Amino Acids as a growing solution for Veg

Botany and Cultivation
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Does anyone have experience feeding with amino acid solutions for cannabis in veg stage? I’m curious because I can see that amino acids would be a great source of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen (for complex molecules). They can also chelate metal ions that are critical for plants and they plant might be able to save energy because it doesn’t have to synthesize them. One additional bonus is that they are buffering agents that can maintain pH albeit either pH9 or pH2 most effectively. I’m considering mixing in a yeast hydrolysate from lallemand as an amino acid source but I’m curious to see if other people have done something similar?

Are there considerations for those that are growing in soil vs. hydronic systems? …or is this just a terrible idea!

Thanks for any input on this.

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I swear by raw NPK aminos and AGT-50

I switched to a cocoa substrate, drain to waste hydro setup a little over a year ago, coming from living/super soil.

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What aminos are you finding effective?

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My feed schedule is my next thing to really dig into, and do some discovery. Right now I use RAW and AGT-50. Raw is L-Glycine and L-Glutamic Acid. I just switched off super/living soil and switched to salts. I am dialing in my automation and lighting at the moment.

AGT-50 is a magic soup, and I believe it has humic and amino acids. @AgTonik could probably break down the make up better than myself.

Adding humic and amino acids is huge imo. It’s basically a tea made from forest floor products. Amino(animals and animal waste) Humic(plant material)

UV, Far Red, and Acids (all things historically missing from indoor)= LOUD TREE

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Healthy veg velocity sets you up for a great flower cycle. There is a whole world of organic acids out there that are beneficial to plants.

You’ve got amino acids, which help regulate nitrogen. Then there are elements like iron (sulfate, fulvate, humate, Fe III and IV) that can be attached to amino acids.

There are beneficial organic acids like citric, lactic, gallic, caffeic, fumaric, shikimic, cinnamic. ferulic, benzoic, protocatechuic, phenylacetic, acetic, and succinic acid for plants, more prevalent with organic growing medium. A lot of these are microbial byproducts from metabolites are are present in humates and fulvic acid sources from their millions of years of composting and aerobic oxidation.

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just saw this thread. how is your switch going? i cant find agt50 in canada what would be an alternative?

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You can add various amino acids to your nutrient solution. Most of those that you would be interested in are easily purchased on sites like Amazon for dirt cheap. You’ll most likely encounter them as supplements on a retail site like that, make sure that you’re purchasing pure powders and not gel caps meant for immediate human consumption.

When paired with the right microbes in your soil these amino acids will be broken down and their nitrogen content will become bioavailable to the plant pretty quick. Start with very small amounts of amino acids and work your way up to larger doses for your ladies.

Tryptophan works well if you’re just looking to add nitrogen, but you can also use small amounts of amino acid salts like magnesium glutamate or potassium glutamate to add some micro nutrients.

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There is a study on the use of aminoacid supplements in cannabis plants (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2022.868350/full).

The study shows that the effects of aminoacid supplementation are hard to predict. They seem to reduce Ca and Fe uptake and enhance N and S in tissue but the effect on secondary metabolites is all over the place. They also seem to affect the timing of max THCA accumulation in the plants, so the optimal times for harvesting might differ if you add aminoacids.

It is clear that aminoacid supplementation changes things, but not strictly positively so there are pros and cons to their use that need to be considered. In my opinion the correct way to treat this is like any other biostimulant, evaluate pros and cons and use them if the pros outweigh the potential negatives they will cause.

When using them in soils or microbially active media, consider that aminoacid metabolism by microbials strongly increases the pH and oxygen demand of media, so care must be taken to ensure that ample oxygen is available and that pH is properly being monitored to ensure it doesn’t go too high.

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what is the mechanism that helped in nutrient uptake for all elements in this study? Was it purely the potassium silicate with the aminos?
We use agtonik which is fulvic and aminos so it got me thinking about amino and silicate uptake.

Potassium Silicate and Amino Acids Improve Growth, Flowering and
Productivity of Summer Squash under High Temperature Condition

1 (1).pdf (1.1 MB)

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Thanks for sharing. Many things to unpack here:

  1. This study is on squash in soil for heat stress. This is very distant from any application for cannabis, except perhaps outdoor cannabis, in similar soils, during the summer under heat stress. These factors matter a LOT, the conclusions might well be opposite if you changed these factors.

  2. The amino acid treatment here is foliar, vs solution applications of amino acids. This also matters a lot. Foliar treatments of the amino acids are far more direct and have substantially different effects.

  3. Silicate treatment here was only done on the seeds before the plants were grown. This therefore does not relate at all to treatments of plants with silicate solutions once they are bigger.

  4. The reason why there is improvement in uptake of some elements with foliar amino acid applications has little to do with the silicate (which is only used to treat seeds), it has to do with the fact that the plants were squash under heat stress in soil.

  5. Plant response to amino acids is very species specific, because of differences in amino acid transporters in root systems and differences in the eliciting responses of some specific amino acids. To see the effect of amino acids in a species you absolutely need studies in that specific species. While studies and results on some species are indicative of things that might be interesting to study in others, often times studies in different species yield very different results.

  6. Amino acids are a very diverse group of compounds, many with fundamentally different effects. The specific composition of the amino acids applied plays a big role in their effect.

So long story short, I think there is very little we can transport from a study of squash under heat stress conditions in soil where silicate was applied to seeds and an amino acid foliar was done, to cannabis grown indoors under no heat stress with foliar applications of a fulvic acid containing some amino acids of a probably completely different distribution.

With all that said, I wouldn’t expect silicon to be heavily involved in the effect of amino acids, either through root or foliar applications. Si applied through roots has some important effect on nutrient uptake (reduces Mn/Cu uptake and seems to improve Mg transport) but I would expect these to be largely independent of anything amino acids do. However this is just conjecture we would need a specific Si+amino acid study in cannabis to know, even then, the conclusions would apply to the specific composition of amino acids used. Different amino acids mixes can have largely different results.

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Thank you for the insight. So essentially looking at studies of other dicots wont truly give the full picture of how amino acids work with cannabis.
I am curious about your experience with aminos. Could you please share some of the challenges or discoveries you have encountered in your research? Or possibly best practices when working with aminos.

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Aminos acids are just precursors for metabolic activity. Auxins are created from amino acids, or the breakdown of carbohydrates. Amino acids will alter the intracellular plant structures, promote energy/metabolic process, and alter the absorption and transportation of macro nutrients.

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The problem with statements like these is that they are not really useful in practice. Amino acids are a huge group of compounds. The question is not whether they can have some effect but what specific amino acid has what specific effect in what specific plant at what specific dose. That is what is key in the discussion that is absent.

This very specific information is absent for good reason, the studies are difficult to do and the effects are often mixed or even negative. Plants themselves can produce all amino acids they need, so as they change what they produce they can also react differently to exogenous amino acids.

Just “apply amino acids” is the advice that is generally given, but that is like saying to a person “eat food”, depending on what you eat, how much you eat and who eats it, the effects will be very different, even diametrically opposite in some cases.

I believe this is why the use of amino acids in agriculture hasn’t really caught up, there is really no understanding of how to use them in a way that gives a positive, reproducible and predictable effect that justifies their cost – at least to the best of my knowledge. This with the exception of using them as a source of nitrogen for microbials to convert to inorganic N to then feed plants in organic agriculture, where this is done frequently.

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Thanks for your reply. Your statement is correct, looking at other dicots won’t really tell you what to expect with amino acid applications in cannabis. However dicots that are taxonomically closer (hops would be best, strawberries second) might at least help guide which studies might be interesting. In the end we do need specific studies in cannabis to have a better idea. Like the study I quoted before.

My experiences with amino acids have been diverse. In organic hydroponics (also called bioponics) I have mainly used them as a nitrogen source for bacteria to generate inorganic nitrogen for the plants. In cannabis I have tried very specific pure amino acid applications to achieve specific effects in plants, using for example cysteine or methionine to try to get higher S in tissue or glutamate as an elicitor.

I made a video a while ago about exogenous carbon in hydroponics (below) that does talk a little bit about amino acids and some of the studies in dicots showing their potential for either direct nitrogen supplementation or to create eliciting effects.

In terms of best practices, if you want to have reproducible results the best practice would be to use pure amino acids first and use them one by one to see which effects they create on the plant (which is very time consuming). This is also dose dependent and delivery dependent, so both root and foliar applications need to be tested at 0.1mM, 1mM and 10mM concentrations to see what effect you get in each case.

The above is obviously geared to understanding what’s going on. Many people blindly apply amino acid supplements to plants with no ill results. Amino acids are quite safe - besides their potential for creating biofilm in lines - so while applying them can have unpredictable effects, amino acid mixes at reasonable concentrations are unlikely to harm plants.

However the effects of such mixes will be unpredictable - because mixes can have a wide array of amino acids makeups depending on their source - and might change if the composition of the amino acid mix changes with time.

This is fine for people with their own grows, for me as a consultant, advising clients to apply something generally requires me to know that the effect will be a net positive after cost, so I only recommend things for which I can be confident the result will be positive, reproducible and evident. Amino acid mixes sadly haven’t reached this state yet, at least from the evidence I have access to.

I also have nothing against amino acids or amino acids mixes, I would be really happy to use them if I just knew what exactly to expect, with what amino acids, at what doses.

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