Croptober: The Challenges of Outdoor Cannabis Cultivation

With any type of cultivation, there comes a time to collect the fruits of one's labor. In the cannabis industry, the harvest season has become popularly known as “Croptober.” Continuing this cultivation interview series are Adam Jacques and Zacariah L. Hildenbrand. Jacques is a world-renowned expert with more than 20 years’ experience cultivating various unique strains of cannabis who has developed more than 300 high-cannabidiol (CBD) strains of cannabis and Chief Geneticist at AgSense LLC. Hildenbrand is a research professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, the principal founder of Inform Environmental, a partner of Medusa Analytical, and is a director of the Curtis Mathes Corporation. Together, they dive into the different types of challenges experienced in outdoor, hybrid, and indoor growing, soil testing, cannabinoid and terpene content, and more.

What should a cannabis cultivator consider when deciding between indoor, outdoor, or hybrid growing operations?

Adam Jacques, Chief Geneticist at AgSense LLC | Image Credit: © Adam Jacques.

Adam Jacques: When you're growing outside, you have no control over your temperature, [or] if it's raining. Environmental controls are not really in your control anymore, if you're growing outside. If you're growing in a greenhouse, you have limited-to-extreme control based on how much you spent on your greenhouse and what you're looking for. And indoors, you have full control over environmentals. So, that's like a really major thing, like you need to live in the right area to grow outside. If you have a monsoon season in the middle of flower, it's probably not the best to be growing, at least for flower, outdoors. Hybrid is, as far as I'm concerned, the way. Using greenhouse, a nice greenhouse technology with supplemental lighting, something that mimics the sun, and keeping it nice and contained and sealed is the premier way to grow if you're growing for flower, I would say. And then, indoor growing, you can really grow the best cannabis in the world indoors. It is not extremely cost effective, so therefore...how much you have to charge goes way up. But there's nothing finer than indoor flower, but it's a very specific, almost niche market at this point.

Zacariah Hildenbrand, PhD, research Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, the principal founder of Inform Environmental, a partner of Medusa Analytical, and a director of the Curtis Mathes Corporation | Image Credit: © Zacariah Hildenbrand.

Zacariah Hildenbrand: Yeah, I would echo those sentiments in that it really just depends on what your final applications are. If you're growing trying to get the best quality and you're trying to get the best commodity price, it's going to cost you probably $350 to $500 a pound to produce indoors, but you're going to probably get a better-quality product, and you're going to get better testing data, which allows you to sell it at a higher commodity price. As Adam alluded to there, the greenhouse option is nice because you can still kind of control the environmental conditions. You can add supplemental lighting, which allows you to drive up the yield and the phytochemical content to get better terpenes, better cannabinoids. You also get the benefit of the sun, so it's a little bit more cost effective than indoor. And then outdoor, in my opinion, I think it would be for "Hey, we're just going to produce a large amount of really nice biomass for extraction. We need to do so cheaply." And so, you know, there's that. I think the hemp industry really exemplifies how challenging outdoor cultivation could be, because everyone just thought, "I bought these seeds online. I'll just put them outside, and when I harvest them in two, three months, I'm going to make a ton of money." And they don't account for the fact that, okay, pollen, pollination, errant weather, all these things can go wrong, obviously.

Jacques: Bugs.

Hildenbrand: Yeah, bugs, right? And so, I mean, as you remember that first summer we had in Oklahoma where it was like, looks great. Next day, army worm infestation. Where did these things come from? They were not there yesterday, and then we're toast, right? So outdoor cultivation, very challenging, but can be more cost-effective. Indoor obviously, is controlled environmental agriculture, so you have greater control over things. It is more expensive, but you produce better products, so it's really a trade off from what you want to do.

Jacques: I feel like if you're not doing any sort of post-processing on your product to clean it up, growing outdoors [is] kind of a bad idea. I do know that there is a a subsection of the community, and I mean no disrespect whatsoever, if you want to smoke outdoor, that's great. I get it, and I get the zero energy growing, I understand. But it's not strawberries, right? It's not potatoes. You can't take them and rinse them off and clean it, and then smoke it, right? So, you're smoking all of the dust, all of the pollen, and all of the mold, every bug that climbed on it. You know, one year a bird dropped half a dead frog on one of our plants outside. You can't take that and scrub it off like you would scrub off fruit, right? And so, getting it clean enough to be a smokeable commodity outdoors without extreme controls, it's tough. It's tough. They test with all sorts of weird stuff outside on the plant matter. But if you're clarifying it down using extraction methodologies or something like that, like, it's
generally fine.

Do you need to analyze the soil? How is the soil tested?

Jacques: Yes. You need to look at it. Absolutely.

Hildenbrand: Absolutely, yes. These plants are really effective at what's called plant remediation, which means they can pull heavy metals out of the soil. They test in most recreational or medical states, they test for the "four horsemen", which are lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury. They do that by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), or inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). There's some other technologies you can use, but basically, you can characterize like 60 different metals simultaneously using that technology. But if you don't test your soil beforehand, I think Arizona is a great example of this, where the soil is horrible outdoors, coupled with the fact that you have really poor groundwater that's hard and loaded with arsenic. And so you could think you're doing everything great in the world and following all these standard operating procedures (SOPs), and then you come to find out either your water or your soil was laden with heavy metals and then you test hot. And heavy metals are not one of those classes of constituents that you can remediate. It's not like, let's say Oklahoma, where you test hot for microbials, then you have to do an extraction, which would then kill the microbials, and then you can sell that product. You can't sell the product as a flower because of the microbial contamination. With heavy metals, you don't get remediated, just you've got to destroy it. So, testing is hypercritical, for sure.

Jacques: Also, when you're looking at soil, you need to understand "What is my soil made of?" And so, you're going to want to get soil tests done on, "What are my parts? What's in my dirt? Is it clay? Is it loam? Is it sandy? Do I have to change the growing?" If we got a lot of clay in a field and it's only a foot deep, well, then you got to go through, rip it all up, down to about 4 feet deep and add compost, right? And so, you're adding all of this labor and all of this extra money into a piece of property that just probably wasn't ideal to begin with. So, you're really looking for, good loamy soil, particularly something where a river used to run through, something that runs four to six feet deep, and loam, things like that. And then people like Zac saying in Arizona, look at the ground, and they're like, "Nah, I can do this." And it's like, rock and clay, you know? You can force stuff to grow there, right? You can, like, 20-20-20, just hit it with feeders, you know, like 20-20-20 nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK), and just force feed it into the ground. You can force stuff to grow there, but it's not ideal. Knowing what the constituent parts of your soil are, is very helpful. Is it a huge hill to overcome to make that ground fertile for cannabis plants? Or is it just small additions of things to keep things upkept? That is thinking along the lines of, "I'm not going to use like a 20-20-20, high-end fertilizer and force feed my plants. Quality is really dependent on your soil.

What are some of the differences between indoor and outdoor cannabis cultivation?

Hildenbrand: Indoor, for the most part, you're able to produce a higher quality product because you're able to control the environmental factors. You're able to hit it with supplemental lighting, which allows you to use more nutrients to get more yield and all the things, but it is more expensive to do that. And then on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have outdoor cultivation, where you have no control, there's no supplemental lighting but, your cost produces much lower and the quality of your product is much lower as well. In most cases, greenhouses are kind of the happy medium where it's cost effective, you can still produce an unbelievable product, but at a reduced price compared to indoor given the electricity. In most cases, indoor cultivation, you're using the 60% of your cost to produce in your lighting and your electrical so if you can get the benefit of natural sunlight with a greenhouse, then you know you don't need as much supplemental light.

Jacques: With greenhouse and indoor you can do soil control. We were just talking about soil indoors and greenhouses. You pick what soil you're using, you pick what amendments you're using, you pick how you build it out, or you go hydro, or something along those lines. But, not only are you controlling the environment coming into it, you can control the environment that's growing in that you can't do outside. So, if some sort of contamination happens to your ground outside, what do you do? There's a lot of stuff that could happen to your soil outdoors that sneaks up on you, or you're too close to something that spills or getting ground contamination isn't unheard of. Indoors, you don't have that problem.

How do you know when to plant and harvest outdoor cannabis plants?

Jacques: Absolutely dependent on where you are in the world. Here in Oregon, I would say kind of in the belt of outdoor growing, the problem is you don't want to put it out before the light levels are at a point where it's not going to go into flower. So generally, halfway through May, May 15th, is kind of when you hit the safe zone for putting plants outside where they won't go into flower. Generally, with us, if we're in the ground pre-June 15th, we're happy. You could push it as far as July 1st, if you want to. June 1st is kind of the firing gun for us. That's when we know we're going to see the maximum amount of growth. Then you have to know when is your 12-12 lighting cycle going to flip your plants on the other side. Here, that's generally the last two weeks of August we'll go into flower. So then, therefore we know that by the second week of October everything should be done. Now, if you're living in Alaska, your time is way different. Or if you're living in Costa Rica, your timing is way different. Costa Rica is 12-12, all the time. It's going to constantly be in flower. Up north, it's near 24 hours of light, and then all of a sudden, it's no light. And so, you need to adjust to where you're at. A lot of that's going to come down to what genetics that you're picking for those types of locations. But I would say that's something to really think about. Where do I live? What is the humidity or lack of humidity in the area that I'm growing? What are the high temperatures? What are the low temperatures? What's the average rainfall? All of these things need to be looked at when you're trying to pick an outdoor spot like that.

Hildenbrand: Yeah, and then as far as, like harvesting, we hear about croptober, right? So, October, November, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, and because of the drop in temperatures, you start to see the plants express the anthocyanin flavonoids. So, they start to get blue and purple and have these beautiful colors. And this is actually a question I'd have for Adam. So now you're into late October, and your plants are looking beautiful. Are you looking with a microscope or a magnifying glass at trichome color? Cloudy versus clear versus amber. What are you using as the differentiating factor to tell you this is time to harvest this plant.

Jacques: Like in a perfect world, in a real world, we harvest generally when the weather tells us we have to. When the buds start getting saturated with water and we start running a risk of botrytis or Aspergillus, or anything like that, then it's time to cut. A bud rot infestation will rip through your plants like a wildfire. You'll see it on one spot, and the next day you'll see it on 20, and the next day you'll see it on 1000. It spreads so fast, so you don't want to tow that line. Generally, the weather tells you when. In a perfect world where I'm not seeing those issues, 20% amber is generally where I want to cut at because then I know the other 80% will be milky. Our cannabinoids are nicely bloomed at that point. You're getting about everything you can out of it. When you're starting to see the amber, you're starting to see the degradation or oxidization of the trichomes. So, you know that the rest of them, when you hit that 10 to 20% of amber, the rest of them must be rich and ready. I err on the side of going long. Most outdoor growers, me included, do not have that luxury and we cut when the weather tells us to.

Hildenbrand: That always seems to be the case, right? It's like, all of a sudden, we're going to get this crazy storm. Is it going to come in the middle October or late October? But it's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when.

Jacques: Yeah, talk to the boys out there. Cutting to 2am, to get everything down, because there's a typhoon coming through.

What are the best methods for planting and harvesting?

Hildenbrand: Harvesting is interesting, because I think we saw this in the hemp space, when everyone was getting into the gold rush, so to speak, in 2018. We saw, "We're going to plant 10 acres. So, I'm going to do 100 acres. Well, I'm going to do 1000 acres." Okay, great. How are you going to harvest all this stuff? "Oh, I'm just going to do with a combine." Okay, I don't know if anyone has seen these videos of combines trying to go over hemp plants or cannabis plants. I mean, they're so thick and fibrous, it was tearing the combines up. And then they would build up this hash material on their blades, and they were catching on fire. There's really no automated way of harvesting traditional branch stock hemp or cannabis varietals. I mean, Adam has developed a lot of single stock varietals, both on tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) rich side, that just grow as like a like a pussy willow, if you will, like a single stock and then a cob of flower on the top. Those, you can come in and just chop the top foot off, and then you got your flower, and then you can segregate the stalks. But when you have something that grows like a Christmas tree, there's no other way of just going in there than with a machete and that's a lot of fun, don't get me wrong.

Jacques: It's fun for about 20 plants.

Hildenbrand: Yeah, exactly. We got four or more guys working a couple acres here, and that's all we're going to do today. We're just going to chop down plants. So, the thought of like, "I'm going to do 100 acres of this,” that’s not feasible, in my opinion. So, it really is genetics dependent, but there's a lot of manual labor involved, from what I've seen.

Jacques: First you have to ask yourself, are you looking for uniformity? Are you looking for growth rates? So, you're going to pick Cloner seed to start when you're growing outside. I would always highly recommend seed. You're going to get a taproot that's going to run, likely to find groundwater. It's going to help you a lot with your watering cycles. If you're going to do that, you need to make sure that your seeds are trustworthy to some extent. You don't want a bunch of Herms in your field or because, you know, if you have 10,000 plants outside, you're going to go through and look for male flowers every day. So, you got to be sure that your genetics are locked down and what you want to use if you're going to grow from seed, because stuff can sneak up on you. Even with the most perfect seed in the world, 99% of them are right, you know. When you're planting that many plants, there are still going to be offs. So, then you go to clones. Well, you can grow with clones. They're going to grow more of a mat, especially if you have clay soil a few feet below your loam, it's going to grow into a mat-type structure that leads to issues with wind storms or rain, plants are more apt to fall over break at the stock, things of that nature. They're just not as set as something with a taproot. I would highly recommend seed. You can do clone. I would only recommend doing it on a small scale though, with ground that you can control, like not out in a field setting. Otherwise, just row in seed and then let it rip. Also, scale. If you're doing an acre outside, you can baby a bunch of clones. If you're doing 20 acres, the manpower cost is just too high. You won't be making any money if you have everybody out there babying clones or putting them in. Now, a lot of what I see people do is clone planting outside, but they'll do it from a single stock. So, it's all the same mother, it's all the same plant. It's been used over and over and over again, and I think that's fine. Those people generally build up like piled up rows, though, and they run individual watering spigots to every plant. When they're planting, it's a whole thing with machinery, but it works quite well. But I would just dump feminized seed out and roll the dice. I think that's a lot easier. You'll see some variation, but just the genetic vigor you get out of a seedling versus a clone is just so much higher. You're going to see prolific growth compared to a clone. You're going to have a top cola that you can either cut or you can leave it till it looks like big Christmas trees. What Zac was talking about with harvest, that's also something to think about. If you're growing big, woody-stocked plants, let's say you're growing it for flower, or you're actually growing the stocks to use for Hempcrete or something similar. You kind of want woodiness in your plant, but there's not really a piece of agricultural equipment out there. I don't think people realize how woody and how thick a cannabis plant can grow, because we're used to seeing trees grow. How quick a stem can grow in a field over three to five months. A piece of wood like that at the bottom, cored out like, big piece of wood, there's not, except for, like, a brush hog, there's not a piece of farming equipment out there that's going to reliably take those down.

You're going to mess up your equipment. You're looking at, and we've done it, you hire 10 guys with machetes and cut down the field. That's a way to do it. When one guy in a machine could do it with, like a single stock crop, like, when you talk about single stock, is it woody? Yes, but is it so woody that's going to gum things up, no. It's like cordage, right? And so you go through and top deck all the colas off. Those go into one truck, go away to get processed, and then you're left with woody stocks. You come through and just bottom deck all those out with a combine, collect those up, bundle, and throw them into a truck, and then you have the separation you're getting what you want. So, it's kind of the best of the both worlds when growing outside. People get caught up. Then there's, when you're buying hemp genetics, especially like online, there's nobody to really tell you, "No, you aren’t taking this down with a combine." They're going to do everything they can to sell you the seeds.

Are there any specific nutrients that need to be added or controlled for the plant?

Hildenbrand: We could chat about this for hours. Yeah, it's complex. You have major nutrients, minor nutrients, minerals, all kinds of things. I mean, folks are also into like the microbiome, beneficial microbes, so you can get absolutely as complex as you want. Adam, how's the best way?

Jacques: The question would be, do you want to live within the soil food web and have plants that are eating things that are naturally available to the plant in the soil? Do you want to build a soil ecology, or do you want to dump chelated metal, 20-20-20 fertilizer on it, and call it a day. So that's going to change everything, right there. If you're using 20-20-20, it doesn't matter. Do whatever. As long as it's wet and it's got that stuff on it, it's going to eat and you're going to grow plants. They're going to be gross, but it'll get done.

If you want to build a soil ecology, this comes back to our soil testing. You need to know exactly what's happening in that soil so you know what pieces to add to make your soil like a soil food web, a living ecology in your field. That's more difficult to start, but once you get the ball rolling on that, and you can create like a no-till living soil type of situation in your field, then you win. Then, every year, you just go out plant stuff, and you don't even really worry, its taking care of itself. You're growing cover crop, growing clover, when anything's out there. Clover's really nice nitrogen, putting it back in the soil. So, you're doing all the things that the soil needs to provide the food for the plant. And how we look at it is: What's healthier, a plant that chooses when to eat and chooses what it wants to eat to keep itself at its healthiest or a plant that's being forced 20-20-20? Do you want to go sit at a vegan buffet, or, let's say, just a fancy buffet, or do you want to go sit at a McDonald's and gorge yourself? And which one's better for the plants? That's really how it works. Now, to be healthy and to do the right things for your plants takes effort. Going to McDonald's and ordering food doesn't take very much effort. So, it just matters how much effort you're willing to put in for the return that you're going to get, because a lot of times growing outside, there's not enough return there for you to feed them a buffet. Right? McDonald's is bad. You can't even get a Big Mac meal for 12 bucks anymore. So Top Ramen, like you throw Top Ramen at the plants and be like, go for it, and they'll do all right for a while.

Does outdoor growing affect cannabinoid or terpene content?

Hildenbrand: Absolutely. Because relative to indoor growing, you don't have the additional lighting, and you're not able to punch in additional nutrients. You're not going to get the same kind of phytochemical content. So, you're not going to get crazy high cannabinoid or terpene numbers. But I will say there are also some advantages to outdoor growing. I mean, it's the natural way that plants...listen, that's how we started, right? We didn't start growing plants with LEDs straight out of the chute. So, from our experience, we've done quite a bit of work on this. I think you get a greater expression of some of the ancillary cannabinoids and terpenes. So, these are like the lesser-known compounds. So, you get more of a bouquet of molecules. You're not going to get 35% tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA). You might not get 4% total terpenes, but you're going to get more variety in that plant. I think they look better. I mean, I really love the look of freshly harvested plants at the end of October and the beautiful anthocyanin expression. They smell incredible, they look incredible. You can't beat it. I think it's just a matter of, "No, you don't get the same phytochemical density", but you get more variety just because the plant is in its natural environment and it's not as artificial as indoor cultivation. So, yeah, that's the tradeoff.

Jacques: Once again why greenhouses are just the best of both worlds. Because you're going to get those expressions. But Zac's nailed it. You see a bunch of the minor cannabinoids and terpenes you may rarely see, especially like flavonoid production goes off outside. Those are things that are very hard to recreate indoors. Even with...we did the whole thing with supplemental lighting, with red light to try to mimic what the sun's doing in the late fall seasons indoors and we did better on doing it that way, but we still weren't seeing the widespread expression that we're seeing in a true outdoor plant.

How has outdoor cannabis cultivation changed and what would you like to see more of?

Jacques: I would say that a lot of it, with the regulations that have come out to protect people and protect their health has been important to how we grow outdoor cannabis, be it smaller on scale. There were certain things you would never think about. If there was a moldy bud touching another bud, we just cut the piece of mold off and sell the rest, right? But what if that was a big old chunk of Aspergillus on there? Not my problem, right? And it's never going to come back to me, because I'm selling it to the black market, and what are they going to do? Call the Better Business Bureau? There was just no checks and balances on what was happening. So, now you have metrics that you have to meet to have a clean product that you can use, and especially when you're growing outdoor, a lot of the reason I would even grow outdoors because of what we were talking about with the chemical content of the plant, it's a lot better for medical or pharmaceutical applications, especially when you clean it up and break it down and extract the oils, you're getting a much more well balanced oil. So I think growing outdoor definitely has its place. I think what people have found out is that there is no bottom to the price on outdoor cannabis. If you can do it for this cheap, somebody can do it cheaper, and that's what's been happening everywhere. And so corners get cut all over the place. Outdoor used to be a badge you could put on people that were doing it right. Put a badge on and say, "This is like living soil outdoor," and like that meant something. That meant that was clean cannabis.

Now, when you hear outdoor you just think, “Gross, like, I don't want to smoke that.” And that's just the problem of the industry. There was a complete race to the bottom when it came to outdoor cultivation, indoor cultivation too, but mainly outdoor cultivation, where back in 1998/2000 you could get $3000 to $3500 a pound on outdoor. Come 2017, you could get $1,000 a pound on outdoor, come now, $100 or $50. So, where is the, where is the meat on the bone for somebody to say, I'm going to do this the right way? There isn't. So, I would say that's the big change. Once you try to mix corporate ideology with art, you end up with worse art.

Hildenbrand: And I will say the last thing here, just to chime in, from an analytical perspective, you have some of the states, I think California in particular, that have been testing extensively for a lot of these legacy pesticides. That's a totally different can of worms, where you buy this property, it hasn't been touched in five, six years and you think you're going to grow this high-end outdoor flower. Turns out that they use legacy compounds out there in the soil, which the plant is now effectively pulling into its plant material and boom, you test hot, and you've got to destroy all the material, because just like heavy metals, you have pesticides in there, you can't remediate that. So yeah, it's a major, major issue. It has various people in the industry calling for them to kind of curtail some of the testing requirements. But I would almost say, “No, let's expand them.” Because you need to know what you're doing and get your soil tested comprehensively before you start. I mean, the thought of allocating millions of dollars and not knowing what sort of soil you're growing in or what the water quality is like, it's really an indefensible position to say, “Well, I didn't know that this was here.” Well, you should have. You've got to do your due diligence to figure out what you're dealing with. I think the testing requirements have changed, obviously, over the years, and unfortunately, as Adam touched on, the commodity pricing. In Oklahoma, I don't even think you can sell outdoor. I really don't. I mean, I've heard people getting trim prices, like $15 a pound. It's like, okay, "Well, I guess if I have to take this off your hands, I'm going to pay you $15 a pound for it." Just really, really sad. Hopefully that side of the business changes. Hopefully, outdoor gets a little bit more respect, because there is value there, for sure. It's the easiest way to do the race to the bottom compared to like the indoor, which still that's very competitive, and those prices have come down considerably as well, but not to the same extent as outdoor.

Jacques: With indoor cultivation, there's levels, right? There's quality standpoints. I still know people getting $2400 to $3000 a pound in Oregon. It's worth it at that point. I also know people growing indoor, getting $800 a pound. So, it matters what you're doing in your grow. It also matters outside, if everything is extractable and you fresh freeze it, this all adds money to your bottom line. You take the time, you fresh freeze it, you set it to an extractor, you're going to get better money for it. But, at the same time, now you're buying all of these large-scale industrial freezers to freeze everything instantly and move stuff over. So is the price difference between $15 a pound and $300 a pound really worth it when you just put in $1.5 million in infrastructure? Probably not unless you're scale's insane.

Hildenbrand: It is tough and our sentiments here aren't to dissuade anyone from getting into this industry, but it is challenging, and there are going to be waves and peaks and valleys to this.

Jacques: I have the utmost respect for outdoor growers and what they do. I know it's hard work. It is hard work for very little money, you are not getting what you should. It's one of those jobs that people do where they don't value their own hours, right? Like at the end of the day, when it comes down to the bottom line, how many hours did you put in don't even come up in the conversation. To make the ends meet. You just know you're doing 60 to 80 a week, right? Like, how much you're paying yourself is just zero, right? You're just hoping to make enough money to pay the bills.

About the Guest Columnist

Madeline Colli is the Editor for Cannabis Science and Technology magazine. Direct correspondence to: MColli@mjhlifesciences.com.

How to Cite This Article

Colli, M. Croptober: The Challenges of Outdoor Cannabis Cultivation, Cannabis Science and Technology, 2024, 7(5), 14-19.