Cultivation Market Segments?

Botany and Cultivation
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I would have never thought the cannabis market would be what it looks like right now. A unit of hemp sells for more than type I cannabis. We are more dependent on China to do business (judging by all the recent posts on F4200) than ever before, all while the price of energy skyrockets domestically.

Although cannabis has been my livelihood for the last 25 years, we have been trying to diversify. Because of the increasing cost of doing business, there has been a trend to drastically reduce input costs. The shift has been to move from high intensity production indoor to greenhouse with minimal supplemental lighting. There is a lag time from March until June, but the extra input savings justify changing cultivation norms in a lot of cases.

This can also be seen in the move towards controlled environment agriculture (CEA) versus high energy sealed rooms. and farmers diversifying with markets like aquaponic chronic. Our fulvic, amino and organic acid supplement helps save on base nutrients, calcium, magnesium and iron supplementation. This hasn’t necessarily caused a retraction in the market, but finding other ways to do business.

What market segments should we be looking into? What other trends are you seeing in cultivation? How have you adapted in the current market?

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Long one but a good one. According to the video NYC has been making some novel moves in catering to the high end smoker.

Breeders picking their 3 best phenos letting the people vote on the winner was one innovation mentioned.

If in the flower game, catering to “the smokers” seems to be the least underserved market.

There is a massive disconnect between the smoker paying 20_40 an 8th and the wholesale pricing. Wholesale price suffers, genetics get bottle necked to easy to grow yielders, smoker suffers. Amazing smoking strains that you can’t get 2 plus a light get thrown away by the growers, due to the 800-1300 price points.

To top it off covid affected a ton of people’s smell/taste abilities. Combine that with a higher percentage of growers/breeders/wholesalers who don’t actually smoke /have connections to reliable smokers with good taste, and you have a lack luster market where the customer suffers at the end of the day. The prices are good, but variety and quality I’s getting culled every day, as EVERY step of the supply chain suffers.

The only way i see it working out where customers do not suffer, and the market thrives , is direct to consumer (as much as possible/as vertically integrated as possible this would include growers and whole sellers who work together with a goal of surviving/thriving/growing instead jumping ship at the next opportunity.

Loyalty built on trust and an understanding that truly working together and pushing the game forward in your little corner of the world is the only way your going to survive what’s coming

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Oh man! <3 Other market items - food grown at home and low maintenance application for food production outside of the US, that reclaims/saves as much water as possible is the market segment I’m looking at right now. We might be worried about where the weed is coming from…but there are almost a billion people going hungry every day right now. The people who support those people need something that is easy to install and can function with minimal inputs. I think a lot of what our industry has been figuring out can help with that.

Not only that - but these places (I’m looking at you California) who are running out of whatever happen to be where most of the non-seasonal and a lot of our seasonal food comes from here in the US/Canada. Those places need this tek too. People be crying about inflation right now… how much worse shall it be when there is no more water in the aquifer and all those farms in SoCal, Central Cal, and Arizona stop producing food?

I’m seeing a lot of trends to trying to utilize the sun in different ways - different tek for supplemental lighting. Different ways to get better plant uptake for water/nutrients.

But more than that I’m see NEW TEK coming out for production of these products using bioreactors. That’s been a trend for drug production for almost 20 years, and its nice to see it happening for cannabinoids now. I expect that after rescheduling (and perhaps even before…) we’ll be seeing New Drug Applications for cannabinoids that have been cultured and produced in a bioreactor - no cultivation or farming needed. And I expect that we’ll probably see their production as byproducts of other “abundant” biomass that has generally controlled pricing (think corn, soybeans, beets, etc.)

In 2017 - people were talking about $10000 an acre for HEMP production. Corn/Soybeans gets you around $1000 an acre if you are lucky, and that’s the revenue, not the actual profit which is closer to $50-60 an acre. Taking these other agricultural products and the 30% of waste that comes from BigAg in the US and making that into more productive things, that’s where I see us going. Getting completely away from our sacred plant market - because at some point things will be legal and the BigAg guys will step in and make everything a commodity.

I’m still trying to adapt. I came to this industry to make sure my wife had safe access to medicine for her MS. I’m still trying to decide if I want to stick around - its very different than other industries, I don’t imagine that it always will be. I’m focusing on making sure to stay focused on new innovations, working on my own innovations (mostly cheaper home grow options) and focusing most of my energy on getting legislative change to happen.

I wonder about market retraction. The revenue for growing weed is SO MUCH higher than normal crops - I still don’t understand why people are so pissed off about price drops. I mean… its more than any other agriculture commodity out there, isn’t it? Even other drug plants don’t get nearly as high a price.

But I don’t think people are interested in commodity farming when they get into cannabis, are they?

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We have a customer who paid his farm off for the year with fresh mail order ghost chilis. He’s hoping to expand his harvest season to Jan. / Feb.

Cannabis is a commodity. I mean . . . Nothing wrong with diversification!

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Every grower has two numbers when they start in their head, what they would like to get best case scenario, and how low they think it will get worse case scenario. .
I imagine with current market dynamics most people are receiving 50 percent of what they thought there worst case scenario would be. Many of us have never went through a recession , none of us have gone through a recession with the clusterfuck of Oklahoma @ the eye of the storm of backdoor boof.

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We have had a huge uptick with livestock, aquaponics/aquaponic chronic, and are now looking into vertical farming/CEA for fulvic acid recently.

Sounds like a really bad band name or the preferred ROA for drugs for kids on Reddit. I joke, I joke.

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I’m still tired from COVID, but I wanted to respond to @Patsykilledtony. While this was framed more towards my day gig, it also applies to my role in the cannabis industry. Thank you for your response that is very well thought out and genuine.

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A few people i know have taken there permitted farm and started growing food etc on it and selling at the local markets and kinda like the ghost chili thing a few doing specialty mushrooms and shipping those ( no not that kind) and are making more from it with less headaches, hassles and the costs to start are minimal at best.

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the exotic fruit producers in FL are pretty neat, I’ve been wanting to get a banana sampler/try some gros michel

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My buddy Miami Botan sells rare plants and aroid hybrids down in FL and is killing it!

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