Taking a Holistic Approach to Your Cultivation Business Can Improve Your Bottom Line

Cultivation businesses that don’t take a holistic view of their operation are destined to fail.

It isn’t one piece of equipment, a specific growing technique, or a single process that defines the success of the organization. Instead, it’s the sum of its parts.

Too often, entrepreneurs new to horticulture tend to focus intently on just one or two areas of the business, and ironically, this moves the company farther away from profitability.

This concept isn’t unique to horticulture. Just look around you. A holistic approach is crucial to improving mental or physical health. Ailments are seldom due to only one influencing factor, although, unfortunately, Western medicine often treats it that way. A visit to a doctor usually results in a 9-minute conversation and a drug prescription in your hand.

What the patient often needs are several minor changes in various aspects of their life. Diet changes, better sleep habits, more physical exercise, tools for stress relief, improved work and personal relationships, less screen time, etc.

Focusing intently on just one aspect leaves the rest of the picture untouched, and inevitably, things get worse. Your grow site isn’t any different.

Recently, I received a call from a grower looking for a crop steering expert.

Crop steering is a growing methodology that drives a crop towards vegetative or reproductive growth by manipulating factors like irrigation frequency, water volume, and relative humidity.

This is useful when growing crops like hydroponic tomatoes. Plants that are too vegetative won’t yield much fruit, and plants that are too reproductive generate too many tomatoes too early and prematurely shorten the crop cycle and overall yield.

I asked the grower why he needed a crop steering expert, and he explained that he wanted to increase his yields. He saw a company boasting on Instagram about using crop steering to nearly double their production.

The first mistake here is making business decisions based on photos from Instagram!

The second is to believe that just one tweak will increase cannabis yields. Yes, crop steering may be able to increase a grow room’s overall production, but it’s highly unlikely to double it.

That’s because, like most complex issues, crop improvement requires that we approach the situation holistically by looking at, among other factors:

Light
Insufficient light will result in lower yields, but overly intense light can compromise plant health. Handheld light meters or daily light integral sensors are key to ensuring a crop receives the proper amount of light for photosynthesis.

Carbon dioxide
A room full of flowering plants will rapidly deplete the CO2 in the air, resulting in stalled growth. Plants require CO2 to photosynthesize, and supplementing the air far above ambient levels can result in higher yields. Avoid switching out dozens of small CO2 tanks; have a gas company install and maintain a mini-bulk system at your facility instead. This will ensure optimum levels in the grow rooms at all times.

Nutrients
Underfed plants will flower, but they won’t yield much. Too much fertilizer can burn plant leaves, compromising their ability to photosynthesize and, ultimately, their yield. Skip the guesswork and establish a bi-weekly plant sap analysis program to ensure your nutritional game is on point and your crop is producing at maximum capacity.

Water
Chronically dry plants will suffer from a plethora of problems, and low yields are just one. Chronically overwatered plants suffer from root loss and stunted growth and—you guessed it—lower yields. Ensure all new cultivation staff are trained, re-trained, and re-trained again to know when to irrigate a crop. Or, better yet, reduce the risk by installing moisture meters or weight scales throughout your crop and link those sensors to an automated fertigation system. 

Plant density
Too many plants on a grow bench will restrict airflow and light penetration and place the crop at a greater risk of foliar disease. Too few plants can result in an overall higher cost of production and lower yield. Establish small R&D projects to identify the ideal plant density for each variety without risking the entire crop.

Implementing crop steering won’t result in improved yields if a grower is blind to the above five factors. In fact, concentrating only on this technique at the cost of ignoring the whole picture could result in more harm than good.

If you’re an entrepreneur new to commercial horticulture, ensure that you aren’t blinding yourself to the bigger picture by focusing too intently on just one aspect of your business. The success of your cultivation site depends on the healthy functioning of all its parts, from genetics and equipment to personnel and protocols.

If your business isn’t up to par, step back and take a holistic assessment of your operation. You’ll most likely find that small modifications made in several areas will yield greater results than drilling down in just one spot.