the calcium, they look at the pectic acid, and they have mechanisms internally, enzymes that can attach directly to these molecules and make use of them right away. There's no energy expenditure. The reduction power is already stored in those bonds. So when plants take up our nutrients, they experience a net gain in energy, which leads to an increased productivity and yield.

Even if you don't have a sealed flowering room, you don't have to have a sealed flowering room anymore, because we can put as much carbon as is found in about 5000 PPMS of CO2 in the air, but inside of a liquid medium. So we're loading carbon from the inside out rather than the outside in. And the focus now for us becomes how do we increase transpiration

potential for the plants? Because the faster we can get the plants to take up the feed water, the more carbon they're ultimately going to be able to access. And so this transpiration pump is really a key focus of the carbon based chemistry in our products. Yeah, there's like trying to match the certain levels of everything so that it can grow at its most optimal form, basically. So as a layperson like I'm, I'm wondering like does that like increase the the growth cycle,

the the, the time? Does it shorten it you? Mean. Yeah. Does it shorten it? Yes, it can. In most cases, we've seen a decrease in the overall time spent in flowering without a decrease or a reduction in quality or yield. And I often attribute this to a lot of stressors that get in the way of plants performing at their peak levels and their optimum performance. It's just a natural law in biology that there's always

going to be 1 limiting factor. There's always going to be something that the plants need a little bit more of to maintain an equilibrium. It doesn't matter how much nitrogen you have, if you're deficient in phosphorus, you can add as much nitrogen as you want. It will never correct that phosphorus deficiency. But when you add in more phosphorus, all of a sudden that doesn't become the limiting factor.

Now instead of phosphorus, your limiting factor may be magnesium and so you have to look at adding magnesium. And so all of these things have to be very tightly coordinated together and then delivered to the plants progressively so that they don't experience bottlenecks that are, you know,

reasonable. I think if the bottleneck itself can be the intensity of the sunlight or the ability of the dehumidifiers to pull moisture out of the air, that puts the stress on the external factors that are not in. The environment, yeah, no longer the plant and that. And that's, that's what I initially learned through all of that study was like, oh shit, this guy who's growing is not doing anything of this. There is nothing that's being tracked. And I was like, what are we

doing this? What are we doing with this? What are we doing with this? What are we doing with this? And the guy's like, crickets, so. Yeah. And I I think about that cause like when you're talking about decreasing the time for full yield, but on top of that I'm just thinking about like you're taking a lot of the complexities and you're being able to utilize all of the nutrients in the waters that are going in there.

So a big problem with a lot of growers is the usage of water like when I got involved he made the investment and he's like hey, I don't think these guys really understand business talk. Can you talk to him and when I just. Started business at. All, yeah, business at all. It's. Him on as like the CEO and that would be a good idea. Well, 'cause I came from the supply chain and manufacturing world at that time. And so I was like, OK, well, cool.

I need to know your water usage, your power usage. You know what? What's your nutrients you're putting in the ground? What's the cost on your nutrients? And and where are you getting it from? Is it a trusted source that at the time there was a a grower out there that they had to recall a bunch of their cannabis products because everybody started getting hepatitis? Yeah, it did some horrible thing out there. Yeah. And I was like, what the? Crap.

I mean, who? Who knows what they were using for fertilizer at that time? And that's I think that's a big misunderstanding for many growers, especially when they're getting into it and even some of the larger grows, they kind of treat it like it's just tomatoes and you can just do is whatever you get over at Walmart and saying, hey, yeah, that's going

to give me the best shield. But when you were talking about the color of the leaves, I remember one of those times where we got pictures back from this grower they invested into like the yellowing of the leaf and they're like, oh, it's probably just too close to the lat. And it's like that's that that it just like when you talked about that, it's it's literally like foundation medicine within

us humans. Like if we are deficient in one thing or another and we run a lab report on it, it'll tell us like hey you're low in testosterone, you're low in in vitamin D you have low sodium. I mean and those things matter and adjusting them accordingly helps to level things out. And it sounds like it this is like a super dense nutrient food that plants are able to just get the most out of and you said you have a line of products, is that right for different types of

plants with that? Yeah, we have a full product line. There are 9 distinct formulations, but there's eight products. So one of them is a two-part base nutrients and they're all incredibly fine-tuned specifically for cannabis, but they work phenomenally well on other crops as well. It's just the use rates may change and the timing of application may change, but the form factor of those products represents the most biologically relevant form of those elements

that are inside of the bottle. Like I mentioned with the calcium for example, fermenting the orange peels in particular lets us really deliver basically like a 99% complete cell wall for the plant. It doesn't have to do any work anymore. All that has to do is take it and it actually releases energy within the plant because once the production power is opened up in the plant that powers the

plants processes. So in a in a strange way, the electrons that flow through the electron transport chain during photosynthesis are actually identical to the ones that are captured in our products. And So what we've seen is also that there's a decreased need for highlight intensity as well because the electron energy which is captured in the form of reduction power is stored in the chelates that we make. It's physically present in those molecular bonds as potential

energy. And then plants have these enzymes, they've got these tools and the ability to go and maybe cut up some of those compounds, break them down into simpler compounds. And it's during the breakdown process that the potential energy becomes released as kinetic energy and that drives metabolic processes that typically the plants would have to absorb energy from the sun in

order to power. But now we have this advantage of them being able to actually take it up directly from the feed water and access the power of the sun as it's stored through the fermentation chemistry and delivered through the actual feed water. I think it's worth questioning too, like you were just talking about, you know, plants and car engines are actually remarkably similar in their underlying

mechanistic principles. In order for a car engine to produce horsepower and torque, you need spark, you need air and you need fuel. Those are kind of like the basic components and you start to build out a system around that

with the intake and the exhaust. You start looking more specifically at like the strength of the spark carried through the plugs themselves, the amount of air and fuel, and really the ratio between the two of them to prevent the engine from running rich or running lean or dry. I should say plants are actually exactly the same way. Their spark is the sunlight. Their air, quote UN quote, is the carbon that comes in from the air. And then their fuel is water, because as we all know, plants

take up water. They split water molecules apart, they convert them into electrons and protons which each get funneled down to their respective metabolic pathways, and then molecular oxygen, which we learned in kindergarten. Plants breathe out, humans breathe in and we released the CO2 back to the plants. So this is the kind of underlying principles and obviously car engines producing horsepower and torque, plant engines actually produce primary

and secondary metabolites. It's a really good way of thinking about horsepower and torque and what is the measurement of the flow of power in a car engine? Will it's horsepower and torque and the same measurement applied to plants as primary and secondary metabolites and for? Cannabis come out with cannabis is like terpenes and cannabinoids. Yes, yes. The terpenes and cannabinoids represent the flow of power through the plants. These are very high energy

molecules. They require a lot of energy, which is exactly why you need to highlight intensity and direct light intensity. No one ever won any cups or got any awards as a result of shade growing a plant under very low light and only watering once a week. You know the the the intensity associated with these molecules is captured in their the rates at which they are accumulated and the more intense your grow environment.

In other words, the more intense your air, spark and fuel are, the higher the performance that you're going to achieve. In other words, more cannabinoids and terpenes your plants will be able to cause. As long as your ratio matches and it fits, you can increase that. You know spark gas and feel like you can increase all of those as long as the the ratio is perfect and it matches what that plant

needs. And it sounds incredible because what it sounds like to me is this, this fertilizer basically allows the plant to not work as hard in some aspects and put more of its energy into growing bigger and probably healthier, meaning that it's going to fight off more things.

I would, I would imagine naturally, just because it's no longer putting so much energy wasted in trying to convert or do these things that are not necessarily necessary processes when they have the fertilizer and the nutrients, you know, at the correct ratio. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're 100% right about that. Just like a car engine operates, plants are very similar. So imagine you crank up the light intensity in your guru, but you don't increase the strength of the fertilizer.

The plants will quickly become deficient. Let's say you increase the light intensity and the fertilizer load, but you don't increase the CO2 concentration. Same thing. Now. There was a bottleneck there. Now let's back up one step. Suppose you did not increase the light intensity. What if you just fed them a lot heavier and you cranked up the CO2? Your results would also be limited because there's not enough spark that's there to combust this combination of stronger feed with.

You're going to burn rich or yeah, you'll run rich or you'll run lean. So exactly. Someone way or the other, your end product won't be ideal because it won't, it won't ever be that perfect level if those ratios don't match. So that's yeah, that's incredible, I think. Yeah, and we know it was talking about with the fermented orange peels and and what that it's ultimately doing by being able to give it more calcium rich,

strengthening the plant. Like in my mind it went all like marvel, like how the cells are like the biting and everything like that. When he was describing that and then thinking about the calcium is creating this like stronger exoskeleton to really protect the plant from a lot of, I mean and that's kind of a question I have there is this through this nutrient, through your, through your product, is this able to help the plants be stronger and being able to fight off against

like pests? Yeah, absolutely. And there's two halves of that approach. One is just treating carbon like a macronutrient because as it turns out, when plants have additional substrate pools, they can afford the production of certain molecules. I actually created the analogy of a bank account, a Chemical Bank account. You know, imagine you go to the store and you have a $10 to spend. You're trying to get a variety of ingredients to make your sandwiches. So you have to buy your bread.

You have to buy your meats, cheeses, sauces, little accoutrements here and there. Plants are the exact same way. They too have reduction in power that they build up and put inside of a Chemical Bank account. And they use that reduction power much like we use dollars, except instead of buying, you know, sandwiches and ingredients for sandwiches, they're trying to effectively access minerals

and nutrients out of the soil. They want to convert the nitrogen, so they have to spend a certain amount of energy on that. They need to fight off the disease pressure. So there's a huge tax that's placed on their bank accounts, if you will. It's very expensive for the plants to deal with certain types of disease pressures. And if you increase the substrate pool available for them to spend, they can start to have all these expressions that they typically wouldn't because

they don't have enough money. They're being taxed by having to process too many nitrates or too many sulfates or too many synthetic fertilizers. All this stuff robs the plants of their energy pools that they progressively build up throughout the day, which is why when you deliver our products, because there's no, because the reduction power is captured in those bonds, the plants can automatically utilize that to ward off disease pressures by producing secondary metabolites

with almost no tax. I mean it's it's like you work, you know, through the day and you put a certain amount of money in your bank account, let's say every week or every month. Imagine if someone came in and just gave you an extra $1000 a week and said spend this on whatever you want, but it has to improve the quality of your life. It has to give you a stronger structure. It has to give you a better foundation. It has to smooth out the rough

bumps for you in your life. This is exactly what happens with the plants. You give them the additional reduction power and they are capable and they certainly do generate more compounds. But on a on a more microscopic level, the basis of this sort of effects all plant expression down to the DNA. So we actually see the gene expression increase significantly, not only the overall concentration of terpenes and cannabinoids being higher, but also the breath and the death.

And we see these terpenes come out and test results that are typically very rare and very conserved in cannabis. So now there's this additional layer of complexity because the plant has this extra energy. So it says, well, let me turn on this pathway. And now there's this synthase enzyme that's responsible for producing A terpene that typically is just kind of in the background hanging out, doesn't get much attention, doesn't get much activity.

But in an environment where the plants have access to a surplus of energy, now you have all these other ancillary enzymes coming in and they start participating in the process of taking the substrate and creating a compound out of it. And that's where we start to see the increase in the breadth and

the depth of the terpenes. I mean huge difference in the overall flavours and aromas that are captured in the plants and really their ability not only to resist disease but also to hold a really long cure and a really long shelf life with no degradation to the terpenes or cannabinoids whatsoever. That's when. Yeah. I was curious with that because as you were talking about that, it really just sounds like you said a wider expression of

terpenes and cannabinoids. And for everyone who understands the entourage effect, that truly just means like a better experience. So do you living in Washington, do you grow your own at home or do you grow your own, maybe even commercially like? Not anymore. I like to live vicariously through other people's gardens. I mean, I have a small garden in my backyard every year. I'll grow like fruits and vegetables and I have a chance to see how our products work there.

But it's been a couple of years since I've grown cannabis and. Do you have? Friends who are utilizing your soil that you I'd just be very curious like the experience of a side by side comparison because I would wager that products grown in rooted leaf would have a much better experience. Even from like if I were to pop 2 seeds one pot next to each other and have one standard like soil or whatever, I'm using UN1

rooted leaf. I think that entourage like I think it would be a much more complete experience with that rooted leaf one. I'm just curious, how often like do you get to sample that? Yeah, we're fortunate enough to have friends that are local to us here in Washington state that we do a lot of really good work with. A couple of these guys have been working with for a few years and they've definitely provided very valuable feedback and information that initially is a little bit theoretical.

I'm just thinking to myself, like, hey, I wonder if I fermented orange peels, if we could see a better translation of calcium being fed to the plants versus calcium that it actually becomes deposited into the cell walls, right?

Because it's one thing to just have it in the soil or to have it dissolved in your feed water, but it's another thing entirely when the plant starts taking it up and starts acting on the calcium in a way that makes it relevant for its both primary and secondary metabolic purposes.

And and some of the things that we've theorized and hypothesized in the past, we're now through the good work that we're doing with our close friends, not only here in Washington but certainly across the US We have a number of people that are testing in a variety of different climates. And it's nice to start to see very consistent pieces of feedback come in not only anecdotally in terms of what the growers are seeing.

Some of these differences are like, hey, my plants are drinking 20 to 50% more water even though I'm in peated drinks faster than the comparable set up in rock cool. I mean plants literally go through wet, dry cycles that fast as a result of the way that our products work.

But also on the test results themselves, we see fractions of terpenes and particularly furnishing is 1 to one example of a terpene that typically we don't see very high concentrations of until people start using our products. And then all of a sudden, it just becomes almost a dominant terpene, in some cases, harnessing. Yeah, yeah. It's a cespraterpine that's produced kind of gives like Jasmine flowers, their floral aroma. It's also involved in the

aromatic profile of apples. So a lot of times, it's kind of like this sweet, fruity, floral kind of thing. And there's a very good reason why that occurs. That has to do with the way that our products work. But you know, to kind of answer your question more directly, there's there's effectively 2 halves of what we're doing. One is this advanced approach to looking at carbon like a

macronutrient. This is where the advanced chemistry comes in. We're starting to actually look at individual elements, individual atoms of carbon, and figure out how to fit them within the dynamics of these plant engines, both primary and secondary metabolism. And then on the flip side, totally opposite but still dovetailing imperfect. It's this like leopard skin loincloth wearing jungle shaman that's using four dozen species of plants and their extracts to create this holistic nutrient

profile. So we do work with four dozen species roughly of plants. There's, you know, 3/4 of them are terrestrial plants, 1/4 of them are aquatic plants. We've got red kelp, green kelp, brown kelp, single celled algae, all of which we're extracting in house. We have very specific portions of plants, like we're using a organic Matcha that's produced in the Uji region of Japan, very high quality Matcha, but it's just the powdered green tea

leaf. In some cases we're using just the orange peel for example, or when we're making silica skin, we use just the pistols of the safflower plant. And so they look like little strands of saffron. But you know, the point I'm making here is that we're not

using the whole plants. We're using very specific and isolated portions of the plants because those portions contain very valuable compounds for us. An idea basically here is that these plants have been used for thousands of years already for a variety of different reasons, everything from pharmaceutical and therapeutic all the way to industrial and textile

applications. In some cases these plants have been used for over 6000 years and so we understand that they have this long standing history with humans for a very long time and what we're trying to do is repurpose the compounds that they produce into the context of agriculture. We're asking this question of hey, we know this is a plant based medicine. It's been used as medicine for thousands of years to heal the human nervous system. I wonder if there's some analogy, some metaphorical

equivalent that we can make. Maybe instead of just healing the human body and the human nervous system, I wonder if we can heal damaged and degraded soils. Where I wonder if we can improve the quality of life for all of the soil microorganisms, macro organisms such as worms leading all the way up to the food chain, to the human that consumes the flower at the very end of the of the cycle.

So there's this, there's definitely this like plant based approach that we're taking and the use of all these plant extracts I feel allows us to create a chemical environment that is significantly richer than any living soil that's ever been present anywhere on earth. I mean most of the living soil blends out there, they'll have maybe 12 to 15 ingredients. Most of them are animal byproducts. We don't use any animal byproducts at all.

You can give us a clean slate of just peat and perlite maybe with a little bit of cocoa mixed and and after one full round of using our products that is now a living soil with dozens of species of microbes with a perfect physical and chemical properties and it has this very rich orchestra of plant extracts. You have all of these different compounds produced by so many different species of plants that would never be found in nature but they yet here they are

inside of the soil. So of course the plants will respond to it as they grew through the soil. They find the ginkgo leaf. They find the Jasmine. They find stevia extract. They find hibiscus green, they find all these compound licorice fruit extract that is in our root anchor. It's. A very diverse, like genome of plants. Yeah, that's wild. Some of these plants have different purposes, like the licorice root that we extract. We're bringing in whole and we're extracting it.

Licorice roots, as it turns out, produce saponins. And for those of you who are familiar with surfactants or saponins you may be familiar with, like Yucca and Kilaha, these are some of the more common saponins that they're used. But even some of the synthetic surfactants, they effectively just modify the way that, you know, oxygen behaves and also water specifically, they have a tendency to make water wetter, quote UN quote as it's

described. But what we figured out was licorice roots also have saponins. These saponins, due to their molecular structure, can actually capture huge amounts of oxygen inside of their molecular framework. So when we water in this licorice root extract, it delivers dissolved oxygen to root hairs, which is fantastic for the operation of the roots because they behave just like human lungs. They need oxygen in order to breathe and to run their

metabolic activities. What we also found about this licorice root, which I find very interesting, is that it's an incredibly powerful stimulant for beneficial fungi. So we used to put fungi, mycorrhizal fungi, inside of

root anchor. But we eventually cut it out entirely because we noticed that licorice root is such a powerful biostimulant for fungi that whatever fungi you naturally have present either in your soil or in your air, in the surrounding environment, those fungi become so stimulated that easily. Within 24 to 48 hours, you'll see the mycelial networks literally explode in the soil. You'll see these white fuzzy hairs growing all through the medium, and then the fruiting bodies pop up.

Within 48 to 72 hours, we've seen the fruiting bodies of these mushrooms just explode out of the soil, which is fantastic sign of balanced living soil chemistry. It's very healthy. Holy cow, that's insanely fast. That's. So cool. I you know when when I'm hearing you talk about this and and you talked about your background like you didn't come from a chemistry background you were just passionate about this.

Am I right or are you did you go to college or all these other things or or kind of take us through that because it sounds like based on your history and and what led up to to rooted that it's almost like it it was always meant to be because it just everything fit into place. I could imagine your R&D time to develop your products you have now was not as long as many other ones 'cause you already have this background with fermentation in in industrial chemistry like yeah, how did you

how did you get into this? Yeah, it's a personal passion of mine. I did go to college, but I didn't graduate, so I dropped out. You know, in hindsight's always 2020. I probably would go back and and finish, you know, an advanced degree nowadays if I could. But back then I was just really excited about the opportunity to start a business. And I specifically dropped out of college to pursue the Kombucha brewery itself. You know, never really got too

big. At most I was making probably, you know, 55 gallons a week of Kombucha, which for most people it's, you know, quite a lot. But in the grand scale of, you know, where kombucha is at right now, 55 gallons a week isn't really that much. But it still gave me an opportunity to, you know, be my own business owner, be an entrepreneur. I learned from my mistakes. I learned a lot from that one experience.

And then certainly as I move forward through the industrial, you know, chemistry, I kind of took what I learned from Kombucha, applied it to that business, learned a lot more. And now I'm applying everything to this business. And you know, we're doing really well. The formulations themselves are based on a kind of chemistry that not a lot of people even know exists or even understand its relevancy in agriculture. So we we have to come up with these manufacturing processes from scratch.

We don't have any toll blenders. We didn't pay anyone to come in and formulate these products for us. This is entirely from scratch. This is kind of like my intellectual brainchild if you will. And over the years we've been refining the way that these

products are made. And along the way, we've hired some chemical engineers to come in and just to review the processes and give us their input as far as, like which equipment, you know, pieces would be best with what hardware would be best for us to continue scaling this process up. And every single time we bring somebody in, they always scratch their head and they're like, there's no way this is going to work. Like there's no way you guys are actually making this. It's impossible.

And I just, you know, kind of look at them and I say, well, buckle up, What you know to be true about standard chemistry, industrial chemistry is perhaps just one perspective, one way of looking at things. And if you change your perspective and look at things from a slightly different way, you can start to build out a process by which the creation of these types of products is in fact possible to achieve. And that's kind of where we're at right now.

So with that, can you go back? And when you really saw this take shape and saw the difference, like where you've got these chemists just classically trained, and I'll call them classically trained chemists because they've been given these walls? Like, here's this is the bounds that you can travel in. And you can't really go outside of it because this is what academia has said and this is the practices we use throughout any other type of company.

When you change that up and just start going, I'm gonna use my background in fermentation. Like, what if we did this? It wasn't like this is the way you're like, Nah, the entrepreneurial side said. But can we do it differently? One of your first experiences of seeing, you know, let's take a

cannabis plant. Like when you saw that, I mean, what was what was that like for you to be able to just absolute excitement for you and for somebody who's growing it and they're looking at it going, holy shit, this is nuts. Yeah, yeah. And that kind of aha moment came with a very early version of solar rain, which is our foliar spray. It's magnesium based foliar spray and initially at the time, what I was trying to do was create a form of magnesium that could fit directly into

chlorophyll biosynthesis. So there's seven or eight steps involved in chlorophyll biosynthesis, and one of those steps involves the insertion of the magnesium ion into the porphyrin ring that sits at the dead center of chlorophyll. So this is the actual part of the chlorophyll molecule that absorbs photon energy and becomes excited, thus initiating the electron transport chain. It's magnesium that's tethered

in the dead center of this. The photons hit the magnesium ion, and then that's where all the beauty and magic happens. So I was just trying to rack my brain because I was looking at all the ingredients and I, you know, I saw magnesium sulfate and magnesium phosphate and magnesium nitrate. And that's not at all how plants work.

There's just so many steps in between those forms which burned the conventional fertilizers and the final form factor that plants utilize magnesium in that to me it indicated the gap or the distance between the two needed to be closed a little bit so that we could create a product that was more digestible for the plants, more biologically relevant for them. And the aha moment came when we did foliar sprays of a very early version of solar rain and noticed that the plants respond

within a matter of minutes. I mean, the response we know nowadays happens instantly because the chelates are so small that they can freely pass through cell walls. All of the chelates that we make their less than 10 carbon atoms long. These are like high octane race fuel that gets injected directly into the sites of primary metabolism. The moment that plants get them,

they begin using them. The gene expression starts to become upregulated, more chlorophyll can be made and within a matter of minutes you'll see a noticeable change. I always tell people, I always challenge people to pick a plant that doesn't look so healthy, find the one that's off from the corner little bit yellow, not drinking too fast.

Give it a spray of solar rain and I can't tell you how many times people have come back that following day and looked at that plant and thought for themselves, there's no way this is the same plant. There's just no way that this that's. Insane. Well, I have a quick question then 'cause you might have an idea. I get I I have plants around my house and I get every once in a while when I buy a plant from the store that has gnats and then they will spread and fuck

all my other plants. Is there a product of yours that works really well for that? Yeah, you know, most of the products, they're designed in such a way to deliver carbon that strengthens the immune system. So we're not trying to impart a Part 2. We're not trying to override what the plant naturally wants to do. So if you give your plants, depending on the species of plant, whether it's the house plant or a cannabis plant or anything like that, yeah.

So these various house plants, they've all got different molecular strategies, if you will, for how to defend and ward off certain disease pressures. Fungus gnats may be a little bit more benign than something like aphids or mites, but there's still a little bit of a nuisance for the plants. And so when you give our products to those plants, they're going to take that excess carbon and find an outlook for it in the form of that secondary metabolite.

So they'll effectively end up creating their own mechanism or their own pathway to better resist the fungus gnats and in most cases what we find when you can't get rid of the actual fungus gnats. The plants end up establishing an equilibrium where they're not affected by the presence of the fungus gnats at all. There's no loss in the rate at which they grow. There's no loss in the compounds

that they accumulate. They just literally are capable of dealing with them with no tax or draining of the energy. Yeah. Because it's not. They have enough added energy from the extra compounds that are in that carbon that they're not being really hurt. Like you said, that energy tax isn't being used for fighting off that. Yeah, and we have seen certain cases. This is true of some of the terpene test results that we get back from customers.

Cannabis plants naturally produce a terpene called nerola doll, and it's specifically for thrips. So when your garden is full of thrips, you know, thrips, if I had to pick one bug to have in my garden, it probably be thrips. They're very benign. They kind of just mess with the leaves, You know, they're they're kind of there without really damaging the plants in a,

you know, very significant way. But what I've seen over the years is that the concentration of nerolidol produced by plants is sort of proportionate to the concentration of thrips and white flies that exist on the leaf surface. And you know, that's an example of where you give your plants more carbon. They'll naturally produce more neuralidol because they understand through their plant receptor systems that they have thrips that they need to deal

with. Whereas if you had a fungal infection like downy mildew or powdery mildew, instead of nerolidol being produced, you might find the plants produce more limonene because limonene is a compound that exhibits phase toxicity to the exoskeletons of bugs and also to the cell walls of fungi. So when they understand that they're being attacked by that specifically try to up regulate the biosynthesis of this terpene versus that terpene that does

that kind of make sense? Yeah, that's incredible because yeah, the plants really just utilizing those nutrients to go, hey, I need to fight this or I need this because this is what is dependent on like my environment is having this. So it sounds like the plant, if it has the ability and the energy is incredibly smart on its own and can almost self fight these if it has the initial health and you know energy, nutrients and fertilizer that it needs to kind of combat

that. It's exactly what you said. I mean, if it has the right the way that I I mean, I'm hearing this is the same as our body. Yeah, exactly. Because if we have the right nutrients, we have the right. If our homeostasis is where it needs to be, it's able to fight off bugs. Like, you don't think about that. Look, a typical layperson's not thinking about that with their plants, right?

Going, Oh yeah, if it had better nutrients, if it had more carbon, then it's able to produce these terpenes. And the terpenes are like these defensive, the being able to help strengthen it and being able to repel certain things or bring in more things. Like that's just it's amazing how that works. The blown away just spraying it on and noticing within a couple of. Yeah, where he's like, oh, you can notice. He had that change in. Coloration or like.

Crazy though, it it's just like a person, right? You give him, if you give them something really, really healthy, you can see it in their almost their pigment of their skin, like, I feel better, they look better. So that just goes to say with with growers within the cannabis, I mean you you're you're on, you're on pretty good scale. You're all over the US right now. Is that right? Yep all. Right. Are you outside of the US or is it just AUS product currently?

We have customers in Mexico and in Canada and we're looking at doing some more international. We are a global show. We are heard all over the world. Yeah, we're maybe. Six different countries in the top 10 so. We were just curious. Yeah, because it just sounds like such AI mean literally. Like Brandon says, it's like a miracle, this miracle nutrient that it. Makes so much more sense 'cause even when I studied that handbook for growers, it was it went more into like like the

balance, the ratio and that. But understanding the process of where so much of its purpose is to convert most of that back to carbon. Well, if you can provide it with those nutrients and things in the 1st place, it's not going to go through all these extra steps and try and fight this stuff or do this like it's going to just have some basically food or feel to grow into the best possible plant.

Like this Seems like such a more direct method then even the approach that I read and studied in that entire handbook. When you get more out of your yield, I mean you think about all of these growers out there and and and I'm sure you know this too, not all growers are equal. You've got some ones that have the staff the knowledge to be able to understand some elements of what you've discussed.

But from being able to have it where it's all a product that's all in one, it's it's designed specifically for this and things that weren't even thought of before this is gonna be able to help a lot of those growers producing.

Or even home grow. You think about if you're growing your own medicine at home and you're wanting to have the best yield, the highest quality product, the best entourage effect because you've got the widest terpenes, cannabinoids like, and it's taking out so much of that work you're not worrying about crap. I need to worry about all these.

OK, well, if your plant, like you said, has all of this, like, ideal stuff, all of this energy in this bank, well, it's not having to go. Hey, I don't have energy for this. I don't have energy for this. I don't have energy for this. I don't have energy for this. It's going to that bank going, hey, I've got energy for this. I've got energy for this. Oh, sweet. Let's build this new addition. Oh, let's do this like, I've got

energy for days. And I imagine this plant just being so much like, a million times better. It's like the crap if you're putting fast food in your body every day versus honestly, yeah, it might suck and it might be a pain in the ass to figure out, but like the whole food diet, like, I'm sure your body feels a million times better. Well, and I really, really like is you know, on their website when you're thinking about that, if it is a home grow, you can

get a court. If you're doing commercial, you're going up to 5 gallons. The prices are extremely reasonable. Or even reach out to him if you need larger than that. I'm sure they have larger than that options that they can work with.

That's great. You think about all of those types of growers that I'm am so glad that you hit on that Brandon. It's if you know that your home growers, you know, who knows what they do, if you're being able to produce and and you're able to follow great process. It's it's every grower. It was when we invested in that and realizing it wasn't just the grower. Like that founder wasn't the grower.

He had a separate grower. So we had two guys who were there who were supposed to be experts in it. And yet when I went and read one book, one book past my knowledge at that moment, none of the things that I asked, they understood. None of the things I asked they knew. And yet they could take something as simple as your fertilizer and you can take the average Tom, Dick, Harry and turn it into an amazing grow. You're no longer having this Charlie Brown Christmas tree

looking fuck in the corner. Grow and you're like, man, I hope this gets me high. I hope this does what I want it to. So you're over there. Like I'm not sure I would smoke that. Like you probably shouldn't consume. That well I think about it I I get I'm actually really jealous and and I'm just like I wish I knew more growers you know or even locally here are those that we we frequent are using this product yeah I mean I it's I know I am I am seriously blown away here and. There.

So tell us, Nick. How can everyone find rooted leaf? How can they get in touch with you? How can audience get in contact to check you out? Check us out on Instagram, the rooted leaf, and if you send us a message, I'm usually the person that responds, so I always encourage people. If you have questions or if you want to learn a little bit more,

don't hesitate to ask. You know we're all on this together and better you can understand something, the better we all do as a community and kind of push things forward. I do want to mention real quick too. The benefit for home growers primarily is that there's no longer a need to supplement CO2. If you're in a home grow environment, you can crank up the light intensity by returning a dial and you can give extra fuel to your plants by simply

watering them a little bit more. The hard part for home growers has always been how do I increase the concentration of carbon available to the plants because that requires A sealed room. Now you have very expensive build out. You've got air conditioners and dehumidifiers. It becomes a little bit too much for a home grower, but if you couldn't fit the equivalent of 5000 PPMS of CEO 2 into the feed water, your home grower will go from small 12 to 24 inch plants to 5 foot 6 foot tall plants.

You'll shave the veg time in half, you'll save two weeks on bloom and you'll get twice as much yield with an increase in the overall quality. A lot of the home growers, they really like the fact that you do not have to adjust the pH of our products. It does come out acidic. I'm not saying it's APH perfect, like it's always going to be 5.8. We have growers using RO water. The feed water mixture comes out to APH of four point O, which is

incredibly low. It's very, very acidic, but that's 100% safe to apply to the plants. You do not have to adjust the pH whatsoever. In fact, we encourage people to not adjust the pH specifically because of the way that our carbon based chelates work. They operate very, very efficiently at extremely low PHS and the nutrients themselves remain soluble from aph range as low as it goes, maybe 3.54 point O on the low end all the way up to about 8.5. We never see the feed water

mixture come out that high. But you know, over time as we've run bench tests and stability tests, we've noticed that all the chelates, they're capable of maintaining those elements in a true solution, meaning there's no adverse chemistries in that full pH range, 4 point O all the way up to about 8 point O 8.5. Everything is 100% available to the plants. You just mix it up, don't aerate it, don't adjust the pH, just mix it up and water it to the plants and they're good to go.

So, yeah, you know, we'll have questions. Definitely reach out on Instagram. And check out our web. We'll have his website and the Instagram below too. Yeah. And I I am man, I am. So I am blown away. Like I'm literally so blown away because what you've ultimately done, if you have made it easier for anybody to be able to grow high, yield anything. And better quality.

Better quality. I I'm just you know when you're describing these little tiny little plants that they'll grow like I remember your little hemp plant that you get in the backyard and that thing was tiny and the. Problem was, if I had used his, it wouldn't have been discreet, it would have been over the wall and everyone would have seen it. So it's super. It's super fuel, dude. It's it's seriously, it like makes it a mutant in the best

way possible. It's so I am just, I mean and and I know, I know enough about it. But just to hear from you and especially really appreciating that it came from a passion like not only on the business side but you're passionate about it through Kombucha that got you to this point. And it's it's not saying like well that can't be done going what else could we do from what I already know what else can I apply to it.

And you have such a wide range of different products that are specific for different types of what whatever you're trying to be able to accomplish with your grow. I I I would just be, yeah I I could see a massive 1 when I'm thinking on the commercial grow side, I'm thinking amount of of extra cost that's being able to be reduced just by utilizing this. Oh, massive. Like even the talk of carbon alone. Like what is the cost of going and buying all of these carbon?

Like buying all of that carbon well and maintaining all that and everything else. How many outdoor grows can become almost as good as some of these indoor grows even just because it's so hard like that is a really tough thing to do outside is to increase that carbon amount or like the the plants need to get cause like in a sealed indoor environment you can increase the light, you can increase the, you know you can

increase all of that. You don't have any way to manipulate the sun, you don't have any way to manipulate that. So it's way harder to introduce like that carbon based thing but in their fertilizer that becomes this incredible source to just like get almost indoor quality grows from even outdoor grows or

at home grows. Like you said most people at home aren't having a totally sealed environment that they're hey, I've got this enclosed area I've got and they know here's my CO2 levels, here's my like they're not measuring those. They have no clue. Most of them have no idea. Yeah, this is the reason why we wanted to bring you on 'cause we just. Oh, and I didn't even understand

it to this level. So this has been incredible because it it just, it really opens the door for every cannabis grower or those who are even on the fence about man. You know, I've really been nervous to try growing because I don't want to screw it up. I don't want to waste and have all this time that in it, it doesn't turn out OK.

Well, if you can start from scratch with a fertilizer to give that plant like the best suited option to grow the best plant, like that's going to be your best thing. You can grow that at home. You could grow that commercial grade. You could do whatever scale that you're doing with that and take it to the better like you're growing such better quality. How many dispensers have we gone to that it's like, yeah. Well, you can tell a difference

with the bud. I mean you can tell if they've been, if it's really been well cared for it like we've been able to receive some from up around your area to Oregon and Norcal and and just like you, you really are able to appreciate when a cultivar is really taking that time. But that's a lot of time and understanding and there's a lot

of screw ups that go in there. You know the one thing I would think the gateway drug of using this for, those that are are watching or listening get that solar range just thinking about that. What if you have a plant right now that you're working with whether you got like 5 or 6 or way more than that, getting just starting out with solar rain and say, look, I just want to see this like I'm really want to test that. I I guarantee right from that

point that trigger will go off. Oh yeah, you'll be right back on that side by anymore because it's yeah, it. Takes one time and you're sold. Yeah. Particularly on the outdoor side like you were talking about, carbon is always a limiting factor for plants growing out there. So a lot of times when we do our side by sides, it's not an incremental difference. It's not like a 10% gain or a 15% gain.

You know, on the one hand with the salt based fertilizers, you have plants that end up being about four to six feet tall and then directly next to them, you know, same environment basically with our products, those same strains taken off the same mom at the same time, they're 12 to 14 feet tall. And I always try to distress the people that it's impossible unless you have a trained understanding, a really deep and thorough understanding of how to identify a carbon deficiency in

a plant. Because if you give your plants more carbon and they end up producing more terpenes and more cannabinoids, it's a sign that the plant was deficient in carbon. Just like if your plants are yellow and you give them more nitrogen in the green backup, you know the plants were deficient in nitrogen. That visual feedback loop is not possible to achieve with carbon because you can't look at those plants.

You can't look at a test result and say, God, you know, I only tested at 4% terpenes, It's a sign of a carbon deficiency. I could have tested at 5% terpenes. Most growers don't know enough about the inner workings of carbon metabolism to actually see that.

So the benefit with our products is we can hard wire, you know just like an axle connects 2 wheels through the use of our products with hard, hard wire the air and the fuel together so that when you increase the fuel rate you can also increase the air, the concentration of carbon available for those plants. This creates an equilibrium between the two of them.

And the only thing you really have to do is just change up the light intensity and make it more intense And if the plants are a little bit thirstier, give them a little bit more water. Everything else underneath that within the the system is hardwired and linked to the delivery of both the carbon the plants are ultimately ineffably obsessed with. They're even more obsessed than we are with carbon, somehow. And. They. Also utilize all of these elements specifically for that

purpose. It's a little bit, you know, it's interesting because I feel like through this discussion we've actually just kind of scratched the surface, if you will. You haven't even actually looked with the list to be an analogy of how nitrogen relates to an engine mount, or how phosphorus is like the battery in a superconductor or maybe a magnesium is like a specialized

spark plug in all these engines. Those are kind of the more inner layers of this analogy that we've been refining over time. And really as we've learned about how the products work, we're capable of creating these analogies and having people better understand what exactly is going on so that they too, even if they're just the average home grower, that they can hit 3 to 4 lbs per 1000 watts, which we see quite often at this point above 6% terpenes on dry flour. No problem for a home grower.

It's the type of stuff that, you know, any commercial grower would have to spend millions of dollars to actually properly build out. And you know, like we were talking about earlier, Solar Rain was kind of that first aha moment. And there was this underlying theory that we had about how Solar Rain operated and what the specific mechanism was, which then ended up flowing out into the rest of the product line to be developed and designed.

And now all the products that we make, it's like 1 holistic system that represents a carbon centric approach to plant fertilizer and maybe more specifically from the individual perspective of how those elements get metabolized and how they're processed by plants, all in an attempt to capture carbon, to store it or to move it around and utilize it somehow. So there's yeah, there's definitely something and I do want to mention too, we we, we created a coupon code for the

listeners. If they're if they use the coupon code CANNABIS School all one word, it'll get him 20% off. Dude. Oh. Nick, thank you man. Awesome. Thank you, man. Oh. Yeah, that is you're. Welcome. Oh man, this is so cool. OK, so go to rootedleaf.com. You know, for anybody. Honestly, after listening to this, this is probably by far the most exciting conversation that we've ever had about nutrients in the soil. Like we we had a guy we knew he's an ethnobotanist and.

He has his own living soil that he's created here. He sells it around and that. But it's nowhere. It's nowhere. It doesn't level, not even close. And I've known this guy since I was in elementary school and I've never had this level. And he's the smartest guy in the world. Just ask him. But you know, But seriously, I we we love this. It just you have made this such a complex idea of what plants actually do when they use the water, the sunlight and the nutrients and the soil to such a

magical place. Like, honestly, I say that wholeheartedly. This is magical if you are a home grower. I mean, you got to get solar rain, just give it a shot, put it on your plant and see that. And then that's just going to get you addicted to the rest of the line. If you're a commercial grower, you need to be looking at this. I think about the reduction in cost as far as everything else that goes in there and then the

margins that you have. And. Quality and thinking down to the dollar price like the yield as far as what you get the margins, I know you guys are operating in a thinner margin. How would you like to expand that one? By being able to reduce your cost with your actual production this. Is if you increase yield and decrease cost, that is also increasing your margins. That's like a no brainer. Simple. Yeah, but just to be able to watch anyone hearing that, right, solar rain is just like

that. That's cool. That's that conversion moment, right? That's the baptism. Like it's. Awesome. And there's there's layers to the experience of cannabis flower that I feel like are being removed in the pursuit of this very, very large recreational industry that's nationwide. You know people are getting used to mediocre quality of cannabis and they forget there's entire layers of the experience. One of them which is most profound with our products is

the after taste. There's a very distinct and it it's not like a specific after taste that is present in every single strain. But it's certainly flour that's grown with our product line has a very depending on the strain it'll have a different after taste. But it's very distinct and unique thing.

And as soon as people identify that they can start to compare that in some of the other examples of flour that they get and they come back and they're like, you know what that tastes like Salt. I can actually taste the salts I have used in the environment. I've actually heard really negative things about salt grown flowers. There's a one of the content creators on social that we follow and I had a discussion with her about it because she's out in I think she's in Washington actually.

And she was talking about like salt based fertilizers and just even the experience in like a salt based fertilizer flour versus like even an organic grown one without the salt based fertilizers. I was like that's interesting but it was actually more of like a negative experience even from

the salt based fertilizer. And so I'm just very, very blown away just, I mean with the wide range of products that have come out even for cannabis across the years and even in the last 1020 years, how drastically it has changed, you know, I see I haven't heard of any negatives from what he's told us is in there, you know, and there's nothing in there that it's looking at and going it's magic. Sauce. Yeah, that's. Literally what it's like.

I'm like, oh shit, it's like, you know, Space Jam, you got Magic Mike's special sauce or whatever. And I. Don't know where you were going there, but I mean, yeah. Space Jam it's just. Dude, I honestly, I know, I I seriously agree with you. But like, it's just it it's that crazy to hear this from you because I've we've heard a lot of different things about soil and soil composition, especially when it comes to growing

cannabis. This is the easiest and the most that you're just going to have a better experience from. Yeah. And what it sounds like, yeah. And particularly for people that are very used to certain strains, if you're familiar with a particular genetic, you've grown that cultivar for maybe a decade, 15 years, every single time. We've worked with people that have very old genetics, they're very comfortable with, very

familiar with. They come back and they tell us not only are the growth characteristics like visibly different, it almost looks like an entirely different plant, but the quality of the smoke and the flower is dramatically different. You know the the smoke is so soft and smooth that you can barely even feel it going into your lungs. And in some cases, like with a Cushman strain that we grew just a few months ago, it had the distinct and overt cooling property.

This cooling effect because the there was menthol there, which typically is not expressed in very high concentrations in cannabis. For this particular pheno of Cushman's, it was very minty. And it had this combo of, like, citrus fruit, lime, lemon, coupled with this minty kind of Wintergreen kind of flavor sensation. So you would inhale a joint or, you know, bong or even a blunt, You couldn't even feel the smoke entering your lungs.

And then when you exhale, this icy kind of sensation, it's very soft and relaxing. It almost makes the lungs feel more expansive, like you can breathe more deeply as a direct result of this. Nobody's coughing. Nobody's like, oh, that's harsh. It's exactly the opposite. They take a hit, they exhale, and while the smoke was still billowing out of their mouth, they say, whoa, what is this?

Yeah, Nick, this needs to be sold to anyone who grows cannabis because if that's the experience of the end product, like sold, I don't know why any It's like this bong. This is the smoothest bong that we have ever tried. And I don't know why I would tell anyone else to buy any other bong or smoke out of any other bong ever. Because until I find something that is better, that is the best

thing I have ever found. And it makes exactly the same sense because you look at that and you go, OK, cool, you could get like half a subpar product or you could grow like the best quality product. Which one are you going to pick? Dude, this magic magic. Because it makes me think about like we the reason why we love this bong is the the smoothest, most flavorful hits we've ever been able to receive from a bong. But to have flour that's been

grown with your products? And then smoked out of that. I could just imagine because this is one that like, it's really hard to cough. Yeah, it would be just the most amazing experience. Oh, there's so, so much out of this. OK, again, so we've got rootedleaf.com, You go promo code Cannabis school 20%. All one word. Go check them out. This is amazing. Nick, thank you for being on the show. It's for everyone at home.

Yeah. And tuning in, I I think this is going to be an episode a lot of people are going to be listening to over and over and over because this is absolutely a game changer for cannabis. I can't wait to be going to a local dyspo and being able to try some of that. So thank you again, brother. Thank you so much and thank you. Guys, I appreciate the opportunity and for everybody listening, thanks for taking the time.

If you guys have questions, like I said, please follow us on Instagram, send us a message, and I'm usually the person that responds and I like to nerd out and talk in great level of detail. Here. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface, you know, it's the Pandora's box of possibilities. This is an infinite world for us to keep exploring.

So definitely over time if you guys have questions, even if it's not right now, but in the future, feel free to reach out and I'll I'll help out as best I can. All right. We love you guys at home. Love all of our Patreon supporters. Thank you so much for helping us reach just another person like you. All right? Hey, take care.