(11/8/2019) Editor's note: This story has been updated for clarity. While David Bernard-Perron's living soil recipe at Whistler Medical Marijuana Corp. (WMMC) was certified organic in 2014, WMMC received its first organic certification in 2013, the year before Bernard-Perron joined the company.

On paper, it’s hard to understand the scale at which The Green Organic Dutchman plans to operate. What does nearly 4 acres (or 1.5 hectares) of cannabis grown under a glass roof look like? What about just under 20 acres, which equates to roughly 8 hectares? How much soil does an organic farm of that size require? What precautions must be taken and what tools implemented to ensure a consistently healthy crop while still maintaining a living soil?

Seeing that scale in person is dizzying: row after row of mobile racks topped with custom-made pots filled with a house-made living soil—a mixture of rich earth, molasses, beneficial microbes, bacteria, fungi, insects, nematodes—masterminded by David Bernard-Perron, the company’s vice president of cultivation operations.

After obtaining his master’s in agriculture from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 2015, Bernard-Perron moved to the Canadian West Coast and launched his career in the cannabis industry as the head agrologist for Whistler Medical Marijuana Corp., a licensed medical cannabis operation in British Columbia. There, he developed and refined the company’s indoor living soil program.

TGOD, as his current employer is known, hopes to replicate the success Bernard-Perron found in Whistler’s 15,000-square-foot operation, first with the company’s 160,000-square-foot Ancaster, Ontario, facility, then again in its 1.3 million-square-foot behemoth in Valleyfield, Quebec.

Getting to scale has definitely not been easy, and recent headlines about the company losing the funding it needed to complete construction at both sites certainly have complicated matters, but executives remain confident that the setbacks are setting the company up for an even better launch forward.

Second-Mover Advantage

The company headquarters—half a floor at a nondescript office building above a bank near the Toronto International Airport in Mississauga—belies the company’s vision: to be the world’s largest organic cannabis producer. The space doesn’t quite fit the team’s administrative and executive divisions, but no one complains; they know making that organic vision a reality requires time and sacrifice.

“It’s a culture of entrepreneurs that are here from various backgrounds, various industries to create something great that’s long-lasting,” says Drew Campbell, TGOD’s head of marketing. (The company’s headquarters isn’t a Silicon Valley garage, either, which also helps ease cramped tensions.)

Instead of office space, the bulk of the company’s funds have gone into completing construction of its hybrid glass-roof facilities, which, once completed, will officially make TGOD the world’s largest organic cannabis producer with a footprint of more than 1.4 million square feet in Canada alone.

That scale is the major differentiator between TGOD and any other producer in the world, says Brian Athaide, the company’s CEO. “There are ... other organic producers, but they tend to be more craft. We’re the only ones doing organic at scale that nobody’s ever done before.”

Building a facility with the automation and environmental control needed to produce a profitable crop at scale while maintaining organic standards was no easy task. TGOD went through several redesigns that delayed its market launch and increased costs. But Athaide says while those delays prevented the company from enjoying first-mover advantage, they allowed it to learn from others’ mistakes. For example, TGOD tripled its HVAC capacity after seeing reports of other licensed producers (LPs) struggling with humidity control. The Mississauga company also almost doubled the size of its processing facilities to accommodate the volume of flower it will be producing after seeing market bottlenecks in that area.

“So, we added more capital, we pushed back our timings, and I think that’s part of the … second-mover advantage because we were able to learn from everyone else,” Athaide says. “On the other hand, we haven’t really lost anything by not having that first-mover advantage on flower and oil because the rules around packaging are very strict. … So no one’s really built a brand of significance at this point yet.”

Feed the Soil, Not the Plants

The company’s Valleyfield facility, its flagship, was still in the first construction phase before the company announced financial restructuring plans on Oct. 18. The Ancaster facility received final production approval from Health Canada on Oct. 16, allowing TGOD to move plants from the nursery/vegetation space into the hybrid greenhouses for full flowering. (TGOD had been using a few of those vegetation rooms to flower crops for its medical patients and to supply the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS) with organic product.)

A room without plants, however, is the best way for visitors to grasp the intricacies of scaling organic cannabis. “Our facilities are purpose-built,” Athaide says.

Take the containers in which flowering plants will sit: Each room houses 1,450 pots filled with Bernard-Perron’s living soil blend. The pots had to be custom-made to fit perfectly in the company’s mobile tables, another custom-designed piece of equipment. Those two features combined allow TGOD to grow 5,800 plants in a single room, Bernard-Perron says.

The team took an unconventional approach to controlling how air circulates in those rooms. Instead of having fans above the canopy pushing air across the tops of its crops, “we have an air-vent system that will blow air from underneath and then that air moves through the canopy of the plant and then cools the leaf surface from underneath,” Bernard-Perron says. This system also allows the cultivation team to supplement with CO₂ near the root zone and carry away excess moisture from deep within the canopy. “Then we exhaust it through the centralized air filtration system and then outside. So we get rid of the smell, and it’s the most efficient way to cool our product,” he adds.

Managing temperatures in a greenhouse with such a heat-sensitive crop is a significant challenge during Canadian summers, when outdoor temperatures can spike well above average to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Operating at such a northern latitude also means TGOD needs supplemental lights to cultivate year-round. To solve the latter problem without exacerbating the former one, the company opted for LEDs. “Those lights are actually the closest spectrum we can find to natural sunlight,” Bernard-Perron explains, “and we have a better penetration inside a canopy, we use less energy, [so] we don’t have to cool as much to be able to have our target light level on our crop.” The company is studying how those fixtures affect the crops’ phytochemistry and yield and hopes to have results in 2020.

More important than lighting is the company’s living soil program. A living soil, Bernard-Perron describes, is “soil in which we have brought back the natural process that you can find in nature. … We’re using a lot of beneficial microbes, bacteria, fungi, beneficial insects, nematodes, that all work together to transform the organic fertilizer we’re putting into the soil into living nutrients and to plant-available forms. So, we’re basically feeding the soil that then feeds the plants.”

“What the plants do in exchange for the soil is take CO₂ from the air, use the sunlight to photosynthesize and transform that into sugar that they then push back into the soil,” Bernard-Perron says. “The plant is basically sweating sugar into the soil that feeds those beneficial micro-organisms. So, you have this awesome, built-in feedback loop that is your living soil system.”

In addition to lighting, the company is also studying how its organic cultivation approach impacts yields and plant chemistry. (Although more studies are needed, early data shows higher cannabinoid and terpene content, says Bernard-Perron.)

That soil’s microbiological diversity is also the company’s first line of defense in its integrated pest management (IPM) program. “Every handful of soil that we pick up [has] literally tens of thousands of kilometers of fungal network, fungal ivy, that are connecting the soil, the bacteria, and the plants and acting as a line of defense against other [predatory] micro-organisms,” Bernard-Perron says. “There’s so many good micro-organisms that are competing with everything and want to keep the plant healthy because the plants are giving them sugar. So they have to keep up their wall and keep pathogens outside.”

Organic Talk

Communicating these organic concepts to consumers is easier said than done, says TGOD’s head of marketing. But the slower market rollout gave the company more time to build its identity—or, as Campbell puts it, find its “story.” And that story is rooted in organics itself.

“Organic isn’t an adjective,” Campbell explains. “Organic is a fundamentally different consumer habit, [where] people now want to have transparency about where their products are coming from and what goes into [them].”

The Canadian market is fairly knowledgeable about what an organic certification means, and a large segment seeks out that certification in their produce, Athaide says. “Half of Canadian consumers buy something organic on a weekly basis, about 30% try to buy organic or kind of healthier products whenever they can,” he says. “[Public relations firm] Hill+Knowlton did a study earlier this year and found that 61% of medical patients and 50% of recreational consumers would prefer organic cannabis.”

While awaiting further test results on the effect the organic program has on TGOD’s yields and phytochemistry, education is focused on making the connection between cannabis and things people know: soil-grown, organic nutrients, no pesticides. That messaging gets out mainly through budtender education.

“We’ve launched a proprietary organic certification program for budtenders, educating [them] exactly on what is the difference between organic and non-organic growing,” Campbell says. “We want the first question for a budtender to ask when somebody goes in-store to be, ‘Would you prefer organic?’ If that is a starting point for our conversation, to make people aware that there is a difference between organic and non-organic cannabis, that’s a great differentiator for us and for a budtender to guide somebody towards our brand.”

Sustainability-Driven

TGOD’s sustainability initiatives also play a big part in the company’s identity and messaging.

“Our tagline of ‘making life better’ might sound simple, but that’s really what we’re doing,” Campbell says. “On the consumer end, we’re delivering a certified organic product to individuals. … [But] making life better is, beyond just cannabis, how are we improving things? … Improving our legacy on our neighbors, our friends and our generations to come is something we take extremely seriously.”

Being as sustainable as possible permeates nearly every decision the company makes. For example, TGOD packaging is mostly glass. Not only is glass packaging 100% recyclable and avoids static cling (which can cause trichomes to stick to the sides of plastic containers), TGOD also uses its containers as marketing tools by posting videos on how to reuse them to grow herbs or repurpose them as organizational tools. In addition to the original content, that sustainability angle “gives us a bit of a leg up on some of the competition because we can talk about all those things that we are doing for the environment,” Campbell says.

Those environmental initiatives aren’t limited to containers. The company designed both of its facilities to be LEED-certified by the Canada Green Building Council pending finalization of construction and operations. LEED stands for leadership in energy and environmental design. It’s a widely known rating system for green buildings around the world, says Karine Cousineau, TGOD’s director of government relations and sustainability.

In addition to the sustainable materials used to build the facilities, the Ancaster site is decked with solar panels and a co-generation system that produces electricity to reduce the company’s load on the local power grid. The natural gas system also serves as a CO2 generator for the greenhouses and a heating source during the winter to keep the open-air rainwater basin from freezing. Any excess heat can also be shared with neighboring farms.

The TGOD team also collects an impressive amount of data, all processed by a centralized artificial intelligence system that will find efficiencies. Once fully built out, “there’ll be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different sensors within these facilities that will track everything from external weather and environmental conditions to the movement of the plants internally to the soil conditions, the humidity, the lighting, and things that are happening down at a leaf level of a plant [through hyperspectral imagery],” says Geoff Riggs, TGOD’s chief information officer.

While some individuals and companies may look at sustainability from a purely environmental perspective, TGOD sees it as much more than that. “It’s also the whole social side of things and governance,” Cousineau says. To that end, she and her team are working on a survey “where basically we work with our stakeholders to determine: What should be the most important for TGOD? What should we track? What kind of KPIs [key performance indicators] should we put in place?” And at TGOD, stakeholder is a broadly inclusive term. The company not only sends surveys to management, “but also every stakeholder we have, from neighbors, employees, legislators, customers, consumers,” she continues, the goal being to have everyone “be part of what we’re building.”

Striving for Long-Term Stability

Despite the company’s best efforts, slow retail licensing has dampened the legal market and kept the illicit market alive and well, according to Athaide. This caused market investors to pull investments across the board, sending cannabis stocks tumbling and shrinking the ability for cannabis companies to raise capital. TGOD announced a review of alternative financing options on Oct. 9, following a change of terms from banking partners. TGOD’s shares went into a tailspin. As of Oct. 22, the company’s stock was trading at CA$1.09 on the Toronto Stock Exchange, down from its September 2018 high of CA$8.25.

Despite TGOD receiving final approval from Health Canada to commence full cultivation operations in the Ancaster facility, the company decided to scale back its production, citing those market forces out of its control. Ancaster’s production goal for 2020 is 12,000 kilograms (~26,455 lbs.) of cannabis (slightly below its full capacity of 17,500 kg (~38,580 lbs.)) as part of the company’s financial restructuring to maintain profitability by Q2 2020, the company said in an Oct. 18 release.

The Valleyfield buildout also is ramping down; the company expects to produce 10,000 kg (~22,046 lbs.)—Phase 1A originally was slated to yield 65,000 kg of cannabis annually, with Phase 1B doubling that capacity. The site’s processing facility also is on hold, and all product from Valleyfield will be processed and packaged at Ancaster. The company estimates that it will need $70 million to $80 million by the end of Q2 2020 to undertake the plan and reach positive operational cash flow, it said in the same release.

“With the current Canadian legal market being smaller than initially anticipated, mainly due to a slow rollout of retail locations in key provinces, we believe that our revised plan will allow TGOD to right size its production to capture the organic segment, while maintaining optionality to quickly accelerate and expand as more retail locations begin to open,” added Athaide in the statement.

To avoid being at the mercy of a single market’s shifts and woes, Athaide has an eye on a future where TGOD is in multiple markets. “Our vision is to be the largest organic cannabis and hemp brand globally,” he says. “Our strategy is not to be fully vertically integrated into everything. We are doing the organic cultivation in Canada. We have developed the IP, but as we go international, we’re finding great partners. … Like, for instance, in Poland ... we’re buying third-party organic hemp [for our hemp business] where we’re then drying it, extracting it, creating it into oil.”

Along with Poland, TGOD has operations or agreements with groups in the U.S., Jamaica, Denmark and Mexico. In each of those, “we’ve chosen those parts of the value chain that we believe we can uniquely own and add and do better than anybody else,” Athaide says. “You can be good at a lot of things, you can’t be great at everything. So we’re focusing on those parts that we can be great at and finding great partners for the rest.”

That said, the company’s financial struggles make it difficult for TGOD to focus on international expansion—it doesn’t make sense to spend capital on satellites when the core business isn’t as solidified as it should be. But Cannabis 2.0, Canada’s legal launch of extracted products, has the CEO hopeful. “We have a best-in-class science team that is not only looking at clinical research, but also applied science to help differentiate our products. They have been instrumental in developing our product portfolio for Cannabis 2.0, working closely with other teams on formulations. I am excited about the upcoming launch of our organic teas, infusers and vapes in mid-December,” Athaide says.

Brian MacIver is senior editor for Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Dispensary magazines.

A plumbing system is a critical yet costly component of a cannabis facility. That’s why growers can’t overlook proper system design. Each system design should take into account a grower’s specific needs as well as code and regulatory requirements. Proper planning can help growers avoid costly and time-consuming rework. Here are some of the most important plumbing considerations when designing a cannabis facility:

1. Consider and select water reclamation systems early.

One of the common set-ups we come across in cannabis cultivation is a water reclamation system, which filters and reuses wastewater collected by HVAC installations from plant transpiration. Water reclamation systems vary depending on facility size, types of irrigation processes, environmental conditions and compliance and regulations. When designed properly, they can reclaim a very high percentage of wastewater, which, in turn, will reduce water usage, reduce waste and save money. Growers should determine their needs early in the design process, as adding these systems later can be costly from a budget and time standpoint.

2. Understand safety requirements, including eyewash stations and emergency showers.

For cultivators involved in extraction or processing, eyewash stations and/or emergency showers may be necessary, and they are not uncommon in cultivation facilities utilizing fertilizer or another fertigation system. Installing this equipment is typically much more costly and complicated than growers might think. Showers in most residential homes flow at a rate of about 2.5 gallons per minute, while emergency showers typically use 20 gallons per minute and must provide tempered water for 15 minutes. This means water meters, supply mains, water heating equipment and, in some cases, electrical systems, need higher capacities to accommodate the added water supply load.

Also, emergency fixture placement must meet certain standards, such as being located within 55 feet of the hazard, being reachable within 10 seconds and include a path that is free from obstructions, such as steps and doors. It’s important to get this right, as Occupational Safety and Heath Administration (OSHA) penalties can be thousands of dollars.

3. Consider reverse osmosis systems.

Reverse osmosis (RO) systems are frequently used in cannabis cultivation facilities as a water filtration method. RO water can provide a more consistent way to add nutrients and other additives to a cultivator’s irrigation/fertigation water. But these highly engineered systems are prone to maintenance issues, such as corrosivity and backflow pressure, and other issues due to pipe material choice. Be sure to hire a plumbing engineer with experience in cannabis facility designs to avoid common complications.

4. Install hand sinks—even if they’re not required.

The health department generally requires hand sinks in any sort of food processing environment, and adult-use cannabis cultivation and processing facilities typically fall into this category. Cultivators should check with the health department to understand their facility requirements. Even if hand sinks aren’t required in post-harvest process areas like drying, extraction or in kitchens, growers should consider them as the industry continues to place a higher value on contaminant-free products.

Michael Leavitt is a professional mechanical engineer who has been working with Root Engineers since 2014.

Cannabis extraction and refinement create different raw materials for formulation. They are critical processes that separate cannabis extracts into their component molecules. Cannabinoid distillation is a particularly complex stage of the extraction and refinement process that involves a nuanced interplay among component boiling points, heat and vacuum.

Here are some tips and tricks producers can use in their distillation protocols to optimize their results.

1. Aim for highly refined and clean material.

Limit the number of substances that interact during the distillation process and components that can negatively affect the performance of the equipment. For example, certain fatty acids have boiling points near cannabinoids and will often polymerize, which diminishes product purity and increases system maintenance. Also, components of the refinement process (i.e., clarifying agents) can cause isomerization during distillation. To mitigate this, refine extracts prior to distillation. Refinement processes include winterization, clarification and scrubbing filtration.

2. Fully decarboxylate and degas the material.

A simple way to increase the throughput of the distillation process is to decarboxylate and degas the cannabis extract before distillation. Decarboxylation and degassing are the processes of converting the acid form cannabinoids to the neutral forms and removing volatiles, respectively, by applying heat and agitation. By undertaking those two processes, the vacuum operates under reduced load and more cannabinoids are distilled per unit time.

3. Use a well-designed vacuum system.

The atmospheric boiling points of cannabinoids are not known to any degree of certainty because these heavy molecules tend to degrade before they boil. However, by removing atmosphere, the cannabinoids can be encouraged to boil at a lower temperature. Their boiling points under vacuum (i.e., 5x10-3 Torr)—as documented by Adams et al. in 1941 and Gaoni & Mechoulam in 1964—are between 155 and 160 degrees Celsius. That’s why it’s important to have a substantial vacuum system to reduce the heat required to vaporize cannabinoids and minimize the risk of degradation. An ideal vacuum system for this application is a dual-stage rotary-vane pump designed to pull to 1x10-4 Torr with a diffusion pump to increase the depth and stability of the vacuum under load. It’s also important to correctly size the tubing and seal the connectors.

4. Maintain short heated-surface contact.

Heat can degrade or isomerize cannabinoids. Use a system that can deliver heat to a thin layer of oil to minimize total heat exposure. Wiped film or centrifugal systems are ideal for this because the oil’s contact with heat is several seconds compared to several hours. Finally, stainless steel heating surfaces (i.e., still body or centrifugal plate) increase the efficiency of heat transfer and the throughput of the distillation process.

Mark June-Wells, Ph.D., is the principal owner, and Brandon Webster is a process consultant with Sativum Consulting Group, a company that helps clients reduce lag time between laboratory set-up and revenue generation.

Foliar tissue analysis is an extremely useful tool for growers managing plant nutrition of cannabis. It falls into two major categories: routine analysis and diagnostic analysis. Routine analysis is for problem prevention, whereas diagnostic analysis is for problem solving.

The routine analysis allows growers to monitor nutrient uptake in the plant during production. This requires a grower to take multiple samples over the entire course of the growing season to identify problems or issues before they become serious concerns.

Growers can use diagnostic analysis to diagnose deficient or toxic nutrients when the plants are displaying negative symptoms. This process helps identify the specific problem and is primarily a corrective tool. Plant tissue analysis is especially useful in determining micronutrient levels in the plant and has a greater level of accuracy than a substrate test using a water-based extraction.

Tissue Analysis Strategies for Cannabis Growers

Routine analysis sampling is a general management tool when the plant is displaying no negative symptoms. The strategy here is to determine the nutrient status of the plant by plotting tissue values over time to ensure that a fertility program is on track.

For example, when growing a cannabis mother stock crop, a grower could collect samples monthly during the time the plant is developing prior to taking cuttings. This would provide valuable information to ensure that plants contain adequate nutrient levels going into the cutting season.

Another valuable strategy could be to sample the plants just before taking cuttings and then periodically over the cutting season. Typically, with other floriculture species, nutrient levels decline over time as cuttings are harvested. Knowing the status of your stock plants enables growers to modify their fertilization practices to the stock plants during the cutting season to help ensure the cuttings are nutritionally charged when growers take them from the plant.

A third monitoring strategy would be to periodically sample the cuttings taken from the stock plant during the cutting season. This will determine if nutrient levels are being maintained in the stock. This will also verify that the cuttings themselves have adequate nutrients.

Each of these nutritional monitoring strategies requires that growers sample each cultivar separately, as nutrient levels can vary with each one. In addition, if there are differences in the plant’s age or fertilization practices, cultivators should sample those blocks of plants separately.

Cultivators sampling plants for diagnostic analysis should sample them individually. To accurately diagnose a nutritional disorder, growers will need to take samples from the affected plant and/or symptomatic portion of the plant. For example, if the lower leaves display toxicity symptoms, then cultivators should sample those leaves. Because the critical lower deficiency ranges and toxic upper ranges for cannabis are not known at this time, if possible, cultivators should collect a “good” control sample to compare to their problem sample.

Understanding Testing Parameters

Generally, a leaf tissue analysis will include the following macronutrients: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), and magnesium (Mg). (Labs might not include sulfur (S) or may do so at an additional charge.) Tissue analysis also determines the following micronutrient concentrations: boron (B), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), manganese (Mn) and zinc (Zn). Some labs charge extra and require a larger sample amount for molybdenum (Mo) determination, and some will also test for sodium (Na) and chloride (Cl). While Na and Cl are not considered essential for plant production, some fertilizers or source water may contain these nutrients. Cultivators should check with the lab where they are submitting their sample to determine the elements tested and cost.

Sampling Procedure 101

The leaf tissue sample should be representative of the plant or production area being monitored or the problem cultivators wish to analyze. As mentioned above, growers should sample plants of different ages and varieties separately. The process includes:

1. Collecting leaf samples.

• For routine analysis, collect the most recently mature leaf. This leaf is typically three to five leaves down from the growing tip (Fig. 1 above). For a representative sample, take 25 to 30 leaves from five to 10 plants (Fig. 2).
• For diagnostic analysis, sample plants individually, taking leaves from the affected portion of the plant (Fig. 3). Again, if possible, sample a “good” control so that comparisons can be made.

2. Washing and drying leaves.

If the crop has been overhead watered or micronutrients have been foliar applied, gently wash the leaves in distilled water for 20 seconds to remove any surface contaminants. Dry the leaves with paper towels after washing, prior to packaging them.

3. Packaging leaves for analysis.

Send the samples in a paper bag or manila envelope to the commercial lab authorized to analyze cannabis samples (Fig. 4). Label the bag with your name and address. Contact the lab to verify if there are any special requirements for delivery and documentation under current legislation.

4. Delivering the samples.

Immediately send the samples to a lab certified in your state to conduct leaf-tissue analysis. Try to collect the sample at the beginning of the week so delivery will not be delayed over the weekend. If delivery time to the lab (or to a drying oven) is expected to exceed 12 hours, then it’s best to refrigerate or air-dry the samples.

At this point, nutrient sufficiency ranges for cannabis have not been developed for specific growth stage(s). Bryson and Mills (2014) published nutrient ranges for cannabis (Table 1 above). The database for cannabis nutrient sufficiency ranges is still a work in progress and will be further refined over time as scientific studies determine target nutrient levels over the crop's production cycle as well as critical deficiency and toxicity levels. Refinement of tissue standard ranges for cannabis has been a project being studied by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Agronomic Division and North Carolina State University. Those refined values for cannabis mother stock plants grown in a greenhouse just prior to the stage when cuttings would be harvested are also listed in Table 1.

Conclusion

Leaf tissue analysis provides insight into the nutrient status of a cannabis crop. Tissue analysis results will help growers determine if their fertilizer program is on target by providing current nutrient levels in the plant. In addition, tissue testing is one of the best methods for diagnosing nutrient disorders in cannabis.

Brian Whipker, Paul Cockson, James Turner Smith & Hunter Landis are from the Department of Horticultural Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C.