10 Ways Consistent Inputs Directly Impact Your Cultivation

Consistent inputs allow for consistent outputs and consistent results. Considering the one input your plants spend the most time with is the soil or substrate they’re grown in, it’s not a big leap to say there is no more important cultivation decision, particularly when it comes to crop consistency.

Consistency matters to both your business and your cultivation team – from the corporate/business roles to head grower and everyone else on the team. Everyone’s job security and the future of the company depend on consistency.

Let’s take a closer look at how consistent inputs directly affect your business from the grower perspective and the company perspective.

How Consistency Affects Your Cultivation Team

Every grower needs to deliver consistent, high quality crops – crops that manufacturers, wholesalers, and/or dispensaries want to buy and/or stock. With that said, the five most important ways that consistent inputs, like your soil or substrate, directly affect your head grower and your entire cultivation team are discussed below:

1. Improve Planning

When a grower has reliable, consistent soil or substrate, they can develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) and actually adhere to those SOPs. With effective SOPs in place, growers can increase efficiencies, improve productivity, and produce consistent results again and again.

2. Reduce Risks

Consistent soil or substrate reduces the risk of unexpected outcomes. However, it’s important to point out that not all soil and substrate brands are equal when it comes to consistency. While bio365 tests every batch of soil and substrate to a strict set of standards before selling it, other companies don’t. It’s just one of the benefits of choosing the best soil.

3. Increase Peace-of-Mind

Growers have so much to think about and worry about, but when they know they’re using soil or substrate that is reliable and consistent, they have fewer things to worry about and manage. They don’t have to second guess the media they’re growing in from one batch to the next. Instead, they can focus on that long list of other things on their minds.

4. Relieve Burdens

A significant piece of the puzzle to deliver consistent outcomes are the people on the cultivation team. When a grower can’t be certain that the inputs they’re using are consistent, then they have the burden of finding and retaining highly experienced and trained employees to fill every position. That’s tough in a tight job market, but using consistent inputs can relieve much of that burden.

5. Save Time

If there is one thing every grower wishes they had more of, it’s time. The good news is consistent media helps cultivators save a significant amount of time and energy. For example, they’ll have to spend a lot less time making grow adjustments as the examples below explain.

Examples of How Consistent Inputs Help Your Cultivation Team

Imagine a grower is using a soil or substrate that is inconsistent – there is a different level of PH in the soil delivered from one week to the next. That grower has to watch and measure very carefully and do different things every week to address the inconsistency of the inputs – things like making adjustments to the nutrient level or using different products to keep the PH level consistent.

The grower has to have a way to catch those inconsistencies, because if media with two different levels of PH are used, there could be nutrient lockout. If some nutrients are locked out one week because the PH level is too high and the next week, different nutrients are locked out because the PH is too low, that’s a big problem.

It can be difficult to define which nutrients have been locked out. It’s a huge burden that can be hard to fix. That’s because two plants with different PH levels and nutrient lockout might look the same. The grower has to take time to figure out which nutrients are locked out, and there is a chance of getting it wrong.

Another problem that inconsistent media can cause is creating a smaller buffer for margin of error. In fact, the grower won’t even know what the buffer is if the inputs are inconsistent. The plants could need more or less nutrients. The grower may have to change the feeding and watering schedules to compensate. Plants could be smaller, and the grower may not be able to deliver the promised yield or may not deliver on time.

These are just a couple of the many big problems growers can face when they use inconsistent soil and substrate. However, when growers use consistent media, they won’t have these problems and can spend more time managing the big picture rather than the weeds.

How Consistency Affects Your Business

By delivering consistent crops, your company can achieve its goals and experience measurable benefits, including the five benefits discussed below:

1. Increase Revenue and Profits

When crops are delivered consistently – yields, quality, and timing – the business can optimize its plans, forecasting, expenditures, hiring, sales, and more. Ultimately, the return on investment for every crop is maximized, and as sales go up, revenue and profits will go up as well.

2. Improve Brand Reputation

In a competitive market, an inconsistent company’s crops won’t be purchased. Wholesalers and dispensaries won’t buy from cultivators that have a great crop one week if there is no way of knowing what they’ll get if they buy from that cultivator next week. Because there is so much product available today, they don’t have to waste time considering less reliable, inconsistent cultivators. However, when a company delivers consistently high quality crops on time, their reputation will improve and more wholesalers and dispensaries will want to buy from that company.

3. Gain Shelf Space or Wholesale Orders

Depending on the state a licensed cannabis cultivator operates in, it may sell through wholesale orders to manufacturers, directly to dispensaries, or to both. For manufacturers, it’s critical that they buy consistent flower and plant material, so they produce consistent products for consumers and those products reliably pass required testing. For dispensaries, it’s essential that they stock the products budtenders want to sell and consumers want to buy. No matter what, consistency is the key to increasing sales.

4. Gain a Competitive Advantage

Consistency is essential for cultivators to gain a competitive advantage in today’s cannabis market. It can help your business compete against the black market, position itself for success when cannabis becomes legal at the federal level and interstate commerce opens, and compete against national brands (or become one yourself).

5. Improve Ability to Scale

If you don’t have consistent everything, then it’s impossible to scale your business. Cultivators need replicable, data-driven results to scale. That’s the difference between operating in the black market and being able to have a massive, legal cultivation operation – the ability to consistently produce products. No one in the black market does it, and the cultivators who do it in the legal market will win in the future.

Key Takeaways about How Consistent Inputs Affect Your Business and Team

Consistency is crucial for cannabis cultivators, and it all starts with your inputs, specifically, your soil or substrate. However, consistency only matters if you’re consistently good. With that in mind, make sure all of your inputs are always tested and proven to be clean, reliable, and top quality.

When it comes to your soil or substrate, choose bio365 to get the results you need. Contact us and talk to our soil experts to learn what the right media can do for your crops, your team, and your business.