Marijuana Venture recently celebrated its two-year anniversary, and I’m as excited as ever to be the leading source of information for the marijuana business community. What started as a small newsletter focused on the nascent industry in the Northwest in March of 2014 rapidly grew into a nationally-distributed, full-fledged glossy magazine.
As you can imagine, the staff at Marijuana Venture has had fun watching this thing grow, often working 10-hour days at a pace reminiscent of a tech startup. We’ve met a ton of really cool people engaged in all sorts of cannabis-related endeavors.
Beyond plain old hard work, I think two factors have made us successful.
One, we’ve focused strictly on business. We decided right from the start that cannabis culture was already being well-served by High Times, Cannabis Now, Dope, Skunk and several other publications. This enabled us to excel at one aspect of the marijuana world without all the distractions that come with a lot of side projects and subjects.
Two, we’ve been unafraid to call it as we see it. While I’m not going to delve into specific examples, many of the culture magazines advertise products and practices that are just plain wrong.
I remember a call I made to Bruce Bugbee, Ph.D., a professor of plant sciences at Utah State University, a couple of years ago. His team had just published an exhaustive study on the efficacy of different supplemental lights for controlled environment agriculture (you can read it if you go to journals.plos.org and search for Bruce Bugbee). I was curious about the conventional wisdom in the pot world that you initially grow under metal halide (MH) and flower under high-pressure sodium (HPS) lights. That practice never seemed rooted in science, and whenever I drove by a commercial greenhouse, the yellowish glow always indicated they were using HPS. Were cannabis growers basing their decisions on science or old wives tales? Professor Bugbee made it clear that the research, conducted under strict university guidelines (which are quite different than your buddy’s garage), showed there is virtually no difference in how the two varieties of high-intensity discharge bulbs promote plant growth. Light intensity, it turns out, is more important than light spectrum.
However, the research demonstrated that HPS was much more efficient, and simply produced a lot more PAR per watt than MH. In other words, using MH to grow marijuana (even if it’s only for the first few weeks) is a big waste of money. If you’re using HID lights, double-ended 1,000-watt HPS is the way to go. Period. This might not mean much in a 10-light garage grow, but it can have a huge effect on the costs of a big commercial operation. When I wrote about the study in an early issue of the magazine, I actually had growers tell me that a highly qualified university professor who conducted exhaustive studies on how plants respond to supplemental light was wrong, and that they, the growers, were right because they had more experience growing marijuana.
The funny thing is that just a couple of years later, you rarely see anyone in the commercial cannabis industry using MH. My guess is that folks who are about to sink a million dollars into a commercial grow are more likely to do their homework than consumers reading a pot culture magazine. Furthermore, if I were a betting man, I’d say the same sort of enlightenment is likely to occur in the nutrient business as the claims made by some fertilizer companies and their marketing departments come under scrutiny from businesspeople doing their due diligence.
Look for more interesting articles and profiles in upcoming issues as we delve deeper into the endlessly fascinating — and rapidly evolving — business of legal marijuana.
Greg James
Publisher