Every crop needs water to develop, meaning growers must introduce an adequate draining system to capture runoff and prevent oversaturation. Tray selection also plays a critical role in this process, as some are fitted with grid systems to aid in proper drainage. Working with a plumber skilled in vertical racking systems and grow rooms can make a considerable difference when determining the best approach.

The first step in designing a vertical grow room layout is choosing a racking system. Growers must account for various factors beforehand, including available space, compliance regulations, and future cultivation plans. 

Forgetting about these critical considerations can ultimately lead to problems down the road. Our best advice is to always work alongside an experienced team of designers, techs, and support professionals to ensure proper decision-making and seamless integration.

Pipp Vertical Racking Systems are tailored to fit each unique facility. You can use our Room Generator Tool to create an interactive 3D floor plan based on your available canopy space. 

Here are just a few things to consider when integrating a vertical racking system:

Room Dimensions & Obstructions​

The size of your grow room (e.g., length, width, and ceiling height) dictates much of the racking system setup. By calculating the area of your space, your design team can recommend the ideal amount of aisles necessary for your production needs.

Equipment Width & Material​

Racks and grow trays house the heart of your business–your plants. Naturally, you want to ensure these structures are made with top-quality materials to protect your crops from pathogens, pests, and disease.

Pipp’s Vertical Grow Racking Sytems fitted with Mobile Carriages are crafted with cultivators in mind. Each stainless steel, UV-stable rack is covered with an antibacterial and antifungal coating to prevent the spread of plant-killers like mold and mildew. 

Another key consideration is aisle width. Growers should leave ample space for multiple teams to interact with plants simultaneously. Keeping aisles between 36 and 54 inches wide allows for tandem work while helping prevent accidents due to tight quarters.

Compliance​

Compliance laws can vary depending on the location of a facility. For example, some states like California must meet specific seismic regulations in preparation for unexpected earthquakes. In these cases, Pipp’s low-profile racking systems with optional anti-tip features offer an all-in-one solution. 

Regardless, any cultivator can benefit from implementing an anti-tip system. This simple addition can protect plants and employees from harm. In the words of Michael Williamson, Director of Cultivation at Pipp Horticulture, “I can always grow more plants, but I can’t grow more people. So, keeping your employees safe is priority number one.”

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.

Cultivators must account for various factors when designing a cannabis grow room, such as ease of access to plants, airflow, irrigation systems, and structural elements. Vertical farming techniques solve many of these problems, as growers can smoothly integrate automated environmental controls to monitor water, nutrients, and humidity levels. 

Other factors to consider when building a cannabis grow room include:

• Ceiling height
• Drain locations
• Current workflow
• Installation timelines
• Potential obstructions to plant access
• Local municipal building codes
• Door locations
• Ground level

My experience as both a cannabis grower and Director of Horticulture at Pipp Horticulture has led me to develop a nuanced understanding of the CEA landscape and how cannabis fits within it as the outlier. To appreciate this, we should first zoom out and define what we mean by CEA and indoor farming.

Controlled environment agriculture is a technology-based approach to crop production that involves the control of most (if not all) plant growth variables. This includes lighting, temperature, humidity, irrigation, fertigation, airflow, CO2 supplementation, and more.

CEA can broadly be divided into two categories: indoor farms, and mixed-light structures. Mixed-light structures utilize both natural sunlight and artificial lighting to optimize plant growth. These facilities provide the benefits of natural light while allowing for environmental control through supplemental artificial lighting. 

Greenhouses are one form of mixed-light facility. These are structures with walls and roofs made chiefly of transparent material such as glass or plastic in which plants requiring regulated climatic conditions are grown. Greenhouses can range from small, simple structures to large, high-tech installations, and they can be leveraged with or without supplemental lighting.

Hybrid mixed-light structures have a glass roof allowing sunlight to penetrate and insulated walls to better control the environment. These facilities combine the benefits of natural sunlight with enhanced climate control to optimize plant growth.

As opposed to mixed-light structures, indoor farms rely solely on artificial lighting. These are sometimes referred to as urban farms, vertical farms, and container farms.

While approaches to cannabis cultivation are broadly similar to food and floriculture production in mixed-light structures, cannabis indoor farms are unique in that they often are at the extreme of plant production levels. From lighting, CO2 supplementation, nutrient uptake, irrigation, and latent heat load management, these structures can be extremely energy- and resource-intensive. Some indoor cannabis growers operate their lights at intensities as high as 1,800 PPFD, which increases transpiration rates, latent loads, and nutrient delivery needs. 

The cannabis plant’s ability to thrive in these environments and the dollar value crops can generate justify these large inputs. Produce or cut flower indoor farms are generally less energy-intensive than cannabis farms due to economic and crop limits (i.e. plant stress would negatively impact yield and quality in those conditions).

For these reasons, cannabis growers have been viewed as “lucky” to be able to make mistakes that would otherwise bankrupt an indoor food production business. Conversely, indoor farmers growing crops other than cannabis have been told for years that their methods aren’t feasible without the benefit of a cash crop. There may be some truth to both sentiments, but the fact that these industries continue to evolve in parallel remains true.

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.

Before committing to a location, assess the available utilities. After all, you need a great deal of power to run your operation, and you’ll want to consider any long-term expansion plans for your business.

Peterson said that, in most cases, your team will need to augment your site’s power capabilities. “More often than not, you’re going to have to run additional power to these facilities, sometimes gas,” he said. “Most commercial buildings today just don’t have the infrastructure that indoor grows need. That’s why it’s good to locate a building close to a denser area that has a pretty established grid.”

Conduct a thorough load assessment to verify the availability of three-phase electrical connections for HVAC systems, grow lights, and irrigation. 

If natural gas is required for heating or CO2 enrichment, consult with local utility providers to determine whether extending existing gas lines is feasible. 

For water supply, perform a pressure test to ensure the system can meet the demands of irrigation. 

A primary hurdle to this type of CEA development has long been cost. In mid-sized and larger American cities, commercial or industrial real estate is often expensive and limited in availability. This is changing in the post-pandemic real estate market, but those long-standing challenges have often kept cannabis businesses, strapped for cash early on, from setting up shop in city environments. 

Vertical farming addresses this constraint by expanding overall canopy upward, doubling or even tripling the actual grow space. For businesses acquiring land or real estate that may not be as expansive as an industrial footprint in a more rural community, vertical farming lets growers exponentially increase their production capacity in a given room. 

This spatial efficiency is crucial in densely populated areas, making vertical farming particularly appealing to city planners and developers looking to attract new business to their jurisdiction. 

Buckeye Relief, based in Eastlake, Ohio, just east of downtown Cleveland, built out a new facility and eventually saw the need to expand upward. Early on, the Buckeye Relief team ran into environmental trouble with an original site, so they pivoted to a 10-acre plot of land offered by the city of Eastlake. It fit the company’s needs for the medical cannabis market, but expansion would be inevitable. 

Mobile racking on the company’s initial single-tier setup helped them achieve their expansion to a second tier within the existing footprint of their facility. Future footprint expansions are one thing, but growing up and adding vertical tiers to a given production facility can provide significant returns. 

Now, the company runs two tiers of production space, and they are preparing for the rapidly expanding customer base that will come from the greater Cleveland area once adult-use sales begin (following legalization in November 2023).