Article Image

IPFS News Link • Agriculture

How LEDs Are Making Weed Better

• http://www.wired.com

A few years out of graduate school in botany, Paul Gray found himself tinkering with the lights for growing Green Crack. Yeah, that Green Crack: the strain of weed so strong that none other than Snoop Dogg—according to ganja lore—bestowed it such a name. Gray wasn't just messing around, though. He found that growing Green Crack under light-emitting diode lamps could make the already potent strain even stronger.

Gray works for Illumitex, one of many LED companies catering to the cannabis industry. As more states legalize recreational and medical marijuana use, the business is growing and professionalizing. And LEDs, for their part, have recently gotten cheap enough to be more than a novelty. The once-underground world of indoor cannabis growing is coming out into the light—a soothing, magenta glow from LEDs.

LEDs offer two main advantages: One, they give off specific wavelengths of light that can be fine-tuned to the plant and its stage of growth. That's why you see so much blue mixed with red, or magenta, light. (More on that later.) And two, they use way less energy—up to 60 percent less than traditional bulbs, by some accounts. Indoor marijuana farms are a notorious energy suck, and stories abound of illegal farms getting busted by their electric bills. So yes, illegal farms have an obvious incentive to cut their power bills. So do legal growers, though, who can save money and burnish their eco-conscious reputations at once.

Blue Plus Red

When Tweed, Canada's largest pot grower, was setting up shop, its plant scientist turned to the most authoritative source out there: the Internet, of course. "I can't tell you how much time I spent in the beginning looking at forums just trying to get ideas," says Kayta Boudko, who heads up R&D for the company.

Boudko found that conventional weed-growing wisdom pointed to high-intensity discharge lamps, basically the lights you see shining down on stadiums. Growers typically use metal halides for the early vegetative or "veg" phase, and high-pressure sodium lights for the flowering phase.


midfest.info