Yup, HydroBuddy is free and open source. Daniel shares binaries for a few different platforms, and I think he also has an Andoird build. If you’re on Windows, all you do is download the zip file, decompress it, and click on the .exe file
@anon56994712 Thanks a lot for your donation
I also accept donations through bitcoin if you want to do those anonymously. you can deposit to the following address: 3LcPPdqrh489SaUDkEwsodqrcVFHdiriDs
Nice! Thank you for posting this! And also, here’s the paper you coauthored
Great interview! @Sidco_cat, I bet @danielfp would be a great interviewee for your podcast.
I thought you guys might find this interesting
Nice blog post as usual @danielfp! Thanks for sharing it here.
However, I wonder if an extra zero or two was added to this sentence by mistake. I tried to find the calculation for these figures, but I didn’t see it listed. Please ignore if I’m off base:
Even a medium scale growing facility working with boutique fertilizers can often spend 2000-4000 USD per day, even using some of the more cost effective solutions available in the boutique market.
Since I have no cannabis centric content, I was thinking about starting a paid-access monthly newsletter discussing cannabis cultivation from an evidence based perspective. This would include discussions and reviews of scientific literature and an evidence based approach to a wide variety of topics surrounding cultivation.
I would do an in-depth discussion of one topic per month, likely something in the 5-10 page range. The idea being to always end with practical recommendations relevant to growers based on the evidence available.
To support the effort I would offer it through a monthly subscription model. Starting at 5 USD/month for the first 10 people, then 10 USD/month for the first hundred and then likely 25-50 USD/month from then-on.
I am trying to gauge interest before fully committing to it, so if this is something you would be likely to subscribe to, please like this post.
I would definitely be in for this.
I’ll subscribe right now lol!
I’m interested
Sounds great Daniel.
Thanks for all the support guys!
Makes me wonder if I should take this to an ever wider approach and start a paid community website for evidence based cannabis cultivation. That way there can be more of a community that cares around cultivating the plant based on data.
Do it! I would definitely be interested in something like that.
I’m interested in your newsletter idea and would like to read what you share. You’re an excellent resource for evidence-based information on some aspects of cultivation. I do, however, wish you had hands-on experience with cannabis cultivation. I have some thoughts and suggestions for your newsletter (which you may have already considered).
Also, out of curiosity, why are you not willing to write about cannabis on your blog, youtube, or IG? In academia, cannabis research is in vogue. You always dance around the topic when I assume many of your clients work with cannabis. You’re in Spain, correct? Hasn’t Spain decriminalized personal cultivation and use? And at least two universities in Spain (UPC Barcelona and UMH Elche) offer cannabis course tracks. For example, UPC Barcelona offers the postgrad course Cannabis Production and Transformation Technologies. So I assume it’s not illegal to write about cannabis cultivation in Spain (I could be wrong).
My thoughts and suggestions for a newsletter:
- Offer a monthly subscription so people can cancel without losing a year’s worth of fees. Alternatively, make it freely accessible and accept sponsors for payment.
- Include a guest column (as a value-added feature) where experts can provide the same evidence-based content in their areas of expertise. For example, Dr. Bugbee and his postdoc students like Brendan Fatzinger, Dr. Justice, Dr. Sabeh, myself, emdub27, etc.
- Include a 'letters to the editor section so people can comment on previous newsletters after you decide if they have merit. E.g., these could include beneficial critiques of the content, valuable commentary, and additional papers and resources.
- Include a monthly poll on your website asking your subscribers to vote on what ‘topics of the month’ are most interesting or useful to them.
- Accept various forms of payment (I don’t know anyone who uses PayPal any longer)
- I know you’re aware that discussing evidence without experience can lead to inaccurate or plainly incorrect information dissemination.
- It’s one thing to read a few papers and discuss how they may be applied, but it’s quite another thing to apply those papers and discussions to real-world cultivation.
- And it’s worth considering whether a subscriber who may follow advice based on research paper findings (without the advisor having experience applying said advice) could have negative consequences for the advisor.
I don’t think this is a great idea. The whole reason sites like Future4200 and dozens of other forums exist are to ‘share the wealth (of information)’ and level up together. IME, an open forum with a diverse membership, allows everyone, including experts, to learn and gain insights they may miss otherwise. A paywall forum is antithetical to the gaols of most growers.
You would need strict moderation, customer support, etc., which would become a full-time job for a few people if the site became popular. And it could be challenging to provide enough information to keep the site active; the death of any forum is a lack of activity.
IMO such a site wouldn’t reach critical mass to make it a profitable venture considering the many free discussion forums available today. Most growers don’t want that level of understanding; they prefer to believe what IG ‘experts’ say and typically pick the lowest-hanging fruit. A few forums have members who could provide similar content but don’t because of lax moderation and trolls. Future4200 is an excellent example of lax moderation preventing great content from experts.
Subscription-based forums have been tried before, and I don’t know of any that are still in existence. An example is Grower’s Network Forum, which started as a subsection-only forum IIRC. But too few people signed up, so they opened the forum and made a private, premium (subscription) “vetted forum” within their site.
That’s a steep price for many people, especially people outside of North America, some parts of the EU, and GB. Anything more than $25/mo would probably stop many people from subscribing. And at $25-50, the content would need to be top-notch, or I think you would have a high subscriber loss rate.
I just think @danielfp’s idea for a “pay for information” type site, would be good for people like me. I always feel like an ass trying to glean info from people who have paid bucu bucks for that info. It sure would save some time having to scour old posts from others like yourself and emdub just to find those tidbits of gold. Also this is the only real site IMO, that contains the levels of knowledge needed to truly advance in the realm of Cannabis cultivation. I know that certain information is privy though, and not freely given. JM2C.
Thanks for your suggestions!
About my normal content and cannabis, I keep them separate because algorithms treat anything cannabis related very differently. The way google, youtube and IG index content means that any significant and explicit discussion of cannabis on any such platform would reduce my exposure and change the way my content is categorized substantially. Since I do have many clients who are in the general horticultural industry, which I also greatly enjoy working in, I prefer to keep all my content free from any direct mentions or content exclusively written for cannabis.
About experience, I definitely do not intend to write information based solely on evidence gathered from only reading papers without having ever applied it. I have significant personal experience with the cannabis plant, as well as experience gathered from work with dozens of growers across many years, across many facilities at basically all scales. I believe content using evidence from these experiences - when possible - when mixed with evidence from scientific papers, can create compelling content.
My business and online content have never addressed cannabis explicitly, so it is perfectly understandable for you to think that my degree of experience is lower than it really is.
About the website, I didn’t mean to create a paid forum. But just a website with content that would be additional to just an emailed newsletter. There might be some discussions in the form of comments on pages/posts, but I don’t envision to create a forum like this one.
About the price, that is basically the price tag at which it would be viable for me to take the time to do this. Even if the number of people is more reduced (in the end my objective would not be to have a site with thousands of people - with the support needs that carries - just a couple hundred would be more than enough). I like to believe there are two hundred people who would find that price tag reasonable for high quality information, I of course might be wrong.
I am still mulling over whether this would be practical for me to do (how much time it would take, etc).
Your opinion is appreciated.
Ah. That makes sense, and I was unaware of how biased those algorithms are. Thanks for the info!
That’s excellent news. I had assumed (incorrectly) that you didn’t have personal experience growing cannabis. Yet another reason I can add to the long list of reasons I hold you in such high regard.
Where do I sign up?
You can count on me to be a subscriber to your newsletter. $50 per month is a deal for the level of content I’m sure you’ll provide.
I was referring to a large subscriber base of thousands (the general grower population). I think you could reach 200 subscribers in a short time. Heck, I bet you could achieve that with Future4200 members signing up.
Would Patreon be useful? I have no idea how much they take off the top or if it would affect the algorithms you mentioned. I was subscribed to a Patreon account a while ago and was impressed with the service (tiered memberships, discord channel, audio/video content, etc.).