Perfecting Indoor Sungrown Cannabis (Podcast)
It takes a lot of energy to grow cannabis indoors, and as the legal industry has gained momentum, much attention has been paid to the energy footprint of producers who run indoor grow facilities. While arguments between indoor & outdoor growers have existed for some time, a regulated market brings a new level of public scrutiny to the issue. But what if growers could have the best of both worlds? What if you could beam sunlight indoors to combine natural lighting with the benefits of a controlled environment?
This is the question that Fleurish Farms, a cannabis cultivation firm based in Sonoma County, has set out to answer. In the latest episode of the Ganjapreneur.com podcast, our host TG Branfalt interviews Dr. Jonathan Cachet and Dr. Joshua Earlenbaugh about their unique DSS Supplemental Sunlight™ systems which employ Solatubes, a form of tubular skylight that has been around for decades, to harness sunlight and beam it into an indoor environment. This method of indoor growing is not a new kind of greenhouse: using Solatubes, Fleurish Farms is able to have much better control over humidity and temperature than a greenhouse typically affords.
In this interview, Cachet and Earlenbaugh discuss how they came from academic backgrounds to pursue opportunities in the cannabis industry, how they first contacted Solatube about using their skylights for growing cannabis indoors, and how they have worked to perfect their systems so they can achieve comparable results using only 20% of the energy typically used by grows that employ artificial lighting.