One of the most crucial elements to consider when sizing your indoor farm is how your grow room sizes and overall square footage will affect your HVAC system costs. We’ve created some visuals to help you get an idea of how the cost per ton of common HVAC approaches may change with room and overall facility square footage.
In the endless quest to improve efficiencies and boost yields, multi-level cultivation environments have the obvious benefit of allowing for more production and higher yields within the same square footage. However, there are also some drawbacks. Let’s carefully consider the benefits and risks of cultivating in multiple levels prior to facility construction.
The relationship between VPD and temperature & humidity is complex but crucial to creating a balanced environment for indoor cannabis cultivation. Let’s break this relationship down to better understand just how great of an impact it has on your environment and bottom line.
Focusing on improving efficiencies isn’t just the right thing to do–it can help our own bottom line as business owners in a big way. With that in mind, we thought we’d share some of our top tips for improving energy efficiency in your grow.
As cultivators and owners know, building out a commercial sized facility takes a lot of time, patience and money but can be extremely lucrative in the long run. Large-scale commercial facilities that are up and running are generating huge profits, mostly in cash. But this type of revenue takes time. To get to a place where a facility can sustain itself financially, owners first must go through the long and expensive process of licensing, permitting, obtaining land and/or buildings and, of course, choosing lighting and environmental control.
Biosecurity is quickly becoming one of the most important topics in the cannabis industry. Testing standards are getting stricter and rates of tainted crops are sky rocketing, causing supply shortages and significant financial blows to cultivators all over the continent. Crops with mold or fungus can be deadly to consumers—especially those with lower immune systems, like many medical users. The alternative for many cultivators is to use chemicals like pesticides and fungicides to combat mold but unfortunately, these still pose a threat to consumers, placing cultivators in a catch-22 situation. Should you risk mold and fungus by avoiding chemicals? Or should you introduce potentially harmful chemicals to your plants to ensure against mold and fungus? Neither is a good option. Not only do these options put consumers at risk but, with increased regulation, they also put cultivators at risk of losing significant profits from having to dispose of sub-par harvests.
Right now, cannabis in the United States is a hotly debated topic. Many people are anti-prohibition citing medicinal uses, economic growth, job-creation and removing its incentive from underworld criminals as reasons for creating a legitimate, regulated cannabis industry. Others see negative impacts of legalization, believing that cannabis is harmful and prohibition only keeps citizens safe. But more and more, the consensus is moving toward the former with a new poll suggesting 93% of voters support medical marijuana and 59% support full legalization. Elections in November highlighted this trend as four states adopted medical and another four voted in favor of adult-use programs. Now a record 60% of the United States’ population live in a state that has legalized in some form.
Designing an indoor garden can be complicated. Cannabis is a new industry and though growers can pull best practices from similar industries, the fact remains that setting up a commercial cultivation facility is complicated and hard to navigate for new entrants. From navigating regulatory requirements to finding an appropriately zoned facility to choosing the right equipment, nothing about this process is simple. As soon as one task is completed, another task needs attention.