Vertical growers can thank the cannabis industry for helping to fund much of the research & development into indoor farming. Cannabis growers, due to the value of their crops, could afford to take risks and/or allocate space to R & D projects, something that traditional crop growers would be hard-pressed to do given the thinner margins they must contend with.

The necessity to build lean operations and purpose-designed facilities makes most non-cannabis vertical farmers better agricultural economists. Most of these companies have clear and targeted business plans, with crop production tailored to their final customer’s needs. For some, that’s a general grocery retailer like Kroger or Whole Foods. For others, it’s specialty food retailers or independent grocers. Some farmers only grow products for restaurants. Most only grow a handful of products at best, while some only cultivate one lettuce or strawberry variety.

Whatever crop and market these vertical farmers serve, they can meet customer quality and consistency expectations. By delivering products to spec, they’ve built solid business relationships to sustain their operations for years.

Cannabis growers have had the opportunity to dabble in multiple retail and medical products: some grow both branded and white-label products, as well as make extracts, edibles, tinctures, and topicals in-house. Many of these businesses found early success thanks in large part to their cultivation capacity, but as competition has ramped up in many North American markets and consumers identify brands they most resonate with, several of these companies have found themselves overextended, unable to meet quality expectations or achieve consistency across batches.

Take for example Canopy Growth, which once upon a time boasted having the largest cannabis canopy footprint in the world. After years of producing more cannabis than it could sell, the company divested from all of its cultivation assets. Now, it exists only as a house of brands, relying on other, more specialized producers to make its branded products.

Taking a page from the traditional agriculture market, cannabis growers should consider retooling their business plans and production goals to go from jacks-of-all-trades to masters of some. It’s incredibly difficult to get everything right all the time, but it’s much easier to get one or two things consistently perfect. By finding their niche and focusing their efforts on deepening their expertise in that market, cannabis growers will be much better positioned for the commoditization movement we’re already seeing play out, which will only get worse in the U.S. with full federal legalization.

Optimization referenced during the webinar was mostly referring to design, airflow, and workflow in an indoor multi-tier cultivation facility. When comparing working from clone, seed, or tissue culture there are advantages and disadvantages for each. Growers must take it into consideration many other external, regulatory, and infrastructure factors. 

Clones are one of the most common approaches for starting a cultivation facility. Clones are genetically identical copies of a mother cannabis plant, so you more or less have a general sense of what to expect in terms of the cultivar’s cannabinoid and terpene profile, plant structure, and overall performance. Mind you, how growers manage the environment, substrate selection, and irrigation strategy can manipulate plant performance. Clones also allow for the fastest speed to market (with the exception of auto-flower seeds) of the three options. It is important to ensure you are sourcing clean clones that are free of pests, diseases, and viruses. If the mother or stock plant has pests, diseases, and/or viruses, it can be spread through clones. All clones should be inspected, tested, and quarantined before being introduced to craft or commercial production. 

There are three major types of cannabis seeds, which are regular, feminized, and auto-flower. Regular seeds can germinate into male or female plants. Feminized seeds are modified so that they are incapable of creating male chromosomes, growing only the female plants. Autoflower seeds or day-neutral seeds automatically switch from vegetative growth to the flowering stage based on age, as opposed to the ratio of light to dark hours required with photoperiod-dependent cultivars. Seeds are typically free of any pests, but viruses can be spread through seeds if the parental lineage plants used to create the seeds are infected. 

Plant tissue culture (PTC) is a collection of techniques used to grow plant cells, tissues, organs, or seeds in a sterile environment on a nutrient medium. The sterilization stage in tissue culture cultivation can be particularly effective in eliminating diseases and viruses, making it stand out when compared to starting from clone or seed. PTC propagation can result in faster maturity times compared to growing from seed, which enables growers to use space more efficiently without overcrowding grow rooms. However, the key advantage of tissue culture is the sterile environment, which can eliminate diseases and provide a clean environment for plants to thrive. Most cannabis operators who utilize PTC are creating clean stock mothers and then taking cuttings through traditional cloning techniques for production. Because of the equipment involved, chemicals needed, and tools required, setting up a cannabis lab becomes an expensive process. Thus, it limits many low-budget researchers and growers to work with the technology. PTC is new to the cannabis industry and not everything has been figured out so far, like the kind of work that has been done with other plants in the area. Thus, it will require a lot more time to get a working protocol or workflow that will enable growers to produce healthy, stable, and reliable genetics without much loss.