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Legal cannabis: Why it is not inevitable that outdoor cultivation will become the norm · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hello there, and welcome back to
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  Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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  I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, the founder of Utrema Limited,
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  and I say soilless cultivation, but actually today we're talking about hydroponics
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  versus soil cultivation, and particularly in legal cannabis.
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  And this was sparked up by reading a
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  linkedin post that my good friend dan fox
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  had liked and it was by a cannabis
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  molecular biologist called daniel fowler and
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  he holds a number of positions in the u.s and he was talking about the flower
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  that the legal flower and he was saying how it's hit 650 a pound and that's
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  it'd been the price had been going down but that was dramatically still too
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  high he says that weed isn't saffron folks, expect the price to keep dropping.
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  There's no other flower product that even comes close to hundreds of dollars per pound.
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  Cannabis plants can make several pounds per plant. It's not weight limitation like saffron.
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  I'll read the whole of his post and then I'll go into why I disagree on this.
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  The only reason it costs so much is its extremely unsustainable resource-intensive
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  indoor cultivation methods that the industry has adopted as the way it must
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  be grown, in inverted commas.
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  Those that innovate cultivation methods will
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  win ideally bringing it back outdoors outdoors where
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  it belongs so into the soil those that
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  continue to cultivate indoors like it is 1985 drug war bunker will lose the
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  only constant is change so and i think he might have also published that in
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  mj biz daily so an interesting take there from daniel fowler and i disagree
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  with this for two reasons.
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  One is that cannabis flower is a very sticky crop with all the trichomes and resins. And so.
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  Outdoors you get a lot and lots of dust
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  just imagine your car if you didn't
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  you your cannabis crop is growing for months and
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  the flower is developing for months imagine you haven't washed your car for
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  months that's the amounts of dust if not more that
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  you're going to get on your crop because being a sticky crop it's going
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  to collect all the dust so unlike your car where the dust sort of
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  wafts off and and disappears and only
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  a small amount of that dust and grime gets attached to your car
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  over a few months if you if you just left it there on.
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  Your driveway imagine if you had a sticky car and
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  all the dust and the crap just stuck to it so
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  that's what you're dealing with with outdoor crops
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  whereas indoors you're able to filter the air
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  coming in and prevent all that dust and crap from sticking
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  to it to the sticky flowers that's option number
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  one but imagine i'd taken dan's
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  advice and i'd started to grow outdoors in say you
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  know ohio rural ohio and then
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  i i've got competitors all around me and if
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  i was an indoor grower and i had a competitor who was out competing me
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  but with cannabis i could put them out of business overnight legally
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  by just putting a male plant somewhere upwind
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  of their facility and they couldn't
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  do the same with me because i'd have inlet filters on and so
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  over with that one practical planting
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  of one male cannabis plant upwind of
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  their facility their seed goes their crop goes to seed
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  the flower becomes far far less
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  potent and far less saleable they have to remove all the seeds from their crop
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  and they're they're there for their commercial enterprise becomes unsustainable
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  and an economic disaster so So I think it's a game of chess in business often,
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  and I think outdoor cultivation is an option, but it's not a surefire win.
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  It's definitely not, without a doubt, the way the industry is going,
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  and hydroponics still has a lot under its sleeve.
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  And yes, that is a nefarious tactic to put a male flower upwind of somebody's
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  facility, but it just shows you one of the things that could be done by people
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  who, in business, want to maintain their market share and things like that.
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  It's not like you're destroying their crop by going on
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  and burning it but it is you know it's
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  up to everyone else's morals what they do in this world isn't it so somebody
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  could do it just as somebody could do anything you know biological to your crop
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  so i don't think and but i think probably the you know already people don't
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  buy outdoor flour because of the the dust and things like this.
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  Outdoor flower goes into vape cartridges and lower end uses extraction rather
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  than smokable crops when it is where it is legal and it's a legal crop.
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  So let me know what you think. Do you think there is a risk of people contaminating
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  crops with male flowers outdoors or is this just something I've got in my head and.
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  It'd be interesting to know how much, if you had a yellow sticky trap,
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  for example, and you left it outdoors laying down, how much dust and crap would get stuck to it?
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  And does that sort of sit with how much contamination you would get on a flower anyway?
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  So we have to think of being soil grown as being superior when it comes to crops, but it's not always.
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  It might be when it comes to nutraceutical levels and vitamin levels and mineral levels,
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  but maybe not when it comes to dust contamination and
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  things like this so and the more crops you've got in the
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  area the more chances you've got of contamination if you've got a hemp crop
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  near you then you'll get pollen contamination and if you've got pollen chuckers
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  and plant breeders in your area then you'll get pollen contamination as well
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  so then there's always something to consider that's been hydroponics daily for
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  today a bit of a contentious one but yeah thanks to,
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  Dan Fowler for posting it on LinkedIn and Dan Fox for sharing it. So I got to see it.
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  As I say, check it out yourself and love to hear from those guys what their
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  opinion is as well. All right. Until tomorrow. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye.