Ways Emerging Technology Can Improve Your Cannabis Crop
October 7, 2021 
Cannabis growers can use PowerScore to receive competitive performance benchmarks comparing facility key performance indicators to the average. Photo: Resource Innovation Institute
Editor’s Note: Neda Vaseghi, the CEO and co-founder of Microclimates, a software company in controlled environment agriculture (CEA), also contributed to this article. Vaseghi is responsible for running all facets of the business. She has a proven track record of managing teams and more than 25 years of experience driving business growth. Prior to Microclimates, she held various roles at Merieux NutriSciences, a global food safety company, where she was responsible for North America Mergers & Acquisition. Her passion for agriculture and sustainability started early on at the University of Washington School of Public Health. Neda holds a Bachelor of Science & MBA.
Greenhouse technology continues to improve to serve business needs so growers can achieve excellence in efficiency and crop production. While hardware solutions monitor conditions in the field, software solutions connect disparate systems together, make sense of data, and benchmark performance for cultivation operations seeking to get ahead of issues and optimize facility key performance indicators (KPIs).
Resource Innovation Institute is a non-profit organization committed to cultivating a better future for all of humanity. Our consortium of members brings perspectives from across the field — uniting architects and engineers, growers and operators, researchers and analysts. Together, we lead the measurement, verification, and celebration of the world’s most efficient agricultural ideas. In this article, RII’s Technical Director and members of the organization’s Technical Advisory Council working groups highlight several new emerging software tools that help growers optimize for maximum yields and benchmark for KPIs.
Emerging software solutions, for example, are demonstrating value to growers using supplemental lighting. The 2021 Greenhouse Grower Medal of Excellence winners were celebrated at Cultivate in Columbus, OH, in July. Several companies combining hardware and software were finalists for the Technology of the Year award. The winner was Candidus Adaptive Lighting Control, for its Daily Light Integral (DLI) control solution. Candidus software uses information from greenhouse controllers to inform dimming strategies to ensure crops receive target DLI and help facilities save energy and become more efficient. Greenhouse operators using technology to maximize production should also consider integrating their control systems and benchmarking resource efficiency to validate performance.
Integrating Controls
According to RII Technical Advisory Council Controls Working Group member Microclimates, the controlled environment agriculture industrial revolution is underway, and businesses can leverage automation, data exchange, and software solutions to build resilient and smart farms. As growers deploy lighting controls and other strategies to control greenhouse environments, integrating environmental controls with software maximizes the benefits of building system automation.
Microclimates provide a software solution that optimizes grow environments using unified control and harmonized data. In today’s controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) facilities, most systems operate in closed silos. They are independent from one another and can often perform well on their own, but can perform better if connected and able to communicate with other greenhouse systems.
With Microclimates software, data integrated from unique systems harmonizes on one platform to continuously improve the operation. Photo: Microclimates
Microclimates addresses complex system integrations by deploying a unified controller that provides simplicity by reducing the number of controllers to manage. This controller is programmed by software that tracks system performance and empowers growers with a single software interface.
Data integrated from systems harmonizes on one platform to continuously improve the operation. Integrated controls monitor conditions, let systems communicate and inform one another, and offer a facility-level view of combined data from greenhouse systems so everyone can observe how mission-critical systems respond. Greater efficiency gains are realized through ongoing engagement with information from integrated controls and analysis platforms. Insights from alerts and reports can help growers update Standard Operating Procedures and controls sequences. As changes are made, benchmarks of key performance indicators can verify improvements. Over time, more systems can be integrated and controlled from the unified controller platform.
By optimizing the environment, identifying issues, and benchmarking, MicroClimates operators begin to realize a reduction in labor, improved energy usage, and control over crop yields.
“We seek to transform the horticultural landscape in the Caribbean, starting with eliminating the import of cool weather crops and those vulnerable to tropical conditions,” says J.C. Chidiac, Horticultural Engineer at Island Growers. “Our approach is designed to be as sensible and lean as possible, minimizing inputs all around and maximizing outputs sustainably.”
Island Growers’ partnership with Microclimates on monitoring, automation, and a data analysis platform, Chidiac says, gives the operation more tools for optimization. This includes:
- A high-resolution map of environmental conditions through strategic and widespread data collection, which helps detect potential issues quickly and stay on top of them.
- An ability to control all electromechanical devices remotely, which allows Island Growers to make changes promptly and facilitate oversight management of multiple farms on different islands.
- Record-keeping functionality, which helps seamlessly integrate environmental, production, inventory, and personnel data.
- Business analytics, which creates the potential for rapid and constant improvement on all fronts so that a business can become more efficient, sustainable, and streamlined.
Benchmark for KPIs
While quantifying the benefits of hardware and software solutions and using intelligent software to control and monitor building systems and optimize environmental conditions can be advantageous, measuring improvements can be tough without standardized key performance indicators and calculations. This is why benchmarking is a grower’s best friend to quantifying continuous improvements.
Resource Innovation Institute’s PowerScore is a not-for-profit resource benchmarking platform that benchmarks energy, water, and emissions key performance indicators for controlled-environment agriculture operations. The PowerScore platform accepts facility information in a variety of ways. Growers of all crops can fill out an online survey of questions to describe their operation and get KPIs to compare performance year over year. Cannabis growers can receive competitive performance benchmarks comparing facility KPIs to the averages of the dataset.
The PowerScore software solution has provided benchmarks for hundreds of facilities so operators can understand their year-over-year performance and improve their resource efficiency and productivity. Optimize greenhouse energy use, water efficiency, and space utilization using real data from the field to inform business decisions. Prove the value of hardware and software solutions with continuous benchmarking against your year-over-year baseline, and learn from the average performance of other growers.
Keep an eye out for additional tips in Resource Innovation Institute’s next peer-reviewed Best Practices Guide on Automation & Controls for Cannabis Producers, coming soon. Consider benchmarking your greenhouse operation with PowerScore. Dig deeper by joining RII and participating in its Technical Advisory Council working groups.
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