This post was originally published on this site.
This guest column is from Colin Decker, owner and founder of 7 SEAZ, New York’s first legacy-to-legal adult-use cannabis brand, and owner of Hudson Valley-based Sensei Growth Consulting. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of NY Cannabis Insider.
I hope that farmers cultivating cannabis commercially here in New York State have learned from these past few seasons. The first year of outdoor legal cultivation was beyond dry, with last season’s cultivation conditions being quite different due to the rains, heavy winds and other conditions we had to deal with.
This is a testament to how unpredictable Mother Nature can be, which ultimately has the last say on how your yields and harvest will go. With the famous groundhog just recently making his statement that he did not see his shadow, spring is ultimately upon us and will arrive before we know it.
The time is now for farmers to: gather genetics, either in seed form or placing orders if growing from clones; improve upon last year’s set up for irrigation purposes; walk the fields; dig extra drainage outlets; and, for greenhouse growers, purchase pallets of potting mix, sterilize tunnels and order trellis net and nutrients before the lead times grow even longer for needed products.
The biggest thing I’d like to touch on – as I do every year, though it seems to fall on deaf ears – is genetic choice.
Genetics are your engine for the grow, and cutting corners or costs on this will only make your efforts even more futile. I would encourage growers statewide to think about the end product, to help with choice.
What will you be able to show that is different from the competition, and what will you be able to sell to the market come October harvest by growing these plants? Will you have all the same strains as most of the state? Can your flower wholesale price, fully packaged, sustain your business if pricing falls through the floor?
Processors aren’t going to pay what they did last year for biomass (each year prices decline) and they certainly won’t pay you for distillate this time upfront, either (there is a literal sea of distillate currently available across NYS). So start thinking logically.
I beg of all of you, even if your blueberry muffin seeds from Humboldt Seed Company grew great – please, for the love of god, let that strain go out to pasture. The market, store customers and I thank you as a whole.
When choosing genetics, think about your: microclimate, cultivation medium, environmental factors that you do or do not have control over, strain name for marketability, flowering times, disease and pest resistance, and most importantly the plant’s terpene profile.
Everyone looks for potency these days as if it is a marker for quality, when in fact terpene profiles are what matter most and affect the consumer’s endocannabinoid receptors more than anything.
Lab tests mean just about nothing after what we have seen over the years, along with reports put out this past year by NY Cannabis Insider. Potencies of New York State products are just about all inaccurate anyway. Genetics make up 80 percent of the outcome of your crop, with the other 20 percent being the efforts you and your team put into the grow day in and day out. You get what you pay for when it comes to genetics, and the more love you show your plants by being hands on with them the better the outcome you will ultimately have.
If you are growing from seed you will have more non-uniform flower at the end with phenotypic expression visible in your pounds and packaging due to the variety of phenotypes present in your garden, as opposed to growing from clone where you can expect every plant to pretty much be identical if they have come from the same mother stock.
Some farmers have expressed wanting to grow fields for fresh frozen and to sell their harvests in one shot for producers of hash rosin and other concentrates with the dream of securing deals now for a market floor price point per pound, thus allowing them to bypass the drying/trimming/packaging and retail aspects.
This is good in theory, but from seeing what producers have made for the end product over the past two years with state-of-the-art washing rooms here in New York, I can see why this still hasn’t bloomed into a viable business model.
The old saying goes with rosin – “fire in, fire out.” When you try to wash pounds from outdoor fields that lack the resin head content and quality that hash makers desire here in New York, like that of clean greenhouse flower not impacted by the weather, or indoor-grown flowers, the end product comes out very dark and lacks personality in comparison to products consumers are used to, especially with rosin currently going for a hundred dollars a gram at retail – which doesn’t help at all and is ridiculous.
However, if you are steadfast in this mission, then clone selection for cultivation with fresh frozen as the end goal should be accompanied by one thought and priority – along with proof of such – how well does the cultivar wash with 6 percent being a minimum desired washing yield?
Greenhouse growers could certainly find this to be a viable model, but they appear to be focused on cashing in on selling their flower at a high price point. They may be looking to cash in as long as possible before the price ultimately drops once indoor product floods the market (more so than it is currently) with ROs who have transitioned to adult-use already wholesaling eighths of flower to dispensaries from $22 to $27.50 per unit.
When indoor flower is cheaper than some greenhouse-grown flower in a market, something has to give, especially with more stores carrying these products due to their quality and price point, along with most retailers not wanting to lose customers to a nearby store that carries indoor products if they do not.
Many of the seed companies selling to farmers in New York are fairly new in their enterprise and come from selling CBD seeds back when hemp was the new fad. This does not bode well for growers looking to grow out top-tier genetics at scale and expect yields to reflect such.
Companies like Ziplock Seeds have been breeding the THC form of the cannabis plant for multiple generations and devote their lives to the plant and success of their genetics. Growing seeds for farmers by farmers. In the past seasons here in the New York legal cannabis market, farmers who grew genetics from Ziplock Seeds ended up with incredibly unique, well-yielding harvests where flowers showed layered terpene profiles distinguishing their crops from the cookie cutter Humboldt Seed Co. or Brothers Grimm varieties we have seen so much of.
Ziplock Seeds were genetically tested in a variety of setups including: microclimates across the state, high-tunnel greenhouses, light-deprivation greenhouses, and outdoors in row crop formations under full sun.
This provided ample testing grounds for genetics bred in greenhouses in southern Oregon, where the climates strongly reflect those of New York’s spring through fall seasons. Greenhouse-grown seeds have incredible vigor to them when compared to seeds that are bred indoors under full supplemental lighting. It’s quite a drastic difference to see these greenhouse seeds run side by side with indoor-bred genetics and witness the difference in speed of growth/vigor of the plants.
Make sure your genetics company has either worked with farmers here in different regions and microclimates, or provided genetics to farmers for trials and can attest to the fact that genetics functioned properly in these areas, such as in Tompkins County and in the lower Hudson Valley regions like Orange/Ulster County, where a lot of the cultivation scene is taking place – an area I am naming the New Emerald Triangle.