Whats the best sterilization tech

Botany and Cultivation Cannabis
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I have seen this solution. Lyo works pretty good for all kinds of stuff. I have heard different views of the quality of the flower after this has been performed.

I’ve monitored… CO2 (kills the aerobics), UV (sunlight), UV-B (indoor exposure), Ozone in a box, ozone in a room, hydrogen peroxide in a box, hydrogen peroxide in a room. Fogging/misting in a grow area. ProKure before, after, and during.

I’ve seen x-ray, electron beam, and microwave irradiation as well.

In every case - there has been a noticeable difference in quality.

So now whenever I see issues like this - I push things to distillate production that is going to go through several layers of filtration and separation before it ever sees a human. ( you know like most pharmaceuticals out there…)

Because until I can feel comfortable with research on these that is peer reviewed (not just white papers from manufacturing companies) and we establish solid standards for usage, labeling, and what not… it just seems like one more gimmick that the cannabis industry is trying to do to save a buck.

If I had fucking MOLDY soybeans - those don’t become an inhalable product. They might become fully processed C or D grade oil, which might then be used for non-human food or industrial purposes.

Why do we have a shittier standard for cannabis than for soybeans?

10,000 CFU is pretty high. Sounds like no control at all over growing conditions. And even then - no control over drying / curing conditions. A large percentage of microorganisms are going to “naturally” perish during drying (they need water to live you know?) which I have seen work many times.

So the really question becomes - if growers all over the country, even in seriously moist places like MS (Michigan, Virgina, Maryland, Florida?) can figure this out without having to resort to killing off the organisms BEFORE people smoke their dead bodies…why cannot MS figure this out?

Its not like they need to reinvent the wheel here. There are successful cultivations all over the country (and the world). There’s books on this. There are engineering teams that basically just do cultivation facilities at this point.

But I digress - really I get remediation, I do. I just don’t think it should be used to create a product that is going to be inhaled by a consumer. We don’t allow it anywhere else when things are inhaled, so why a lower standard for cannabis?

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This makes zero sense. 10,000cfu or below is so far ABOVE clean room standards. Like clean room standards are below 100cfu, you know?

Just because a place has plastic walls and epoxy coated floors doesn’t mean they are controlling and monitoring the environment. It doesn’t mean they are cleaning well. It doesn’t mean their dry/cure rooms are clean and well controlled. And it definitely doesn’t mean that their employees are handling things correctly and keeping themselves clean either.

I see so MANY failures for yeast that’s from that one dude that won’t wash his fucking hands AND wears the same pair of gloves all day, after touching himself and his phone and everything and the weed… YUCK.

Micro tests are tests on your quality system. They are not there to fuck with you. They are there to let you know what you need to fix. There are amazing books on this stuff now.

Its fucked up that regulators are changing things at the last hour on you. But I have to call bullshit on that - these rules came out in fucking JANUARY. That’s 7 months to fucking pay attention to your quality, see where you are falling short, and fix your shit, long before any testing is required.

The tests and the test kits to do micro enumeration are so fucking cheap (I mean SO FUCKING CHEAP) that there’s no reason not to have been at least trying to see if you were doing a good job before now.

So like I get it. Don’t control for anything at all - and have out of control micro contamination (which will just keep getting worse, week after week). And then instead, spend like $200k on a remediation machine.

Rad Source has the best white papers and one peer reviewed journal. You are still going to lose terpenes (even if they say you don’t, even their own papers clearly show you do). And you are going to lose a little bit of potency (just a little…but in a world where every motherfucker is creating fraudulent documents for potency testing…maybe a little matters).

The cryo solution is cheaper - but I’ve seen issues with discoloration.

The ozone solution is also cheaper - in a box, it seems mildly more controlled, but there is definitely reactions that we have very little information about (see other peoples posts to me about potential reactions, I mean sure, things are reacting, but do we really know what the fuck is happening, I mean really? No.)

There’s also a chlorine solution in a box.

There’s a microwave solution (faster, cheaper, lose a bit more terpenes, some discoloration depending on moisture content).

There’s a UV solution that works with a box and a conveyor - its cheaper, but really only does like a 1 log reduction in contamination, and you probably need like a 3 log reduction… run it more times, sure, but then you get more degradation.

I still point to HEAT IT ALL AND FILTER IT - also known as make that shit into distilliate and then make that distillate into other things like edibles and vape products. Why? Because when I learned how to sterilize things (in my pharma career) we did that shit with HEAT and then we filtered the dead bodies of the microbes out.

Doing both seems important to me. If I cannot manage to keep microbes from growing on things to begin with.

And don’t forget to challenge your lab - I’ve been to so many testing labs that were doing micro tests, but didn’t even have a micro hood to prevent background contamination from happening. They should have controls and they should be willing to show you your plates against the controls. <3

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Not trying to get into a debate here (bad call on Future, I know) but I’ve used radiation for years (RadSource) and have seen no significant degrading of material from before v after treatment. Terps are still there, cannabinoids are still there. Tested around the cabinet and had no greater levels of radiation than typical background radiation. It’s safe, it allows us to meet state limits easily and is much much much better than the ozone we tried before. Doesn’t dry it out, can do a decent amount at a time and doesn’t introduce extra oxygen in the form of Ozone or H2O2.

It’s bremsstrahlung so no need for radioactive isotopes as well. If X-ray generators can be made safe for staff in hospitals it can be made safe for staff in cannabis. If you can’t be bothered to maintain it and call out technicians when you need to, you shouldn’t be in the cannabis space in the first place.

I will say, the damn chiller that comes with it has given us issues before but being angry at chillers is kinda common in the industry tbf.

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:rofl::joy::rofl:

Have you tried reasoning with it?

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appreciate the honest feedback

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Have you tried reasoning with it?

@cyclopath I tried whispering sweet nothings to it in both English and German but alas. Even my sexy talk can’t fix broken parts.

I think it speaks Chinese though, knew I shoulda listened to Great Uncle Zhou and learned Mandarin

@Cassin @sweethemp Yes, you almost certainly will lose some terpenes but them fuckers like to run away even when you just let it sit there, in a cool room, in a sealed container and do nothing. I think we do 1200gy on the unit and we still have our terpier strains test at 3-4% terps on the regular and it has managed to maintain the ratios the terps have with each other as well.

If I gotta clean it to the levels demanded by the state, particularly as long as they do plating to test microbials, radiation has been effective and consistent at maintaining constant compliance with minimal degredation.

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Kinda off topic - In my experience, the “figuring it out” boils down to massively oversized dehumidification capacity strip mining the moisture from the bud within 48hrs down to like, 3-5%. This is functionally so violent on the cellular level that trichome heads actually burst from the osmotic pressure differential generated by the … over-generous dehumidification.

Not all of the heads pop, not all the cell walls crack, but certainly enough to limit the quality available on the wholesale market at times.

And, uh, not all of em have “figured it out” either, regardless.

A select few have really solidly invested in environmental controls that limit the impact MDs natural humidity has on their grows, allowing them to get a relatively decent cure in.

Anywho, my point I guess is that weed IS a living organism, and soil is too. I’m personally of the opinion that unless your plan is to literally eat the nugget, fresh, uncooked, straight outta the bag, as long as it passes mycotoxin tests, it’s not the regulatory bodies concern if a company wants to sell some moldy bud. It’s gross, from a consumers perspective, but from a health and risk/liability perspective it’s not a big number. It’s not moldy food after all, it’s gonna get combusted. Additionally, there’s functionally zero pathogenic risks. Someone may get sick from salmonella from bad food and spread it to others if it’s a bad strain of salmonella, but fungi simply don’t work like that “in vivo”.

There’s actually real world examples (though it IS technically food) - Uncooked, pre-mixed, pre-portioned and packaged dough for retail at grocers and wholesale to pizza joints and such. Absolutely would fail cannabis limits due to the necessary yeast load of the product, and may even pop with some e. coli, limited, but some, likely from the water supply used to make the dough. It’s still fine and passes because it’s intended to be cooked by the consumer prior to consuming.

should a company sell moldy bud? No absolutely not, it would be a massive PR problem for them and impact sales regardless of the impact on actual product quality. Is it a health risk though in the same sense that moldy food is? Absolutely not.

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A good kick to the groin should work, otherwise electron beam is pretty good, too!

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This is was my thought to until about 2 years ago when I learned that about 50-60% of people (like in my household) don’t combust their weed. They are vaporizing the weed OR using it for food production. Sometimes that food production goes through appropriate sterilization activities (lots of heat) but often it does not.

And that with vaporizing - most often the temperature and duration is not sufficient to kill any remaining micro-organisms (because its not 100% good any of these processes) combined with the prevalence of people NOT FUCKING WASHING THEIR HANDS - and doing things like licking shit and what not. Meaning that the remnants and the pyrogens and the endotoxins all get in.

It would be one thing if people were actually testing for all the endotoxins - but they don’t. Most states are only testing for the ones from aspergillis, and lets be honest, those are not even the most dangerous ones out there.

But why would people actually care about the science? These rules were made by prohibitionists to stifle access to the plant. They have proliferated because for people who innovated and found ways “through” the regulations they have stifled competition from well, everyone else.

All in the name of keeping folks safe. Without actually caring about the safety of the consumer.

Hell if they wanted to keep people safe they would stop locking them up like pigs going to the slaughter and creating great harm there. But I digress. <3

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I mean, fusarium isn’t going to make anyone sick. Erysiphe won’t either. Penicilliums are fine. 90% of mold colonies picked from cannabis petrifilms are gonna fall into those three categories (Erysiphe being a stand-in for most microsporae).

I’m telling you of the science. As long as mycotoxin screens are good (you’ve got a point though in that cannabis regulations really do need to be unified and step more in line with federal guidelines, all mycotoxins federally suggested should be considered), folks aren’t going to be getting sick, with the singular outlier being extremely immunocompromised individuals, who shouldn’t be doing anything fun with their pulmonary systems regardless.

If you don’t thoroughly cook the raw dough you bought at the store and get sick from it, is it the producer of the doughs responsibility, the states, or yours?

We can take this even further by inverting the ‘question’ here.
Lets say its the growers responsibility and since consumers aren’t always going to thoroughly ‘cook’ their cannabis, therefore all cannabis must be pre-sterilized prior to getting to a retail shelf? Is this something we want? Doesn’t this legislate a massive reduction in product quality for only extremely limited impact to risk management? This doesn’t seem wise, unless our intent is to facilitate the success of companies that do not wish for quality to have an impact on their flower market??? Iunno man, I don’t like it.

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I think this is a perfect example of how past harms (people getting sick because of poor manufacturing practices and cross-contamination) have impacted regulations and how GMPs are handled.

Now people provide education through LABELING to make sure that product which didn’t go through appropriate contamination controls is noted as requiring a specific amount of cooking.

But this cooking doesn’t address endotoxins or pyrogens or the rest of the mycotoxins present. AND the product is not destined for inhalation.

But we’re talking about things that people inhale - which have has some of the most negative repercussions (aka tobacco products) and the most intense consumer protection requirements (all inhaled drugs) - but in our industry we just say FUCK IT. And make whatever we feel like, regardless of people who might be impacted.

I think its interesting that you mention Penicilliums…as though there are no regulations around the VERY RARE chance that they will cause an allergic reaction in a VERY SMALL amount of humans. But because that exists - there are all kinds of controls to prevent cross contamination and all kinds of controls to prevent contamination.

Pretending that medical patients (over 27 million of them in the US alone) don’t use these products is silly. These products are being consumed by people WHO NEED THEM who may be harmed because we aren’t planning to control these things.

And when we are controlling for these things - we’re often not thinking at all about the dead bodies of those micro-organisms. We’re only focused on “passing testing”.

But fucking passing a test doesn’t build in quality. Its just one point on the continum of the quality that we should be building into these products. That are often being inhaled into peoples lungs (about 75% of the time!) - but we continue to pretend that because not enough people have gotten sick (that we know of) and not enough people have died (even though people have fucking died) that its okay.

And honestly - that’s what sucks. That even though we have all this history to build off of - decades of watching other consumer products come out, cause harm, and then have to roll back and make changes - that we are not already doing that work.

That instead of doing that work many in the industry are actively working against making sure research is happening on the harms. And actively working against regulations being put in place to make everyone prevent those harms from happening.

Even here - you are saying that the most common kinds of micro-organisms found on cannabis are fusarium, erysiphe, and Penicilliums. While I agree that these might be most of the molds - I’m more often seeing yeasts and bacteria. Why are these not included in your calculations?

We should be okay with the bacteria that is showing up on cannabis plants? Are the yeasts in the same categorization for you?

Because they are not for me. <3

I have just now seen your additions. <3 My thoughts…

For basically all other inhaled products - the answer is already YES. They are all sterile - having all their ingredients sterilized, formulated and packaged in a sterile environment, into packaging that has been depyrogenated.

Should these products then - also have this same requirement? Regardless of a limited impact on perceived quality to make sure that consumer harm is reduced?

I don’t know the answer to that. I wonder why more people are not asking it. I often wonder why its not already a requirement (like it is for all these other inhaled products). But I think it has to do with people lumping “smoked” things together and since no one gives a fuck about tobacco killing people, then why should we care about weed killing people?

I’m not saying it is killing people - but that’s the sentiment I get often. That “no one is dying” therefore there are no harms…and therefore we should do nothing.

But harms are happening - we just don’t want to talk openly about them. :frowning:

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If someone is immunocompromised, they absolutely should be leaning towards consuming more processed, safer products.

Like I mentioned, if state regulations were more in line with federal regulations regarding mycotoxins, I think things would be relatively safe. A good chunk of my food safety micro experience stems from working in a lab that was doing a lot of the early foundational work regarding the testing for and regulating of this very subject, mycotoxins in food production supply chains. I’m not an expert, but I’m sufficiently experienced enough to be confident that if state regulations looked more like federal regulations we really wouldn’t have any safety concerns within the cannabis industry regarding moldy flower. It would simply be a quality issue, which isn’t really the states responsibility to legislate.

And for clarity’s sake, I think the same thing of edibles. State regulations are a joke relative to FDA guidelines and it sucks. I’ve personally seen edibles that grew MRSA and since the state doesn’t ask for that data, the lab can’t report it.

And for all cannabis inhalables excluding flower, they’re also already sterile, but we’re talking flower, that was once alive, in living soil, or water and soilless substrate. I feel like we’re drifting into some less-than-reasonable parallels.

I don’t include yeast in any calculations because its yeast lol

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Just saw this and no I am not with them anymore.

That tech does work great though

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I’ve quickly glossed through this thread and if I missed it please correct me and I apologize but…

If you have flowers that tests hot for mold you may be able to kill the mold but you will not clean away the mycotoxins that are extremely dangerous. If you want to be more ethical and take better care of your customers I would say that you would need to extract the flower and then remediate. That’s just my two cents worth.

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If flower pops for mold but not mycotoxin, what’s your thoughts?

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In Several papers the productions of mycotoxins is
Way more present in seeded crops than in unseeded crops

Isseu i am diving in deu u to seeded corps in marocco
Where traditional cultivation gives even higher mld Numbers deu to them insisting that cannabinoid content risses and pollen quality Gets better 3 to 5 weeks after i would already harvest

It s hard to find a balance in traditionele and modern sientific growing

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I would defer to what @TheVanillaGorilla said, as this is probably the reasonable course of action:

Nuking your flower(e.g. radsource) prior to extraction is not a bad idea either, but probably overkill.
Then carefully examine your operation and address root cause of mold in product.

Obviously the best course of action would be @Cassin’s opinion, toss your moldy shit and clean up your act. Then try again.

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I was unaware that that was possible.

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Not all molds produce mycotoxins, and the ones that do only produce them under certain conditions. So yes, it is possible.

Powdery Mildew & Botrytis vs Fusarium & Aspergillus

Microbial vs Mycotoxin test

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Powdery Mildew can be like 7 different species, it’s not even a genus, its just a broad term that describes macroscopic morphology.

Botrytis is a genus of fungi, which generally isn’t known to produce mycotoxins harmful to humans. It would be more appropriate to discuss the allergic responses some folks with yeast/mold sensitivities may present with when exposed to consistently high loads of botrytis.

Fusarium and aspergillus are also names for genus, not species, but do however have small chances of producing secondary metabolites (called mycotoxins) which are known to be harmful to humans. Do all fusariums or aspergillus produce said mycotoxins? No, and even of the ones that do, it takes very specific conditions for there to be a large build up of mycotoxins to levels that are potentially harmful to healthy adult humans.

I began my career in general lab work with a lab that was one of the early partners in mycotoxin research within the realm of food safety. Ask me anything, I’ll clear the air, though some of you may not like to hear it. Most of the time a batch fails for yeast mold or even aerobic bacteria, it’s almost always not harmful in the slightest to healthy humans. All the work being done to “sterilize” flower so that it passes these poorly informed and poorly constructed regulations…

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