Benefits/drawbacks of living soil vs. salt-based setup for hash production?

Would like to understand benefits and drawbacks of each. Setting up very small scale indoor grow and will be turning everything into hash/rosin.

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Salts have every advantage, and most organic “advantages” are a myth. Except being able to say organic… Even though half the organic weed I see isn’t. Lol cloning gel, ain’t organic.

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If you’re trying to produce the most trichromes, I would say lighting and strain selection are the two most important considerations.

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This is a very deeply rooted belief within the industry…

I have seen no evidence to support “organic” methods being superior to liquid nutrients for rosin purposes. But I’d love to hear from anyone that does…

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Living soil gives good terp profiles.

…But as mentioned above: lighting, strains, and nutrient availability to the plants.

Don’t lock them out, don’t stunt them through stress and light leaks, don’t succomb to bugs, PM, etc…

Lot at play here.

Hard as fuck to do living soil commercial. But best terpenes tests came from worms being able to be present.

Nobody wants to hear about organic because they are hard to replace in the pursuit of profits over all.

I’ve mentioned KNF/JADAM before, but y’all really like to rock the wool.

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i make my own organic soil. worm castings, compost
and recycled soil. all in house so no bugs. then i use
salt’s for fert’s. has worked well for me a long time.
lights, air and heavy feed. then right strain will get you
there. i use jacks classic for fert’s cheap and works well.
best of luck.

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I didn’t mean to downplay organic nutritional value. It’s all I eat and smoke. Grew up on a giant organic farm. Just haven’t seen evidence of better hash personally…but things like higher terp test results is very valid data that I understand. So you relaying that experience with analytics is excellent.

The farms I work with in our lab’s rosin production right now are mostly organic.

I would never suggest medicinally or nutritionally anything other than organic food and flower.

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My complaint about the organic standard is that consumers use it as an excuse to be lazy about doing their research. I see it at the farmer’s market. As soon as they see the organic label, they are grateful to have to stop thinking. That label can be a guideline, but it’s not the full answer.

A lot of organic California kale has heavy metal contamination. And for international produce, under nafta no nation receiving goods can question the labelling. If that organic label doubles the price and no one can object, then certainly a lot of importers are cheating and mislabelling. Domestically, large corporations lobby to have the standard become a little more watered down each year. The certification people really hate hydroponics, too. When I looked into getting hydro lettuce certified, the rules are written to make it impossible. My pumps have to be made of food safe plastic, despite such a product not existing.

It’s great to care about where your food comes from, but it is rarely as simple as one word.

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So true…so much contamination these days comes from precipitation above and water table below infiltrated by commercial pesticide and industrial chemical runoff too…even if you grow organically the virome is heavily poisoned

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I’ve always found using less bottled nutes made the best for concentrates as far as color and smelll. What I did notice is when I had my gh back in the day and I was running light dep like it was an Indoor grow (using heavy nutes) the flower looked damn near like indoor. But all my extractions came out much darker and I had lower yields and couldn’t wash the strains. When I switched to beds on rolling benches that I amended after each run and just used ph’d water depending on runoff. Weekly would do a few teas. This method produced by far the best material for extraction. Not saying inhabent run material from salt growers that can we out fire. Just more times then not, the best material came from some grow using minimal inputs and just caring for the plants.

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Salts take longer than sugars to breakdown.

And plants need a equal amount of everything, not just base nutrients.
Like a human body. You can’t just put a brain and body and everything all together and expect the same kind of human. Or feed it what you think will make it grow and expect the same outputs.

We believe that you have to have organics, microbes, and salts in order to consistently produce the best hash. Organic beds are great but they sometimes do lack yield vs crop steering techniques. Watering with a lot of salts and growing for flower definitely dilutes hash yields but its usually made up for in flower, however there’s usually more material breaking up in the wash bc you’re washing more material.

It’s all about care for the plant and understanding both the plants root and growing environments. We find that by balancing both you can consistently hit the yield targets and the flavor profiles desired in each cultivar.

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Ya on average I would like to say my best color, terp %s and yields have been from greenhouse organic flower.

But that’s only since I’ve been working with a smaller client list in New Mexico where I can accurately track growing techniques.

In Cali it was pretty tricky to keep track of my sources methodoloy and/or trust their claims anyways. Most material came from large distros and the small batches direct from farmers never amounted to enough data to spot a trend.

I’ve been focused on the structure and integrity of the trichomes when it comes to identifying good washing material. If the material has been mishandled or does not genetically produce the capitae stalked trichomes, it doesn’t matter how it was grown…it wont yield.

I’ve been seeing better yields than anywhere else I’ve ever worked right now. And the owners of the farm I’m running the lab for are striclty live soil no-salt farmers that only take in other no-salt live soil farmers material in the lab. But without side by side comparisons of salt vs no-salt with the same controls for environment, schedule, genetics etc. all I can record is data from what’s coming from the no-salt crops.

Such a broad study covering this topic would be insane.

Or maybe I am just not educated enough to fathom the feasibility :man_shrugging:

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prob going to get flamed for this but.
N P K is N P K no mater how it is derived.
organic or salts. don’t forget also trace elements
for either. never got gnat’s or other bugs from salts.
but to each there own. best of luck what ever way you choose.

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I do agree with you and that is why we use salts our our feed and coco as our medium. We do encourage the use of microbes, agt-50, and other organic amendments at root drenches as it does make the media more active and living for a point before the salts kill off all the microbes.

@ThePhilosopherStoned what kind of yields are you seeing to rosin % wise? We usually see 4.5-5% to rosin 73-159u all washes, on our best performing cultivars. 3-3.5 on the lower ones.

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If no one can understand this, I don’t know what planet their on.

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Wait…which part?

We only offer split processing agreements. We require 1-2 kilo pilot runs for all material before accepting entire batches for splits. For live material we refuse to run anything yielding under 2.4% to rosin during pilot runs. Maximum I’ve achieved is 7.2%. Average is approximately 3.4%.

For cured material we’ve seen as high as 18%

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We have very similar customer intake processes it seems. We always have the rule they pay for the trial run too. I don’t like trialing a bunch of samples for our farmers that don’t dump.

I have seen a few people claiming some cuts doing 8-10% to rosin and I just don’t believe it but seemingly getting there on some cultivars.

Curious to know the the and term % on that 7% to rosin you achieved. Im always super interested on if those higher yields to rosin are a result of THC and resin content alone or other matter the plant produces. Essentially are we growing more rosin or better rosin question if you catch my drift.

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