Strategies for dealing with supply chain uncertainties come in all shapes and sizes.

In my first article, How Cultivators Can Relieve Supply Chain Pain, Part One, I shared advice for negotiating discounted pricing and minimizing the risk of shipping delays by purchasing most of your cultivation inputs early.

In this second article, I examine a less obvious way of decreasing your reliance on the global supply chain by simply using less.

Let’s look at the two most significant inputs for any commercial cannabis cultivation: fertilizer and growing media.

Electricity and labor are the two largest operational expenses, but in terms of non-renewable cultivation inputs, fertilizer and growing media top the list.

Fertilizer

Any cultivation company that’s serious about minimizing supply chain headaches and decreasing its cost of production should be making its own fertilizer in-house.

Instead, pre-mixed, ready-to-use liquid fertilizers dominate the cannabis industry.

These concentrated products contain all of the essential plant nutrients needed to grow a healthy crop. The grower simply dilutes these formulas with water and then sends it out to their plants. These fertilizers are sold in liter containers, gallon jugs, and pallet-wide, 275-gallon plastic totes.

Although convenient, on a commercial scale, they can be costly.

Fertilizer companies are required to list the ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK ratio) on their product labels, but these numbers reveal something much more sinister as well—the percentage of the contents that aren’t fertilizer.

For example, a product with an NPK ratio of 5-3-2 tells the grower that for every five parts of nitrogen, that fertilizer will also provide three parts of phosphorus and two parts of potassium.

But the label also indicates what percentage, by weight, is actually fertilizer. 5+3+2 = 10, meaning that ten percent of that bottle is fertilizer, and 90% is water.

You’re buying water!

And growers pay handsomely for it, too, not only for the markup on the plant minerals but also for the transportation. We all know that water, in large volumes, is heavy, and considering today’s fuel prices, it’s expensive to ship. On the backend, the grower pays for the containers’ disposal as well.

By making their own fertilizer in-house, growers can realize substantial savings on inputs, transportation, and disposal fees. All the fertilizer a grower would need for the entire year could fit on just a few pallets.

Instead of buying large volumes of water, paying to transport it, and paying to dispose of the plastic, in-house fertilizer programs eliminate nearly all of these expenses.

Want to become less reliant on the supply chain? Quit buying water to feed your plants. Instead, just purchase the minerals you need and mix your own.

Growing media

Substrates, or grow media, are what plant roots hold on to. Fibers in the grow media absorb and release nutrients to the plant, and air pockets within the substrate ensure adequate oxygen for healthy root growth.

If you are growing 100% hydroponically, you don’t need to finish a crop in anything larger than a 6″ rockwool cube or 1-gallon pot. Some growers start small and transplant their way up to 2, 3, or even 5-gallon containers to flower their crop.

There is a myth among some cannabis growers that to grow really big plants, you need a really big container and, inevitably, a lot of growing media.

In organic soil, this makes sense. The larger the container, the more organic matter is available to break down and provide nutrition to the plant.

But if you’re growing hydroponically, this simply isn’t true.

Hydroponic systems bring water and nutrients directly to the plant in a form that’s immediately available for uptake. The roots don’t need to grow in search of food or water, so energy goes towards development on the top side of the plant, which is where the money’s at.

Transplanting into larger pots wastes time, labor, and substrate, and adds to your disposal costs.

Don’t think it’s possible? Walk through any hydroponic tomato greenhouse. You’ll see twenty-foot-tall tomato plants growing in rockwool cubes and slabs that are a fraction of the size of the plant. It’s not only possible, but it makes good business sense, too. By growing in smaller containers, cultivators use less substrate. This translates into lower production costs and a minimized reliance on the supply chain.

Changing from a ready-made fertilizer to an in-house recipe can be unsettling, and growing big plants in small pots can seem counterintuitive. The key to adopting these changes is to try them on a small scale first. It will allow you to make mistakes safely and dial in the program before implementing it on a large scale.

The battle against supply chain disruptions won’t be won or lost by changing fertilizer or planting media. However, both tactics can be powerful tools in decreasing your cost of production and your company’s reliance on an unpredictable horticultural supply chain.

In Case You Missed It

How Cultivators Can Relieve Supply Chain Pain, Part One