The Best Grow Tech For 2020

from CannaB2B Magazine Fall 2020 Edition

West Coast Gifts

The commercial cannabis industry is growing and evolving at a blistering pace. What was completely illegal just a few short years ago has blossomed into a multi-billion dollar industry in what seems like the blink of an eye. Cannabis stocks are bought and traded on the stock market right alongside Apple, Google, and Tesla. With laws changing on an almost-daily basis, commercial grow facilities are popping up all over the United States. As the industry expands, the technology used is advancing incredibly quickly as well. As we head into 2020, CannaB2B Magazine would like to shed some light on the technology cannabis businesses should all be paying special attention to in the upcoming year.

For Commercial Facilities: Gorilla Commercial Lighting DE Pro Series Grow Lights

Since its inception in 2012, Gorilla Grow Tent has quickly become the worldwide authority in grow tents, introducing a level of quality and design that had never before been seen in indoor gardening enclosures. Gorilla has now turned that same passion for quality towards horticultural lighting and has recently introduced the Gorilla DE Pro Series grow light.

The Gorilla DE Pro Series sets itself apart from the competition in its use of low-frequency, square-wave design. Almost all standard sine-wave fixtures operate at a high-frequency of roughly 120,000 hertz; whereas square-wave ballasts run at about 120 hertz, allowing the maximum voltage to be provided to the lamp for a longer period of time. This produces more photons for your plant, eliminates RF interference, and produces less stress on the fixture. This improves the performance of the lamp and allows it to run cooler. All this adds up to a more reliable, better performing grow light.

The low-frequency square-wave design of the Pro Series DE ensures stable power resulting in optimum PPF, less depreciation of output, and increases the lamp’s lifespan by 50% when compared to more common high-frequency sine-wave ballasts. Perhaps most importantly, the Gorilla

Pro Series DE boasts a failure rate of less than 0.1%, which translates to less labor, less downtime, and higher profit margins for commercial facilities.

“The square wave technology in the Gorilla DE Pro Series is considerably more expensive to produce, but when you’re a commercial facility, the reliability of your fixtures is absolutely vital to the success of your business,” Gorilla’s CEO Rory Kagan

told CannaB2B. “We want to ensure that our customers are set up for success. Square wave technology puts so much less stress on these fixtures, it increases the lifespan of your bulbs by 50% and the failure rate drops to nearly nothing. In an industry where a single failure can be catastrophic for your harvest, this is a real game-changer.”

Gorilla’s DE grow light sports an optimized reflector design for broad, even PPFD throughout the footprint with no hot spots, and a durable powder-coated enclosure ensuring correct reflector form factor and eliminating the potential for dangerously hot exposed metal that can often plague DE grow lights. Additionally, the internal components are silicon coated to protect against humidity and dust, and the overengineered heatsink and properly designed thermals ensure the light will run cooler than any other DE on the market.

The DE Pro Series has been designed to withstand the rigors of the ever-growing commercial cannabis cultivation industry. These plug and play fixtures include internal ballast, industryleading 1000w lamp, and optional Gorilla Commercial intelligent digital lighting controller capable of controlling over 500 luminaires simultaneously. They can also run certain CMH bulbs as well as traditional HPS bulbs.

The Gorilla DE Pro Series promises to be a significant step forward in the horticultural lighting space, providing muchneeded reliability and durability for commercial facilities.

Double-ended HPS grow lights like the Gorilla DE Pro Series have reigned supreme in the commercial grow space for a long time for a reason: you can’t argue with the results they produce. HPS fixtures produce great yields! But smart growers are starting to see the tremendous benefits of the targeted spectrums provided by LED fixtures, and are finding ways to introduce them into their grow rooms. Kind LED Grow Lights is one of the companies leading this charge with their X-Series supplemental bar lights, which provide ideal solutions for both vegetative and flowering applications A large percentage of commercial growers are switching their veg rooms to 100% LED grow lights due to the targeted spectrum and tremendous cost-savings LED grow lights provide. The vegetative spectrum of Kind LED’s single-sided and double-sided X-Series bar lights considerably speeds up growth times and provides lush growth, and strong, healthy roots.

Many professional growers are now incorporating supplemental LED bar lights into their flowering rooms as well. Their tremendous versatility makes them a great option for vertical farming, greenhouses, and providing supplemental light for under-canopy growth. The X-Series bar lights can be hung horizontally and vertically, which makes them a great solution for vertical racking systems, seedlings, dedicated veg rooms, and even vertical grow towers. Commercial facilities running HPS lighting have begun to use X-Series flowerspectrum bars as supplemental lighting. The extra wattage helps to boost yields, while the targeted flower spectrum boosts terpene production and potency during the flowering stage. While traditional HPS grow lights have long been the choice for facilities looking to optimize yields, introducing LED fixtures provides much-needed UV wavelengths that have been proven to stimulate trichome production, leading to a substantial increase in terpene levels and potency. By pairing these two sources of lighting, facilities can produce the yields they want, while increasing the potency and quality of those yields considerably.

For Commercial Facilities: Kind LED X-Series Bar Light

Available in a variety of formats, the X-Series includes the single-sided X40 and X80, and the double-sided XD75 and XD150, both of which promise to produce 50% faster and stronger growth than any other supplemental lighting option currently on the market. All products in the X-Series range feature a perfect blend spectrum, and are available in either a flower or vegetative integrations, providing ideal photon emissions in every essential wavelength along the photosynthetic spectrum. Additionally, the X-Series line offers ideally tuned photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) delivering optimal concentration and quantity of photon energy from canopy surface to the base of the plant.

All X-Series lights have an IP65 (Ingress Protection) rating that ensures the safety of using them in the harsh conditions of commercial greenhouses. An IP65 rating means that the lights are completely dust-tight and can also handle the spray from a 6.3mm water nozzle from any direction with no harmful effects.

Simply due to the tremendous versatility of these bar lights, we believe the X-Series absolutely belongs on the list of grow tech to keep your eyes on in 2020. We can’t imagine an indoor cultivation environment that would not benefit in some way from the versatility and targeted spectrum of these lights.

More than half of the people in the United States own some sort of “smart home” device, so it’s no surprise that such devices are finally starting to emerge in the cultivation market. Kind LED Grow Lights recently launched the new K5 WiFi XL1000, a significant update to its award-winning K5 XL1000 fixture. A newly integrated on-board computer with a wireless command center, an easy-to-read LCD interface, and amplified UV diodes makes this an ideal solution for growers from beginner professionals, and a must for retailer’s shelves. And it has to be said, the sleek gray paint job looks pretty great as well.

The all-new web-based Kind Command Center gives growers the ability to set their timers and light spectrum for multiple grow lights from the convenience of a computer or mobile device, eliminating the need to manually program individual lights or rely on third-party controller devices. The Command Center also offers a large menu of preprogrammed lighting schedules from seedling to late flowering stages, incorporating sunrise and sunset intensity changes to mimic mother nature and increase overall plant health. Growers also have the ability to customize and save their own timers and lighting recipes based on the unique needs of their plants.

The K5 WiFi greatly amplifies quality and potency, with enhanced UV diodes to increase terpene and flavor profiles. The proven 12-band spectrum significantly increases flower density and harvest weight with re-calibrated secondary optical lenses that focus light intensity and deliver up to 200% greater canopy penetration. The K5 WiFi XL1000 is a 630w fixture but provides all the power of a 1,000w HPS fixture. Kind’s 12-band spectrum ensures that all of the light being produced by the fixture is actually absorbed by the plant, and not wasted and turned into heat.

LED grow lights have become considerably more common in both commercial facilities and home grows because of the tremendous benefits of growing with LED technology. LED grow lights require 40-50% less electricity to operate than their HPS counterparts, and can completely eliminate the need for additional AC and cooling infrastructure. This reduces both cost and carbon footprint. Top-performing fixtures like those from Kind LED are even able to achieve this while increasing harvest quality and without sacrificing yield. Additionally, while traditional grow lights typically carry a 5,000-hour lifespan, LED technology remains highly effective up to a whopping 100,000 hours. It’s also been proven that the targeted spectrum provided by Kind LED fixtures significantly increase trichome production, increasing terpenes by up to 80% and providing improved potency. Kind LED Grow Lights was established in 2013 and quickly made a name for themselves as one of the best LED grow light companies on the market today, being honored by High Times magazine with their S.T.A.S.H. Gear of the Year four times since 2014.

Kind LED’s reputation for quality combined with the added convenience of wireless control makes this an easy choice for one of the products to keep your eyes on in 2020.

Liquid nutrients have reigned supreme in the home grow market for a long time; however growers in the commercial space have been transitioning to powdered nutrients because of the cost-effectiveness and ease of use, and home growers have begun to follow suit as well. Due to the difficulty in combining essential macro and micronutrients, most nutrient companies package them separately, forcing a grower to buy as many as a dozen separate products in order to obtain all of the nutrients cannabis plants need throughout their lifecycle. Liquid nutrient programs can often be complicated and bulky, due mostly to the abundance of plain water included in every mix.

A relative newcomer in the nutrient market, Lotus Nutrients blends all the essential nutrients into a simple three-part system formulated by medical growers and specifically designed for medicinal plants. Their water-soluble powdered nutrients are quickly becoming a preferred choice for commercial agriculture and a great solution for new home growers, and work in both hydroponic and soil growth environments.

Lotus Nutrients was founded by a team of Northern California growers, scientists, and horticulturists with decades of cultivation experience. Frustrated with the glut of

overly complicated liquid nutrients on the market, they united with one goal—to create the benchmark for pure medicinalgrade plant nutrients. Specially formulated for medicinal plants, Lotus Nutrients are comprised of 15 unique, raw, natural ingredients including 13 essential macro and microelements as well as raw materials in seaweed plant extract, humalite, and plant protein hydrolysate.

Lotus Pro Series Nutrients feature a simplified 3-part powderbased formula that promises to outperform any 8, 9 or 10 part liquid recipe. The naturally formulated recipe is also dust-free, 100 percent water-soluble, dye-free and anti-caking, with no fillers.

Lotus Grow aids in producing thick stems, tight internodal spacing, dense canopy development, and massive roots, while Bloom is designed to trigger rapid on-set of flowering by providing plants with all necessary components needed for strong development. Finally, Boost is the turbo-charged secret weapon that leads to unsurpassed size and density of flowers while maximizing oil production for increased potency and taste.

Lotus powdered nutrients are absolutely something to consider for commercial facilities, and something retailers should be stocking on their shelves. While liquid nutrients have dominated the market for a considerable time, they can be needlessly bulky and complicated, and growers are getting tired of spending money on nutrient systems that are largely made up of plain ol’ water.

For Everyone: Lotus Premium Nutrients