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Soil’s Crucial Role in Cannabis Cultivation: The Importance of Soil Health
As we prepare to publish our full Back to Basics: Soil’s Crucial Role in Cannabis Cultivation interview, let’s revisit some of the tips and insights from our cultivation experts, Adam Jacques, a world-renowned cannabis geneticist and Zacariah L. Hildenbrand, a research Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Cannabis Science and Technology sat down with Adam Jacques and Zacariah Hildenbrand for a deep dive into cannabis cultivation and crucial role soil plays in your grow. Here we present a clip from this interview.
Watch the clip for insights into the importance of soil health, read the transcript below, and read more of this interview here.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how does soil health rank in importance of cannabis cultivation?
Adam Jacques: How important is your soil? 10. But there's levels, right? There's multiple different levels to what somebody would consider soil health. Is healthy soil to you, bagged soil from the hardware store, or is healthy soil to you “no till, living soil completely amended out”? It's completely different levels of how important, and then how important is soil in comparison to hydroponics, aeroponics? Because then you're looking at the difference between – it's like anything grown in soil is like a sit down, fancy dinner and aeroponics, hydroponics is like McDonald's. So, there's levels, but if your soil health isn't right, other than having, let's say, no light, it's the most detrimental thing that can happen to your grow.
Zacariah Hildenbrand: Obviously, when anyone's trying to grow the best plants they possibly can, you want to get the best genetics, you want to get the most efficacious lighting, you want to use the best water, and you want to get the healthiest soil. With the plant being so effective at a process called bioremediation, it can uptake a lot of metals and minerals out of the soil that if you start with a soil laden with arsenic, or lead, or any kind of additives that you don't want in there, there's a chance that that could migrate into your plant tissue, and then you have a negative impact. So even if you're using the world's best genetics from Adam Jacques, and you have the world's best LED lighting, if you have bad soil that doesn't have the right nutrients or the right structure or the right microbes or is laden with heavy metals, you're setting yourself up for failure.