🤖 Substrate Reactivity, Deciphering EC Readings, and Real Time Monitoring, with Jason and...

12:19AM Jan 28, 2025

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Greetings cultivators worldwide at Jordan River here, back again like a good dry back today, we've got two brand new guests on the line. Seth and Jason are here from aroya and the Office Hours podcast, very excited to talk to these two. They were nice enough to send me a kit and heard their show. Heard that they had some great education to offer, so I thought I'd bring him on growcast for a nice appearance. I know you're gonna love today's episode. We get into a lot of different stuff before we get into that, though. Shout out to AC infinity. We got some changes over at AC infinity that I got to talk to you guys about code growcast One five. Now, historically, that's gotten you a different discount depending on what you're buying. Well, I got some really good news for you folks. Grow cast one five is now 15% off AC infinity.com, across the board. So you're gonna get 15% off on everything, plus free shipping on items over $99 if your cart total is over 99 bucks, you pay nothing for shipping, and it's 15% off with code growcast One five across the board. Now they're trying to get people to go directly to the AC infinity site. So they're offering that free shipping. They're offering that 15% discount with growcast One five. Now here's the other thing, if you want to get it off of Amazon, growcast one five will still work over there. It might be a smaller discount, but now that one also travels over to Amazon, which you can get a full 15% off, plus free shipping on orders over $99 at AC infinity.com with code growcast, get your grow temp kit, get your grow tents, your grow lights, the best fans in the game. They got pots, they got scissors, they got sunglasses and garden sleeves. Growcast one five saves you 15% across the board, and get that free shipping. Shout out to AC infinity, making the best gear in the game. And now I bring people directly to the site with a 15% off code. So thank you to AC infinity. Enjoy that code, guys. That's 15% off across the board. Grow cast one five at AC infinity.com. It's time to go, re up. Go grab another 10 and get that free shipping. Get that 15% off. Thank you to AC infinity, all right, everyone, let's get into it with Jason and Seth, thanks for listening. Enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners, you are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today, before we get started, as always, I urge you to share this show. Send growcast to a friend, send this show to a grower, or turn a smoker onto growing. It's the best thing to do to help us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure you're subscribed growcastpodcast.com that's where you can find all the things, the membership, the seeds, the classes, it's all there and a special thank you to the members who make this whole thing possible. Today we are back on the line with a couple of new guests, very excited to speak to Jason and Seth from aroya. Today, I just got my hands on an aroya kit. We're going to talk all things monitoring, different medium types. We're talking about EC and pH, all the fun stuff. But let me introduce my first time guests. Seth and Jason are both here. What's up, guys? Thank you for coming on

the show. Thanks for having

us. Jordan, it's great to be on here. Definitely listen to your show for a few years. I appreciate it. I love what you guys are doing. I got my aroya Go Kit. This thing is awesome, and it provides a lot of insights into my grow. So I had to reach out to you guys and see how we could collab on some content. Aroya.io is the website. You guys also have a podcast, office hours, live. You do a lot of good Instagram content. I recommend to follow over there to all the folks who are listening, some good clips that I see coming out of that Instagram account. But for the listeners, why don't you guys talk about your background, your intro into cultivation, and then what brought you to aroya and the show,

yeah, I'll get this started here. So at a college, I started doing, uh, electronics manufacturing, and ended up at a grow facility doing compliance, automation, security type stuff, and really fell in love with the production side and been hobby farmer for quite a few years now, and ended up just really getting deep into using technology to better understand plant biology. And was lucky enough that we had a local Growth Facility doing greenhouses, and those greenhouses took quite a bit of control automation in order to get to a proficient level, we're up here in the Northwest, where climate is variable. You can have cold mornings with hot, hot medium days. And being able to set up dynamic parameters for that was, was one of the things that brought me in love with cultivating. And obviously, as I was using sensors to dive deep into proficiency of growing, I stumbled upon the 12 at the time is the GS three sensor started working with the meter group, which ironically was, was a local company as well, and got on board with them, proposed the ARoy project, and then did about two years of travel research, developing what Roy would be today. I. I think the rest is history. If you know the background on the company, we've obviously spent the last whatever, six years now, helping cannabis growers, specifically, as well as traditional ag growers utilize sensor technology, so looking at what's going on in a substrate, what's going on in the environment. And I think today, we're getting close to 1000 clients with over 50,000 sensors in the field on just aroya itself. And that's amazing. So it's been a great journey. And think we're just gonna keep pushing the bar higher and higher as far as the potential of the genetics that are available,

so cool, so kind of born out of the meter group. And you're right along with there the formation of aroya. What about you? Seth, where did you come into the picture? I moved in the Northwest

back in 2010 and I actually worked in plant breeding for about six years with a private company, and then with University of Idaho, actually for a few years, managing research greenhouses, research plots and working with plant breeders to breed many varieties of peas, garbanzo beans, wheat and Triticale. That's cool. So little different path, and some of us get into it. Yeah, yeah. I went back to school for horticulture, looking for a career, going down the plant breeding path, and then I actually ended up working at the same farm that Jason worked at. I'll be on a little later timeline, because while I was gone back to school, the greenhouse operation popped up. I knew a few people who worked there and had the opportunity to do an internship out there, and then just decided to stay on for a few years afterward, while I was working for the university, doing extension studies on wheat, just basic agronomy stuff looking at like protein content and things. We actually spent a lot of time deploying and using meter group remote sensing technology to figure out climate conditions, micro climates across the area we live on, called the Palouse, which has rolling hills. So there's a lot of fun things to look at there, but that's that was my introduction to meter group sensors and using that. So the whole time that I was growing cannabis and Eastern Washington, running greenhouse operations is actually kind of fun, going from, you know, always being a little bit budget limited in the research setting to being able to spend some money on the greenhouses and make things nicer. Yeah, baby. But yeah, that whole time I was always watching, you know, the meter group job board, essentially, because I was a company I worked with. It was, AG, tech, you know, possible career path for me. This job popped up. And then on the interview I saw Jason, it's like, Oh, hey, it's great, good to see you again. Small and then, yeah, that was 2021, and I've been with the company ever since. So I missed out a little bit on the early dev but came in once they finally had this beautiful platform to work with, which I love, hey, I love it. I'll say the scrolling graph literally replaces a job I used to spend at least a month a year on just converting spreadsheets to CSVs and figuring out how to present it to people in a visual way that's understandable, right? Well,

I've been playing with it, you know, and we're going to get into monitoring and all of these subjects more deeply. But I do want to say it is particularly important to have this type of information living in certain climates. What I mean is we work with growers all over the world, right? I cut my teeth growing in humbled, which is one of the most temperate environments, you know. But that being said, I now live in Illinois. You're talking about Washington, right. Like the swings from summer to winter in these places are astronomical. You're dealing with sweltering 100 degree plus summers with 70% RH here in Illinois, and then it drops to sub zero, literally, some some winters it goes below zero and there's no moisture in the air. So you need to remedy that, to kind of hold your climate in an optimal space. And you don't even know where to begin unless you have good readings, right? I don't think you can just run off of your crappy, 10 year old D hum that has its little detector on the front like that's not gonna give you the reading you need as a baseline to work from. So that's what I've really appreciated. Growing in a climate that isn't perfect all year round, or the same all year round, is getting these readings and then being able to make my plants Much, much healthier, going from that reading to an optimal space.

Oh, yeah. And when you're looking at trying to solve some of those climate issues in your in your growth space. I mean, you can go look at National Weather Service data and get historical data on, you know, highs and lows and get an idea of what that climate's like year round. But, you know, they're, they're only sensing that in so many places. So you know, where I'm sitting in my basement is a little bit different than the weather station a mile from where I live, absolutely and

year to year, right? So it's just very interesting and and when you love to learn, like I do, it's a great tool to have before we get into all of the grow stuff. Talk to me about your show a little bit, office hours, live. You start producing content through aroya. It's really well produced. You guys have really great you get straight to the point, really good information. Talk to me about the inception. That show, and then talk to me about what your favorite parts of doing that show is. Like, I know you help, you help real cultivation facilities, like high stakes stuff. What's your favorite part about doing that show?

Yeah, maybe I'll jump in with the inception of it. So that was about two and a half years ago when we started recording it done 113 episodes, I believe was last week's episode. So been pretty steady with it. We try to run every week on Thursdays for 20 Eastern Time, and the format's been pretty simple to get to get the episode started, or the season started. We kind of just began talking about how Arroyo worked and how we could try to reach out to more growers, increase the audience that knew about sensor technology, and then the format kind of morphed, and we realized that, hey, let's just start answering questions. There's enough questions out there for us to cherry pick the best of them and have a pretty good episode every every week. And I think one of the fun parts about that, for me, is never really, we never really know what we're going to talk about, right? We're just helping people directly. And it brings up some great conversations. You know, Seth and I bounce back and forth, have different perspectives on stuff and and can really try and answer a detailed question in ways that directly help people. Yeah, I love

that man, and like I said, working with a lot of commercial facilities, so I know you deal with some headier topics sometimes. Seth, what do you like doing for the show? And what's your favorite part about it? I mean, personally, I really love the open Q and A format. It's really fun. It's a good brain exercise every week. I think one thing that is honestly the most fun about it as it's grower driven. So, you know, as fun and creative as it is to like produce content that's really well organized and stuff which, you know, maybe we'll do someday. I like the format where people come to us with real problems that they're experiencing, and we can help them solve them. You know, we can get a little heady from time to time, for sure, but our focus is always trying to bring it back into a scope that's easily understandable and applicable. You know, we can go super deep on plant science, but as growers, we're all limited to like the levers we can actually pull in our environment, irrigation setup, how we're growing our plants. So I think it's really fun to help people wade through kind of the big swamp of all the growing information that's out there, not only for cannabis, but for any other crop, and kind of pick out the things that are actually useful. Oh, so true for cannabis growers. Yeah, it's really easy to go down these, these roads, you know, and just get really focused on one little thing that sometimes you can't even change in your grow.

I like that. I like that perspective a lot, similar to what we do here, like trying to meet people where they are and help them figure out their way of growing. Speaking of their way of growing, let's get into the meat of this interview. I wanted to talk to you guys about growing mediums. Basically, this is where I wanted to start this conversation. You have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to nutrient exchange and feeding protocols and scaling up and all of this stuff. But let's start with what the plants grow in. There's a lot of options out there right now. There's a lot of controversy out there right now, tainted batches of rock wool. You know, issues with cocoa. I don't know if you follow like slow nickel has been reporting on this stuff, soil, of course, has that issue. From time to time, we've all had a bad batch of soil. What do you guys think about the current state of growing mediums for cannabis? Do you find one is optimal for commercial use? How should we think about these different mediums and how they relate to cannabis?

It's funny question. We get this kind of question off stars fairly frequently. And you know, for me, I just try not to get too complicated about it, right? But what are the objectives of my my grow obviously, here at home, I grow organic. I don't have to do that much labor in order to build a healthy soil and and run it year round. It's great way to use up compost and keep things clean around the house. I don't know that when it comes to production, I personally, I lean towards the processed media side, because, one, it's a little bit cleaner, a little bit easier, predictable. On the long term, run to run, it's hard to maintain the exact health of organic soils. And so I kind of break it down to thinking, all right, I either have rockwool as an option, or I have cocoa or possibly a cocoa blend, right? And, you know, traditionally, cocoa is somewhat more forgiving. So if I have any challenges as far as irrigation getting to perfection, or just environmental changes, lot of times they'll lean towards cocoa, and so for most grow applications, cocoa is a great place to start. It has good water holding capacity, and as you talked about, sometimes there is issues with supply, and that's been getting better and better over the years. However, it still does pop up when. I'm looking at rock wool if I have a high tech facility and don't have as many concerns about dropping the ball on a perfect environment in the red zone, it's nice that rock wool is so very clean. It's pretty lightweight media, and it is a little bit more steerable. And when I say that, I'm talking about the reactivity of a substrate, and what's happening is when we think about cation exchange capacity, which is the substrates ability to hang on to, cations, anions, broccoli is very, very low cation exchange capacity. So if we change our nutrient supply, or fertigation. It changes very, very quickly, and that can be helpful with with crop streaming. When you get when you get to the ragged edge of pushing it really hard. The downside there is, if you do make a mistake that that Rockwell is not going to buffer it very well for you had to get kind of a laugh there when you talked about tainted batches of Rockwell, because, yes, it's happened. I think it was back in 2018 where one of the most notorious manufacturers of rockwool actually brought over some manufacturing into North America, because they were traditionally out of Europe and and they were starting to see rockwool really take off with cannabis. And so they wanted to localize some that production that that caused a pretty serious headache for quite a few growers out there. So Wow. You know, we always talk about, you know, checking your media, especially with with Coco, before you start growing, do some runoff tests. Just kind of get your head around any new batch or any new brand that you're trying

to utilize. There's a lot that I like there, Jason, first of all, I like that you have you employ two different styles, one at home and one at scale. That means you're intellectually honest. You know what I mean to some degree about like, what you think works optimally. I think that's really cool, that you get to learn from both of those sides. I liked what you said about substrate reactivity. That's a great phrase, because I think one of the differences, like you said, is kind of that interaction with the medium. So soil is like, has that quote buffer, as people say, or it's more forgiving, and that's because of that reactivity. Right? When you talk about the difference between cocoa and rockwool, you're talking about how cocoa has the tendency to grab on to certain minerals, and rockwool does not. So you're saying that certain substrates are easier to crop, steer in and change those parameters. Is that a correct interpretation? Yeah,

that's exactly right. I would jump in here for a second. Jason, please just highlight something, just so people aren't confused when we are talking about cation exchange capacity, whether it's rockwool, cocoa, peat moss, anything we consider soil is a growing medium, typically, unless you've mixed in different particle sizes, things like clay and a lot of other amendments, we're not going to see a high cation exchange capacity in any kind of commercial media we're using. So even though cocoa will hold on to some nutrients, it's still not the same as if you have a soil bed that you've built over time and actually has some mineral component, and that goes along with buffering agents, adding things like calcium carbonate to your media to help with pH or gypsum. There's, you know, some options there. But I just want to highlight, like, the difference between rockwool and cocoa in application, at least in terms of, like, what a plant's root could feel is very, very minimal, until we get down to low water contents. Oh, that's fascinating. So the more saturated it is, the less difference. That makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, and what we're looking for is a hydroponic grower, which is, you know, almost all commercial production is at this point, is to control the nutrient solution in the root zone as much as we possibly can, you know, while maintaining an efficient growing system. But we the idea is we have the control. We're not putting things like, again, calcium carbonate, gypsum or anything to buffer in there, because we're irrigating every day. We have the the opportunity to keep that nutrient solution fresh and hold it at a pH. And you see that we want to see that

got it. And as a more hands off grower, this type of stuff fascinates me. So let's actually, I'm going to go throw you guys a curveball and kind of go a different direction. Can we talk about that crop steering, adjusting the parameters based on what's part of the cycle the plant is in? I want to ask you guys what common crop steering practices look like, whether it's dry backs at a certain time or changing nutrient ratios, and what you think of them, if the juice is worth the squeeze when you're going to a home grower or someone at scale and say, Hey, change things up to try to steer your crop in a certain direction, what does that look like?

Yeah, I think the first go ahead, Jason. No,

you're good. You hit you hit the mic first. Okay, I

was gonna say, I think one thing you know we Jason, I both tell people a lot, is that no matter how you're growing. You're steering your plants a certain direction. You know plants respond to inputs that we give them, whether they're environmental irrigation, just in terms of putting water on, nutrient content, pH, all of these things influence how a plant grows, including the climate in your grow room. So even for the home grower, if we're talking about you. Know, increasing production and quality, there's still certain parameters we want to hit, like Jordan, you have a dehumidifier and probably either a mini split or a source of cooling and heat inside of your grow room. Well, you you're doing that to try to maintain an optimal environment. And once we've got a baseline, we can start tweaking some of those parameters to increase quality, productivity, general plant health, depending on where you're starting. So even watering is a form of crop steering is basically what you're saying, like it's just, it's just tweaking from that baseline to achieve different goals. I think that's a cool way to look at it. Yeah. And I think a lot of us, you know, some of the frustration comes from, uh, at least for me, for instance, even when I started in commercial production, growing in three and three and a half gallon pots. We didn't have much of a problem with quality, because we were watering it the same way I would in my basement, in a three gallon pot, hit it in the morning to run off, you know, maybe let it dry down for two days, a lot during the first few weeks. But the problem was, once you blew that up to 5000 square foot canopy greenhouse, we just couldn't hit the numbers or keep up with the labor demands on that level. It doesn't scale the same. And that's why people lose quality at scale, yep, yep. And then also the, you know, the environmental challenges of managing that big space, not having an insulated roof, essentially, you know, compared to, like, your indoor things. So it's when you're scaling up crop steering, the term we that's kind of come to describe just our holistic approach to managing a growing environment and irrigation becomes a lot more important. You know, it's like for me in my basement. I agree with Jason. I go pretty low tech. I don't grow organic indoors, I do outdoors, but even indoors or growing a two gallon pot. I'm not trying to produce an economic amount of product, so I'll take the I'll take the easy route. Make us only have to water once a day. You know, maybe I only get two pounds of light or something like that, with minimal CO two input, but I don't need more than that. So my approach is going to be different, different focus, yeah, only on quality, right? Like, if I have two pounds of product, I'm not gonna smoke that in two or three months. So, you know, end up giving some away. And I just want to have good herb that I know where it came from and grew. Yeah,

that's exactly right. It's different goals, but, but Jason, give me your thoughts on on crop steering, and you're the cocoa guys, right? Certainly, there's some sort of secret dryback methods that I'm missing out at you, right? Or does it just not work like that? Yeah,

yeah. I'm gonna get right into that just just after I go over a little bit of what crop steering is, right? So says, As Seth said he was right, that's exactly what I was gonna say, that everyone's crop steering. A lot of times we're just not necessarily doing it intentionally. And to break it down simply. You know, when people start thinking about doing crop steering intentionally, they're modifying specific parameters at a different part in the plant life cycle to trigger a physiological response from the plant. And traditional agriculture has been doing this for many decades now, and when you ask whether the juice is worth to squeeze. It just depends if you want more, better juice than it is worth to squeeze right. A lot of times it's pretty simple, and it doesn't take necessarily a lot of modification, irrigation or environment, to actually see some pretty impressive increase in results, right. So if we take a let's say we didn't crop steer right. We said, We just said, we just said, everyone is crop string. But let's say we didn't make any changes. That means maybe our environment is exactly the same every day through the cycle. Our irrigation and fertigation properties are exactly the same from day one of flower to to the end of week eight or week nine, right? And that would be, you know, that's a fine approach. It's, it's simple. Obviously, cannabis is a very robust plant, so you can, depending on the strain, you get some pretty decent results that way. But what happens if we start playing with some of the temperatures, maybe induce a nighttime daytime differential, maybe let our ECS rise up earlier in flower, we can accelerate how quickly we get this plant to develop buds, and then we can just make sure that the rest of that growing time is focused on increasing the size and maintaining a good quality in that plant. And there's, there's always a really serious balance to crop steering, because we can, we can go very generative, and we can go very vegetative. And typically, most, most generic strains, most middle of the road strains, are going to respond to a more balanced type of crop steering. So it kind of comes down to, how can we help people find that fine line of perfect balance between generative and vegetative, and when are the right cues to employ that for different strains?

Oof, well, well spoken. Jason, can you dig down? I hate to cut you off in the middle of a good ramp, but can you dig down on the one thing you just said, which is daytime, nighttime differential. Tell us what we can achieve by expanding that swing or what it does?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we always like to think about is temperature affecting photosynthetic rate. You know, you. Anytime that we push our temperatures down too far, we can decrease the amount of energy available the plant, decrease the rate that it's growing. However, if we do end up growing in lower temperatures, we can, we can sometimes induce some nice properties in the plant. One, one being the most popular, obviously, would be production of the anthocyanin, that's a protein that's causing the purpling in cannabis radically. It's the purpling that is showing in huckleberries and blueberries and a lot of other types of plants and cannabis and all that stuff, right? Yeah, exactly, grapes and so that's one of the really obvious direct responses from the plant and doing temperatures that are a little bit lower. And what we can do is, if we keep our daytime temps up a little bit, and we can make sure we're producing as much plant, you know, helping that plant grow fast, and then decreasing the temperatures at night, especially later in the cycle, to help produce anthocyanin. And there are some other other side effects of lower temperatures at night too. Sometimes it can help us increase the density of our buds. Sometimes it can help us produce a little bit clean air Turkey and profiles and build more more complex hemotype In the end product. That

certainly seems that way, that like low temperature, high quality thing, but I like what you say about the peak versus the valley. I think where a lot of growers go wrong is they're just like, Hey, make it cold. Make it this cold in your space at night. But really, it's more about the highest temperature versus the lowest temperature than it is achieving a certain right, because you might end up swinging way too far. Might. What is what I'm saying making sense?

Yeah, absolutely. There's a there's crossing a point of diminishing returns, right? Like, if my plants are 85 degrees in the daytime, 65 at night, I'm probably not going to see the most optimal results, exactly, hot enough to where I might be getting, you know, some, some Fox tailing, loose buds at that point, and then at night time, I'm really slowing it down. But I think it's important to remember that what we're looking for is a difference in metabolism between the day and the night. We lower that temperature. Plants aren't warm blooded. Everything slows down every degree that you drop in. So in the daytime, we're photosynthesizing a lot, producing a lot of bulk, and then the nighttime, when we slow down that metabolism, the plants not able to essentially respirate as much, burn as much sugar, or produce as much chlorophyll and chloroplasts to keep up with that high light and heat input in the daytime. So if we're at like, let's say, you know, 72 degrees on the plant surface in the daytime, and I'm dropping to 65 I'm not going to see as much of a response as if I could get that up to, let's say 75 to 78 degrees on the plant surface temperature in the daytime. And that's where, you know, we spend a lot of time talking to people, especially clients and bigger operations that are switching from HPs to LED, helping them understand what exactly is that temperature differential. Because with the old HBS, is a lot of times we'd see, you know, a 78 to 80 degree leaf surface temp in the daytime, especially in some of our classic low ceiling, smaller rooms, where we get a lot of heat output from those lamps, sometimes we blow that up to a big room, we're not seeing that same leaf surface temperature in the daytime, and basically that's because we blew up the grow and then used the same parameters, but didn't try to dial it in for that specific space.

That was a shift that I think really rocked the consulting world. I know I work with a lot of home growers who are just growing in a tent one on one. And man, back in the day, when I started grow cast, it was like, your tents too hot. You got to ventilate. Get that out. Hot, hot, hot. The HID is hot. Your plants look hot. And then after LEDs, you see a lot of those heat problems go away, but then I'm looking and I'm going, this plant is cold. It's drooping, it's not transpiring correctly. Where are you growing? And they say, Oh, I'm growing in a basement, and I'm under an LED, and my and my ambient temperature is reading at 70 degrees or whatever. And it's like now it's a whole different struggle to keep the plants warm, which is something that I we never had problems with under H I D,

I'm glad you mentioned that, because I wanted to loop back around to your your secret drive back question. I didn't get a chance to get a hit on that yet, please. So you know, it's kind of interesting, because on the internet, you see a lot of people saying, Oh, you got to push the drive backs really for me, and I always take a scientific perspective on things to try and understand them better. When we're looking at a dry back. For me, it's always trying to think about All right, well, how much is my plant transpiring? Right? The more that we can get this plant to transpire, the typically, the faster that we can get the plant to grow bigger the buds that we can get. So optimizing transpiration rates is really what we're shooting for, and so achieving appropriate dry backs is a factor of how big is your media and how fast is your plant transpiring a lot of times. You know, we read dry backs as a percentage, simply because that's what we're measuring with volumetric volumetric water content is a percentage of of water in the substrate. Okay? And really the most important thing to think about is, what's the actual volume of the plant that's transpiring, or what's the volume of water that the plants transpiring? And we want that to increase as long as we've keep our CO two the same. And I'm not going to dive into water use efficiency, but, but CO two is one that kind of comes into play and and does modify our dry back, and we might dive into that here with one of the questions later that I previewed, talking about things that we can see in the graph by analyzing these data. So yeah, when it comes down to dry back, you know what's the most important thing is, is it predictable? Are you hitting the low levels and the high levels that you want? And most of the time we're just using dry back to help us play with what the EC levels are and ensure that our plant is on a healthy growth rate as far as transpiration.

But you make a good point, which is like, if the plant isn't transpiring correctly, and then you hit it with a dry back, the whole point is to get it to get the pump to work more efficiently. So for instance, if it's cold, and then you're trying to dry back your medium and achieve all this stuff. You're not gonna there's not the transpiration that's required exactly, you know. And we're looking at those dry back numbers. I think one thing that is, you know, everyone wants to do, whether it's, uh, growing cannabis or building a race car. We all like to reference numbers on things, right? And one thing that's, I think, tough to wrap your head around, especially if you've walked into one media size and type, and you haven't experimented with others, especially using some sensing technology, is that that dryback is going to be highly variable depending on, you know, how much biomass we have in that plant, how much leaf surface area there's to transpire, and how big that pot is. So, so true. If Jason I and Jordan, they're all comparing our dry back numbers. But Jason's in a one gallon. I'm in a two. Jordan's in a three. Let's say those numbers are all going to be different if we're growing the same size plant. And one of the most important things we're looking at with that dry bag is an indicator of how well is that transit, is that plant transpiring? And if we're not seeing enough transpiration, or rather enough volume, leave that pot in one day. Now we're starting to run the risk of going anaerobic and not maximizing growth potential, right? Because when we put those irrigations on that stimulating growth, if we've got a plant that's too small for the pot, well, now I can't irrigate it every day and steer that growth quite as aggressively as I could if I was achieving at least a 10% dry back every day in that same media, that way I have enough volume to bring it back up and know that it's going to take that volume out without my pot going anaerobic. And

that's a really good point man. And there's that just points to how unique everybody's grow is. It's like a fingerprint. You know what I mean? Like you said, pot size, medium, type, pot type, time of year. You know, different cultivars, there's so many variables, but I do like what you said about about using it in conjunction with proper transpiration to try to accelerate it, like that's the goal at the end of the day, and everything else kind of has to be in order.

Yeah, absolutely. If you're watching your water content line fall Jordan, then you notice it flattens out. Even if you didn't have a climate station. Go check your humidity, right? Check your temperature. Why did it slow down? There's usually a reason, even if you're only looking at the water content. Well, let's talk

about that. Let's talk about these different metrics, because it's so interesting to look at them all on a graph. Guys, and I want to thank you again for sending an aroya Go Kit, because it's just been a joy to play with. What are some of the most beneficial things that we can pull from real time data on your grow like you get from aroya, you know, comparing these different readings on the same graph, like EC substrate temperature was a really cool thing that I was looking at. And then obviously water content. So you can see the blue line is the water, and you can see when it spikes when you water. But what's interesting is, when you look at the other lines, right? I mean, this probably sounds so like such a lay person, but I'm just now getting into this analytics stuff. What are some of the cool things we can kind of glean from comparing all of these different analytics on one graph? Yeah,

you just start to, I mean, there's two things that really popped out for me. And one is you, you start to understand the dynamics, which makes it a lot more projectable. It's way easier to build a plan if you have the details on exactly what's going on and then the diagnostic ability. And great example of this is when I was growing we unfortunately had one of the thermostats programmed wrong, and every Monday, the greenhouse was warmer than every other day of the week. And yeah, you know, that might seem like something super obvious, and it becomes extremely obvious when you start looking at data sets that that are covering an entire growth cycle, or a few growth cycles. And so, yeah, you know, I think most growers can do a reasonable job of of, you know, hands on, determining what's going on with the plant. And that's a great way to approach some of the plant biology at first. But when it comes down to scaled growing commercial production, you got to have something that's watching your equipment as well, and that's where you can start to deploy sensors. Get that analytics across multiple areas, start analyzing micro climates. Start understanding it is there a variation in the uniformity of our plants due to what process and even some of the best growers that we work with, they end up finding, you know, small little tweaks in their systems that they can use to improve it. So whether they're trying to hit the exact number for a specific variable are just trying to make sure that there's better uniformity across there grow. Analyzing that data at scope makes it way easier to find those adjustments quickly.

Yeah, I think that what you said about micro climates is actually really interesting. I want to, I want to put a pin in that so we can maybe talk about that next. But for me, it's interesting comparing the climate sensor and the substrate sensor all at once, to give you an idea of that transpiration, right? Like monitoring, EC is is a huge game changer for people who are just kind of, you know, watering and praying. But what do you think Seth about comparing these different these different metrics and what you can learn, two

really big aha moments I see most people having when they start using this number one is having visibility into that substrate EC and not having to rely on your runoff, because we can do different things with runoff. If I go in with a wand and just hydrate my pots until they run off, I'm not going to get the same kind of sample quality as if I use small shots to approach field capacity over time, and then let that run off, run out there. So number one, it's just seeing that, you know, hey, you can accumulate a much higher level of salt in this in the substrate than you might have thought possible for your plants based on how you had been growing before. And while you're watching this graph, you're also watching healthy plant growth. So it's really reinforcing, like, hey, what I'm doing is working, and it allows growers to repeat, you know, day after day, cycle after cycle, the same strategy and parameters and actually compare the data instead of having just, you know, let's say one data point a day for water content in EC, or four data points a day for environment. Now I can start comparing, especially VPD and temperature, to my dry back rate, and see that, hey, I you know, everything's, let's say, seems great in the daytime, but now I'm seeing that as I have trouble maintaining my overnight VPD, get my humidity down, I'm seeing slower transpiration, let's say, and in the last two weeks, instance of Bud rot, things like that, and it helps us tie together a more holistic picture of what's going on. Because any growing system of plants there, it's dynamic, right? We have all these different organisms in there. They're living things. So that's they don't behave the same way as machines, exactly. So everything we do is kind of inside of a certain range of averages, right? And we have to use as much data as possible, and the more you can collect, even sometimes things that you may not be focused on. Now, you can look back in the future and go, Hey, man like and especially, how cyclical all of this is. You know, we're in a commercial grow. The best you're trying to do is run the exact same program every time with small tweaks for different strains, and then even on the home grow, we're cranking out run after run. If you can easily capture that data, you can go back and look at it and analyze it, and for you know, anyone that's in the projection side, it's pretty difficult to take, let's say your license space, and say, I'm only going to do research on this. I don't care what the yield data now you can sit down and analyze like, hey, between the two runs, you know, I thought this happened, but looking at the data, you know, looks like we had more of an AC issue, or, you know, dehumidifier issue than an irrigation issue. Yeah, and multiple people can look at the same graph and have the same understanding, instead of, let's say, a manager looking at graph data and or CSV data. And then someone on site that just goes and walks the room every day making sure the plants get watered, they're going to have some different feelings, and this can help put numbers on some of those and say, hey, look, guys, the EC is, you know, we're looking at a 5.0 baseline. Nothing we've read or heard can or tells us that we should have a deficient or locked out plant. Let's start investigating what else is going on, because that's in a normal range, rather than, Oh, we have some yellow leaves and burnt tips, let's flush. And it's like, well, that might do more harm than good if the issue is actually pH related or environmentally related. So true. I think that is absolutely key. Jason, did you have something to add to that? Yeah,

when, when we start looking at the the details and the dynamics, and in the bring up a couple anecdotes. Here. One, we used to just have one of those high, low hygrometers in the greenhouse, and they come in in the morning and it have the low temperature that you saw overnight. And sometimes, if that was really low, then we would have an adjustment. And that's a really poor approach, because one, we don't know what caused it to be low, we don't know when it was low, and we don't know for how long it was low. And using time series data, you get all of those answers, and you also get the answers of what else was going on is there? Other related events that can give us insight onto what this issue was. And another huge benefit of real time data is the fact that alerts can be sent from the system. And so when I first started working with clients to understand what their needs were for a product like this, one of my favorite questions was, what? What's your goal? What's your goal of working with aroya in your facility here, and one of our clients kind of surprised me. He says, Well, my goal is to take vacation for a week. And I that really stood out to me, because most of the growers I was talking to were talking about, hey, I need better yield. I need better quality. I need to reduce my costs. And he was like, I just need to be able to take vacation per

week. That guy's wise. And so

having a system like this that gives you heads up that's looking at your parameters and lets you set basically flags and say, I you know, I never expect my temperature to be lower than this if it does give me a notification immediately, right? And the best of us are setting that in a way where, when we get a notification that an alert has gone off, we know there's something broken. You know, there's some type of emergency that needs to be addressed quickly. And to wrap that anecdote up here, last year, I think we were able to get him on vacation. So, big win.

Yeah, totally standing ovation for vacation guy. The Clone drop is about to go down. We have two waves of amazing cultivars straight from rhizo Riches garden, and you are not going to want to miss this one. Now, members are going to get first dibs. So what you're going to want to do is go to grow cast podcast.com/membership, sign up and wait for the announcement. We're dropping, like I said, two different waves. We've got a bunch of rhizo Rich cuts in there, banana Oreo Blizzard, and we've got key lime madness in this clone drop. We've got two different Double Stuffed Oreos finos that are amazing, plus a bunch of heat from farmer John's collection, like LA Cush and purple milk. If you've been waiting to get your hands on some fire clones for an affordable price, members get a huge discount. So you'll save a ton of money just by going to grow cast podcast.com/membership jump in membership, you're going to want to be in there anyways. We're doing a grand fino hunt right now where someone's going to win $1,000 for hunting through a variety of riches genetics and finding a unicorn. We're going to do more of those in the future. Shout out to high grazie for sponsoring the grand fino hunt. It's awesome of them to come in and put up the prize money. As we give somebody 1000 bucks for finding a winning cut that one's gonna be on repeat. Come and join the fino hunt. Come and get access to all the discounts and the content and a worldwide community of growers connecting with each other, plus you'll stay up to date on everything I'm doing. I got a bunch of events coming up. We got St Louis this weekend. It's Saturday, September 21 grow active solutions in St Louis, Missouri. That's going to be awesome all day. We got classes starting at noon, and we got a concert in the park in the evening. It's going to be a huge event down there in St Louis. So come on out to that one. And then I've got the growers symposium in Missouri, October 5. I've got mush fest, October 12, and the Okay, calyx immersive, which is going to sell out October 19. Things are going crazy. To keep up on everything. Just jump into membership. Like I said, get in on this clone drop. There might not be enough for everybody. We're trying to serve everybody after the fact, but you're going to want to get that discount anyways, you'll save a ton of money. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, I'll see you in there. You won't regret it. This is going to be the greatest clone drop we've ever done. Rich has got a pollination coming up. It's going to be the greatest pollination he's ever done. Really, really good stuff in the work. So thank you to all the members who make this community possible. Thank you to you listeners. Don't miss out on this clone drop. I'll see you in there and happy growing these amazing clones, everybody. They are going to be awesome. I'll see you there. Grow cast, podcast.com/membership,

you're absolutely right. The monitoring systems are the one thing. Here's the thing, skimp out on your video system. You can get a wise cam for cheap, and you can just pop in on your thing. Don't skimp out on the substrate monitor and the climate monitor, the moisture meters that they sell on Amazon. They're worse than not having one. Your finger does a better job than those plastic ones like go all in. You know? This is for this is for someone who takes their growth seriously, this product. But this is where you want to spend the money. You know what I mean, you can get a cheap camera system, the substrate system and the climate monitoring system is where you really want to make sure you're getting accurate readings. Nothing's going to shut down all of that. You know what I mean, you'll get alerts, like you said, before we move on to EC, because I do want to talk about that, anything else on water holding capacity, or water detection, or we can just jump right into EC. Well, one

thing I want to bring up Jordan, kind of, what we're talking about, the sensor there, is that, you know, we're, we're kind of in the middle of an ag, tech revolution right now, like back when I was doing economic research going to college, you know. You'd be looking at over $3,000 for a single sensor like this from a variety of companies. You know, the technology is not super old, and it's evolved a lot over the last 20 years. So we are hitting a point where it's a lot more accessible to home growers, to I mean, we have people, not not a lot yet, but more and more that are investing like you can use this in your greenhouse to grow vegetables, right? A lot of the same production techniques of using commercial cannabis are used to grow cucumbers, tomatoes, etc. And I think that's one thing that's really important to understand when you're looking especially at more commercially marketed agricultural products, is that that market, we have to bring you something at a price point that makes it reasonable and profitable for the balance. Yeah, as consumers and small growers, we can take advantage of it. I

gotta say, though. Seth, I am really impressed with the build. Like, if I'm gonna invest in something like this, that's nice. You want it to be a really good quality build and a really good UI. And I'm a guy who I tell it like it is right, like I would not be saying this to you guys if it wasn't the truth. But the build is really, really nice. The UI is super intuitive and super detailed. It's a really great product. Thank you. I just want to say you really did a good job on this thing, and I really haven't ran into any issues yet, and I'll keep everybody updated. But works like a charm. Really good build quality. I do love my go kit quite a bit. I think it would make a good gift. If you have a grower in your life who you love, that's just about that. It's just true, dude. I think it would be. I mean, well, you talk about a grow light, right? Similar price range, I would say, so it's worth it. It's worth saving up for. I gotta say, you guys did a good job. It's

the only crop insurance you're gonna get in cannabis right now, I'll say that. I mean, that's kind of the way I look at it, too. You know, if I, uh, even for the price point of some of this equipment, you know, if I leave home and I kill my harvest, now I gotta go to the store for a few months. I'm gonna spend money there anyways. So that's true. You know, all of this has a price. And, man, there's a lot of money in fishing poles on the ball behind me, more than I've spent on grow gear in the last few years. I can tell you that it's

definitely worth, worth the price point, if you're thinking about it. I like the go kit a lot. Thank you guys for making a home grow addition. I think that was really smart. You know, yeah, we,

want to help everybody out, and do want to touch a little bit on the tech revolution that Seth was talking about, kind of wraps around what you were talking about there. When I started using high quality sensors in cannabis cultivation, they weren't necessarily easy to set up. And so one of the major goals for Ray was to be able to deploy this to a lot of different types of people. You know, obviously, as Seth is has academic background in this. He's very familiar with how difficult it was to deploy sensors, maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago,

cellular data loggers, manually programming those every time you have to deploy them, and setting every parameter, including transmission time, how often you take readings, calculating your battery life, yeah,

running, running wires, going out in the field to adjust stuff, downloading CSVs and manipulating our data. And so we realized that in order to be successful, especially in the candidate space, we had to be able to make a product that was not just for agronomists,

absolutely right. You got to break out beyond that, beyond that niche. But I'm looking at it right now, aroya.io I guess I'm on the app, but aroya.io is the website, and I'm going to show this thing off to the members as well on growcast tv. Anyways, it's very the UI is very impressive, man. I'm loving it. I'm loving the graph, dragging certain areas to get a closer look and examining, you know, what my air environment was like right after that? Watering and Oh, fuck, it's way too humid. It turns out I need to do a better job controlling humidity. It's fun. It's really it's really good stuff. Being a soil grower, I'm not, you know, I'm not one to monitor runoff or anything like that. But I know a lot of people, a lot of people have a close eye on their EC, and have a lot of concerns about and also a lot of misconceptions about EC. So I want to make sure we make time for this before we run out of time for the episode. When you have this real time data for electrical conductivity, you learn so much more, like you said, so much better than just doing an in EC and an out EC. That's really insufficient to get to get the whole picture. But how do you guys use this information to address problems? I'm sure you work with people all the time about, you know, my EC spiking, or my EC tapering off, or getting this reading or that reading. What type of problems do you solve with this data?

Probably, probably one of the first problems that we've encountered quite a bit is people just having too low of EC. Cannabis is a very hungry plant, and, you know, running too low is kind of on the safe side when we think about a lot of times people were concerned about a nutrient burn, right? Well, you know, most cannabis, you're not going. Actually encounter nutrient burn until we're very high, excessive ECS.

What is low? Sorry to cut you off. What is that too low? In your opinion, that people are settling

on so for, you know, indoor say, HPS or LED grows, you know, running it 225, might have been pretty common traditionally before good sensing equipment was available and early in order to optimize your plant growth that is too low for most nutrient types, there are variations nutrient to nutrient. Yeah, I want to highlight something to here when now that we've gone into, just as Jason said, sensing, but also

more high intensity agriculture. You know, if I was growing with a 600 to 1000 watt HPs, and not necessarily turning it all the way up. Traditionally, growing at that 1.5 to 2.5 might have been on the ragged edge of adequate. But now we're pushing, you know, 1112, 1300, or more PPFD into these plants, and that's where we're seeing, you know, an additional need for the CC, if you arrive growing before under less intense conditions, you might have gotten away with that. I just wanted to point that out, because, you know, for years, if you were growing under low intensity conditions, or you had like, let's say, some cation exchange capacity, you might have gotten away with a much lower fertilizer. That makes sense as lighting evolves. You know, we're not using that janky old metal halide vege bulb anymore, or the T fives to veg under. Now, I've got this high powered Ferrari, right? I don't turn up my LED panel in my garden. I have a thinker Model H. It gets up to like, 70% right now, yeah. I don't need to push it any higher, you know, if I'm blast, like looking into the sun, 1300 PPFD, yeah, like that. My plants need a lot of inputs to handle that. That is a

good point. But continue. Jason, sorry, yeah. And so when we do

start to get competitive in a commercial scale, we really have to consider what, what is our limiting variables? And I talked about it on office hours last week, was, was the law of minimums, and there's some specific publications as far as plants go, in regards to making sure that you're not limiting it on nutrients. And that's what's happening in commercial growth. We see EC levels of 2.0 for example, we're going to be running out of plant nutrition before we're running out of other variables at the facility. And considering the cost of nutrients. We don't want that to be the limiting factor, right? And what happens is, when we're monitoring EC in the substrate, we can also start to push less runoff, right? So we might be able to run a higher EC and actually lose or use less nutrients, because we have less losses total overall. And so it comes down to, how do we really optimize? And they use the term precision irrigation quite a bit. And what that means is simply, let's get the parameters set right. Let's not have excess waste, and we'll be able to produce a root zone environment that is optimal, that

makes sense to us about the efficiency. And do you see that in the numbers? Can you talk about some specific examples, like when people come to you and say you can tell there's an inefficiency? Yes, absolutely

so, because the data is dynamic. It's real time. If we see our plants are eating more nutrients, our EC goes down throughout the day, a lot of times. That's a fairly simple, obvious indicator that we just need to supply more nutrients. And that's one of those things where the first run, first few days of using a system like array, you could identify that maybe 2.5 is not enough for me, if my substrate EC decreases throughout the day, and by the time I irrigate the next day, I'm at one five or two. Oh, then we know we've got to up our nutrient levels, and the only way to do that is increase feed EC, right?

Or another thing that I see is, I guess this goes into a question about calibrating the taro, but, uh, another thing I'll see is, if someone has a reading in this, in the medium like this, but they're mixing their fertilizer, let's say they're a home grower, to a certain EC, but their EC pen is off. They get very, very confused in my Discord, until they realize, Oh, I just realized that the pen that I was using was off. And you understand what I'm saying. So I imagine the taro, just like, doesn't need to be calibrated. It's probably just sending a charge. I don't know how that shit might sound like an idiot.

It never does. It has a lifetime calibration. If it's out of calibration, it's broken, or there's a defect, which is very low rates of that, to be honest. And that's, that's actually something we talked to people about quite a bit, is, you know, pH and EC pens that you're using in your grow rooms. It's a really good idea, even if you're, if you're a serious home grower, let's say you got, you know, four lights, and that's not even huge for some home growers, but if you're producing enough product where you have a little bit of economic input into your life from it, something like an EC or pH pen, you know, the ones we use every day, they get dropped. They get used heavily. They're nowhere near as accurate as like, a scientific bench top meter, yeah. So very frequently we'll talk. Talk to people that you know are suffering issues, like, Hey, I mix it up in the tank and it's at a 3.0 okay, well, you need to really, you know, kind of look at holistic crop registration and keep using that. We're holistic. We want to capture as much data as possible, right? Is the water going on my plant? What I think I mixed up? Because if it's wrong, I'm going to stare at this chart and really, really struggle when I'm like, Hey, I'm putting on a 3.0 and my EC won't go up. But exactly, actually, yeah, I have a mixing problem where it's falling out in my tank, my plants are actually getting 1.5 EC of I'm not sure what balance at that. That's exactly what I was dealing with. Maybe three or four times in the discord, I've seen someone just pulling their hair out and then realizing, Oh, I went and I got the solution that it came with, and I tested the solution that was supposed to be seven, and it was, you know, 10 or whatever. So that's a really good point. It is the is truly superior to having one of those, especially the cheap little like vivid Sun ones. Those are so, yep, janky and fragile and yeah. And that is one cool thing about this. AG, tech revolution. PH, 10 sensing technology hasn't caught up quite yet. But, like our taro sensors were originally designed to be installed out in a field and left there for years, I can tell, man, so that's, yeah, that's, that's a difference that makes it, you know, at least for me, coming into this company, having used those sensors in applications where they're, you know, possibly getting driven over by a tractor a foot under the ground and stuff like that. It was like, Hey, this is, this is reliable. This is solid. That's dope. You know, as we talked before, some of this stuff, it is an investment, but for any grower like and maybe that's one hard thing when you're looking at the whole market out there, but investing in tools that actually help your skills as a grower sometimes, as opposed to, let's say, a fancier control system, or sometimes like, Hey, do you need a new mini split? Like, well, was the old let's do some math. Was the old one actually inadequate? Or was there maybe a different problem that we can use data to say, hey, if we if you're not over watering by an extra five gallons every day, your humidity might be a lot better if it's not just evaporating off the table. And it's hard to tell that without getting numbers on as many different parameters as possible. And like this, EC, for instance, with 24/7 you know, Jason brought up low EC. That usually is the number one, the first conversation around EC we have with clients. But then the next one is starting to diagnose plant health issues. Okay, if your EC is in an appropriate range, but we're still seeing what looks like a deficiency issue. Let's start checking your input and output pH, right? Where is that? You know, we can start looking at other variables that we can actually control.

Again, I think that's why it's so great to see it all on on one graph. But I'll say it again, this is not the area where you want to cheap out, like, get a good light, get a good monitoring system, get the arroyo go kit. These are the things. Get a cheaper tent, right? Whatever. Like you could, you'll survive in, like, an Amazon tent. Don't skimp out on the light. You're gonna you're gonna have big problems. Don't skimp out on the on the monitoring system, because you're just gonna confuse yourself one more time. I gotta say, this is the nicest one I've seen. You guys did a really, really good

job. Thank you. Yeah, you're better off lifting pots than having a meter that's gonna tell you something

so true. That's what I'm saying. It's literally gonna be worse than nothing

we've done with that for years. It's just hard to be there 15 times a day, right?

And I it's funny, I almost feel like a jerk, but I'll see people like, like, Hey, this is my grow they'll join the discord. I need some help. Here's my water content. And then they'll show a picture of one of those. You know the ones I'm talking about? They're green. They're like, $13 they're on Amazon, yep. And they're they're worthless. Don't worry.

I tried the same conclusion, yeah. And

I tell them, I tell them, get rid of that thing. Get rid of that thing right now. So I don't usually do that. So it's just funny. It's one of those things, man. It's one of

those things, well, in it, and it's, you know, from a small consumer goods perspective, it's, it looks like a lucrative market to get into, right? Like, if you go to MJ biz con, look at, look at the number of people trying to sell trimming scissors and a lot of these little accessories to the industry, yeah, because a lot of these products are, yeah, you can make a really cheap to produce easy version. And a lot of not necessarily just home growers, but there are plenty of people out there that will take a disposable product that's, you know, use it twice and throw it away. It's just because they have easy access. And, you know, most of us, hopefully in life, arrived at the conclusion we'd rather have something that lasts a little longer or a lot longer and we can reuse over time, and actually helps us dial in, you know, like we were talking about media earlier, like, when Jason, I work with clients, one of our big goals is to help them understand these properties about the media, so that, you know, hey, if they want to switch from one Coco blend to another one that holds 65% down to one that holds 45% holds 45% they understand how to actually do that and get a very similar result out of their plan, right? You know, they can be proactive and understand what's going on without having to go, okay. It's going to take us two runs to get down the hang of using these one gallon pots instead of a two gallon. Always

with those, those learning curves. The more Daddy you have. I mean, I see it when people switch soil. I see it all the time. Yeah, very good point. Yeah. Just do yourself a favor. I mean, I'm like, I said, I'm playing around with it right now. I'm loving this thing. This hour flew by. Let me make sure and say, aroya.io that's the website. Seth and Jason host the office hours live podcast. Let me make sure I get at least one more question in here. Great interview. You guys really, really good wealth of knowledge, and we kind of covered, we bounced around, but we covered a lot of stuff. Would love to have you back on in the future. I guess. Before we wrap it up, jump to this one, number one piece of advice that you have for my listeners. Let's say you know a journeyman cultivator, maybe he's producing well, at home, as a home grower, maybe she's on a commercial scale, and they're just getting started, but they're they're looking to take their garden production to the next level. I'd love to hear both of your answers. What's your number one top piece of grow advice for me would be, learn from traditional agriculture. There's a lot of advancements that have happened in greenhouse production, especially if we look at

tomatoes and peppers in in Europe, Oh, that's great. They've done a lot of things that does work for cannabis, it's not always directly applicable in the details of things, but for production proficiency, a lot of the labor investments, a lot of the process investments, and even a lot of the agriculture or agronomy investments that they've spent, it's a wealth of knowledge. And yes, you got to take it for a grain of salt, but you can, you can build your education on traditional ag and apply that to commercial cannabis cultivation. I think

that's a great answer. Do you have an example of something that you I mean, I know that you've both worked in traditional AG, so I'm sure there's 1000 examples. But one thing that you've pulled over from the traditional ag world into cannabis. I

mean, we hit on it earlier, and when you talk about crop steering, that's a technique that tomato growers have been used utilizing for three, four plus decades. And you know, it's only kind of just emerging in cannabis now, and how effective it is to optimizing crop output,

tomato steering, I love it, yeah, with with all the watering techniques and everything like that, they get deep into that great, great piece of advice. I agree with Jason, invest in yourself, invest in knowledge and tools, and don't be, don't be close minded to thinking that cannabis, because, you know, we all agree it's a special plan. It helps a lot of us. A lot of us enjoy it for, you know, both medicinal and recreational reasons, but learning as much as you can about, you know, basic plant science, advanced indoor growing techniques, like just all the technology surrounding it, and being open to the fact that, hey, you know, when you look at the the All, all of the knowledge about plant science, everything we discovered was experimental, Like everything we know about plants. People did experiments. They evaluated, hey, if I add more or less nitrogen, what happens? And we see the results. And that's all. These guidelines were established. So if you get behind the idea, one of the best things you can do for yourself is crop registration, following the education, and start to put those numbers on things, and then apply what you're learning to what's going on. Because without, you know, without repeatability, it's really hard to really refine your technique. You know, when we look at like outdoor egg, you know, one of my best examples is, hey, where I'm at. Most of the ground me work I've done has been on dry land farming, so no irrigation inputs. And what we're looking at is soil moisture content. How deep is that moisture, how much rain did we get this year? And for here, for instance, you know, I might have one field that's at 120 bushels an acre of wheat, and then I'll have one that's at 160 okay, I can track climatically, what was the difference between those two fields, what was the soil moisture content. But I can't control that here. That's all depend on, depending on how much rain we get, you know, up until July. Whereas, hey, if I'm looking at that and I'm starting to understand what, you know, hey, this this field, and this is my example, one field, and more or less nitrogen, more or less water. Now I can relate that. But now with my indoor controlled grow, I can control all those variables. So they're, you know, logically, I should be able to pull off a run after run that's as close to the same as you know, my level of insulation from the outside world will allow it

to be replicatable. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah,

man, it's it's hard to learn if you're chasing your tail, you know, if you have 10 different things every time. Yeah, absolutely. And you said, you said, everything's basically started as an experiment. That's a really cool point. Every run you do is learning experience like, don't, don't turn yourself off to that. You know if, as long as you're taking notes and even just take a picture every week, compared to the last time you grew that strain, and you can learn something, I think that's that's probably the hardest thing, is making sure you. Don't get stuck in a mindset that this is the only way to do it, because there are a bunch of ways to successfully cultivate, not only cannabis, but a bunch of different crops. It's just figuring out how to do it in your setting at its maximum potential challenge. Yeah, and people you know as as indoor farmers too. I mean, man, the amount of crops I was able to push through greenhouse in just four years is insane compared to the amount of wheat crops I got to work on, or peas. You know, that's 20 years of agriculture, traditional ag experience that you're packing into just a couple years. You know, if you've got three or four crops a year instead of one man, that's that's a lot of learning potential and accelerated learning potential.

It's a great way to look at it. Man continuing to grow as a person as you grow the plants, right? Yeah. Listen, guys, this was an amazing episode. I just got to say, You guys are great educators, really good wide range of topics that we covered one more time. Aroya.io, that's a R, o, y, a dot, I O. And check out the office hours live podcast. I know everybody who's listening is going to love tuning into that show. Give him a sub and any final words before we wrap it up. Anything you want to Well, first of all, where can we find you? And where can people find more of your work? But also anything you want to tease, I want to give you a chance if you, if you want to tease anything for aroya here at

the end, yeah, uh, my Instagram's underscore van underscore loving. Underscore van lovin. It's kind of just a fun place to check stuff out. I don't do much posting, but you will get links to a lot of people in in the industry. As far as what is coming up, we're going to leave that open for launches here at MJ biz con at the fall. So check us out there if you want more info on what we're releasing. I

might just be there to check that out. Check them out at MJ, bizcon, Seth, where can people find you? I'm on Instagram at Seth, underscore. Baumgartner, pretty easy to find, same as Jason. I'm not the biggest poster, but find a lot of connections there. If you go look, we're both on LinkedIn, and you can find our you know, white background, not a whole lot more exciting. YouTube episodes on YouTube, all right? YouTube, office hours, live, everybody so Roya, Jason and Seth, thank you guys, once again, really great episode. Appreciate you, and we'll have you back on in the future. 100% sounds great. And you listeners, thank you for tuning in today. You can find us at growcast podcast.com make sure you subscribe if you're just tuning into the show, and check out membership. Tons and tons of fun stuff going on inside membership. That's it for now. I'll see you next time on the next grow cast. This is Seth and Jason and Jordan signing off. Wishing you an amazing day. Be safe out there, everybody, and grow smarter. Bye, bye. That's our show. Thank you to Jason. Thank you to Seth for stopping by. Really awesome show. Make sure to check out office hours, the arroyo podcast, and see everything they're doing over there. Tell them you liked the show. Send them a DM. Tell them you heard him here, and that's all for today. Thank you, everybody. Grow cast podcast.com is where you need to go jump into membership for the clone drop. Got a bunch of stuff going on in there that you're gonna love and find all the discounts, all of the good info up there before we wrap it up. Quick shout out to rooted leaf nutrients. Just pulled down. My run looks incredible because of rooted leaf nutrients. Rootedleaf.com code, grow cast for 20% off best nutrients around. No need to pH works in any setup. Hydro soil does not matter. And like I said, I just did a run in pro mix with reroute leaf, and it was one of the best runs I've ever done. Absolutely loving these no pH carbon based nutrients. Nick will be back on the show soon. We got some stuff in the works with him as well. I know you guys love hearing from Nick from rootleaf. So stay tuned for that. Rootleaf.com code grow. Cast supports them, supports us and supports your garden, makes your plants shine. Enjoy that. Rude nutrients. Everybody, all right, that's it for today. I'll see you later. Signing off. Be safe out there. Everybody. Love you all. Bye, bye. You

and to wrap that anecdote up here last year, I think we were able to get him on vacation. So, big win. I.