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.
As owners and operators, we know how valuable our time is. We wear a dozen different hats, take responsibility for the outcomes, and find ourselves fully immersed in all things business seven days out of the week. But what separates the overwhelmed from the productive is respecting the time we are given each day. Without planning and scheduling, we hurt our business's efficiency, costing ourselves money in the long run.
Part of our passion at Giving Tree Farms lies with finding creative ways to boost our sustainability and efficiency. And much like Lean Manufacturing, we work to achieve “Lean Cultivation,” an application that reduces our waste through our cultivation procedures without sacrificing efficiency and productivity. Every area of our operation ties in methods that reduce, reuse, or recycle our waste, from the garden to the processing room and all the way into the administration office. Lean Cultivation is a fully immersive approach to operating our business, one that is great for the environment and our achievement of such high-quality cannabis.
When you walk through the ripening fields of a cannabis farm, there's no mistaking the distinct scent of sappy goodness that resembles a fruit cocktail or an herbal pine forest. These aromas come from terpenes, and the cannabis plant is far from the only plant that has them. Lavender, lemons, rosemary, and pine trees all have an abundance of terpenes too, and they happen to be the same terpenes you can find in certain cannabis strains. But why do plants produce terpenes? And how do they affect our experiences when we consume them?
As cannabis cultivators who have worked in the industry for over a decade, we've tried multiple different growing methods to find what works best for us. We've had to discover where the perfect balance of working with the land and optimal efficiency lies to develop Giving Tree Farms into what it is today. Over the years, we've learned that our desire for optimal control over our environment and the need for multiple cultivation cycles throughout the year was only possible by evolving our approach. From the installation of both our cold-frame and climate-controlled greenhouses to the continuous improvement of our workflow, our personalized approach to sustainable cultivation provides our clients with the highest quality craft cannabis in the state.
Natural leaders are all around us, positively impacting our lives and driving us to become better people. It’s these individuals that play an essential societal role in inspiring others, innovating new ideas, and pushing us toward achieving greater things. There are a few characteristics all leaders share, and by recognizing who these people are around us, we can strengthen our own leadership skills and appreciate the value they bring to our everyday lives.
Depending on your individual needs, the desire to switch to an off-grid energy source can come from a multitude of different motivators, but some challenges tag along with this transition that you should be aware of. Many modern farmers are making the switch due to its attractive attributes, like self-reliance, decreased or eliminated electricity bills, and a lessened environmental footprint. If you're considering the change for yourself, we expect sharing our first-time lessons will make your experience a little easier.
When purchasing a product, many feel it's important to know where that product came from and how it was made. It's natural to care about the origin of your purchases because they affect our lives, whether directly, like through consuming food we buy, or indirectly, like how our dollars are applied to the business, its employees, and its production process. We care about transparency because it connects us to the source of what we've purchased. It puts an understanding of creation and highlights the efforts taken to make the product into the finished good we hold in our hands. Craft cannabis is no different, and Giving Tree Farms embraces transparency as one of our core values.
As cannabis cultivators, it's important that we continue scaling our business to keep up with the demand of a quickly expanding industry. To remain within our strict cultivation standards, we have to maintain quality while we scale, and this is possible through increasing avenues of efficiency and implementing smart-farming techniques.
Sustainable cultivation comes in many forms, each uniquely beautiful in its own way. This is because being sustainable means working with your land and adjusting your approach to serve its needs. From the soil you grow within to the average cloud coverage in the sky, understanding your microclimate is key to creating a sustainable garden that is perfect for your particular space.
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.
