Critics often highlight odor nuisances associated with cannabis cultivation, but it is important to acknowledge that vineyards, too, emit strong smells due to the use of agricultural inputs like sulfur. Addressing odor concerns without considering the broader context of other agricultural activities may lead to unfair treatment. Similarly, noise and lighting impacts are often cited as potential drawbacks of cannabis cultivation, but vineyard operations involving heavy equipment and non-downcast lighting practices can also disrupt neighboring communities.
Let’s step off the cannabis farm for a minute and instead look to agriculture as a whole. The cannabis industry has picked up a lot of lessons from the farming world, and while taking a fallow year doesn’t yet appear to be a widely-adopted trend, this year may be different.
While winter brings some time for rest and recovery, for those involved in year-round cultivation, the new season brings added complexities for growing cannabis. The plant is thought to have evolved about 28 million years ago on the eastern Tibetan Plateau, which is home to extremely cold winters. While cannabis can grow in the winter, taking some extra steps to support your greenhouse cannabis cultivation can certainly help.
In a market that’s increasingly being taken over by large-scale production, lower quality, and cheaper prices, it’s important to look at the better alternative: craft cannabis. What makes Giving Tree Farms and other craft cannabis producers stand out? From seed-to-package, there’s a certain mindfulness involved. So, let’s take a look at what harvesting craft cannabis entails.
Fresh-frozen cannabis has taken the cannabis world by storm in recent years. As the name suggests, fresh-frozen cannabis entails freezing the harvest directly after it’s been picked. It’s been growing in popularity—especially as it’s one of the best methods we have to preserve terpenes and cannabinoids.
Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at how we go about producing fresh-frozen cannabis.
If you're looking to boost your sustainability this year, focusing your efforts on energy efficiency can help cut back on operational costs while bettering your relationship with the environment. There are many ways you can reduce energy use, but if you don’t know where to start, these few tips outlined below can help you get on track to a more energy-efficient lifestyle.
We started our solar journey by signing up for Sonoma Clean Power as our source of grid energy. This program guaranteed that all of our energy use was obtained from renewable sources, like solar and wind energy. But where this came up short was during California's rolling blackouts throughout the fire season. As a cannabis cultivator, fire season takes place during our fall cultivation cycle, harvest, and through part of processing, when it's absolutely imperative that we have electricity for irrigation, humidity and temperature controls, and security measures. When we process fresh-frozen harvests, this adds an even more critical need for continuous power. Otherwise, we could lose our entire crop. We knew we needed to take matters into our own hands or possibly face an uncontrollable fate. This thinking was the start of our off-grid solar journey.
In an effort to raise efficiency standards for indoor cultivators in California, the California Energy Commission (CEC) has proposed a new mandate that would require all cultivators currently using supplemental lighting to switch to LED lights by 2023. This costly requirement has put many California cannabis cultivators on edge, knowing that this transition may not be possible in an industry that's heavily taxed and already expensive to operate compliantly in. Most cultivators who want to produce cannabis outside of the regular season, like within a greenhouse or indoor facility, don't have the monetary means to support such a costly transition so soon.
