High On Green Mountain by James Bridges Herbage Magazine
Once, when I was very young, my little sister, brother, and I went on a canoe trip with my grandparents. Some of my most cherished memories come from the adventure road trips with them. One day it was a different kind of an adventure. We found ourselves in a bit of a pickle. On one end we had my 100lb sopping wet grandmother clinging to a tree with her other hand holding onto a quickly sinking and non-user-friendly vessel as her grandchildren dog paddle to safety. Meanwhile, Gramps is swimming and trying to collect all our valuables. To say the least...it was by far one the most dramatic things to ever happen to a group of children and their grandparents while on vacation. Ever. According to the audio tapes of those children involved telling the story once they got home to mom and dad. Seriously, the tapes exist… Now on this wonderful day I can revisit an area that has been imprinted into my head as a danger zone. Today on this beautiful mountain, overlooking the winding and always intriguing Illinois river, I was able to witness this chaos of survival. I was able to witness the survival mode of something positive and uplifting. I was able to bury that danger brand I associated with the Illinois river and replace that danger association, with something positive. Green Mountain Farms in Tahlequah, OK was founded in 2018 by Mark Turner and has been pesticide-free since day one. They consider themselves pioneers in irrigation theory. What I walked into was an automation system that blew my mind. “I can go back 2 years and tell you what happened every week with battling humidity and weather conditions outside versus what is going on inside of the building. Our state-of-the-art monitoring systems help me predict what I need to do, no matter what conditions are occurring. For example, if you have a storm coming and it is going to surround your building, it could bring a hundred percent humidity for the next 6 days and you just put a new crop
in the Cure room even though we have three inches of rain already. Mother nature. She comes right in with you” Mark took a moment to shift his thoughts to vapor pressure deficit. “This is the key number I watch right here.” As he pointed at one of his many graphs on a screen, “This is the VPD, that’s what determines how stomata on the back of a marijuana leaf will open and contract based on the ambient conditions in the room.” He was teaching me something. “I am sure you have been in grow rooms where the plants look like they are praying and look happy. They are not happy. They are trying to expose the back of their leaves to as much of the atmosphere as possible and capture some CO2. She either has too much light, too much food, or not enough CO2 for her to absorb the food she is getting. VPD allows me to monitor these and find the ideal leaf temperature and humidity to grow thriving plants.” “If you can maintain the temperature within 2° plus or negative, or the humidity 2% plus or negative, you can actually watch the stomata of the plant constrict or expand on a microscope. So, I know to watch the VPD closely, this way I keep those stomata cranked wide open all the time, maximizing growth. Manipulating the watering frequency makes them believe they are going into drought, causing them to uptake more nutrients. Then if you maintain a specific moisture content, voilá, magic.” I felt like I was talking to a baseball team manager at some point and other points I was listening to a Ted Talk hosted by Einstein himself. I noticed the intricacy of this new-found technology that Green Mountain Farms uses to produce some of the top-quality products in the state. “Everybody here is very passionate with good souls,” Mark said to me. “I’ve got my own fishbowl here and everybody here is a different kind of fish, swimming around trying to make it better for all the other fish in the bowl. We all work well together and they bring a passion to work every day, I love it. We soak it up and we are learning together. There ain’t like no secret deal here. When everything works together, it’s fire right?” Mark is correct. Brent Sullivan, who is a key player for Green Mountain, met Mark while he was selling vehicles at a local dealership. “Being in the car industry, I saw a lot of people that
