This article originally appeared in the January 2018 print edition of Cannabis Business Times. To subscribe, click here.
True story: Along with a standard thank-you note, I once mailed a bottle of Windex to a Cornell University administrator who had interviewed me for a management position. The bottle was bedecked in a gold bow. I asked her to give it to an hourly employee whose name I remembered because his greenhouse section was the cleanest of the 15 I walked through. That fellow emailed me grateful thanks for noticing his work. The administrator offered me the job.
My commitment to sanitation goes far beyond being meticulous. The neat freak trait is a good one, as is even paranoia, perhaps, because so much of what we battle with grow room sanitation lurks invisible to the naked eye.
Like much of my management experience, this cleaning habit was learned the hard way. At the growth facility I managed in West Lafayette, Ind., we spent one disastrous summer discarding valuable research plants—some irreplaceable thanks to their genetic modifications—due to an incurable viral disease. The disease, Impatiens Necrotic Spot Virus, can only be spread by feeding the common greenhouse pest, western flower thrips. Each faculty member had their own grow room, and they continuously cropped for years, meaning these particular greenhouse rooms were never emptied and cleaned. New seedlings were placed next to maturing plants. This resulted in persistent thrips, excessive chemical spraying, inevitable pesticide resistance and more thrips. The pest cycle was never broken. Once the virus entered, it ran rampant through the susceptible crops.
We learned that summer that it was best to have communal rooms where researchers shared space, but that space was divided into growth phases so each room could be sanitized following seed harvest—about every four months. This hard lesson, coupled with other painful ones involving tobacco mosaic virus and powdery mildew diseases, made us sanitation experts. We experimented with methods, tools, environments and chemistry. We were given advice from that special brotherhood and sisterhood who manage plant-growth facilities at universities across North America. What we learned can be helpful in developing or streamlining your sanitation protocols.
Start with a Scorched Earth Policy
For being a horticulturist, you’d be surprised how beautiful I find an empty grow room to be. Our pest scouting indicated that a few days of being empty resulted in two months of pest control in a greenhouse, longer for a grow room that was better-sealed from the outdoors.
First rule: Empty means empty. The equipment can stay, but all vestiges of life need to be removed. Every plant, every leaf, every scrap of root substrate. And one step further, what sustains life: water. You need to dry out the place so that any insect and disease life that rely on water will perish. Even pressure wash that nasty crud in the drain.
To accomplish this, invest in good shop-vacs and pressure washers. We learned that it paid to have two shop-vacs, clearly labeled for their use-one “dry” and one “wet.” In most models, the dry vacuuming requires a dust filter over the intake inside the machine. If this filter is left in for wet operation, it becomes caked with mud, which lowers airflow. You’ll have a mess when the clock is ticking to get the room back in production.
To read the full article in Cannabis Business Times' January issue, click here.
Top photo by Jake Gravbot
