Regardless of your crop – cannabis, herbs, vegetables, or fruits – indoor farming is accompanied by a number of operating costs. Managing these costs can seem daunting, but there are practical steps that every cultivator should take to ensure you are operating as efficiently as possible.
Surna Cultivation Technologies had the honor of touring Aeriz’s 150,000 sqft commercial aeroponic cannabis operation located in Anna Illinois. Follow Head Grower Zack Bigg and General Manager Steve Bundy as they walk through various layers of their grow process.
Equipment malfunctions, nuances of specific geographies, unexpected power limitations, cultivar inputs that need tweaking. These are just some examples of issues that may not be fully apparent until the facility is in operation, and anticipating the possibility ensures that you’ll be well prepared to address them.
Most cannabis industry cultivators think of “controls” as the dashboard where they can see their room parameters and adjust photoperiods or temperature setpoints, and a lot of folks make their decisions around controls based solely on that user interface. This is an important part of the toolkit but is really the least critical piece to a controls system’s functionality.
As we look at every path a cultivation operator takes to success, those paths always seem to lead to one central theme: manufacturing/cultivation process control. Cannabis cultivation continues to evolve into a hybrid of farming and manufacturing. We are producing a product, and like any steel plant or toaster factory or car manufacturing facility, the process must be repeatable to enable successful expansion…
As branding and strain consistency grows increasingly important in the cannabis industry, cultivators are looking for solutions to give them more controllability and more repeatability. The key may lie in utilizing controls and automation to monitor data and adjust environmental variables accordingly.