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The secret of Tahoe Hydroponics Company\u2019s considerable success can be found on the floor of the licensed Nevada cultivator\u2019s grow facility in Carson City. The secret: there\u2019s no soil in sight. The success: a trophy room full of cups, including a clean sweep of all three flower categories at the 2016 Jack Herer Cup and a first-place win at the 2018 edition in November with Mac Jack, \u201ca strain I created, and it was the first time we ever grew it,\u201d says company CEO Ray Schiavone.<\/p>\n
Tahoe Hydroponics<\/a>\u00a0has 11 grow rooms that run continuously, with one room harvested every six days. And, at top-shelf wholesale asking prices of $3,000 a pound, Schiavone says, \u201cWe\u2019re sold out. We sell out to the last gram.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a lot of cannabis and a lot of money, which is probably the main reason why, as of press time, Toronto-based company Golden Leaf Holdings is in the process of acquiring Tahoe Hydroponics for a reported price of almost $40 million.<\/p>\n Purple Punch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But in those grow rooms, what you won\u2019t find so much as a speck of anywhere is dirt.<\/p>\n Not on the floor, where \u201cguys are mopping\u2026 literally all day long,\u201d Schiavone says, and not near a single one of the plants, all of which are grown 100 percent hydroponically, just as the company\u2019s name indicates.<\/p>\n For the uninitiated, hydroponic growing is a term that refers to any\u00a0method of cultivating plants<\/a>\u00a0that does not involve soil.<\/p>\n This is not to say that hydroponic plants are grown with water only, as they may be suspended in a medium like rockwool or clay pellets. But the lack of soil is a fundamental difference in the plant\u2019s life that, according to Schiavone, makes all the difference in the quality of the final product.<\/p>\n Jelly Sickle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSoil is cool, I grew up smoking weed in soil and I love it,\u201d he says. \u201cBut anybody can grow weed in soil. Anyone. You can, I can, anyone off the street can get a pot, put some weed in it and grow in soil. But they can\u2019t do that with hydroponic cannabis.\u201d<\/p>\n Abandoning soil means saying goodbye to most pests, which in turn means saying goodbye to pesticides \u2014 a fine tradeoff for modern-day growers in the marijuana\u00a0legalization era<\/a>, where strict state regulations mean the wrong pesticide or the wrong application can make an entire room too toxic to sell.<\/p>\n It also means enjoying near-total control over the plant\u2019s life cycle, including the ability to maximize its intake of just the right nutrients necessary for an enormous yield of top-shelf cannabis, with remarkable consistency from cycle to cycle.<\/p>\n The consistency also means selecting strains based on what will work under these conditions. The nutrient mix in each of Tahoe Hydroponics\u2019s rooms is the same, but some plants vary in yields. Schiavone says the biggest monsters produce 400 grams of cannabis per plant, and if a particular strain \u201cdoesn\u2019t yield or if we don\u2019t like the look, we just throw it away.\u201d<\/p>\n Sundae Driver.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This hints at the big challenge with hydroponic growing: Cultivators have no room for any kind of learning curve or cushion when things go wrong. With\u00a0soil,<\/a>\u00a0you may have a few days to notice a problem with your nutrient mix. You may survive if you leave for a weekend and a fan breaks on a Friday night. But with hydroponics, the slightest misstep can wreck the entire investment in hours.<\/p>\n \u201cIf anything\u2019s off, you\u2019ll fry your plant and lose your entire crop in minutes or hours,\u201d Schiavone says. \u201cIt\u2019s a very sophisticated process that produces high-quality results \u2014\u00a0 when you know what you\u2019re doing. That\u2019s probably why most people don\u2019t do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Case in point: Not long after setting up shop in Carson City, Schiavone and his partner, company co-founder Mark Bruno, noticed that all of their plants were dying. Starving, to be exact, because they were completely drained of nutrients. The culprit, it turned out, was the water, as the city\u2019s ionized water supply wouldn\u2019t carry any nutrients to the plants. The company pivoted, creating its own reverse-osmosis filtration system, but it took a full two years for Tahoe Hydroponics to start producing cannabis at full speed, Bruno\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the Nevada Appeal. In the meantime, the self-funded company lost $500,000.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we still have problems with our water,\u201d Schiavone says. \u201cThat water is so bad it will burn out the filters in our reverse osmosis machine almost within a month. And if it breaks, that water gets into the flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re growing in the hydroponic medium, there\u2019s really no buffer. The plant is up-taking 100 percent of what you\u2019re feeding it, good or bad,\u201d he adds. \u201cWith soil, if you just add water, there\u2019s still nutrients in the soil. The plant is always getting fed, versus when you\u2019re running hydroponic, it\u2019s only getting what you give it. If you don\u2019t know exactly what the plant needs, then you\u2019re just going to get an average result.\u201d<\/p>\n Fleetwood MAC (Watermelon Tree x MAC)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Like the Michelin-starred chef who learned his trade only through sweating in someone else\u2019s kitchen, the Tahoe Hydroponics team earned the knowledge to figure out exactly what a plant needs only through years of experience. You could say that Schiavone and Bruno both come from a long line of hydroponic growers. Both of their fathers grew cannabis without using soil since the 1970s which, in the cannabis industry, qualifies as legacy heritage.<\/p>\n Both have also grown cannabis in various mediums during their careers, under the sun in greenhouses, outdoors and in dirt indoors. But both believe that nearly all top-shelf cannabis must be grown hydroponically in order to maximize both yield and quality, and to do so on a consistent, commercial-grade basis.<\/p>\n Drunk Driver.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While\u00a0Nevada<\/a>\u00a0is not seeing the rise of commercial cannabis greenhouses at the scale that neighboring California is, the Tahoe Hydroponics team thinks their hydroponic model would still thrive in a market flooded with greenhouse cannabis because of their ability to consistently deliver premium cannabis.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that\u2019s the difference: How do you produce high-quality cannabis on a commercial level?\u201d Schiavone says. \u201cRealistically, I think it should be the standard. High-quality indoor cannabis really should be hydroponic, in my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, what\u2019s your preferred cannabis cultivation method?<\/p>\n Originally published in Issue 35 of Cannabis Now.\u00a0LEARN MORE<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n The post Welcome to Water World: Inside Tahoe Hydroponics\u2019 Soil-Free Grow<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The secret of Tahoe Hydroponics Company\u2019s considerable success can be found on the floor of the licensed Nevada cultivator\u2019s grow facility in Carson City. The secret: there\u2019s no soil in sight. The success: a trophy room full of cups, including a clean sweep of all three flower categories at theContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":33109,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,4081,1224,8042,85,7260,8043,26,107,8044,8045],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33110,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33108\/revisions\/33110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Purp-Punch.jpg\")
<\/p>\nSplish Splash<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Jelly-Sickle.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Sundae-Driver.jpg\")
<\/p>\nDrip or Drown<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Fleetwood-MAC.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe Future is Fluid<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Drunk-Driver.jpg\")
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\nRead More: Welcome to Water World: Inside Tahoe Hydroponics\u2019 Soil-Free Grow<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"