?Hello, everybody. My name is Jim Strain. This is a podcast we're doing down here in Las Vegas. This is episode one, season one, The Podcast J. R. Strain cannabis. We are British Columbia, Canada. We're a licensed producer. They're growing and selling into the Canadian market. We have a brand across the country and we're doing some export as well. But at the moment we're down here in Las Vegas, Nevada with some good friends of mine. These guys are the Suppliers of our lighting that we use in our aeroponic facility in BC. So this is my friend Jeremy, this is my friend Mike. We are at their very gracious hosting of us down here in Las Vegas. First of all, thanks guys for bringing us down to Vegas, getting me out of Canada. This time of year kind of sucks right now, so this is great to be in Vegas, hanging out with my brothers, talking about weed, growing weed, smoking weed, and seeing what you guys are up to down here. Good old LV. Definitely. Yeah, always good to see you, man. Fuck yeah, brother. Always good to see you, too. So, let's jump into it. Jimmy, can you tell us a little bit, just kind of, your origin story into cannabis, right? When was the first time you smoked? When did you decide to do this as a career? You know, give us the gist of your story. Let's talk about the past, Jimmy. Rewind to 1987, in high school, Calgary, Winston Churchill High. Yeah. Yeah. Being a weed dealer, you know, selling weed, selling the pre rolls to the friends, shit like that. And then one day I was like, look at this stack of paper I gotta give to my dealer. And I get to keep this little stack. How do I keep that stack? Fuckin grow it then, right? We'll go back a little bit further. So, first time I smoked weed you asked me. I was in Grade 9, playing baseball out in left field. Not right field, stuck in left field. Stuck in left field, staring at my shoes, waiting for a ball to come my way. And I looked down and I seen a vial sitting by my shoe. Just a vial of green oil as it turned out. I didn't have a clue what it was. I was 14 years old. I was like, what the heck is this? Picked it up and I was like, shit, that might be drugs. So, you know, put it in the pocket and after that ball game I phoned my friend Rich who was I figured we'd know what it was, and he did. He's like, oh yeah, bro, that's a weed oil, we got a hot knife, that shit. So, a big thanks to him, right? So, you know, off to my house, I remember in the basement, my parents, we had a pool table in the basement. Nice green felt, picture it, right? We got a shiny new set of knives out of mom's kitchen drawer, right? Keep them babies up, and as soon as that blob of oil hit the knife, just right off her, you know, now it is, I'm sure, just right off it, right on the pool table, big stain of oil on the pool table. I'm like, oh, of course, Dad's gonna kill me. Either way, then season the blades, you know how that goes, you gotta season them up, rub some tobacco on there, whatever, so they don't slide off. And that was the first time I tried a cannabis product, so it was a... Probably just some gunky dirt, green oil. Somebody made with some iso. Went straight to dabbing. 1987 salmon. Straight up. Did you, did you do it with the water bottle? Did you cut off half water bottle or did you just straight Yeah, hot knife it and just, and try not to burn the lips and then, yeah, no, that was straight. And then the water bottle. Then we were doing wall talks, you know, until we passed out. Even 14, being dumb. What's a wall took? You know, when you hold it and it's breath, different presses on your, uh, your gut, you hold it and then when you blow it, they, we don't have this in America. Yeah. That's off you dude. That's you sure that vials wasn't cannabis and not heroin? No. They're not each other. They don't exist. Ugly H. It's a smack. No, for sure it was green wheat oil, uh, without a doubt. So then, you know, we started, this is what we did for business. So that was lead up, grade 9, grade 10. We got our greening vials and we would skin up papers, right? Just skin up zigzags with a smear of oil across, a little tobacco skin, a little skinny roll, and sell those for a buck a piece, right? Yeah, a buck. But you could skin up 45. papers out of a one gram vial, it cost you 20 bucks. So right away, markups over a hundred percent. I'm like, this is good business. I like it. It's how things sell themselves. Yeah. So back then, I mean, Canada was kind of one of the first markets with legalizing right? Sure. What was the mood kind of back in the day in Canada? The acceptance of cannabis in general? Was it still kind of very stigmatized at that age? Was there harsh penalties? Yep. Not harsh compared to you guys. We take everything up a little bit. You know, half of Canada back in the day was damn near, you know, growing. Well, BC, yeah, BC Bud is pretty much famous. So South, this whole Pacific Northwest region is quite famous for, you know, inception of growers like the Washington state, you know, and then into British Columbia, people who left the U S, uh, war defectors that didn't want to go to the the interior of British Columbia, a region called Nelson, a lot of history and a lot of growing, a lot of growers came out of BC. So the talent pool is there. Whatever. Maybe comparable to your Humboldt County guys down here or something. I think I was watching a documentary back in the day that said back then in B. C. Like one out of every hundred houses was a girl house. Fuck one of four probably. Well, okay. Maybe not back then in the 80s. But like 100 percent they were growing, you're going to jail. Okay. First time offence in Canada, about, about two years less a day and non violent offence, he served one sixth, so three or four months. I had some guys that, you know, a friend of mine that went down that path. Not me, it was one of the lucky ones. One of the lucky ones. One of the lucky ones, fuck, one of the fast ones. I, uh, I've had some chases, you know, the back door for sure, in the middle of a trim session while they're coming through the front, the battering ramp. And, uh. Drop the scissors and run out the back. Fuck, that was a whole other story in itself. Big chase. My, dude, pre helicopter days. So, otherwise I never would have got away, right? But, yeah, this was, uh, the early 90s. In a warehouse. So, yeah, so anyways, kind of just to backfill a little bit. Yeah. Chellan weed. High school. Got out of high school and, and then grow weed. And I remember my very first girl, so, well it's actually, we got a clone off my dealer. This guy wouldn't give up a clone. And I remember it too, it was a really, we called it houseplant. We didn't know, I know that they call that in front of stuff, but I don't know. Yeah, watch out, we're gonna get a fuck out of you. This is the real question. I was first. But whatever. And I finally got a clone off him, and I was living at home at the time. I've been living with my parents since I was with my buddy. And we got this clone, so we. Fired a point his dresser with a little light and we had to hide it from the parents and Furiously look for a place to rent so we can start growing right? So we're caring for this clone In mom and dad's and my buddy's parents were ultra religious, too So we got a place and it's so funny when we found this house it was such a rundown little You know, it was obviously a former biker house or something, because in the closet downstairs there was a secret door that went into another room. And I remember my landlord was like, I don't know why this is here, but whatever. We're like, I know why that's there. So we just, wood paneling, like shit, uh, fake wood paneling. Yeah. And throw that over the door in the basement. Yeah. And basically, the corner of the basement's gone now. People come down there like, hmm? Right in there. You go through the closet into your little secret grove. And of course, I mean, this is back, everybody needs to remember this. This is pre internet. This is like, no info available. Yeah, high times, basically. Yeah, high times. There's a few articles in there that you can read. A couple little grocery stores. I remember my house. The grocery store, strange people in there. I remember my guy, Raj, from Quick Grow. You go in there and, you know, you're just like, uh. People, I'm busy. You take taxis to the grocery store, right? You know, fucking showing up in your car and your plate and all that stuff. So, ultra careful. You know, buy all your stuff from different places and we made a drip bucket. My very first goal was a hydroponic drip bucket. Okay. So the LECA, you know, the LECA rock, the, uh, expanded clay pellets, basket, yeah, hydroton. Hydroton. Exactly. So we just, uh, got our clones in that, hung our light, you know, the old reflector that just a flat, shitty reflector with a vertical, uh, I think it was a metal halide and then probably HPS. You know, just figure it out, build some shit, see what happens, learn about community, learn about this. And unfortunately you learn from mistakes, right? Or fortunately, hopefully we learn from mistakes, but there's a lot of that going down. What about the first drill, kind of what did it look like? My first drill? How long did it go for, what did it look like? Like, what did... Yeah, how do you water that was pretty advanced for back in the day with the, uh... Is it called a happy bucket? What did they call those? Well, actually, no. We went to the ice cream store and he gave us free pails. You know, like the big ice cream pails? Yeah, they're like four gallon pails or something. Yeah. But they were white. Of course, we had to spray paint them black. So light didn't come through. Sure. And then you'd drill in your hole through your, your two hole fitting in the bottom and... And they just, the hoses connect back to your little reservoir right in the corner. With a drain, sure. You know, just manually do it all. I don't really, I mean that was a long time ago, but it was manual as shit. We didn't know much, dude. You know, That's pretty high, I mean that's way high tech back in the the day. I got my very first grill was hydro. Here at Home Depot or whatever it is in Canada, getting all the grommets and the pieces. Canadian Tire, bro. Canadian Tire? Really? You guys were at Canadian Tire? Well, you know, I don't think we had a Home Depot back then, no. Damn, Canadian Tire. The Walmarts and shit. I love the Home Depot stories, though, dude. It's a whole other little tangent. But going to Home Depot and you got this shopping cart filled with fucking, like, electrical shit, plumbing, like, wire tubing. 8 car noses and stuff like that. And these fucking awesome noses, they're like... What are you building? What are you building? What are you doing? What are you doing? I'm like, a fish pond. My go to answer was always a time machine. I looked at him with a straight face and said, I'm building a time machine. And they go, ha ha, no really, what are you building? A fucking time machine. No, I need some more of that tubing. It's one, I just placed it on the other island. The ice maker tubing, the thin line, the water line. And I needed, you know, a lot. I needed that. Well, most people only need like 10 or 12 feet of this. I go, I need 100 feet. Well, that's an awful lot of reinsurance. I go, you know, I'll make it 200. And I sent the guy to take the, on the end of the corridor, take the measure, because they have it marked out on the floor. Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, ah, keep going, keep going, keep going. So, so that was the late 80s, and yeah, of course, illegal, without a doubt. Alberta was more conservative, so the penalties would be harsher for sure than it was in British Columbia, as we mentioned. You know, a lot more people are going, and then judges see it more often. They're like, ah, fuck it, not another grower. Okay, whatever. Way less harsh than our penalties back in the day. Oh, yeah, back when we were single. Maybe I can grow it on Plaston. Yeah, that's right. You guys are, you guys are... I mean, a seed in Las Vegas was a felony for forever. Yeah, yeah, absolutely crazy. So yeah, that kind of starts the, the history of it anyway. That's the first time I smoked weed. No, then the history of smoking weed all through high school, selling weed, then growing weed. That was my first role. So you've been growing since the early 80s? 87. So can you walk us through your progression growing, kind of as the industry ramped up, right? I remember John, me and Bodhi was a really good point. You don't have to stress now. Like, what were some big advances and kind of like quantum leaps that you saw from the growing community throughout, throughout the years? Oh, that's a good one. For sure, the carbon filter one was a, was a really big game changer. So. Yeah. Prior to the carbon filters, we were, uh, using the UV bulbs that created ozone. Okay. Yeah. That's true. So you It's a full circle, right? Yeah. You would pump your, you know, air. But, I mean, it worked, but not It wasn't effective. We didn't really know It kind of mastered, right? It kind of mastered. It kind of It kind of It just twisted that over into like It was a basement. I grew in a basement bedroom, then it became a full basement. Then we came to grow houses. And then it became warehouses. Warehouses. And I was like, I need more power. You know, like, let's go three phase, we gotta grow more faster. And again, back in those tough, figuring shit out with no internet and, and being able to talk to people. So it's like, what the fuck is three-phase power? What do you mean? What is that? Right. Let the smoke over the wires a few times. Figure it out. uh, had some crazy close calls, dude, I had, I had a bro wiring up the opposite end of a thousand watt valves. They go in the lamp cord. Is that breaker off? Is it hot? Yeah. Breaker's off. Next thing you hear. Yeah. A thousand shit cord. But, you know, anybody hasn't done a midnight move. You don't, you weren't a clock market grower. Landlord's comb. We'll let him over and check that one out. We have an appraisal. I have one. We have an appraisal. Where are you going to sit? Oh, well, I'm going out of town for about a week. I had a week left to flower. I'm like, I can just push it up a week. No, no, I need to be over there. This has to go down in the next 36 hours. I said, all right. How about this time tomorrow and I call the boys and we went and got a U Haul, we got the wardrobe boxes, we were literally seven weeks in the flower, couldn't just hack it down, drop them in the wardrobe boxes, army of plants, army of shit. Take everything out, paint. I mean, it was crazy. She walked in and she said, What the hell just happened here? That's how it always is. We just painted it. We won the appraisal to go home. I've done so many moves. Can you, what were some other, you said you kind of started off in buckets. What, what did that progress to, right? Oh, the chip system, the SATA float. Yeah. What were the nutrients, I mean, what did you use back in the day? Was that just like fucking, just using tomato shit? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Tomato recipes, you know, um. A little miracle grow. A short drive. No, uh, that's a growing story we went into. Yeah, it was like a short drive. Love that shit. But anyways, all the different systems, you know, like most growers, we're always looking to level up and get better, you're getting better at that. So we try different shit. You hear about a new thing and you go, oh, I'm going to try that. So, I've literally tried them all probably eight times. I keep circling through the, the gamut of, uh, different styles. And I think from, you know. Back then it was called DIRT. Sorry, don't get everybody fucking lose their minds, in this case Living Soil, I know, but back then it was just DIRT, okay? D I R T. Then, you know, DIRT Day. DIRT Day in Canada. Of course, Rockwool was around. Coca was not a thing. The Hispanic Clay Pellets, they were. They were around for so long. Back to why I was water based. So I looked for systems. They didn't have to carry a bunch of medium in and out of houses. You're in a black market situation, in a basement, you got to bring in and get rid of. Moving stuff in and out of places. And similar now to even our facility in Canada, our legal licensed producer facility. We don't buy medium, we don't discard medium. And that's operating costs. Are lower on a monthly basis because we're not purchasing that. A dump truck full of rock will go into the landfill. Makes it a lot easier too because like here in Vegas we have to render it useless. Even the root ball. Is that right? Crazy man. Yeah. No shit. Yeah. See in Canada, in Canada the roots are not considered a cannabis product at all. It shouldn't. I mean obviously it shouldn't be. But it's just another one of the crazy rags that we have to deal with. Yeah, it was difficult, obviously, coming from black market stuff, but I will, I'll say this, even in the black market, I was very much opposed to using harsh pesticides, because I'm a smoker. I grew my crops, I smoked, I'm gonna smoke a lot of shit. I don't want to smoke, uh, Florimate, Nova, Eagle, Pawnee, blah, blah, blah, even though I knew tons of growers that use that shit. So I'm very grateful. Uh, I think I'm much happier that this point out is clean, you know Like I think that is smart because I know I as a black market grower I knew a lot of colleagues, you know, we all visit each other's grows and many of my colleagues didn't smoke They were in it for the month straight up, right? So they were spraying Nova They didn't give a fuck Man, Bronx bigger yield Yeah, fucking PGRs and Yeah, whatever So You know, of course, completely handcuffed. In the early days of legalization in Canada, literally like nothing. The harshest insecticide you could use would be like a canola oil based shit. Is that one of the reasons, kind of, vegetarian products? Has that always been kind of like a transition that... Happen. Were you doing black market? Can you kind of walk us through the story of Cool, kind of how you got into robotics too, because Yeah. I mean, not many people do it on the scale you do, right? The success that you have. So fair. I appreciate that. I, it was, and it was a good, let's say, I guess a good marriage there with, uh, our, our company that when we did, I built the Onic systems in the nineties. I literally built my first Arrow system, I think probably 94, 95 bus. In, and I did a 40 lighter, did some deep water culture systems in Forest two. Can you walk us through that setup? What was it like? Yeah, sure. Where's a good idea? I mean, to go into robotics? Not many people were doing it. Fucking 94, right? How many people you know, that was, I don't know. I psychopath for sure. Yeah, it was, you know, Sure, it wasn't the easiest path, without a doubt. But I'll tell you just what it was to me. Long, I remember in another basement grow I had a, I did a side by side. I had a bottom third, and I had a rock wall, and I had a hydro plant. All the same genetic. And I wanted to compare growth rate. By far that hydroponic plant outgrew the other ones. You know, by a tremendous rate. So growth rates are really fast. Well, that's one of the big things that Jimmy's been able to achieve in his commercial grow is he's been able to shave off time. Yeah, shave off time. So when I look at yields, everybody talks about how many pounds of light did you get or what's your biggest crop? I'm like, well, fuck, there's a ton of other variables. Tell me how long it took you. How long did you vegetate on it? Did you vegetate for eight weeks? Right. You don't want to, they don't talk about that. They just say, I crushed it out. I got fucking thousands pounds per light. Or whatever. Right. Which, okay, but let's talk cycles per year. Let's talk about a year, you know? I think that's the best metric. So, the AeroPront system in the 90s that I built, how did I get into it? I probably read an article somewhere. Did you read the BWC at all? Yeah, sure I did. You bet. And some warehouses in Toronto. So those were interesting. They were like a picture of four foot by four foot tub. One foot deep. With a plastic lid on it and then 12 plants in that. So one big container instead of individual. So first, fill those bucket systems, all that hosing, connecting them all. So then instead of just one larger container that would hold nine or 12 plants, you know, and the root system hangs in that and had those connected similar to, you know, the current culture guys, large piping that left that water flow. So, but that holds a tremendous amount of water. Guess what else happens in Groves? Water loves to get out. It always finds a way. You know, one of our topics, we talk worst floods. Oh my gosh. Fuck me. I'm a flood master. Flood master X right here. So, deep water culture. We're talking, I don't know, 800 gallons of water in the system in these warehouses or whatever. So, move to aeroponics. No, no, I need to diminish that water supply and, and, or water volume rather. In the system, so we have these aero systems and used irrigation for your yard, you have those zones, 12 volt systems for irrigating your yard, plot those, put them in and have those click through zones on a programmer, okay, zone 1, zone 2, zone 3, and a reservoir, all things back to click through the things. You know, of course, learn how to kill the water efficiently. Went through lots of different iterations on that, from electronic chilling to just cold water running through the coil, transferring heat out of it. So here I am for quite a while. I probably did that for a long time. And then I moved to British Columbia in 08, and kind of had a lot of difficulties with there. Yeah. A lot of challenges. There's a lot of challenges. Especially back in the day. Back in those days. It was pioneering. And the porcelain is back down and it comes down to, well, at that point I thought it was water supply. So British Columbia has a lot more with, uh, the lakes have water algae, and just like in Calgary, it's glacial water. The river that feeds Calgary is just glacial. So it didn't have all the allergies in different pathogens probably present in that water supply. A lot better success there. BC not as much. And then that's when I started messing around with ozone and other, uh, forms of santin. But then Koko showed up, you know, and I'm like, Hey, you know, let's, this is what everybody, of course, the ProMix days, uh, do you guys have ProMix? Yeah, yeah. ProMix. Tons of ProMix. Sunshine Mix. A little different. Because it's Cantonese. Yeah, sure. And then Koko. Um, but, you know, this facility we're in now, I started with them, they'd already, they'd already gone down the MJBiz. It's a really nice, uh, display. In fact, you guys were set up next to them this year, Essence. Yeah. Right. You guys were right next to them in MJ. Past couple years. Yeah. So they had a really nice looking shed, man. It's, it's really, really well built, et cetera, et cetera. So the company, and that's a whole nother story is how I even started with them. I was not looking for a job. They kind of found me out of that side of things. Just how life coincidences work. You end up on a flight with somebody, you talk to one person, and the next thing you know they're like, Hey, do you want to come look at our facility? I'm like, Oh, let me look for a job, sure. I'll come check it out. Well, I hope you guys already know what you're doing. You're doing, uh, you're doing Aero. Good for you. Ballsy. What scale? What scale was it at when they told you? Like, 800 lights. Okay. 800 tubs, 800 lights, big. Yeah. And they wanted to double deck it all. So I'm like, you guys are done, right? You know what you're doing? I remember Jimmy calling me. He's like, Jerry, listen to what's going on up here. I said, well, if anybody can do it, it's you. Yeah, well, so that's just damn tenacious. I love a good problem to wrap my head around. Did you double deck it? We have okay. No, hang on. We have two rooms We have two rooms of double deck and six rooms single tier. So my six single tier rooms. It's all aero First of all, let's just cover that the whole facility is aero on the median. We have six Single tier rooms with our A3Is So I love those rooms because I can grow my taller plants and get my sativa dominance in there those lights I set them for get on my hate raising and lowering. Those lights are not going to let ceiling in though They're hanging just below the ceiling, about 16, 18 inches or so. And they're fixed. We don't mess with them. I, I dim to get sure what I want to or increase power. You guys end up like four feet off canopy at final. Oh yeah. Roughly. Yeah. Roughly, roughly, depending on, you know, my cultivar, if I flipped it a little later, what happened here, what happens, but that was the target we're, we're targeting and we averaging. We're averaging in the area of 1, 200 to 1, 400 PPFD a canopy. Okay. Yeah. And this is kind of related but a little bit off topic. The nutrients you use for aerobotics. A lot of the feed charts and a lot of the guidance that you're writing now is directed to a fractal or a COCO. Sure it is. It's, you probably have to figure out a lot to figure out what to feed, how to feed, what lines work, what lines don't within a system. Can you kind of walk us through? What you developed, kind of, to figure out all of those nuances for feeding in aeroponics, because I think it's a, kind of a cool box. I mean, it's crazy to hear about different methodologies. You're right. I mean, all the information out there is completely geared at media based. Drydowns, flushing, you see the upper rock walls. How are you processing an aeroponic dropster? Little mists, big mists. Right. Little squirts. I mean, there's a lot of dialing into it. There is a lot of dialing. The micron of the water drop. But then again, that's just, we have a combination in the facility. We have high pressure aeroponics and we have low pressure aeroponics. Essence builds a low pressure aeroponic system. That's it. Six P s I generally, or four. What's the range for low? The low would be anything probably under 10 20 P S I. Okay. 30 PS I is starting to climb into high pressure, but I don't consider that high pressure. High pressure is a hundred plus. Okay. So in our high pressure systems, we're pumping out 1 50, 1 70 P ss I. Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And that's for my arrow cloning and veg stage. Okay. Then they move out. So what that does is help develop a much nicer root mass off the get go. And trichoblasts. So trichoblasts are the buds on the roots, you know, the hairs, right? Those are those little, fine, fuzzy pieces off the top root, that's called a trichoblast. Those are 20 times more efficient at absorbing nutrients or water than a trichoblast. So at high pressure aeroponics at 170 PSI, we're achieving, we're trying to achieve about around a 15 micron or 80 micron water droplet. If it gets too small, that won't carry nutrients. Okay. So if you're getting down in the fog, for example, like fog ponics, So that's that balance you want to achieve, right? Yeah. You have to carry nutrients, but not small enough to where it can't carry nutrients, right? Right. So, I mean, like with most root zones, I mean, they, Don't like being drowned. They like oxygen. The roots want oxygen. In any medium. That's why rock holds quite well. Cocoa would share. So, uh, porosity. So, you know, even in the mixes. But I think one of the biggest things is how fast can you dry it down and see if you can get another feed in, right? Yeah, depending on what stage of growth you're in, what kind of cues you're trying to say, size of the plant. Yeah, you have different irrigation times, let's say, for veg, for flower, for aeroponics, Way different, yeah. How do you steer within that? Yeah, well, it's the same, it's irrigation frequencies and duration, so I can, I can program. So we write a full growth plan, so back to the essence stuff real quick, because they have a software called the GGM Grow Value Manager that runs, I mean, It runs the system. So I write a role plan from day one to day 63, for example, right? A flower only one. And I tell it each day or each week or whatever segment of that length I want. I can say this is a four day segment. This tab is an eight day segment. This one's a 12 day. And I can change everything within it. Everything from AC, pH, water temperature, humidity. I mean, every parameter. Okay. And then that sends the signals to our HR system or whatever. So, uh. Frankly, I could be on the beach, you know, in the Philippines, running the mill, except for the key leaping part. Do you have different cultivars? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. We have some standard ones, of course, you start out with. And it is really interesting that cultivars respond differently in different grow systems. Some work better in cocoa. Yeah. I have a cultivar that are included in there, and have some that work better. It's, it's a nuance to everything, right? Like, people want to know exactly what their plants are going to do from HVS alley B, right? You gotta, it's almost like... You can't just pick one. Yeah, it's like, we, we feed it on to new genetics, right? Oh, I love this quote. Some might look exactly the same, some might look completely different, some might work in a new system, and some might fall off, right? I, I love that quote. People always think there's just one, versus a lot of other people, but they think there's one answer. How did you do? Yeah. It's not, you know, there's just one diaper, right? Yeah. There's so many variations. It's not a silver bullet. No. It's like, you know, what are you feeding your plants? What's the nutrient of your salts, bro? Absolutely. It's a giant balance between everything though, right? But, let's be, okay, so, uh, back to that original question. We blend our own salts. Okay. We buy really high quality, high solubility, high purity salts. And we blend our own nutrient recipes. Because we don't want any dyes in our, in our mutes. So. Also, I don't believe in shipping water across the country, so. Absolutely true. But, that being said, so, there's a lot of great brands and dates out there, too, that ship new dry salts. You can mix, like, an egg and put it in your mixer. So, we have a nice big paddle mixer, and our own mixing table makes our salts for days. We do a lot of leaf tissue analysis, of course, and tweak recipes based on those results. But no, I've seen nothing organic in an aeroponic system and a recirculating water based system. Zero organics. So, no cumic, no biological, seems like it's just a sanitized system. is how, how it's gotta work. Biofilm is a real nasty, nasty situation. Yeah. Have you tried, have you experimented with different things that just kind of went catastrophic? What were the, what were the aeroponic fuck ups, if you will? I'm sure within a system like that it's like, fuck, you get this idea one day and you throw it in and it's just like, oh, fuck. They didn't just, they didn't just throw it into the... In the facility Jimmy ran it. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. True. Back in the day. I learned some of those learning experiences too. Fuck. I mean like, learning, yeah, ok, microbial teas. Let's brew up some voodoo juice. And all that shit. And you brew it and you make a nice microbial tea. The roots are gonna love this. But, you know, it fucks your system, it breathes, it slides, it can bubble and slide on the side. So it colonizes, you know, so it's good to inoculate your roots perhaps with this for a quick, but not just put it in your system and leave it, which is what I did. Okay, microbial tea is great, you know, the shit, you get the seaweed in there and the food and then brew up your teas and throw it in. Next thing you said that term, fish pond. It's really one of my key things to determining the health of my system is my nose. Yeah. I can smell instantly that. If you've ever been to an aquarium, then you know. If you clean an aquarium, that fishy, bacteria smell, whatever. If it smells like a pond, I want my system to smell just like nothing. Clean, clean, clean, right? Roots clean. So, bacteria breathes really fast in a recirculating water based system. My analogy that I tell people usually is a swimming pool or a hot tub. Imagine having a hot tub at home with no chlorine or bromine in it. By the next morning after you've hot tubbed, it's a petri dish. Water temperatures are crucial, of course, too. For your benefits here in the States, we call that, uh, 68 Fahrenheit or 18. 3 Celsius. Uh, warm water breeds micro disaster. But then again, too cold of a water, uh, you know, the plants aren't really liking it. You know that, uh, we need a nice medium. But we're compromising that for... Pythium is our number one enemy. Number one enemy in, you know, air quality. Or any water based system is pythium, which is... Brown, bushy roots, root rot. You walk us through kind of process, procedures you do to avoid things like that and you can touch on a little bit about IPM and stuff like that because it's different than everything else media based. Yeah, it really is, but I mean I do love, here's the one real pro, of course, I mean there's many pros to it, but insect wise we are clean, like we just hardly ever get insects. A little bit in the summertime, maybe we've got to take care of it. Thankfully, winter freezes the shit out of everything that dies outside. Absolutely. But IPM management in the root zone is different than the plant zone. So, we'll separate that topic right now into the root zone, which is, you know, any pathogen that can be waterborne and recirculate, especially Botrytis, I'm pretty sure HLV can be waterborne as well. We, you know, that's not a concern right now, but, um, it's interesting that fucking we discovered a brand new one. Remember that article on mdb? It's that black root, right? That was, was that you? Yeah. It just looks like a snot. Like, Godzilla black snot. Brooklyn Micey's Root Seg. I love that. Yeah. What the fuck was that stuff again? It's a sporulating fungus. Okay. It's sporulated everywhere, bro. It was sporulating fucking... Well, it grew pretty fast, right? So you discovered it within Canvas? Canvas, yeah. No, we discovered it on the world. Okay. We sent this shit... No one knew what this was. We sent it to fucking six labs and they were We can't identify it. Nobody got there. So we sent it to a university and... This guy, a PhD candidate, genome sequence that, you know, the DNA, blah, and yeah, it's never been, you guys want to name it? I'm like, I didn't say that, I'm calling it aerobastardia. Did you? We try to name it. Fuck that shit, it's ruined. I mean, it's overnight. So talking about these explosive situations, we've kind of seen some on the roots. I inspect the roots a lot. It's, you know, a real important situation in there. Take care of the roots, they'll take care of the plant. So, IPM scouting occurs peeking under the dome. Lift the lid. With your nose, right? Yeah, with your nose. You smell that? Nope. No, that's not a smell. Smellless. Here's the other thing. That shit thrives the colder the water gets. The colder the water gets, the better it smells. So it's actually like so different. Different. So I was trying the the things that I would normally do for a pathogen invasion in my root zone. Yes. Just cool the water even further. Okay. Make it colder. Higher oxygen content. Yeah, over the water, blah, blah, blah. All so you can hold more. Dissolve oxygen. The water shit just took off. Shit. Explode. Exploded, dude. Like , man. The next day he was covering the reservoirs. It was on the whole, I remember the picture like, what the hell is this? I thought I melted. Fucking Robert pump or something like what's up? Is this rubber? It's thick. It was gross. Yeah. So how do we fight something that's completely new, right? So, I mean, I would have needed a fungicide, but we can't use any. Okay. So in health Canada, zero armaments to deal with shit like that. So at that point it was just all, you know, thankfully this was back in 2020 or 2019 or something. Before our new expansion happened. So this was a small room, about this size. Okay. A small grow room for R& D purposes for what's required in Canada is to grow two crops. And pass them both, submit the samples, you pass both and you get your license to sell. So we had a cultivation license, got that. Okay, go ahead, grow a crop, send a sample, destroy the whole crop. So you're not going to grow them. Yeah, destroy it. You can't extract it, you can't do nothing with it. So. You know, you're just going to grow it. You can't even protect it for the second crop. No. Until you pass. Grow it, send us a sample. Pass. Destroy that crop. Grow another one. Show us you can do it twice. And pass. Microbials, heavy metals, pesticides. Which we're very good at. We're very good at. Which is one of our brags. Is um, of course pesticides. Nobody, you can't bother. We're a facility. We're a facility. You guys have so many different layers. You know, i p M, it's just prevention. Prevention. Keep it clean, clean, clean, clean arrow. You know, just keep that shit clean, clean sanitizer for your phone room, clean phone, sanitizing, UV things. And, but we're proud of our microbial. So that's one thing that people can't, I don't know if you have it here in the states, we into the lab. Is it micro? I don't even see. Yeah. Yeah. States has different limits. 10,000, right? 10,000. Yeah. So that's a high. Well, I think there's some states that are 100, 000, I think there's that separate aspergillus outside that cow. That's right, aspergillus is separated. Yeah, aspergillus outside here is separated. Is it? Yeah. So we're looking at it. There's masses pretty strict down here. So we have some C Lasers, man, that I'm probably going to provide to you guys. I think we can download them, I'm sure. Flash them. Flash them, dude. Our C Lasers are fucking great. Microbials. Lower than attractible limits, like most 9 times out of 10. The allowable limits are up to 5, 000 CFU. Our CRAs come in lower, LO would be under 10. Did you, did you increase that type of, let's say, security for your facility after that incident happened? Yeah. Did you just go in full fucking... Yeah. Like, like as clean as possible. You know what I did? Never bring a clone in again. Okay. Is that where you think that came from? Yeah. Okay. Pretty sure. Yeah. Everything's from T. C. Everything. All of our stuff now is T. C. And, uh, so in the early days, back in, uh, again, that inception of our facility, Health Canada was getting their ass handed to them by the black market. They were trying to diminish it's success and they realized that when they first started out, they were like, Oh, all these little girls, y'all have to grow these genetics. Here, we got some for you. All these bullshit fucking... Mm hmm. Why, you know... Well, think about it. Why am I over 80? What's happening? I'm talking... Trading in profits. Yeah, here we go. And they're trying to sell these seeds or genetics and like everybody's going the same 15 strings. So then, they were like, the black market's still just crushing us. Wonder why, dude. So, guess what they did? They said, okay, we're going to let, you know, a one time exemption. To bring shit in. To bring shit in. So facility like ours, we got our arrest for everyone. , dude. So that's when I, Jim brought in a shit load. I mean, yeah, I came even see you, I banked up on some seed. You probably got some James Club. No, not clones. I probably did. You. And all of it can be carried via seed, obviously. It's, uh, and this movement started to take a lot. It's pretty wild. Look, three, even three years ago, the movement of tissue culture was like this, right? Like it's maybe and everything, obviously, because it's a necessity for, you know, we need it for our success. Start with clean. So that one time exemption. I went on a rampage before, you know, I already had. I had a lot of collection from my days, uh, and with my last name being Strain, it was kind of incumbent upon me to collect strains. I said, ah, I was like probably a hundred in my possession, roughly, 50 or 60 in actual mother plant form, but I maintained it in the mother room, resetting all the time, pain in the ass. Then another 150 different genetics across seeds, across 1, 200 seeds. So after that. So we brought that all into the facility, you know, and I'm, I'm screaming, you know, we've got to take this all before it comes in and then the company's like, Oh my God, that's a big tab. Like, you know, we're going to charge 5K per genetic to take, what, fucking six months. Yeah. So, you know, did that, got slapped on the hand for our error. Thankfully it was again in the small little error we called the crop. Took that equipment out. Once we learned what it was, I mean, this shit was a bastard of a breeder, like fucking, it could be the doctor's death. Anyway, took out a few pumps, some lines that we didn't want to clean, didn't deal with. We could fund the side, the rest of the equipment and put it back into service. But certain things you wouldn't want to risk. You know, like your irrigation lines. Or sprayers. Even a pump. EquiPlus, 250s, you've opened them up before, right? The only way to clean is brushes. You gotta, you gotta clean. There's no, there's no just running a chemical through your system and going, Yeah, yeah, I got it. And reloading it. You'll get your ass handed to you. Yeah, we melted some of our spray tips with the green clean, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, we left it in too long. And the next day, the green spray would just fall right out. Oops. A lot of trial and error. So. It's kind of a nice segway into what we do now, which is I won't go into detail about it, but we have a very, very clever anti ozonation system. So we use ozone. So we've done all the paths of what we use in Canada, which is nothing, virtually. Um, but ozone is O3, and it turns into O2 when it's done. When that, um, oxidizes, the third atom of oxygen that happens. Oxidizing whatever, but it is an incredibly powerful oxidant, right? It kills viruses, pathogens, anything. It's obviously harmful to people as well if it's in the, I mean, even levels that under 1 ppm are pretty noticeable in the environment. So it was a challenge to figure out how to impart ozone into our water system without it going into the atmosphere. So what I wanted was aqueous ozone and not atmospheric ozone. So just like, you know, dissolved oxygen content. I mean, you guys keep really close eye on your ORP system as well. It's exactly, ORP is oxidative reduction potential of the solution. Jerry and Bridget can't say that. I'm just ORP. ORP, oxidative reduction potential of the solution. Obviously, if you're doing like a drops of chlorine or, or other things that increase that level. But generally speaking, the plant roots don't like any of that. They don't want chlorine. They don't want some of these powerful oxidative things. So, ozone was, uh, something that took about a year and a half for us to go through. Again, nobody's done it. Nobody, uh, there was no... Here's the internet, here you go. Build this. Are you building a system within a company, within yourselves? I did, I did, yeah. Completely, just a lot of sleepless nights. I sit in my hot tub, smoke a lot of weed and I'm like, Ow, ow, ow, ow. I'm gonna do this, you know, that's it. And then, trial and error. And of course, my background as a black market grower gave me all the skillsets to tinker and I can build shit. I can problem solve it because I had to. So. That'll allow us to bring this in, figure out how to. Aqueous ozone, not atmospheric ozone, because it'll fuck up your plants bad. It'll burn. Have you ever had one of those ozone systems going wrong when you were fed back in your room? It would burn your leaves like, you know. Just becomes toxic and so forth. Yeah, it's pretty harmful. So, also we have to deal with, you know, our WorkSafe regulations in this province. And, uh, and we also use a product, uh, out of California called Clearline, which is hypochlorous acid. Hypochlorous acid is a, is another good sanitant, works well, it's not a harmful to the plants. I mean, uh, a nice collaborative company like yourselves. So both essence. They're called Current Culture out of California. They built a deep water culture systems and they have a product called Clearline or a weaker product called UC Roots. UC Roots. And it is, uh, you know, it's a, it's obviously, it's really another word for is ECA water or electrically chemically activated water. So you can make it at home even with, uh, water, salt and vinegar and electrolysis. And that's, get out of that knife. It burns a lot right now. It burns a lot if you can, if you can disinfect things with it. Yeah. At home. Wash your fruits and veggies. But actually, you know, your body produces cyclochlorosacin, white blood cells. So it is a, another tool in our toolbox. But really the implementation of it all is Is the other thing. It's one thing to know about it, but it's another thing to know how you're going to use it. Yeah. Because ozone also reacts with and knocks out, um, iron and manganese. And, um, sort of drop right out of your nutrient solution. Totally without iron in the bottom. Is that right? of your nukes in there. First of all, if you mix nutrients and, you know, they have dyes, okay, like many of the, I won't name names here, but you know, they get the pink, the green, a little dye, a little, whatever, so. What's liquid based as a color, mostly? Yeah, um, they dye. So anyways, the ozone knocks that out. It also completely eliminates all the iron that's dissolved and oxidizes it. Okay. Manganese and, uh. Okay, that's a nice color, right? Yeah. So you run it by itself? Yeah. Ozone. Well, no. Well, again, back to the tweaking, the formulas. I won't give away all my super sauces, but we can tailor a, a recipe that doesn't have those items in. And then when we do ation events, we don't use those obviously. Gotcha. And then we impart it back in. But you're not running ozone 24 7. Well, you don't have to add dissolved oxygen either, because it's a byproduct of the whole process. It does increase our do. Which is cool. Right. Which is cool. So after elimination, Period. It degrades and it does. That's actually the first thing you see rising on your, your nanometer is the do when you start. But then now that you're on the topic, we actually do that as well. You guys that as well. We auction, we, we fire up our do. So on a normal system, let's say a, okay, a pond, shitty pond is probably three or four ppm of deal, okay? The highest you can get is 10. naturally. So let's say under a waterfall or a river, you know, that's really oxygenated naturally. So, you know, a hundred percent saturation. Now there's such a thing called super saturation where you can actually really drive nanobubbles, the Mollier guys. Yeah, and water systems and stuff like that. Driving up DO? Like super saturation. Oh, super saturation, yeah. But of course, it doesn't last long, like, it wants to return to equilibrium. So, supersaturation... There's a lot of water being cycled too, right? Yeah. That's right, if you're out too. So, water standing will probably settle in around 3 or 4 ppm. Water moving, waterfall, river. So, exactly that. If you're out in the forest and you have to drink some water, go find a waterfall, not a pond, right? Yeah. So, of course, what does DO do? It helps the health of the system. The anaerobic bacteria versus aerobic bacteria, right? So, DO is important for us, for sure. We track it, we want to increase that as much as possible. There, there's just a ton of nuances to it, for sure. It's, it's a niche, but what I'm really happy with is the aeroponics being one of the faster ways to grow a plant, coupling that up with the FOS A3I. So when I look at this, when I came on board the company, Shit, you guys are really sending it here. I hope, you know, what are we going to do? Let's, let's fucking rock it. Well, you need to raise all the levers at once. You can't, like you as a grower also know this, you're not just going to increase light to 2, 000 ppm and leave your CO2 at 400 ppm. Yeah, so exactly, we raise all levers. But again, when I saw our system, which my analogy was what I tell people often, it's a Ferrari system, you know. We need a Ferrari mechanic, we need a Ferrari driver, you know, this isn't the low and slow method. Higher risk, higher reward. 100%, right? And when you push those parameters, the risk is higher. Absolutely. You don't have to understand that. You've been to Irrigation and you do something like that. Like roll. I'm running way lower. You might be fine. I was down there last Christmas morning. Wake up. Uh, fuck. Yep. Alert. Wow. Son of a bitch. Roll four offline. Roll four. Down. Uh, whatever. Coffee Bailey's a joint. Get my Santa hat on and down to the facility and fix it. Now, had I been in soil or, and maybe I just dimmed the lights by from home and I'll get around. I'll be fine. I'll get a ride to the pump. I'll be fine. You know. forgiving. This is not one of those systems. . Mm-hmm. . This is not, that's a hundred percent anxiety. All fast reaction out of it, out of the plant, for sure. Yeah. But that's, you know, I live away from, right. That comes from it is just that much greater word that comes out of it. And it's such a competitive market, dude. I mean, we we're not shooting for the middle. Well, we don't want to compete in, in the band from 20 to 80. We want to be up. We are competing in the 90 to a hundreds. So terrapins taste flavor forward growing. I wish I could have brought you guys some Rainbow Flame this morning. Oh my gosh. So many of course, U. S. is federally illegal, so I couldn't. So you didn't want to get banned for 10 years? So I couldn't, uh. Shout out to. Yeah. No, I didn't want to get banned for 10 years. I love coming here. I love seeing my homies. I love coming down to the States. So no, it wasn't worth the risk. So I brought some empty packages. But the Rainbow Flame are Mac 1. Um, I'm definitely, I've been a lot of fan of the THC race. I could give a shit. Like we never back in the black market and have those numbers, you know, good pack was a good pack. Terps. Terps, baby. Smoke, look at it. Smoke clean. So clean, clean burn is one of my main parameters, um, and that's why Aero is great because as much as I can input salts, treat formulas instantly. Like literally from here, I could grab my laptop and I could increase nitrate to row three if I need to, all along. Just don't judge me on this, tell it to dose more. That's an insane amount of control. Insane amount of control. It is. Um, you know, coupling out again with your lighting. So let's just go rehash here. In our facility, we have F1Vs. I have 64, 600 I'm going to give you guys a real big respect for this one here. So when I bought my F1Bs, they get them in the facility and I'm cloning and vegging with them. So we have a one touch system. When I take a clone off, it goes into my aero cloner and it's big double deck, double tiers aero cloning. So it's one touch, roots and veggies in place. Then it comes out of that with roots this long. Into the production room, flip the file. So, the F1Vs, when we got them, What we're gonna shut off? Jared, 31%, right? Yeah. 31? You guys have them off. And, of course, they're too powerful at that percentage for cloning, by far. So, I'm like, ah, fuck, Jared, what are we, tell me. Clones are welding, man, I need to dim these fuckers down. Alex? God bless him. Whoa. Shit, okay. I can get you down to 11, 10, 11%, I think. So you modified some controllers for me, a couple of solutions, modified some of your false controllers, we patched those in, he modified them, shipped them off, boom, had them in a couple of days, we put those into our loop, into our system, kind of in between our BMS system. No problem at all. Now we're definitely getting to 11%. Nice. Can you, yeah, it's cool that I kind of understand how people are utilizing the spectrum changes in the A3I. Can you walk us through just your kind of spectrum changes, what you do, intensities from like veg to flour, how do you ramp into those higher levels? How many weeks are you running spring, summer, autumn even? Cultivar, dependent for sure, as every one of these answers usually is, but as a general rule of thumb, um, The atri without a doubt. I utilize the different spectrum changes and I'm, you know, playing with some different stuff. Like for example, in last week of flower, I might go back to spring, we'll see guy enough. The, but generally speaking, no, I, I'm most of the time in summer. Okay. Most of the time. Uh, keeping in mind that in my veg corner rooms, they're under your, already your spring spectrum on the F one Bs. Correct. It's similar. It's a white. It's just a nice white. Is it a higher? Okay. So, coming out of there, that's, if we're done that, then I'll leave them on spring, not for very long, because the summer has more red through it, and red photons carry more energy than blue. So, we have probably 80 percent of the time in summer. The dimming is something I use a lot. Then, of course, last few weeks I'll go to fall mode. Do you, do you try to handle that 1, 500 right away, Farr? Some people try to acclimate them, some people hit them right away. No, no, we're gonna ramp. Okay. So do you, how long do you usually ramp to those, like, levels for? I'm ramping daily. Okay. 5 percent maybe. Okay. So just a slight increase. Uh, do you remember my lesson? Don't fucking ramp 50%. Please don't. Please don't. We have, you've been sitting down and he said, for research that they've done, 150 micromole. Adjustment is pretty much, I think, where you want to stay around. Don't quote me exactly on that, I think it's around those levels. It's a good increase. So, on a remote, it would probably be. Just kind of photon blast it all at once. Yeah, I would do 2 3 percent a day. Because it gives you time to kind of see the plan, see what's happening, is it stressing, do I need to adjust my parameters, is it where I want to be? Again, with the arrow, what I like is the coupling of those two things allows it to happen quicker. Because transpiration and uptake is easy in airplanes. Right. The, the root zone systems, again, will show you some images. I know you have 'em, but they're just right there waiting uptake. So do you just ramp your nutrient concentration kind of in tandem with your increases in light then? Yeah, a ramp up on all of those things, even c o two. So every time I'm ramping light and ramping c O two, so a lot of people, I always say kind of match your light levels around people ask for a good guide should be like a thousand or 1500. I matched my c o two to my light levels. If I'm at 1, 200 in flower, I'm right at 1, 200 in CO2. Just cause you like the sound of it. Yeah, it's really funny. That's true. It's apparently easier, right? Where you hit, it's probably CO2. We're getting up to 18. 18, okay. Juice. Less. 18, 100. And when you have that much control over every other system like you do, you can push, right? I've done experiments, I've tried 4, 000. Okay. Damn. Sure. Yeah. Boy, I've never been 30 seconds in front of this room. Oh, no. Scrappy. Quick break. Yep. Pissed. Just give me a call. Okay. I'll try to give you that 12 o'clock. Yeah. I want to hear that too. Sorry, I just thought that'd be fun. No, I'm sorry. Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for joining me today in the podcast. Uh, Season 1, Episode 1 of Deer's Train. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's a learning experience. It's a learning experience. Maybe tomorrow morning we'll come back sober like myself and you guys will see. Was that you ending the vlog? That's me ending the vlog. Ow! I'm done. We're gonna hit the Episode 1. Well, Jimmy Shane, Jim, thanks for, thanks for coming on. My pleasure, man. I appreciate you. I really appreciate this. Yeah, tune in for the next episode. We're excited to see what happens. Later. Peace.