The Path of the Cannabis Plant: How to Optimize Your Grow Room Layout
Creating efficient, profitable cannabis grow rooms requires thoughtful planning. Plants demand different levels of care throughout the growing process. How you arrange them along the way will play a vital role in ensuring healthy movement and development.
Your facility floor plan must include distinct rooms for propagation, mother, veg, and flower. This ensures proper care, productivity, and limited risk of cross-contamination.
Additionally, multi-tiered vertical farming solutions provide even more space while allowing cultivators to continue monitoring pH levels, nutrient content, and humidity with ease. Using the right racking systems is paramount in maintaining consistent air circulation and light filtration.
Accounting for current and future needs when designing a grow room can be daunting. However, we can help you craft a facility equipped with optimized growing systems, layouts, and workspaces to boost profitability and longevity in the cannabis industry.
How to Set Up Grow Rooms for Plant Movement
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
1. Mother Room
Your mothers secure future crop yields. Keeping them happy and comfortable in their vegetative state ensures you can continue cloning and cultivating new plants. An efficiently managed mother room will account for individual genetics and incorporate nutrient management, pest, and pathogen controls. These carefully curated practices foster consistency and reliability.
Many cultivators have opted for double-tiered racking systems rather than single-level layouts in their mother rooms. This change allows for growing additional genetics or housing new and older mothers in the same area. Larger facilities may even consider triple-tiered systems if budget and space allow.
When considering multi-tiered systems, growers must remember the importance of good ventilation. Proper airflow maintains stable temperatures and humidity levels while guarding against pests and mold. In-rack airflow Systems like Vertical Air Solutions (VAS) can be built into tiered racks for seamless, even air distribution (we’ll touch on this further below), freeing more space for easy plant access.
Ensuring Sanitation and Hygiene
One thing to note when building a cannabis mother room is sanitation. Cross-contamination can ruin your efforts to cultivate productive, healthy mother plants. Therefore, never use cart systems intended for mothers outside the mother room. Ensure other grow rooms are supplied with enough equipment to sustain current and future needs.
2. Clone Room
Clone rooms, also known as propagation rooms, are designed to encourage healthy root development in new plants or cuttings. However, this space is not inherently necessary for every operation. Smaller cultivation centers can combine veg and clone rooms to save on resources and space. Still, 2-5% of the total floor plan should be dedicated to this stage of cannabis growth.
If growers are using one room for multiple purposes, proper considerations should be taken when approaching the layout.
Generally, cultivators should keep clones with vegetative plants rather than mothers. Less traffic in the mother room protects genetics and mother-plant health.
Combining clones and veg plants in one space can expedite the transplanting process once clones are ready for vegetative propagation. Clones can be placed in the same racking systems as your veg plants but be sure to adjust the light levels lower to accommodate their needs.
For larger CEA operations, a dedicated clone room incorporating a multi-tiered rack system is ideal for optimal plant movement. One triple-tiered wired mesh cart can house between 300 to 600 clones. In the end, many of your design choices will be budget and scale-dictated.
3. Veg Room
Multi-tiered systems are most commonly seen in veg rooms. In the beginning days of cannabis cultivation, growers did not have enough vegetative space to keep flower rooms supplied. In response, they took advantage of cubic footage by growing upward rather than outward.
Now, a best practice when sizing a veg canopy is to allocate between 20 and 30% of your total flowering footprint to vegetative growth. Square footage may vary if facilities have a combined veg, mother, and clone room as opposed to separate spaces.
Regardless, the ideal size for a racking system is 32-40 ft. in length and 10-15 ft. in height. Triple-tiered racks are typical, but facilities with smaller inventories may consider double-tiered solutions instead. Regardless, these dimensions set you up for success as you create a functional veg room layout (and they apply to flower rooms, as well).
4. Flower Room
The flower room is the heart of operations and harbors the potential for your business–this is why layout and design are so critical.
Increasing yield is of the utmost importance to any cannabis cultivator. So, how can an efficient flower room boost profitability and efficiency?
Ultimately, layout, engineering, and equipment will determine your ability to achieve desired metrics. A well-designed space can produce two to three times more than a poorly drafted setup. Having an optimized operation gives you a leg up over competitors and ensures you’re equipped for evolving market demands.
Technologies, automation systems, and HVAC are essential components, but your floor plan is the foremost factor to consider. Plants should be spread equally to ensure proper development and consistent growth. Your crew must also have access to them for scouting, cutting, and transporting.
Modular systems solve both needs in one easy-to-navigate system. First, vertical racking systems maximize space and are seamlessly integrated into a current footprint. Second, growers can further boost capacities by adding mobile carriages, allowing for flexibility when expanding or rearranging floor plans.
Two-tiered solutions are the most common, but some facilities can accommodate three tiers. Remember–populate vertical growing systems with grow trays that are compatible with automated technologies to enhance functionality and yield.
Here are additional factors to consider when optimizing a flower room:
- Environmental control systems: Consider including programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in your design. These controls can monitor how plants respond to subtle environmental changes, such as lighting and airflow. Using this information, you can gauge whether or not your current setup facilitates healthy plant growth and movement.
- Proper airflow: Adequate airflow ensures proper humidity and temperature control while reducing the risk of contamination, pathogens, and mold. Multi-level airflow systems address these concerns by ensuring every tier receives consistent air movement. This technology can be easily integrated into multi-tiered racking systems.
- Irrigation and fertigation: Don’t forget about irrigation systems when optimizing your grow room for plant movement and growth. Automated drip or hydro setups are great because they require minimal space and can prevent mishaps from stray hoses or cumbersome equipment.
- Multiple cultivars: Different cannabis strains have unique phenotypes. Growers can adjust vertical racking systems to accommodate both tall and short plants.
- Light mapping: Your flower room design will rely heavily on light mapping. You can use software to determine where plants can receive optimal exposure and distribute accordingly.
Planning for Future Growth
Always factor in your goals for expansion before you design your indoor grow rooms. Modular setups are typically best because they ensure growers can easily integrate new sections into each space. Incorporating additional modules requires less downtime, saving you resources and money.
A multi-tiered grow room setup can mean a higher upfront investment.
However, vertical farming greatly increases capacity, both square and cubic footage, which boosts potential yield and profitability. Growers have a more efficient indoor cultivation strategy with the added advantage of room for future augmentation.
Below are a few other things to consider before building a grow room:
- Financial pro forma: This plan will guide you as you design a CEA operation. A financial pro forma should include initial building, operating, testing, labor, and utilities costs. You should also factor in potential profits and selling prices.
- Your goals: Where do you see your business down the road? Are you comfortable with your current growing capabilities? Grow room designs should account for potential year-round production, specific strains, or crop-rearing methods.
- Environmental resources: Ensure your location has the proper facilities to provide optimal environmental control. Consider energy availability, water quality, labor availability, and proximity to your target market.
- Room for automation: Leave space for additional automation if you anticipate larger production. Additional plants could mean integrating more pest management, nutrient dosing, humidity control, and CO2 enrichment systems.
Pipp is here to help with all your grow room needs. We can guide you through designing a space that meets current market requirements and accommodates expansion. Our innovative solutions are excellent for any cannabis cultivator–whether you’re a beginner, expert, or somewhere in between.
