♻️ Sustainable Cannabis, Switching to Soil, and Container Growing, with Soil Guru

10:21AM Jan 29, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

The Soil Guru

Keywords:

sustainable farming

soil guru

organic growing

auto watering

microbial support

living soil

nutrient balance

moisture management

biodiesel production

cannabis waste

sustainable practices

community cup

cannabis industry

environmental impact

grow cast

Greetings cultivators from around the world. Jordan River here back at you with more. Grow cast, doing it for the community. Today, we have the amazing soil guru back on the line. Soil Guru is an awesome soil mixer. He's into sustainable and regenerative farming practices, and he's speaking at Community cup. That's right. Community cup coming up May 7. You'll hear more about that dropping this week. I know I'm excited to see you guys there in Oklahoma City. The soil gurus episode today is awesome. We talk about sustainability. We talk about switching to soil automated watering. Everything is included in this episode. So before we jump into it, shout out to sustainablevillage.com with their blue matte auto watering systems, code growcast is live only till the end of this month, so grab yourself a blue matte watering system. Put your soil grow on autopilot. This is what you want, folks. Code growcast@sustainablevillage.com you can use it now. Get the kit, get the blue matte watering sensor. You'll never go back. It's going to hold your soil at an optimum moisture, which is going to help your microbes thrive. It's going to help deliver more nutrients to your plant. And more importantly, you're gonna have to you can have so much extra time not hand watering all the time. Just fill your reservoir, set it and forget it. It is the future of organic growing. Get your blue matte watering systems 10% off, only till the end of this month. Code grow cast at sustainable village.com. Thank you to Michael box and sustainable village, an awesome episode recently. And then, of course, the 10% off code live at sustainable village.com. Go grab it, everybody. You'll thank me later. Thank you to sustainable Village. Alright, let's get into it with soil guru. Thank you for listening and 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 the show. Tell a grower about grow cast. Turn someone onto the show. Turn someone on to growing. It's the best thing that you can do for the cannabis community. And of course, see everything that we're doing at grow cast. Podcast.com, forward, slash action. There you can find the classes, the meetups, the seeds, the membership, all the fun stuff. It's all up there. I appreciate you listeners tuning in. Today. We've got an awesome episode from a return guest. It's been a minute, but he is back. We have none other than from environmental soil sciences and much more. We've got soil guru back on the line. What's up? Valian, how you doing? Man, I'm good. I'm good. How are you excellent? Man, excellent. Thank you for coming back on the show. Of course, soil guru of environmental soil sciences, you can find that website exactly what I just said.com, and also one of the speakers at the upcoming community cup Oklahoma. Thank you for agreeing to do that, man. I'm so excited to see your presentation at the community cup. That's going to be

awesome. Yeah, I can't wait. I've got a lot of store for you guys.

Hell yeah, dude. Well, I saw you at one of the other expos. You had the nice booth all set up with your grow tent and all your soil out there. You do it right before we jump into all these questions and stuff. Can you tell us what you've been up to and what's been going on in the world of soil? Guru,

in the world of soil, it's been, it's been steady, you know. I mean, you know, you have those slow seasons and your busy seasons and all that. But, I mean, this past year has been a hit for the industry as a whole, you know. But for the most part, I've just been up to, you know, making soil and growing cannabis. I run two cultivation facilities, catalog farms and Bud Tender farms. I'm now getting my own cultivation facility off the ground, tropical trichomes, organics, nice. So a lot has been going on, you know, and on top of that is, I'm opening an organic vegetable farm this summer, and then raising two beautiful girls. I mean, that's, that's the highlight of my life. No matter what it is that's

a lot. I love it. Yes, I love that you're a family man. I love that you're into the sustainability side now you're working with, you know, your own craft facility and two others here in Oklahoma, right? These licensed cultivators doing soil organic grows. That's really cool, getting that product on the shelf all

organic, like literally all 100% organic, all grown in my soil, my company's complete regimen actually dry nutrient and soil, but it's super simple, man. It takes the guesswork out of it for a lot of people, and it gives you a clean, quality product for your money. You see what I'm saying? Like, obviously, the market, if you know anything about the market in Oklahoma, it's just, it's, it's bad, you know. So you can't afford to be, you know, cost of a pound of cannabis to be to your cost on 800 bucks, you won't make any money, right? You'll have to shut down. And that's what I feel like is happening with a lot of these grows, is people relied so heavily on bottled nutrients, and whatever these nutrient companies told them it was, it was easy, you know, but it was easy when you can sell it at 2500

a pound, exactly. Now you have to think about costs. You

have. To think, you know, you have to do a lot of things like, I mean, there's a lot of growers growing the organic route because, one, it's cleaner, obviously, the only reason, I mean, the biggest, and I'm probably going to get a lot of shots for this, but the only thing that synthetic grows, and in very few cases, have over organic growers, is yield that three three ounces, three and a half ounces per plant, versus two and a half ounces per plant, three ounces per plant, that adds up, you know? So that's an honest take, man, yeah, when you're expecting a 30 pound harvest, and in organics, you're getting a 27 pound harvest, 25 pound harvest, let's put that into perspective with numbers $1,000 a pound, that's $5,000 that you're now out right? But you could afford that when you're running synthetic synthetics, you've got to buy nutrients all the time. So your cost per pound, and I don't know what synthetic cost per pound is, I'll be honest with you, my customers that have switched from synthetics told me personally, that I have personally, single handedly saved their growth because they were going under trying to keep up with the Joneses, essentially, of buying the entire advanced nutrient lines, like I'm going to name call, but you know, they they ran the entire line, everything that advanced offers they had, and they Were running it, and he was like, man, we just watched our margins get slimmer and slimmer. Like, right now, his cost per pound, 350 bucks a pound. Wow.

Soil grown. So this is a subject that I want to focus in on. It's a good start to this episode. And I do want to get more into, you know, sustainability and microbiology and everything. But I want to start here, from this point, which I've seen a lot of growers consider, which is switching from a bottled nutrient line to a soil grow. And first of all, I like that you have an honest take. You're not, you don't seem like you know what I mean, for you to say, okay, like there are salt there are salt growers out there. They're doing well, you can get good yields. We, we're the same here at grow cast, right? I want to see people growing, that's the most important thing, but there are a lot of people who are looking to get off that bottle and get into the soil. Man, this is a transition that many people are interested in, so I'd like to get your take on that from the beginning, like, where do you recommend if somebody who's good at growing cannabis using bottled nutrients switches to a living soil type grow, talk to me about what container size you'd recommend. They might start out

with living soil setting. I wouldn't go any now again, commercial scale. I have customers that run three gallons. They do teas twice a week. There's a lot more feeding involved in a three gallon pot. It can be done because people question, well, if I use three gallon pots, and if I have to use a minimum of five gallons, then now that's, you know, you can fit fit more three gallon pots on a table, which means you can fit more plants, because that's the way people think, yes, more plants, more more flour, more money. All of that goes to, you know, you as an individual. Now where to start is, is buy a bag of soil. You see what I'm saying? Like, I can sit here and give you articles upon fucking articles, bro. Like, literally, I can give you science scholar articles that are all related to why soil is better, but that don't necessarily mean that everyone's gonna do it. You see what I'm saying. If these, let's think about food. If your food, or these veggies and sprouts and stuff you buy from the store, they're in a, more than likely a mix that's made in house. It's just peat moss and pearlite and vermiculite, right? If not, it's going to be Miracle Grow Scott soil, which is just peat moss, like in quote, unquote aged forest products, which, in Fox farm uses the same lingo. That's just sawdust that's inoculated with a chemical that makes it poof, like peat moss. Wow, like, literally, that's, that's what it is. And people don't know this. You know, that's the cheat codes, essentially, that people are willing to take and sacrifice quality because that, believe it or not, you leave that lettuce, or whatever it is, sprout in that little plug for any more than a week or two that you have to there's no nutrient there. So it's going to survive off of whatever you give it through a liquid medium being your water. So whatever calcium, magnesium, whatever macro micros are in your water, that's what it's going to eat off of. And that's how it's going to be a coin time where that plant needs to take another step. So we're going back to, like, what's your question? Size pot matters, because you need to have sufficient food to feed that plant,

right? You need enough minerals. I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make when they switch to soil, is they go with these small pots and then, no, it won't work. They start running into problems. Where the plant eats nutrition is too fast, exactly. So you get them into a larger container, you

have to five gallon is, is standard. That's what I recommend. The commercial cultivation minimum is what you're saying home growers, a minimum, absolutely, like, like, I would never go anything. Smaller than a five ever, right? I veg in smaller parts, like I veg commercial scale. I veg in one gallon pots, nothing but water. Like, just think of what I'm saying, and then in a commercial perspective, that alone, how much money could a commercial grower save by just vegging in one gallon of my soil? So if you do the math, there's 200 gallons of soil in a cubic yard. There's 370 bucks in a cubic yard. So you're spending less than $2 on your medium in a gallon pot, and all you have to do is give it water and microbes, which is probably, you know, nothing. It's

beautiful. I think that that's where this, like soil growing, really shines to is like veg stage. They're so healthy, and they just cruise along. And then I think once they're big enough, like you said, once they start chewing through a bunch of calcium and sulfur and potassium and flour, that's when you want them in, like a bed, or like a 25

gallon so that's what we do. That's exactly what we do. So that's actually going to piggy back to another question that you asked me, but I won't hit on that. I'll let when that time come. But you know, that's the biggest thing there is, is, is having that size pot that that is ample enough, like, think of you, like, you can be in a four by four room, and they can fit as much food as they possibly can in that four by four room with you. But there's going to come a point in time where you're not going to have any more food in that four by four area you've eaten it all. The same thing happens in a pot plants. They they search outward. So as they eat they're going into, you know, like, I hate to put numbers on it, because there's no science to prove it. So let's just say, within the first four weeks of flour, they eat up about another gallon and a half soil, sure, and then now they have that remaining, you know, two and a half to to finish out bulk up. That's why, like in that five gallon pot that gives it enough food, like I ran full cycle that my company soil was just water side by side with lush and so on, two massive companies and almost 50% yield increase from my soil to theirs. Overall plants way happier. Like, literally, it was a night and day difference. And that's when I was like, Oh crap, I made my soil too good, you know? But that doesn't you know, that's not going to change. You know, what I do, my product's always going to stay the same. My quality is going to remain the same. Will I be able to produce as much as Scott's landscaping or the Monsanto group, absolutely not. But that's not the market that I'm trying to tap into. That's not the market that I want to be in relationship with. You know, I want people to be able like I tell people all the time my Instagram is open. People come and ask me questions that I answer every single one.

I love it. Man. I absolutely love it. Now I will say, I haven't tried either of those soils myself that you mentioned, but I will say this, a lot of soils on the market, pre bagged, tend to be under mineralized. Absolutely plug your plants into them, and they fucking run out of sulfur. There's not enough sulfur. The biggest issue

is the trace minerals too. They don't have much trace minerals because they don't have organic matter in there. The root of your trace minerals is truly based on the foundation of your soil. So you can have, you can supplement trace minerals Absolutely. But trace minerals are traced for a reason. They're very, very old. They have been in that soil for a very long time, right? Like you don't have a trace mineral that becomes available instantly. It's going to be water soluble, yes, but it still has to go through a cation exchange. It still has to go through many other processes to get to the plant. Like, the plant just doesn't go and grab, you know, borrow it. Like it doesn't work like that. Like, that's not how the chain of like, and that's where I think people get mixed up, is to think, with a bottle nutrient and cocoa I'm feeding directly to the plant, yes, in that setting, you absolutely are. In a soil setting, you now have basically a whole fucking universe in between the nutrient, the actual nutrient, and the actual rhizosphere, or the plant root tips, right? The microbes have to do their thing to it and do this because plants and microbes communicate through sugar. The plants roots let off a sugar, the microbes then go and eat the sugar. That's where that nutrient exchange actually happens, and then the plant takes it up like that's how it happens in nature. So that's what we do in a living soil is, you're just trying to mimic that as best as you can. That

is so important for a first time soil grower to understand, which is exactly what she just said. And there's, there's practical applications of that, right? Which is so let's go and going back to what you said, like, I like that. You said, buy a bag of soil your first time. Maybe try your own mix the second or third time. Once you have it down, buy a reputable bag of soil, get enough to learn to fill a good container. And then, when you're talking about the biology and getting that biology thriving, the number one thing I see is over or under watering, which, by the way, oh yeah, being in a bigger container helps that you it'll be harder to over in underwater when you're in a bigger container, right? That's something that's really important to get that biology. Be actually functioning and thriving. Yep. So there's a

happy medium in there. So there's your your temperature has to be right, your moisture content has to be right. Like, there's so many things that, and that's why people have refrained away from organics for so long. It's hard for me to sell organics. There's so many moving parts that one has to understand it's easy for Scott's Miracle Grow to sell you a bag of Miracle Grow and then tell you you have to buy a pelletized chemical for tomatoes, a pelletized chemical for whatever. So, yeah,

flower ornamentals or specific,

right? Exactly, you can't go and make you. Know, they don't. They're not teaching you to go and make your own lactic acid bacteria. They're not teaching you to go dig a hole or find some old leaves and create your own, IMO, right? Like, no. Like, that's things I run on a commercial scale. Like, when we had an ofma inspection, the lady was like, does your nutrients have a product label, and I'm like, No, ma'am, it's fish bone meal. I'm telling you what it is. Like, literally, like, my

No, this came from dry nutrient,

yeah, literally, this all came from nature. Like, I don't have an answer for you. I don't know how, like, I know how fish bone meal was made. That's not,

you don't hate fish. I'm sorry, ma'am, yeah. Like, I cannot do

that. And she was just like, mind blown. And I showed her some IMO, too. Okay, that's and she was like, Okay, well, you had to make this. And I was like, brown sugar cooked the white rice and leaf mold from outside. And she looked at me like her brain exploded. And I was like, goodness gracious. Well, you know, this is the person that's supposed to be telling me that I'm legal,

exactly. And that's, that's the same sentiment I heard. We did a tour of fluor cannabis in Las Vegas, and there's very few people doing living soil in Nevada, and they're doing living soil, and they said the same thing. The inspector was furious. What? What is going on here with this, and this is gonna violate code? It's like, No, this is Korean Natural Farming. This is whatever, whatever it really was here. Yeah, it's all closing

my loops, and that's what they don't want you to do. You know, that's, that's society doesn't want society wants you to be dependent on society, right? That's how the system works. That's how the world keeps going. And I'm not mad at it. I take part in society every day, you know, I buy fuel. I have a nice truck. I've, you know, like, I take part in society. But there has to be a point of, if society decides that there's no more food in the supermarket, yes, what am I going to do die?

There's got to be a dividing line between you want to protect society, but like you're saying, producing your own food, your own medicine, own

medicine. That's right, you got it. That's all it goes down. Like sustainability, I I spoke about this on another podcast, but sustainability is is not an achievable goal. It's not a realistic goal. And that sounds very coming from me, knowing that my degree is in global environmental sustainability, but in college, they taught us that, like, you'll never be 100% sustainable. There's going to be a point in time you're going to have to rely on something that's not renewable, but as little as you can create that situation of you having to rely on something that's not renewable now eliminates your carbon footprint. So, you know, like me, like I don't my waste doesn't go my food waste doesn't go to the trash anymore. I now have pigs, goats and chickens, so I feed them my, you know, veggie straps, if it doesn't go to the compost pile, right, or, you know, things like that. So like my trash now, you know, I've seen when we were recycling, and I'm not recycling now, but I've seen my trash go down to once every two I was emptying my trash once every two weeks, because I recycled all my cardboard, all my food scraps, I was putting very little things in my trash bin, and that alone cut down my my my carbon footprint, because now that trash truck doesn't have to stop to my house, they can keep going. So like, things like that, I think of things on a micro on a macro scale, because global environmental sustainability is my degree. So I try to think of of things as a total perspective of why and what I do and how I do and things like, you know, with my company, like, I do everything as sustainable as possible, you know, because I'm giving back, I think that's

on a lot of growers minds. And you said something really interesting, which is, I have said this for a while, it's absolutely true, which is, you really shouldn't pick each other apart for what we're doing that's wasteful, because all of us are doing something that is wasteful in some way and in some way, just by existing and consuming, we could all pick each other apart. But what we need to do is focus on the thing that we care about the most, and focus on doing better at that, not tearing down others for what they do, but necessarily. No, this is the one thing that I really care about, and I want to knock this out. So for instance, you said food waste. I want to start composting and then. Food waste is taken care of, and then you feel better, and maybe you move on to the next thing. So I totally agree with that. And like, let's be honest, you can, you can grow cannabis highly irresponsibly in an organic system. And you can also, you can also grow cannabis pretty responsibly using salts, if you're careful. The big problem is the runoff with the salts. That's that's the thing that you don't really encounter with the organic soil grow that you do with the bottled nutrients. Is that freaking runoff. Where does this run off? Have to go? No, that's

a big that's my biggest pet peeve. Yeah, honestly, like, and again, I'm not against hydro growers. Like, there's more than one way to skin it, yeah, yeah. You know, so, and there's more than 100 ways to grow cannabis, you know. So, like I am not knocking your entire deal. By no means will you see me growing hydroponically? Absolutely not. I wouldn't grow veggies hydroponically because it's, to me, it's it's a waste of such a valuable resource. And people don't think that way, because water is is everywhere you can go and get water, like, here, like, I'm from the Bahamas, like, there's some literally, I'm talking neighboring communities no more than two miles away that's getting water at a pump, at a community pump, and I'm, you know, a mile, two miles, or the island I live on is only seven miles by 21 wow. So like, you know, everyone's my neighbor, essentially. That's crazy. That's very small, exactly. It's crazy, and it's so funny. We're dependent. We're not we import 96% of our food, and we have sunshine every day of the year. Our coldest temperature might be a 65

Oh, my God. First of all, that sounds amazing. You

understand what I'm saying, like, you can grow anything year round. Oh, my

God, that sounds amazing. But you, you have to find a way to be resourceful on an island like that, right? And you have to be sustainable to some degree, because you can't just, you know, throw something off the highway and never see it again. You're on the island

exactly you're literally. And everybody knows everybody. So that's, you know another thing.

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Look around you first see what nutrient you can produce from your surroundings. Because there's, there's situations where people live in the city and they're growing in a tent, but they really want to try living soil and be as zero, you know, as neutral, carbon neutral as possible, when it comes to, like, nutrient supply, or whatever you want to call it, or be, just being more sustainable, they can't go outside, like I can go out and make some IMO, tomorrow, because I've got 15 acres. I've got, you know, trees Lake, you know, like a little pond that used to be a pond. So, like, I've got quite a bit of places that I can pick my own, IMO, from, you know, so that now gives me my microbial support that you need in a living circle set in which, if you weren't in my position, you would have to buy that from a store, right? You know? And there's great companies out there that have, you know, microbial supplements you got in Mammoth P, you've got advanced have their own. There's so many different microbial companies. The one that I love, my favorite, is Wind River microbes. They're actually an Oklahoma based company. The owner of the company is. Uh, an old rancher, but basically, she is research microbes for so long, and now they have gotten a consortium of microbes in their their microbial supplement that can actually horizontal gene transfer. So

does that mean sharing the genes with the same generation, essentially, right? So

like, let's just say there needs to be a higher uptake of phosphorus, and there's certain microbes that make certain nutrients available, and they do a certain job. So like, if we need more of x, they can horizontal gene transform and supplement

x. Now everybody knows we need more now, right?

So like, they bro, microbes are so crazy. How they communicate. It's like, it's, oh my goodness. Like, just take it. Humans were dumb. Like, that's it. Like, that's right, like, nature is so freaking intelligent. It's not even funny. Our

gut is smarter than our brain,

literally, like, you know, like, so that's my favorite microbial company that's cool. I'd love to talk to them. Yeah, Wind River microbes, great, great company. And it's, it's actually not even used in the cannabis industry a lot. It's used more in in like livestock and like birds and so, like, there's turkeys. Turkeys have a they did research on it with this massive turkey farm that has so they have a product called pH, balancer two. I think it's called balancer two, I think is what it's called. But it's basically like a gut microbe, essentially for animals. So, like, I give it to all I put in my chickens, water my goats, water my pigs, water. Like I had a chicken, a chick that was freaking had pasty butt and it was literally just constipated. I gave it the microbes that that afternoon, like, three o'clock, she couldn't even walk. She was, like, crippled, essentially, because she was constipated. It was a chick I gave her, put the water microbes in their water. Literally, three hours later, at six o'clock, when I went to go, put them to bed, like, put them all inside to put them away. She was running around with everyone else, no more pasty. But within three hours of just correcting her gut with the right microbes, it allowed her to pass properly, and then now she was able to function again.

That was like a previous guest we had on that was talking about drinking the BAM, the beneficial anaerobic microbes that he always he says, I drink it every single day. Listen, if

I can't, if I can't drink it myself, or if I can't consume it, why would I give it to my plants?

Man, it isn't. It is an interesting theory. Now I want to point something out specific, though you mix bottled nutrients with IMO, I think that's really cool, because usually people fall into one of two camps, right? Like, oh, I only make my own stuff. But you're saying, like, right? No, add microbes. Add microbes that you can get, right? Like, the ones that are around,

anything like, I mean, they see. Now, the thing is, you've got to realize that that's something that's not going to be taught by the big guys, right? Because they want you to buy a product

on either side. Yeah, the organic guys are gonna say, no bottles, exactly, and the bottle guys are gonna say, and

I don't stand there. I literally do not. I go into grows all the time that run. I'm working on a grow right now because I do irrigation and automation on the side, and I'm working at this probably 3000 planet grow massive growth, and they run salts, and I get told them about my soil, and they're like, we'll try it someday, I guess. But you know, like, I'm putting in the irrigation system, like, I don't like, I don't see color, right? You know, we're all human beings. We're all growing cannabis at the end of the day.

We're all run by microbes at the end of the day, it's all the same, exactly, you

know. So like, use those. You can use them in any setting, like fish. It markets that hydro grows. Can use their product as well. Yes, you can. The issue with that is you have to continually use them because, you know, you're not going to have biodiversity saturation, you're not going to have a population saturation, or any of that. Because in most of these synthetic systems, an enzyme is usually a part of their program, and an enzyme literally just cleans everything out. It's like a big bulldozer, right, right? It comes through and eats away all the salt build up, and anything that's in the medium, it literally flushes it all the way out, breaks things so and then you go ahead, usually that's right before you feed, or you have a heavy feed, because they want to make sure that you flush out all that whatever is in the medium, so that these, these salts that you're now putting in there, they now have to use cation exchange to be able to bind to The roots of the plant, to be able to transmit this nutrient, right? All of that plays a role in people's marketing. But yes, you can absolutely 100% use microbes of any sort. You know, they don't have to be no indigenous micro organisms to your where you live, you know, like I said, there's. Of store bought options that you have that, and I can almost guarantee you. And obviously I'm not going to say guarantee because I don't have the research to prove it, because there's no cannabis research to prove it Sure. You know, in other settings, it's been proven, like tomatoes have more yield. You know, they taste better all of that

time and time again. I've just seen it time and time again, and and it's, we're really on the same page, because it is when you introduce microbes. I can't tell you how many of these hydro guys I've seen that introduce one product with bacteria in it, and they say, I'm never going back. It's like, Yeah, I think it's really cool. It's, it's super, super cool. Clearly, you're

starting to understand more. That's all it is. That's mark my word. There's going to be a lot of people switching to raised beds and living soil. It almost doesn't make sense to not do it.

So let's go back there you. You're saying, I love this idea of, look, of what's look at what's around you, get what's close to you. That's that's always a good idea. You also talked about like urban environments versus not urban environments. Versus non urban environments. I know a lot of people, for instance, will go to their coffee shop and ask for coffee grounds. Now let me ask you this. When you're getting inputs like that, are you worried about, how do you balance grabbing something from your local environment but also possibly having some source of contamination like coffee grounds, for instance, are very pesticide I've heard people say, put them through a compost first, but you tell me, how do you balance so,

so that's a good way of cleaning it, but when you compost it, what happens the microbes access it and break it down? Do they not that's, that's how that, that cleansing essentially happens. So microbes are honestly the answer to a lot of questions, because they keep pH balance, they keep so many things in the soil in check that it's not even funny, like there are literally your workhorses. You know? Why is earthworm casting so? So, so good of an input, because there's microbes in their microbiome in their gut that now is in this feces, when they secrete it or excrete it, that's what we're getting. A big a little bundle of microbes, is what earthworm castings, essentially is. And organic matter, wow, their food, so that when you do put that in an organic setting, top dressing it on a pot, like I've literally seen customers. So I had a buddy of mine that grown in my soil since I have, since I my company came around three years, only three years ago, and he's been religiously growing in my soil. He's ran, he runs worry be gone, which is like, they've got a pretty big farm, but they run salts, and he's been preaching his, you know, his boss, basically a freaking devil or angel on his on his shoulder, but trying to tell him, like, hey, like, you gotta try this living soil stuff out. Like, try this, try this. One time they were running for like, two gallon plastic bags with like, all hydro. So he took some soil and top dressed two plants, and didn't top dress anything else. And if you saw the difference the plant just by top dressing two engines on the top of that cocoa and allowing the the microbes to to get in there, because he didn't use the enzyme on that particular those two plants, just to see the difference, because I told him, like the enzyme is going to clean everything out. Like, you're wasting your time putting my soil on there. You're wasting four inches of good soil. And he was like, Well, I'm not going to do it on these ones. I'm like, alright, well, just don't get fired, you know, like, do it at your own risk. But, yeah, so like, microbes, man, like they're, they're so

important. Oh, well, we're casting too, like, carrying those microbes. I mean, is that, is that your top? Like, that's okay. So back to the coffee thing again. That's a great way to feed coffee grounds to your worms and then have them firmly compost it, and then, bam, there you have the nutrition. And, like, I think that worms and worm bins might be one of the best things to recommend to

people. Getting very easy, yeah, easy to have. Like, you can have one in it. You can build one in a little two by two area, you know, right? You can put that if you, even if you live in an apartment city, you know, a city apartment,

you can put that on your pocket. The worm is key. You're right, absolutely, you see what, I'm

okay. And they'll reduce your your carbon footprint, because now you can put your food waste in there, you know, like, there's just so much to say to pick one favorite. I guess you can say it's hard. That's why I usually always just go back to microbes, you know, like, that's my soil. Would be nothing without microbes. How

do we maximize that? You know, if we have the good nutrition in our soil, how do we how do we maximize our biological activity?

So obviously, moisture is going to be your biggest thing. You know. You've got to know the saturation limit of your soil. You've got to know right when the soil is going to let off water, because you don't want run off in a living soil setting, right? Like if you're watering and worrying about run. Off and check it and have like, a puddle of run off and living soil. I'll see you in second week of flower looking for nutrients, like garage. Yeah, it's gone. You're leashing it all out. You see what I'm saying. Magnesium is a mg plus positive. So it's going to automatically bind to h, 2o once it gets in there, and you're just going to run it right out of the media. So that's the biggest thing. Is knowing, like you, you mentioned it earlier, your your watering habits, you have to be able to, you want to water with living soil. My pack the living soil is knowing your soil saturation limit, right? You can do this at home. I mean, it just take a one gallon of soil, and then you you just measure, okay, I put, let's just go by ounces, you know, I put in an ounce of water. Keep adding, keep adding, keep adding. When that pot then starts to drip, or cup, or whatever it is, then you know that that soil is at saturation limit. It cannot hold any more water. Oh, I like that. You take that volume of water and then now you know your saturation limit of your soil. Same thing with cocoa like that's why you water. If you're running whatever, however many mills of cocoa, you know how many mills of water that you need to be feeding. That's how these dosing systems work. It's not rocket science. How dozerons and all these dosing systems work? I'd never heard

of that from volume, though. That's a good idea, because I'd heard like, Okay, you wanted to achieve field saturation, so like, pick up your soil and squeeze it and it should feel like a like a freshly wrung out sponge, right? And that's all well and good, but you're saying that's a good that's a good rule of thumb as well. I like what you said, though, because you go by volume, which is, like you add enough ounces to where, okay, that's how much this pot needs, essentially,

right? Like me, for example, like we have shoots I haven't seen, let me tell you how little runoff we have. On a commercial level, my run off is it goes into a five gallon bucket, and I've emptied that bucket twice.

So you just, you achieve the tiniest bit. You want to fully saturate the soil. But you just, you don't want right? You don't want to puddle. You want it to be right

there. You want to be able, like, in a fabric pot, you want to be able to pat the bottom of the pot and get water out of it. Oh, that's great. That's a good way to in a plastic setting. That's tough because, you know, water won't move equal and all of that, sure. So that's, you know, like in a plastic setting, you just gotta look at the bottom of the pot, and hope you can see right when it comes off the bottom of the soil. But like me, on a commercial scale, like we run, I run 1000 milliliters per five gallon pot. That's roughly within the range of five to 8% of the soils volume and water, and I know that because I made the soil so I know what my soil can hold. Now, other soils in the market, I have no idea. I've never tried growing in them to know the you know practices, I guess you know fine tuning, but that's for consumers to find out. If you want to go right ahead, I'll help you find it like I don't I help anybody. If you got questions about growing in another medium, I don't care, you know, like that. Yeah, I may not know the answer, but I can. My science brain will allow me to probe and ask questions, to point us in the direction of where we need to be, because that's all growing is, is knowing how to, like, if your plan throws something or it's going to throw a deficiency at you, you know that before the deficiency comes, if your deficiency, you're late,

yeah, exactly. You're

slapping a band aid on it now. You're You're, uh, what's the flex sealing it? You know, he slapped

the tape on the water tank. You're flex sealing because your boat, yeah,

yeah, that's what you're doing at that point, because the plants already hungry. New

Flex Seal tape. I got a question for you. You I know you've done consultations, and you're talking about, you know, helping growers and kind of probing and seeing what's wrong. What is the number one mistake you see in living soil grows? What? What's some of the comments over watering?

Oh, there you go. Over watering. That's the biggest, that's the biggest criminal right there, over watering, and sometimes under watering. But most times it's over watering totally, and it's them just trying to figure it out. You know, like your environment, I can tell you, I run 1000 I told you exactly what my SOP is, 1000 milliliters of solution, whether it be water and microbes or just water. Because we we do water only one day, we do water and microbes another day, and then the third feeding in the week is, is a tea so, you know, like I do 1000 milliliters of each 3000 milliliters in a week. If you want to really get down to nitty gritty numbers, you do the math 3000 times 100 plans, three, what? 3 million milliliters. Convert that to gallons, that will tell you how much water you need to run an entire running. No,

that's funny, dude, that's cool. You just you got your stuff dialed in, like you had it dialed in, you

have to. That's all it is. And it's running numbers. That's all it is. If, if you can run numbers and figure things out, like, even as simple as you running your podcast. Times it comes back to numbers. That's it's it. You've got to know your numbers. And any successful businessman will tell you that you got to know your numbers. If you don't know your numbers, you got to have somebody that knows their numbers,

especially when you go to scale up. That's exactly right. Hobby home growers have a different level of irresponsibility, I guess is the word. You know what I mean, whereas when you've got to get away with a lot more, yeah, why not? But when you got to scale this thing up, and you actually got to grow plants, and you get yourself a license, it really matters. It starts to matter. It matters if you have, if you're a character, that's true, because

they can't sustain. They can't keep up with the Joneses. They can't keep buying liquid nutrients. Nobody can, unless you are you've got some real good backing, or some real good money, or you made good in the beginning, when pounds were 3000 bucks, like I used to sell pounds for 2800 bucks. I know right. I used to sell for my I had a really good friend who owned a commercial growth, so I sold for a bit. And like, man, I was getting $2,800 prices are not without a question. I mean, without a question. When it fell under

two, I was like, How is this feasible? And you again, you take a look at other and that's kind of where I want to go, actually. You take a look at other industries. You take a look outside of the cannabis sphere, and you're like, how do these people get by? How do these coffee farmers survive? They're not, it's fucking mind blowing crazy. They're not a lot of the time. That's true. And the other thing is, the supply chain is fragile as a as a you know is tinsel farmers

do not get paid with their work. Exactly same thing with nurses. Any, anyone that's essential, you know, get the politicians get paid. They're not essential. Yeah,

all the farmers, we give them a job, all the people who feed us need to be subsidized because they're paid so little. Has

to they're paid so badly. And it's sad, you know, like I was talking like, I promised you, I've spoken to farmers. I had this meeting with a group of farmers and livestock people with the same micro company, and they were just talking about, like, you know, applying ammonium and nitrates and this, that and the next. And I'm like, so you're telling me you spent all that money per acre just to fertilize, do that every single year, and you're dependent on that, and you're okay with that, right? And I was like, Do you know what, like, like, they know what ammonium nitrate is, but like, do you know, like, you can't go outside and pick up ammonium nitrate, right? It's not natural buying that. I mean, they're, you know, they're applying it 50 100 acres. So just imagine the state of that soil, the ruin. It's freaking inert. Yeah, that's

nuts. Man, it's absolutely nuts. Have you seen some solutions inside or outside the cannabis industry when it comes to sustainability, something that's made you go, Wow, that's a creative solution to sustainability. That

leads to one of the questions you asked me, biodiesel. I did not know some of the things I know about biodiesel now, like, it's crazy. Like, literally, we're, I'm doing the the foundation work now to produce biodiesel from cannabis waste. Oh, wow, cannabis and hemp, it doesn't have to be stocks

and leaves and any root, roots, any biomass, and you bring me any biomass,

and it's, man, this machine is absurd. And

you're gonna, I'm gonna run my car on what you give me back? Yes. So I,

I you can get diesel, this diesel, so like me, like it'll be beautiful for me, so I'll never have to go to a gas station again. My truck is a diesel, so I'll, I'll be fuel free. Literally, I'll be producing, that's

wild. So, so buying a diesel machine

can use that, yeah, or livestock waste. They can use livestock waste to produce biodiesel as well. Whoa, it's crazy. It's it's absolutely yeah, it's, trust me, bro, the technology that's out there with sustainability, sustainable, the cannabis industry is so behind that it's not even funny. We are wasting people look at things. People look in the cannabis industry, and think of things that are so high tech. That's how people have to think about these things. And when you put it into the grand scheme of things, agriculture has been using a troll master. It just have the name troll master,

no, that is you think green. You think green. Green

houses were just vented because it was hot in there, and they rolled the sides up. Like, no. Like greenhouses, bro. In Europe, there's greenhouses that can even some here in America that have louvers and evaporative cooling and so much other shit that we don't utilize in the cannabis space, right? That's absurd as to why we don't.

I think it's just because, what it's so fast, everybody's just trying to make a buck now, because, because, like you said, you know, probably. Is going down, and things like, you don't know. You don't know. Yeah, it's volatile. Yeah, you just kind of run it. You don't know that you're overpaying cannabis. I like to

compare the cannabis industry to Bitcoin and crypto. Sure, it's so volatile, like it's not even funny, the

Wild West, a lot of same regulation, problems, banking, you're,

you're not only against competitors, you're against, you know, the higher ups trying to fucking chop your hands off like you said, right? You're against regulation. Don't get

too tired. I'm growing a

little bro, my little grow here, my personal cultivation facility is, like I told you before, it's a 12 by 24 shed that I completely built out like I'm talking four inch thick insulation, nice walls, everything I built it out as best I possibly can. But like, there's things that they're making me do, like an occupancy certificate, like nobody's going to be occupying this building. Plans I have, I can't even get my obn certificate without an occupancy certificate. It's absurd, which basically just says, How many people can be in this building. You see them in buildings all the time. Oh,

my God, people count. Now, listen, I've heard of plant count, but this is, this is a, you know, they're double regulating you, yeah,

but it's crazy, man. It's like, I can, literally, there's, I can go on and on, but all of that goes back to sustainability, you know, like for an and I'm not mad at them for putting regulation in place, like it has to happen. Absolutely I agree with regulation, but it's the way that you do these things. You see what I'm saying, right? Like my growing up on the island, one of the most famous things there's, there's a time and a place and there's a way to do everything right. There always is going to be a time and a place and a way to do something. A lot of this regulation that they're trying to push if they had just done it the right way and and in speaking for Oklahoma, I know you have listeners everywhere, but like, the way you impose regulations and rules, like, you didn't hate that your bedtime was 11 o'clock. You just didn't want to go to bed, right? But that was a regulation that was in place by your parents whether you liked it or not. You didn't get to vote on it. If you're going to live under their roof, you're going to follow their rules, right or wrong, right? So, and it's the same thing,

they're trying to revoke these, these rights now and dial it back, and that's what I worry about. And it's like,

that's where my cry. You're trying

to put me to bed at 7:30pm Fuck this. Yeah, yeah. What

are you doing? What

are you doing today? Yeah, like you you're not going to bed. Like it's crazy, man, it's crazy. And then And again, you have to pay to play, no matter what industry you're in, whether you're milking cows or selling weed, like, there's gonna be right, believe it or not, freaking people that milk cows and dairy farmers are under way heavier regulation than we are in growing sugar, like, growing cannabis, bro, we've got the dream. Like, literally, we, we live such a lush life in the cannabis space. And I know this because I I know the perspective of other industries exactly like we I had research and market analysis. Yeah, I had a market analysis in college on it was on a massive company, and like, you'd be amazed. You would think that this company was doing great, but if you look at their market analysis, they weren't doing so great. They were spending a lot of money, right? Because I was a part of my degree, I had to figure out what are ways that this company can save money.

Listen, man, this has been an awesome exploration. Do you have any final words here before we wrap up the show and hear about where people can find you and all that? But any parting words from soil guru this? I mean, this episode flew back. We're gonna have to have you back, for sure,

just my core value that I live by, just try to try to leave the earth better than you met it in everything you do, like literally, in anything you do. I mean, whether it's you recite deciding tomorrow to go and recycle a plastic bottle versus throwing it in the trash bin, you just left the earth better than you met it where, if you did nothing else with your life and you died tomorrow, you putting that plastic bottle in the recycle bin versus the trash bin made a difference. So just try to leave the earth better than you meant it. That's literally a core value that I live by. Oh, it's beautiful,

man. That's some philosophical fucking gold right there. I absolutely love it. This was a dope episode. Well, we'd love to have you back again. Community cup, Oklahoma. I'm so excited to see you there May 7. That's going to be a time card. Thank you for being part of the stacked card. Man, that is so cool. Why don't you give out your Instagram and your website so I make sure you get it

right. My Instagram is the soil guru, T, H, E, S, O, I, L, G, u, r, O, underscore. You gotta put the underscore. Also, it wouldn't come up. And then my soil company's name is environmental. E N, V, I, R, o, n, m, e n, t, a, l, s, s. And that you'll see it. I mean, there's only one one page of that, but, yeah, you can find that's my social media handles. You can contact me there directly. My company's website is up on our Instagram page. You can tap the link look at our products, product labels, anything. I mean, if you got questions, just reach out. And it doesn't have to be about growing in a living soil medium. It doesn't have to be growing cannabis. You might be growing your own veggies and you need some help, like just give me a shout. Hell

yes. We appreciate you, Valen, as always, man, go and give valen a follow, and we will see you next time. Everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been an awesome episode. You know, there's more coming your way, but that's all for now. This is soil guru and Jordan River signing off, saying, Be safe out there, everybody and grow smarter. All right, everyone. That is our show. Thank you so much for tuning in, and thank you to soil guru before we wrap it up, of course, I want to tell you about community cup coming up May 7. That's right. We have a stacked lineup of speakers. Okay? Callux is going to be there. Brandon rust is going to be there. Touched by cannabis soil guru, Oklahoma fungi Farmer John is going to be speaking. Kyle from the foop, I'm going to be there. This is a stacked day of education. You can attend for 25 bucks and get the whole day and enjoy the awesome party that is community cup, free seeds, free veggie seeds. It's gonna be amazing. Plus, if you have a medical card, go ahead and get your Oklahoma medical card or apply for a temp one and come on down. You can be a judge in the cup. $99 gets you a 28 gram flight. That's right, 28 grams for 99 bucks, and you tell us who your favorite is, or just come down and enjoy the home growers showcase. It's free to enter if you have a medical card, and you can put your homegrown flower out on display, and the speakers will come around, choose their favorites and award you prizes. It's a day of education. It's a cultivators cup, and it's a home growers showcase. Come on down Sunday May 7, 11 to 4pm at the Oklahoma City Public farmers market. I hope to see you there. Grab your tickets ahead of time, grab your judges passes, or just get a general admission ticket at grow cast podcast.com/community, cup. I cannot wait to see you all there. Thank you so much, everybody. Stay tuned. We got some bangers lined up for you. I know you're gonna love the episodes that we have in the can, so you stay tuned, and we will continue to bring you this awesome grow cast content. Thanks, everybody. Talk to you next time. Bye,

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You know, we're all human beings. We're all growing cannabis at the end of the day.

We're all run by microbes at the end of the day. I.