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Is the Oklahoma cannabis market to blame for the crashing industry? Ft. Jessica Baker

Is the Oklahoma cannabis market to blame for the crashing industry? Ft. Jessica Baker

Oklahoma cannabis market

Anybody who is operating in the legal cannabis industry is likely feeling the strain of a seemingly shrinking market. Despite the massive growth of the national cannabis industry thanks to legalization in multiple states, the increased production of cannabis is tanking prices.

Cultivators and business owners are beginning to wonder if the industry is still profitable for small operators.

Jessica Baker owns and operates Clone City in Oklahoma City. She provides high quality clones to cultivations across the state, and has definitely noticed the industry beginning to shrink there.

Oklahoma has been the red-headed step child of the cannabis industry since it legalized medical cannabis in 2018. What started as a highly unrestricted industry that exploded into the largest cannabis market in the country in just two years, has turned into an industry that is rapidly shrinking.

Oklahoma has been, you know, an interesting market to say the least when we first got there, you know, three plus years ago, it was a very immature market in terms of the knowledge surrounding cannabis was pretty limited to you know, the little bit of, of knowledge that people have gained over the years from, you know, the private market, which is always amazing, but the strain names and things like that really weren’t, hadn’t quite hit Oklahoma yet. But now, you know, it is pretty much you’re hearing the same things as you’re here in Colorado and California in terms of growth techniques, terminology, and cultivars that are now popular in Oklahoma. So I feel like I’ve really seen that change and people get really enthusiastic about cannabis.

According to Jessica, the Oklahoma cannabis market has evolved to more or less replicate the Colorado and California cannabis industries, despite only being available to medical patients. However with easy access to a patient card and no cap on cannabis business licenses until very recently, the Oklahoma cannabis market quickly saw the consequences.

An oversupply of cannabis has led to the price per pound tanking across the country. While Oklahoma has been getting a lot of attention recently for the state’s efforts to restrict future licensing and regulate the industry more strictly, it is by no means the only state with the issue.

Many blamed Oklahoma when the industry began tanking following the COVID pandemic. However the criticism typically fails to account for the pandemic and the impacts that had on the industry as a whole.

With restricted trade and major impacts to the supply chain, inputs needed to cultivate cannabis at a commercial scale went up in price, if they were available at all. Without raising their prices to match their costs, many cannabis businesses began operating at a loss just to stay competitive with larger commercial competitors.

I think it has dropped nationally, because there’s just so much cannabis being grown and a lot of states that never were legally allowed to grow before. And I think with metric or not, I think there are still ways that people are probably putting that on the private market, even though they’re meant for the public market. But I think there’s just a glut and cannabis.

Overproduction is not an issue exclusive to Oklahoma. Oregon’s legal cannabis industry faced serious issues early on due to similar regulation. A lack of restrictions on who could grow cannabis led to a massive oversupply of cannabis, which dropped the price per pound drastically.

The state eventually passed a law that would allow the export of Oregon cannabis to neighbor states. However no neighbor states have passed a similar law yet, making it irrelevant. Eventually the market consolidated as grow operations could no longer afford the overhead costs with such a low profit.

It isn’t just overproduction impacting the current cannabis market either. Inflation, high gas prices and multiple other factors that impact individuals has resulted in less people purchasing cannabis recreationally.

 If gas is $5 a gallon, and you have to make a choice between buying your eighth or ounce for the week, or continue to put gas in your car to get to work and everywhere else you’re going, then you may have to sacrifice by spending less on cannabis.

For example, Colorado has seen a 30%+ decrease in cannabis sales since July 2020, the peak of the pandemic. While at the time many people had more disposable income thanks to stimulus checks and saving from staying inside, that has changed drastically.

When looking at the industry as a whole, it is hard to conclude that Oklahoma is solely to blame. Just about every legal cannabis market in the country has seen a drastic drop in price per pound.

As consumer purchases decrease, so does distributor purchases. With growers sitting on a massive stock of cannabis product from 2021 thinking the pandemic boost would last, there is an oversupply of product sitting in storage.

The longer it sits, the less it is worth.

I mean, people have already gone out of business, and it’s just the nature of business. 100% of all businesses don’t survive in any industry. So especially in a boom and bust scenario, and with the banking issues we have and the tax issues. You know, it’s not simple.

Listen to the latest episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker to hear more about how the Oklahoma cannabis market has been impacted along with analyses of other state markets, and what it all means for the future of the industry!

Transcript:

Chip  

This is Chip Baker with The Real Dirt podcast. We’re back again. Wow. It’s been a long time since we put out an episode. But we got a lot of important things going on in the cannabis industry and we felt like this was the perfect time to get back into it. 

You know, today it is July 10 2022. I’m in Denver, Colorado. We’ve been spending time all over the country, but primarily in Oklahoma this past year. And it seems that the state of the cannabis union is really in flux right now. You know, with the economy with inflation. With post COVID You know, structure of business and in life, the cannabis industry is really taking a turn. Today I have Jessica Baker as my guest. Jessica owns and operates a series of cannabis businesses in Oklahoma. Welcome, Jessica. 

Jessica  

Thank you for having me on the show, Chip. Always a pleasure to talk to you by cannabis and cannabis business. 

Chip  

Just to introduce yourself a little bit. I know you’ve been on the show before. And many people know you as my wife, but you are a incredible entrepreneur and educator. And let’s just talk about Jessica for one song moment. Okay, great. 

Jessica  

Thank you for the introduction. I am your wife gladly. But I’m also an acupuncturist for the last 15 years and a Western herbalist for the last, you know, two decades plus, so I have well versed in, you know, Chinese medicine and Western herbalism. And also I own several cannabis businesses. I’ve been growing medical cannabis since 1997. Back in the good old days, and so probably grown a lot of different ways. Not every way. But I’ve definitely dabbled in growing in multiple different modalities. And I own a clone nursery in Oklahoma City, as well as cultivation and processing facility. And so we’re kind of do a little bit of everything. And yeah, I love cannabis. And I love your show. Well, thanks, Jessica. And you know, I really appreciate all the women weed warriors out there, you know, this industry is is filled with dudes and dudes often try to dominate, uh, you know, whatever we’re involved with. That’s just the dude power. But, you know, we know so many women, cultivators, women, extractors, women, business owners, and the you know, I get to see it throughout the industry. I see. Maybe you call it discrimination against women business owners, just as we see it in the rest of society. But man, you know, if if the women that you know, in the cannabis industry, I guarantee you, they’re working twice as hard as the dude right next to them. And if you have a problem, you should go like maybe chat with the women that you know, in the cannabis industry and see how they feel about what’s going on. Because often they do have a different perspective than our dude oriented industry.

Bro science. 

Chip  

It is bro science. But yeah, we’re here today to talk about the cannabis industry. Boy, it is in a tailspin. Every aspect of the cannabis industry from the manufacturers and the suppliers of all the equipment, transportation, all the cultivators, the distributors, the the grocery stores, the dispensaries, like everybody is really filling this economic depression right now. Jessica, how has it been an Oklahoma what’s going on there? 

Jessica  

Oklahoma has been, you know, an interesting market to say the least when we first got there, you know, three plus years ago, it was a very immature market in terms of the knowledge surrounding cannabis was pretty limited to you know, the little bit of, of knowledge that people have gained over the years from, you know, the private market, which is always amazing, but the strain names and things like that really weren’t, hadn’t quite hit Oklahoma yet. But now, you know, it is pretty much you’re hearing the same things as you’re here in Colorado and California in terms of growth techniques, terminology, and cultivars that are now popular in Oklahoma. So I feel like I’ve really seen that change and people get really enthusiastic about cannabis. And so you know, the last year we’ve definitely seen especially at the clone nursery, a lot of the big cultivators aren’t buying clones, like they have been the two years previously. A lot of people that were maybe larger Cole debaters came in and bought less clones, because their facilities that were 1020 30,000 square feet, they, maybe they didn’t have the knowledge to pull off that large of a grow at the very beginning. So they were like, Hey, I’m going to scale back, learn a little bit more about it. And then I can always scale up again in the future. And then I know people who, unfortunately, you know, maybe they had a 401k They took out or some early retirement or some other personal investment to invest in cannabis, and it didn’t work out for them. And now they are cultivating anymore, either their want to sell their licence, or they are just kind of letting it stay dormant for a little bit.

Chip  

Tell us about like, what you feel about the number of cultivators that in Oklahoma that are cultivating this year, or number of businesses that maybe have like gone out of business or just aren’t operating? 

Jessica  

Well, I only know a handful of those, but I can say it’s all across the board, from dispensaries to processors to cultivators, I’ve heard a little bit from all of those sectors, saying that they’re they’re taking a break, or that they just downright are going back to their job at the, you know, do an oil rigging or we know whatever it is, I don’t think that’s the proper terminology. But you know, they’ve just decided they’re gonna go back to what they were doing before, right, or what they never stopped doing, you know, and they were doing cannabis on the side. And so, yeah, it has been significant. I know that, you know, where we’ve heard stories about when metric came into, into law at the end of May, that a lot of people never signed up for metric that actually had a licence. And so maybe they were going to do that later. Or maybe they just decided, well, I’m out now that there’s more regulation and work to be done to you know, how to leave or business

Chip  

To catch up on in Oklahoma. They’ve had a series, one, if you don’t know really was a free for all until recently on getting licenced and started cultivation in Oklahoma. But in the past couple of months, we’ve had a series of things going on between changes in the law, moratoriums and the licences requirements for metric tiered licencing. And it has reduced the number of people in the industry, right? Some people just didn’t want to deal with it, or they were barely making any enough revenue to support their hobby, so to speak.

Jessica  

Yeah. And like, oh, MMA, the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana marijuana advisory or stands for something like that. We’ve had a couple of inspections. Now it took it took a couple years or more, but we finally have been starting to get inspected. And our inspectors are telling us that, you know, they’re going to places that are not operational. So a lot of places still have a licence, but they’re not operating. 

Chip  

And we haven’t touched on to the elephant in the room, but it is about the decrease in price.

Jessica  

Oh, 100%. It has to do with also the decrease in profit margins for people. Right.

Chip  

Right. Right. Yeah. You know, it’s not just Oklahoma, across the country, people are having these, you know, this, this decrease in cost per pound cost per gramme from the wholesaler to the distributors to the manufacturers. Everybody has their theory on why you think this is. And some people say it’s just simply supply and demand. I believe it goes a little bit deeper than that. But why do you think the national price of cannabis has gone? So it has dropped so much? And why do you think it’s dropped so much in Oklahoma?

Jessica  

I think it has dropped nationally, because there’s just so much cannabis being grown and a lot of states that never were legally allowed to grow before. And I think with metric or not, I think there are still ways that people are probably putting that on the private market, even though they’re meant for the public market. But I think there’s just a glut and cannabis. I know people regulated market, the regulated market, right. So I know that there’s a glut of you know, cannabis in Oklahoma, and Colorado and California. And in Oregon production, overproduction. People still are sitting on hundreds or 1000s of pounds from last year. And now they’re like, growing again this year. So there’s going to be even more on the market.

Chip  

Do you think this is overproduction in the regulated market or the illicit market?

Jessica  

Probably both both. But yeah, I would say both.

Chip  

Yeah, farmers mostly have one. You know, one business plan and we talked about this many times on The Real Dirt is prices down, grow more, prices up, grow more. And that’s really what’s going on and you know, there was just such this huge decrease increase in demand for cannabis products, you know, 2020 2021 And it’s a fact unemployed people consume more wheat, right? They unemployed people smoke more weed. Right? So, you know, all those people have gone back to work right now we’re at the lowest unemployment rate, you know, the country’s one of the lowest the country’s ever seen like everybody’s back at work, but the economy is not so great.

Jessica  

And if gas is $5 a gallon, and you have to make a choice between buying your Eight for the week or your ounce for the week, or continue to put gas in your car to get, you know, to work and everywhere else you’re going, then you may have to sacrifice by spending less on cannabis

Chip  

Or many people walk. Many people don’t have that option. Yeah, how many people unfortunately, transportation options, but you know, that recreation is one of the first things to go. And you know, they say that, like the vice industries are recession proof, but it’s just not true. As as we see it now, if people just don’t have the money to spend on it, you know, and cannabis isn’t like coffee, or alcohol, right? People really need that coffee and alcohol. And most people can just like do without we, they might want it. But they can do it out do without it. And it’s similar to the cleaning business we were talking about this earlier, is, you know, one of the first ways that farmers can cut their costs is by not buying clones. And you know, one of the one of the things that I see, you know, farmers use clone nurseries for is when they can’t fill up their fields, they can’t fill up their rooms, and they come to clone nurseries often in an emergency situation. Absolutely. I see that. And they say, you know, oh, my clones died or

Jessica  

Yeah exactly my clones died, or I bought clones apartment out or

Chip  

and it’s often because they need to fill up that room. Yeah, but many people are shutting down lights, they’re shutting down greenhouses.

Jessica  

Their rooms are getting smaller. They had, you know, eight rooms and a 20,000 square foot facility and they’re gonna run two of them. Right? That’s where they started their own moms. Right and took clones, right, you know, but most of them still come back saying my clones didn’t work out. I need more. You know, we can all we always need more, you know? Not always but

Chip  

Yeah, totally. But no, we we know several people who have shut down parts of their business, you know, and aren’t cultivating any longer because they can buy cannabis cheaper or as cheap as they can produce it. And so now in their dispensaries instead of buying a built making in house, they’re buying it on the market.

Jessica  

Yes. Yep. I see all of that. 

Chip  

What about this overproduction that’s been going on in Oklahoma.

Jessica  

So you know, the overproduction in Oklahoma is twofold. One, and just to be frank, it’s okay. To be frank, a little bit about the overproduction of Oklahoma, is that a lot of the cannabis just isn’t really that great. So you have inexperienced growers growing outdoor in a really harsh environment. Yeah, or a greenhouse or greenhouses, you know, in harsh environments. And so it’s kind of sub quality weed. And so that’s one reason why the price is so low,

Chip  

because when the market is flooded with whatever it is, the price does drop, but it drops that lowest common denominator with the quality of the weed being

Jessica  

exactly and I think a lot of people, outdoor growers and greenhouse and even indoor, they know that they’re just growing for extraction, and that their quality is only going to be extraction material anyway. And so there’s this large volume of only things that they know will only go to the extractor, so the quality doesn’t have to be there,

Chip  

right but then somehow that extractable quality weed still ends up in the flower market. Oh, absolutely. Right, because there’s just 1000s and 1000s of pounds. Do you have an estimate of how much nobody even knows how much wheat was grown in Oklahoma?

Jessica  

I can’t even try to guess but I mean hundreds of 1000s of pounds million. I don’t even know what 2 million so I think that’s part of it. And then I also think that

Chip  

Hey right now, if people are listening to this, we’re definitely getting some responses about how Oklahoma was fucking up the market for everybody else. But that’s

Jessica  

just not true because California and Oregon have waived for cannabis and Oklahoma even has because there’s more people and it’s better quality and it’s still going for super cheap. And that has nothing to do with Oklahoma’s outdoor and non regulating the amount of plants you can grow.

Chip  

Yeah, so you know talking to people around the country we still see the most cannabis both regulated and you know A private market cannabis is coming from California and Oregon.

Jessica  

I mean, California, of course. 

Chip  

Right. It’s just pot the seed over there. Yes. You just put it in the ground and it grows great. It’s not like that anyplace else in the country. Absolutely. So we got in Oklahoma, we’ve got an overproduction issue, we’ve got inflation issue. And we kind of have a regulatory issue that’s occurred here, too.

Jessica  

But you know, the other thing we have is the fact that a lot of people with no knowledge or history of being in cannabis, or business, or business thought that it would be easy money to get into cannabis. And then three years later, they’re realising that’s not actually true. And so I think that’s a large part of it too.

Chip  

Getting rich quick since 86.

Jessica  

Yeah, I mean, I love you know, it is what it is. But I think

Chip  

that also because, at least at Oklahoma, it’s not get rich quick, is it? No,

Jessica  

it’s absolutely not, you may have some couple of great harvests and think you made some money. But, you know, you never know.

Chip  

You know, few people can do this number, where they like, enter the market, get a bunch of weed, make a bunch of profit, and leave and exit the in and out hot potato business strategy, right people that just doesn’t work for No, absolutely. There’s this just dream. And what happens for most people is they put all of their retirement. All right, exactly. 101 K, you know, their friends, money, their grandparents, whatever, whatever investment, they use it, right, because they’re inexperienced, they may love weed, they may have grown wheat all of their life, they may grow great weed, but none of that matters in commercial sales, commercial production. You know, when the price drops so low, you have to know how to grow that cannabis as inexpensive as possible, but still remain the highest quality,

Jessica  

Absolutely absolute, but most people, especially with how low the prices are right now, even for indoor and a lot of places. It’s really, you have to know how much it actually cost you to grow per pound, to make sure you’re not actually losing money on every pound that you sell. 

Chip  

Yeah, absolutely. In many people, you know, there’s this struggle because people so many people think that like you’re reducing quality and blah, blah, blah, but but so much of it is just organising the space, time and materials, right and people, right, and if you can organise space time materials and people like you will, like have the most efficient operation that you have that you can get a no matter what technique you’re growing under. But when you’re able to do that, then you will reduce your you know, your cost of good your overhaul cost. In hey, let’s talk about that. Jessica, what do you think the breakeven cost of production for farmers should be your needs to be for, for people to continue to stay in the industry or cultivators?

Jessica  

I mean, that’s hard to say if you are just talking about you’re growing for extraction, and Oklahoma pounds for extraction go for about 50 bucks a piece. So if you’re growing cannabis for under $50, and then you know and that’s your entire cost of labour and you know,

Chip  

You’re gonna grow it for extraction in Oklahoma,

Jessica  

then you better be growing it for $25 or $5 of have me just hard to

Chip  

do right because of the manual labour associated with harvest mostly manual labour associated with planning till the irrigation can be put together what but what about indoor?

Jessica  

I mean, indoor again, I’ve seen the indoor for as low as $500 in Oklahoma, and these you know, I don’t know if they’re truly selling indoor if they’re just calling it indoor, it’s hard to say. But I’ve seen what they call indoor that does not look that great.

Chip  

We see this throughout Oklahoma, and we’re unsure if it’s just, you know, nice greenhouse operations, poor operators indoors. Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, we don’t quite know.

Jessica  

But I know I’ve seen it. You know, I’ve even seen $350 pounds of indoor with somebody that claims they have a 50,000 square foot facility.

Chip  

We have seen those prices in Colorado to hurt them. I don’t think that’s the average price. But those are the lows. What do you think people in Oklahoma or? I’ve heard you sing for the like, how much does it cost to produce it? That’s what I’m asking. 

Jessica  

I mean, I honestly don’t know for people because I don’t know. So you have to Yeah, okay, you know, because I don’t know what they owe on the building they’re growing in are they paying back investors every month for part of this grow? Or if it’s, you know, they own the building

Chip  

for $500. Then like, you know, like you got to indoor specifically, they’re either liquid needing to get rid of round is how much it’s gonna cost, right? Yeah. Like if you’re the one of the best operators in the country, you got all your shit together, you might be at 250 pound indoors, and some people can do it even cheaper. And that’s trimmed all your cost of production in the bag. Yeah, most people it’s not that much money. It’s 450. It’s 750. It’s, it could be $1,000 For some people, and it doesn’t matter how great the weed is.

Jessica  

I mean, I’m still hearing some rumour. There’s a couple growers in Oklahoma claiming they’re still getting 2000 and door lb, I have yet to see that. I’m sure that exists. I get but the emails I get, they’re not selling for that much. 50.

Chip  

So there’s the other thing we talked about, about pricing throughout the country, too. And now what’s even worse, is these emails and texts, often I feel like you’re just driving the price down. And so much of it’s fictional, right? There’s nobody that has the operation that needs 1000 pounds a day or you know, it’s just fictional in order to drive the price down or to manipulate the market or just people fucking around.

Jessica  

Well, and these brokers don’t even get me started on like, how they lowball and then still try to get the same price because at one they in Oklahoma, none of them had a licence to be doing that anyway.

Chip  

Yeah, they you know, they shouldn’t be called brokers. They should be Hey, pardon me, all brokers out there. They’re really nice and honest, dudes. They shouldn’t be called brokers. They should be called hustlers.

Jessica  

Yeah. Well, we always tell the middleman and we really never liked unless they were helpful and actually, like, not just trying to rip off the growers.

Chip  

Well, you know, what I’ve seen between old days in these days, and distributors and brokers is old days, it was like a set like, Hey, I’m gonna get $50 or $100 a pound.

Jessica  

Now they want as much as the grower made. 

Chip  

Yeah, exactly and they’re just trying to lowball the grower to get that price down so much. And then the bad part is, it’s usually not even their money. So it’s often this like, you know, fucked up deal where they’re truly middleman, someone else has the money. Right? And, you know, they’re like, 

Jessica  

they’re acting like they have some inside knowledge into the weed space. 

Chip  

They should be connection and they should be paid for that connection. Don’t get me wrong, but like, I don’t know, if you want a sustainable business and you really wanted to clean up like, you know, having a reasonable brokerage fee. You know, I mean, hell, what a, you know, like,

Jessica  

but you can’t be trying to make $200-300 a pound you’re buying for $500 or $400. Well, not only that, 

Chip  

but like your seeds right now. I know. But hey, man, you’re gonna go they’re gonna go out of business right now. Or your your profit definitely is gonna change.

Jessica  

Yeah, absolutely. As it should. Because I mean, once again, the farmers are always the ones who take the hit.

Chip  

Yeah, let’s talk price structure. That’s a great way to do it. Alright, so we’ve been taught cost to production, but like farmer sells the pound for 500 bucks. Let’s just say $500. He sells it to a dispensary direct. Right? dispensary sells $100 ounces. They make $1,600. dispensary sells $75 ounces. Right. They’re making 12 hundred bucks.

Jessica  

But then 40% of that goes to the tax man because of you know, the

Chip  

well 40% of the profit. So not 40% of the sale. Right. Right

Jessica  

or 40% ofthat profit goes to the taxpayer. Well, that goes to the feds. And then if you’re in Oklahoma City, 15.5% of that immediately goes to

Chip  

passed on though it’s usually not out the door pricing on what I’m talking about. Sometimes it

Jessica  

In Oklahoma they really like out the door pricing

Chip  

Yeah, but this just is just not the standard, you know. And so basically what I’m saying you’re buying it for 500 bucks, you’re selling it for 1600 bucks, you’re making $1,100 profit and then 40% of that should go to the man which is about 400 and something dollars. So like, now you just made the six $700 on a $500 lb there’s still quite a bit of money going on with dispensaries.

Jessica  

Absolutely. But I mean, especially in Oklahoma, man, you’re seeing three ounces for 150 bucks and unit Yeah, but that’s greenhouse or outdoor we No, I’m just saying that like, I’m not seeing the high priced in Oklahoma. I don’t see as much of the high price than you used to. So I do think in some respect, those profit margins may not be as high but I’m sure they’re still high for a lot of places.

Chip  

Sure, sure. And then a lot of those places are produced a lot of you know, if you’re producing the cannabis and you’re selling it, that’s the best deal you got going if you can grow it cheap enough? Yeah. Right? If you can grow it for 500 bucks or $700 a pound inside, and then resell it for that that’s decent money. That’s really good, good money. But I guess my point is this is that restaurants, farmers, entrepreneurs throughout the world operate on 10 and 12%. Net profit. And it just takes a skilled business person to operate in that manner. And you’re still making money, as the dispensaries right at these at these low prices, you have to get the customers come in to buy it.

Jessica  

And you have to have the staff, of course. 

Chip  

You have to have the staff and in all of that, but there’s still money to be made out there. And if you’re in the cannabis industry, and you’re like, oh, man, I can produce $170 $190 pounds in a greenhouse. And I can sell them for 350 or $500. But you’re making good money.  

Jessica  

Yeah, there’s still no doubt about that. It may not be the profit margin you think you should be getting? Or do you use to begin entitled to be or you feel entitled to be getting. 

Chip  

Right. But it is the sky is not falling? There? Will many people go out of business in Oklahoma? 

Jessica  

Well, of course. I mean, people have already gone out of business, and it’s just the nature of business, not 100% of all businesses don’t survive in any industry. So especially in a boom and bust scenario, especially in a boom and bust. Yep. Especially with the banking issues we have and the tax issues. You know, it’s not simple.

Chip  

Well, you know, one interesting thing from my perspective is, you know, we operate hydroponic stores and, you know, potting soil manufacturing is, you know, how bad the manufacturers are and how much the prices have risen on our side. Inflation is truly shit. You know, in all of your cannabis, grow equipment, at Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC you know, we operate an online shop there, cultivateokc.com cultivatecolorado.com. People from all over the country in the world buy products from us. And you know, we have seen, they’re still we still understand there’s the demand there. And even though we have a decrease in business in our retail shops in Colorado, and in Oklahoma, we’re still on an up three year average last year was a banner year for us. But we’ve been able to like still do pretty good and you know, we we made may operate a little bit differently than other people, but many of the stores that are you know, because we’ve been around for such a long time and many of the other stores including like, grow generation and you know, some of the other like smaller stores that either are just oversized or underdeveloped they’re they’re having a struggle hanging on to this industry. But you know, we have a really well established business Kobe, Colorado you know, we expect to weather this storm, you know, you know, well you know, we’re definitely talking to our customers you know, we’re offering the best prices we can we know everyone’s struggling you know, we see new products come out all the time. This past couple of years. We haven’t seen any new products come out

Jessica  

There’s a couple new products that have come out.

Chip  

I guess you’re right, I do have some products coming out. Yeah, growers our potting soil company if you’re not familiar with us, we make potting soil in and outside Denver, Colorado, some of the highest quality potting soil in the world made from cocoa fibre. We’re coming out with two new products right now that we’re actually using, you’ve been using you’ve been a prototyping our organic cocoa for a moment.

Jessica  

Absolutely great cocoa

Chip  

…so we’re coming out with a organic cocoa and a 7030. And we’ve actually put these off for a moment that are coming out with them right now at really great great prices because everybody’s having a hard time right now.

Jessica  

Well it’s also you know, just thinking post COVID and everything going on with not only inflation, but it is a supply chain issues. So really noticing that there are things and all of our grocery stores and markets that we noticed just isn’t there anymore because of supply chain.

Chip  

Oh yeah, it’s it has been hard we have we have bought more cocoa fibre than we thought we were going to use. We’ve really tried to get the biggest deals from our competitors coming from our suppliers, the best deals so we could, you know, be able to like me Eat this market because…

Jessica  

Well I don’t even have it in stock when you need it struggling

Chip  

to manufacture is you’re struggling to get materials. But yeah, so we got a 7030 Cocoa fibre coming out. We’ve got a organic cocoa fibre coming out right now. Call us at cultivate Colorado, look us up at growers grown on Instagram, cultivate Colorado on Instagram, and Facebook. And, you know, follow your progress there. If you’re in the Colorado area, we’re offering incredible prices to you right now on this product. So give us a call if you’re in Oklahoma or Michigan or anywhere in the country, if you’re a grower, or if you’re a grocery store, you know, drop us a line at growers cocoa or it goes big Colorado. We’d love to help it out. How do people getting get in touch with you and your organisation?

Jessica  

In my organisation if you’re a commercial grower in Oklahoma, and you want clones, you know you can reach us at You can go to our website, which is clone dash city.com on Instagram, we’re at the clone city and also clone nursery. You know, because you gotta have more than one and then you can always just Google clone City, Oklahoma, and we come up oh my gosh, probably around 50 These days we really expanded our our mom rooms and got some great Oh, there are Yeah, we plant a bunch of seeds we select for specific finos and then we grow them at least two different ways in Oklahoma and then we put them out on the market so so we know they’re actually going to survive in greenhouses and outdoor yields 

Chip  

Great speaking to you today, Jessica. You know, I fortunately I get to get your wisdom on Cannabis industry all the time. Is there anything you’d like to say to fellow business?

Jessica  

I always have things I want to say.

Chip  

Women Business Owners or just cannabis business owners in general.

Jessica  

I’m gonna say cannabis owners and business owners in general even if you’re not in the cannabis space yet and you’re just thinking of any business endeavour. It is a long game it there is no shortcuts. Like I said you may do well successfully at first and then that’s when your hurdles start. But don’t think this is an easy like I’m in and out and I’m gonna just it is a long game and enjoy it Have fun, please honour and respect the plants and your employees and your business contacts, the earth, all of it. But definitely it is not it is not a short game. It’s a long game. So be patient. Take deep breaths, connect with the other people in your industry community and don’t feel entitled to anything because we’re not

Chip  

Hey, and I just want to say to you listeners. We love you all, keep the plant in your heart and just keep going you know times may be tough but just roll the biggest joint you can and fire it up.

Jessica  

We’re about to!

Chip  

This has been The Real Dirt!

Breaking Down Salt Nutrients with Front Row Ag (Pt. 2)

Breaking Down Salt Nutrients with Front Row Ag (Pt. 2)

Front Row Ag nutrients review and interview

When someone first sees a bag of Front Row Ag nutrients, the first question they might have is “what is it?”

Front Row starts with a simple Part A that is packed with nitrogen, calcium and chelated micronutrients, followed by Part B, full of magnesium, potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen. The Part B also has surfactin, which is a natural antibiotic produced by Bacillus subtilis to help strengthen plant immunity against disease. And that’s the base.

No Grow A&B followed by Bloom A&B. Just Part A and B for growth, and Bloom for flower. Three bags total. The flower nutrient from Front Row is more than just a PK booster too. The biggest benefit to Front Row Bloom is the inclusion of sulfur and magnesium included in the bag. This helps make significant changes to calcium and magnesium ratios throughout the flower process, which is extremely useful in greenhouse and outdoor applications.

Ease of use and affordability

Silicic acid has become a hot commodity for growers, but the price point has been too high for many to commit. Front Row decided to create a mono-silicic acid that is just as effective and more affordable. While some silicic acid products may be designed with propylene glycol as the carrying agent, Front Row uses an alcohol-based sugar carrying agent that the plant can metabolize and use for more energy.

And the affordability carries on throughout the full Front Row Ag line up. Additionally the application rates are simplified to avoid over measuring or over feeding. The entire growth cycle can be completed with the base line; A, B and Bloom. However growers looking to increase their rhizosphere and take a more biosynthetic approach have more options that Front Row offers.

This Week’s Episode

In Part 2 of the Front Row Ag interview, Chip, Matt, Zach and Leland dive into what makes up their products, how they differ from the competition in their composition, application and effectiveness. They also talk about the debate over fertilizer injectors, stock solutions and more as the gang dives into the rabbit hole of irrigation and cultivation.

If you missed Part 1 of this interview, you can catch up right here. To hear more Real Dirt Podcast episodes, subscribe and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts to get over 100 episodes instantly!

Transcript

Chip:  And we’re back. Oh man, you know we always have people do like, you know, feats of strength so to speak while we’re, while we’re on break. And I was just amazed. That was like, the largest dab I’ve ever seen anybody do, Leland:. That must have been like, a three and a half gram chunk, and you didn’t cough once, and you don’t even seem like you’re high, man.

 

Leland:  You know that they say I have callous lungs.

 

Chip:  Callous lungs, that that that’s it. 

 

Leland:  Part of the [inaudible 00:45].

 

Chip:  Yeah, you know, some people can handle that stuff. I can’t. I really love extract, we were just talking about extract. And I love what it’s done to the cannabis industry.

 

Leland:  Yeah, absolutely. Not, it’s, it’s changed the game.

 

Chip:  So yeah, here we are, it’s The Real Dirt. I’m talking to Matt, Zach and Leland, also known as Zeeland. And this is Front Row Ag we’re fixing to get into the nitty gritty. All the questions that my guys out there at Tribe Collective have been asking, and want to know about, we’re fixing to talk about all of the products. We’re going to talk about the technical details on how to use it, indoor, outdoor, greenhouse, in the ground, in pots. We’re going to talk about how to put it in a mixing tank, how to put it in a stock solution. Oh man, get your, put your joints down, pick your pens up, get your notepads ready, and, and, and here we go. So, let’s start from the beginning. What are, what are these products?

 

Matt:  Yeah, so we have the Front Row offering starts with Part F. It’s basically all of our nitrogen, all of our calcium and a really, really healthy micro package. So you have all the essential micronutrients in there chelated. We typically use two different chelates, EDTA, and EDDHA. And it just helps with really high availability in a wide, wide pH range, then our part B, the bulk of our magnesium, a lot, a good amount of potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen in there as well. And then, the cool part about our part B is that there’s a surfactant in there. And then there’s also a small amount of inclusion rate of citric acid. It acts, once the fertilizer goes into the solution, whether you’re injecting on the fly or putting it in a reservoir, however you want to feed, it just, it helps the chelates to be more active. And in the fertilizer world, we call kind of a preservative, it helps keeps things in solution as well. But a little bit of added value there.

 

Chip:  So that’s an A, and a B, and that’s your major MPK. That’s where it all comes from.

 

Matt:  That’s the, that’s probably the, if you’re going to refer to a base for like, the base of any other nutrient, whether you’re looking like cannis A, B from back in the day, the GH or even any of our competitors on the dry side, the A and the B is what you’re going to use start to finish, whether it’s veg or in flower And then in flower, we have our third product, which is Bloom. Traditionally, the bloom when you look at the the guaranteed analysis, it looks like it’s a PK booster, which it absolutely is and it serves as that. But one of the biggest benefits of it is the sulfur and the magnesium that we include in our bloom. So it allows us to make really significant and meaningful changes to the calcium, the magnesium ratio throughout flower, which is tremendously needed for greenhouses and outdoor. And we’ll talk about is a good amount of sulfur at the beginning of the flowering process as well. So more so than just being a PK booster, I’d say its contributions to sulfur and magnesium are, can’t be understated. In the fertilizer world, there’s a lot of other value added products that do offer great benefits depending on the situation. And that’s, that’s something we’re always wanting to talk about. But another product that Front Row really stands behind and created to help growers out there from a value standpoint is our silicic acid, so we offer a 10% monosilicic acid as well.

 

Chip:  That’s the SI, right?

 

Matt:  Yep, the Front Row SI, yep. And so the reason –

 

Chip:  Huge value in that project- product, man. I mean you know, other SI products or the other silica based type products we sell in liquid form are just so expensive, like, like –

 

Matt:  Oh, yeah. And that’s you really, when when we were, when we were looking at the opportunity repetitively, we were just told that. We were, so we were told that a lot of these other specifically mono and disilicic acid products, they’re great. They work awesome, they do exactly what the people say they do, but we can’t afford to use them, was the the recurring feedback we would get. And we said, “Okay, well, we know that’s a benefit from strengthening the cell wall, adding some weight, helping with the resistance of different bugs and diseases and things like that. But we need to make it affordable.” And something that’s a no brainer for the cultivator and a commercial grower, and that was really our aim there was just help them out. But with that though I mean, it’s a tremendously high quality monosilicic acid. And then a big difference too is a lot of the products you’ll buy if they are monosilicic acid will use a propylene glycol , a arrying agent to help keep the solulized. We actually use an alcohol based sugar that the plant metabolizes and uses. But then yeah, and then Leland:’s gonna talk about two of our other products as well.

 

Chip:  I’m gonna, I’m gonna pause you here. So it’s, it’s, core of this is this a B product that you guys use as the base product from start to finish. And then they’re just used at different ratios for the week or the phase of growth. And then there’s a bloom enhancer, that’s a separate product from the A and B, right – and that’s bloom, right?

 

Matt:  Yeah. And that’s important actually, um, ease of use we talked about earlier. When we designed this product, the A and the B, you talked about how they get used. When you make them into a liquid concentrate, which is kind of where we saw the industry going, people buying dosers, injection skids, things of that nature, even making concentrates at their house. The product is used at AMB or always used at equal dilution rates. And so at milliliter per gallon, the you know, if you use one at 14 mLs, the other one gets used to 14 mLs, and that’s veg through flower.

 

Chip:  Traditionally speaking in liquid products, right?

 

Matt:  Whenever you use an injection equipment or make our product into a liquid, and then from a dry, yeah, they’re used at different gram rates per gallon. Because from a design of a fertilizer, you have to choose whether when it’s made into a concentrate or stays dry, if it’s going to be even mapped on, on which side of that.

 

Chip:  So the core products is A and B, the Bloom and the SI. That’s ,that’s the base product line, right? That’s what most commercial people are buying. But there’s these other two products, you got the Bioflow and the Unleash.

 

Leland:  Yep. And so that’s for people who are taking, you know, a biosynthetic approach where they’re wanting to encourage that rhizosphere development, and have more health to the root zone, and like, avoiding more pathogens. So when people are looking for that solution, we have the Unleash. It’s NPK mobilizing microbe, and it’s designed mainly to supply nitrogen to the plant, mobilize any nitrogen that may be fixed and locked out in the medium, as well as doing the same thing with phosphates. And converting those phosphates into plant uptake will forms as well. There’s also some other microbes in there that are helping with general disease resistance, as well as making sugars and different enzymes that the plant can use, facilitating more of an organic process on top of just the traditional synthetic ion exchange. The other product that we’re offering is the Bioflow. So that one’s actually really, really cool. And we’ve seen a lot of killer results with that across the board. It’s made to, or it’s designed as a irrigation mine soap. So as part of a treatment that you’re using in your, your irrigation system. It’s all microbial, so it’s plant-friendly. So what we’re recommending is that people are using it overnight or for like, a minimum of four hours in the lines. That way, it’s breaking down any biofilm that’s building up, any kind of nutrient scale, and making it into a flowable form that in most situations isn’t going to affect the plant in a negative way. The worst thing you might see from it, if you got really nasty lines, there might be some chunky stuff that’s coming out the first time you use it.

 

Matt:  That’s what you want.

 

Leland:  And that’s what you want, or it’s gonna have a really low pH, which is also you know, a sign that it’s working. But I’ve seen, I’ve seen that take care of some of the gnarliest irrigation line problems where people wanted to throw, throw their whole system away.

 

Chip:  Right. Wow, that’s great. I can’t wait to get into that a little bit more. So these are the core products and, and people use these type of products in all different ways. But the man, that the most exciting way or the, I should say the most conversation we have is with fertilizer injectors. And I kind of like to go right into that on how to learn stock solutions, fertilizer injections, and, and let’s, let’s hop down that rabbit hole as they like to say.

 

Leland:  Absolutely.

 

Matt:  Definitely. Yeah, and they’re, I would say that’s what our product is designed for specifically. It’s great for going direct in the res, it works awesome for that. But from original intent, the math behind it, we really saw it being a you know, great for injection systems. And so the products themselves are pretty easy. We have some videos now that you can look up whether it’s on Instagram, [inaudible 9:30] as well. And some other resources in terms of just watching it happen. But there’s a pound or gram per gallon that you use to make the stock concentrate. You mix it up and and then you start injecting at a really, really high level. And we, our instructions are so simple, where if you’re saying you’re making 55 gallon drums, we tell you to put X amount of 25 pound bags into the 55 gallon drum while you’re filling it up, top it off and then give you instructions to test it to make sure it’s accurate and correct. And then you’re off to the races from there.

 

Chip:  So when you have these stock solutions, you have to constantly mix these things up?

 

Matt:  No, no.

 

Chip:  Okay. 

 

Matt:  Well yeah –

 

Chip:  We’ve got customers out on you know, farmland that are, have like totes and large 40 gallon a minute type dosers, you know what I’m talking about. So yes, totally fine for this just to dump the product in the reservoir, let it sit there, you don’t have to mix it up after it’s mixed.

 

Matt:  Or after it’s mixed. Leland:’s looking at me sideways here. Yeah. The, once yeah, so as you’re, as you’re putting the, the dry powder in the water to make the stock concentrate for the first time, there needs to be agitation and it needs to be mixing.

 

Chip:  Like a paddle or, or you know, a pump, or like –

 

Matt:  Our recommendation is, is the the weaker the agitation, the longer you need to mix it. If it’s mixing vigorously, you’ll watch it. I mean, within minutes to seconds, it’s in there. But much like mixing salt and water, that’s gonna get it all to come off the bottom and look like it’s swirling around. You need to keep mixing it beyond that for some time just to make sure it’s all homogenized and in solution. But everything in it still water-soluble, you follow the instructions, it’s going to dissolve. So if you find that there’s something at the bottom or something isn’t mixed, it’s probably because you added it too fast. Or, you know, hit the bottom, or it didn’t have water in there first. We see a variety of different things, but uh –

 

Chip:  Right, absolutely. What’s the best way to mix this product up? If you’re telling you know, me, Chip: at the Baker Ranch, like hey, how do I, how do you mix it up to 55 gallons? How do you do it?

 

Matt:  So yeah, in 55 gallons?

 

Chip:  No man, let’s say a tote, let’s say a tote.

 

Matt:  So the best way is to like, Mixer Directs Company. You can get it online and they make really high quality industrial mixers that actually go right on top of 250 gallon totes. Or they size them for cone bottoms, or even barrels, they have barrel –

 

Chip:  What’s that, what’s that brand again?

 

Matt:  Mixer Directs, I think they’re out of Kentucky. 

 

Chip:  Mixer Direct. Okay.

 

Matt:  But that’s what we’ve used for gosh, for almost a decade to buy our impellers. But they make them for 55 gallon drums, totes, and huge vats, if you want to.

 

Chip:  Okay.

 

Matt:  But, I would say ideally, you buy an impeller from them that size for your container, they’ll help you out with that. And then you would fill up the, whatever the container is, a drum, a tote halfway up with water, start to get it mixing slowly with that impeller and the water moving, and then start to add the salt. You’ll see the water volume come up. Keep it mixing, add the bags of salt and then top it off to the volume that is your target,  and then check the solution.

 

Chip:  Man you make it, you make it sound so easy. And the math is on your websites, right?

 

Matt:  Oh, it’s on our mixing charts, our websites everywhere. It’s right on the front of the bag actually, in the instructions right on the bag. Yep.

 

Chip:  So, so I can just look up the feed chart for my totes which are these large like, how do you guys I mean, they come in all sizes. How do you guys say the size, 200 gallon or 275?

 

Matt:  I just say it’s a 250 to [inaudible 12:57].

 

Chip:  However many gallons they want in it to stabilize the – alright. So like, we have 275 and we call them two hundreds and we fill it to the 200 one, right?

 

Matt:  And so one time, whether you’re a new customer, or as you call us, like you call Leland or you read the instructions, which is very clear, you would have 200 gallons you’d like, okay, well, in a 50 gallon drum, I put in three bags. So in a 200 gallon tote, I’m gonna put three times four is 12 bags. And that’s it, you know, fill it up to 100 gallons or so, and your 200 gallon tote. Slowly start adding the 12 bags while it’s mixing, maybe a little bit of water as you with that to displacement. And then –

 

Chip:  Cold water? I can use –

 

Matt:  Right so two things here, there’s a little bit of –

 

Chip:  Those be out on the farm, man, you know –

 

Matt:  Room temperature or hot. But if –

 

Chip:  It’s better.

 

Matt:  Yeah, if it’s warm, it’s going to mix better. If it’s –

 

Chip:  Alright, what if it’s coming right out of the ground? ‘Cause that, many of these people you know, and myself, we have to come right out of the ground into like, our water store area.

 

Matt:  Ideally above 65 or 66. But the lower the temperature is, you’re gonna have to mix it longer. 

 

Leland:  [inaudible 14:04] solution, longer mixing, yep.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just got to put some time into mixing it.

 

Matt:  Yeah, I mean, if you’re using a 58 degree water, trust me, it’ll go in, but you’re going to spend two or three hours mixing that.

 

Chip:  Right, right. And with this, with the, with the agitating mixer you were talking about, you just turn it on and walk away.

 

Matt:  Yeah, I mean, and we don’t recommend this but we’ve, were at a grow doing a site visit in Washington a couple weeks ago. And the guy had an impeller on the end of a cordless drill. 

 

Chip:  Sure.

 

Matt:  30 seconds to a minute, we sat there. And it was definitely mixed in the solution. And then we came back about every five minutes and mixed it for 15 minutes, and called it good after, I mean after about 15, 20 minutes.

 

Chip:  Oh, right.

 

Matt:  Then it got mixed three or four times and it was good to go. I told him I would say you know, I would definitely mix it longer. But it validated, it checked out and that’s the tools you had on hand. So yeah.

 

Chip:  Alright, right. I mean, you could use a paddle you just, you know might have to like, you know –

 

Leland:  You’ll sit there for a while.

 

Chip:  Yeah, l mean that’s how we used to make ice cream right?

 

Matt:  People use Monde pumps in the bottom, I mean, but it’s, like Leland: said,  it just lower agitation, longer mixing time, lower temperature, longer mixing time.

 

Leland:  You can let it sit and mix overnight, or you can heat up your water overnight and mix into warm water. You know, there’s, there’s a couple different ways to solve it. Yeah, generally the recommendation, just because I like things easy is to try and get the water hot. So if I know that I’m going to have temperature issues, mixing my stock tanks, then I’ll plan for it, it’s something you only have to do every month or two.

 

Chip:  Dump all my water out of the well into the stock tanks one day, come back the day later, and it’s gonna be –

 

Leland:  Another yeah. Another note is that you’d want to use RO water if you’re gonna be mixing stock concentrates, just because the carbonates and other minerals that you’ll find in the well are gonna interact with the mix, it’s a concentrated mixture.

 

Chip:  So you just spend some time and get the RO on the stock tank –

 

Leland:  Only on the concentrates.

 

Chip:  Yeah, only on the concentrates.

 

Matt:  And remember, a really good point though is we do find to which is interesting,  people will mix smaller volumes for some reason. And once it’s mixed in solution, I mean, whether it’s weeks or months, unless you’re sitting on a freezing cold floor outside or something crazy, it’s going to stay in solution for an incredibly long period of time. So mix something that lasts you several weeks to a month, a month and a half. Not something every other day.

 

Chip:  Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got our, we’ve got our stock tank, we have our totes, they’re out on the farm, they’re on the back 40. Literally, that’s what we call it, the back 40. We’re on the back 40 –

 

Matt:  Thought this was someone else. 

 

Chip:  And, quote unquote. Nothing for sale here, everything’s legal.

 

Zach:  You know, and then we’re taking our injectors of choice, you know, dose trying and kind of sets the standard in the game.

 

Chip:  We’ve used it all. That’s what we use currently. We sell them every single day at Cultivate Colorado, we’re probably one of their largest vendors for it so.

 

Zach:  You have set up many happy customers with those trumps, I have seen that.

 

Matt:  Yeah, I think we’re, what we’re talking about today it’s the, a good injection ranges anywhere from 0.2% up to the 2%. injectors, which is like the [inaudible 17:12].

 

Leland:  Yep. Yeah, the MC-2.

 

Matt:  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

 

Leland:  That’s a great, great little workhorse. But uh, yeah, so as far as injection goes, and if you’re following our instructions, you’re injecting at around 1:250 ratio. So that’s sitting you anywhere between, you know, like around 20 to 22 milliliters per gallon in veg, if you want to feel like you would typical liquid nutrients. All the way to like, if you’re using all three parts in flower, we’d be closer to 10 to 15 milliliters. So it’s got a little bit of a range. And mixing in no liquid makes it easier to make those adjustments if you wanted to, if you’re looking to be hitting a target EC. After everything’s mixed, it’s all being used at a one to one ratio. So you know, if you’re using 14 mLs of A, using 14 of B, 14 in Bloom.

 

Chip:  So you know, you just mentioned something many of our customers do use Dositrons and they’re great, you know, siphoning injection system. There’s many other types. And one of the types that we frequently see customers come in, they have like a high rate of 1  to 1 hundredth, or just a set rate of 1 to 100 when they come in. How do you use your product that way?

 

Matt:  Well, Leland actually – and the only reason I was interrupting was because he helped build some of the sheets for our fixed injection rates. 

 

Chip:  Great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This comes up every day, because quite, question almost every day.

 

Leland:  Yeah. So assuming that you’re mixing our formula to our instructions on this coming  at around a 1 to 250, maybe 1 to 200 ratio. So you’re literally just going to be cutting our application rates in half. If you have a fixed injection rate of 1 to 100. Or if it’s a 1 to 350, which is pretty common too, then you can mix our concentrates even worse, even more concentrated. But we’re only at about 20 to 30% of our maximum solubility. So you can mix it even stronger if you want, it’s going to be…

 

Chip:  If it’s a 1 to 100 hundredth injector, how do you mix it?

 

Leland:  So you’re going to take our recommended rates and just cut that in half. So for recommending for a 55 gallon drum, and you’re adding four bags of A to mix your stock concentrate, you’re just going to add two bags of A. Now one thing, one thing to note, if you’re going to be doing that and mixing at a lower concentration, is that you’re probably only going to have about two weeks to a month of usage rate out of that concentrate. Since it’s at that lower rate, it’s –

 

Zach:  It’s going to eat it up.

 

Leland:  Stuff can, stuff can start growing in there a little easier, yeah. 

 

Matt:  Yeah. I think what Leland’s trying to say too, is it’s probably smarter too, than go through it faster. Because it’s, because it’s so diluted, but you’re injecting twice as much. 

 

Chip:  Oh, right. Because it’s, I see, I see. Conservative issue associated with all the product too, so there’s more water in it and right.

 

Leland:  Yeah, and in our typical concentrate, you can put it in a clear, in a clear jug and nothing will grow in it. Because the pH is so low and there’s so much fertilizer in it. Now you start cutting it and it’s a prime area for anything to grow in a petri dish.

 

Chip:  Okay, so that’s how we make stock concentrates for reservoirs. What if I want to make a gallon stock concentrate to be, to be used out? Is it the same way?

 

Leland:  Same way.

 

Chip:  Same way.

 

Matt:  Sorry – no, I was just gonna say our five pound instructions for either smaller commercial facilities or hobbyists, it’s the same instruction sheet that we have. You know, instead of being in a, in a 55 or 50 gallon drum, it’s in a five gallon bucket and or, you know, what, or one of the old liquid nutrient five gallons you’ve kept people make them in that all the time.

 

Chip:  Yeah, those are great, because then you can just – well, the two and a halves are great, because you can shake it up. Shake it up.

 

Matt:  And in our instructions too now are, we try to avoid using a scale to make this stock concentrate because it’s easier and faster. We say, X amount of bags for X amount of gallons and then check it. And it’s either if it’s too strong, cut it a little bit. 

 

Chip:  On the smaller scale, you have to weigh it out.

 

Matt:  Yeah, well, yeah. And you can , you can.

 

Chip:  You can. Right, right, right, right. And then they had that stock gallon or two and a half gallon, and they take that and there’s instructions also on your website on how to use that stock solution by the tablespoon or the milliliter reservoir.

 

Leland:  Yeah, same way we’re used to do it.

 

Chip:  Right. Same way you’re used to. Alright, so you’re basically making your own fertilizer, right? At home or at your you know, at your grow, you bring in dry powder, which is easier to get in, which is more cost effective, it’s better for the world. You’re making your own stock concentrate that you’re keeping in your own one gallon, two and a half gallon, five gallon, 55 Gallon, 200 gallon. And then you get to use it you know, at will. You can use it with a injection system at varying injection rates, or by the milliliter or tablespoon per gallon in a traditional reservoir.

 

Matt:  You can go right out of the bag dry, right into your reservoirs as well.

 

Chip:  Yeah, let man, let because you don’t have to make a stock concentrate.

 

Matt:  No, you do not. And I would say –

 

Chip:  Most people don’t.

 

Matt:  Exactly. As much as I want people to, to inject and make our stock concentrate and enjoy that, I would say a super majority of our customers actually go right out of the bag into a reservoir like we all did. One thing I wanted to mention on shipping costs that’s kind of mind boggling is on a pallet of liquid product, you can fit 200 gallons on that pallet. We get, or 250 if you order a tote, where you can put the equivalent in dry of 2000 gallons of stock concentrate, that fits on that same palette. And then also typically our shipping costs instead of shipping that weight of water, and then because the units, it’s about five to 10 times cheaper in shipping as well.

 

Chip:  Shipping it’s, it’s such an economic cost and environmental cost, man. There’s more than one way to care about the environment than just growing organically and it’s shipping and packaging, you know movement of people in materials over space and time. Man, we really got to think about that as an industry and as businesses. One, It makes us more money the more effective we are with it., but it’s better for the world.

 

Matt:  Keep telling Zach to stop flying his private jet everywhere.

 

Chip:  Oh, Zach, what kind of jet you got?

 

Zach:  I can’t tell you. We’ll go, leading off of that, and I guess this is something that I like to focus on a lot is that us compared to some of our competitors to reach a desired outcome of your EC, a lot of these other companies that are powdered, dry fertilizers, you’re having to hit numbers, sometimes double the amount of the input that you can reach a high or desired EC than with ours. So let’s just say by chance, you know, it’s competitor A or whatever it is, to reach 2.0 EC are using let’s just say, 4 grams across the board each of ours. So you’d have to use 6 or 8, even, even more grams per gallon to reach that 2.0 EC. So, not only are you having a savings originally when you buy our product not only from dry to dry, but also dry a liquid. But then on top of it, the savings comes in from the amount that you use grams per gallon or mLs per gallon to equal your desired EC.

 

Matt:  And we do, we hear that all the time as well. I had to use this product at 30 EC and I want to use yours at a 24 or 25, and you’ll compare the product and it’s well at 2.4, we have the same ppm of nitrogen and potassium phosphorus and meaningful things. But in order to achieve those same rates of micros or even macros, they have to use substantially more conductivity to get the same amount of, same amount of product that we offer.

 

Chip:  Hey guys, just a quick break to tell you about Cultivate OKC, Cultivate Colorado. You know, I got into the hydroponic supply business 2009. I had wanted to open up a retail hydroponic store for years and I was already making potting so at that point, maybe some fertilizers and some other stuff I was into. You know, I hadn’t opened up a retail shop and got this opportunity to open one up in California. Right as I was fixing open up down in Riverside, Colorado came along. Ended up being better bigger opportunity. Opened up our Colorado stores and you know, man is just we’ve been off to the races ever since. Now, we’re in Colorado and in Oklahoma, we ship all over the country and even the world, man. It’s amazing the people that call us, contact us that needs, that need some, some, some equipment to grow their fine cannabis with. So if you need any help, any equipment, you want to come to a great grow store where people don’t judge you, we’re not clique-oriented, we’re just there to help you grow. Man, come see us at Cultivate. Cultivate Colorado, we’re on exit 206 I-25. We’re also on the Stapleton Monaco exit there on I-70. And down in Oklahoma City, our newest store and man probably our nicest showroom right now is we’re right on the corner of 10th in Meridian. So come check us out, 1101 North Meridian. Yeah, man. Got any questions about growing no matter if you’re big or small, just come on in. We’ll be glad to chat with you. Hey, guys, I know everyone who’s listening. We all love The Real Dirt. I mean, I love The Real Dirt. But you know what I love even more than The Real Dirt is actually growing in dirt. That’s right, Growers high porosity coco formula, that’s my potting soil. Man, I’ve gone through so much trouble and research to build the cleanest, most effective potting soil for growing cannabis. Man, we built all this stuff inside. I break all the pallets, all the raw materials down on, on the morning. I push it through our machine, we use a series of conveyor belts, there’s no cross contamination, everything’s machine mixed. It’s all made and mixed by volume. It goes directly into bag. By the end of the day, everything that we started at the start of the day, all the raw materials, they’ve turned into bagged product that’s all stored inside. Now, the importance of this is many, many other, every other potting soil company, they don’t do it like that. Here’s how they do it. They take their raw materials, whether it’s coco, peat, perlite, pumice, compost, sand, whatever they got, and they make a huge pile of it outside with big industrial equipment. They use tons of diesel to do this, tons of diesel fuel on the grinders, on the screeners, on the loaders. And they leave the huge piles out that’s just like, the petri dish for cross contamination from weed seeds, bugs, whatever, whatever is capable of living in it. And it does and it will, and then they take these piles and they bring them into another facility that’s probably also not indoors, very few of them are. They’re usually covered tin sheds or something like that. And they, they bag up the potting soil, they wrap it up, pallet it up, clean it off nice and pretty. And then when it gets shipped to you, you think it’s this great product, but in reality, it’s just like some dirt on the ground that people have shoveled up and put it in a nice plastic bag. And the potential for it to be full with everything from root aphids to fungus gnats to contaminants., it is just, it’s mind- boggling actually. At how bad it could be and it’s really not that bad comparatively, but our product is so clean. We go through so much trouble from the RO water to the clean cement, to the way that we move all this product around with conveyor belts instead of using big loaders. I mean, I’ve been making potting soil most of my adult life and I’m now using 1/10th of the petroleum products to make this potting soil. 1/10th. And that’s almost all in diesel fuel, all in propane with forklifts. Because of the way that we’ve situated our plant and made it this really great, environmentally friendly weed-bug-seed-free product. So check it out man, growerscoco.com. Hop on your computer right now. Go to growerscoco.com. Check out our website. If we’re not in your community., ask your local grow store. He can get it in if you’re in Colorado or an Oklahoma, man, come to some Cultivates and we definitely got it. Thanks guys and let’s get back to the episode.

 

Chip:  So we get the stock tank solution question all the time, we get this question of do I have to make a stock tank. No, you can go right from the powder into your reservoir. Man, the other like, like thing people talk to us about especially here in Oklahoma but also with hemp growers throughout the US is like, how to use it outdoors in the ground, right?

 

Matt:  That’s a great question. Part of, kind of like our water testing, one thing that we do or we look at and we offer and one of the partners at Front Rows is [inaudible 30:26], is we read and analyze your soil tests. Any farmer that’s going to grow outside or cultivator that’s going to grow outside and wants to put their plants in the ground, the first thing we recommend as hiring a company like like Waypoint, for instance, testing your soil. Just taking a standard soil test and going out there and figuring out, “Okay, what’s my [inaudible 30:45], my pH, my organic composition, my pounds of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, everything out there. And then we’ll actually look at that with the farmer or the grower. And we’ll say, “Okay, well, you already have this amount of nutrients in the field based on how much the crop is going to use from and the length of your crop. This is what you’ll need to start amending with our product at some point.” And same thing again, though, they can make into a liquid concentrate and inject it in their drip system, they can put it in giant reservoirs, and you know, using on sprinkler heads, whether it’s a center pivot or actual heads. At that point, we see a variety of different things. But we always start with them on a soil test because they might have no food in their, in their field, and need a you know, fertilizer from all of our products. Or they might only need one of our products for two weeks at the end, because the field is super rich in fertilizer already.

 

Leland:  Another point to add to that is, a lot of people like to kind of give salts a bad name, wrecking the earth and polluting the water with nitrates and phosphates.

 

Chip:  ‘Cause that used to be the case, they used to have inferior quality fertilizer.

 

Leland:  Absolutely.

 

Chip:  That’s not what you guys have.

 

Leland:  No, this isn’t an ammonia based fertilizer. Um, you know, like we do, we do rely on some synthetic nitrates, that’s the majority of products out there, even if they’re claiming to be organic, there’s not a lot of soluble forms of calcium out there that don’t include a nitrate with them. So that being said, we’re delivering about 20% less nitrogen to a field as a conventional farmer would recommend. And doing that with the most practical, responsible forms of irrigation possible. So like, we’ll always be recommending is, drip system to be going into a field. That way, we can deliver precise amounts of irrigation, know exactly what the roots are getting in terms of the fertilizer and not just trying to do a broad application, even though it will work in conventional systems. And I’d rather somebody be doing that than throwing, I’d rather somebody use 250 pounds of Front rRw per acre than, and spend a little bit more money versus throwing 200 pounds of ammonium nitrate on a field and hoping for the best. So you’re going to get as much nitrogen out of our system, with our drip system or subterranean system delivering water directly to the root zone. And I mean, there’s guys who conventional corn farmers and wheat farmers who have watched hemp growers row crop and do really, really well with plastic mulch in a drip system, to the point where they’ve gone through and done in the next year for their heirloom strains and hit record yields out of their fields. It’s something that, it’s on the forefront of agriculture, if you don’t see, if you see it as a problem, look at it as a solution to a problem, and to transition into a more responsible way to farm.

 

Chip:  ROI comes in so many different ways on a farm.

 

Leland:  Exactly.

 

Chip:  That’s for sure. And you know, one of the ways we see many organizations have problems, cultivations, they’ll reorganize their facility, they’ll bring somebody in as a manager, a CFO, and the first thing he wants to do, the easiest thing he wants to do to make himself look good. Hey, you guys are in this position, either don’t do it or recognize it, it’s happened, the first thing they do is like, we’re gonna cut our production costs, and we’re gonna get the cheaper shit. And man, you know, there’s one thing and getting the same thing, the exact same product at a better discount from a vendor. But like when you, when you say you’re going to get a cheaper product, there’s outcomes that you pay for, right? And that cheap product, you know, you will lose out in time and wait, right? Time, the most crucial part of it, right? But by using these these higher quality cannabis specific dry soluble fertilizers, just like Front Row Ag, man, that ROI comes back immediately within 90 days, as soon as you harvest, you know, especially on large scale, it comes back.

 

Matt:  If you’re spending less than 1% of the gross revenue that your product brings in on fertilizer, then you’re exactly where you need to be. And I would say we’re well below that. And so there are products you should spend money on though, is what I’m getting at.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah.

 

Matt:  Like Leland brought up in terms of fertilizers you shouldn’t spend your money on as well. 

 

Chip:  Yeah. So we’re talking outdoor in the ground. What about outdoor and pots?

 

Matt:  Yeah, same thing. We [inaudible 34:58], I mean, I run some pretty large outdoor grows and pots, yeah.

 

Chip:  Oh yeah, I’m a container grower. I love it, man. I love it.

 

Matt:  You get 45 and 50 gallon pots, we use 12 foot metal stakes, we drive into the ground, put up a shade ourselves and then run trails and it’s kind of like growing an indoor plant huge outside. It’s eight foot by six foot centers.

 

Chip:  Oh wow and 40 gallon pot. So you’re like, you’re like feeding it, feeding it constantly with Front Row.

 

Matt:  Yeah, beginning, well, beginning of the season, we like to definitely let our plants dry down in terms of letting the roots spread promoting oxygen in the soil, at the sites that we’re running. But, uh, yeah, I mean, the plant goes in typically coming out of a one gallon into that one large pot, and it’s going to dry down for several weeks, between its first irrigation and watering, and its second one. And then pretty rapidly, the irrigation events get quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker. And at some point in flower, we’re watering, you know, sometimes every day to every couple days, and those giant pots, still. I mean, you have some plants that are easily six to eight feet tall and [inaudible 35:57] out if not still 10 feet tall.

 

Chip:  I love containers of all size. But you know the thing, the great thing outside about like that 30, 45 gallon container is, you know, you really get to feed it like an indoor plant. You know, you can get them huge, but I like the smaller plants. And we’ve even run like four plants and a 440 gallon pot, you know, four foot tall, and it just be this. I mean, the some of the highest weight we’ve ever seen, honestly, you know, it’s basically out of a pot. But it far be the just single huge monster plant out of it. But yeah, we, so small containers, big containers, it doesn’t matter, you can, you can use the same, same fertilizer rates as you would indoors.

 

Matt:  Well I mean, and this is important actually, internally, we’ve been talking about this as how to address different feed charts and pot sizes and things of that nature. And without going down a giant rabbit hole, generally, the larger and larger and larger the pot gets, and the longer of time you have between an irrigation event, you need to increase the EC pretty proportionately too. You know, so if you’re in a 5 gallon to a 25 gallon, there needs to be a substantial increase in the conductivity you’re feeding in the start of that schedule and how it tapers down. And then the other thing is, is when there’s a large amount of time between irrigating and you’re using a high quality fertilizer that’s acidic, the pH is going to drive down as well. So you need to actually feed at a higher pH as well.

 

Chip:  Higher pH meaning?

 

Matt:  Well as you know, so a lot of times, you know, if you’re feeding it say  a 2.0 and a 6,0 pH, the 2.0 you see and a 6.0, and you’re in a three gallon. Let’s say then you step it up even into a five gallon and you’re feeding at 24, you already should be feeding at maybe like a 6.2 or 6.3. And then if you’re transplanting and when we transplant into five gallons, or even seven gallons, we’ll feed as high as 2.8, 3.0 UC. And at that point, our pH is you know, 6.5 to 6.7. And then but still, we’ll watch it dry down for 20 some days between that, that really heavy irrigation and sticking in the clone. And you’ll get the runoff and it’ll be in the low to mid fives actually by the time we would irrigate again. And that’s how far it’s come down. But if you fed that plant in at 6.0, I mean, the pH would be in the really, really low fives to high fours, and the plant wouldn’t look good. Like drafting proportionally, somebody’s gonna make the graph someday, of you know the drawback of given media’s coco, rock or peat moss, even probably different soil blends uhm, showing as they dry back X amount of percent, 10%, the EC is going to go up by 10% as well. And the pH is going to decrease by X amount of percent depending on the components, the fertilizer. So as your media dries out, and the plant leaves some of those ions on the table that are registering a charge, the water becomes more concentrated, so to speak. So if you’re going in to, like Matt said, by the time the plant’s ready for another drink, there’s probably a lot of unused fertilizers still left in that source water or stuff that’s been displaced and exchanged with the media, that you’re either going to be rinsing out or rehydrating with the plant uptake.

 

Matt:  A misconception too and in growing, potted liner is I guess from – I’m using the ag term – anything that’s in a container, whether it’s a one gallon to 200 gallon. It’s been a misconception in the cannabis industry that there’s no other plant that’s grown this way, in a potted liner or you’ll open a book that tells you to grow it this way which is start off at a lighter, a lighter feed solution and increase it as the plant gets more mature and drinks faster. Every plant that’s going to contain a potted liner would be recommended from a peer reviewed source to be watered in a way that when the dry down is longer, and the, let the roots spread fastest and the plant to grow at the fastest rate, you want to be the highest availability of food when a drink, when there’s the longest amount of time between irrigating. Then, as the plant starts to drink faster and faster and faster and faster, and you water more and more often, you cut the feed solution so you don’t burn your crop. And that would be how any period read source would actually tell you to grow rhododendrons or roses or chrysanthemums.

 

Chip:  So opposite of the way the cannabis industry does which is like, start it off soft and then jacket, right? Jack it and then go soft.

 

Leland:  And you’ll see our feed chart as well. Our feed chart, whether it’s a two gallon or a three gallon feed chat, or we’re telling you to grow in a large pot, it’s going to start off at a high conductivity and taper off as you irrigate more rapidly.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, no, I have noticed that on your, your formulation. And I’ve had people ask me about it. And I’m like, I don’t know, just follow the chart. Everybody does it, it works. Right? 

 

Leland:  Good answer. 

 

Chip:  It’s a good answer. And, you know, I mean, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been involved in agriculture my whole life. And though I almost had this really inquisitive phase, where I wanted to know reasons for everything, and there’s just too much question in the world. And so I’ve had to, like, reduce, like, where I want my brain power to be, right? And sometimes I just like, I don’t know how it works, I don’t care, right? Because I got my brain power on something else, to me might be more important. And I don’t necessarily want to, like know, like everything about, you know, a bug or a fertilizer. Even though I’m interested in all that –

 

Leland:  Yeah you wish you could, but you gotta move past it.

 

Chip:  Yeah, you just gotta, gotta move past it. For instance, you know, people ask me all the time about, “Hey, can you identify this bug?” And I’m like, “No, but I can tell you what can take care of it,” right? You know, because it’s also solution-oriented. And that’s back to the like, follow the feed chart. Everybody says it works. Just do what they say, right? So outdoor, in the ground, outdoor in the pots, you know, greenhouse in the pot, same as outdoor in the pots, right?

 

Matt:  I mean, greenhouse, indoor, outdoor, I mean, a lot of containers, a lot of for us is understanding your environment too. Like, we’ll talk to you when you, when you call Leland or Farmer John or any of the guys, myself included, we’ll be, we’ll talk to you about, well what’s your lighting intensity? How dry it is, how humid it is, you know, what’s going on in the space? And the pot size, the media you’re growing in. And we’ll talk about all these different things and have a discussion instead of just you know, being your normal consultant that says, “Here’s what you have to do. And you got to do it now,” and never listens to you.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, man, when we’re done with this, we’ll go next door and you can tell us how to do it, man. My wife has a clone nursery dispensary just right next door. It’s Baker’s Medical, it’s in OKC. We’ll go over there next you guys could check me. Yeah, you saw it earlier. That’s right, Matt. We’ll go over there and you guys can give me like a detailed on what we’re doing. We got some like, random things, you know, we’re just like, “Oh, the plants don’t look healthy, change this or that.” We’ll look and see what the mills of everything are currently. And you guys can give me some idea, right? The technical advice has been incredible here. We’ve talked about stocks, tanks, we talked about reservoirs, indoor, outdoor greenhouse, man. And we’ve talked about pH significantly. But I really want to talk about this, because this is something that confuses people. And like, here in Oklahoma, the pH out of the, out of the ground or out of the tab is like 8.5 often. And you know, like what’s the best way to deal with PH in your product? And or some of the ways that are the best ways to accomplish this?

 

Leland:  In terms of pH in the product, when you’re using it?

 

Chip:  pH in the product, you’re using or if you’re in a situation that’s like, a large scale outside where you can’t necessarily pH it or how do you deal with it?

 

Matt:  Well, we’d check your ppm. So if you’re, if you’re historically , if you have a high pH in your source water, and when I mean a high pH , it’s above 8, there’s a lot of carbonate and bicarbonate in the water, about 50% of the water is going to be carbonate bicarbonate. So if you have 400 parts per million water, 200 parts per million of that 8 to 8.5 or 9 pH is going to be carbonate bicarbonate. And that’s important though, because that’s easy to get rid of. You can put in holding tanks and actually just use acid and precipitate off all that bicarbonate, and that’s filtering your water through acid injection basically. And then the other thing is, is understanding what the remainder of that water is. If it’s calcium or magnesium –

 

Chip:  What kind of acid?

 

Leland:  You could use phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid.

 

Zach:  And you can get lysergic if you have enough of it.

 

Chip:  Oh, excellent, that’s my choice.

 

Leland:  But yeah, you can go –

 

Chip:  But you don’t want that to go down.

 

Leland:  if you’re concerned about clogs –

 

Zach:  You’d be using like, four grams a gallon. Not very cost effective.

 

Leland:  But no yeah, and if you’re concerned about cost, sulfuric acid spray probably the cheapest.

 

Chip:  Yeah, it’s, sulfuric acid is common in the agriculture industry, right?

 

Leland:  Oh, all the time.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

 

Matt:  They  take up in a lot of places. That’s what I would I would look at first is what is what’s, what’s my water? You know, what is that 400 or, or 800 part per million? Because a lot of the time it’s not a big deal. You can get rid of you know, half of the bad things in it with acid and then you use some of the remainder of it, you can probably use.

 

Chip:  Right. And so you just like, have a big holding tank, drop the pH with sulfuric acid, and the bicarbonate drops out of solution. 

 

Leland:  It actually turns into CO2 and off gases.

 

Chip:  Okay, excellent. So you don’t even have any reservoir sediment at the bottom of your tank.

 

Leland:  No, no. And then –

 

Chip:  And do you have to drop your pH at any level for that? Or just…

 

Leland:  Around, below five is recommended. That’s a really loose recommendation, because say someone who’s using RO water, which is not part of this conversation, it would take such a small amount to get it to be that go down. But in high pH water, I would say get it below five, and then check it often, about every hour to three hours, if you check it, you’ll start to watch the pH drift upward. And that’s your acid actually working and precipitating off of the carbonate. But if it keeps drifting up, it means that there’s not enough in there. So you want it to hold pH actually. 

 

Chip:  Okay. So you drop it to 5, and then it holds pH at..?

 

Leland:  It should stay around 5, but you’ll watch it go up and then add a little more so that you can get it to stay there.

 

Chip:  I see. And then when you reuse it in your reservoir, you just add, you just the new, you increase the pH or the fertilizer..?

 

Leland:  I would keep track of how much you use the first couple times, because then you’ll probably use about that same amount of acid every single time. And then at that point, if there’s not, if you haven’t used an excessive amount, run it in your injectors, and then use pH up to correct it. You’ll have added enough acid to precipitate off the bicarbonate, but there won’t be a lot left over to ruin the water quality. So then, just run it in your injectors and use pH up would be my recommendation. And at that point, we recommend potassium carbonate for the pH.

 

Chip:  Oh, okay. Sure. Sure,.

 

Leland:  Just like tables.

 

Chip:  You’re mixing them immediately with the Dositrons.

 

Leland:  Yeah, if you’re doing that, or if you’re going into a reservoir, pump it into a giant reservoir, throw in the fertilizer, and then adjust the pH just like you would with anything else. But ideally, ideally, if you’re you know, if you’re on a well, and you’re having to condition your water beforehand, you can get it to where you’ve got the perfect ratio of bicarbonate. That way, you don’t have to pH anymore, and you can kind of set it and adjust based on how heavy you’re going to be feeding and no, I’m adding less acidity later on in my cycle, so I’m going to need a little bit more aggressive of a pH. 

 

Chip:  That’s a great tip. I was trying to get to that earlier. So like you know, the best thing to do is to drop it down to 5 initially and get it to go up to 6.

 

Leland:  Yeah, if you’re anticipating it’s gonna rise by 10% or so. Um, you know, if that’s what you’ve seen is everybody’s gonna have a different experience. Water is pretty fickle. 

 

Matt:  I’m gonna say though the fertilizer takes about 80 to 120 parts per million bicarbonate carbonate to pH it like he said. To about you know, and that’s if you’re feeding anywhere from 1.6 up to 2.5. It’ll take between 80 and 120 parts per million. But if you leave some amount in there, then you won’t need pH up. It’ll just come out and then adjust itself.

 

Chip:  Sure. Sure. Now, I get it, man. Oh, man, that’s a great tip for so many people’s watering  at home, man.

 

Matt:  Yeah, ’cause that would be about right., somewhere in like the, you would want it to drift up to like the mid 6s.

 

Chip:  Mhm. Okay, okay. 

 

Leland:  I have the lucky water. I had Front Row at like 2.2, EC. My water goes down to about 5.9. And it’ll usually be resting at about 6.3, which for me is perfect watering daily in coco. 

 

Chip:  So many growers in Oklahoma are going to just rewind this past eight minutes and listen to this pH thing. This is such a crucial issue here. Because the water quality and then the bug pressure, right? And as soon as you get you know, off pH you know the bug pressure comes in, the mold comes in and it’s you know, your yields are going down and your water consumption;s changing. It’s like pH is just so crucial. And it’s often misunderstood. So many people don’t think you need to adjust the pH, especially if you’re using organic ingredients. And maybe there’s some argument for that. But most people that’s not the case at all. You have to control your pH no matter what your fertilizer source, right? In some way, it’s got to balance each other out, right? Acidity and alkalinity or you have to force the balance.

 

Matt:  Yeah. Soil’s got to control the pH , the water’s got to control the pH, but one of them has to.

 

Chip:  Yeah, one of them have to. You have to know what it is. It’s one of the most important things about growing cannabis.

 

Zach:  And we can also like you said, if they keep rewinding, and we can, if they just go on to the website, and leave their information, put an email in there. Matt, I’m sure can write up a candid email about this and then be able to send it off. So people have that as well.

 

Leland:  All of this conversation all day, that was, that was eight minutes of my life right there. Guys, reach out.

 

Matt:  Yeah. And then back to using your water, I think to be clear, the worst water contaminant that we’re looking for is sodium usually. I mean, we look for heavy metals, but they’re rare. We’ll look for nitrates, because they’re not good for people. But when we, when Leland: and I get a water report nine times out of 10, we’re looking for sodium. And we check out the calcium magnesium rates. But if your water starts to get above 30, 40 parts per million sodium, that’s going to, no matter what you’re using, it’s going to start affecting your quality in some shape or form. But if it’s not there and it’s bicarbonates and calcium, and magnesium, and other things, it’s very usable water.

 

Chip:  Right. Yeah, absolutely. Well man, I think it’s the perfect time to take a break. This has been The – and is, this is The Real Dirt. And today, it’s The Real Dirt with Front Row Ag. Hey, roll up another fat one. Look up one of my websites called cultivatecolorado.com, realdirt.com, growerscoco.com or hey, man, we’re talking about Front Row Ag, look up frontro2

Indoor Grow Construction and Set Up (Freaux Pt. 2)

Indoor Grow Construction and Set Up (Freaux Pt. 2)

Indoor cannabis cultivation construction techniques

Building out an indoor grow is about numbers and design.

The amount of square footage in the space, the number of lights needed for full coverage, how many plants will fit and how it all needs to be placed to fit your needs; these are just a few factors that need to be figured out when building an indoor grow facility.

Designing and building an indoor grow room is no easy task. From room temperature to air flow, every little variable impacts how plants will grow in the space. Planning is key, but executing the vision isn’t always as simple as just following the blueprint.

Building Out an Indoor Grow

In Freaux’s case, when he was building his indoor grows for Jive Cannabis Co in Oklahoma he had limited space and wanted to take advantage. This meant packing more light into smaller rooms, which had to be adjusted over time.

Some extra duct work and ventilation helped solved the issue of too much heat caused by the lights, and there’s still new add-ons that Freaux is considering. Rolling tables and trellising are two that he mentions.

Chip on the other hand brought in an electrician to help set up his mom room. However the electrician was not experienced with indoor grow facilities for cannabis, and so the design was flawed.

After going back and fixing the problems himself, there are still some issues that Chip wants to address to make the room better.

In the Grow with Freaux

This week’s episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker takes place in Chip’s Mom House on the Oklahoma farm. For the confused, it’s not Chip’s actual mom‘s house, but the room where he keeps the mothers plants for cutting clones.

The two talk about their different construction techniques, the planning, implementation and adjustments that have to be made. From sourcing materials to setting up lighting, HVAC and more, Chip and Freaux dive into it all in this episode of The Real Dirt!

Transcript

Chip:  That’s right. You hear that sound, and you are in another growroom episode with Chip: Baker. This is The Real Dirt with Chip: Baker. And on today’s dirt, I once again have Freaux: from Jive Cannabis. And we’re just kind of like, hanging out in my new mother room, talking about cannabis construction techniques. We’re talking about HVAC and fans, and lighting, and how he built his room, and how I built my room and how maybe we might do it a little differently in the future. So, hey, if you’re interested in growing construction, I want you to just to sit back, roll up the largest joints you can and join us for another episode of The Real Dirt. 

 

Chip:  Alright, man. Here we are.

 

Freaux:  What’s going on, Chip? Thanks for having me on once again, man.

 

Chip:  Oh, I know man. It seems like forever since we had you here at the studios. I know the last time we were here, we just laughed and laughed.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, it’s always a good time with you, man. Can’t help but to laugh sometimes, yeah.

 

Chip:  Oh absolutely, man. We, I remember we sampled like, so much different weed. It was great. But here, we’re over here in my newly constructed multipurpose grow room. Right now, this is a big mother room. What do you think?

 

Freaux:  I think it looks awesome. How many lights you set in here?

 

Chip:  Man, I got 66 lights in here. You know, 66 is my lucky number. And we’ve overclocked this room a little bit, it’s about 110, 15% more light than we should be running in here. But we’re just dimming it down with the Trollmaster, you know the Trollmaster?

 

Freaux:  Yeah, Trollmaster’s a great product, we use that over at Jive.

 

Chip:  Yeah, I got mine at Cultivate OKC and you can get yours at cultivateokc.com, as a matter of fact. That’s what, I got mine there. Did you get yours there?

 

Freaux:  We sure did.

 

Chip:  You might have got yours from Cultivate Colorado, even.

 

Freaux:  Ah, no I think once, mine originally you might have got the ones…

 

Chip:  Cultivate OKC, that’s right. Alright, cool. Well, I love my Trollmaster and we’ve got these dimmed down to 50%. And that’s one of the cool things about it. These are their 1000 Watt phantom double-endeds, and we have them all linked up daisy chain with a data cable that all goes to the control unit, the Trollmaster control unit. And we have it dimmed down to 50%.

 

Freaux:  It looks great. What you got, that’s what, the unit structure looks like you’re looking to kind of, put it out there, is that what that is?

 

Chip:  Yeah, this is the, this is the way we like to build grow rooms. You know, with my Cultivate OKC and Cultivate Colorado, we do supply for all this equipment. But our other company, Greener Group, we build grow rooms or advise people on building grow rooms and this is the way I like to tell people to do it, right? It’s efficient, it’s effective. You do the math of the lights and you just mount the lights at one point on the ceiling. We basically build a unistrut frame, and on that unistrut frame we run some conduit, some electrical, but we also hang our lights from it too, right? And it makes it a real sturdy system, it adds a little bit of weight to the ruse, but and it is a little costly, but you can see how easy it is that just mounts right up to the unit’s drive.

 

Freaux:  No, it looks great. I mean, super pretty room here, Chip. I like the way you guys set up a lot. And you said what, these are going to be moms that are going to take clones off to go outside this year?

 

Chip:  Yeah it is. It’s early May, we’re taking clones of all of these right now. We have a bunch of clones already. And we also have a clone nursery in OKC, or my wife has a clone nursery there. So, these are all for the Oklahoma medical cannabis commercial market and for here at our farm.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, nice big healthy moms in here. The little you know, setup and schematics you got in through, the plant seem to really like it with the lights, fans, well-ducted AC. You got it nice and insulated. Electric work is really uniform and clean.

 

Chip:  I had the AC just kicked on.

 

Freaux:  It’s all quiet in there now, huh?

 

Chip:  Oh it is, man. Yeah, we turned all the fans off so we could have this episode here. But it, you can feel the light intensity, but the room’s holding temperature pretty good.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, I told him temperature great.

 

Chip:  We struggled with some of the AC, man. We got an AC guy, he came in here. I would never recommend him. He put all of this equipment in for us. It looked pretty, all the angles were almost right and straight, and then it just didn’t work.

 

Freaux:  Why was that?

 

Chip:  You know, they didn’t do the math properly on the ducting size. They had one of the units wired on heat when it should be on cool. So one unit was coming on heat, when everything was coming on cool, right?

 

Freaux:  This is redone now?

 

Chip:  Yeah. And then I got some other guys that actually worked with us over at Greener Group. They kind of redesigned the system they had here. They pulled in this main plenum right here, they pulled off these vents like, directly off the side, right? They calculated all of the airflow that was supposed to go through here, and the previous guy didn’t do any of that. Fortunately, I got the right HVACs and all of that was specked out. But my guy came in, he’s an engineer, he engineers HVAC stuff and you know, he just kind of did it for a favor, and retuned all this stuff in, retuned all my HVACs. And, man, it’s been, it’s been working flawlessly ever since then.

 

Freaux:  No, it looks beautiful. When you’re saying earlier, I was kind of like, “Well, it looks great here.” But you said the other guy came in and did this. But yeah, he did a, he did a great job.

 

Chip:  Yeah, we added in all of this soft ducting on here, right? Where we had to, and some back here and back here, where the other guy didn’t quite calculate for the steel ducting. But yeah man, testament in like getting a poor quality contractor, even though they can like talk a big game, they look good, and their truck looks clean, and they got a pin in their shirt does not mean that they really know what they’re doing.

 

Freaux:  Oh, I know. You know, unfortunately, that’s definitely not the case. But you do get a good one, though. You know, you got to, you got to hold on to him., because in a lot of those cases, you know, especially people who aren’t familiar, like you’d have experienced actually doing, you know, setting up a room, it’s just like a regular HVAC guy kind of winging it or whatnot. There is a specific, you know, equation as far as like, you know, your square footage, how many lights you know, all that that goes into it. So somebody who’s like, familiar with that, and can, you know, have the correct format and build out a grow room to where it needs to be and keep the environmental controls, you know, sound, that’s, you know, somebody you definitely want to hold on to. And there’s a lot of people out there that think they know, but, you know, their work proves otherwise.

 

Chip:  Yeah, absolutely. And many, many people that just knows, no experience and can cannabis and you know, they, they, they don’t really look at this for what it is, right? They either think they know better, or they want to observe the situation. Because, you know, oftentimes I find these people that come with this arrogance or entitlement of not being involved with cannabis.

 

Freaux:  Yeah. It seems like a lot of those type of guys too, always got a better way, you know, they can do this to prove that, but uh…

 

Chip:  Let’s jack this thing up, man. I’m gonna pull the catalytic converter off so we get a little bit more flow, you know what I’m saying?

 

Freaux:  Straight up.

 

Chip:  ,No man, my cousin here pass your smog no problem. 

 

Freaux:  That’s hilarious, man.

 

Chip:  True story. True story.

 

Freaux:  And that’s why I would say being, you know, the, sometimes experience and stuff like that, and just, you know, knowing it, you know, you know how it weighs, what somebody would think, I mean, it’s, you’re actually, you know, doing it yourself and have R&D to know what works and not. And it’s, you know, there’s always different ways to improve, but you know, you know, it’s all through trial and error, and, you know, yeah, to actually do it. So there’s a lot of good ideas out there people have, but, you know, to try it, you never know, and a lot of times people try new stuff, and it doesn’t work, you know?

 

Chip:  Yeah, right. And you know, we’re paying for it. So, I don’t want to have an experiment if I can, and, you know. Oh hey, speak about something that’s held the testament of time. Georgia Pine right here, aka Gilz Nilz, or Gilz Nilz, aka Georgia Pine. Man, this is from The Swamp Boys. I love this weed. It is just incredible growing, I love to smoke it. It’s got zero name. It doesn’t look like much of anything.

 

Freaux:  Makes great water hash, feels good too.

 

Chip:  I mean it’s just, it’s just greasy as I move my hands over it like oh, man, this stuff is great. I really love it.

 

Freaux:  It’s a happy girl right here, too.

 

Chip:  Yeah, we were talking about the fans earlier, man. And so I don’t have any horizontal fans here. I don’t have any wall mount fans, right? You pointed this out. And you asked me how what I thought about the way I had my fans going, and what’s going on here is we have all of our fans are blowing horizontally, right under the lights on the ceiling. You can check this video out or our Instagram out, on YouTube or on Instagram, you can see what we’re talking about. And it circulates the ai,  right? And that’s the principle we’re going. We’re trying to circulate all the cool air coming down from the HVAC. We’re trying to blow the hot air from the lights around the room and cause the air in a circular motion to start to move in. And there’s no direct fans on any of these buds, right?

 

Freaux:  No, I know. That’s the first thing I noticed when I was asking you about you know, a lot of people are kind of starting to move the fans up to the ceiling and move in there like that. I was wondering what you thought, but I can really see the difference from when it turned on to not. I mean it’s [inaudible 10:12] with it I actually haven’t like isolated fan on the wall, they’re kind of hitting the plants and stuff. You know, –

 

Chip:  Those oscillators take up so much room, man.

 

Freaux: Yeah, they do. And then they blow directly on your plants, which, you know, cause some you know, burns or you know, stuff like that on your plants. But uh, I really liked the way you got it set up like that. And I mean, I could definitely feel the airflow, all the plants were moving. It seemed like pretty much all the room was like, circulating everywhere it was to emulate just like that without having to like you sai,  take up space or you know, have a you know, fan blowing directly on your plants, especially those plants close to the wall and –

 

Chip:  It’s still loud.

 

Freaux:  Yeah. It’s definitely loud. You liking the way that’s working so far?

 

Chip:  Yeah, man. Oh, man, it works great. When you do the math though, itt only says it should have like, 12 fans in here, maybe even nine. But like, the reality is we have like, 18 or maybe 20.

 

Freaux:  Leave some of that, at least 15.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, let’s count them. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I think there’s 26.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, that’s a lot. But it’s a –

 

Chip:  1, 2, 1, 2, 3 I can’t count man. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 30, 40, 50, 60. Okay, well, that time I got 19.

 

Freaux:  How much you got?

 

Chip:  I got 19, man. 

 

Freaux:  That looks about right. I’ll take your word on that right there.

 

Chip:  Yeah, well, we threw a couple random ones in here, so the math doesn’t quite work out. We got six over here., we got three in the middle, and then we’ve got eight over here. There, there it is. 19.

 

Freaux:  I like that set up a lot. I was kind of looking into you know, it seems like I was saying earlier a lot of people switch into the low end air with the fans up you know, up top. I’m gonna probably give it a whirl myself, see how I work it out and you know, trying in our room see how it does, but it seems top be working great for you, Chip.

 

Chip:  Yeah, man. We’ve been doing it for years, we build rooms this way for Greener Group all the time and for other people. And you know, if you’re, if you’re building out a new room, it really does help in your square footage. I really don’t like the oscillating fans, just one more thing that’s gonna move that’s gonna break, or you just got to pay a million bucks for the oscillating playing fans there’s just no easy way around it. But you know, in the hydroponic industry you know, I mean, I’m guilty of this. Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC like and you know, our distributors have been selling us these fans we you know, have been promoting them. They’re inexpensive fans but they’re just not that great. And people come in and demand an inexpensive fan and that’s what they’re going to get is a wall fan that might not have the best performance, right? You pay a little bit more for these you know, steel 18-inch you know, hanging fans and you know – I won’t replace these.

 

Freaux:  Yeah. It seems like it pushes more air you know, especially up top like that. Definitely more powerful. Yeah,

 

Chip:  Absolutely. So when you were building your recent room here, like, what were some of the things that surprised you? That like, ideas you had about the way you were going to build it and in the way that it ended out.

 

Freaux:  Some stuff that was like, surprising? Um, you know, honestly when we first set up the new rooms that we built out in the back building, the one that you came over and toured that one time, you know, we had it set up to try to like work towards the room. Because we had like, limited space so we wanted to try to make as many rooms as we could or whatnot. So in a sense, we kind of had an overlit room, but the way it was like set out. But then we tried to put some you know science behind it check in you know, the lumens or whatnot, and we kind of had to go back and you know, set up the rows a little bit better. Have, it doesn’t look as like, crisp but it’s like, better for the room as far as like, square footage and having a good light spread over the canopy. I would say also to which I had to position some you know ductwork and some of our, our original rooms that we started with or whatnot. You know, added a quite a bit of ductwork to try to help with some like, hotspots were occurring and some like microclimates. You know, when we, you know, added that type of airflow to it, it was able to kind of mitigate a lot of those issues, but I think it’s one of the things really any grower, you know, different techniques come out, they see a buddy that’s doing something different. I think it’s always good to try to improve on whatever you can or whatnot. I know some stuff that we’re kind of looking into at Jive, we’re looking into, you know, going into maybe doing some like table and trellises instead of doing some stake-end and maybe even looking into –

 

Chip:  Oh yeah man, I’m, wait, I’ve got all the, all the tables just came in for this room. This room is  may – is gonna well, we got some construction and I got some stuff to clean up after our bill and we’ll go into that in a minute, but we’re gonna put tables throughout this whole thing.

 

Freaux:  That’s gonna look super crisp when you get those tables.

 

Chip:  Yeah, you know, one of the things I talked to people about putting the grow room together and you, we just talked about the things that didn’t quite work out, is you need to plan for that in your construction, right? You can get competent people, people can think about things but like, you know, unless like, every room is a package and they never are. People want to use different controllers, electricians use different equipment, I only use Square D, right? Like, you know, like stuff like that. And I actually I do, I only Square D.  People use different controllers like, it all ends up being different. So this room specifically, you can see all of my thermostats, the electrician thought it was it was good to put them all in one spot, right? Right. So all my, all my thermostats for the room, the dehumidifier, the Dehumidistat, all of them they’re, all five thermostats –

 

Freaux:  It’s all of your sensor here?

 

Chip:  Yeah, that’s for all sensor.

 

Freaux:  Oh, my god.

 

Chip:  Right. Right. So, uh, you know, I’m gonna have to pull all those out. And I’m gonna place them on each one of the corners, basically. And then just one in the middle.

 

Freaux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  I’ll put them in on two stages, at least then. Right? So that way, two of them will come on, and three of them will come on, right?

 

Freaux:  That sounds like a good setup right there. 

 

Chip:  Right, right. But that’s not the way it’s set up right now. But if I had come in here, go, go, go, go, go put the tables in. Go, go, go, go, go go. You know, I would have. But because the HVAC didn’t work right?

 

Freaux:  Yeah. 

 

Chip:  Right off the bat.

 

Freaux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Right? And then, and then, and now I’ve been growing in here for a little bit because this is just a mom room. And now I’m like, “Okay, I need to change,” and this didn’t work out that well for me and I’m able to like dial it in.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing about always kind of improving your techniques and dialling it in and you know, any way you can, any, any way you can improve in that you want to you know, try to improve from harvest to harvest, you know. You definitely put a you know, a lot of time and effort in you know, to grow in it and you want to be able to have the right tools to make you succeed. If there’s no better stuff you can do, you always want to improve it, you know, the best you can you know?

 

Chip:  Hey guys, just a quick break to tell you about Cultivate OKC, Cultivate Colorado. You know, I got into the hydroponic supply business in 2009. I had wanted to open up a retail hydroponic store for years and I was already making potting soil at that point, maybe some fertilizers and some other stuff I was into. You know, I hadn’t opened up a retail shop and I got this opportunity to open one up in California. Right as I was fixing open up down in Riverside, Colorado came along. Ended up being better, bigger opportunity, opened up our Colorado stores and you know, man it’s just, we’ve been off to the races ever since. Now we’re in Colorado and in Oklahoma, we ship all over the country and even the world, man. It’s amazing. The people that call us contact us that needs, that need some, some, some equipment to grow their fine cannabis with. So if you need any help, any equipment, if you want to come to a great grow store where people don’t judge you, we’re not clique-oriented, we’re just there to help you grow. Man, come see us at Cultivate. Cultivate Colorado, we’re on exit 206 I-25. We’re also on the Stapleton Monaco exit there on I-70. And down in Oklahoma City, our newest store and man, probably our nicest showroom right now, is we’re right on the corner of 10th in Meridian. So come check us out 1101 North Meridian. Yeah, man. Got any questions about growing, no matter if you’re big or small. Just come on in. We’ll be glad to chat with you. Hey, guys, I know everyone who’s listening, we all love The Real Dirt. I mean, I love The Real Dirt. But you know what I love even more than The Real Dirt is actually growing in dirt. That’s right, Growers High Porosity Coco Formula, that’s my potting soil. Man. I’ve gone through so much trouble and research to build the cleanest, most effective potting soil for growing cannabis. Man, we built all this stuff inside. I break all the pallets, all the raw materials down on, on the morning. I push it through our machine, we use a series of conveyor belts, there’s no cross contamination, everything’s machine-mixed. It’s all made and mixed by volume. It goes directly into the bag. By the end of the day, everything that we started at the start of the day, all the raw materials, they’ve turned into bagged product that’s all stored inside. Now that the importance of this is many, many other, every other potting soil company, they don’t do it like that. Here’s how they do it. They take their raw materials, whether it’s coco, peat, perlite, forest, pumice, compost, sand, whatever they got, and they make a huge pile of it outside with big industrial equipment. They use tons of diesel to do this, tons of diesel fuel on the grinders, on the screeners, on the loaders. And they lead these huge piles out that’s just like a petri dish for cross contamination from weeds, seeds, bugs, whatever, whatever is capable of living in it. And it does and it will, and then they take these piles and they bring them into another facility that’s probably also not indoors, very few of them are, they’re usually covered tin sheds or something like that. And they bag up the potting soil, they wrap it up, pile it up, clean it off nice and pretty. And then when it gets shipped to you, you think it’s this great product, but in reality, it’s just like some dirt on the ground that people have shoveled up and put it in a nice plastic bag. And the potential for it to be full with everything from root aphids, to fungus gnats, to contaminants. It’s just, it’s mind boggling actually, at how bad it could be, and it’s really not that bad, comparatively. But our product is so clean, we go through so much trouble from the RO water to the clean cement, to the way that we move all this product around with conveyor belts instead of using big loaders. I mean, I’ve been making potting soil most of my adult life and I’m now using 1/10 of the petroleum products to make this potting soil. 1/10. And that’s almost all in diesel fuel, all in propane with forklifts, because of the way that we’ve situated our plan and you know, made this really great, environmentally friendly weed-bug-seed-free product. So, check it out man. growerscoco.com. Hop on your computer right now. Go to growerscoco.com. Check out our website. If we’re not in your community, ask your local grow store, he can get it in. If you’re in Colorado or in Oklahoma man, come to some Cultivates and we definitely got it. Thanks guys. And let’s get back to the episode.

 

Chip:  You know, I was really going for function over fashion in this room. It’s a little, there’s a little, there’s a little ugly spots here or there to it, but it’s going to be a see of bud in here soon enough when we turn this to like, an indoor room in the future. Where you know, the math I believe is we’ll put tables in here and you know, then like, a thousand plants or something. And should get two and a half ounces of plant is kind of I think the goal with still like, not packed in or still be able to walk around.

 

Freaux:  That sounds good. I mean, you could set up right there. What uh, what kind of tables you going with?

 

Chip:  You know, I believe I ended up with the the hawthornes slash botanic care tray tables. Yep. The rolling benches. 

 

Freaux:  Nice. Have you used those before?

 

Chip:  Yeah, we’ve got those. And we have the hydro farms. I actually liked the hydro farms better. But there was a supply issue, because right now we’re in an international supply issue for all products, right? And cannabis products are not you know, any different.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, you’re really starting to feel that now. A lot of people are out of stuff, price is up. Yeah, man, it’s been kind of hard to get like, raw supplies, especially if you are either building out or if you need, you know, just normal stuff, you know? They’re, you know, fertilizer, all that stuff seems to be, you know, kinda on, I guess, high demand and also too, the supply chain’s kind of been, you know, down a little bit or whatnot.

 

Chip:  Man, it’s a, no, there’s an international shortage, man. All of India has a bunch of containers and they’ve been shut down over COVID. China, Hong Kong, they’ve been shut down a bunch, man. They’ve got less containers on the market for all the rest of the product, right? All of our manufacturers were in a slight downturn slightly before COVID. And everybody started smoking tons a week, because they were unemployed and staying home, and they could smoke more weed. Right,? Right? So our industry all went and now like, more people want bags of soil. More people want, right? More people, more people. So yeah, that’s good though. It’s all moving. forward so fast, but like, you know, we all want to expand, but we can’t because we can’t get unistrut or we can’t get – this literally just happened to me –  I couldn’t get to 2 by 6 steel framing or you know, ACs are 16 weeks out if you want to do construction right now. 

 

Freaux:  That’s crazy.

 

Chip:  So it’s hard all over if you’re building the grow room currently, you know, you should really plan everything way ahead of time, it’s not going to work any way like it, it normally should.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, you got to plan in proper because, you know, stuff is so you know, behind now and going up in price and just not, you know, not readily available. But you are right, definitely if you are planning something you know, in the near future, you know, definitely at least get your material list. And, you know, make sure it can get sourced or whatnot, because it is definitely hard to find, you know, raw materials right now.

 

Chip:  Yeah, man. The, my biggest complaint about building this room, though, was that I couldn’t build a bigger one.

 

Freaux:  Man, that’s always, that’s always the number one problem, huh?

 

Chip:  So man, what would you, what do you want to do on your next room? What are you gonna do next time?

 

Freaux:  You know, honestly, if you know, on the next room or next setup, I would say I would probably, you know, start fresh with tables, you know, move over to trellis. I would probably like to do some sort of fan setup, like you got. Like, kind of, you know, go away from the oscillating you know, the oscillating fans kind of do the fans set up like you got going on right now. And then, I know I’d probably say you know, do some duct work kind of similar this. You know, something that’s going to have it where, you know, the, where it can, you know, not have a bunch of like, microclimates and hotspots. And then I don’t know, I you know, look at like different products that are out there now. Like, could be you know, like DPS panels, does that have advantages, you know? Any kind of, you know, like, you know, foam in an installation that could help out with keeping the climates you know, dialed in. And then any kind of like, you know, stuff like Trollmasters, like maybe going to a pro or getting set up on, you know, water automation, doing stuff like that, you know, probably different stuff like that. If you’re gonna do something else like that.

 

Chip:  Yeah, the Trollmaster Pro’s definitely something I’d like, but no, man, the internet’s not great out here.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, that is something you got to, if your internet’s not working, that’s not working, you know?

 

Chip:  What about LED vertical?

 

Freaux:  Yeah, that’s something you know, LED’s something I would like to, you know, try out a room or something like that, at some point. I’ve been hearing even of recently, a lot of people are starting to switch over. People who are, you know, been [inaudible 27:48] or whatnot. And, you know, always regretted the switch. I feel like a lot of people are making it and having like, good results would be good to try to, you know, give that a run ,see how that goes. And then you’re talking about one vertical like, stacking up or whatnot?

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, vertical stacks.

 

Freaux:  I know. That’s something that we’re kind of, you know, doing that at Jive right now. One of our veg rooms, we have a vertical stacked LEDs at the bottom and CMH is up top. You know, it definitely makes more room. You can have more, you know, put more plants on there. Even if it’s just for your one gallons or whatnot, free up some space. I know there’s a lot of facilities out, there’s a facility I’ve heard about out here where they have I want to say like, 100 lights at the top and the bottom. I would just like to see it myself, how like, a workflow a day of that would go because you know, setting that up in like, you know –

 

Chip:  It’s high labor. It’s absolutely high labor. You know, there’s advantages to it. There’s disadvantages to it, that’s for sure. You’re going to grow twice as much or three times as much weed but it’s going to take that much more effort to do that as well, right? It’s not just like growing three times more weed horizontally. It’s like that much more difficult because now it’s on ladders.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, that’s understandable.

 

Chip:  Right, right. But it can be done and the LEDs grow great weed, and it’s just the expense. And I look forward, my next, my next bill.

 

Freaux:  There’s always a next one, huh?

 

Chip:  My next bill.

 

Freaux:  Straight up, huh. That’s funny.

 

Chip:  Yeah, man. So let’s check out this MAC, man. Check out this Mac 1, this Mac 1. Grows funky, huh? Do you know this plant?

 

Freaux:  I don’t. I’ve never actually grown it. I know it’s been really popular. The weed I see its from, it’s been amazing.

 

Chip:  It can be pretty good. It didn’t fill out so much, but it’s really stony and it smells incredible.

 

Freaux:  No, definitely. It’s got a nice look to it, too. I’ve never actually seen it like, in garden, in person, but a definitely beautiful looking plant. Looks super happy right there too.

 

Chip:  Yeah, it’s got a weird growth pattern, man. It’s real slow, it’s real slow until, until it’s not. 

 

Freaux:  Does it, does it seem to catch up with everything else or is it kind of –

 

Chip:  Okay, hey, check it out. Those are, those are Cookies and Cream, right? Those plants over there. And these are the Mac 1s, these were started you know the same time as those.

 

Freaux:  Were those smaller when they –

 

Chip:  No, it was all the same size, all the same cutting, all the same cutting day, right? All of this came out on the same cut. Well okay actually, that’s not true. This stuff in the middle, this all came out on a week later cutting day. But everything else, all these taller plants all on this side, that was all the same day, right? So but the Mac, it grew so slow initially.

 

Freaux:  It really exploded then, because this –

 

Chip:  Now it’s bigger.

 

Freaux:  It’s like probably one of the taller plants in the room, honestly. Besides this one in the corner over here on the left.

 

Chip:  Yeah. You just got to baby it, you got to, you got to watch the water, you got to, you got to really work on that initial transplant, and root bound it out. And then transplant it again, and root bound it out. And like, and now it’s happy.

 

Freaux:  Definitely look good. How’d she, how’d she do outdoor?

 

Chip:  It did great, man. I’m really, we’re gonna make a bunch of crosses of it this year. You know, we’ve got 28 different flavors so far we’ve planted. And then we’ve got about seven returning, seven returning ones. Seven or five. We’ve got, we’ve got Granddaddy Dawg, we’ve got Purple Punch, don’t hate on me. We got Train Wreck. I’ve got Georgia Pine, we’ve got Mac 1. And then we’ve got Cookies and Cream.

 

Freaux:  Nice little lineup right there.

 

Chip:  Yeah, I got a couple other Melonades in here someplace and –

 

Freaux:  You’re gonna rerun like, Sherb Dosis or any of that?

 

Chip:  Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We’re going to run a bunch of Sherbadosidos. We’re going to run a bunch of Lemon G 13 Dosidos. I’m going to do some, oh man, the list is epic. I got a ton of Hawaiian strains. I figured like, “Hey, where is it humid but they grow dank weed? Oh, Hawaii!” So I call up my Hawaiian homies. And they were like, “Oh, hey, I live in Oklahoma now.”

 

Freaux:  Straight up. Seemed like everybody’s out here now, huh?

 

Chip:  Yeah, totally. 

 

Freaux:  Hawaii had some good strains. I’ve always had some pretty good Hawaiian weed, man.

 

Chip:  Oh man. I got, I got, I traded like, all of the originals, man. The Molokai Frost, the Puna, the Tar, the [inaudible 32:19]. I got a bunch of originals and then those crossed, right? And then I’ve got also like some other modern like, Dutch strains crossed with local strains as well. 

 

Freaux:  That is badass.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, we got about 12 or 13 of those. We went heavy on R&D on that.

 

Freaux:  So that’s awesome. I’m interested to see what those look like when they’re done.

 

Chip:  And then I think we have every something out,  some amount out of the whole Archive flat, Archive catalog, probably like 80 or 100 of almost everything that he’s produced the past. I’ve been collecting them for the past couple of years and we’re putting all that out.

 

Freaux:  That’s awesome.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah.

 

Freaux:  Can’t wait to see those.

 

Chip:  And then man, my buddy Shaw up at 707 Seeds, we got, we’ve got his whole collection of seeds going to probably you know, I said 28, that number’s nowhere right. Because I’m calculating like,  42 or something inside my head now. We’ve got like all of the NorCal clones, all of the flavors all crossed with this really hardy Kush cleaner that’s a proven outdoor strain, a great indoor strain. Wash is great, we’ve got it crossed with with pretty much everything.

 

Freaux:  Sounds like y’all have been busy, huh?

 

Chip:  We’re gonna be. We just popped all these, you have to come back later on. But mass pheno hunt, we’re like, I got a cell culture lab we’re building over here in the other building this year. And so by the fall time, that’s all going to be ready and we’re gonna have our online lab here where we’ll be able to like, test like, nuggets as we go, plants as we go. And we’re like, “Okay, that’s the one, that’s the one.”

 

Freaux:  Hey, that’s badass. Can’t wait to see that in action.

 

Chip:  Yeah. No doubt, man. I’ll tell you, you know my biggest problem with it all here, man, I really need some good solid people to work.

 

Freaux:  I hear you on that.

 

Chip:  We should start an employment agency. Oh hey, if you want a job in the cannabis industry but you got to like, be able to like one, be work well with others. Two, work hard all day. Three, have like, zero ego and only admiration for the plant. Man, I think you could probably get a job with either one of us right now, right?

 

Freaux:  Easily.

 

Chip:  Easily. Or other people here in Oklahoma. Call us first.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, definitely call us first. But if you have all those attributes, definitely.

 

Chip:  Yeah, absolutely man. Like, you know, you got to be able to pick up 50 pounds and do it all day in the sun, right? You got to be able to like stand under like 60,000 watts., 100,000 watts of light.

 

Freaux:  And also too you know, no to, you can’t really have like, just kind of a normal workday. You got to be on the garden time, you know? Like, it’s not not your traditional work day and it kind of got to work around the plants, you know?

 

Chip:  Yes, sometimes it’s like, oh, middle of the day, we had to shut down for this reason. If you want the hours, you can come back later.

 

Freaux:  Yeah, definitely, huh?

 

Chip:  Right, right. Or for me, outdoor like, we do a lot of work here. But you know, greenhouses, we grow up until December and process up until March this year. But there were some weeks we’re like, “Oh, what are we going to do?” And, you know, we had to find some stuff. But now this time of year, I told the guys, “Work as late as you want.”

 

Freaux:  Nice, yeah, straight up. But it seems like you said, there’s those times where there’s the down period. You can always find stuff to do. I mean, any one of us could find some for somebody to do, there’s always work to do. But uh, yeah, I mean, it’s definitely the busy season. I’m the same way. I mean, we got you know, we’ll have our, you know, slow week or so here and there. And then it just seems like you don’t have enough people some weeks, you know? Just depending on where you’re at in the cycle, you know?

 

Chip:  Well, you know, I saw just last week on one of the major news networks that 300,000 people are now employed in the cannabis industry throughout the US. Can you believe that, man?

 

Freaux:  That’s incredible. I  love hearing those type of numbers, you know? 

 

Chip:  300,000 people.

 

Freaux:  I hope it just continues to rise on top of that, you know?

 

Chip:  Oh man, that’s like 1% of the population or something, right? With the math. Can I, hey, can I get a statistics check on that? Here. We’re gonna, we’ll be back with you here in a minute. But no, seriously, if you want a job, look us up. Look me up first. It’s my show, bro. I’m just you know, I’m sorry.

 

Freaux:  I can’t argue with you on that.

 

Chip:  Yeah you know, we’re looking for experienced cannabis people that either live in Oklahoma or who are interested in moving here. We pay an honest wage for an honest day’s work. You know, both of us are good people and we’re looking for all types of, all types of people. You can, you can drop by  yourresume for Freaux: or for Chip: at thereal dirt.com. You can look on the website, and it’ll be a little thing someplace. It’ll say like, :resume.” Like, point that and like, you can drop your resume in.

 

Freaux:  Hey, that sounds like a plan right there.

 

Chip:  It could say like, “help” on it. It could say like, “employment opportunities.”

 

Freaux:  You know, word to the wise too, it’d probably  be the funnest job you ever had, huh?

 

Chip:  Dude.

 

Freaux:  Especially if you like weed. There’s nothing better than working around weed plants all day.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, you don’t get to smoke weed all day, but you definitely get to play with weed all day, right?

 

Freaux:  Yeah, straight up.

 

Chip:  Right right. Yeah, man it’s been another fabulous episode here on The Real Dirt. It’s almost like The Real Dirt with Freaux. That’s how I should start saying it. Like, this guy ’cause like, you know, we know I’m The Real Dirt. But it’s like, it’s The Real Dirt with… Here’s The Real Dirt. In today’s real dirt, we’re with Freaux. I love it. I love it. Alright, here I’m gonna start over. Right, it’s The Real Dirt. This is another episode of The Real Dirt. My name is Chip: and this real dirt, we’re with Freaux. It’s The Real Dirt with Freaux. I’m gonna have to work on that.

 

Freaux:  I like the way that sounded so far. I liked the start.

 

Chip:  I know I had last episode, I had a song, right?

 

Freaux:  That song was awesome, man.

 

Chip:  You had some great weed there, man. I hope you brought some good weed this time, man.

 

Freaux:  Always. I definitely got a backpack full for you, Chip.

 

Chip:  Well, we’ll have to, we’ll have to go up into the private residence after this and check it out. So thanks for joining us on The Real Dirt. You can download this episode and others at therealdirt.com. Please subscribe on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And make sure Real Dirt is one of those. And hey. also check me out on YouTube. I just started a Real Dirt YouTube channel over there. We’ve got about 500 or 1000 followers, and you too could be one. If you’re not now please, please, please please, please join my YouTube channel, please. Real Dirt.

The Real Dirt on Indoor vs Greenhouse Cannabis [Freaux Pt. 1]

The Real Dirt on Indoor vs Greenhouse Cannabis [Freaux Pt. 1]

indoor vs greenhouse cannabis cultivation podcast

The day indoor cannabis cultivation was invented, it has been said that immediately a man came running over the hill top to argue whether it was better than greenhouse cultivation. Not really.

But it’s a funny way to say that the arguments about indoor vs greenhouse cultivation have been around since indoor cultivation was invented. There will always be the traditional growers who will only grow in outdoor sunlight, and others who have converted to strictly indoor. Then there’s those in the middle who may use a greenhouse, light deprivation or some combination of indoor and outdoor.

Any cultivation method has its pros and cons, so it’s difficult to argue that one method is the best above all others. Most would probably agree that indoor cultivation would be the best if it wasn’t for the price associated with set up and maintenance. Most would also agree that when it comes to cost, growing outdoors will always have the lowest overhead.

Freaux started Jive Cannabis Co in Oklahoma to produce boutique, small batch, selectively bred cannabis strains that are constantly on rotation. Jive has quickly become one of the most sought after flower and extract in the state, and it’s because of Freaux’s extensive indoor cultivation experience.

Chip on the other hand has been a traditional outdoor and greenhouse grower, with plenty of experience in an indoor setting as well. But currently he is growing outdoor, greenhouse and indoor in Oklahoma.

With the two touting their recent harvests from the past season, Freaux and Chip have a lot to compare, contrast and learn about each other’s grow methods, genetic sourcing and more. Which is why this episode is all about just that!

This episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker is all about the great indoor vs greenhouse debate. Coming from different cultivation backgrounds Chip and Freaux have plenty of differences in how the cultivate cannabis, indoor and outdoor. Yet both grow some fine cannabis for their respective methods.

It’s not a competition, there is no winner. Just a couple growers sharing some of their secrets for growing some high quality cannabis!

Transcript

Chip:  This is Chip: with The Real Dirt podcast. Welcome to another episode of The Real Dirt. Today, I have one of my favorite guests in Oklahoma. He’s a surprise guest, but he’s been here several times before. You can’t see him through the radio but, but maybe you can hear his voice skip. Mr. Surprise Guest, say a few words to see if our audience can, can pick up on, on who you are.

 

Freux:  Chip:, it’s always a pleasure to come out here.

 

Chip:  It’s Freux, it’s Freux from, its Freux, it’s Freux from Jive. He’s here today. I know everybody guessed that immediately. Good times, good times. Sorry, just sorry to step on you. I was just having a good time with the audience there myself.

 

Freux:  Oh, you’re more than good.

 

Chip:  I’m getting into my podcast character.

 

Freux:  It is a beautiful day out here. Always, always good to come out here. It feels like every time I come out here, there’s just more and more stuff going on, you know?

 

Chip:  I know, man. This place is really great. You know, we’re sitting in our kitchen of our grow farm in Wellston, Oklahoma. Our dining room there’s these two huge windows looking to the north from the south, we get to see all the storms come in one way or the other.

 

Freux:  I mean, it looks beautiful out there. And the lake, everything’s blooming, everything’s green, weather is great, not too hot yet.

 

Chip:  The grass is high. Literally, I need to, I need a zero turn. Do you cut grass?

 

Freux:  Oh, I used to when I was younger. I haven’t lately. I kind hadd to outsource that now. Just not enough time in the day, you know?

 

Chip:  I enjoy the occasional grass cutting. We lost our grass cutter this year though. He literally passed away.

 

Freux:  Oh, I’m sorry.

 

Chip:  No, we’ll make light of it because he was a really light and fun guy. But man, he can cut grass for the shit. Sparkles, if you’re listening from the netherworld…

 

Freux:  That’s terrible, man. 

 

Chip:  Oh, I know. We love the man, we love the man. But yeah, he liked to like, leave. We’ve got, we have to cut like, 40 acres of grass out here for the cultivation, because that’s one of the ways we manage the IPM. But Kelly would like leave the same, like, not cut row over and over again. And it was, it was this pattern. It was just so amazing that you – he’s just grown up. He just passed you know, not several months ago. But you know his last cutting has just grown out. But you could see over the whole property these like, rows where he missed a strip of grass, right? For like, succession for year, you know after month, year after year. But you know, it’s always sad when you lose somebody but you know, you get to remember the fun times, you know for as long as we’re around. Yeah, so, enough serious talk here. Hey, man, this is the weed episode, Freux.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  This is a podcast about cannabis, and about marijuana, and medical marijuana. And we’re gonna look at some, some weed. This is gonna be a verse. This is a verse, right? This is a greenhouse verse indoor. Smoke-off 2021.

 

Freux:  Sounds exciting right there.

 

Chip:  In one corner, we’ve got Jive and Freux weighing in at five nice jars. They’re the good kind too, the wide mouth jars.

 

Freux:  My favorite. When they’re not in stock, it’s never good.

 

Chip:  Yeah. And we’ve got Chip: weighing in the other corner. He’s got several piles of large Mylar bags stuffed full of weed.

 

Freux:  Making my pile look small, right? Taking up whole table right there.

 

Chip:  Right. So how are we going to play this game? You know, I think I should pick one of yours and you should pick one of mine.

 

Freux:  Let’s do that.

 

Chip:  Let’s pick and talk. You –

 

Freux:  You know, you kind of, before we got started you were showing me a couple bags. You know, the one that kind of stuck out and was that uh, that sherbadoe, that dosi, that’s what that was, right?

 

Chip:  Sherbet Dosido, yeah.

 

Freux:  I also liked that uh –

 

Chip:  This is, this is a photo op right here. I’m gonna pass this over. Right? Like this way. There we go. Here we go. Audience, I’m passing the weed over for the photo op. Yeah, there we go. Oh, it’s great. Great photo op. This is Sherbet Dosidoe. This is a Archive strain.

 

Freux:  Very familiar smell, I love the smell.

 

Chip:  Yeah, Fletcher’s a longtime friend of mine. I’m part of his you know, his research and development network. And that basically means he, many of his friends, he gives us seeds or gives us good bulk deals on seeds. We plan out genetics and you know, tell him what we think about it. Fletcher grows in just incredible seed, his quality of seed is incredible. Man all of this stuff, of this past, this is all experimental for him I guess we’ll call it. They’re all Dosidoe crosses they’re kind of just like everything. I don’t think any of this really hit the market, other than the moon bow. 

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  The Moonbow did hit the market.

 

Freux:  That’s been huge for the last couple of years.

 

Chip:  It has. But this Sherbet Dosi, Dosidoe. And I really love the name, Sherbet Dosi Dosidoe. Say it five times fast.

 

Freux:  Yeah, it looks great. I mean, anything from Archive is solid. And he’s one of my favorite breeders, I would say. You know at Jive, we run him pretty heavy.

 

Chip:  Oh yeah, we get your Thin Mints. What else do you, do you have Rude Boy?

 

Freux:  I don’t. I have like, Hazmat OG, Sunshine Lime. 

 

Chip:  Yeah, Sunshine Lime very popular with the dispensary customers.

 

Freux:  Mhm. We have Dosi, Dosi 22, we ran out some of the Dosi 22 F2s. That’s really good. 

 

Chip:  Right, right. Yeah, we just planted some of those as a matter of fact.

 

Freux:  Yeah?

 

Freux:  You’ll like those. I mean, amazing flavor, amazing flavor. Found a lot of good phenos, it’s obviously one of my favorite things smoking right now. The pheno we found not as much bag as feel as some of the weed out there. But as far as flavor and smoke, I mean it’s…

 

Chip:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  It’s good.

 

Freux:  It’s going on awesome. 

 

Chip:  Man, you know, Fletcher really hit it with Dosi. He it’s one that became you know, a craze throughout the US. A mad craze with all the youngsters.

 

Freux:  It’s been one of the highest strains the last seven years.

 

Chip:  Yeah, it’s hot. It is, it’s a great strain to grow. It is phenotypically similar, it’s a good stretcher all the crosses that comes with it just become phenomenal.

 

Freux:  Yeah, that male he use, whatever male he breeds with I mean anything that Dosi touches turns to gold.

 

Chip:  Yeah, he does a lot of male work. That’s why his seeds are so good. I mean, this is starting to sound like an info commercial. No, no, he does a really good job. We plant a lots and lots of seeds and the Archive seeds always pop the best, pop the quickest, grow the fastest, are the strongest. And mostly it’s because he really selects that male, right? He’s done tons of work just to select the male alone and most of the other, you know, seed makers out there, they don’t really do that. They just, they get a pop of male, they force a herm, right, of whatever. And then they start their line.

 

Freux:  That seems to become a practice and that’s why a lot of you know, seed packs you get out there are kind of watered down now, you know?

 

Chip:  Oh, man.

 

Freux:  Nobody puts the time and effort into it. There’s very few people out there and you know, most of guys now are dropping, you know, so many different varieties so quick. I mean, they can’t possibly be, you know, R&D and taking where it needs to go, you know?

 

Chip:  Right, unless you’ve been doing it for years and years.

 

Freux:  Or yeah, unlesss –

 

Chip:  But most haven’t.

 

Freux:  Correct.

 

Chip:  Hmm. Alright so, back to our game. So you’re rolling up the Sherbet Dosidoe, and I’m gonna roll one of yours here. What do you, what do you got here?

 

Freux:  So I tried to bring what I had on hand. I got some GMO times Sherb Crasher. I’ve got some brand new Dungeon Vault I’ve got some actually, Dolato from Fletch. It’s a lot of 41 times Moonbow cross. I got one of our classics, Grandpa’s Breath and then I brought you a little bit of a pheno hunt we just went through. Sugar babies, which I’m really excited about. It’s Dungeon Vault Genetics, Sugar Babies is Runts times Sugar Daddy. Sugar Daddy is Wedding Cake and Grandpa’s Breath. And a bunch of interesting phenos has come out of that. But I want to say, other than the, you’ve definitely seen the Hot Rod and the Grandpa’s Breath. This is everything new right here. Got three different phenos of the Sugar Babies and then Brandywine GMO, Sherb Crasher, and then Dolato.

 

Chip:  Man, I think I’m gonna go for that Dolato.

 

Freux:  Go ahead.

 

Chip:  Alright, Dolato. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier. Fletch has an incredible like, naming strategy. I asked him the other day if he had a, if he had a book of names, right? And he’s like, “Nah, man, I just come right up with it.” He didn’t talk like that, but you know.

 

Freux:  Seems like when he names stuff too, you kind of like know what’s in the lineage a little bit you know. He’s kind of able to pair those together where it’s not like you know, what is that? Yeah.

 

Chip:  Wow, man. That’s, oh.

 

Freux:  It’s pretty serious stuff right there.

 

Chip:  Smells like Purple. No, it’s actually it smells like OG, it’s very Purple. This is great weed. I’ve been looking for this weed. Purple OG, right?

 

Freux:  Pretty much.

 

Chip:  It’s got super strong OG smell, right? Not the like, not the, not the classic OG but OG, nonetheless. Heavy OG, right. It’s a bit – because it’s sweeter.

 

Freux:  It is.

 

Chip:  There’s a sweeter part to it, right?

 

Freux:  It’s got that sweet almost like, Z from the Moonbow or whatnot. You can kind of smell that underlying in there.

 

Chip:  Dude, this is great weed, man.

 

Freux:  I appreciate that.

 

Chip:  Oh yeah dude. This is great weed. And your trimmers have gotten much better?

 

Freux:  Oh our trimmers, yeah. They’ve definitely stepped their game up lately. 

 

Chip:  Right? You’re smiling over there. 

 

Freux:  Not that they don’t do a bad job but I think they’ve been really on par in the last couple months. That’s one thing we’ve been trying to dial into, you know? Can’t have good weed without a good trim, you know?

 

Chip:  I can, I can, I can smell [inaudible 10:34].

 

Freux:  It’s coming out there poppies.

 

Chip:  Coming out, you know. And as I break the bud open, it’s purple on the inside, it’s purple on the outside. It’s got these small green you know, leaves and you know, anytime you get that in cannabis where you’ve got this purple and then light green color like, it really just like, looks phenomenal.

 

Freux:  Yeah, it looks awesome the way it just kind of combines with it.

 

Chip:  Because a lot of times you can get the green,  the purple leaf, but you don’t get the purple buds.

 

Freux:  With natural buds that’s really –

 

Chip:  Or like the you know, you cut the purple off all the leaves and the trim and it’s, there’s nothing, nothing purple.

 

Freux:  Yeah. But that bud, everything’s purple in there everything, even in the middle edges.

 

Chip:  Everything’s purple. Have you done, have you washed it?

 

Freux:  I have not. But that is actually one that we are going to, we kind of you know, got on something at the shop where as we pheno hunt and kind of you know, go through strands, we’re trying to wash everything to see what happens with you know, especially with [inaudible 11:32] being so popular now. You know, you want to find something that makes sense where you can you know, dedicate some space to washing, but we’re pretty much gonna run everything. You know, as we run it through the cycle to pick out what we want. We are going to you know, do the for R&D and wash them, see how that goes as well.

 

Chip:  Man, this just smells phenomenal. 

 

Freux:  But when it’s lineage I think you know, some strands that probably would wash well.

 

Chip:  Oh, that was, that was me. That was Kevin Colver from Cutting Edge.

 

Freux:  Nice.

 

Chip:  Speak of the devil.

 

Freux:  Speaking of the devil, I’m literally rolling on a Cutting Edge tray as we speak.

 

Chip:  Yeah, right, right.

 

Freux:  Shoutout John, huh?

 

Chip:  Yeah dude. Man, we have used John’s products and do tons of business with John, with Cutting Edge. If any growers out there are interested in you know, really like, stepping up the quality of the inputs that they put into their cannabis, to be enable to like dial in their own recipe like, Cutting Edge is the product to do it. It’s a base product of three parts. So you can like follow his directions, which are incredible. Or you can make your own, right?

 

Freux:  If you follow straight what’s on the on the jar bottle, you’re gonna get a very good end result, you know, even without tweaking it.

 

Chip:  Yeah, absolutely.

 

Freux:  Dialing into what you’re trying to accomplish.

 

Chip:  For the commercial grower, it’s a three part but it really is effective, because you can boost, you buy your three parts, you boost up on your grow and your micro during the vege. And then you know, when it’s just bloom, you don’t use so much of the grow, a little bit in the transitional formula, but then it’s just bloom and micro, right? And it’s like 8 micro 15 bloom, but you know, many people buy bloom enhancers. Well, you just add more bloom with Cutting Edge, right? And so you go 20 mLs to the gallon. And it is just like any other bloom enhancer on the market, but you can control the dose, right? It’s a customized it’s, it’s customized for you to make your own formulas, right? And do you use the supplements as well?

 

Freux:  I do. We use quite a bit of Cutting Edge. I mean, we use you know the Sugary, we use Bulletproof. I’m trying to think of what else we use like that Mag Amp. We use quite a few of his additives as well, especially the Uncle John, Uncle John blend.

 

Chip:  I love the Mag Amp. I love the Uncle John’s blend. Alright, so we’re gonna light these hooters up at the same time. Mmm. Well, hands down, hands down. You got the flavor on this over here for sure.

 

Freux:  It doesn’t really know got the flavor.

 

Chip:  It’s got the flavor, man. That’s one thing I’m really like lacking on our weed here is we haven’t really been able to get the flavor. We get the look in the greenhouse, but not this superior flavor, right? Part of it is you just can’t let it go till it’s actually done, right?You know, just a few greenhouses you can actually do that. And we’re at scale here such a large amount, right? With such a small workpool, it’s also difficult, right? To pick plants on time and right?

 

Freux:  Yeah no I hear you, man. This Sherbert Dosidoe man though, it’s got good flavor, man. I mean, you can definitely taste the Dosi, you can taste the Sherb in there, little bit of creaminess. You could definitely taste the Dosi I feel like, the Dosi is shining through in the taste.

 

Chip:  Yeah.

 

Freux:  Yeah, like the smell, you know, kind of maybe lead a little harder to like the Sherbert side. I kind of knew that creamy, you know, kind of like Sherbert-y, that type of smell but uh, but taste is very Dosi 4 with a little kind of Sherb on the back end or whatnot.

 

Chip:  You know, we planted it out maybe 2000 seeds of these and they all grew Dosi-like, right?

 

Freux:  The last time I was out here that was my, by far my favorite house.

 

Chip:  Oh yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

 

Freux:  Good color, got a good look, good smell.

 

Chip:  I think I even picked out the buds that you were like, “Oh, I like that plant, that plant. But I think I smoked those.”

 

Freux:  That figures, huh. What do you want to say to this again?

 

Chip:  Man the, yeah this Dolato, yeah, man this is uh, looks a lot better than the taste. It’s really harsh. I can’t smoke anymore of this. You should probably just leave that jar here with me.

 

Freux:  Oh yeah, huh?

 

Chip:  You know I really like tasting coffee – you ain’t got the COVID do you?

 

Freux:  Oh no. 

 

Chip:  Are you on the vax, man? You oka, did you check his warrant? I mean not warrant, his passport, passport in here. Oh okay, he came through processing. Now this is, this is really good man. Let me take another hit and shut up. I meaan I really, I really enjoy having a cup of tea.

 

Freux:  That’s why I got one when you offered, clear the palate. 

 

Chip:  I’ll get, we’ve got tea service here, I’ll get you one. Hold on. Hold on. It’ll be here in a minute.

 

Freux:  It’s like that, huh?

 

Chip:  It’s totally like that. Oh, it’s the magic of radio. So we were saying?

 

Freux:  No, I was asking you earlier, we’re talking about the you know, the taste or whatnot –

 

Chip:  Flavor.

 

Freux:  Flavor. I was asking you you know, how long are y’all curing that?

 

Chip:  Yeah that you know, the processing part was our problem, and we’re really lacking employees here and infrastructure. We got great people we work with but you know, we’re man, my eyes are bigger than my stomach, so I’m trying to grow more weed than I can actually handle.

 

Freux:  Yeah. I think that’s, I think that’s something a lot of Oklahoma’s out here are doing.

 

Chip:  Oh hell yeah, man. That’s the great part about Oklahoma.

 

Freux:  Go big or go home.

 

Chip:  I don’t think there’s been any other state we’ve been involved in where we’ve actually been able to grow more weed than we could handle.

 

Freux:  It’s a crazy concept.

 

Chip:  Fuck yeah, man.

 

Freux:  You never thought it was possible –

 

Chip:  Yeah, I know, man. You know, it’s so funny when we moved down here. You got it too. People were like, “Oklahoma?!”

 

Freux:  Oklahoma’s badass man. I mean it’s where it’s at right now. It’s where, it’s where everybody involved with cannabis wants to be right now.

 

Chip:  If you’re into ganja and really into the plant, this is one of the few places that you can actually like, do it. 

 

Freux:  That was beautiful man.

 

Chip:  Right? Right, man? It might be a difficult market you know, there’s definitely a lot of people here growing weed. There’s a ton of dispensaries here. You’re going to be in competition if you want to do that.

 

Freux:  But 7000 growers, 5000 disposers, something like that?

 

Chip:  Yeah, so many so many, but man, you can plan out however many seeds you want. You can have as many clones and as many plants and scale as fast as you want. You can you know, unlike California, you’re not required to like have certain markups at dispensaries. You can sell however you want. You can be the like, discount cheap person, you can sell it for the most money possible, right? Right, you can have the absolute best or absolute worst weed as your business model.

 

Freux:  Free market capitalism.

 

Chip:  It really is free market here. And if there’s any others, you know, people involved in legislation, involved in policy writing, there’s anybody involved – look, stop trying to regulate the plant so much. Stop trying to regulate the business of the plant so much, right? Just regulate the compliance of it. Just regulate, like, you know, in a simple metric track and trace, right? Just simple stuff. And the industry will grow beyond your belief in your community. But if you’re there over regulating California, it’s over regulated, and I’m starting to sound like a super conservative talk show. But no, it’s true, man, right? Like they’re that, we are a capitalist country. It is a free market society. We shouldn’t be regulated in this industry.

 

Freux:  I agree.

 

Chip:  Yeah, the people it gets sold to like, you know, 21 and up, like health concerns, absolutely. Pesticides concerns, input concerns, absolutely. Zoning, of course. 

 

Freux:  Yeah, all that stuff, yeah.

 

Chip:  But man, forcing me to pay 40 cents per plant tag.

 

Freux:  That’s ridiculous.

 

Chip:  That’s, that’s ridiculous, man. There should just be a simple track and trace system, or the state should pay for it.

 

Freux:  That’s a shakedown right there man. 

 

Chip:  Right? That’s a total shakedown. And you know, we’re talking about metric that’s one of the things going on here in Oklahoma, right? Oh, man, you should, we should rename this, what is it called? What is this weed called?

 

Freux:  It’s called Dolato but it’s spelled like d-o-l –

 

Chip:  Yeah, I got that dough, I got the do-do-do-dolato. Man. This is like Politico though. As soon as, as soon as I hit it, I started talking shit about the government.

 

Freux:  Straight up, huh?

 

Chip:  It will do that to you though, it really is a, it’s a, I mean, many people believe it to be a conservative or red state, which it may be all of those.

 

Freux:  I think it’s a little bit of Oklahoma’s got a great vibe and we almost kind of get the best of both sides, honestly.

 

Chip:  Man, we’ve had like one or two super, super, super conservative people, like try to preach their super conservative stuff, to us. One or two, that’s it. Right? Everybody else, they don’t care. Politics never comes up, right? Like you know.

 

Freux:  I’ve gotten the same vibe. I mean, everybody I’ve come across out here  issuper cool. Oklahomans are really cool people.

 

Chip:  They are. They respect your personal rights and property as a community outlook or as a community policy. There’s no interference in business, right?

 

Freux:  Yeah, I mean, they kind of let, they’re very pro business state and they want everybody to  succeed. I mean, they’re setting everybody up to succeed I feel like. I mean, if you’re running a good business model, you got a good product, you got a good you know, good thing going on. They kind of let it, they kind of let it happen, you know?

 

Chip:  Okay, okay. Well if you, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know that I like potting soil, make potting soil – coco potting soil, specifically. And you know, I just wanted to talk to you about how much I love coco fiber and why you should use it, and why your plants should be in coco fiber and they’re gonna love it too. One man, my new product Cocos Growers HP is just an incredibly clean product and made for indoor cultivation. I mean, you can use it anywhere but man it is clean as you can get it. We try extremely hard to avoid all cross contamination, all bugs weeds in seeds, we keep it all inside this manufacturer, all inside. We treat it like a bakery, we start out clean, we end clean, we clean up while we’re going through the day. We really try to take a great effort to put this quality product together. So the number one reason you should use Growers HP is man, it is clean. Number two reason you should use Growers HP is man, this product we have developed it I mean almost specifically because we want to see like, just incredible root development and root growth. And that’s what this product does. You know, I used to be a die hard coco only guy, compost coco, and I just saw the benefits of peat. And we so we started putting small amounts of peat in it. Man, the roots take off. Coco and peat just blend together so well. So there’s the second reason that you should buy Growers HP is man, just an increased root development. Now, the third reason you should buy Coco HP is because man, it’s a really, a light potting soil. And when I mean light, I mean that like you can, most people can pick up four bags at once. Kind of no problem. It’s light like this, because of the way we make it, the way we can control how much water we put in it, we make it a really dry elevation, or really dry high elevation area in Colorado. So it dries out really nicely and when it gets in the bag, man, it’s as light it’s lighter than any potting soil of two cubic foot that you can get. So there’s the third reason man, that it’s a really light product that the moisture is controlled in it specifically. Now, the fourth reason, man, it’s real easy one man. It’s just because your friend, Chip: asked you to go support him, support The Real Dirt and buy some Growers HP. So there you have it, man. Top four reasons why you should use Growers HP in your garden. Hey guys, just quick break to tell you about Cultivate OKC, Cultivate Colorado. You know, I got into the hydroponic supply business from 2009. I had wanted to open up a retail hydroponic store for years and I was already making potting soil at that point, maybe some fertilizers and some other stuff I was into. You know, I hadn’t opened up a retail shop and I got this opportunity to open one up in California. Right as I was fixing to open up down in Riverside, Colorado came along. Ended up being better, bigger opportunity, opened up our Colorado stores. And you know, man, it’s just, we’ve been off to the races ever since. Now we’re in Colorado and in Oklahoma, we ship all over the country and even the world man. It’s amazing the people that call us, contact us that needs, that need some equipment to grow their fine cannabis with. So if you need any help, any equipment, you want to come to a great grow store where people don’t judge you. We’re not clique-oriented, we’re just there to help you grow. Man, come see us at Cultivate. Cultivate Colorado, we’re on Exit 206 after 25. We’re also on the Stapleton Monaco Exit there on I70. And down in Oklahoma City, our newest store and man probably our nicest showroom right now, is we’re right on the corner of 10th in Meridian. So come check us out, 1101 North meridian. Yeah, man. Got any questions about growing no matter if you’re big or small, just come on in. We’ll be glad to chat with you. So, I got carried away and we were talking about processing, which I’ve said over and over again, on The Real Dirt is one of the most important parts of cannabis. People ruin great intentions and great crops and great weed all the time through bad processing. And that’s what I did here too. I’m not saying it’s ruined, right? But I’m not, I’m also, it didn’t reach its full potential. Because of my inabilities to be able to give it that.

 

Freux:  Postharvest is almost as important as you know –

 

Chip:  It’s just as important, it’s just as important.

 

Freux:  I mean you could, you know, for sure.

 

Chip:  You know, the way I would like to do this is big leaf it moderately right before harvest. Two weeks, right? You know, this is outdoor greenhouse, it gets a little leafier than indoors. Hang it and dry it in something like a 70 degree room with, you know, the humidity goes from 90% down to 70, 65% by the time it’s all said and done, right? But it needs that whole swing. I want it to dry in like, 10 days to two weeks. And then I want to take it off the stem branch, the big branches, right? Take it – 

 

Freux:  Like buck it down?

 

Chip:  Yeah. But still like leaves stem on it. So it’s just small branches. 

 

Freux:  Ah, gotcha, gotcha.

 

Chip:  And put that in a food grade container, right? Because it’s still like slightly moist, then?

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Right. And and, and let it, and then burn this container and let it dry, right? I leave the stems on it so it doesn’t compact, right? Because if you just cut it all off, the bud could tear. It goes into the bins, then it goes flat. Especially when you have a lot stacked on top. That’s why you can’t really fill them up all the way. And you cross stack the branches and you don’t fill them up all the way. We do like about half to three quarters. 

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Right. And this is like the best, my best case scenario, right? And then that whole process right there and it takes about you know, that also could take a week to 10 days. Meanwhile maintaining the same like, you know 70, 60 tight bob? Right 70%, 60%. From there, we generally take the bucked up weed, either put it in a large like, Turkey bag or a large other, you know, food grade plastic bag of some sort, right? Tie it off, and it’s it’s stored until we can trim it. 

 

Freux:  Okay.

 

Chip:  Right. And then, you know, we trimmed to various different ways this year, we called an outside trim service. Did you use those guys?

 

Freux:  No, I talked to them. We talked to them. But um, we’ve had kind of like a, like an in house crew that’s been working with us for a while so we kind of just, you know, kind of handle that in house. 

 

Chip:  We were lucky enough to hire some people who came in with some awesome machinery, cleaned everything. We also have like, Green Bros, but there’s only a couple of us here. 

 

Freux:  I used to use Green Bros way back in the day.

 

Chip:  Yeah. And we still and we still do use it. But like, yeah you know, technique required. We had those guys just barely clean it. I shouldn’t say barely clean it, mostly clean it. And then we had after that people go by and ham trim it.

 

Freux:  So kind of just like run it through there and get the initial stuff off, and then clean it up.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. And then –

 

Freux:  Do you feel like that saves time than actually just hand trimming it? Do you feel like that saves time?

 

Chip:  I don’t know about time, but what it does –

 

Freux:  It’s labor.

 

Chip:  It’s labor.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  It’s significantly less labor costs per pound. If you can do it all at the same time, right? If you can do that, that quick pass with the machine and trim it right then, that’s the fastest absolute way to do it. 100%.

 

Freux:  So basically just cut it –

 

Chip:  The least amount.

 

Freux:  Even the machine one person, it’s in there kind of doing –

 

Chip:  And then like, 4, 5, 6, 20 however many people you need to clean it right then, right? Then you can, you can move and we were doing, you know, 80 pounds a day with the batch one. That’s what it was, batch one trimmer. 

 

Freux:  Dang, that’s a lot.

 

Chip:  Yeah, and you can go faster, you can absolutely go faster, right? You could do 300 pounds a day with the right weed? You could do 300 pounds a day, right? If you, if you just wanted to have it machine trimmed you yeah, you could. But, but we just were like running it through it to knock off all, most of the stuff. And then we just bend it up right then and then I had two guys go through it over the course of about a month. All in all, it equaled out like, one of the, one of the most affordable processes and way to do it. But I think we won yes if we have like, I would bet like, six people on the other side of that trimmer, we could trim 80 pounds in a day. Gotta have it bucked, so it takes, it took like four people bucking to do that 80. We could probably had six people buck in, six people trimming, right? And like, literally done 80 pounds in a day with 12 people.

 

Freux:  That’s pretty solid.

 

Chip:  You can see the trim job. I mean, it’s uh, yeah –

 

Freux:  It looks good.

 

Chip:  I mean, there’s there’s a leaf or two, or a stem or two, but like, you know, it doesn’t look round. It’s not beat up, all the buds have a different shape.

 

Freux:  No, it looks good. Looks super solid.

 

Chip:  We excelled at that part of it. But we didn’t excel at how fast we got the plants in the bins. So they got too dry before they went in the bins. They got, they were too wet before they in. We had too much so we couldn’t open and look at everything. right? We didn’t have enough like, trained you know, people to know like the feel and the touch of it all. And you know, it was starting to take hours and hours a day to just go through it and look at it all, right? And so that was really what started to bring the quality down, man. I couldn’t control the temperature either. I had some temperature problems in my dry room.

 

Freux:  Yeah, that yeah.

 

Chip:  That’s when we had that we had that big storm.

 

Freux:  Yeah, I mean, if – 

 

Chip:  A big storm, the power went out, it was fucking negative 10 for days on days. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Freux:  That’s the thing, I mean, if you can’t control the temperature in the dry and I mean you’re at a you know, definite disadvantage. But you know what you’re saying just a second ago, I mean, no one that perfect, you know?

 

Chip:  Oh, this is really good. I’m not gonna smoke any more of it. I’m gonna try another one. You want to you want to spin again? Let’s spin again? 

 

Freux:  Yeah, let’s go ahead.

 

Chip:  Spin again. Let’s see. Here, you pick out one for me. I’m going to pick out one for you. Because, yeah.

 

Freux:  Which one’s that?

 

Chip:  This is also one I’m partial for, is Cookies and Cream.

 

Freux:  Oh, that was the first one you showed me earlier. That’s awesome.

 

Chip: Look at the bag. I just wanted to hand pick out nuggets that I thought I would want to smoke for you. Okay, and what do we got here?

 

Freux:  Sugar Babies.

 

Chip:  Sugar Babies, uhuh? Aren’t you trying to get sued?

 

Freux:  That’s fine.

 

Chip:  The Skittles controversy, what do you think about that?

 

Freux:  I don’t know, it’s pretty crazy.

 

Chip:  Oh shit. Now damn, Sugar Babies. Here’s the thing, man. This is more like, this have more, has the original OG smell.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  This right, I mean, oh yeah, this is more of like, like, like the OG.

 

Freux:  Honestly, it’s a truth that Sugar Baby is like my favorite thing smoking right now. It’s seriously just –

 

Chip:  Man, why didn’t you just say this to me first, man?

 

Freux:  Well, you picked earlier, you know?

 

Chip:  You know I like that LA. This is it right here. Man, this is great. Now tell me about this.

 

Freux:  Sugar Babies, it’s Dungeon Vault genetics. We had a pretty nice hunt of that, we probably popped about 80 seeds initially. 80 seeds went into like you know, it’s out to germinate. And then from there, we, I guess 80 or so? 23 to 28 females made it and then you know, that’s actually probably my favorite pheno right now. But the crosses Runts times Sugar Daddy, Sugar Daddy is Wedding Cake and Grandpa’s Breath.

 

Chip:  So Runts.

 

Freux:  Runts.

 

Chip:  Grandpa’s Breath –

 

Freux:  Grandpa’s Breath and Wedding Cake. Pretty nice little tree right there. Interesting combo.

 

Chip:  How did you, how did you sniff out this pheno?

 

Freux:  So to honestly tell you the truth, I’m the type of person when, to me, it had the craziest flavor. I mean, it looked good. I really liked the plant. ,

 

Chip:  Did you notice it growing?

 

Freux:  I did notice it growing. And it was kind of in the back of a room in the corner. And it was one of the last things –

 

Chip:  Shy girl in the corner, worked at the library on the weekend.

 

Freux:  It was, it was back in the corner. And I didn’t notice it right at the end, it was like the last thing kind of when I was you know, going through the room at the end that really caught my attention. But it’s really in the dry room and the taste because you know, you can never really tell on a plant. Sometimes that smell in the plant doesn’t really translate over to either the smell or the flavor. So it was one of the ones when I was smelling it really you know, caught my attention, but it was the flavor. The flavor was absolutely nuts to me. And then I was kind of going back and looking at some pictures I’d taken.  And I was like, “Oh another plant, looks really good.” It was kind of chunky. Because there’s so many plants you forget sometimes, you start kind of looking at your your logs or whatnot. But to me smells, smell and taste, that’s that’s what I like to select for.

 

Chip:  And there’s this great, like Granddaddy or Urkle smell.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Like it’s like a soft, I call it like, it feels it smells like baby powder feels. Feels soft.

 

Freux:  That’s awesome. Yeah, I mean, it’s got so much you know, Granddaddy Purp in the lineage, you know? Through some of the other you know, parent strains in there. To me it was, it had that like, Skittles Zest Candy but it was also like Cakey. Again, I guess coming from like the Runts.

 

Chip:  I’m just gonna put my shit away, man.

 

Freux:  I don’t know, it really it really caught my attention on the the flavor. I mean, pretty much it’s very, very rare you smoke weed and it gets better throughout the joint. It almost gets more flavorful like, the halfway through it. It comes back there like –

 

Chip:  You’re like ruining the movie for me. Telling me how, the plot. You know, the plot thickens. He speaks and tells me the end. He speaks and be like, “Oh and the road, it’s so good.” And then you’re out for hours. Hey, I just wanted to stop and say I’m having a really good time today on The Real Dirt podcast. And we’re laughing, this is like, our last podcast was like, March of last year right as COVID hit.

 

Freux:  Yeah, you’re right. We tried to do it outside too.

 

Chip:  Right, right, right. And yeah, yeah, that was our last, our last podcast. Right, right? And so it is, it’s a different world now.

 

Freux:  Oh, it is.

 

Chip:  Right? It’s a much lighter mood, there’s laughter in the air.

 

Freux:  Somewhat back to normal now, huh?

 

Chip:  Hahaha. It’s back to normal. I’m just gonna take a puff off this, there’s dry hidden in here. It’s got that, like I said that baby powdered soft feeling.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  This guy has this other like, cheese.

 

Freux:  Cheese? You get cheese?

 

Chip:  Cheesy like, like, like Brie or cheese rind or something like that.

 

Freux:  There’s something in there –

 

Chip:  On the dry hit, on the dry hit. Almost like mmm, not the blue part of it. But the cheese of like Roquefort.

 

Freux:  That’s right.

 

Chip:  Right. What is this, where’s the Bob Marley lighter? Oh it’s Bob, Bob Marley.

 

Freux:  I don’t know, I’m always big on just like, I mean pretty much flavor to me. Smell and flavor, terps you know? Just interesting unique to me that it has something, there’s something in there that the combination of everything you can kind of like, everything like kind of blends together, and almost make it its own like, flavor. It’s super mouth coating. To me, it has flavor all the way to the puff, that last puff. And I get giggly on it. Like, I like to smoke and wake up smoke a joints to that, have a great day. I get the giggles often the more, I love it, it’s upbringing.

 

Chip:  Goddamn, that’s really good, good, good weed, man.

 

Freux:  I’m glad to hear that. I really appreciate it.

 

Chip:  Yeah, that’s the kind of weed I wanna smoke. Well, I guess the podcast is over now. Right, right, the sound crew is like, maybe I should try it. “Hey, can you pass the tray over, Chip:?” Yeah, they’re so enthusiastic. They’re moving all the old crumbs off the tray so they can get a fresh joint.

 

Freux:  Oh, that’s the way to do it. This was the Cookies and Cream. Definitely got that like, the kind of like, you know, Cookie-esque kinda like you know, sweet but like almost doughy.

 

Chip:  Very Vanilla.

 

Freux:  Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

 

Chip:  You know the ‘Nilla Wafer, you get that one?

 

Freux:  Vanilla Wafer? That’s the name of the strain? 

 

Chip:  Yeah.

 

Freux:  I don’t. Is it out there?

 

Chip:  Mhmm.

 

Freux:  People are definitely gonna have to start chasing the day on stuff like that, huh?

 

Chip:  No shit, no shit. I you know, I’m sure there’s a Vanilla Wafer out there. If not, I’m making one right now. The Nilla Wafer, Vanilla Wafer, a collab.

 

Freux:  We’ll do a collab. 

 

Chip:  Vanilla Wafer Collab.

 

Freux:  A little breeding project.

 

Chip:  Alright, so what would it be? What would it be? 

 

Freux:  Need something you know, kind of you know Cakey Doughy Cook-esque. We can start with that Cookies and Cream, and then maybe add something like, you almost need those, you know those OGs back in the day that were just like, almost like, I don’t even. Something like, it was something like, really gassy sometimes that’ll kind of cut the sweetness almost make it a little like, wafery enough.

 

Chip:  Yeah, totally. We need like, a Triangle.

 

Freux:  Yeah, there you go. A Triangle or a –

 

Chip:  Right. And a –

 

Freux:  Some are super gassy.

 

Chip:  Yes, some are just super gassy or an Alien, right? But it’s something like that, cross with one of the Cakes or the Cookies.

 

Freux:  Yep. It’d have to be a Cake or Cookie, something like that.

 

Chip:  I mean you know, if you’d like if you want a winner, a home winner would be like, like, Wedding Cake crossed with, with what was, what was that again? I got –

 

Freux:  Right there, what you’re smoking?

 

Chip:  What am I smoking again?

 

Freux:  Sugar Babies.

 

Chip:  I just got stoned in my sentence.

 

Freux:  It’ll do that to you, man.

 

Chip:  What are you pointing at me for? What? Oh, yeah, sure, man. Here. Oh yeah, I immediately got stoned, right? I like, hit it and like, like, the wave of stoneness came over me immediately. Like, this would sit down at elephant.

 

Freux:  It’s got some power too, you got to be careful on that.

 

Chip:  Mmm. And flavor, too. it is an old school flavor with that Urkle on it.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Right? The Og doesn’t come as much through as much as I wanted to, because it smells so OG, right?

 

Freux:  Yeah. You’re really getting like, kind of like old school like Purple Urkle flavor, that’s kind of what you’re getting out of there.

 

Chip:  There’s definitely like this lavender purple –

 

Freux:  It does, yeah.

 

Chip:  Purple, like but it’s, but it’s not the like, primary taste. It’s back taste. And the front taste is the gassiness, the OG, right? Both of them are real, it’s real soft. 

 

Freux:  Yeah, I could, I could see that.

 

Chip:  Mm hmm. You know this weed is for like them hardcore ladies right here.

 

Freux:  Straight up, huh?

 

Chip:  Right? They like, they want to be like, sexy but in the streets, you know? 

 

Freux:  Yeah. I got that.

 

Chip:  Whoop ass with tire iron, but wear a dress still.

 

Freux:  Straight up, huh? Yeah, honestly, to tell you the truth. That’s my hands down the favorite pack of seeds I ever rain in the last probably two years. Dungeons Vault man, he killed that, Dungeons Vault Genetics.

 

Chip:  So strong. So good. 

 

Freux:  Yeah. 

 

Chip:  So we were talking about our collab? And we came, what was said, Wedding Cake and what?

 

Freux:  We had to pick some super –

 

Chip:  Oh, Cookie.

 

Freux:  So many people have bred with the Wedding Cake though. It’s like, what we’d be thinking, it’s probably already been done. We’d have to pick something like, what’s like something, what’s something like, off the beaten path OG that’s like, super gassy. You would know better than me.

 

Chip:  Well, I mean, if we were talking Triangle and Wedding Cake, yes. Somebody’s already  done that, sure. Right? It seems like you know we get, we still stick with the OG, the Triangle and we just got to go with the pastry flavor, flavor of flour, butter and eggs, vanilla all rolled up into one.

 

Freux:  If somebody out there has got a vanilla strain, they ought to send it our way, you know? And then we can you know, it’s some sort of vanilla with that, you know?

 

Chip:  Yeah. I really love the GMO. And often I feel I get the – oh look, SMO. Look at that. Awesome the crosses of it have that like cake, or vanilla like taste of it. What is this?

 

Freux:  This GMO and basically Sherb Crasher, but just saying that made me want to get there. When you said GMO,  you got to put your nose in there. 

 

Chip:  Damn, Sugar Babies. Alright. Oh man, that’s so good. I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to beat that today. Hold on. I’m gonna have to clean my palate.

 

Freux:  That Sugar Baby’s my favorite weed right now.

 

Chip:  What do you think, sound guy?

 

Travis  It’s pretty good.

 

Chip:  Sound guy gives his thumb up

 

Freux: It’s got a good flame, huh?

 

Chip:  Mhmm. See, this needs the gas.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  You put the gas on the GMO, who’s doing that?

 

Freux:  The gas GMO?

 

Chip:  Yeah.

 

Freux:  A lot of people are doing that right now.  

 

Chip:  How do you make some original shit? 

 

Freux:  No, I know. It’s hard these days.

 

Chip:  But you have to have your own original lines.

 

Freux:  You just got to start somewhere and make it yours.

 

Chip:  Right, right? If you’re, if you’re trying to talk about, if you’re talking about starting out seeds, there’s so many people doing it. You have to have original lines. 

 

Freux:  It’s gonna take a little while to even get there.

 

Chip:  It’s gonna take a little while to get there. You need to come out of the woodwork. I’ve been doing it for 10 years, and not just want to get into it right away.

 

Freux:  Ten years of prep work, huh?

 

Chip:  Mhm. Sherba – sherba dangle dingle? What was it?

 

Freux:  It doesn’t really have a name. It’s just the cross. The cross is GMO times Sherb Crasher. 

 

Chip:  Sherb Crasher.

 

Freux:  But um, when you mentioned GMO, it’s got that like GMO funk but a little sweet there too with the, with the Sherbert or the Sherb Crasher.

 

Chip:  It’s definitely got the GMO on it, man.

 

Freux:  Yeah, so that’s one of your favorite flavor profiles right now, is the GMO?

 

Chip:  I like how, I like when you cross it, it comes out with that cake or that butter type of taste.

 

Freux:  A lot of the GMO crosses you know, we’ve ran them. They’ve all been very GMO dominant. Like, pretty much are like you know, damn near overpowers everything it touches. Talking about washing, that’s a wash right there’s is GMO. 

 

Chip:  I bet this goes good outside. 

 

Freux:  I bet it does too. Why don’t we find out?

 

Chip:  Let’s do it. Test patch. Yeah, you’re talking about hoophouses earlier today?

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Yeah, we just we just built a bunch today. 

 

Freux:  I’d love to go to see it.

 

Chip:  We’ll walk down there a little later and check out the hoophouses. That’ll be the hoophouse episode. Oh yeah, we’re gonna hang out all day. We’re gonna have like, Episode 47 of Freux, Chip:’s house.

 

Freux:  How many said y’all have corn right now?

 

Chip:  Man, we’ve got eight houses planted with auto flowers.

 

Freux:  Anything you’re excited about?

 

Chip:  Oh yeah, man we got some Cookie Dawg and some Cookie Dog Thin Mint cross autoflowers.

 

Freux:  Nice.

 

Chip:  And we’ve got more 3 Bears which we really love growing, it’s a great extractor and you know, everybody loves the extract on it.

 

Freux:  Everybody did like that one. 

 

Chip:  Looking good.

 

Freux:  You let me sample some of that. It had almost like a, like a pair of Starburst flavor to it. It kind of smelled like a, like a candy almost like a Starburst pair if that makes sense.

 

Chip:  Yeah, we dubbed it Papaya Frosting.

 

Freux:  I like that. I can see that, yeah.

 

Chip:  You know, you know dried fruit was –

 

Freux:  It definitely  had fruit.

 

Chip:  We all kept saying, “Oh it’s like dried fruit.” I’m allergic to papaya and mango, so I don’t really care for the stuff. Actually I love mangoes, just everytime I eat, it my mouth breaks out.

 

Freux:  Oh, that’s not good.

 

Chip:  It’s uncomfortable.

 

Freux:  Really taste the Cookie on this Cookies and Cream right here.

 

Chip:  Oh dude, this is a smoke out with Freux today. Yeah Freux, so tell me about what’s going on dude. You’re selling your shit all over now, huh? All over Oklahoma.

 

Freux:  Yeah, we’ve been fortunate enough to get out there and hit you know quite a bit of this data. I feel like we’re in you know a lot of good areas. We always like to expand them more.

 

Chip:  I know I should have gotten a zip code restriction dude.

 

Freux:  Straight.

 

Chip:  No, you’re totally expanding. I saw your grow room. The last time I was over there, you were just adding on, it was just starting to come online [inaudible 48:45]. And like, you’re starting to see the product all over Tulsa and OKC now.

 

Freux:  Yeah, Tulsa, OKC.

 

Chip:  You’re getting the outlying areas?

 

Freux:  We actually hit quite a bit of the outlying area. Like we got friends in like, like Sallisaw and trying to think like Roland, and [inaudible 49:09], Sparrow. I’m trying to think what else, can’t even think off the top of my head.

 

Chip:  Oh yeah, GMO.

 

Freux:  You have to come by, the last time you were, we were kind of just getting all that together, getting dialed in, you know?

 

Chip:  You were just transplanted some plants. You were a little behind or something. You were making the first run in one of the rooms and there, people were like, “Oh, I don’t know what we’re doing here.” People rolling joints over in the corner, turning weed in the other room, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah totally. Well, that’s great, dude. How’s the new building?

 

Freux:  The new building’s going good. It’s definitely to help us like, you know, meet the demand. When we first got started, we were you know, kind of limited and I’ve been able to, you know, build out and build more rooms on the last couple years. And yeah, we’ve been thankful for all of our accounts, all our dispo partners, all the patients, you know, we appreciate every one of them. You know, without them we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t be anything. 

 

Chip:  And is it, it’s Jive Cannabis?

 

Freux:  Yeah. Jive Cannabis Co. Just Jive, Jive Cannabis Co. Yeah, either or.

 

Chip:  Right.

 

Freux:  Yeah, you know, just kind of trying to dial in, keep our flavors fresh, you know, trying to, you know, stay with the, you know, the genetics. And we’ve always been quality over quantity, just trying to give everybody the experience that we would like, you know. We’re all, like I was saying the last time, we’re all kind of sewers, so we like to give everybody that stuff you know? Not a lot of people are really trying to, people are in it for different reasons, you know? People can be in it for money, you can be in it for this, but I know us personally, we’re just trying to give the best quality product. A lot of people aren’t really thinking about the end user, their patient. You know, a lot of people you know, cut corners when they can, you know? Dial in their plans, we’re all doing different stuff and we’re, you know, taking the time, taking the effort to try to just, you know, pump out the best, absolute best quality we can. And then we’re trying to be, you know, different than everybody else as far as like flavors, you know? You know, through we’ve talked about pheno hunting and like different things, you know? You know, acquisition of different like, you know, genetics or trades or, you know, different stuff like that. You know, we’re working with breeders, collaborating with different breeders, you know, kept collabing you know, just trying to stay ahead of the curve genetic wise. It’s been great you know, it’s been a you know, it’s been a process. A lot of time and effort goes into it but uh, you know, wouldn’t give it for the world. I mean, to be able to get up and do what you love every day is a blessing, you know, so.

 

Chip:  Oh, man, you’re so right. Man, this weed’s great. This is the SMO, and one of the things I got to say about it as I’m sitting here puffing on it here, it just drags so good.

 

Freux:  Yeah. Smokes very well.

 

Chip:  It just smokes very well. It’s like, it’s got, has the authentic GMO flavor, which is like leads to the Kim Dawg, right?

 

Freux:  That musty, stanky – 

 

Chip:  Yeah, exactly. It’s a lighter color though than Kim Dawg. But here’s what really thing I’m noticing. So you grow all this weed the same?

 

Freux:  Do I know?

 

Chip:  You grow all this weed the same?

 

Freux:  Yes.

 

Chip:  It’s all in the same room? It was all tried the same?

 

Freux:  Yes.

 

Chip:  Right, right. Man, look at that. Look at that, like white ash. 

 

Freux:  Yep.

 

Chip:  Right? One of those other strains didn’t quite have as much white ash, but it still had like, really good flavor. 

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Right? But like, you know, this is the most flavorful one and it also has this like, white column of ash. I mean, it almost looks like a cigarette ash, right? Right? Look at that. And it comes off like a cigarette ash and this is the tastiest one, right? And other stuff tastes good too but, there’s something to that shit, right? I know it’s a huge debate. Oh, white ash doesn’t mean anything, right? But I just randomly noticed it, right?

 

Freux:  Yeah, I mean, I know there’s a, that like you said, a big debate going on whether it means this or it means that. I definitely prefer white ashes. Like you said, something about, seems like the strains and stuff like that, that seemed to smoke the best, always do burn kind of like white ash. Especially too I mean, depending on how you know, I guess obviously you grow it or take care of it too. But uh, I think a lot of it does just have to do with you know, proper care and you know, the way you take care of it. I mean sure, genetics probably does have something to play into it.

 

Chip:  You grew and dried all this weed about the same and I know individually it’s different, right? They all have different water requirements. They all take up nutrients differently, right? This is in the same room, and the ash looks different. 

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Right? That’s the amazing part to me. That shows like, what’s really going on with the plant.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  Right? And how like I’m continuing to learn about you know, cannabis and how it’s processed and grown, and more and more, it’s not just one way, that’s what I see.

 

Freux:  Oh, I got you.

 

Chip:  Right?

 

Freux:  There’s 1000 different ways to skin a cat, there’s no right or wrong way when it comes to cannabis, you know? Let’s do honey.

 

Chip:  That’s right. 12 minutes ago, we ordered tea from this shabby little restaurant off the North Canadian River. Wellston Oklahoma, Freux’s on the way, Freux’s on the way with another j and it’s okay. And it’s okay. Freux’s on the way, Freux’s on the way, Freux’s on the way with another j and it’s okay.

 

Freux:  All you need was your guitar for that one, huh?

 

Chip:  I can’t sing and play at the same time. I’ve been off the guitar, man, I really, you know, and I need to get back on it. That’s for sure. I need to get back on it. It’s so good for my brain. You know, even if I’m bad at it, right? 

 

Freux:  You get lost in the music, you know? It’s kind of a –

 

Chip:  Strum, strum, strumy-dee, strum, strummy, strum. Oh, excellent. Well, hey, man. I’m glad you got your tea here. Yeah.

 

Freux:  Really good. I didn’t really expect it.

 

Chip:  You’re able to cleanse your palate?

 

Freux:  Feels good now.

 

Chip:  Right. Wait, what are you puffing on over there? That looks like a giant goddamn bambam stick over there. It’s like Fred Flintstone rolled up a huge hooter out of a pterodactyl egg.

 

Freux:  That was those uh, those handpicked nuggs that you gave me for the Cookies and  Cream, yeah. The ones you said that you would want to smoke. 

 

Chip:  I would want to smoke, right.

 

Freux:  Good choice on it.

 

Chip:  Right. You know my first weed dealer turned me on to this, right? It’s like oh, when your friends come over, you give them the best nuggs out of the sack. And then you sell like normal people sack.

 

Freux:  Yeah. Straight up, huh? 

 

Chip:  Yes. Yeah, here’s to you, Ed. Thanks, bro. Gave me some great skills. I rolled in one day and he did all his business in the bathroom, right? And so you know if the cops came, you can wash it all down, right? Clean it all up so weed’s everywhere. We’re like doing the deal and I pull out like you know some weed to smoke and he goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on man?” “I was just gonna roll up a joint.” And he’s like, “No, man. You just kept all those buds? You should smoke that, and put that trim back into the sack.”

 

Freux:  Taught you some valuable life lessons later in life, huh?

 

Chip:  Right then, he was like, we smok the best buds, right? Oh that’s right, that’s why we’re doing this. We want to smoke the best bud.

 

Freux:  Exactly. I’m totally guilty of it.

 

Chip:  Oh yeah. I see your personal sacks over here.

 

Freux:  Yeah, totally guilty.

 

Chip:  I know those don’t look like that. Just kidding, just kidding. I know they do, I know they do, I know they do. All in jest, all in jest. No man, it’s hard to get good quality pounds with the consistent nuggets. You know, my wife wants a dispensary in Dipcon Nursery in dispensary in Oklahoma City. And it’s hard to find growers that have like, consistent looking cannabis that know how to trim it, you know? And know how, what’s nuggets to put in the sack for sale, which one to put in the leaf bag and, you know, know how to dry and trim it like, that does not come across her desk much.

 

Freux:  And that’s that like postharvest care we were talking about earlier. And I know with us, we tried to um, you know, when we’re, you know, have like, you know, raw weight sitting there ready to be made into a pound, we try to take the best nugs off top. And, you know, those are the pounds going out. And then like the smalls or the you know, we’ll throw out like anything that might you know, stem or like break off. But then that little small nuggets is what we’re using for our pre-rolls. We kind of started a pre-roll line a couple months ago and it’s all nug pre-rolls. And that’s kind of where those little nuggets that you know people are trying to sell to like the stores in the shelf, other companies or whatnot, that’s what’s going into our pre-rolls instead of like, you know, shake or anything like that. So as I work on you know, doing that, we want to make sure all the accounts and you know, dispose get the the top quality nuggs that we would want to smoke and then you know, anything that kind of falls on the bottom, you know, goes to pre-rolls or whatnot.

 

Chip:  It’s all about the quality control. It’s about the curation of the sack, right? You know, that’s has as much to do with the end user presentation –

 

Freux:  Presentation’s everything, you know? To start off with.

 

Chip:  Right, right. And you know, I mean, you know, this is a perfect example of a boutique that sells, your weed sells it highest of the market, right? And then my greenhouse over here is like really good weed but you know, it’s just like, you know, Heineken or Import. It’s not like Budweiser, right? 

 

Freux:  That was a good one. 

 

Chip:  Like Guinness. Like Guinness. No, but it’s a , it’s a, it’s a totally different thing, right? Like, you know, this is at scale, there’s, it’s, we cover a bunch of square feet for sure there’s only a handful of people that do it all. It’s part of this whole mad scientist project I have, right? Totally different business plan, then what you have, right, which is like high in boutique, right? Strain select, branded product. And that’s what I really love about Oklahoma, right? It’s like, I can like plant thousands and thousands of seeds, because I’m, you know, searching for something or want to see how it grows. Or I’m trying to develop technology or a potting soil technique or a planting seed technique, or whatever it is, right? And I can do that here, right?

 

Freux:  Every time I talk to you, you’re planting seeds. Seriously every time we’re like, “Dang, it’s a little bigger this time. A little bigger and bigger, huh?

 

Chip:  Oh, man. I love it, dude. I love it man. You can do the branded you know, model, right? Because we just sell our cannabis mostly wholesale. It’s not what branded, we sell it all by the pound, right? I see yours in the shops, in jars with cool little labels and you know, it’s different. It’s a totally different like, way to enter the market. We’re not forced to do any way.

 

Freux:  Oh, not forced at all.

 

Chip:  Like in other states, you’re like, the growers have to package it all. It all has to show up branded and packaged in the marketplace. Right now, Oklahomans might demand that in the future, but like, that’s market-driven and we’re not made to do it.

 

Freux:  Yeah, most people just do in deli style shop, put a you know big old turkey bag and kind of go from there you know?

 

Chip:  Oh man. There should, somebody, so  if there’s a shop out there – I’m sure it is – it needs to be called Old School.

 

Freux:  Yeah.

 

Chip:  And you come in and you sit down on the couch, right?

 

Freux:  Little coffee table.

 

Chip:  Little coffee table in front of you.

 

Freux:  You got a duffel bag.

 

Chip:  Pitbull running around. Cool now. And you know, some turkey bags right rolled neatly out on the coffee table.

 

Freux:  Tie that little knot on the top so they’re easy to open and close, huh?

 

Chip:  You mean the little plastic thing that it comes with? No, I don’t like, I got I got my twist technique down.

 

Freux:  There’s an art form to that.

 

Chip:  Mhm, there is. You gotta like, you really have to feel the weight and balance  of the football. Yeah, man. It’s been a great day dude. I think, I think you got me stoned, man. We have any like like, you know, like idea of what happened today? We started with so much good intentions. 

 

Freux:  Just kind of rolled with it, you know? Literally.

 

Chip:  Well, let’s recap the cannabis that we reviewed today. Today, we reviewed the –

 

Freux:  Dolato?

 

Chip:  Dolato right? 

 

Freux:  Sugar Babies.

 

Chip:  Yeah, the Sugar Babies, mmm. The SMO. 

 

Freux:  Yeah, the GMO Sherb Crasher.

 

Chip:  Which is the GMO Sherb Crasher.

 

Freux:  Looked at your Sherbert Dosidoe.

 

Chip:  The Sherbert Dosi Dosidoe, right. 

 

Freux:  And the Cookies and Cream.

 

Chip:  And Cookies and Cream? Yeah, wow.

 

Freux:  It was a nice little lineup right there. 

 

Chip:  We did see a lineup today, man. Wow, like, I haven’t had one of these in a while. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, man. We need to do this more often. You know what we need, you know what we need to do? Oh shit. Alright, I got it. We’re gonna start bringing in guest weed people to bring in, we to smoke us all out on.

 

Freux:  I would love to do. A little kind of honest review type deal. Just kinda, you know.

 

Chip:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know get their story. Let’s see what’s going on. Like, you know, and like, and we get to smoke out. Alright, here it is. We’re looking for the top cannabis producers, growers, growers, the top don’t, I mean, you know, if you think you’re the best, you have to know you’re the best. We want the best. Only the best quality. We can show up here, right?

 

Freux:  Full flavor.

 

Chip:  Full flavor, right? And, you know, we would never be rude or mean or bash everybody, right? But you know, a completely honest and open smoke out and storytelling time of the strains, right? We can like, find out about the genetics and where they came from, and how the plants grow. And it’ll be like, if Mr. Rogers meets good old house. 

 

Freux:  I like that. That was clever right there. 

 

Chip:  No, seriously –

 

Freux:  No, I would love –

 

Chip:  I told you, yeah. We should have, we should have okay smoke out. Okay smoke out, right? We’ll get some, we’ll line a couple people up, 4.2 people up in over the course a year. This way, I can formally keep up with you and everything’s going on, you can bring more Sugar Babies back over, right? I can tell you about like all the seeds I killed, or the genetics that didn’t work out ,or the stuff I didn’t, I’m like “No, no.”  Oh and uh, and Travis over here, he can just continue like, you know, smoking joints and twisting the knobs to make it happen.

 

Freux:  You need that.

 

Chip:  Have you been doing any special effects on our voices today?

 

Travis  You’ll find out.

 

Freux:  Anytime we get good people, good company, good weed around, there’s bound to have good conversations, whether it’s cannabis related or not, you know?

 

Chip:  Oh, good times. Good times, and we’re gonna call it there on this episode of The Real Dirt. Thanks for joining. Please check out other episodes on YouTube. That is The Real Dirt on YouTube. We have many of the episodes on there. This episode will be on there. Some are video, lots of audio. You can also download any episode on iTunes, subscribe. You can get it on Spotify and all the major suppliers of your favorite podcast and hey, if you just want to check us out, come to therealdirt.com. This has been The Real Dirt, thanks again.

The Truth About Delta 8 THC

The Truth About Delta 8 THC

Does delta 8 thc get you high?

CBD wasn’t the only cannabinoid that inadvertently became legal when the federal government passed the 2018 Farm Bill.

We know that there are currently over 100 known cannabinoids in the cannabis plant. When industrial hemp was legalized on the federal level in 2018, the only cannabinoid specifically kept illegal was Delta 9 THC, the main psychoactive cannabinoid that produces the common cannabis high.

Leaving over 100 other cannabinoids to fill the space, growers began experimenting. We saw the CBD boom and the rise of CBG and CBN over the past year, but another cannabinoid has broken into the spotlight and has a lot of enthusiasts curious.

Delta 8 THC claims to be the legal alternative to Delta 9, providing similar effects to a traditional THC high. But is it really a 1:1 replacement?

Delta 8 THC explained

Just like D9 THC, our knowledge about the effects and benefits of D8 THC are limited due to lack of research. For the most part, the resources for learning about Delta 8 THC come from first hand accounts of users.

What we do know about D8 THC is that it is chemically different from delta-9-THC by only a few atomic bonds, and according to the National Cancer Institute is defined as, “An analogue of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) with antiemetic, anxiolytic, appetite-stimulating, analgesic, and neuro-protective properties.”

In other words, it sounds a lot like plain old Delta 9 THC. However the experiences noted by Delta 8 THC users reveal some slight differences.

Does Delta 8 THC get you high?

The short answer seems to be yes. Most descriptions of the Delta 8 THC high note that it is more mild or “lighter” than a traditional Delta 9 THC high. User have also said that the high feels almost identical to D9 THC but without the associated paranoia or anxiety many experience.

Other anecdotes note how it can take multiple hits of a D8 THC vape to get a similar effect to a Delta 9 THC vape of similar potency, and that the flavor differs, and not always in a good way. Granted, taste is typically associated with processing, especially when it comes to distillate cartridges.

The most popular form of consumption seems to be vaping and consuming D8 edibles like gummies. However just like CBD, you can also find Delta 8 THC flower and other extracts.

This Week’s Episode

In this week’s episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker, Chip sits down with Matt Chandler from Sunshine Connect, a Full-Scale Hemp Product Development, Supply Chain Management & Production company. Matt has been involved with hemp and CBD for over four years, and he’s learned a lot about the different cannabinoids in the hemp plant, including Delta 8 THC.

Learn whether Delta 8 is just a new hype trend that will fade away, or a solid replacement for Delta 9 THC in states that haven’t yet legalized. Plus dive into the science and real dirt behind hemp and CBD, projections for 2021 and more.

Transcript

Chip: Well, here we are. The Real Dirt 2021, thank God. Welcome back. Oh man, it’s so good to be on a roll of Real Dirts. Right now, we’re recording all the season, and it’s just been really exciting. We’ve been doing a lot of market research, really, you know, trying to hear what you guys want to listen to, and give it back to you. And today, man, we’re real fortunate, because one of the most asked about topics we have is hemp, and the chemistry of hemp, and the genetics of hemp, and the genetics of cannabis. And today, I have Matt Chandler, and we’re going to talk about all of that. How’s it going, Matt?

 

Matt: Doing great, man. Thanks for having me.

 

Chip: So Matt, tell me how you’re involved with CBD and hemp.

 

Matt: So currently, I have a brand really focused around more of the experiential side of CBD. And we kind of talk about more of that of like the market. I got into cannabis and hemp about four years ago, I’m actually from Oklahoma where you’re at now. And then you, you were from Colorado. And we switched, right? 

 

Chip: So where did you grow up?

 

Matt: I grew up here in Oklahoma City area, just a little bit east of the city, Choctaw area. You know, around here growing up, cannabis was pretty taboo.

 

Chip: Oh, yeah, this was a really hard place.

 

Matt: Yeah, they’d even have tattoos that were illegal when I was growing up here. You had, people had to go down to Texas to get a tattoo. 

 

Chip: Absolutely, you know. So Oklahoma, for those of you who don’t know about the free lands of Oklahoma, now we have tattoos. We have beer over 3.2. Yeah, totally. There’s breweries.

 

Matt: And cannabis.

 

Chip: And there’s medical cannabis.

 

Matt: Yeah. And when I was growing up, or actually, when I got into cannabis when I was 26. And mainly got into it, because my partner at the time had a hard time sleeping, and was trying to decide between Ambien or that. And we had a small kid and it was like, I can’t do anything. She’s like, in college cannabis helped me a lot. And so I was like, “Let’s do that.” So we went found her some. And at the time, it was illegal. And that year was right before we got into the business. And I think they had 20% increase in incarcerations for cannabis. Yeah, and here it was like a pretty stiff penalty like, two years for possession.

 

Chip: A small possession.

 

Matt: Yeah, it’s ridiculous.

 

Chip: Crumbs, and that’s all changed.

 

Matt: It’s all changed. It’s all changed. So that’s kind of how I got in the industry,  just coming for the plant that way. Really just –

 

Chip: The medicinal side. 

 

Matt: Yeah, the medicinal side.

 

Chip: Man, yeah, that is the true great gateway to cannabis is the medicinal side.

 

Matt: The medicinal weed is the gateway drug. Yeah, exactly. But I feel like I contribute cannabis to really helping me open up my mind to many things. I feel like you know, growing up here, we’re all taught, you know, proctor our own environment what we’re, you know, our experiences growing up and it’s a conservative state, and cannabis was the devil’s lettuce and all that bad stuff, so.

 

Chip: Pass the devil’s lettuce.

 

Matt: That’s right. So – 

 

Chip: You know what Oklahoma’s really done? One of the things that’s obvious for me now, and this is might be a stereotype.

 

Matt: Yeah?

 

Chip: But now we write country songs.

 

Matt: That’s right. We got some good cannabis country songs.

 

Chip: All the time. We just came up with “pass the devil’s lettuce.”

 

Matt: I like that one, man. I like that one. You guys are making hits over here. 

 

Chip: No, it’s me and you. It’s not –

 

Matt: Yeah, right. There we go. Do you play guitar or anything?

 

Chip: You know, I just, I make noise. I make noise. I just picked up a hybrid dulcimer. 

 

Matt: Oh, okay.

 

Chip: Totally pretty cool. You know the dulcimer?

 

Matt: No, I don’t. 

 

Chip: Well, I found out it’s the easiest stringed instrument to play so I immediately excelled at it. It’s the easiest to pick up. Yeah, I started with the banjo and then I moved to the guitar, and I’ve been banging away with those guys for a few years. But I’m kind of new to at all like, maybe three, four years I’ve been playing. My David dulcimer just has this hybrid dulcimer. It’s a Merlin dulcimer. it’s only has, it has four strings. They’re metal, like a banjo. You can play it however you want. You can pick it, you can claw banjo style it you know, you can strum it. Dulcimers are traditionally made to be on your lap. But this Merlin style is more like a guitar. It’s also half. It only has seven frets and I believe the dulcimer normally has 11.

 

Matt: So when do we get cannabis country album this year, dropping this year?

 

Chip: Yeah, let’s drop that shit.

 

Matt: 2021.

 

Chip: You know what it’s, you know what I really like about it, is it sounds it is, so I really love the banjo sound and the banjo tuning, right? You get the claw, the banjo claw to it. And really have a great like, banjo like, sound.

 

Matt: Nice.

 

Chip: Right? 

 

Matt: Yeah, I like the banjo sound, too. It’s unique and different. 

 

Chip: Yeah. I mean it’s all based on that root music back from Africa man. You know, that same tuning. There’s something with the harmonics in the world and like, how that same tuning that’s in many instruments, Indian stringed instruments, and African string instruments. It resonates.

 

Matt: Creates a unique sound.

 

Chip: The universal buzz.

 

Matt: Yeah, I like that.

 

Chip: Yeah, totally, totally. Universal frequency.

 

Matt: Universal frequency, that’s right.

 

Chip: Yeah.

 

Matt Well, sounds good.

 

Chip: But yeah, just kind of like weed.

 

Matt: So yeah, that’s why I got into cannabis that way. CBD was a big part, probably about a year into after I started in cannabis, smoking cannabis. Pretty much on the back porch at night, relaxing, chillin’. Notice that I stopped watching as much TV, it was more of just like, hanging out, having more conversations. And so, it really improved my life in a lot of different ways. And I felt like just some of the patterns I had growing up and programming of what to do in life started to become more aware and more conscious. At the time, my ex-partner had a couple of autoimmune disorders, and we started learning about CBD through it. And it started really helping her improve her energy, and overall mood, and different things. And so at the time, was wanting to get out of Oklahoma, wanting kind of a lifestyle change, because I grew up here my whole life. And we were looking at places in Colorado. It was obviously a big cannabis state. They were big into hemp. It’s probably one of the biggest places in capital for yeah, for hemp. That and Kentucky, I think was two early adopters. 

 

Chip: Absolutely. 

 

Matt: And so moved up there to learn about the plant. We started our own brand. I started consulting with a company that was making CBD isolate at the time, which is about flexing, four and a half, five years ago, so it was pretty new. Yeah, I learned a lot about the chemistry side, started jumping in the supply chain about the growth side, and really just learning good growing techniques, what people were doing, how to grow hemp, because I was unfamiliar at the time. And then how to extract it, and basically for minors and different things like that. So like I said, I’ve been involved with a lot of different areas in the supply chain. But when we first moved up there, it was a brand. When we started up there, I think when we first started CBD, there wasn’t like many manufacturers won’t touch this stuff. There were still a lot of regulations, banking was a mess. And we got shut down several times and banks, and credit cards, and all sorts of stuff. And so it’s just, even now it’s still a little bit challenging, we’ve got a lot better. But really, there was no manufacturers that took touches so we ended up getting our commercial kitchen license and getting some of the licenses we needed to start manufacturing products, and doing products ourselves. Did that for ourselves and other people, and the market’s taken to some crazy turns over the last three years.

 

Chip: It’s been like a rodeo man. 

 

Matt: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I think with hemp because it’s not, it wasn’t, it had that not same regulations as cannabis did, because it was federally legal, it got a lot more attention and money. So there’s big players starting to dump money in the last three, four years, because there’s a multi-billion dollar market that’s forming. And so people are wanting to get into it. But then, there’s a lot of people that I feel like with cannabis that they’re like, “Oh, it’s gonna be big. We’re all gonna throw money into it.” And so they infrastructure, almost overbuilt, a lot of people started popping up that were making different isolates, and different farming. And when I first started, our farmer made $90,000 an acre on his farm. 

 

Chip: Oh, wow.

 

Matt: Drawing hemp. Now back then, it was I think Colorado had like, three or four years that they had that pilot program that they were able to do that.

 

Chip: Oh man. I tell you, I saw all that happen and I really missed out on it all. I tried to get involved with it, but like, it just, I was just so busy with the rest of my world that I just couldn’t get involved with it. It was an awesome, that was an awesome time to be in hemp. And I mean, it still is.

 

Matt: It is still is, yeah.

 

Chip: [inaudible 9:02] now though, ’cause you know, now you’re like, maybe a couple $1,000 an acre, $3,000 an acre if you can.

 

Matt: If then, that’s when you have to be really efficient. Yeah. Just last year, my farmer that made that $90,000 that I’ve been working with a lot, he ended up getting out of the business, because he made less than he did growing watermelons. And he’s an organic farmer and he’s like –

 

Chip: I grow watermelons, right? They’re just farmers.  Like I grow watermelons more. That was my first crop, watermelons.

 

Matt: And you don’t deal with it, any of the shit. They can sell the whole foods at Walmart. You know, the watermelons, where the hemp market, people that buy it are all over the board, and changing, and it’s constant chaos it sounds like. So, yeah.

 

Chip: The market got flooded in so many different areas. There were multiple bottlenecks, there were multiple issues with it. One thing that happened you pointed out was that the hemp market was flooded with manufacturers of hemp juice products flooded with brands, lots of co-packing going on. So a lot of this stuff was all just the same stuff even, right? It was all, so much of it was just and is still just homespun. Homespun people never dealt with marketers or copackers, and might not realize that like, “Oh man, they just made my hemp product the exact same thing as everybody else.”

 

Matt: Everybody else’s. Yeah, exactly.

 

Chip: Right? 

 

Matt: And then the more it started being acceptable nationwide in the like, stores and things like that, and all the bigger brands that might already have a name for themselves, but just was looking at CBD as another health ingredient, or adding it to their products and their lines, and they already have the distribution set. So I feel like it pushed a lot of the brands out. And then the ones that got in early that were making stuff like us, it made it very difficult, ’cause as soon as the manufacturer started opening up, they’re set up with large facilities to scale. And so if you’re a –

 

Chip: You guys are a boutique style. As nice as it might be, it’s just the volume that’s just boutique.

 

Matt: Mhm. So you got into it, because you had to because the bigger ones weren’t doing it at first, but then after a couple years of regulation changes and them getting more comfortable, they started flooding it in and bring in some of the bigger companies over. And so, I feel like a lot of people that invested heavily in the manufacturing side, which a lot did end up in trouble, you know? And they’re still, some of them that made it survived a little bit longer. But a lot of them those big companies are in trouble. 

 

Chip: Yeah. And it went a couple different ways too, because there was the initial scale that happened where it went from homespun boutique operations to like, the step up, or maybe two steps up even.

 

Matt: Oh yeah. 

 

Chip: For manufacturing. And then hemp was federally legalized, right?

 

Matt: Yeah. Which made it a lot easier.

 

Chip: Everybody could, everybody that ever wanted to grow cannabis could do it. And they did. 

 

Matt: They did, yeah. 

 

Chip: So it seemed like.

 

Matt: No it really, that’s true, that’s true.

 

Chip: Do you know any stats from the last year? I mean, 2019 production?

 

Matt: As far as production, I really, the more familiar set I am is just price per acre. Because you know like, from the farm it was like from 90,000 the first year down to I think it was like, cut in half the next year, down to 10 that was last year, which we were making around $1,000 an acre. And it was like, there wasn’t much sense. They could grow multiple other things. And I think too, it’s just because the amount of hemp licenses I did look at per state, just skyrocketed. I don’t know the numbers off my head, but it went significantly up. And I feel like the supply, basically there’s an oversupply.

 

Chip: Oversupply. Absolutely, absolutely.

 

Matt: Yeah, there was an oversupply of the growth, because people and the growers – 

 

Chip: Was Colorado and Oregon could have probably produced all of the hemp for the country, right?

 

Matt: Yeah, exactly. You know, acres and acres are, that’s a lot.

 

Chip: That’s a lot.

 

Matt: It’s a lot. It’s millions and millions of dollars of actual products.

 

Chip: People went in from the homespun people, the small farmers, the farmers wanted to stick your toe in it. We’re doing one acre, 10 acres, 40 acres. And then all of a sudden it became legal, and I heard multiple people say 100 acre, 1000s acre, right?

 

Matt: Well if you’re a farm that’s a mass farm and you’re growing hundreds of acres of certain crop on your on your farm, you can make sense out of it, out of $1,000. And that’s still a premium than what you’re getting paid over weed, and other things that you can farm and sell. So yeah, the farmers that have bigger farms, I think they’re the ones that are like, kind of coming in and cutting down the rest. I know so many people that came in hemp that wanted to grow those 1 to 10 acre range. And if you’re doing it by hand, it doesn’t make sense for the labor, and your time, and all that stuff for what you’re gonna to sell it for.

 

Chip: There is a market for the smokable, or the higher end hemp that you can get into with those smaller acreages.

 

Matt: Yeah. Which is that, is that popular in the dispensaries here? Or any like, do people buy hemp?

 

Chip: Oh, it’s at gas stations.

 

Matt: It’s at gas stations, so people are buying in there?

 

Chip: It’s a non-weed illegal state, I have been into a gas station that has had hemp or a head shop that has hemp buds for sale.

 

Matt: Nice. Yeah. Which I don’t know if you’d, do you use hemp, have you smoked them personally?

 

Chip: Yeah, totally.

 

Matt: Yes. I’m mixing them with mine.

 

Chip: I mix it with the ganja.

 

Matt: Yeah. I mix them with the ganja. I think it’s good like, I blend it.

 

Chip: Absolutely, it blends great. Because you know, that’s the thing for a lot of the hemp is it’s not fed at all. And it’s just given water, there’s hardly any fertilizer in it. So it might not have the best look. But like, it smokes really great. 

 

Matt: Yeah, it’s more earthy.

 

Chip: Or it can smoke a really good. The quality of the smoke is good. It might not have the flavor, it’s not stunning but like, it’s a really good smoke.

 

Matt: Yeah, it’d be more like more of an earthy blend to me as I’m grounding and mixing it.

 

Chip: Matt, you know what? We’re gonna grow some ganja that way next year.

 

Matt: What mixing them, half and half?

 

Chip: No, no. I’m just gonna grow it like hemp, and only water, and just give it some water, and not pay it any, much attention at all, just for the smoking quality. 

 

Matt: Yeah, okay.

 

Chip: Because then I can mix ganja in with my ganja.

 

Matt: Okay, yeah.

 

Chip: No, water only cannabis is the best smoking cannabis, no matter how you, if it’s ganja or hemp, just –

 

Matt: Just water only.

 

Chip: Just water only. It’s just how it is. The volume of water just changes the composition of it.

 

Matt: Okay. Do you give nutrients and things like that?

 

Chip: Mix it all into the soil.

 

Matt: Soil, right. Caring more about the soil.

 

Chip: Yeah, yeah care more –  or I mean even if you use synthetic nutrients, you just like, give it the synthetic nutrients two, three times and then water.

 

Matt: Yeah. So water is the main, yeah.

 

Chip: Yeah, water. Water. But yes, it’s not. I mean, fat kids love cake. That’s my theory of growing cannabis. And if you want fat cannabis plants, you got to feed them. 

 

Matt: Feed them water. 

 

Chip: No, feed them fertilizer. Fertilizer, if you want fat ones.

 

Matt: Okay, gotcha. Gotcha.

 

Chip: I know that’s not a politically correct statement. But everybody can identify that I was a fat kid. I loved to eat cake, I get it, right? 

 

Matt: That is the perfect analogy. 

 

Chip: Right? But yeah, no, you gotta feed it. Yeah, I don’t know why like, a million people tell me that you don’t after we just said it. But hey, that’s cool. 

 

Matt: Yeah. Do what you do.

 

Chip: No, yeah. Hey, man, if you want to get that price per acre up, you got to spend the money on it in order to put the fertilizer in it to get more out of it. And there is a cost benefit there. You know, like, you can either do it for $10,000 an acre organically, which is a shit ton when we’re talking about 100 acres or 1000 acres, right? Or like, synthetically, it might cost you 500 bucks.

 

Matt: Yeah, exactly. I don’t think that the organic markets quite doesn’t pull that much higher of a price right now, for cannabis in general. I’m a profound proponent of organic farming or [inaudible 16:50] and stuff like that. But I do feel like there’s not enough market right now to differentiate if you’re a grower for the cost sometimes. So yeah, I think it’ll start to pop up a little bit more. There’s gonna be some buyers that are –

 

Chip: No, it already happening. No, it’s already happening. I already see organic cultivation in Oregon. And people ask if it’s organic, you know, and I haven’t seen that for a long time. 

 

Matt: Yeah. Certainly. People are caring more for sure.

 

Chip: Yeah. So hey, man, this is a perfect time for us to roll into a break. 

 

Matt: Sounds good. 

 

Chip: Hey, let’s a take a moment.

 

Matt Alright.

 

Chip: Hey guys, it doesn’t matter if you’re a hemp farmer, or if you’re a medical cannabis farmer. If you’re farming in your basement, if you’re farming out in the back, 40 Cultivate Garden Supplies can help you. If you need anything from truckloads of soil to pints of fertilizer, we have it all. You can contact us online, we ship all over the country and the world. You can look us up at cultivatecolorado.com, cultivateokc.com. And if you need to talk to somebody great, just walk into one of my shops. Ask to speak to anyone, anybody. You don’t even have to ask to speak to someone, we just come up and start talking to you. They can help you solve all of your fertilizer problems, all of your lighting problems. We serve as the largest, most commercial gardens in the country, and the smallest most boutique. And I’m just getting started guys. So please come by. We welcome all of you Cultivate Colorado in Denver and Stapleton, Cultivate OKC in Oklahoma City, and please check us out online, cultivatecolorado.com. Yeah, man. Nice little break. Wow, I can’t believe you did that with that bong man. That was incredible. I can’t even smoke one of those anymore, you know?

 

Matt: I like the bongs. Yeah.

 

Chip: I know, I know. Everybody’s heard about the bong at The Real Dirt studio. Man, the industry kind of, it went flat. It went more than flat this past 2020.

 

Matt: Oh yeah.

 

Chip: Right? Has it recovered?

 

Matt: I feel that it is recovering a little bit. I think most of the people that have flooded the market with like, came into hemp as like, this is a gold mine. Farmers are making 10,000 an acre were used to doing this –

 

Chip: Gold diggers. Gold diggers.

 

Matt: Exactly. They came in and lost their ass in 2019, 2020. And so, they’re slowly getting up.

 

Chip: Oh man, I’m sorry for you guys.

 

Matt: Yeah no, I mean it’s, if you were in those, if you came into hemp for the first time to grow during those times, it was definitely going to be challenging. Not only to grow, but then to sell, because I don’t know about you, but I think every hemp farmer I’ve met, any cannabis grower, the first year is always a learning kind of journey. And you know with hemp, you get one shot that year in most places, at least I think in California and places they might have more growing seasons, but yeah, you had a hard time. And so, most of them I think are got out and so where it’s kind of normalized the supply chain a little bit. Some of the bigger guys that are still in there, they’ve kind of driven the price down, got their price to where they know that they can money on it. And yeah, that the hemp market is completely changed, and it’s really elevated on a global level too. There’s people growing all over different countries, and just like most of the other crops and commodities that we have, wherever the cheapest and makes the most sense to grow for the climate, is where I feel like there are gonna be the most growers, and the most  activity going. And I think that’s gonna be happening with hemp too.

 

Chip: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s that way with every other crop, right? There’s some superior areas to cultivate it. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking, we were talking watermelons earlier. Like man, Florida’s a great place to grow watermelon.

 

Matt: Yes, yeah. Oh yeah.

 

Chip: But weed is harder to grow there, right?  It’s just so humid.

 

Matt: Humid, yeah. I figured it was the humidity.

 

Chip: You know, I mean, it can be done, absolutely and people are crushing it down there. But it’s not as easy as say like, Oregon or southern Colorado, right? Where it’s nice and dry, and you get, all your water comes from irrigation. You can control it all.

 

Matt: Control a little bit more.

 

Chip: You know,  and in Tennessee like, it might rain every day of the harvest season. Yeah. Kentucky’s kind of the same way, but it can be a little drier all throughout the east coast are affected with the hurricane season like, which correlates with harvest season.

 

Matt: Yeah, growing’s different in every climate, I’m sure. Obviously, it changes constantly, and so, yeah. It was –  

 

Chip: Absolutely there’s always something to learn no matter where you go, it’s gonna, it can if you’re open to it, you can submerge yourself into the environment and kind of read what’s going on, understand. If you understand what the plant wants and needs, right? Then you can manipulate both the plant and the environment to do what you want. It might not be exactly the same, but you gotta pay attention.

 

Matt: Oh yeah. And I feel like with cannabis or hemp growing is going to be, if you’re starting out, it’s probably not the best place to start in the industry right now. If you’re looking at doing smokables and growing some higher end stuff, then that’s a little bit different. But I think there is a market for those and they are pulling in the $150 a pound versus right now, I think like, yeah. 5, 10 bucks for you know, or lower depending on you know for points, yeah. It’s pretty high.

 

Chip: I even see people pulling good money on it, on 

 

Matt: Smokable?

 

Chip: Smokable. It  all depends on how they sell it. But you know, it’s out there. So the future, I mean, the history of hemp has generally been CBD, and maybe some like, snake oil medicine and but it’s really started to mature. And this flood, the thing about floods is historically, the flood will come in and they wash off all the trash us humans like, have put in the way, you know? What they leave is fertile ground, for us to like, rebuild on, you know? And then that’s what’s going on right now in the hemp industry. I think a lot of the like, gold diggers came and went big and small, came and went. Some of those gold diggers turned into like, real cannabis farmers and are interested in it and like –

 

Matt: Yeah went to stick with it early –

 

Chip: Went to stick with it and you know –

 

Matt: All the brokers went to PP or the you know, the PPE or whatever equipment [inaudible 22:23] they just follow the money and whatever big industry is there.

 

Chip: “Oh, I’m a broker hemp, oh a broker PPE.” Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with making money, dude. I get it if that’s your hustle like, sell buy, buy, sell. Whatever it is. 

 

Matt: Sure it is, yeah.

 

Chip: I mean, [inaudible 23:42] to this plant. I can’t seem to do anything different beyond it. Or even want to honestly. I mean, I have other interests in my life, but this is the only business I want to be in.

 

Matt: Yeah, no, I’m the same way. I’ve been in it for almost five years now. And I don’t, I’m in it for the long term too. So not one of those quick fly by night.

 

Chip: Because I mean, it is a business plan. People come in to me all the time and they say, “Hey, in three to five years we’re gonna exit,” right?

 

Matt: There’s probably a lot of opportunities with dispensaries and cannabis, especially if it’s been federally Iegalized –

 

Chip: I have seen people do it all the time successfully. And I don’t see anything wrong with it. Tap on, I hope people do it. You know, like lately, “Hey, let’s go do it man,” you know? I’m on different trip, bro.

 

Matt: You like to be in the plan and learn it, yeah. Be in the –

 

Chip: Yeah, totally. I want to be in the mix, man. I want to be in the dirt. That’s why this is The Real Dirt, right? So the real dirt on hemp, cannabis genetics. We just started to like really, like, really get into that right? You know, the first thing is everybody just wanted some weed, wanted some hemp, wanted some CBD oil, wanted some relief, wanted some, those urge for cannabinoids that us humans need and want without even really realize it, but the truth of the matter is coming out. Now there’s all other secondary compounds that are being developed, they’re are already there or have been like, applied. Let’s talk about some of that.

 

Matt: Sure. I think the first one that kind of came out was CBG, because they can, they’re making genetics now that are high-end CBG, which is the first cannabinoid that the plant grows into before it kind of blooms to CBD, THC and the other various cannabinoids. And the genetics, when they’re making that plant high-end, it’s going to grow higher percentages and extract at higher percentages too, that you can make final products with. And I think some of the things that are going on right now that I see in the industry is that on the chemistry side, they’re learning how to take industrial hemp, which is 0.3% by dry weight, Delta-9-THC, and basically formulate through chemistry mainly by sunlight, heat, sometimes pressure to form different cannabinoids. All the cannabinoids kind of like, turn into different cannabinoids, and don’t care which side off the top of my head, but there’s like, a whole entire tree where CBD might turn into CBN, and then after a while, CBN might turn into a CBC. And there’s this whole like, tree that they turn into different ones. And so yeah, I feel like the you know, we’re able to generate from industrial hemp which can be mass harvested through chemistry, turning them and things like Delta-8-THC, which I feel like it’s very popular. We kind of talked about it a little bit. I like how you said a THC light?

 

Chip: THC light.

 

Matt: It’s like THC light to be really honest. But I think it’s awesome for people that are new to it. And like you know, new to THC, or maybe they taken, to me, I feel like hemp is a good stepping stone to people that are like, brand new to the plant. You know, they’re a little sensitive. And so you know, if they took a big bong rip, you know, it’s gonna be a little different experience for them. But taking –

 

Chip: They might pull a Stevie Wonder that’s for sure. 

 

Matt: Exactly.

 

Chip: You know, getting stoned blind and start singing.

 

Matt: Oh, yeah. Definitely, man. Definitely.

 

Chip: Oh, that goes out to my good sister in law.

 

Matt: Yeah. Yeah, nice. It’s a good stepping stone. And, you know, D-8, I’ve experimented a lot recently myself, and I really enjoy it. You know, it’s more of a body high and less of a heady high. It kind of gives me that giggly and relaxed feeling, not taking pretty high doses. I feel like with D-8, especially for me, it’s been like, 100 milligrams, versus like, 20 in the edible that I might do. So it’s probably five, four or five times, I feel like you need more of. But really, it’s been great. And I feel like, you know, if I’m trying to still focus and get something done, but want to relax and have a body high, Delta-8 has been great for me on that. And so there’s just cool that there, I think the market, new market is like-

 

Chip: Let’s talk about Delta for a second. It’s legal in many areas, and only a couple of states have defined it.

 

Matt: They kind of defined it as legal.

 

Chip: Yeah. Right, right.

 

Matt: And who knows what’s gonna happen? Because I think the DEA or the FDA, right now it’s in that gray area, because the only define laws we have are around Delta-9, and that you’re in 0.3% by dry weight. So when you extract it, it’s even in higher percentages, and that’s another debate. But yeah, I think like, some states have came out and said they don’t want it. But overall, the DEA and some of the statements have around from, it’s still derived from the plant, as they term in the Farm Bill industrial hemp. It’s kind of one of those areas where they might come in and interpret it someday, and be like, “It’s too close” and things like that or whatever, but we’ll see. I think in the next six months to a year especially with all the activity we have with like, federal legalization and things like that, we’ll know more on those. But I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity right now, because they’re getting popular, and less people are doing them. And there’s some good alternatives to like you know, I think for more affordable like Delta-8’s pretty affordable in general for you know, comparatively to Delta-9 just because of all the regulations and things you have to do around Delta-9.

 

Chip: Oh, absolutely. Give me the 9’s but hey, I’d love to have some 8 too. Don’t get me wrong. It’s fascinating, we’ve been saying this for years, that it’s not just THC, it’s not just THC, it’s not just THC, it’s not just THC. But be it in Colorado, and California, and some of the other states have really pushed this certificate of authenticity, this high THC number to sell product, or low THC number to sell product. But you know, they’ve just put THC-9 as the boogeyman honestly.

 

Matt: They have.

 

Chip: You know? And the good thing  is it means everything else is pretty much legal on the plant.

 

Matt: Yeah, pretty much. So they focused on that entirely and forgot about the other seeds that are very similar. They play on one of the two receptor cell sites in your body CB1 and CB2 and –

 

Chip: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s good. Now see, CBG was one of the first alternative cannabinoids besides CBD, CB, THC that I had –

 

Matt: Heard about so?

 

Chip: Well that I actually got to use. Like I’d seen like, I’ve seen them all, read papers about so many of them, and there’s like, theories. There’s hundreds, or 15 or –

 

Matt: Gave you used the CBG product? Like have you dabbed it or..?

 

Chip: Yeah, yeah I had CBC, CBG Hash, CBG Key – 

 

Matt: What did you think? 

 

Chip: CBG – first it was a Moroccan style hash made from CBG. She was great, very uplifting, relaxing at the same time, but we literally like, packed a bowl of it thinking it was bedtime. So we packed some hash. And because we also had their CBD hash, this is in in some part of Eastern Europe. Man, we fired up the CBG, we started chatting, everybody started chatting for hours and hours more. Like, “Let’s go get some more food.”

 

Matt: You got more like I guess, energized?

 

Chip: Energized, yeah, totally, totally energized. You know where the CBD is far more relaxing.

 

Matt: Yeah. Some people say CBG is more relaxing too. I don’t know, it seems like everybody’s system sometimes responds slightly different.

 

Chip: It is. I’m a professional user. So it really, it’s similar to how cabo works, that’d be a great description. It’s stimulating yet relaxing.

 

Matt: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. I feel like all cannabinoids are still overall relaxing. I’m more chill. I’m more sitting back, I’m more aware and observant around me. You know, some of them make me a little more tired. CBN specifically makes me a little bit more drowsy when I take CBN. Even Delta-9 sometimes makes me tired, but depends on you know, terpenes have so much to do with that too. 

 

Chip: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, we’re big fans of Lemon G, and we’ve got a Lemon G Dosidoe. And we also have a Gils and Nils which is a Y cross with Georgia Pine Skunk strain. But none of those are real –

 

Matt: Stimulating?

 

Chip: Yeah.

 

Matt: Also tried those. Yeah. 

 

Chip: Sometimes I’ll confuse those in the evening. And like, like last night, right? Or it’s just so good, because it’s got that pentatonic buzz we were talking about earlier, you know? That I’m just buzzing and don’t want to stop, you know?

 

Matt: Oh yeah, oh yeah. When you do that, does it make you not fall asleep? When you have the [inaudible 32:36]?

 

Chip: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

 

Matt: So you’re up more when you do that? 

 

Chip: Yeah. Totally, totally. 

 

Matt: I always see that I could find like, sleep though when I’m, when I need to even with –

 

Chip: Yeah, you’re like my wife, Jessica. Yes. She’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna go to sleep now,” you know?

 

Matt: That is like me.

 

Chip: You know? And I’m like, yeah, I struggle.

 

Matt: Yeah. Okay. Is that one of the reasons why cannabis helps you a lot, is it? 

 

Chip: Man. I am manic as hell, man. I mean, up and down. I get so excited about stuff. Oh, I’m so excited. Right? And then I mean, I also like, feel it really, too. And I get like, really like, you know, depressed. I shouldn’t say really depressed but like, you know, I really feel it when I lose something, or it doesn’t work out for me. I’m a little bit of an emotional roller coaster and cannabis absolutely evens that out quite a bit. It makes it oh, man, the font’s not exactly right on that, right? Like, you know, instead of just like, “Oh my god damn it. This font’s not right,” right? And for those of you who get into fonts, you’ll understand. “Not that one. Not that one. Oh, man, this, I need this one. Where did the guy get this one?” Yeah, you know, there’s just like, a million fonts out there. You know, I’ll obsess over it. I’ll swing one way or the other. Like, “Fuck it. I don’t care. Use anything. Oh, no, that one sucked. I can’t use that one.”

 

Matt: Not that one.

 

Chip: Not that one. You know? Yeah. So cannabis really helps me with that. But you know, I mean, I also, like, a common problem so many of us have is like, I really enjoy the manicness of it sometimes, too, right? And it’s part of like, who I am. And you know, it keeps you know, things exciting to some degree. I don’t want to just be “brrr” all the time. Yeah, you know, but I need to calm down a little bit. Yeah, I need to calm down a little bit.

 

Matt: Helps you, yeah calm right aways.

 

Chip: Right, right, right.

 

Matt: That’s one thing that’s helped with me too. I agree. I think that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed people overall takes them down a notch, kind of where they, a little more chill, and calm, and look at things from a little bit different perspective.

 

Chip: Yeah, I definitely don’t want any medication over you know, my manicness. But I bet many people with my condition are given it, you know? Or don’t even understand their weed, or do they have like, this simple access to it. Heed on to the nation, man. Hey, I gotta give a big shoutout right now to King Shiloh Sound Systems. If you guys don’t know King Shiloh, I want you to stop what you’re doing, go onto Facebook, go onto YouTube. Look up King Shiloh Sound System. He’s out of Amsterdam. And it’s a group of DJs who previously pre-COVID would go around and have these big speakers and do these big sound Wall of Sound type shows, right? Old school 70’s Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead style. 

 

Matt: That’s awesome.

 

Chip: Right? But the best reggae you’ve ever heard. These guys have the deepest cuts. They have the best, the biggest collection of reggae singles and vinyls I have ever – I love reggae, I’ve been listening to it for 25 years. And these guys absolutely crush it. Nettie? I think he’s one of the DJs, big belly, overalls, a big white beard. Man, he plays just incredible singles. And, you know, interesting thing about Jamaica, is they got all of our leftover recording equipment from the 50’s and 40’s. And back then like, they just made singles and radio stations would have songs and you know, and so they got all of that equipment, started kind of replicating the same type of thing, right? Like, lots of small producers, lots of like, singles every week, singles every week. Anybody could show up and make a single every week. So all this stuff’s off copyright now, right? So King Shiloh, they play it, so it’s all the stuff you’ve never heard of from artists that you know they’ve lost the copyright or publishing or however YouTube allows you to do it.

 

Matt: So they can just take it and run with it then. 

 

Chip: King Shiloh Sound System, YouTube, Facebook, everybody please check it out. Tell King Shiloh Chip from The Real Dirt sent you.

 

Matt: Alright. I like it. I’ll have to check them out. Definitely check them out.

 

Chip: Oh, it’s great. They play a live show out of Amsterdam every Saturday at noon. 

 

Matt: Okay. How many of you been to? You said –

 

Chip: Well, it’s all Facebook now. So he’s got 42 that he’s released since COVID, right? Yeah, and man, if you love reggae, or if you’re even interested in it. That’s how to find out about it. Listen to his 80 hours of reggae.

 

Matt: Nice man. [inaudible 37:45]

 

Chip: I would suggest episodes, some of the mid-teens, 12, 13, 14s, those are some of my favorites.

 

Matt: Okay. Good to know, man. Thank you, reg.

 

Chip: Reggae sidenote.

 

Matt: Reggae sidenote. Reggae and cannabis goes along great though, and there’s something to them that – 

 

Chip: I mean, just music in general and cannabis go pretty good together.

 

Matt: Yeah.

 

Chip: I need more musicians in here. I’m gonna bring some more.

 

Matt: Yeah, you have to have some people play in.

 

Chip: Yeah, yeah well, you know, just talking about getting stoned and you know, using you know, cannabis as a performance enhancing drug.

 

Matt: Yes, exactly, exactly. 

 

Chip: A little PED.

 

Matt: It’s part of the like, a reggae musician prerequisite is cannabis, I think. A  lot of them use.

 

Chip: Yeah, I’ve met a few that have shoved it but not many.

 

Matt: Not many. 

 

Chip: But yeah, not many. You know, reggae’s not really off topic, but we did move along a little bit. So what do you see coming forward for hemp and hemp farmers and hemp industry people?

 

Matt: Sure. Like I said, on the farm side, I feel like the boutique side, the smokable flower side, if you’re looking to get into business or looking for opportunity, that’s going to be a better opportunity. Most of the products and industrial size are going to be mass farms. If you’re not into that, then it’s gonna be hard to compete, and the market’s more of commodity. I think on the extraction side, same thing. It’s a little bit more commoditized now. There’s some large companies that got into it, got a lot of investments, so the price for them to create CBD oil and isolates and things like that have gone way down. The labs that seem to survive and that I work with a lot now, are the ones that are good with minor cannabinoids. Finding ways to produce these minor cannabinoids from hemp, so they can be sold on the market. Like the ones that are Delta-8 are crushing it obviously, because it’s similar to Delta-9, but they’re able to sell it in more states and things. And so, I feel like that’s yet another opportunity. And then on the brand side, I would say, if you’re just gonna say, “I want to set up a CBD product,” it’s gonna be, you’re gotta have to differentiate yourself. You need the target market you’re going to be going to, an audience you’re going to be serving, and really trying to – I feel like with anything, like Dollar Beard, Shave Club or whatever, razors and stuff wasn’t new and it was a huge market already. But they took it, did a little something different with it, made more of a, targeted to a certain audience, had a different experience and packaging and stuff, and then they crushed it, didn’t they? So I think you know, doing those kind of things in cannabis is more what I’m really focused on, and creating experiences around it. Would love to have a property in the mountains and doing retreats and events around it. And really people can come in and experience it in a safe way, as well as try some different parts of it, I think are going to be really popular. You know, and I think overall just the event and experience industry is going to grow starting this year, from this whole last year not having any events and experiences. So, I feel like that’s going to explode as well. So those are the areas that I feel are most going to explode if you’re looking to get into the hemp and CBD industry. You know, the minor cannabinoids, the boutique products and if you’re on the brand side, it’s really finding your audience and unique people that you’re calling to. 

 

Chip: Everyone who had a rough year in 2019 that decided to keep into it they did, they probably scaled back and really realize this year how to move forward with their business. Some people fell apart, some people waited. I know a few big organizations who were just like, “Oh, yeah, we don’t, we’re not going to grow anymore.”

 

Matt: Yeah.

 

Chip: Right? And some of those people may come and go. I think the wisdom of age of the industry is starting to develop. And you know, out of the necessity or the desire or the want, so many businesses and so many products and so many brands have been developed. Nike’s one of my favorite, favorite stories and it came out of like this need for an athletic shoe, right? And even though there were stuff out at the time like, they were the first people who really started to do research on it –

 

Matt: And cornered that market.

 

Chip: And cornered that market. And I think that like, the hemp industry is in exactly that place. The cannabis industry is in exactly that place where now, we have time to do research and development. We have time to like, standardize practices and not just think about it as like, this get rich quick scheme. My friend Stacy Johnson, Stacy J of Harvest House, he likes to say, “Getting rich quick since 1989.” And it’s so true but like. right now, I think it really offers that time. And people had all this hemp laying around the past year, they were able to do all kinds of stuff with it. I think the textile market’s coming down.

 

Matt: That’s different, yeah. I feel like that could be a huge market that really is picking up. Again, I feel like on the growing side, they’re going to be in huge farms that are you know, they’re growing and 15, 20 foot high plants, and they’re coming with harvesting machines that are you know, it’s very efficient, and you get very little bit of a –

 

Chip: I met some guys that have got 1000 acres in like, Nebraska or Oklahoma someplace. They’re doing it for industrial hemp and they’ve got a pressboard plant or something like that, and man, that’s gonna be great. You know, they like, just harvested their crop and like, they’re trying, they’re gonna go and do it all this next year, they’re gonna have their first round of product and, but it’s good.

 

Matt: Yeah, it’s the innovation I feel like that has the opportunity in those areas of like, taking the hemp [inaudible 43:20] from the growers, and making plastics out of certain molds for construction, or developing products from hemp on the industrial side is going to be big. I think the bigger stuff like the growing, or the extracting, and the commodities are going to be tougher to get in. There’s a lot of people in there and prices are pretty far down, but creating and innovating from those are what I think there’s, it’s infinite opportunity. Like Nike, shoes were around forever, but Nike came in and claim this domain and you know, has crushed it, and I think there’s gonna be, there’s a lot of opportunity within industry to be able to do that.

 

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, man, it’s all just started. It’s all just started. For people who think it’s over with, or you’re not able to like, it’s all like, just starting so hold on to your hats.

 

Matt: Exactly.

 

Chip: It’s happening, man.

 

Matt: It is, it is. A lot of opportunity. Sticking a plant in the ground and thinking, “Alright, I can just do this, follow this process, and make a shit ton of money,” those are over. You know, you had a short window on those, but the opportunity to take something, and do something cool with it. 

 

Chip: Man, I’ll say I’ve been doing it for you know for, wow, a long time. This is my 32nd outdoor year. 

 

Matt: Yeah. You’re OG.

 

Chip: It’s never been that easy to just stick a plant in the ground and pull money out of. Yeah, like some people, I hear that works. But like, it’s not real, dude. That was fantasy. 

 

Matt: Yeah, you’ve had, every year has been learning, huh?

 

Chip: Every year has been great, every year has been a learning curve every year. But it’s just, it is a job. If you want to do it professionally, it’s a job. Go grow a plant in the backyard, you don’t have to do much if you want to, right? But you know, we’ve got great top soil there, you got a water sprinkler there like, you got a fence around, like, you know, go grow a field.

 

Matt: Personal use plants are like that, yeah. 

 

Chip: Right? It’s just a different scenario, but love weed, love everything about it, and just wanted to keep learning more, talking to more people about it, and, you know, helping more people grow.

 

Matt: Nice. Which I know you do a lot of growing supplies. What do you feel like the market for people that are just trying to do things at their house? Or, you know, I think that’s another opportunity to like, growing kits. Especially if things come  –

 

Chip: Yeah, you know, we’ve tried to put a lot of kits  together over time but people, the cannabis industry or DIYers for sure, they just want to buy the parts and pieces, and kind of put it together, right? But I’ll say that part of that is grow tents. Grow tents are, you know, they’re hard to get. I mean, there’s just so many of them out there now. Like, if you are one of the 300,000 people in Oklahoma that got your prescription for medical cannabis, you try  to go by a grow tent, which is like a little 4×4, 8×8 or 4×8 little vinyl type cloth tent that you can erect in your house, and it’ll light tight it so you can flower cannabis. Right. Everybody is interested in that. And I think they’re one of the greatest things in the world, man, honestly. The entry level for everybody who’s wanted to grow a plant, they can easily go do it in their backyard with a bag of soil.  Go pick up a bag of growers, Coco HP, or just drop it in hole in your backyard and plant your plant in it. Like, everybody wants to do that, who’s ever smoked weed or thought about it like, “It’s legal now. Let’s grow.” And honestly, everybody should. Think of how much better it would be. If 150 adult Americans all went out and planted one plant in their backyard. . Alright, let’s split it off into couples and families and just say 50 million Americans went and planted out one plant of ganja in their backyard. Wow, man. We could see some real change in the world.

 

Matt: Yeah, that would be. It would, and maybe there will be that one day. You know, that’s what I was wondering like, you know, coffee people. I mean, they don’t necessarily grow the coffee, but they’re grinding up the beans, they’re French pressing, they’re doing like, you know, all the extracting basically, the coffee right there in the house. And I’m wondering if cannabis is gonna have that same kind of market to where there’s all these at home, kind of little extraction systems and things like that, it becomes like that much of a household plant, you know? Especially as we get deep down of like, learning more about the plant, the different cannabinoids, and growing different strains. I think it’d be interesting you know? Like I want a little more CBD, or this is more for daytime, or this is more for my nighttime. I’m curious of how the market ends out. And I think there’s a lot of innovation in that area. There’s a lot of room to grow.

 

Chip: Oh, there’s tons of room to grow, man. It is just starting. Well, hey, Matt, let’s talk about the brand you’re building, and what’s going on with you and your business?

 

Matt: Sure. Well, thanks man. So currently right now, like I said, I’m really focused on the experience around cannabis. It played such a large role in my life on the way it helped me open up to patterns, and things, and programs that I had that weren’t necessarily serving me, and I feel like it’s a big stepping stone in that. So currently, I have three main core values around our products. Number one is intention setting. So I like to say the analogy of a car analogy. To me, cannabis, and CBD, and hemp are the vehicle that we’re using to get to a place. Our intentions, our navigation, basically like, where are we wanting to go? So we’re really big with for the first 30 days people taking our products, trying to connect with them and find out what are their intentions for taking the products. Is it to sleep better? Is it, why are they wanting to sleep better? Because they’re starting a new business, or whatever it is in life, right? Really be clear  –

 

Chip: The sleep feels good.

 

Matt: Sleep feels good, right. 

 

Chip: No joke but like, you know people, like, sleep is one of those things that people like, oh, you can’t sleep. And it’s like, if you haven’t been in that position, you know not being able to sleep, we talked about this already, you sleep great.

 

Matt: I sleep great.

 

Chip: And I don’t at all, right? And like, man, it is hard, man. Like, you know, and then like, when you start like, taking you know, substances to help you sleep, most of them have some hangover effect.

 

Matt: Yeah. More drowsy in the morning more. Yeah, I agree. And so yeah, cannabis has been one of the biggest things I feel like for what I hear most people taking them for, help them relax and sleep. 

 

Chip: And you know, inflammation, any type of inflammation I see. I see with CBD specifically, I see the aid in, you know, they’re the other, you know, pharmaceuticals they’re using, right? They don’t have to take as much. It means that they don’t have as many adverse side effects from the pharmaceuticals as well, right? And all that means something.

 

Matt: Yep. Oh yeah.  I think that it’s a natural plant that has a lot of different uses. But I think mainly in helping people relax, kind of helping work on the nervous system and their immune system, which is basically taking their inflammation and why people say that cannabis has helped with such a wide range of things, because it usually comes down to those two things. It helps calm their nervous system down, which I think everybody’s a little bit more wired nowadays. There’s a lot more stimulus we have coming at us in COVID and things like that. We just, there’s more nervous system disorders, anxiety, depression, things like that where I feel like you know, definitely cannabis and endocannabinoid system when it’s healthy, helps the nervous system regulate as well as immune system with inflammation. And like I said, it works on a host of different diseases, and I guess conditions that people say it helps with so yeah.

 

Chip: And hey man, it’s fine to self-medicate. Damn right, we do it all the time. Like there’s nothing wrong with it. And, you know, that’s why all the over counter drugs are there is because you can self-medicate. Self-medicating with cannabis is one of the most effective, less, least harmful things that anyone can do. And I know I’m preaching the choir here, because we’ve got 30,000 listeners here that are just gonna say, “Right on, Chip!”

 

Matt: Oh yeah.

 

Chip: But it’s true.

 

Matt: It is true, it is true. You know, and that’s, I think with our brand, it’s more of like, set your intentions, have gratitude around it, and really just focus on like, what are you trying to bring this plant to do in your life? And you know, our deal is building a community where we can support each other in those changes, right?

 

Chip: Are you guys, are you connected on Facebook or Instagram? You have social media platforms you work with?

 

Matt: Yes, we have. We’re on Instagram, @thealchempist.com. The alc-hemp-ist, I don’t know if some people would debate, the name was based on the book, The Alchemist, have you read the book?

 

Chip: Oh, yeah, sure.

 

Matt: Yeah, I love that book. And, you know, to me, there’s a lot of hidden stories in that book and hidden gems in that book of good lessons that you can learn. But for me, it was more about that, you know, the boy that kind of went against the programming that he was taught, and what he’s supposed to be in this world to, you know, discover his own personal legend. And that’s kind of what I you know, with that with hemp. ‘Cause as you know, I kind of was the same way I grew up in a, this was not an acceptable plant, like the devil’s lettuce, like we talked about earlier. And, you know, and finding it, helping in my life and following that path, and my intuition that I’ve discovered my own journey. And so, I feel like everybody can do that with cannabis in their own way. And our goal is to kind of help them set that intention, help them form the gratitudes around it, and then build a community where people that are going in the same direction like, “Hey, we’re all trying to sleep better, we’re all trying to do this.” We can kind of share openly like, “Hey, this is this is working for me. These you know, I’m smoking cannabis at night and I’m using CBD during the day, and this is how it’s affecting me, and these are the dosages I’m doing,” because you know, we haven’t had a lot of research around the plant because it’s been illegal.

 

Chip: Yeah, next to none.

 

Matt: Next to none. Because federally yeah, it’s still Schedule I which hasa prevented colleges and things like that, which I’m sure your listeners know too. But Schedule I, you can’t do any research around as much where you know, you have cocaine and meth and all of them are Schedule II. So it’s just nuts how that works, but I feel that you know, there’s starting to become more research, especially hemp and stuff is least introduced the plant because I you know, I tell people hemp is cannabis, there’s no difference. It’s the same plant.

 

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. All the time. People are, “Oh, hemp, not cannabis.” I’m like, “Same stuff. Same stuff. ” They’re like, “Well, not the new federal regulations.” I’m like, “Nope, new federal [inaudible 53:46].” Right?  It just the same plant, it’s just –

 

Matt: Government had to reclassify to make them feel better about you know, “Alright, we’re stepping, we’re stopping the line at 0.3%.”

 

Chip: That’s hemp. 

 

Matt: That’s hemp. Now it’s hemp. Now it’s okay. Yeah, exactly. No, it’s an artificial line in the same plant. And so, we’re able to study it from that angle a little bit to kind of see what THC is doing and what, you know, CBD, and CBG, and all these different minor cannabinoids and terpenes are doing inside the body. I feel like that’s going to continually grow. And the more we get into that and more research we get into that, the more we’ll be able to develop products, and have businesses that are focused around certain parts of the plant, and what people are dealing with or need help with in their life.

 

Chip: Hey, Matt. Well, hey, thanks for joining me today, man. This was a great conversation. I was looking forward to it. We always talk so well together about hemp, CBD and cannabis. Next time you’re down here in Oklahoma, we’ll, let’s go track down some of those industrial hemp people.

 

Matt: Sounds good, man. Sounds good. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. 

 

Chip: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you once again for listening to another episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker and today, Matt Chandler. Hey, you guys. We all love cannabis. And you know, the hemp, and the medical cannabis, and the ganja people, you’re often fighting this wrestling match. And I’m gonna ask each and every one of you to embrace each other. Embrace your cannabis brothers and sisters, it doesn’t matter if they’re a hemp grower, if they’re a medical cannabis grower, they’re a ganja grower, if they’re a personal grower, or if they’re a home grower, right? Hey, we’re all in this together. And let’s work together and really find out the real dirt on hemp, ganja, and medical cannabis. This is it. The Real Dirt with Chip Baker.

The Real Science Behind Compost Tea

The Real Science Behind Compost Tea

how to make compost tea for cannabis cultivation

We all know the benefits of compost when it comes to cannabis cultivation.

But we’ve also come a long way from just dumping a pile of compost into your soil and mixing it in. With compost tea, we can now incorporate compost into our cultivation practices by simply feeding the plants through irrigation, just like hydroponic nutrients.

If there’s one man who has gone to extra mile to understand the science behind compost tea in order to create powerful, organic tea mixes, it’s John Picirrilli, Founder of Cutting Edge Solutions.

“So my grandma turned me on to compost tea, I think I’ve already told you this story. She made anaerobic tea. It was just like a jug, a five gallon bucket of manure that we’d fill with water and sit there forever. And then occasionally, she’d get a scoop of water out of it and dilute it and pour it onto her radishes and tomatoes, or whatever we were growing in the backyard, right?” – Chip Baker

Even since he was boy Chip Baker was learning about compost tea and its benefits from his Grandma. And John learned a similar way himself.

 “You know, going back on some of my many mistakes, one of the early ones was doing something like that. And then you do it on a larger scale than a five gallon bucket. Because pretty soon, you see a little works pretty good, so you want more of it to use all at once.” – John Picirrilli

From a five gallon bucket to 50 gallon drums, John quickly expanded his research and development of his compost tea product. And that was 40 years ago. The science behind compost tea and growing with biologicals had limited research at the time, and John was at the forefront of looking at the microscopic details of the teas he was making.

Eventually he would start his own microbiology lab where could study compost tea and all of its components scientifically.

What John Learned

Through his decades of research, John’s findings are plain and simple.

“That’s when I realized better biology means better flower.” – John Picirrilli

While compost teas are nothing new, using them for cannabis cultivation is a relatively new practice, and that’s why John is focused on educating growers on its benefits. But explaining the complex science behind how good compost tea develops isn’t so simple, especially when cannabis cultivators come from a wide range of backgrounds, age and education.

The Real Science Behind Compost Tea

In the Season 5 premiere of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker, John and Chip dive into their history and experience with compost tea, from their first discoveries to developing their current regiment. John goes in depth about how he began and continues his studies into compost tea using his sophisticated methods to find which specific microbes and bacteria are the most beneficial for cannabis.

The two talk about the history of using compost tea, how it has evolved, and why every cannabis cultivator should be incorporating it into their regiment. And of course the two long time friends share some old school stories from the Northern California days.

‘A regulator told me a long time ago. “Don’t try to list too many things on the label. Just say it makes plants happy.”‘ – John Picirrili

Is it that simple? Find out in this episode of The Real Dirt with Chip Baker!

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Chip: Hello, my friends. It’s so good to be back here in another episode of The Real Dirt. Got an exciting season this year for you, The Real Dirt. Wow, last year was incredible. And this year, wow. It’s gonna show so much for the cannabis market and cannabis industry. You know, we’re gonna hold on by the, fly by the seat of our pants. It’s coming so fast and so strong. If you’re involved in the cannabis industry right now, you know what I’m talking about. Everybody sitting at home, unemployed, smoking more weed than they ever have, or you know, they maybe have a little stress or – hey, also, there’s medical cannabis in so many more states now. 2001 is gonna go up in smoke. And I mean that in the very, very best way. That is my prediction, is the cannabis industry is going to be one of the saviors of the country and of the planet. If we’d all just sit back and smoke a little bit of weed, then you know, it’ll be a better place. And those of you who consume cannabis, or who work in the cannabis industry know how good this plant is. And man, dude, it has been so good. Despite of what’s going on in the rest of the country, the cannabis industry just had a banner year last year. And we’re gonna repeat it again. So these next episodes of The Real Dirt man, we’ve got a new studio, it sounds great. You can hear it right now, you can hear the bass in my voice. And I’m stoked man, we’ve been running out of this bedroom in the back of my house. And it hasn’t been the best, and the best internet reception. But man, we’re here, we’re set up for a very socially distanced event. I have many, many guests both on Zoom and as well here in the studio. I have a huge eight foot table, we can all be across from each other. We’ve got great ventilation in here. We’ll socially distance and be as careful as we can. But man, we’ve got some great people from all over the world. They’re gonna chime in this year. And we’re gonna run things a little bit different this year, I hope you guys enjoy it. But I’m really, you know, in this quest for knowledge, and previously, I wanted to know people’s story and understand stuff about them. You know, and I still want that. But one of the goals that we’re gonna have this year at The Real Dirt is we’re gonna answer questions. So if you have any question, and we’re looking on the internet, we’re looking at our Instagram, we’re looking at Facebook every single day. If you have any questions about cannabis, the cannabis industry, you know, ask us at The Real Dirt and maybe we’ll make an episode about it. So currently, we have about 35 episodes planned for this year, we’ll see how it unfolds, we’ll probably get a little bit more, a little bit less. But man, it’s gonna be really informative. If you’ve ever, I apologize for all the bad quality recordings this past year. We’re gonna do far, far better this next year. But uh yeah, man. We’re just gonna grow right along. So yeah, if you haven’t already subscribed, please go to The Real Dirt on iTunes, and on Spotify, and on Amazon and all the other major places where you can listen to podcasts. And listen, all the other episodes you know, if you’re interested in anything, you can ask us at The Real Dirt. “Hey, I’m interested in this, do you have an episode suggestion?” And we’ll give you a suggestion but you know, some of the early episodes are great, great, great information, even though they might have been four or five years ago, three or four years ago. Man, some of that stuff is just great. You guys should all go back and listen to that if you haven’t. We got about 70, 80 episodes published right now and man, they all have some great tidbits of information. But this year it’s going to be super high quality, super informative. And yeah, man. Here we go, man. My first guest is John Piccirilli. Me and John have been friends for years. He introduced himself one day to me in Humboldt County right after I’d started a potting soil plant. He literally rolled by and heard that I’d started a plant, had kind of heard about, you know, what I was trying to do, royal gold coco fiber, this was in like, 2008. John stopped by, said hi. He had a company called Cutting Edge. And so has a company called cutting edge where he makes top quality fertilizers for cannabis. And John helped me over the years tremendously. Anytime I had a question, he was there for me. And you know, when I started selling retail product with Cultivate Colorado and then Cultivate OKC, you know, really supported John and all of his products and whether it’s his 3 Part or his Uncle John’s, or, you know, the Sonoma Gold, man, he’s just got some great, great, great products. He makes nutrition for plants simple. And we’re going to talk to john about of a couple of things. We’re definitely going to get into some compost tea, and we’ll have a few episodes here, where Uncle John kind of explains it all. If you’ve ever met John, you know how he can go on, and on, and on, and on, and on for hours. So, I’m going to try to consolidate all his knowledge into you know, some good, good, good information we can all digest. But what I want you to do now is sit back, roll the largest joint you can and enjoy this episode of The Real Dirt.

 

John: Hey guys. We got John Piccirilli here. He’s the founder of Cutting Edge Nutrient Solution and pretty much go-to source of all things cannabis cultivation and nutrition. There should be like, a Google section that’s just like,  “John says, Uncle John says.” Welcome, John, thanks for coming. 

 

Chip: Thanks Chip, and happy birthday. 

 

John: Oh, yep. This is my birthday episode. For those of you who didn’t get me a gift, it’s okay. You still have all of next year to plan. 

 

Chip: Right, I mean, I was caught off guard myself. And I’ve known Chip, you know, 15 or 20 years. So…

 

John: Yeah. Well, the reason you were caught off guard is because you’re eagerly waiting to tell me happy solstice in a few days from now. And you just forget that it’s my birthday a few days beforehand. 

 

Chip: Yes. And then it gets brighter every day. 

 

John: It does. It gets brighter every day. 

 

Chip: So wow John, me and you have known each other for a long time. We met a decade or more ago, when I opened up my first humble soil plant, you walked in the door one day, and politely answered all my questions and told me how I was doing everything wrong. And now I’m successful today because of you.

 

John: Oh, I don’t know, Chip, that’s not true. You’ve been at it a long time, too. And, you know, for me, I’ve been at it for 40 years, you know. I was one of those punk kids that ran away from Berkeley at 14 and started growing in Mendocino County in 1978. So I’ve had a little bit more time to make more mistakes than you. So I’m just telling you the advice that you think I’m giving you, I’m just telling you the mistakes I made, and not to do this. 

 

Chip: Now you are a world-renowned, known as the problem solver. I’ve made that mistake for before, you know, answer for many, many, many, many, many things. Right? 

 

John: And if people don’t believe it, I tell them how much it costs to make that mistake and it scares them. 

 

Chip: Yeah, absolutely.

 

John: So they back up and they look at what kind of solutions that I’ve come up with. And those are pretty much our products.

 

Chip: I sell Cutting Edge Solutions. It’s one of our biggest sellers here at Cultivate OKC, Cultivate Colorado throughout California. It has been called the Calif-or. It starts off as a basic three part nutrition formula, but then there’s several other additives, magnesium additive, calcium additive, cal mag. I mean, you’ve got numerous, numerous products. The thing that’s great about John’s products is one, the customer service. You guys got great customer service, t feedback that you get. But man, you and Kevin go to see more gardens than pretty much anybody I know. I mean, I see a lot of gardens. But you guys like. really are in the dirt, man. You know, the thing that fascinates me is that everybody has a like, this little magic or something they do. It’s not magic, what you’re doing.

 

John: No. Well, it’s kind of magic. I mean, it’s science. But science is just a small explanation for magic. And there’s more magic than science. So you don’t always use your head, sometimes you use your heart. 

 

Chip: Yeah, I’ve seen you guys turn around more gardens, for sure, after visits and more happy customers. Is there like, one thing that, is there a common thing that people have problems with? 

 

John: Yeah, I would say using pH up and that locks out calcium, and calcium is key. And so ais phosphorus. A lot of ways that we back people out of problems is by using home tea which is a compost tea. 

 

Chip: And you know, it happens to be the topic of our episode today –

 

John: Wow. 

 

Chip: Is composting. 

 

John: That’s great.

 

Chip: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So my grandma turned me on to compost tea, I think I’ve already told you this story. She anaerobic tea. It was just like a jug, a five gallon bucket of manure that we’d fill with water and sit there forever. And then occasionally, she’d get a scoop of water out of it and dilute it and pour it onto her radishes and tomatoes, or whatever we were growing in the backyard, right? As a little kid, but I didn’t know any different until kind of I met you, John. And you started talking about compost tea, and actively aerated compost tea. Wow, if you’re not compost tea-ing now, it’s definitely something you should think about. Mostly, I recommend it for soil growers, the indoor outdoor greenhouse, it doesn’t matter applying it to the soil foliar feeding. Should I make this statement that it is the most effective thing that you can do for your garden, compost tea?

 

John: It is. It’s true. You know, probably what your grandmother did, you know, she used manure, broke down, and she poured it on and the plants got boosted, right? They look better. You know, going back on some of my many mistakes, one of the early ones was doing something like that. And then you do it on a larger scale than a five gallon bucket. Because pretty soon, you see a little works pretty good, so you want more of it to use all at once. And then you use, make a 50 50 gallon drums. And then it really goes anaerobic. And then you get acids in it that just melt the roots, when you overapply it. So then, there’s an application amount that you should use too. But I mean, that’s how I started out was, like I said, like over 40 years ago, you know, one of the benefits of being back then was you got to see cultivation going from fields and planes flying over, to actual helicopter traffic coming in. And then we had to move back in the barrage, and then ultimately back near the tree line. And then there’s a lot more microbiology that interacts with the plant then. But about the same time – 

 

Chip: So this is application. You saw this through application, you saw the biology change through application.

 

John: Right, through just trying to use the same amendments and in holes, or trenches, and grow plants and then you know, we had to march the plants back into the barrage, and then ultimately back into the tree line. And then at that time, I thought just fertilizers grew plants. But then I realized by that point that it was the microbiology that was making the chemistry available.

 

Chip: Yes, the roots, they grow the plants, don’t they? And they need that proper biology around the roots in the soil in order to digest the nutrients in order to feed the plants, right? People can argue that science all day long, but it’s pretty much how it works, right? Synthetic or organic like, you have to have that biological dynamic.

 

John: You do to have healthy plants. And otherwise you get diseases or bugs are attracted to them, which transfer diseases to other plants that are still somewhat healthy. 

 

Chip: So let’s take this back, John. Let’s do a couple things. Let’s talk about like, what is compost tea, and then we’ll talk about some like, things we can do with it, and problems it creates, and problems it solves. So, how do you define compost tea? Because I know this, people say and do this all different types of ways. 

 

John: Right. So you know, some people define compost tea as any compost, like we were saying before, put into drums of water and they make sun tea. And you know about the time we were being pushed back by the helicopters, I was making sun teas and taking horsetail which is high in silica, cutting those up, putting them in –

 

Chip: Wild, crafting horsetail. 

 

John: Right. And stinging nettle, which is not easy to collect, as you think. 

 

Chip: Got to pick it from the jungle.

 

John: Otherwise, your arms are thrashed. But you know, using different herbs and making sun teas, and that seemed to be okay. But I got more results out of it when there was bubbling going on. And then I used it before the bumbling stopped, before it got completely anaerobic. And you know, I got a microscope and I started looking at things closer. And then I got bacterial stain kits for Gram positive and Gram negative, started kind of identifying different bacteria, and started looking at fungi, and staining that with prussian blue, and that led to just building a microbiology lab. I was kind of a kid back then. That was the early realization that you can make liquids that help the amendments of the soil. But compost tea, you know, you asked me that question. And I started to aerate it, so that I could break it down further. And then about that time, you know, it was just sort of wide open. There was not a lot of research being done using biologicals. But I started to learn how to isolate them out of healthy agricultural systems, and scraping them off lichen in the forest, because I realized that some of the best plants were at the drip line were lichen were. They weren’t necessarily getting more sun, but they were growing healthier, and they yielded better, and the flavor of the –

 

Chip: Better biology. 

 

John: Yeah, better biology. And that’s when I realized better biology means better flower. 

 

Chip: I mean, compost tea is new to many people, but it’s a very old technology. I mean, I’m not sure how far back actively aerated compost tea goes. I mean, people have been bubbling compost in the liquid solution for a moment, right? But it’s new to many people. So what we mean by this is we’re actually injecting air of some sort, and people use all types of things. Are there things you should or shouldn’t use, pumps you should or shouldn’t use? 

 

John: Yeah, some people build these elaborate brewers that’s spin the whole liquid inside of a cone tank. And that might be good to generate bacteria, aerobic bacteria, but not necessarily good for protozoa. And so you know, you’re looking for three things in a compost tea that’s aerated as you say, by at least putting in an air stone if not putting in lines that are perforated, and [inaudible 16:13]. it just depends on the size of the brewer that you’re working with. 

 

Chip: Sure. I’ve made probably millions of gallons of compost tea through all my potting soil stuff and you know, royal gold, we used to apply it directly on the line and use compost tea within our products. You know, I’ve always liked the simple air bubblers, right? I always felt those made the best, you know, product, the best compost tea, even though we’ve kind of used everything. I’ve used, you know, these jet pumps that move water around, we’ve used [inaudible 16:52] pumps. Man we’ve used, you know, just like large air pumps with a bunch of lines going into it. But for some reason, the air stones, they they really do work the best.

 

John: They do, I mean, you put them in the bottom of a cone tank, a lot, you know, a line that runs from the pump into the tank, and then it’s at the bottom of a cone tank, and it has just the right amount of air. 

 

Chip: Those with bubble size, I think what it has to do with it? Because you got all those little small bubbles, and as they’re turning over in the water, they’re mixing everything, right? And you know, if you think about it, a bubble is this real like, natural like, thing. You know, I just like the idea of that anyway. I don’t know if it’s reality or not, but millions of bubbles mix better than hundreds of bubbles.

 

John: Well, you know, it’s like champagne. 

 

Chip: Yes, the champagne effect, right.

 

John: It’s the champagne of compost tea. You know? And the other ones are like the jacuzzi jet of compost tea.

 

Chip: Yeah, because you don’t really, you don’t want it really swirling. You don’t want it really bubbling, right? You just want it like, moving around. You wanna inject the right amount of air. Do you know if there’s any math involved with this? 

 

John: Oh, yeah. You know, there’s a, you know, you look at, see I’ve used of different organisms that are in a spore state or in a cis state of it, which is like your egg state for a protozoa. Take a drop of compost tea, and put it on a hemocytometer, that’s what you use to look at blood. But it’s the same thing you use in microscopy to look at the population number in one drop, which is pretty much a measured amount. And on this hemocytometer, it’s got a graph and you can estimate, do a bacteria, fungi, protozoa count. Sometimes people are off on the on the fungi because of actinomycete, which is, you know, when you’re turning your compost, you get that white fuzz on it. –

 

Chip: Yeah, I know it. On the outside, and the inside –

 

John: Right. And then you dig through that and you see all the strands, that actinomycete is helping break down the compost, but it operates at a warmer temperature, which is just on the outside shell. But when you’re making compost tea, a lot of times you have that in there. People mistake that for actual beneficial fungi. It’s beneficial in the sense that it’s breaking things down and making enzymes, but it’s also, can throw you off if you’re actually reading it. So, you need a Gram stain and there’s a certain way to identify that.

 

Chip: And all this stuff is inexpensive now, right? Like, you know, digital microscopes and you know, all this equipment is readily available to people. When I started doing it 20 years ago, it was like, $5,000 for a microscope. But now you can get it for 100 bucks, right? 

 

John: Yeah, yeah. There’s decent microscopes for 100 bucks. I mean, we pretty much use Olympus and Leica microscopes which are German lenses and those are – 

 

Chip: Well, you guys are professionals. Of course you use Leica.

 

John: Well, because we look at, because we look at a lot of samples, right? And so you can get eyestrain. It’s like, the difference between getting reading glasses and real glasses, I guess. 

 

Chip: Now me and you and other people were fascinated with it all. And we might break the microscope out and notice the balance of bacteria and fungi or protozoa over temperatures or, but most people aren’t going to nerd out quite like that. You don’t necessarily need a microscope, right? 

 

John: No.

 

Chip: No, I saw that look in your eyes. You’re like, “No, you gotta have a microscope.”

 

John: Well, you know, you were just saying it.

 

Chip: It’s not that expensive. 

 

John: They’re not that expensive. And, you know –

 

Chip: It’s easy to use.

 

John: I mean, we used to have Maverick cameras that cost like$1400 that attached with a special adapter that went on the compound microscope. In the end, you’re like spending thousands of dollars –

 

Chip: Now you can almost do it on your phone. 

 

John: Yeah, right. Exactly. And they have smaller digital microscopes and digital cameras that are maybe $100 or $200 that are great for taking photos, and sending to someone to identify something that you think is wrong with your plant. Or, you know, the cross section of a root, or you know, many different things. So it’s definitely worthwhile to get these. It adds to your digital library of things that are either going right or wrong. 

 

Chip: It’s just another tool in the tool bucket. So basically, compost tea is any type of compost that’s dissolved in water. And then we’re aerating it.

 

John: That’s a good basic definition.

 

Chip: When doesn’t it have to be compost, then?

 

John: Yeah, I mean, to be compost tea, it should be compost. Usually, it’s vermicompost. Because that’s, you know, high in bacteria. 

 

Chip: The earthworms are incredible creatures and get rid of all the E. coli. And you know, that’s the best thing about earthworms. You use a pure earth, pure black castings and you’re not gonna have any E. coli. 

 

John: Right. That’s very true. Sometimes you could have coliform bacteria, but –

 

Chip: Still rare for earthworm castings, unless it’s like, unless it’s not been screened. If it’s just compost, and earthworm castings, that’s where you see the coliform bacteria.

 

John: Well, it depends what state you’re in. And it’s not you personally, but it’s you physically. 

 

Chip: Yeah. Okay, okay. 

 

John: And you know, because different states do different tests. And you know, for a while they were mixing up E. coli, which is a coliform bacteria with all other coliform bacteria. We have coliform bacteria in our hands.

 

Chip: It’s everywhere.

 

John: It’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous, right? So but you know, it’s not something that is going to harm you. 

 

Chip: Mostly compost tea is made from earthworm castings, water and maybe, you know, a couple of other things. I mean, there’s all types of recipes people use for all types of reasons. I know you guys sell a great, great product HumTea that is a completely formulated compost tea recipe or, what do you, how do you phrase it at? 

 

John: Yeah, so that would be a compost tea. 

 

Chip: HumTea, is it, do you call it an inoculant kit, or a starter kit, or..?

 

John: Yeah, you know, you could call it either thing. You know, I’m not very good at marketing as you know. 

 

Chip: Right, yeah, yeah. You’re great at sales though. 

 

John: Yeah. [inaudible 23:34] I could go in and say, you know, yeah, we have a spawn bag, which is a resealable plastic bag that’s impermeable by pretty much anything, except that it has a GoreTex window on it. So it allows gas exchange. And in there we have some woody material that we grow protozoa on. The actual let’s say, compost itself is a mixture of this woody material, and a mixture of earthworm castings. So the earthworm castings have really good background bacteria, fungi and some protozoa. But we enrich that and enhance that in our composting process and our finishing process. So we usually have a screen of 10 important bacteria, a few fungi, and about 22 different protozoa. So you would take this out of the bag, put it into, you know, we have brewers that have screens. And you can put it into the screen or a HumTea Brew Ball, and that’s actually floats in any container. It will even float in a reservoir. And then we have three different containers, three different say pint or quart bottles depending on the size that you buy of the HumTea inoculant. And those have certain bacteria and there are food sources in there. You know, ours is a little bit more sophisticated than just taking compost from your earthworm castings, and throwing it into some gauze or some sort of screen system, and then bubbling it in water, where a lot of people would add molasses. 

 

Chip: Because you’ve done all the work for you with the HumTea. You don’t have to have a microscope. You can just drop your pre-made formulated compost tea inoculant in a barrel of water in the compost brewer. Any compost brewer, but specifically a Cultivate OKC or Cultivate Colorado compost brewer that you can get in Colorado, you can order it online. Go to cultivate colorad.com, cultivateokc.com, we’ve got great, great deals. Better deals, and you could ever get on 15, 30, 35, 45, 65 gallon brewers. All of that will make it easier for you than just using some random container or you know, maybe not like the easiest thing to clean. But you start with a good compost tea brewer. But any type will work, right? And use the – oh I see, they’re like ” Oh well maybe not any type,” because we already kind of went over that. The ones that move too much water don’t really work so well. 

 

John: Well they work well for bacteria, to generate bacteria but –

 

Chip: So if you got a specific bacteria you’re trying to grow or wanted high in bacteria, then  you would use that.

 

John: Yeah, you wanna use of those high volume mixing, spin it around, [inaudible 26:35].

 

Chip: I mean, anybody can go out and make their own. Anybody can go out and get a bag of earthworm castings. They can get some bat guano, some trace minerals, maybe a little, the smallest amount of some sort of sugar product. They can make their own but man, the HumTea product is really so much better. You know, when you first came out with this, this is how John sold this product. He first came out with it and he gave it away. And he taught us a lot about giving stuff away, all of us in the cannabis industry. And so he would give it away – where would that have been? I mean, you gave it away all –

 

John: North coast horticulture.

 

Chip: North coast horticulture, it would have been –

 

John: In Humboldt County. 

 

Chip: Yeah, it would have been in Humboldt County. And people were like, “Oh, what do I do with this?” He was like, “Well just take a gallon home and when your cuttings are rooted, feed it to them.” Right? “Oh, I’m having problems with you know, my plant. Should I feed all my -” “Well, just start on your cuttings. Take this gallon and feed your cuttings.” And you sold so many people on compost tea and educated so many people on compost tea and Humboldt Tea that way. Off one single gallon. Change their, changed everything for them, right?

 

John: Yeah, yeah. It’s actually Humboldt Countea.

 

Chip: Humboldt Countea.

 

John: Right.

 

Chip: I see. 

 

John: And then there’s just the t-e-a at the end. 

 

Chip: And now, is there some special biology that you’ve put into the Humboldt Countea? 

 

John: Well, yeah. You know, by just raising it and generating it, and then using it in a good agricultural system and then re-harvesting it. You know, some of the bacteria alone, you know, there’s Pseudomonas putida, and that can break down herbicides. So I mean, I was working with that a long time ago, back when they used the silvicultural practice in Mendocino County and Humboldt County, was to spray hardwoods with Agent Orange that was left over from the Vietnam War. So long ago, this was –

 

Chip: [inaudible 28:44] for you and me, right?

 

John: Yeah, that’s right. 

 

Chip: Spraying all the weeds in the woods, they say it’s gonna make the world go good. Oh yeah, man.

 

John: Right. 

 

Chip: Some protest songs there, protest songs from the 90’s. 

 

John: Right. Born right out of NorCal, you know. There was fighting for their lives out there, literally. 

 

Chip: We got pesticide danger. Oh, can decide, danger.

 

John: Nice. Oh, yes. Reggae on the river, I hope it comes back. 

 

Chip: Oh, it will. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it’ll be in memories forever. But…

 

John: Yeah, we still bring it to life. Yeah, you know, I was giving it out at first because not just to educate people, but just to give back to the community. I can see that here in Oklahoma again, where a lot of people just left because they saw corporations rising in their state, whether it was Colorado, Michigan, Washington, Oregon, California. And they wanted to be back in a community of people that share plant material. And you really see it here now. And it’s good. 

 

Chip: Oklahoma reminds me a lot of Humboldt in the late 90’s. 

 

John: Yeah.

 

Chip: Right? The organic movement, the freshness, the newness, the idea. Because even though like Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity, they’re thought about and they are the world capital of ganja production and have been for, like 50 years, right? It’s like Mexico, Humboldt County, right? 

 

John: Right. You go anywhere in the world and they go, “Where are you from?” And you say, if you say Arcata or Trinidad, immediately they’re like, “That’s in Humboldt County. You’re from Humboldt County.” Yeah.

 

Chip: Yeah, right. So I know there’s a lot of haters out there, but that’s just how it is, the volume of cultivators up there, it’s just now incredible. But back then, in the late 90s, we had just gone through Operation Green Merchant. There was, one of the Bushes came in with an aircraft carrier off the coast of Humboldt, they had National Guard, they were like, stopping and searching people coming in and out of highway roads that just went through National Forest systems. But, you know, all kinds of illegal Gestapo type of stuff. And in the late 90s, cannabis, it was really, really underground. You know, outdoor cultivation. It had it for like, 10 years at that point was really hard, right? You had to hide it, you had to put it under trees. And people were growing indoor. It started growing indoor in like, huge farms. Absolutely some of the biggest farms in the early years. Everybody seemed to have a 40 or an 80 light indoor on a generator back then. 

 

John: Right.

 

Chip: Right? That’s kind of what’s going on here is that it’s easy to get a 200 amp license, it’s easy to get a license to grow and grow under 200 amps. Maybe that’s what I should say, 2500 bucks, $3,000 you can easily get a license. And it’s kind of the same way back then, it’s like you could go get your prescription and grow some weed and sell it to the dispensary, right? They just kind of formalized it a little bit. But the same enthusiasm, right? The same old coops coming out of the hills going, “I love weed. We used to grow it back in the whenever it is,” right? Man, and we saw it happen then. Because we had that big first explosion happened in ’97. And it was like ’97 to like ’94 or something. And then there was smaller changes in the laws like in Mendocino, they made it legal for 25 plants for anybody, and then 99 plants. If you registered, they were one of the first registrations in the country, that was back in 2004, right? And outdoor cultivation really started to take off again. We got rid of Terry Farmer and a couple of other holdouts from the old war on drugs and it reminds me all of that here. It’s like the, except it just went differently, right? Instead of there being this big political issue, you know, the police are just like, “Oh, weed’s legal? Okay,” right? And it’s not like it was in Humboldt back then where everybody fought it for years, and years. Now it’s like, “Oh, weeds legal? Okay.” People were really accepting of it here, right? They’ve embraced organic cultivation like those old days in Humboldt. Remember how it used to be if you [inaudible 33:22] wasn’t organic? Like I mean, your friends would just like, rail you for it.

 

John: It’s true. 

 

Chip: Remember?

 

John: Yeah.

 

Chip: I mean like, what, I mean, it means me and John are both hydro guys. And I love organic too, John does too. John’s got a whole like organic thing too. You know, organic supplements, organic nutrition, that we use – I’ve got some weed over there in front of us –

 

John: Oh, nice.

 

Chip: That’s all just happened in here. It’s a special time and special place in Oklahoma. And man, it’s starting to happen that way in Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois,  Michigan, right?  It’s this new great industry that still anybody can get into. In Colorado and in California now, anybody just can’t get into.

 

John: No.

 

Chip: Right? 

 

John: No. 

 

Chip: And if you guys are into it over there, and things are going great for you, me and John are both giving you a thumbs up. 

 

John: We are still there, Chip. 

 

Chip: I mean yeah, we’re – 

 

John: We’re still in Humboldt County, but –

 

Chip: We know how hard it is, man. It’s hard. 

 

John: The building codes, everything that goes along with it, the invasion of your private property. You know, touring farms here, I don’t see that I see people doing their best, instead of having to pay regulators and go through all these different code enforcement issues, and wait, and wait, and wait, and spend money on their mortgages, or leases, or whatever. In the outlying areas of major cities here, there’s no building codes. So I mean, I was just yesterday at a place that you know, they spent 300,000 on a state of the art greenhouse. And they’re putting up two more, they’re putting up one first and they’re gonna join these greenhouses together. But my point is that when people are allowed to do their best, they do great. And when people are held back by a regulatory industry that doesn’t understand what they’re doing, but wants to take opinions from everyone else –

 

Chip: And a percent.

 

John: Yes, let’s not forget that. 

 

Chip: And let’s not forget the percent of profit that they want to take as well. 

 

John: Right. And it really should just be grown and sold at the end that it’s being sold that it should be taxed. 

 

Chip: Easy enough, man, Oklahoma’s got a really good handle on it, that’s for sure. And it’s got some problems, don’t get me wrong. Back to compost tea. A couple ways, I guess, people use compost, either they like, do a soil drench, or they do a foliar spray. 

 

John: Right. So a foliar spray would be to offset other potential plant pathogenic fungi that could be on the plant like, powdery mildew. Aspergillus brasiliensis will take care of –

 

Chip: Like I know if he’s pronouncing that right. 

 

John: Yeah, I was kind of hesitant when I started because  –

 

Chip: He almost, your eyes go up in your head, like they’re having this rain man moment. 

 

John: Well you know, you throw out these kind of terms, and then people are, they can’t, you can’t catch it. It’s something that’s really got to be written down. But, I mean, that’s something that offsets and outcompetes powdery mildew, which is a big issue. Going back to this farm that I was just at yesterday, you know, state of the art greenhouse really good quality Quonset houses, and one is lit up and holding all the best mothers. But at the same time, they were put in not Chip’s soil, but another soil let’s say. And that soil was made from composted pine needles back east. And then what happens is, it’s super acidic.

 

Chip: Oh. So there was a pH problem. 

 

John: To the extreme, where the plants were basically dying. When I looked at them a month and a half ago, the person didn’t want to take them out of their 30 gallon plastic pots. So the only choice is to use a compost tea or to use HumTea, because the microbiology will start breaking things down and leeching out certain elements that are toxifying the plant. And these are prized plants. I mean, they’re, you know, they’re – 

 

Chip: Compost tea. One of its benefit really is if you have sick plants, if you have plants that aren’t doing so good, regardless of what diagnosis you think they have, compost tea will help them. 

 

John: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, it’s like magic, you see? You know it’s working because the leaves –

 

Chip: It’s kind of like chicken soup. It’s like the chicken soup.

 

John: It is, for this time of year. It’s flu season. You know, people are afraid to even cough in public. You know, will be hauled off. But you know, when you want to keep those mother plants going until the spring, and you have light in order to be able to do that in a greenhouse and you’re heating the greenhouse, if they’re in bad soil, or if they get some sort of disease because it’s too humid, and you don’t want to open it up because it’s too cold outside, compost tea or Hum Tea is is what you need. Not only foliar spray with, but run through the soil and then that has another action when it goes into the soil. It will stimulate the plant’s immune system. 

 

Chip: So there’s lots of talk about dilution when you do soil drench. Do you have a typical dilution rate? Or how about this, what’s a, because I know it’s varied. What’s the best dilution rate?

 

John: You know, when you have a brewer, say it’s even a five gallon bucket. When you make tea in that, you should be able to take 1 gallon to 25 gallons. And if you want to go thinner, you can go up to 50 gallons. One gallon of compost tea or HumTea to 50 gallons. And you’re going to get the benefit. You can pour HumTea straight on, and it’s good to do. Pour it straight on. Do it 1:25, do it 1:50. And you pour it straight on, you see a result the next day. You do 1:25, it’s two days. You do 1:50, it’s three, maybe three days. And for me, 1:25 is good because you know brewing it is roughly like, $6 a gallon. So I don’t want to spend too much money, but I want the plants to be healthy. 

 

Chip: Yeah my experience is exactly the same thing. If you, I think that the HumTea, it works best diluting it 1:1, because I think you can use it. I mean, I know you can use it just straight on, but most people can’t afford to, or the volume of it. And you know, I also try to just use it on like, just rooted plants or vegging plants, so I can get the most concentrated colony forming units in one area, right? I like the 1:1. That being said, man, like, you can pretty much pour it in any volume of liquid that you have to feed your plants, right? If you’re using a 300 gallon tank even, you will absolutely see benefit by making a five gallon compost tea and pour it in there. Now, it might work better for [inaudible 40:34] if you only have 5 gallons, and you have a, you know, a garden that would require 300 gallons of water, you’d be better off boiler feeding it, I would think. Even if it’s just on the top of the soil, because we see people doing that too. And I’ve done that too, is just take the like, direct HumTea, Humboldt Countea with a pump sprayer, right, right? Have you ever seen this? 

 

John: Yes, oh yeah.

 

Chip: They just spray it right on the top of the soil as opposed to the plant and then you get the water in and you get the like, you know, the colony to develop there. And I mean, that’s like, three bucks for something like that. 

 

John: It’s super cheap, and it’s super effective. And that’s a good point, Chip. Putting it in, regarding the sprayer, you can do full strength or 1:1 and foliar spray it. 

 

Chip: The only problem with the full stream is sometimes it’ll clog your sprayer and you have to like, screen it out anyway. 

 

John: Oh, yeah. 

 

Chip: Right? But if you just dilute it, 1:1 goes to the sprayer. 

 

John: Yeah, that’s true. 

 

Chip: Pretty, pretty good. 

 

John: And not use the bottom little part, just pour it on the top. 

 

Chip: Yeah, we screen it out exactly and try to leave the bottoms. When we’re actively doing it, and I don’t know how you feel about this, but I just try to do back to back to back to back compost teas. And I never clean out my compost tea brewer except with water. So I’ll just wash down the sides, wash down the sides, and then just start another one up. And it works. If it’s back to back to back to back to back, that seems to work great. As soon as I let it sit a few days and don’t fight with it. I gotta start over.

 

John: And there’s a good point in there is, so you’re on a farm and you’re using well water. 

 

Chip: Yeah.

 

John: So it has no chlorine in it. 

 

Chip: Correct.

 

John: Right. And chlorine isn’t really a bad problem, you can aerate it for 24 hours and it’ll, you know, take the chlorine out. But, you know, if you’re using chloramide or chlorinate, some cities use that, then you’ve got nitrogen injected with the chlorine. IT forms a more stable compound to keep the chlorine in the pipes, right? And then you have to use something like a Hydrologic Big Boy. Or, you know, if you don’t want that, you could go to your local hardware store and get a carbon filter that removes chlorine, and that’ll also remove that. 

 

Chip: Right. 

 

John: So because that will kill,  mean, why is it there? To kill biology. And you don’t want to do that. 

 

Chip: So don’t use chlorinated water.

 

John: Yeah.

 

Chip: So back to the foliar spray though. So we can use it as a soil drench, or we can use it as a foliar spray. How do you recommend people doing that?

 

John: That’s a good point. You can screen it through a piece of nylon and get all the particles out of it. And then either do it full strength or 1:1, and foliar year spray the top, foliar spray the bottom of the leaves and the stem, you’ve pretty much completely covered the plant. You can also, and this could be called foliar spraying, you could spray where the drip emitters are. And that will, the water coming out of the drip emitter will drive the biology down to where the roots are. And if you just, if you hand water, same thing. You can either throw it into your hand watering reservoir, your hand watering in or you could put, you know, just put it on the top and spoil the tops of the pots or the trench or whatever. 

 

Chip: Yeah, my first commercial application of compost tea was down in Salinas at our first Royal Gold potting soil plant down there. And I saw people spraying it on lettuce and cauliflower. They would say it was a foliar application, they just called it spray. But they’re spraying the plants and the ground at the same time. Right? To get these big rows and this stuff wasn’t plastic culture. To me, it’s like part of it all. It needs to go in the soil. You need to spray the plants. Now what is some of the benefits of spraying the plants over soil drench?

 

John: Well, spraying the plants, it will knock back powdery mildew and other plant pathogenic fungi that might grow on the leaf surface. So that’s the benefit there. It’s not really like it’s going to be able to break down any fertilizers. Some people say, well, it does, it seems to boost the plant. Well, that’s because they’re spraying with chemical fertilizers, and it’s helping move those into the plant. But in general, it’s better to spray with organic supplements than it is to spray with NPK directly on the plant. The plant doesn’t really take it in well that way. 

 

Chip: Let’s talk about compost tea and synthetic nutrients. Because this is one of the myths or maybe not myths, but concerns people have. Like, if I’m using synthetic nutrients, can I benefit from compost tea? 

 

John: You can. I mean, it depends on what type of synthetic chemicals are being used. I mean certainly, if you’re using urea, you know, you’re gonna kill things. If you’re using something that’s made, and it’s got sulfuric acid in it, you know, there’s some harsh chemicals out there. But in general, when you go into a hydroponic store, or if you want to call it a grow store, the lines of nutrients that are on the shelf are better quality. A lot of them aren’t –

 

Chip: Say at the farm store.

 

John: Right.

 

Chip: Right.

 

John: You’re not getting ag grade, you’re getting possibly food grade. I mean, we use food grade in our line of fertilizers. You know, there are other companies that use ag chemicals because it’s cheaper. And then people call them salts. I mean, all it means is that it dissolved, those minerals can dissolve in water, and that it’s not necessarily sodium chloride. But you know, going back to how microbiology works, and how well will it do with these different fertilizers? Well, I would say it just depends. But when I was working on HumTea, I developed it so that all the functional groups that do the magic,  let’s say, are offset by our fertilizer lines. So because I built it so that it could be used in recirculating systems.

 

Chip: And we have used it in recirculating systems with your you know, 3 Part Cutting Edge for sure. It works great. I gave up the organic components and [inaudible 47:25] during a while ago just because I don’t want to deal biofilm, or clogged comps, or some of the other problems  that happened with it. But it worked great. I just prefer to keep the synthetic stuff and recirculating systems separate. You know, if you’ve got a tank that’s not recirculating, then no reason not to mix synthetic and biological stuff together. Right, I know, I know. I’m [inaudible 47:53] now that I said that. Oh dude, I’m gonna have a flurry of people like, “You can’t kill all the biology dies when they come across [inaudible 47:59],” what did you say that [inaudible 48:00] was? You didn’t listen to that?

 

John: Yeah, it doesn’t. I mean, if –

 

Chip: It doesn’t, and we can see. And here’s another big myth that happens is people talk about, “Oh, in California, the ground’s dead, because of all of the chemicals that they’ve put on it. You can’t grow anything there anymore.” Do you know any place in California that’s like that?

 

John: Well, you know. Yeah. Maybe not in the Hills but you know, you look in the Central Valley. And yeah, there are a build up, there’s a buildup of boron from the groundwater. And the boron, you know, it gets to certain parts per million, and there’s fewer crops you can grow until you’re finally left with pistachios. So –

 

Chip: Oh so they just moved pistachios to those areas?

 

John: Right.

 

Chip: Oh, that’s why. Okay, okay.

 

John: It’s like a succession of planting. And then ultimately, the pistachios come out and then they grow cotton. And then when you –

 

Chip: Uhuh, that’s Oklahoma. 

 

John: Certain people say, “Well, what caused the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma? Wasn’t that the killing of all the microbiology?”

 

Chip: No, it was all the people leaving at once.

 

John: They were trying to get on the freeway first. It’s really dirt roads back then. 

 

Chip: Oh man. I miss the railroad on the freeway. There’s a song there, right, right? Hotel California or something. 

 

John: Right. But you know, the dead lands of California, it’s more like, they’re not dead. They just don’t have, they don’t have the water quality to grow crops. And what is growing burns down. 

 

Chip: Yeah, I mean water quality is a big issue here in Oklahoma and throughout the country. That’s for sure. I mean, the water quality here is pretty poor. We almost all use RO filters. If you’re an indoor you should be using an RO filter here. 

 

John: Yeah and you know, I go to a lot of places here and there, you have boron problems. That’s why those farms were abandoned. So that and the fact that everybody tried to grow one type of wheat, not weed. Fortunately, that’s not happening, because we’re growing many varieties of weed. But wheat, I mean, that’s what pretty much caused the Dust Bowl. It was, there was one popular wheat that everyone wanted to make bread out of in the northeast. And so everybody ran out here, tore up the land, grew one kind of wheat, because it was profitable, and then it became not profitable. And then all those farms were abandoned. And that’s part of the reason of the Dust Bowl. All these people left. They weren’t farmers to begin with anyway.

 

Chip: Yeah, series of droughts. Everybody was planting at once over and over again.

 

John: Same thing.

 

Chip: You know, World War One, it had a huge demand of food for, you know, for that effort. Everybody kind of like, had several great, great years and just everybody pumped it up.

 

John: Right. And my –

 

Chip: Kind of like the hemp industry. In the current hemp industry, there’s a Dust Bowl reference in there someplace.

 

Chip: Yeah, I mean hemp growing, you know, that’s farming once again. I sell a HumTea to hemp growers. You know, they use very little of it, but they use it at transplant because it helps with adjusting to the field from the greenhouse. I mean the hemp industry, there’s another over regulated industry. Keeping people at point three has punished a lot of plant breeders who –

 

Chip: How will that manage? You know what I hate about it? This is the biggest problem, is it still differentiates cannabis growers. There’s either the no THC or the THC growers. And the non-THC growers – mostly, don’t get your feelings hurt if you’re one of these people – mostly you’re like, “Oh no, I don’t grow THC.” It’s like come on, man. This is just the cannabis plant. Let’s stop being so scared of some letters, right? THC, CBD, DEA, FDA. Let’s stop being scared of those. Let’s think about like the cannabis. Let’s think about the plant. Let’s think about the world. And think about it that way, instead of this just fucked up liability type, human health and safety issue that they try to raise with it. We know cannabis is harmless. We’ve been using it for a long, long time. 

 

John: Very true. 

 

Chip: Yeah. Alright. So John, we’ve gone over a handful of things here with compost tea. Who can most benefit from this? Is this just for small people? Is this just for big people? Can anyone benefit from this? What are the best scenarios for compost to use?

 

John: The plants benefit from it.

 

Chip: Anybody, any plant can benefit from it.

 

John: People are problematic.

 

Chip: People benefit from it only because their plants are better and it makes the people happier?

 

John: Yes. 

 

Chip: Oh, I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it.

 

John: A regulator told me a long time ago. “Don’t try to list too many things on the label. Just say it makes plants happy.”

 

Chip: Yeah, yeah. Happy plants. 

 

John: And this was California. And I took that to heart because if you read our Constitution, we have the right to the pursuit of happiness. 

 

Chip: Absolutely. 

 

John: So why shouldn’t plants? 

 

Chip: Absolutely. Well, I love compost tea man. I’m glad we kind of got to talk about all of this. I got a couple compost tea recipes I love. I love 5 gallon compost tea, right? And the way that I like to make it, I don’t know if this is right or not, but when I make it this way, my plants absolutely respond. I usually dilute like, 5 gallons into about 20 gallons when I do it this way, right? And that’s out of sheer necessity. But I like 1 gallon of earthworm castings, 3 gallons of water. I’m gonna then put in a half a cup of some type of trace minerals. And then this is where it gets a little sticky, but I really like some sort of fish product. The fish [inaudible 54:33] or the fish emulsion, there’s controversy over all of that. And then just a smidgen of some sort of sugar. That recipe has been great for me and many other people for years. It’s so easy to follow. It’s not hard at all. You bubble it at you know, it needs to be over 60 degrees. I usually almost always bubble it outside. It usually takes three or four days for the fish smell to exchange from putrid to sweet. And, that’s what I like about this thing. When’s it ready? As soon as it turns sweet. I generally like the soil drench as opposed to the foliar spray. And part of that is because I’m scared of the yeast and fungus tests. 

 

John: Oh, interesting. 

 

Chip: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s real or not. But I’m scared of it. And I know you can outgrow it, you know, but many people spray throughout their flower period and I just choose to only like, spray it once or twice when they’re clones. I feed the clones stray compost tea and then dilute it, you know, like 5:1 or 4:1 or something like that. That’s my favorite compost tea. 

 

John: Yeah, I mean that sounds like a successful formula right there. Simple, easy to use –

 

Chip: Oh kelp. I forgot the kelp. There was my trace minerals, I say trace minerals, but I do prefer kelp for my trace mineral. 

 

John: Ah see, I was gonna add that.

 

Chip: Oh right, right. Yeah, and you know ’cause trace minerals, mined trace minerals are now harder to find, John. Have you looked for this lately, or it might not be hard for you because you’re in California, but they’re hard to get.

 

John: Yeah, you have to buy them in volume. You know, they come from mines in New Mexico and volcanic areas. But, you know, no one wants to go out there and truck them in anymore, that’s one of the problems. Cost, fuel, cost of operation –

 

Chip: There’s something they sell for 19 cents.

 

John: Right, right. So you know, I keep stocked up on all those. When I get halfway down in a container, I’ll reorder, because I like to use trace minerals for a couple different locations in my, in HumTea. And of course, there’s also kelp in there. Simple things that make a great tea. And sort of feed the microbes that you want to step up and be able to further break down what they need for the plant. 

 

Chip: So if you’re interested in compost tea, definitely check out more information we’ll have on The Real Dirt. Check us out at Cultivate Colorado, Cultivate OKC. You can buy all of your compost tea equipment. If you’re not familiar with Cutting Edge products, how do people look you up, John? 

 

John: Cuttingedgesolutions.com.

 

Chip: Cuttingedgesolutions.com. Ask your local vendor. If you’re a commercial grower, you absolutely need to check out the quality of the product. We didn’t even go into the whole lines of this whole compost tea conversation I wanted you here for today. Because I believe in compost tea and it’s something we’ve been talking about forever. And you know, really something that I want to turn people on to. So thanks for coming today, John. I really appreciate this little chat and I look forward to having you on in the future. 

 

John: Sounds good. You know all I have to do is drive down from Tulsa now. 

 

Chip: Oh, yeah, that’s right. We’ll get on that whole relocation on the next episode. Hey guys, thanks for joining me today on The Real Dirt with Chip Baker and John Piccirilli. If you liked this episode, and you have not subscribed yet, please subscribe on iTunes. Join us on Instagram, join us on Facebook. Hey and always comment, always leave a message. And if you’re interested in soil, or any type of growing equipment go to cultivatecolorado.com. Stop in one of our stores in Denver or Oklahoma. Yeah, man, we’re always willing to chat and we’ve got great, great, great people who are willing to answer any question you have. So there it is, The Real Dirt on compost tea. Thanks again.