💧Irrigation History, Soil Physics, Moisture Release Curves, and More, with Michael Box

11:13AM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

irrigation history

soil physics

moisture release

blue mat systems

sustainable village

automated watering

AC Infinity

grow cast discount

soil retention

irrigation evolution

flood irrigation

soil water tension

volumetric water content

tensiometers

crop steering

Greetings podcast listeners from around the world. Jordan River here back with more grow cast, perfect air to water ratio. Today we've got Michael box. He's back on the line. You know him. You love him. He's from sustainable village, and you know it. Code grow cast is active again for 10% off at sustainable village.com that gets you 10% off all your blue matte products. Now this is the automated watering system that people love, and they don't really do discount codes. So Michael box, he comes on the show, he gives us a 10% off code for a month or so. This code runs through March, and it's one of the only codes out there. So it's a great time to buy a system. If you want to set it up in your home garden, in your outdoor garden, whatever you need, they'll take care of you. So Michael box is back on the show today to do some more education as well. This is one of our best episodes. You can go check out all the older episodes. They're all fantastic. But in this one, we start from the beginning and talk about the history of irrigation technology, and then we move it all the way up into modern products, and the research that they're currently immersed in, just really getting into different mediums, how they hold water, how water moves through your soil, and the rate at which plants drink water and eventually wilt, and all the steps in between. You know, Michael really, really likes to dig into that stuff. And today is a very enlightening episode. I know you're gonna enjoy it. But before we jump into it, quick shout out to AC infinity. That's right, they make the best grow gear on the market. Acinity.com, code grow cast one five saves you 10% that is the maximum discount we've had the code forever. We've been partners with AC infinity for years. And why? It's because they make the best tents you can get your hands on. They make the best inline fans, the best oscillating fans. They make really, really great quality accessories like scissors, pots, Ratchet hangers and things like that. And now they also have lights. They've got the ion board and now the ion frame bar style. Really, really great stuff at AC infinity. Get the whole grow kit you've been after. You know, you can get a three by three kit, a five by five kit. You know you want another one, just go ahead and pop over there. Use code grow. Cast one five, always at checkout for the max discount. And thank you for supporting us and AC infinity. We love them so much. They make our favorite grow gear out there. I'm looking at two AC infinity tents in my bio dome, and you won't regret grabbing one. Use code grow cast, one, five at AC infinity.com. Thank you to AC infinity. All right, let's get into it with Michael. 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 please share this show. Turn a grower onto growcast. It's the best way that you can help us out. Or turn a smoker onto growing for the first time. That's the best way that you can help us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure to check us out at growcast podcast.com There, you'll find all the episodes. Membership, seed co events, everything's up there. Huge special. Thank you to all the members. Today we have a good friend of the show back on the line from sustainable village, us, distributor of the amazing blue mat watering system, Michael box is back on the show. What's up? Michael, how are you doing? Ooh. Jordan, hey, doing good. Yeah. Welcome back, Mr. Mayor, back on the show, ruling over ruling over the sustainable village. You know, I love it, Michael, yeah, Listen, man, you've done some really great episodes. If you're just tuning into Grow cast and you're a new listener, make sure you go back and listen to the old episodes with Michael, where he talks about the manufacturing and and the origins of blue mat. There's a really great episode on the moisture retention curve. That's a really strong one. But all of them are good. Just go search Michael box or sustainable village in your podcast app, they will all come up. Great stuff. Michael, you've been killing it as usual. We're here approaching spring. You've activated code grow cast again, 10% off at sustainable village.com. Of all blue mat systems, one of the only codes out there. We're very, very grateful you do this for us every so often. Michael, but what else has been going on? Man, what's happening with sustainable village? What have you been working on? Where are you going next? All that stuff.

Well, let's see. I mean, we're we've kind of gotten going this year, pretty busy. There's been some pretty large projects that we're working on. I just finished one up in the ag sector. It was done in Arizona, and there's another we just did a really large project with a big multi state operator out of Missouri, actually, and did like 100,000 square feet of indoor facilities there. Yeah, I had to kind of re engineer and resupply a whole, whole facility. Those are kind of some of the projects that just came off my plate. We're getting. Uh, kind of geared up for the spring. Gonna do few events coming up. We've got a couple trade shows. We're gonna go out to, uh, Minnesota, I think in let's see, that'll be in late April for the Lucky Leaf show. So, oh, I wanted to go

down to that one man, isn't it funny? Michael, you're on a, you're on a cannabis tour now, doing your job and doing events, and you're going to Missouri and Arizona, and these are, like, the new places, man, it's, I love to see it. What can I say? Yeah,

absolutely. So yeah, the I think that shows in Minneapolis in late April. Think we're going to have one of our guys is going to be out at knee can in Boston, hanging out with they'll probably be hanging out at the build of soil booth, I believe. And but what I'm really excited about for like events coming up grassroots fabric pots, who's a who's a kind of partner of ours and, you know, kind of friends of ours are putting on the soil life Summit. It's out in Pahrump, Nevada, just about an hour outside of Vegas, and it's on the small market garden, kind of regenerative farm that's owned by Steve Cantwell, Green Life productions, some folks might know him, and it's going to be a pretty cool setting. It's a three day event, March the sixth through the eighth, seventh through the ninth, is when there's March 7 through the ninth. There's gonna be a ton of speakers there. We're gonna be going out there to do, let's see. Got a I got a team here of of other design guys that work with me. It's really myself, Izzy Becker and Cooper Didier, your

team is cool, man, and Izzy in particular, all knowledgeable. All you guys are knowledgeable. Yeah, Izzy is. He is a good speaker as well. Me and him were cutting it up at one of the last trade shows. I hung out with you guys

at, oh yeah, yeah, Izzy can talk, and he's got a lot of great things to say. He, and in fact, he's going to give a presentation at the soil life Summit, and then Cooper and I are doing a couple hour workshop there, just on blue mats. Cool. We're going to build some systems, and, you know, kind of go through best practices, SOPs, you know, kind of all of our new techniques that we're doing with with, you know, we can kind of get in this later. But with the preset carrots, our carrots are coming out of the factory preset now, so that's right adjustment. Bunch of

my listeners have been using those and trying those out. Yeah, yeah. So we

got some cool things to say about that and how that's kind of functioning to steer plants in these biological settings, and that's great. So we're going to do a really cool workshop there. So, yeah, anybody that's, I know, I don't know if this will go out in time, but anybody hears this and wants to jump on a last minute flight to Vegas, I'd recommend it. Yeah, exactly. I think they're streaming a lot of it too, but there's a ton of people you know this, Bryant Mason, soil doctor. He's giving a keynote address. Nice, passion, kiss. Organics are going to be up there. There's a whole bunch of like growers panels. One of them is foreign flame. I don't know if you guys have heard of that facility. They're out in Oakland. It's just dude, Chris Castle, kind of the lead guy there, and he's someone we've been working with for years, and we just took a tour of his facility recently. It's one of the first multi level. It might be the might be the first, I don't know, but it's one of the first multi tiered, indoor raised bed grows. They had a whole purpose built building. Oh wow, racks and everything. Oh yeah. Hundreds, hundreds of raised beds on moving racks two to three stories tall. Man,

I'm sad that I'm missing that one. You know, I'm out here in the islands until April, and I would like to take a last minute flight to Vegas. I don't know if I can make it happen. I mean, listen, if I could make it happen, Jordan River is going to make that happen. But, yeah, but for all the listeners out there, yeah, this is going to be dropping just around then. So if you're local, or if you want to catch a flight to Sin City, go and see Michael box and sustainable village up at soil life Summit, very cool. Man,

yeah, that's up on the horizon. But, yeah, yeah, Listen, man,

you've done some really good episodes, and we're going to turn our attention from looking forward to what you're what you have on the agenda to looking backwards. I wanted to talk a little bit today about some different topics that we haven't really covered. It's funny because we were talking about this off air and this first subject you actually have done, like research and presentations on I want to look backwards in time and talk about how far irrigation has come. First of all, you know, looking back at ancient man, basically, and just how smart they were, how freaking smart they were when it came to irrigation, and then all the way up to our modern systems, and, you know, drip emitters, and then eventually these pressure based systems like. Course, I was just thinking how incredible it is that we've come so far in irrigation technology. And when I was down on the farms in Columbia, they were telling me, you know, we're introducing these ancient practices. We've terraced the land. You know, you dig here, and you create a flume here, and the water gathers here, and their farm had dealt with drought better than anybody else. It's a really big subject, man. So I guess I'll set you up with this. Let's go all the way back, like if you had to give a 35,000 foot view of the history of irrigation practices. Where would you start? Where would be the middle? And how would you bring us to modern day? Yeah,

that's big question, but you know, you're right, like irrigation in general. So it's the the short answer is, it's, it's just largely tied with the development of agriculture throughout, you know, human development over time, sure, and that's been happening for for a really long time. Yeah, we've, I have talked about this before, when we've done certain presentations and events and and we've, we've talked to about kind of that evolution of irrigation and and how it develops. You know, going back into early agricultural practices. Some of the systems that were devised were like, pretty ingenious and very technical. So true, you know, a lot of that has to do with using the rain for irrigation, right? That's kind of the earliest stage is capturing rain water and holding it in the soil. So that's also called dry land irrigation. That's a lot of what you're talking about, the terraces that are built into hillsides. I mean, you see this practice throughout many, many cultures all over the world.

Yeah, the rice fields in Asia, for instance, do that, right?

Yeah. And there's lots of water there because the rice fields are flooded, so they're, you know, yeah, yeah. But you know, there's this concept of building swales. Anybody that's in the kind of permaculture world is going to hear about swales a lot. But like a lot of things, in permaculture, there was early agriculturalists and indigenous people all over the world doing these practices, and building swales is a big one. So, you know, essentially building berms that will slow water down as it crosses, crosses the landscape and capture it and hold it in the soil. Kind

of what we're going to get into next, the physics of soil. It's amazing how these ancient people, like you said, were first of all so smart. Like, we don't give ancient people enough credit for just how ingenious they were. But like you're saying, the physics of soil, if you have a mountainside, if it's just a sloped mountain side, you're going to lose all that water. They said, If we dig terraces out, or, like you said, a swale, which is it's exactly what you said, slowing down that water so it doesn't just run right off. And they realized, Oh, this is going to make the soil hold more. It's going to saturate better, and then when the drought comes, we're going to do better. What a crazy we don't give these people enough credit. You know what? I mean? What a what a crazy high, uh, high falutin thought that is,

yeah, and I mean, it's still used like we work with a lot of the kind of these permaculture designers around Boulder County for the large scale installations. And one of the first things they do, and they go into these bigger projects, is, is they do a lot of Earth work and build swales on contour. And again, that's it. You know, storing the water and in the in the soil. You know, from there, you move on to flood irrigation. And flood irrigation is, you know, taking water from one place and moving it from another and flooding fields. That's, you know, that's, that's really closer to the rice paddies. So they're, they're moving water from one place through ditches and canals and flooding those rice paddies. But you see it all over. I mean, it's really common today, throughout a lot of the United States and all over the world, you know, it's kind of one of my favorite types of irrigation, in a way, just because of its simplicity and the elegant nature of just using gravity to move water around to irrigate crops. So it's low tech in that way, you know, and it's and really, a lot of the stuff we're talking about here is, this is all into the agricultural space, you know, this is what we're talking about. It's not so much the cannabis growers and the home growers and all that, but these are techniques for cheaply irrigating large amounts of total land. Yeah, not only is it cheaper, there's just less fail points, but please continue. Well, yeah, so, I mean, it's, you know, all throughout history, you know the Roman aqueducts, many, many cultures have really, really sophisticated systems of channeling water from one place to another, with some pretty impressive, uh, engineering feats for you. Like low tech cultures and societies long ago. So cool, man.

I heard that the britannians, after the Romans, thought that the aqueducts were built by giants. They didn't know where they came from. They didn't understand the technology, and they would, they would tell the explorers or wherever they came there. Yeah, those were left here. They were built by giants who were here before us. That's crazy.

That's so cool. But, you know, here's the thing about flood irrigation. So flood irrigation, again, we're using less energy to move water around. So that's like, there's a the there's a conservation aspect there, where you're not, like, using power to move pumps, but from a kind of like long term soil health perspective, the way flood irrigation is used, you know, at least the way I see it used a lot in western United States can actually be really detrimental. Of course, there's like exceptions to this, but when farmers are taking water out of ditches and, you know, using like gated pipe or different techniques like that, to kind of move water along contours and then let it drain across a sloped field. It's really labor intensive. It's not kind of even and consistent in the way it waters. So if you have a sloped field, which you kind of need to have flood irrigation working. What you're going to get is one end of the field is going to have a lot more water on it than another. The bottom of the field is going to get a lot more water than the top of the field. And what happens over time is the fertility in that field, it gets pushed down, but basically all the salts that are in the soil are getting pushed out of the soil. That makes sense. So soil fertility and soil health in general declines over time when using flood irrigation. And that's really, I think, the main I mean, there's other reasons too, but something that, like I do with with my work here is we, we do sell some kind of large scale over drip overhead irrigation. So moving from flood irrigation to overhead, you know, it's definitely not as doesn't have a high level of efficiency and water conservation like say, a drip irrigation might, sure, but it does improve water conservation and efficiency by about 50 to 60% over flood irrigation. So that's kind of that next step in that step by step, evolution of irrigation is the overhead piece, and that could be lots of different things.

So like the farmers driving through the field, or you see those big watering rigs that go across the field. And that makes sense when you're pivots.

Yeah, so center pivots are the big ones, like, when you're flying in the airplane, and you look down and see the big circles, those are center pivots. It's so there's a there's a center in that circle, and then there's a big boom that's as long as that circle is that just spins around slowly in a circle and puts the irrigation water down. There's the other thing called Water reels. They're like. These are hose reels, traveling hose reels. They're like, big sprinkler guns that are connected to a big wheel of pipe that could be anywhere from an inch to four inches thick, and extend out a quarter mile and put anyways, yeah, so and so, that's we work with those a lot, and we've designed some pretty cool systems that have converted kind of larger scale, like hay and alfalfa fields over from flood irrigation to overhead using the water wheels. Use these ones called kifco, the brand, and yes, we're able to improve water conservation pretty dramatically, and as well as soil health. And in the projects like that, we're often working with the NRCS federal organization that provides funding for farmers to upgrade their efficiency and improve resource conservation, no, so they'll get funding and we'll come in and design make things

more efficient. Yeah, exactly. That's really cool, man. And okay, so I want to focus on something you said there about moving water and the flood irrigation basically being based all on runoff. So when you get onto the flat plane, like you said you're not running off minerals, and you're not unevenly water. You're keeping evenly moist, which is going to be better for the Microbiology in the soil, yeah, and overall, improve the soil health. That is very interesting, because otherwise, your whole system is based off of erosion and runoff, right? That could even cause problems with runoff into waterways or something like that. It's probably easier to control on a flat plane.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, that's another thing too. So any, anytime people are applying different kinds of amendments and fertilizers and things like that, if they're over watering and flooding the fields, and they're pushing that down into waterways, and there's all kinds of issues that come along with poop

rolls downhill as they. Say,

yeah, yeah, no. And again, there is ways to do it efficiently. There's ways to defer, you know, like flood waters into fields, that will bring minerals and and nutrients into the soil, but generally, the way it's practiced now, it will, over time, leach out the nutrient profile. And I hadn't thought of that. See,

I love this stuff. Man, I love thinking about the meta of these things and just how ingenious humans are. They were ingenious for doing the aqueducts, you know, 1000s of years ago, and they're just as ingenious for coming up with a clay carrot that reacts to pressure in the soil. I mean, essentially, it's all a application of science, like a lot of your job is physics, Michael, it's not necessarily like botany. You understand I'm saying you're measuring in M bars. That's not, yeah,

that's a measure of pressure. Yeah? No, I do know what you mean. I mean it's a lot of it's engineering work, mechanical engineering. I myself am not a licensed engineer. We do have one on staff here,

kind of an unlicensed engineer, though, Michael, I'm gonna just say it. You do it. You're right. You guys are engineers at the end of the day. And I guess that the modern systems are all like that, right? You got your drip systems. You got the ones with the spray emitters, yeah, absolutely

everything of scale like that is engineered out. And so we're taking into account flow rates, pressures, friction, loss, velocity, everything we need to make sure a system is going to be able to deliver the volume of water that we need to in a given amount of time. And there's, you know, lots of different kind of factors and variables.

Sounds like math. Michael, that sounds like math to me, buddy, there's

a lot of math. Yeah, there can be a lot of math.

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you let's

talk about this, man, I want to, I really want to get this in the listener's head, which is, we talk about watering and we talk about the saturation of the soil, yeah. But when you take a look at a good moisture meter, you know, you grab a nice blue matte moisture meter, and you get that reading in pressure in M bars. We've said this before. It makes perfect sense. The more water you add to the pot, the higher the pressure is going to be as that water exits and leaves. And there's just air space negative pressure in there. The pressure goes down and down and down. But I was thinking, Michael, it's more than just the water. Well, I was having a bit of a freak out moment, a bit of a revelation moment, where, if you're measuring m bar in the soil, it's not just the amount of water that plays into that. The amount of aeration in the mix probably plays to that compaction probably plays into. That, can you talk a little bit more about, like, the physics and pressure of your soil and what? What affects that really delicate balance?

Well, it really comes down to, you know, the two variables when we're talking about water in soil, there's the total amount of water, like the total volume of water that's that's in any kind of given soil solution. And then there's the amount of plant available water. Those are two different numbers. So water, the H, 2o you can think of it as being kind of sticky. So it likes to kind of glom on to particles and surround them. And when it's in a soil structure, it's going to surround and stick to the particles in the soil and the layer of water that's closest to that particles be really close, like very, very strongly adhered to that particle. And then as you move further away, there is a layer of water that's that's less strongly adhered to the particle, and that water can kind of move around a little bit more, and that's the type of water that's actually available to the plant. I've never heard that that is so cool. So when you think about, you know, you bring up these, these. You talk about aeration and compaction and things like that. Yeah, you're talking about how much space is in the soil. And that amount of space, that kind of negative space in the soil is, are those are places that water can be. So, you know, they talk about, there's different soil types, right? Like, kind of basic soil types are, like, sand, silt and clay, and those are all defined mostly by the particle size, you know, and then, addition to that, you have, like, organic material that's often put into, like, the low tension potting soils that everybody's using. But we're talking about soil in general, with sand, silt and clay. And the biggest particle size is sand, okay, sand is a large particle size. And then kind of the medium size one is silt, and then, and then clay is very, very small, fine particle. So in something like sand with very large particles, there's a lot less surface area than silt. So stilt has lots of little pieces, which means there's lots of surface area. So because of there's that much more surface area, there's more space in between the particles, and there's, there's, there's more water that can be held in those kind of negative spaces. That makes sense. So built can hold more water than sand, and then clay can can hold more water than Phil clay has its own special characteristics. They're so the particles are so small that water will actually kind of shear off of it in certain ways, but it also absorbs much higher levels of water. Jeez, man, yeah. And so, you know, we get back to that basic kind of discussion of the variables, like how much water is in the soil in total, what's the total volume versus the available? And you can kind of break that up into how we measure water, right? So the first way would be VW, see your volumetric water content. And that's like water by volume in a soil, in the soil structure, if you,

if you sucked out every last drop out of the pot into a separate container, what would the volume be? Literally, how much is in there? Yeah, by volume.

And then there's the soil water tension. So that is kind of like it's the what it's well, what soil water tension is, is the water that's available plant. So that's what you're measuring. So when you're measuring volumetric water content, this is kind of a simplification, but you're measuring the total water in the soil. And then with soil water tension, you are measuring the amount of water available to a plant. Because that's sort of that. It's measuring the amount of water that's moving the

negative space water, which I imagine like you're saying water clings to these types of things. I'm even just thinking about, like water sitting on a table, like the cup in front of me, and the condensation gathering around the bottom. I understand what you're saying about the water kind of sticking to particles and the organic matter, probably like soaking up and holding on to that water. And then as the plant drinks the plant available water that pressure probably causes it to then be replaced and dry out and vacuum out. Like it's all making sense to me now, until it's completely dry. Yeah, that's all making sense to me now, man, really,

really good stuff. And you know, those, those two things, so, like, I got a couple different directions here, but the VW, see, versus soil water tension, these are the two factors in that moisture retention curve that we talked about before. So again, just to kind of step back to that, what that looks like is you have a graph, you know, with an X axis and a Y axis, and that, that vertical axis, you know, that's usually the volumetric water curve. Content, right? That's water as a form of a percentage, like how, what percentage of the soil is made up of water. And then your your horizontal axis is often the soil moisture tension, which is measured in in pressure, so millibars, or centibars, or kilopascals, units of pressure. And then when you get to measuring those. You know, that's what tensiometers measure, versus with the VWC, that's what the volumetric water measurement devices measure. Anyways, with a moisture release curve or moisture retention curve, you have those two axes. And the way these curves look there, it's like a graph on this chart. They'll start off really high, and they'll be flat, and then they'll they'll kind of pitch downward at a steep angle, and then they'll kind of mellow out and still be heading downward, but not at quite a steep angle, and then they'll get flat again. And this is a measurement of the relation between soil moisture, tension and volumetric water content as soil dries out, right? So if we're seeing this line is really high up on the chart, and it's flat, that means the water is completely saturated and it's starting to dry out. So it's it's staying flat up high on the on the chart, it's fully saturated as we start to dry it out and we're removing water from it, we kind of hit this, this steep drop. And that's, like, the point of runoff. So, like, that's your like, runoff period for any kind of different soil profile spilling out the bottom of the pot, because it's so, yeah, so that's, that's it drying out. You know, that's a drying out and water leaving the soil through the bottom of the pot. And then it's going to hit this next part of the graph. And depending on the soil type that you're looking at, these graphs look differently. They have different shapes.

Yes, that's what I remember being blown away by that other episode, again, guys, moisture retention curve episode, cocoa looks different than Pete and perlite.

Yeah, like Coco. Well, anyways, so it'll, it'll kind of crash down, then it'll hit this, this point where it's sort of a gradual decline. Now, when we get into that gradual decline, that is the ideal window for plant available water, and it's gonna, you know, for something like cocoa, you know, maybe the the wetter end of that is what we're seeing like, around, say, 30 millibars, something like that. And then then drying out to, like 8090, millibars. Now, the thing about cocoa is it'll actually kind of continuously, slowly decline and be like available until there's none, and then, and then your plants in a permanent will state, and doing, you know, real serious damage, right? Things like peat will will kind of level out. It's a little bit easier to control that. You kind of have some more warning signs with a peat based medium, interesting, when the plants starting to dry out. But we're looking at these moisture retention curves. We're looking at this, this chunk of of the graph where we see available water, and, you know, at the top of that, it's kind of like the upper, you know, like the wet zone of where we want to be, and the bottom is like, approaching, like, say, you know, you're like, maybe three quarters of the way down this gradual decline, and that's approaching the permanent wilt point. So you never want to touch that permanent wilt point, but you are getting kind of close to it, and then re irrigating. So ideally, when we're irrigating, and particularly cannabis, what we're doing is we want to introduce an irrigation event right when it hits that kind of the dry end of that kind of, you know, Goldilocks zone, and then irrigate it up until the top part of that ideal zone. And basically just kind of cycling the plant through that so irrigating to the point where it's at the top of that zone, and then letting it dry back down, and then irrigating it again. And you know, some interesting things happen, like when we start to dry out the soil, like the EC increases, and this is a lot of the kind of, like real, real, real basic crop steering principles is that you're taking a plant and you're drying its media down, and you're getting it closer and closer to that kind of permanent wilt point. And as you're doing that, the EC is increasing because there's less water in the solution, but the nutrients are staying the same, so the percentage of of nutrient is increasing and it's becoming more rich, and the plants absorbing that more nutrient dense water, and as long as we don't take it too far, where it brings up too much nutrients or dries out too quickly, then we can just reset it to that wet point again, and then again, dry it out and dry it out. So that really that crop steering is, is just moving between a very like fairly narrow range. And. Say, 40 to 50 millibars of range, and sometimes introducing feeding events as well. Wow.

So just like bouncing it, ping ponging it back and forth between that range perfectly dialed in, it's come a long way from digging a ditch or running an aqueduct. Man, I gotta say, Yeah, sure. And

so that's one of the things that like. So we didn't, you know, drip irrigation would be like the next stage in that whole kind of evolution of irrigation. You know, it's developed in the 70s and, like, mostly in the Middle East, and anyways, highly efficient uses a lot of like, plastic components to bring but

they weren't taking the soil pressure like you are. They're not getting those readings. They're just spitting water at this amount and this time. Yeah?

So really, I mean, you can, you can inform those events based on data that you're collecting through either volumetric water content meters or through tensiometers. That's crazy, but either way, yeah, we're doing that and and so that's what it's doing. And like some of the real high end drip irrigation that's out there now is using a lot of sensors and data collection devices to measure soil moisture, and you see in them informing their irrigation events based on that. So you can spend a lot of money fertigation projects that are, yeah, you're gonna do that. You get

yourself the whole setup. The climate system now has the the soil probe that you can plug into the soil, and then, like you said, time your events through that, people are getting crazy with it. You can, you can spend a lot of money. Man, yeah, or you can dig a ditch. You know, that's what I love about gardening, is there's 1000 different ways to do it, and I support all the different styles. Man, so when we talk

about commercial cultivators, though they're, you know, looking for the best performance and with high value, high margin crops like cannabis, it really does tend to pay to to get the most efficient system that you can get, true because, you know, doubling your yield one way or another is pretty significant. Yeah, that's right. It's beneficial to the business. You're right, man. So one of the, one of the cool things that, and to keep this even further, is, you know, with our with the blue mass, you know, there are these moisture sensing valves. They're tensiometers themselves that operate a valve, kind of, in a manual way. And for those who have used them, you kind of see them turn on, water irrigate, and then they turn off. And what's pretty cool is there's, there's this window, right? So they they turn on when the soil dries out to a certain level, and then they irrigate, and then the soil, like gets wetter, right? And then it dries out over time, and then they turn on again and irrigate again. So you have these cycles, and that cycle that they turn on and off of is is remarkably similar to the window of keeping plant available water in a soil mix, sure. So if they are properly calibrated in the soil to turn on when you're approaching about halfway to that permanent will point, and then they'll water up. They'll water the soil to a point that's right at the top of that that window, and then dry back. And effectively it's cycling the soil through that same window of dry back, of irrigation and dry back and there's, there's different tricks and techniques to kind of manipulate that. If you want bigger dry backs or less, or you want to keep it more static, where we place the carrot, you know, if it's a five inch versus a nine inch carrot, things like that, yeah, ways

to dial that in. That does raise a question, though, because I know you guys are sending out pre dialed carrots now, which is really cool. They're just the cap is set on them to where you don't have to dial it in. You just literally plug it into your system and go. But I imagine, I imagine you have to ask them what their media is before you send that out. Right? Do you have a different dial for a cocoa grower?

No, it's because, you know, most of the folks that we're working with are are either in, they're in some sort of low tension soil, right? Like a peak based or cocoa based medium.

Got it. They're all pretty much the same. Giver, yeah,

they're all pretty much that window, the window that's operational, is pretty much the same for these mediums. I mean, they're not like, you know, I know Izzy will come in here and correct me if you heard this, but they're, but they are. They're very, very, very close. And this is the cool thing. So when they come preset, and which is the kind of like new thing that's happening here at sustainable village, that's, you know, really important is we are now. We've kind of built like a new area in our warehouse where we manually preset all the carrots, and we've kind of figured out how to do that so that we can set the dial that they're marked they have, they'll have, like a paint mark on them and in a couple different places, and then they have this protective cap snapped over the top of the dial. So now when you receive the carrots, you have to ask for. Preset carrots. Or order the preset carrots when you're on the website, you can otherwise, they'll come just standard. But when you get the preset carrots, and they're, you know, a couple bucks more, they'll come preset with a chart, essentially, that will say, if you run, you know, 15 psi on the back end of this system, this one will produce this moisture level, right? And it'll, it'll turn on at this point, and it'll turn off at this point, and it'll, then it'll dry back to that the to the on point. And you can make a small adjustment on the dial with a little little key. So if you have different pressure, or if you want to keep it a little bit wetter, you can do that. But for the most part, anybody that's running off a pressurized system is going to receive these carrots. They're going to soak the bottoms, screw it on the tops, connect it to your system, turn the water pressure on, and your system is now going to be just automatically cycling within that ideal kind of Goldilocks zone without doing any kind of dialing in or figuring out or learning curve on, on the customer's part, set it and forget it, yeah, which is it's really like actually turning into that, which has always kind of been the real difficulty of the math in the past. So it's kind of amazing where we're at with it, in my opinion, just having been with this company for, you know, about six years now, and kind of watching the evolution that we've we've put it through, you know, with myself and also, but most, you know, big, big shout out to my, my team of guys, particularly Cooper and Izzy. And you know, those guys have really brought this over the finish line of Cooper has been just really kicking ass with with a lot of the r, d piece. You guys should check him out on Instagram if you have and it's, you pay a garden, you probably gardens. It's u, p, a, y, a, gardens, you pay a garden. Solutions. Is kind of like we've actually been sending him off the facilities to, kind of like a lot of these larger blue map facilities that are around the country. We're sending him out there to help commission them. So if you have a blue mat system on a commercial facility and you need some like on site support, you know, let us know. Give us a call and we can you talk about getting somebody out there to help you do that? Yeah,

you guys really work on the phone to you guys answer the phone there, and it's a real person you're talking to. It's a real team member, not a call center, and you get people what they need. Man, you've designed large scale grows for my listeners. You've designed one tent home grow setups for my listeners. And again, code grow cast is active currently through the month of March, so go and get it, everybody. Sustainable village.com, code grow. Cast, the only code out there. We appreciate you, Michael. You can

get out there on the website and use that code, and we really happy to give it to you. And if you're there, there's a button on there. It says, request, to quote, quote. Request button you can click on that you enter some information about the size of your grow, like how many plants, you know, what kind of containers, some questions about your water source. And we'll kick back a design, so a free design and parts list to go for the for the blue matte system. So I really, I really encourage people to take advantage of this. I mean, we've done it for years and years, and you know, we'll continue to do some form of it, but right now we're still just doing it for anybody that wants it of any size. If it's a big commercial facility, we'll do it. You know. Again, the blue mass systems are all free to design, and we want cab drawings. We can do that too. But the same goes for the small to medium guys, too, and gals that want to grow some weed with the blue mass. Well, thank you, man, yeah. And we'll design up the system. We'll get a drawing and the parts list and again, so just right there on the website, request a quote, quote request button. It's in the upper right corner, and yeah, click on it, put the information in, and one of us will get back to you like neither Cooper is here. I'll

get after and tell them, of course, that they grow cast sent you, and that you like the Absolutely, yeah. So you mentioned testing the soil, and, you know, switching from this or not, rather switching, but having these different metrics of total volume and soil tension and measuring and bars and all this stuff. A lot of people are sticking their finger down in the soil to test if they need to water. I was, I was guilty of the finger test for a long time. Now, of course, I do have a blue mat moisture meter. I recommend anybody who's not 100% confident in their watering game get one. And by that, I mean almost nobody like you have to be really talented to Master Hand watering. It takes years for a lot of people to Master Hand watering, and I thought I was really good at it. I got a meter, and I realized that I could be doing a lot better that being said, man, a lot of people like I said, they're doing the finger test. They do the lift test, which I actually think is. I've come around. I think the lift test is better than the finger test. This is where you lift up your pot when it's totally dry. So you like, get a feel. You get a feeling of the weight that I that I like better. And then there's people who are grabbing a moisture meter, but they're really bad, man. They're like, 13 bucks on Amazon, and they just don't work very well, in my opinion. How do you rank these soil testing methods, and what do you think of the finger test, the lift test and inferior meters?

Yeah, sure. So there's kind of, like three ways to measure moisture in soil. I mean, the first is by weight. That's kind of your lift test, actually. So you're not, you're not wrong in saying lifting a pot is a way to measure water, but I'm not a human scale is the problem. Yeah. So you have to kind of be able to understand what you're trying to go for there. The next is the VWC, volumetric water content. And so there's a bunch of different meters out there. They're capacitive meters. They're basically measuring electrical resistance in the soil. And you know, as the volume of the water increases, the electrical conductivity that changes, right? And that's how the measurements are are derived. And those are going to give you measurements in form of a percent. And then the third kind is through tension, right? So soil moisture tension, that's your tensiometers, more solid matrix potential sensors, which are different kind of thing, but they're they also measure soil tension, your tensiometers. You know, basically it's like a tube with a ceramic tip. And then, you know, blue map makes some arometer, makes some meter groups. Got some really high end lab quality ones that are used in universities, that sort of thing. I mean, I know there's like these conflicts of interest, but for my money, the blue mat moisture meter is the one that's the most sensitive one to be found. And for the price too, yeah,

bang for the buck all day. I mean, I'm sure there's one fancier out there. But for my home grower buddies, you know, it's like, yeah, you know, between 80 and 100 bucks, depending on where you get at what time of year, whatever. And yeah. So we're yeah right now, yeah, it'll, it'll pay for itself 100 times over.

And really there. I mean, we put them in all the designs we recommend, but most people buy them because they really should be kind of standard issue for home grown weed, like, you just don't know what you're what you're looking at, without some sort of objective data point. And that can give it, because the real, you know, the volumetric water content ones, they give you a lot of hard data. And you can kind of extrapolate a lot of information from that, if you know how to you know, and then you can kind of get, you could figure out, like, how much water, like, by volume, to apply to soil. To get certain results, I get that, and you can use all that information too to find the really important piece of information, which is, how much is water plant available? Water is there, whereas tensiometers bring you right to that number. Got it. So tensiometer is going to bring you right to how much plant available water is in the soil. So when you're measuring those different soil types, sand, silt, clay, you know 40% in sand is a very different number than 40% in clay, okay, but if you're looking at measurements through tension, like you know, 80 millibars in the Sandy, silty or clay based soil is going to give you the same results, but those are going to have very different percentages associated with them also.

Okay, so that makes sense. I have a question about the ones that measure the water content through electrical conductivity. Though, won't that change drastically depending on what I'm fertilizing with?

I think it's more has to do with, like the resistance, like the amount of water of electrical resistance, so

less the conductivity itself. Yeah,

I don't think it does. Yeah, I'm not, but I'm, you know, I'm first person to admit my blind spot. So I'm not,

I mean, what I'm not, what I'm saying is that I don't believe so, no, the pressure seems like a better idea. It seems like a better idea to measure to me. Well,

it's the data that you really want. It's giving you the data that you really want, which is how much plant available water is in the soil, sure. And again, that's what most people are really concerned about in the long run, yeah. And

I, all I know is, I see a lot of growers use a lot of different products, man, and those cheap two prong, I assume it's, they're, they're testing some sort of conductivity, because, like you said, because they have two metal problems the cheap ones,

yeah, cheap ones. They're author, they might as well not use them. They're garbage. They measure in, like, low, medium and high, low, yeah. I mean, there's some, there's some cheaper ones out there. Like, I've seen those, like, eco wit ones. Like, they used to be really kind of cheap, but I think they're maybe getting a little better. And they have like, cool apps that come with them. Those are kind of your like, kind of entry level things. There's like, you know, like blue lab or Paul. Else. I didn't know. Blue lab, they make some of the kind of better VWC ones, and then, like the best VWC ones. Or meet our group, have some Arroyo and look, but they're real expensive, and you know that what they're using? Oh, interesting.

Yeah, Arroyo. Or Arroyo was we were, we were in talks with them. It's interesting. I hadn't heard of them, and now you bring them up, but I appreciate that, dude, that's that's cool, that you're like, giving an honest assessment of, like, what the field is. Like,

yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there. I mean, yeah, there's tons of stuff out there. Yeah. I yeah,

for, like, I said from poking your finger down in the dirt, which I guess is what the world's most low tech, not a tensiometer. I guess it's more volumetric.

I mean, think it's pretty subjective.

Feels wet though. You know, I don't like the soil. I don't like the finger test, because sometimes, especially in a mix that isn't totally even water, sits down lower in the pot. So you're just not, you know what? I mean, I think that it can lead you to over water. Anyways, it's funny, dude. It's funny, dude, it's funny to see all the different growers have their different methods, you know, lift, kick the pot, or turn on their soil meter. I've seen it all. Yeah,

yeah. Like, I said, I mean, like, you know, if you know about what your pot is supposed to weigh, you're a fan

of the lift, as I'm holding you to it, Michael, I'm

just saying it, you know, it's for, for super low tech. It works, but, but really, I mean, to get the good to get those results where you're circuit, circulating between those, those high and low limits of plant available water, and really driving the water cycle. You know, having that tensiometer is the data point that is going to give the most, best results. Because, you know what's happening when you're doing that, when you're moving from like that, within that window of wet to dry to wet to dry, you're giving the plant these kind of generative cues, right? So like, as that plant starts to dry out, you know, this is like the advantage of the dry back thing, right? Like you're drying it out a little bit, and the plants all of a sudden starting to, you know, feel like the not not stressed, but the beginning of stress that, like, it's basically introducing the concept that stress exists. And we want to do that. We want to, like, remind the plant that stress does exist, right? And it could, it could be there. It could be there at some point. And then we want, as soon as it kind of starts to understand that know it. And this is really, you know, like humanizing a plant, but as it starts to, like, know that, or experience it, to understand the existence of, you know, impermanence and suffering in the world, then we give it water and bring it back up to the top of that, that cycle. And so we're just kind of introducing that concept of stress, and it's, it's creating these generative cues to produce flower, you know, to induce flowering. And there's different things we can do, right? Like, we can have a longer stretch of dry that we can dry it down longer if we want to during the flowering cycle, or at transition, or while we're in the like, we want to introduce vegetative cues. We'll keep it at a much narrow, much more narrow cycle. So we're only letting it get a little bit dry and then wet, a little bit dry and a little bit wet, and then that way, that's that's keeping the plant in a vegetative state. And then when we extend that drying out period, that's when we're getting more the generative cues that will induce flowering and promote fruit set.

That's really cool, that you can automate that ping pong, yeah,

so that's all there, like, that's all there within the realm of irrigation. And the science is there. And I mean, a lot of it's, you know, ongoing and new, but it's there, and you can do it different ways. And, I mean, the thing is, the you can do that with with computers and data, and, you know, high end electric controllers, and you can do with the blue mass, and they kind of do it on their own, or you can

do it with just physics, just just like what we were talking about with ancient man, like, I don't know man, I think it's really cool that you can use gravity by elevating your blue matte bucket, and then it goes down without a pump, without needing to be plugged in, without anything into a porous clay carrot that's perfectly crafted to withstand a certain amount of pressure, that is so cool for like non electronic technology, it almost reminds me how we're going to high quality hash rosin as consumers and less away from like the solvents. Yeah, the solvents were like, you know, magical chemistry, trichome pooling machines, but now people are going back to what heat and pressure. Heat and pressure, the same heat and pressure that people have been using for 1000s of years, just applied in a different way. So I love to see ancient concepts evolved into modern tech. It is so cool.

No, I was thinking the same thing as, like before the shows like thinking about that concept of, like, biomimicry, you know, like taking, taking, kind of like natural phenomenon. And understanding the principles and then engineering and like modern devices, totally and in a lot of ways, that's what's happening, you know, with these blue maps. But we, you know, you can see it throughout a lot of different examples and kind of cutting edge engineering.

That's true, dude, that's exactly what's happening. Really great episode, man, we're here at the top of the hour. I want to make sure you get your plugs in. Anything else you want to say before we wrap it up again? Code, grow, cast, sustainable village.com, it's active right now. 10% off on blue map products, yeah. What do you got? Michael,

Oh, no. You know, just that thing about the quote request you guys got, got a system. Let us do a quote for you. And you know, I think you'll be, like, really surprised at how affordable it is if someone's got a facility that that wants regular drip irrigation, or farm project that needs drip irrigation, we got, we do that too. You know, that's a big chunk of what we do, in addition to the blue mat work. So, you know, all we can kind of handle all of that. We're really keyed up to work in, you know, anything irrigation, you know, side I can

tell on cannabis space there, it's all you do. Michael, yeah, you're like, how does we do so, I mean,

you know, you got, we should come back on here and talk about capillary mats again, and how those are working. And, like, I've

seen some good results for those, the bottomless pots, man, I've had some members loving those, yeah? So the bottomless

pots are cool. We've been using some was fertile pot, yeah. Brandon Russ has got some new pots coming out, the Nutri pot. I think they're cool. And I think he's going to send us some of those. We want to test those out on the capillary math. I've got a feeling those are going to work real well. That's

a cool collab, two friends, a grow cast, very cool man. Well, listen, keep us up to date. Anywhere else Instagrams, anything they need to do to find you? Yeah,

I mean, just blue mat watering systems is, you know, where we we have all of our cannabis related activity on on Instagram. That's, the main one. Go give them a follow, everybody. Yeah, blue mat, watering systems,

and then soil life Summit. Come on

out the soil life Summit. I think, like I said, those guys, the team that putting it on really, really great people. They always do high quality event, like I said, I think they're doing, like, a streaming version of it. So if people want to stream it, they can do that. They can find all the information there, I think on the grassroots fabric pots website and their Instagram, they got a ton of stuff on there right now. Grassroots fabric I love it on Instagram,

I love it, yeah, we're fans of those guys as well. A bunch of my members using grassroots fabric pots, totally. Yeah. Shout out, everybody. Appreciate you. Members, appreciate you. Listeners tuning in again. Check out the other episodes with Michael box. There's a bunch of them. They're all good. Thank you, Michael for the limited time code. And

thank you, Jordan. I really appreciate it. And I really appreciate all your listeners too, because we always get a ton of response after these shows. And you know, everybody's listening that has a blue mat system. I just want to kind of personally, you know, thank you for for giving us a try. And feel free to call us in to help us solve any issues you might have, or tell us how it's working. You know, we always like getting lots of feedback here at sustainable village, I

love it all right. Everybody you know what to do one more time. Sustainable village.com, code grow cast only throughout March, everybody, so go and grab it. Thank you so much. But for now, this is Michael box and Jordan River signing off, saying, be safe and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody. Thank you to Michael box and again, code grow cast is live for 10% off only this month@sustainablevillage.com and that it only applies to blue matte products. Grab a moisture meter, grab a blue matte kit. Don't be scared to call them up. It's a really, really great system, and we get one of the only discount codes ever to exist for blue matte so go and check it out, everybody one more time. Thank you to Michael. Go to growcastpodcast.com There you'll find everything. We got our seeds. We got our class schedule for this year up there. It's a little bit more sparse, but there are some events up there that I'm very excited about. What are the ones that are coming up? Let me think here, cultivators cup, April 13, already sold out in Illinois. Thank you to everybody who grabbed tickets to that. I think I'm gonna do a quick little member meet up in Oklahoma at the end of April, so keep an eye out for that. And then in May, we have a Grow Your Own workshop in Tampa, Florida. That's May 18 at Battle buds again, grow cast podcast.com, for all the information. And then June 15 is the Colorado meet up. We're gonna join forces with weed. Should taste good and Farmer John and hopefully some others, and do another big Colorado meet up. Can't wait for this one. So stay tuned, everybody. We got a lot more going on after that. We got a Okay, callux Natural Farming class in October. We got one Pesta Palooza, one breeder class. Got some good stuff in the work. So stay tuned. And again, grow cast podcast.com, for all the things you can. Jump into membership there too, save on your classes and your seeds and everything. Okay, everyone. I appreciate your support. I will continue diligently to work towards our mission of overgrow and creating 1 million new growers. Got some really good stuff to unveil later this year, so don't touch that dial. I appreciate you members for supporting me and allowing me to continue on my mission, and for you listeners as well, I super appreciate you just for tuning in and listening to this show. Hope we helped you out in your garden. All right, everyone see you later. Be safe. Bye. You.

But either way, yeah, we're doing that. I.