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.
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.
With efficiency as one of our main objectives, we like to regularly evaluate our workflow and see if there are areas where we can improve. Because of this, we've made changes along the way, some that turned out well and others that presented challenges. But what we've found through our years of discovery is that a linear workflow design works best for our farm for several reasons, and maybe it will work best for you too.
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.
A smart farm starts with a smart design, and new technologies can help us create a plan that maximizes efficiency and encompasses sustainability, all while keeping our unique land restrictions in mind. Regardless of the crop(s) we decide to grow, taking the time to ensure our garden will be able to operate at peak performance will prove beneficial. The future of agriculture relies on efficiency, and with a little brainpower and help from technology, even small, personal gardens can enjoy the advantages of a well-designed cultivation space.
Working on farm efficiency requires trying to look at a familiar issue through an unfamiliar lens. It’s vital to question standard practices in order to develop innovative “smart” farming alternatives. Smart farming is an evolving strategy that can benefit many parts of a farmer’s operation, regardless of the crop they are cultivating. Through the use of data collection, we can recognize inefficiencies throughout the season, allowing us to improve the following cycle, reduce our impact on the environment, and increase our transparency with customers.
For labor-intensive crops with strict climate requirements, the help of robotics and sensors have made farming more efficient and accurate. From auto-potting machines that boost business efficiency to sensors that regulate humidity and temperature, smart-farming technologies have granted tremendous value to the modern-day farmer, and the agricultural tech wave has only just begun.
Farmers today face erratic climates, a reality that seems to be worsening year after year rather than improving. With this, a new set of challenges rises to the surface, unfamiliar forms of pest pressure being one of them. We can combat this with smart farming technologies, using them to collect data from every part of the field to closely monitor potential threats, understand their impact, and determine the best approach for protecting our crops. Using the precise application of safe and effective crop protection practices that are both sustainable and economically efficient protects our farm from possible outbreaks that could be detrimental to our overall success. By understanding our field's data and implementing the correct treatment methods, we can shield ourselves from anticipated pest problems and create a foundation that's easy to rely on.
Advancements in agriculture have led to the use of technology in all aspects of the craft. With the demand for food, textiles, and other crops increasing year after year due to population growth, farm operations must find creative ways to increase their production output as well. To do this efficiently, we farmers have to utilize Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), a necessary step to lower our overhead costs while maintaining consistent quality. By adopting and integrating these smart-farming technologies into our daily cultivation operations, we can improve data-reporting accuracy and avoid some of the additional labor requirements, saving ourselves valuable time and capital in the process.
