Transcription
Welcome to the Micin Mastery podcast! I'm your host, Jona Crck Malin. Together, we'll explore the art of turning tiny seeds into a thriving Micins Empire, sharing insights, coveted secrets, and strategic wisdom from building one of Canada's largest Micin Farms. Stay tuned for thought-provoking conversations with leading figures in the world of Micr [Music] Greens.
On today's episode of the podcast, we are answering your questions from social media. Everything from pricing your products for restaurants, inexpensive tray filler options, differences between white and purple grow lights, and so much more! Stay tuned, as we have a really great Q&A for you today.
The first question is, "I've seen Growers say that 20 to 25 grams is the right seating rate for broccoli, and you've recommended 10 grams. Why the difference?"
So, first off, you can see broccoli at 20 to 25 grams. I've heard as high as 30 grams as a seating rate for broccoli, but what you're doing is you're sacrificing quality for yield. My philosophy on growing Mic Greens is to produce the highest quality product because that will allow you to sell more of the product to consumers and really differentiate yourself from all the other Growers that are seating at this high rate that's sacrificing the quality of the product.
The reason the quality is much lower at this high seating rate is if you're seating really densely, each plant has less room, less light, and less soil space to grow. Each individual plant is going to be smaller, and when each individual plant is smaller, it's going to have less nutrition, less light energy, and less nutrition from the soil. It's going to generally cause a lot of elongation in the stem, which is where the yield will come from at this high seating rate. You really want to avoid this because you're going to have a lower quality product because of that lower nutrition and lower light levels per plant, and you're going to have much longer stems, which is considered a lower quality Micin product.
So, the reason I recommend 10 grams, from all the experience I've had growing Micr in the last 10 years, is that it is the right balance between seating rate and getting a good yield on Broccoli Micins. If you seed at a really high rate, you're also much more likely to get downey mildew issues and moisture issues in the canopy of the crops. When you seed a really dense tray of Micr, even if you have fans and air flow, it still can be really hard to get those crops dry before harvest, which is a really important step to avoid extra work after you harvest of drying the crops with fans after they're cut.
The best thing to do is always to dry them before they're cut, and that saves a lot of time. The other thing, besides nutrition, which I think is really important, is the shelf life won't be as good if that product is wet. At 20, 25, or 30 grams, you're going to have generally a pretty wet product because of how dense the canopy is; the leaves are literally going to be overlapping each leaf, so there's no room for it to transpire properly.
For all these reasons, having a correct seating rate is crucial. There's so much information out there, some of it from seed companies that are just trying to sell more seed, some of it from Growers that are trying to maximize yield. I totally get that; yield is definitely very important, but I don't personally think that having a higher yield is worth the sacrifice of having a lower quality product.
If you think about it from the consumer's perspective, if you're a consumer and you have the choice between a product that's much larger, tastes much better, is much crunchier, and has higher nutrition versus a lower quality product with longer stems and smaller leaves that doesn't have as much flavor, what would you choose? It's pretty obvious you would choose the one that's higher quality.
So, if you have other Micin Growers in your area or even if you just want to put out a high-quality Micin product for your consumers, you're going to want to lean toward that side, which is having a correct seating rate, or lower seating rate I should say. It's up to your opinion if it's correct or not, but a lower seating rate will get you a much higher quality product. It'll make sales so much easier for you guys if you just seed properly and have a high-quality product because a lot of people won't say that they didn't like your product.
That's where working with chefs can often be helpful; they'll be straight up honest with you and be like, "Hey, look, this is a poor quality Micin." But if you're selling just direct to consumer or just to retail, you may not have that same feedback loop to find out what is considered a high-quality product. So that's kind of what I'm trying to put out there. Hope that answers that question!
The next question is, "I've been using the Quick Cut Greens Harvester and it's great! Any tips for using this tool?"
First off, congrats on using that! It's a really, really great tool. I really hope every Mic Greens Farm adopts this, and that's one of my goals—to get people to be more efficient. So I'm glad you're using it because it's a great inexpensive tool that you can use to speed up your operation.
So tips for using this tool: There are a few I have off the bat, and I've had from—I’ve probably used the Harvester for about six or seven years now. A few things I've noticed is, one, you want to use—you’ve seen a lot of videos with the Quick Cut Greens Harvester—battery-powered drills being used. You can use a battery-powered drill, but the challenge with that is as your harvest goes on, the amount of torque is going to change as the battery gets weaker or loses power.
For Micr, you're generally growing indoors, so you don't need a battery-powered drill. You can use a plug-in drill, which will avoid any issues and have consistent torque in the drill and the drive shaft throughout the harvest. I think that's really, really important. Honestly, you can get like—I was using a Ryobi drill and it was like 50 bucks. Maybe I only had to have two in that six- or seven-year period I was using the Harvester, so it's cheap. You just plug it in, and then you don't have to worry about the battery power changing.
Also, there’s a recommendation on how many RPM of a drill you want to use with the Harvester. I can't remember; it's roughly around 2,000. But some drills are lower than that, and some might be a lot higher, so you want to make sure that the drill you're using matches the RPM for the Harvester. I think it’s for how fast the blade is spinning and the tines are spinning; because if it's too fast, the tines might spin so quickly that it spews out a lot of greens.
Which brings me to the next tip: you will find, even with the correct RPM, that some greens will spray out from those tines spinning. The best way I’ve found to fix that is really two things. One is, as you're harvesting the greens, if you find it's piling up right by the tines, you kind of have to move that to the back of the basket. That will allow space for new greens to be cut.
So if you cut, let’s say, 10 trays, and you just leave the greens that are being cut, by the 10th tray, it's going to be spewing out a lot of greens because there's no space for the cut greens to go. So, every roughly three or four trays, you can just, with your hand, push back the greens to the back of the basket, and that will almost solve that problem completely.
The second one is to add some sort of plastic covering over the top and front above the tines. If it does spray out, it'll hit that plastic and then bounce back down. You can just use any sort of food-safe material, which you can either pin with clips or attach with Velcro, to make sure that instead of the greens flying out, they'll hit that plastic, bounce back in, and stay in. This will allow you to get even more of the harvest and will also prevent any greens that are not getting cut with the push-back method; you'll find that more of the tray will get cut.
The only time the Quick Cut Greens Harvester isn't super effective is in two scenarios: one, where the greens are really, really wet, so if they’re soaking wet, you’ll find that it won’t cut that well; and the other scenario is if, let’s say, your trays are flopped over—like they're so elongated that they're just flopped over, it won’t cut those kinds of trays very well. But usually, it's only the ends that people find that flop over.
Obviously, having the correct amount of light and having the correct soil nutrition and temperature will prevent the greens from getting too leggy, as well as the seating rate, as I mentioned earlier. These are really the only two issues I've ever run into with the Harvester, and they're both fixable: one, just make sure it's not too densely seated, and two, make sure that they're fairly dry. They don’t need to be perfectly dry, but fairly dry before harvesting.
Next question is, "We're doubling our farm next year and need to improve efficiency."
That's awesome! I love to hear that. What do you recommend we implement?
So, just quickly, the first thing that comes to mind is having low-cost automation at your disposal. This includes things like the Quick Cut Greens Harvester, the seeding machine that we're going to release early in the spring that will allow people to speed up the time it takes to seed significantly, and things like Vertigro Farm software that kind of automates all the tasks you need to do each day and reminds you to ensure you get all your watering done. This is especially effective if you have staff because you don’t have to keep on top of them; you just have a checklist that they can use, and it'll track a whole bunch of data that will help you see where you're making the most money with your farm and what crops are not that efficient.
So having that software at hand and that data is really valuable. The first thing I’d recommend is having these low-cost automation solutions. Obviously, there are things that are higher cost, like tray washers and soil mixing machines and things like that. Those are important, and if your farm is big enough that it makes sense to buy those, definitely do, but you always want to go after the low-hanging fruit first—low-cost items that you can implement today, whether you’re a small or big farm, that will save you a ton of money and a ton of time in the long run.
So those I recommend everyone to do. Depending on the size of your farm, those higher-cost automations might make sense as well. Next is having effective tools to train staff to handle the extra workload. So, as you expand—if you’re doubling your farm, you’re going to have, in theory, double the workload. The automation will help reduce the amount of that, so maybe, let’s say we can get it instead of it being double the workflow, it's 1.5 times—so a 50% higher amount of workflow, but you have double the revenue, which is great!
So that’s kind of the goal. As you scale, you have this automation in place. Having said that, you're still going to have extra workload. At a certain point, every farm comes to this conclusion that they can't do everything themselves, including myself, which took, you know, maybe too long for me to recognize and accept. You’ll have to train staff; you're going to have to hire staff. Until the Tesla robot comes out, we’re going to have to hire staff to do the extra workload at our farms.
It's really important that this is done correctly because training staff is very time-consuming and energy-intensive. It may not seem like it, but it really is. When you're training someone, you're doing what you normally do, but you're also doing all this training to help your staff take over some of those tasks. There’s this period of time when there’s extra workload, and it's important to plan properly for that. You can really burn out during that transition phase, especially with everything else going on with your farm—doubling capacity, having a lot of stress on getting everything set up with sales and production, and everything else you need to do.
So, you want to do these things in advance. Preparation is really important. Having things like SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and training manuals is one thing I think is really important and easy for most people to implement. Now, video recording how you do things can be really helpful. You can always add audio above it, very easily, and just explain what you're doing. Then you have something on the equivalent of paper on your computer that shows your staff how things are to be done. This is the easiest way to do it because you’re already doing these tasks right now, and it's just recording the video of you doing it and then adding in audio on top of it explaining why and what you're doing.
This is so important to avoid broken telephone. One thing that can often happen is let's say you hire your first staff; you teach them a certain way, and then you get them to teach the next person, and then they teach the next person. There are going to be all these small things that change over time as they’re taught by different people. If you have something that's recorded by you—the person that has been doing it the longest—it'll ensure that there's less broken telephone as time goes on and as you build up a team and expand your farm. I think this is crucial—something that I wish I had been told when I started hiring people.
Hope that helps! The last thing is, I see this a lot where people, as they expand, want to offer more and more products, and this can be positive if it's in line with your production system. For example, if you're growing Micro Greens and you want to add a new Micro Green that fits in with your timeframe—let’s say you limit it to "I only want to grow crops that take two weeks or less," as an example—and you find a crop that's profitable and in demand.
This goes back to the last podcast episode for anyone listening or a few episodes ago where I talk about choosing the right crops. So if it works with that model of choosing a crop that's profitable and makes sense, add that in as you expand—that's totally fine. But what I see happening more and more is people are trying to sell dried Micin products as supplements like AG1 or salad dressings that have their basil in it. This is almost like running a separate new business. People don't always realize that you're pretty much creating a whole new production system.
You have your Micin production system, and then you're creating a new production system and a brand new product line that’s related but not the same production process. You’re pretty much starting another business in a way. I think it's really important to stick to your product offerings that are profitable and scalable. For example, if you want to do dried Micin, you want to do a powdered Micin product; you have a whole different production line.
You have to create the Micin in the same way, but then you have this extra step of drying the Micro Greens, blending them up, packaging them—most likely in a different type of packaging because it’s a dried product—getting distribution for that, selling that product, marketing that product. It’s a whole other business that may not appear like that at first, but once you start doing it, you’ll see it really is another business and if it’s not as profitable as growing the Micin (which most likely it won't be, just based on the high profitability of Micin), it would make more sense to stick with growing Micin and selling Micin as a fresh product and getting that to be more efficient or getting more sales for that would be a more effective use of your time than starting another “business.”
I think this is really, really important. Luckily, this was something that I didn’t have to learn the hard way because I kind of understood the business side of that and how important it is to stick to a core product offering. But for those of you that are considering that, I don’t want to discourage you from it—I just want you to understand how much time that can really take up because it can be significant, and it can lead you away from making a really profitable Micin Farm.
Next question: "Any recommendations on staying productive if you miss a week or two of deliveries?"
So, I was a lot more strict with myself than I think most people are to the point that I missed one delivery in 10 years. It was due to a very difficult situation where a lot of people had COVID, and I had too much going on. I was actually filming the Freedom Farmers course—the How to Start Business from Scratch course that week—and it was just way too hectic. I was like, "We're just going to cancel this one harvest and move on."
It was hard to take the loss on it because it was a lot of money—I think it was like five or six thousand dollars for that harvest—but I was like, "This is not practical." Everyone's burnt out because so many people had COVID and all this stuff. There was one time early on when I was working on my own, and I had some sort of stomach bug. It was really bad, and I still went in and did the work.
So pretty much what I would do is I would sit for five minutes and then—because I was so exhausted—get up, do the work, feel exhausted five minutes later, sit down, and get back up. It took forever to do the work, but I got it done. Having said that, I wouldn't recommend that; I don’t think that’s very good for your personal health, so that was something I just had a lot of drive for, and I really didn't want to disappoint customers, but I wouldn’t recommend going that far.
If you miss a week or two of deliveries every once in a while, I think people can understand. Life happens; it’s just the way the world is. Especially the last few years, I think people are more accepting of, like, if you're sick, not to expect you to go out of your way and do something that you really shouldn’t be doing because you're sick.
So I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Of course, you have to keep in mind when you're missing deliveries that you’re potentially damaging the relationship with customers. If you do this all the time—like say, “Hey, I’m going to be on vacation for the next month; I’m not going to be doing deliveries”—it may cause some people to leave and go find another Micin farm to buy from. That’s not guaranteed, but you know, if you have, let's say, a thousand customers, you may find some that are like, "Hey, I want my Micin every week," while most of them will be totally accommodating and understanding, but keep that in mind when making those decisions—especially with vacation.
If you know, obviously if you're sick, I think people are more understanding, but if you're like, “Hey, I’m going to Hawaii for two weeks; I won’t have your Micr Greens,” people may not be as receptive to that. So just keep that in mind. But, you know, you can't expect someone to be on the ball 365 days a year; it's just not practical, and people have lives, so just keep that in mind. At the same time, remember that customers will be affected and to keep that in your decision-making process.
Next question: "I want to sell to restaurants, but I'm not sure how to price my products. How should I approach this?"
This is a great question! What I found, which is kind of fun—I think it's like a detective kind of way of finding out what you should sell your product to restaurants—is to contact a few distributors that carry Micr Greens in your area and ask for a price list.
If you say you're a micro farm, they might not give you the price list, so, worst case scenario, you can just say, "Hey, I’m considering opening a restaurant, and I just want to find out what the price of Mic Greens are." Once you have that—so that’s what I did—that's the easiest way to find out what the price is in your local area. Once you get that from a few different distributors, you don’t want to rely on one; you want to contact a few different ones.
Most restaurants are going to order from distributors, so that’s where you’re going to find what the price point is. Once you have that, you know what they’re currently paying for Micr, which is a huge piece of information that'll help you determine what to charge.
Now, there are different approaches: you can charge the same for the same size, which, in my opinion, makes it the easiest switch. If, let’s say, it’s a 4-ounce clamshell they’re currently buying, it's much easier to sell it in a 4-ounce clamshell than to sell it in a 3-ounce clamshell because the chefs just want to know; they're busy. The same thing with the distributors; they want to know, "Hey, I’m getting this product in the same size; this is what the price is." It’s an easy comparison for them and an easy switch because they know how much they’re ordering.
So if a chef is ordering five clamshells of basil every week, then if you start changing it from 4 ounces to 3 ounces, they’re less likely to want to switch because it makes it harder for them to switch. As simple as it is, which is just a simple math calculation really, they don’t want to do that. They want to know, “Okay, I like this product better, and everything's exactly the same, so it’s an easy switch.”
Now, with price, there are a couple options. If you think your product is much higher quality, then you can go in at the same price. If you think your product is the same quality, you have to incentivize that distributor to want to carry that product. The best way to do that is generally with price, so I would offer something about 10%—maybe 50% lower than what they’re currently paying, and you’ll still make a very good margin on that.
Then you always have the option in the future to raise it back up to be in line once you have success. You can always do these early promotions whether it's with retail stores or restaurants, offer steep discounts to get in the door, and then slowly raise it back up to what the market level of price is. That will make it a lot easier to get into these types of places if you're struggling to get in, because price is obviously a big factor in those decisions for distributors, for restaurants, for retail stores, etc.
Next question: "My last crop of sunflower had some brown divots in a lot of the leaves. Any ideas what may have caused that?"
I've seen this a few times, and generally speaking, what I have seen is it's a seed issue. If there was some sort of, let’s say, mold or any sort of issue in the growing environment when the seeds were forming, you may find some seeds have these brown, beige, or yellow spots on the cotyledons as they’re growing, which is the first set of leaves. That’s really all you eat for sunflower, which is the cotyledons.
That is something that can happen, and there’s really not much you can do about it other than get another lot of seed. Now, keep in mind, if there are just a few of them—in a tray, you have thousands of sunflowers—if you have like five of them in a tray, I wouldn’t worry about it. If, let’s say, half of the leaves have that, then that's obviously a huge issue and you want to find another lot of seed. So from what I’ve seen, there’s not really much you can do other than find another lot of seed that doesn’t have that issue.
So, yeah, that’s the simple and quick answer for that!
Next question is, "Do you keep your greens under the lights for the same amount of time, or do you keep some longer or shorter?"
I've always kept them the same for all the crops, but having said that, there are ways to optimize your system to save electricity costs or to increase the yield on some really slow-growing crops. Some crops can handle 24 hours of light, but where I am, we’re under time of use, which means electricity is really expensive for six hours of the day.
Here I have some crops growing behind me, and I’m really excited; I’m going to do some YouTube videos on doing testing between the white and purple lights and a bunch of other tests, so stay tuned for that on YouTube; those will come out soon.
Where I was going with this is you can do testing and optimize for certain crops. For example, peas and sunflowers—you can probably get away with 12 hours instead of 18 if you really wanted to. It’s hard to say for sure because I haven’t done this testing yet and whether it’s going to affect the yield or quality. My guess is you’re going to have longer stems, which they already have. Pea shoots and sunflowers already have long stems, so that’s not something—you can just cut a little bit higher. You’re probably going to get a little bit lower nutrition levels because the light gives the plant energy to absorb the nutrients in the soil.
So if you have less light, you have less nutrition. Those are really the only two crops that I would lower to below 18 hours. There are certain crops I would definitely not increase beyond 18 hours; basil is an example because it is native to India, and it's in an area where it’s very used to having about 12 hours of light a day.
So when you give basil 24 hours of light, it grows really weird. It gets these bizarre morphology; it looks like something out of a plant horror movie or something. It just gets really bumpy and looks like it has some disease, but it's not a disease; it’s just too much light, and the plant literally can’t handle it.
But for a lot of crops, like lettuces and many brassicas, they can handle 24 hours, but you’re going to get a very minimal marginal increase in production unless your light levels are really low. If you’re using one or two lights, then you're going to definitely see benefits increasing it to 24 hours from 18; if you’re using three lights, you’ll find there might be some benefit, but it’s probably not worth the extra electricity cost, especially if you’re on time of use like I am here, where you're paying double or triple for electricity during those six hours of the day. So I just have the lights off, and that’s what I recommend for anyone that is on time of use.
Next question: "Are there any inexpensive tray soil fillers out there? We're growing rapidly and I'm worried about keeping up as we ramp up production."
Again, awesome that you're growing rapidly! I think that's great. It’s important to manage this, so it’s great that you're asking this question because as you ramp up production, you want to ensure that it’s not a linear increase in the amount of work. Ideally, if you’re doubling, you want to have less than double the work, and that means you're getting more efficient.
As for soil tray fillers, there are some that are in the roughly $7,000 to $8,000 Canadian price point—maybe $6,000 US is about the cheapest you can get buying one new. Those are not the best tray fillers, but they're much faster than doing it by hand, that’s for sure! The one that I know of that I used is called the SB05, and it's made by SB Machinery in Quebec. That's what we used before we upgraded to a larger soil mixing machine.
Going from soil mixing by hand to that is a huge upgrade; it’s, in my opinion, well worth the money. But once you go to the really good soil mixing machines that have conveyor belts and that really are fast to fill trays—like it just put it in on the other side and it spits out five seconds later—those are great to have, whereas these less expensive ones are still much faster but are not going to be as efficient, so you got to keep that in mind.
Another exciting update regarding inexpensive tray soil fillers would be with the cedar. I had this idea to create something similar to the cedar but for mixing or not for mixing soil but for filling trays. So you just put soil in this, and then you roll it across the tray, and it’ll fill and flatten the soil evenly. That’s something that is still in the idea phase, but I think we’re going to implement it, and I think it might even be less expensive than the cedar.
That would be a great dual toolkit for people to have when they're running smaller Micin Farms, especially for the soil mixer. You’d still want a proper soil mixing machine at some point, but this’ll be a good option for people that want to have something portable, that doesn't take up much space, is easy to use, and is inexpensive.
So me and James at Vertigro are probably going to start working on that later this year. It’s not something that’s going to be out in the next three or four months, but I’ll keep you guys updated on that because I think it’ll be another revolutionary tool for farms to have that can speed up the seeding and soil mixing process.
Next question: "What are your thoughts on adding silica packs to clamshells to capture excess moisture?"
So I thought about this a lot early on, and they are not that expensive. Having said that, I don’t think they’re necessary. If your greens are really wet, they’re definitely going to help wick away moisture from the greens, but if your greens are soaking wet, that's just like throwing a band-aid on the solution rather than actually figuring out what's causing the problem, which is most likely either seed density, moisture in your space, or not using enough air flow prior to harvest.
Having those things would make a lot more sense to fix the problem rather than trying to find a band-aid solution that also costs money, right? Because for each clamshell you sell, you have to put one of these silica packs in if that's the route you want to take to keep the product lasting longer. I would recommend just ensuring the greens are dry before harvesting by having good airflow prior to harvest.
So adding a fan on high speed for 12 to 24 hours before harvesting those trays will make a huge difference. That’ll save you from having to spend money on these silica packs, and a fan will be much cheaper in the long run than having a silica pack for each clamshell, even if they’re like five or 10 cents. It does take away from the profitability of your farm, which, as much as we can, we want to avoid.
Next question: "Is it okay to spray the seeds during germination with diluted Zerotol if I see the beginning of mold growth spreading? If not, what is an acceptable solution or method for dealing with this?"
So first off, yes, it’s totally okay. Zerotol is approved for the spraying of crops at a certain dilution rate, so it’s going to be more diluted than if you're using it to disinfect trays. You've got to keep that in mind. On the label, it has full directions on what is safe to spray on crops versus spraying to disinfect. You want to make sure you stay within those ranges because you potentially could damage the seed.
This has happened: if you sprayed Zerotol on the leaves of Micro Greens at the dilution rate for disinfecting trays, you’ll find that the leaves will get bumpy, pretty much trying to defend itself from the peroxide and vinegar that’s really trying to kill the plant, in simple terms. So, you want to have the right dilution rate, and Zerotol is totally safe at the right dilution rate to manage mold.
Having said that, I did this early on in my farming journey, and I found it’s much more efficient just to add vermiculite on top of your seeds as a way to prevent mold. It’s actually more time-efficient, and at a certain point, you will get to where you’ll realize time is the most valuable resource in this world, and I want to maximize my time.
When you get to that point, you can switch from Zerotol to vermiculite. It’ll probably cost a bit more to be honest to use vermiculite, but you get a bunch of different benefits from it; mold prevention is just one of them. So you can try that and maybe test that out. See if it helps, which it definitely will. I’ve had many either consultative clients or people that have been listening to the podcast or following on Instagram tell me how much vermiculite has helped them, so I’d definitely recommend trying that at least as a test to see if it helps or eliminates that issue.
So we’re going to do one last question here: "What is the difference between white colored light and purple colored light?"
This is a great question! I think there are a lot of misconceptions in the industry about this, and this is why I’m doing this test you can see behind me—to showcase the differences between the two. I don’t want to say for sure yet, but from my experience, we’ll see what the tests show. From my experience, you’re going to have better growth with purple colored lights because they're much more efficient for growing plants.
The science behind this is you have pretty much two wavelengths that are peak photosynthesis production in plants: one is a blue spectrum light that's around 460 nanometers, and a red spectrum light that's roughly 660 nanometers. Those two lights combined will be much more efficient for plants to absorb light and energy than yellow-green colored light, which is what most white light is. It's mostly green and yellow; it's a full spectrum of white light, but it's much more predominant in the green and yellow spectrum.
In the green-yellow spectrum, the plants still absorb that light; they just don’t absorb it as efficiently. So, it takes more electricity to get the same output; or in the case behind me, you have the same amount of electricity, and in theory, you should have higher yields or more production with the purple lights because there’s more energy hitting the plant. That’s really the difference between the two.
The reason white colored light is more popular is really because of the cannabis industry. At a certain amount of light level, so if you get to the really high, you know, thousand-watt lights used to grow cannabis or tomatoes—things like that—fruiting crops, or flowering crops, you can’t put 100% of the light in those blue and red spectrum bands because at a certain point, the plants can’t absorb any more of that light.
So you hit a peak, and then beyond that, the plants can’t really absorb more of that light. When you have a white colored light, you’re giving a full spectrum of these different wavelengths, and the plant can absorb all of them because there’s not too much of any of them. My guess is a plant can probably only absorb so much of the green and yellow light as well. Now this is just me speculating, not actual science, but my guess is that.
If you had the opposite situation where you’re only giving yellow or green light, you would have the same issue occur and you'd have to add in purple or red light to increase the yield beyond that. So the cannabis industry has obviously taken over, especially as it’s become legal in Canada and then in the United States—decriminalized and legal in more States every year.
The industry is growing and that's a much bigger industry than Micr, so the tendency is to produce products that are geared toward the cannabis industry instead of the Micr industry. So that’s why you see more white colored light, but the purple light is much, much better. Some people call them the blurple lights; they’re much more efficient for growing Micr because you don't need to give that much electricity or that much energy for Micr compared to fruiting or flowering crops.
That’s really why I recommend purple lights. Now, having said that it’s really nice to have white light. I’ve been growing under purple lights for, I think, nine years since the first year I used fluorescents, and then after that, I switched to purple LEDs. It’s really nice to actually grow with the white light from just an aesthetic perspective; it’s easy to get pictures of the crops. I’m doing a time-lapse right now of the crops growing, and it just doesn’t look as good with the purple lights, so you don’t get the vibrancy of the greens and purples and all that sort of stuff in the Mic Greens.
I think it’s really great to have it from that perspective, but from a growing perspective and an efficiency perspective, the purple lights just make a whole lot more sense.
Hope this helps you guys on your Micin journey, whether you're a beginner or an established business. If anyone is interested in starting a Micin business or learning a lot more about starting a Micin business, feel free to go to jonah.freedomfarmers.com, and you can get a free Micin training on how to start a Micin business from your home in just six square feet. It’s a great free resource, and then at the end, you get a really steep discount to a full business-in-a-box Micin course that I’ve created with Freedom Farmers—thousands of students have started farms with it, and it's a really great resource for anyone looking to start or learn a lot more about running a Micin business.
Even for those, there are lots of students that have taken that course who have established Micin businesses and found a ton of value from the course. So feel free to check that out at jonah.freedomfarmers.com.
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Until next time, let curiosity fuel your growth, and may happiness be your harvest. Happy growing! [Music]