Ayra (The Science of Efficiency)
Ayra (The Science of Efficiency)In the early days of legalization, while most cannabis producers charged ahead with cultivation methods notorious for their energy and resource consumption, brothers John and Tim Dunley took a refreshingly different approach.
Armed with John’s knowledge of insects and agriculture as a former Washington State University professor, the two entrepreneurs founded Ayra and focused on building the most sustainable indoor grow possible, from its electricity usage to its pest control.
“There will never be pesticides in this facility,” Tim told Marijuana Venture for a 2019 cover story. “Nothing will touch our plants but dissolved minerals.”
The LED-powered grow utilizes a proprietary aeroponic cultivation system and to this day is unlike any cultivation facility Marijuana Venture has toured.
At the Ayra grow facility in Seattle’s industrial Sodo neighborhood, everything is geared toward efficiency. From the lighting to the water usage to the fertilizer, the goal is to be as sustainable and efficient as possible, including the company’s proprietary closed-loop aeroponics growing method.
Which makes sense considering one of the company’s founders is a scientist who spent 20 years in Washington’s agricultural sector, striving to find new methods to help farmers increase their harvests and expand ever-shrinking margins.
“I spent my whole career, basically, in tree fruit,” says John Dunley, who with his brother, Tim Dunley, founded Ayra in 2017. “Cannabis is another flowering plant to maximize yield and increase quality on.”
John’s scientific background and Ayra’s constant testing and retesting of inputs and methods has led the company to build a “super sustainable” facility that uses only 35% of the energy of a traditional indoor grow operation and less water than a typical Seattle family of four, while producing a consistent, sought-after product that holds its own with any other buds grown in the state.
Through constant experimentation, Ayra has a good jump on many of those practices, but even for a longtime farming professional like John, the cannabis industry still presents a new set of challenges and difficulties every day that keeps him engaged in new studies and new attempts to make the operation even more efficient.
“It’s much more complex than most situations in ag,” he says. “This is the hardest damn thing I’ve ever done.”