I'm Brandon. And I'm Jesse.
We're. Cannabis school having cannabis
infused conversations. With everyday.
People, Cannabis companies. Celebrities.
And your mom. Welcome to the Sesh.
All right, welcome back everybody.
For the SESH, we have got a very good friend of ours on the
podcast. Now we look for things that are
going to be able to enhance you in many different ways, from it
more of the plant medicine side to the spiritual side and
understanding exactly when you have cannabis, is it being grown
with the best products available for the.
Best way, Yeah. I mean, we learned, yeah, we
learned a. Lot we We got to learn a lot
through. Terrible investment.
A good learning opportunity. It was very expensive A.
Very expensive education. For me, but for him.
The most expensive education I've had to date.
Oh yeah, dude, I'm still paying back on my student loans, and
that shit still is. That's.
Yours is way more scary than that.
But. Without further ado, we want to
be able to introduce our friend. Now, Nick, how do you pronounce
your last name? I don't want to butcher it.
Nikolayev. Nicolaya OK, that's easy enough.
Yeah. So Nick Nicolaya from Rooted
Rooted Leaf. Rooted Leaf, These guys are I I
mean, I I really want to go into the product.
But I got to say, Nick, we really want to get a little bit
to know you and our audience know you.
So first thing, when I looked over everything, you and your
wife, martial artists, what system did you guys have
studied? We studied a Japanese style of
karate, which is pretty old school and hardcore, you know,
more traditional style. So it was not what you see
nowadays with people just kind of playing tag.
It was very much so a rough and full contact kind of martial
arts. So it developed a good
character, you know, in both myself and her.
I started when I was 8 years old and I met her when I was 19.
And you know, initially I was her sense again, she was a
student, but over a couple of years we got to know each other
really well and that kind of led to us developing a really strong
relationship outside of the Dojo and and now we're married so.
I was reading you just six months now.
Congrats. Thank you.
I appreciate that. Yeah.
We got married last September
and had a chance to fly to Hawaii for our honey movement.
Spend a lot of time there. Nice.
Yeah, it was great. So with the system that you
study, is that Kyukshin? It's related to Kyukushin.
It's a brother art of Kyukushin, it's called Quay Con and the
founder of Kyukushin studied directly with the founder of our
style. They were effectively, they had
the same sensei. So yeah, it's very, very closely
related to that. And then there's a couple of
other martial arts styles that are also very closely related.
But it's like a family or a group of very small number of
martial arts and then everything else is kind of a derivative or
an offshoot of those. Yeah, I'm, I'm.
You're speaking to another. I've been studying martial arts
since I was seven years old. I'm 45 lifelong.
I mean, I've studied from. I did a bastardized version of
Kempo Karate when I was growing up and then did Taekwondo, did
Wing Chun for about 9 years and then got into MMA styles like
Muay Thai and all that one. But I did get to practice with a
lot of Shura Khan and Kyukshin Karate stylist and I it's
exactly that like looking into your style.
I I know that style too. So hard, so brutal, but so like
actually usable. It's not flash, it's just the
body is hardened and it just gives you such amazing
character. I mean, I could see that from
the amount of of detail that you put into your work and that's
just a direct correlation to that one I would imagine so.
Absolutely, yeah. And I don't think I would be
able to do the work I'm doing today if it wasn't for, you
know, the life's worth of learning experiences that I had
from the Dojo and just learning how to overcome challenges and
obstacles. I mean, my black belt test, you
know, it takes about nine years or so to get a black belt in our
style. And my black belt test was 14
hours long and it was spread across three days and all three
days that we trained. I ended up losing 10 lbs.
Most of it was water rate obviously, but I was still
drinking 2 to 3 gallons of water and still losing 10 lbs of
weight. So just to give you some context
here, this is an opportunity to actually demonstrate and
showcase how the will of an individual can can go a lot
further than the physical body wants to go.
And so the goal or the purpose in that exam is to break you
down to the point where you can't physically go on and the
only thing that you can do is keep believing in yourself and
keep pushing yourself and mind over matter type of thing.
You eventually breakthrough to the other side and you realize
that you're a lot stronger than you thought you were in all the
moments leading up to that point of physical failure.
The goal is to encourage that point of physical failure so you
can dig really deep and try to find what is beyond that point,
man. That's amazing.
That's. No, I I one.
Hell of a journey, it sounds like.
Yeah, I I I can completely relate.
You know when I, I grew up during an era where martial arts
was truly martial arts. Like the padding on the floor
that I had was a concrete floor that was just painted on that
was smooth and the protection is you don't want to get hit in the
groin, then don't get hit in the groin.
It was truly to train you to utilize the martial art.
And I and I agree with you, A lot of martial arts these days,
you don't see a lot of martial artists.
Their younger generation, it's more of just steered towards
MMA, which is great in its own sense.
But when you look at it, the traditional, very, very
structured systems that are based on a lot of respect, not
only for your instructors but for yourself and for the system
and for those around you like it is is there something to be said
with it? It builds character.
I wish that there were more schools that built character
like that instead of being MC Dojos pumping out black belts
every September when you signed up in March.
It's just like truly like that. Like you said, I mean, it took
nine years to get up to even test to that.
The goal wasn't to sign up going mom, dad, you know, I'm going to
have my black belt and we'll have some cool display cases and
you can brag to your friends. It's not that at all.
It was truly about you and it defined who you are.
So, and I remember those times where, I mean, you'd be training
for it, it just seemed like forever.
And they're like, hey, cool. And then twice a year we'd have
a camp and that's three days straight.
It's just not like roasting marshmallows and finding some
cool lizards out there. It's like you're going to train
for morning until we can't see. And even by the sea it's going
to be by the fire. So man, a lot of respect for
that. That's says a lot about your
character. That's amazing.
And I was super excited. I see.
And it's like a family of martial arts.
I can imagine when you guys, if you guys have children, it's
going to be just it's it's just part of your culture now.
Is that something you and your wife still practice together?
We do occasionally. I mean, it's not as much as we
used to practice anymore. I'm really busy.
She's really busy. But we still make time for, you
know, it's really important for us to kind of keep that
connection, you know, alive and strong.
One of the things that I find follows me regardless of what I
do is that development of character.
You know, the things that I learned in the way that I
discipline myself and really the respect that I developed not
only for people surrounding me, but also for the style that I
practiced and realizing how much hard work it actually takes.
It kind of softens you as an individual at the same time that
it strengthens you. So you become a lot more
well-rounded. And I find that thing is
something that is integrated into me in all walks of life.
And how I do anything is how I do everything.
And it's that kind of approach that I think was really forged
into me as a young child to make sure it doesn't matter if
you're, you know, unloading the dishwasher or if this is like
the make or break kind of, you know, opportunity in life.
You have to give it your all in every single moment of your
life. Anything that you do and
everything that you do should be done with passion, and it should
be done with the kind of vigor that you know defines what a
black belt really is, that you know at the core of what it
means to be, you know, the heart and soul or black belt.
Amen. It sounds like you take that
heart and soul and passion into every part and every aspect of
your life at this point. What led you?
Or like what was the initial passion that found like that you
found in rooted leaf? Well, you know, there's an
interesting story to be told about tea, I guess.
You know, I'm a big tea connoisseur.
Yeah, I was hearing. That some like 30 like $30 a
gram teas, 20 to $30 a gram teas, do you actually.
Drink. That.
Yeah, yeah. You know, in some cases they do
get very expensive. I think the most expensive tea
that I have tried thus far is, is about $8 a gram.
And it comes from a very limited production region.
The total quantity produced is very small.
And these are typically teas that are reserved for
dignitaries that are traveling, like presidents, I think, I
think Richard Nixon and all the way up to Barack Obama.
You know, they would get tea when they visited China for
their political trips. They would get teas that come
out of this particular garden and some of the surrounding
regions as well. But you know the the types of
teas that I prefer to drink on a daily basis, these are Phoenix
Oolong. So it's a type of oolong tea
coming from a very small geographic region called the
Phoenix Mountain range and they happen to have the oldest
standing history of oolong production that's also
remarkably complex and intricate.
I feel like the manufacturing techniques associated with
making these teas represent 1000 plus your journey that humans
have been having, you know, in conjunction direct conjunction
with nature. Part of it is informed by their
breeding practices, which takes 20 to 30 years to select for the
corrected genotypes and the correct phenotypes.
And then there's also this fine tuning of processing techniques
that are applied. And in some cases the teas may
take upwards of one year just to finish making and then they rest
for another two to three years before they're actually ready to
be consumed. So.
Isn't even the curing process. That's just like because the
resting I'm guessing is the curing stage then that you're
talking about or is that a separate like is that kind of
inclusive all together in the curing stage?
Yeah. You know, there's various phases
to the manufacturing process. Initially the, the initial
stages could take anywhere from a few months up to maybe 8 to 12
months at most. And then that you know,
additional two or three years could just be a curing process
to allow the tea leaves to kind of mature into the techniques
applied to them. Because a lot of times we'll
you'll apply these techniques and then for the next six months
the constituents of the leaf will continue to transform and
change. And really what you're looking
for is a particular spot along the progression of the the
transformation where you can drink the tea and you get kind
of the maximum of, you know, all of its potentials.
Yeah, I just barely started roasting my own coffee beans and
it's kind of very similar in that stage of like like all the
degassing stage. And after that, there's like
perfect stages of within the developing flavors of when to
drink That and every day is almost like different flavors as
it develops and changes and progresses.
So I can imagine with teas, I worked for Teavana for a few
months in a really rough time period years and years ago, and
that was like my first introduction to loose leaf teas.
And I was just like, Oh my gosh, this is a whole nother world
instead of just like cheap little tea bags from the store.
Like way different level of. Yeah.
Do you ever go slumming on those types of teas or you're like no,
my my appreciation and and level of consumption is a little bit
higher. Yeah.
Do you ever go like poor kid chips with rum and break it up,
you know, and it's, it's tea bag tea, you know?
Not, not really. Not these days.
And you know, I try to maintain a fine balance between being a
snob and being a connoisseur. I guess it's like a really fine
line between the two of them. But you know, as far as the
overall price points, I mean I drink teas that are inexpensive,
that are affordable for daily consumption.
But I also try to seek out teas that are relatively unique.
One example would be like in in the Phoenix Mountain region, in
general, there's mother trees that are several 100 years old.
And the way that they're propagated is farmers will come
in and take cuts, very limited number of cuts get propagated
forward. But when you take those cuts and
you populate, you know, another garden full of those cuts, you
may have to wait 20 to 30 years before the tea tree is old
enough for it to be harvested and processed and picked.
So you know if you can get the mother trees, those are very
expensive because there's only one tree of those in the entire
world. They happen to be several 100
years old and the total amount of tea produced from them
oftentimes is less than £10 per year.
And I would say you know unless you know somebody in the
innermost region and who has a very strong network with multi
generational farmers, it's very difficult to access authentic
mother tree productions and they can cost upwards of $5 a gram if
not more. I think the oldest if I recall
correctly back in I think it was 2006 or maybe it was 2016.
But the oldest tree on Phoenix Mountain, which is around 700 to
800 years old, the tea leaves were auctioned off and I I think
they sold for $500 a gram. Holy cow.
Have you experienced any of that before?
Nothing like that. And to give you guys some
context, I need about 7 grams to make one pot of tea.
So 500 bucks times 7g. You know, it's a little bit too
that's. An expected.
Product. That's right.
Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, it's
something that you have to kind of become soft wired for.
You got to drink a lot of tea in order to appreciate the kind of
nuances and subtleties that really old trees can convey.
Because it's not. Some of the flavor profiles
aren't quite in your face. I mean, for some of these teas,
don't be wrong. You can smell the tea from 1520
feet away and it's like this explosive bouquet of, like,
flowers and fruits and it's just the most amazing thing.
But a lot of the old trees, they're they're a lot more
subtle. They won't punch you in the
face, but they'll creep up on you like an edible you weren't
feeling an hour and a half ago, and then all of a sudden you're
just like, whoa, this is crazy. It definitely has that kind of
psychedelic aspect to it. So with that said I mean you
know on our show we we we completely understand what
you're talking about. You know after years of
consuming cannabis on a very, on a on a level of not like let's
get highbrow like it's very about what what's the intent
that we really have for this plant and the respect we have
for it. And over the years like it's not
just burning plant to us just like it's not just Gray Earl tea
for you. It's you can taste the nuances
and and you can really understand even through the
quality of it like what that growth cycle must have been.
Like what kind of care went in and the nutrients that were
given to the plant in order to produce the highest quality that
you're getting at that moment 'cause now like we were just
joking around about slumming and having some ramen style you know
tea bag which it means affordable is totally you know
you're you're using affordable tea.
But I'm saying like over there it's in a box.
We don't know how long that's been sitting on a shelf or in a
warehouse. Like all these things take into
account like I found cannabis in a little tube that I'll put even
its airtight. It'll be there for over a year,
it'll be OK, but it's still not appreciated as when you really
know the steps that have gone through.
And so when you talk about I can pick up on subtle tones with
like these really older Tees that are very complex and it it
creeps up on you like like an edible.
When you said that I just started, I'd started laughing at
my ass. That's like you know we know
that feeling and to experience that through tea that is very,
very unique and in that way where you just have to know and
and I mean from we have so many different people that listen to
us from cultivars to your end consumer and it's appreciated.
It really is appreciated and that's where you know I think
about what you are doing now and and the complexity of going into
it. Brandon, you know what are some
of the things as I mean I know you got but so our audience
knows a lot about Brandon's past as far as getting into the
cultivar side of cannabis and understanding that.
But I know you got a lot of questions based on that.
Yeah, I'm just curious, explain to the audience a little bit
about rooted leaf, what it is that rooted leaf is what it is
that they do? OK, so rooted leaf Agrotech is a
manufacturer. We make carbon based
fertilizers. We've been in business since
April of 2019. And the idea, the idea for
rooted leaf initially came around as kind of a combination
of a variety of different experiences that I had in life.
The first was obviously tea like we just talked about.
Then I started fermenting tea and making kombucha and I
realized that during this fermentation stage or process,
there was a remarkable amount of change that occurred, you know,
between the parent material being tea leaves and perhaps
cane sugar and water. You combine the three of those,
let the microbes do their thing, come back 10 to 14 days later
and it's a completely different product altogether, got
different physical properties, different chemical properties.
So I became really intrigued by this process of transformation.
How microbes in particular are capable of changing things
around. So at that time probably, you
know, 2010, 2012, I had a small kombucha brewery and I was
exploring this. And then I ended up getting
hired at a company, chemical manufacturing Company here in
Washington state. And I worked there for maybe a
year or just over a year. And my job there was to help
them do some formulations work. So I went in and I kind of took
a look at some of the recipes. I didn't have much experience in
industrial chemistry at this time, but I had a deep passion
for it and an underlying understanding on on the
fermentation side at least, of how transformations in chemical
systems can occur. So I was really intrigued to
explore this. Ended up spending a little bit
of time there and realizing in in terms of synthesis, chemistry
and making stuff. Order of operations is just
remarkably critical. You can take 10 different
ingredients, combine them 100 different ways, and 99 of those
waves will break. And the one final way that
actually works, you know correctly who produces a product
that's stable. That is a combination of some
very detailed steps. You know, like some of these
steps can involve particular temperatures.
You know, you have to add this product into that product.
You can't go the other way around.
Sometimes it's the temperature thing and it's a time in terms
of rate of addition thing. So there's all of these
different steps in the process than most people would overlook,
right? It's just as simple as adding
ingredient A into ingredient B, but that couldn't be further
from the truth. You have to understand all of
the physical properties of what is A and what is B, and then try
to figure out how did they interact with each other.
Do you want that reaction to happen very slowly so that you
can create a very consistent product?
Or do you want it to happen very quickly, in which case it might
break entirely and the formula's no good anymore?
And I think that kind of. Experience.
Like at the different temperature you know is it, Then
you have a whole different compound you're working with
too. Exactly, exactly.
So time, temperature, rate of addition, pH, there's so many
different properties to measure that ultimately have an impact
on the creation of this product. So I did that.
I became really inspired. And then in 2014, Washington
State legalized the recreational cannabis industry.
And so, you know, at this time now I have experience with
fermentation chemistry and I've got experience in industrial
chemistry, synthesizing compounds and doing a little bit
of synthesis work. And I just felt like it was a
natural fit for me to transition into the cannabis side of things
because I've been a passionate cannabis enthusiast for a very
long time. Initially going back to the
medical days here in Washington about 2008 or 2009, I started to
get involved a little bit on the cultivation side, although it
was never really a big grower. And you know, I just started
meeting people kind of exploring the plant a little bit more and
realizing that everything that I was passionate about with
fermentation chemistry was mirrored in the cannabis plant.
And I always had this burning underlying passion kind of
explore, you know, how did the plant get here?
How did we end up to, you know, in a spot where the profile of
terpenes and cannabinoids is what it is and looking some at
some of the underlying mechanisms behind that.
So that, you know, led me about 2014, two, 1015 to start looking
at plant nutrition. And ever since then, you know
we've been doing this work which we now described as a carbon
based fertilizer. Obviously, when we initially
started, it was more difficult for us to characterize what
exactly we were doing. And fortunately, we've learned a
lot along the way. And now we're in a position
where we have a pretty good understanding of how this
technology works, what exactly sets it apart and I'm super
excited to talk to you guys about that.
That's amazing. Yeah.
So take us through say like your carbon based fertilizer, say we
have a plant, say we have Blue Dream for those growers at home,
very simple to grow, very high yielding.
A lot of those beginner growers might start with something like
that introducing say your carbon based fertilizer versus a normal
fertilizer. What would you see as far as
like structure changes or growth or even like massive benefits
from the carbon birth based versus that understand?
From what I understand you have a great analogy by using the,
the a car all the way down to its chassis of how your actual
like take take us through that because that's it's probably by
far the best explanation of it because it's really easy to
break it down and you understand that it's everything comes from
the nutrients and how it's actually going to build a very
strong platform if you will, right.
So real strong yielding, high yielding plant take it, take us
through that. Yeah.
And I guess the underlying premise of a carbon based
fertilizer and the reason that works so well specifically for
cannabis is because most of the compounds that growers are
seeking to produce, the monoterpenes and the
cesspoterpenes and obviously the cannabinoids, those are roughly
80 to 90% carbon by weight. In fact, all of the monoterpenes
like Mercene, pionine, limonene, they're 90% carbon by weight and
all of the cannabinoids are 80% carbon.
So in reality, if you want to get more cannabinoids, as you
want to get more terpenes out of your plants, you really have to
try to figure out a way to feed them more carbon.
And now traditionally the way that this this has been done is
to inject CO2 gas into a room that's sealed.
And growers who have done this before, all of them will attest
to this. As soon as you increase the CO2
concentration to the plants, they start responding much
better. They they increase their yield,
they increase quality. There are morphological
differences that change, such as the surface area of the leaf
becomes a lot bigger, the plants just grow faster.
They seem to transition between the various stages a lot faster.
And the thing that I want to point out here is that carbon is
a macro nutrient for crops. In terms of how much is taken
up, we often times just look at nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium,
the Calmac, micronutrients, so on and so forth.
But these elements actually represent a very tiny percentage
of what plants will ultimately accumulate.
In fact, you could take all of the NPK Cal mag.
So you can take all 17 elements that you'll find in a
conventional salt based fertilizer, take that number,
add them all together, multiply that number by 5 and the plant
still has accumulated more carbon than all of those.
So it really cast things into a different light to say well the
thing that plants are trying to do more than anything is utilize
all of these elements like nitrogen for example as a means
through which they can capture more carbon.
And as I've built out this analogy of a car engine over the
past couple of years, it's it's something we've been working on
for a few years now. And I feel like the analogy is
at a really good place now where we can kind of blow it up a
little bit, take a look under the hood and see what exact
exactly is going on. One of the high level examples
I'll give you guys is that 90% of the nitrogen that you apply
to your plants, actually more than 90% of the nitrogen becomes
either chlorophyll which is that green pigment or becomes an
enzyme called Rubisco. And Rubisco has one job and
that's to take CO2 out of the air and convert it into a a
plant available form of sugar effectively.
So it's the very first enzyme involved in this dedicated step,
and it's a little bit ironic in my perspective how most of the
nitrogen you apply towards your plants actually goes towards
capturing carbon, right? Because chlorophyll takes light
energy. What's that light energy used
for photosynthesis? Rubisco operates to take CO2 out
of the air, using that light energy to create sugars.
And if you become deficient in nitrogen, one of the first
places that you can look is towards the leaf surface and see
if it's yellow, for example. It's an indication that the
plants are deficient in chlorophyll.
They don't have enough of that green pigment, so it's ironic
that a deficiency in nitrogen is actually the exact same thing as
a deficiency in carbon. The plants have a bottleneck in
that carbon. So this is a high level, easy to
understand type of example, specifically as it relates to
Nitrogen. That's incredible.
Yeah, 'cause even. I mean, like we joked at the
beginning, I made this horrible investment or expensive
education. And in that I read the Oakster
Dam University's growers handbook from front to back,
just because it was like, oh shit.
You just invested a bunch of money, yeah.
Like I need to really like, I know at least.
OK, I in my mind I felt like I knew nothing about cannabis in
relation to a lot of people. I probably knew a lot about
cannabis, but that wasn't anything for me in relation to
Ki just dropped $100,000. I need to figure out what the
hell I'm putting this money like into and really understand it on
every level that I can. And so I sat down with that and
I read it and it was like even just that discussion of like
nitrogen and like all the oxygen, every every mineral,
every like thing that goes into that plant.
But when you're understanding that the real like end goal and
that really is just changing a lot of that to carbon or really
pulling in more carbon. And even on understanding on a
basic level like looking at trees and then looking at the
cannabis plant and cannabis pulls out like four times more
carbon than like trees, isn't it.
So you like that little plant is reducing or pulling in massive
amounts of carbon. So wouldn't like that sounds
like it is its end goal like feeding it more carbon.
So having a fertilizer that is based or you know in that has
more of the nutrients that it's actually looking for that seems
like a supercharged soil almost. Yeah, yeah.
And it's a little bit, there are some differences which we'll get
into a little bit. But the idea is that, you know,
we understand plants, all of the activities that that the plants
participate and revolve around capturing carbon or storing
carbon or somehow utilizing carbon, whether it's taking in
energy from the sun to make sugars or doing something as
specific and nuanced as making a mono terpene out of the
accumulated pools of carbon. And you're right when you say
that there's some reduction that has to happen because CO2 in the
air is in an oxidized form. It's got the oxygen molecules is
attached to it. The plants don't really care
about that. Really what they're trying to do
is break the oxygen apart from the carbon and then use that
carbon. And in this process of
converting the oxidized forms of carbon that are in the air into
the reduced forms of carbon that are perhaps the mono terpenes,
Right. Because mono terpenes are just
carbon and just hydrogen. They have no oxygen inside of
their structure. Some of the oxygenated ones do
obviously. But you know the the, the, the
thing I want to try to convey at large is that plants use the
power, the reduction power generated through photosynthesis
to capture that carbon and then to store it and then to utilize
it for certain things like the biosynthesis of secondary
metabolites. So really what we've done is
take a carbon centric approach to creating fertilizers to say,
look, every element that we have in our product line has to be
fundamentally connected to carbon because then when it's
delivered into the plants, there's no energy expenditure
that's required. We're doing the chemical
reduction of that carbon through fermentation chemistry and then
creating chelates and complexes that deliver those minerals like
the NPK, calcium and magnesium in the most ideal forms.
And one of the examples I can give you guys for that is when
we manufacture our calcium chelate, we're fermenting orange
peels because as everybody knows and most growers will tell you,
calcium is component of thick cell walls.
So if you have more calcium, the plants form thicker cellular
structures. Well, if you look at an orange
peel, it's just basically a really, really thick cell wall
and it's full of pectic acid residues which as it turns out
all plants utilize pectic acid to complex calcium.
Shove that into the cell wall and then that's their that's one
of the basis for their cell cell wall components.
By fermenting the orange peels, what we're doing is taking those
pectic acid residues that are naturally present in very high
concentrations and then running a chelation reaction with
calcium so that when we're delivering that calcium chelate
to the plants, the plants are taking up something that they
recognize it's biologically relevant for them.
They look at the calcium, they look at the pectic acid, and
they have mechanisms internally, enzymes that can attach directly
to these molecules and make use of them right away.
There's no energy expenditure. The reduction power is already
stored in those bonds. So when plants take up our
nutrients, they experience a net gain in energy, which leads to
an increased productivity and yield.
Even if you don't have a sealed flowering room, you don't have
to have a sealed flowering room anymore, because we can put as
much carbon as is found in about 5000 PPMS of CO2 in the air, but
inside of a liquid medium. So we're loading carbon from the
inside out rather than the outside in.
And the focus now for us becomes how do we increase transpiration
potential for the plants? Because the faster we can get
the plants to take up the feed water, the more carbon they're
ultimately going to be able to access.
And so this transpiration pump is really a key focus of the
carbon based chemistry in our products.
Yeah, there's like trying to match the certain levels of
everything so that it can grow at its most optimal form,
basically. So as a layperson like I'm, I'm
wondering like does that like increase the the growth cycle,
the the, the time? Does it shorten it you?
Mean. Yeah.
Does it shorten it? Yes, it can.
In most cases, we've seen a decrease in the overall time
spent in flowering without a decrease or a reduction in
quality or yield. And I often attribute this to a
lot of stressors that get in the way of plants performing at
their peak levels and their optimum performance.
It's just a natural law in biology that there's always
going to be 1 limiting factor. There's always going to be
something that the plants need a little bit more of to maintain
an equilibrium. It doesn't matter how much
nitrogen you have, if you're deficient in phosphorus, you can
add as much nitrogen as you want.
It will never correct that phosphorus deficiency.
But when you add in more phosphorus, all of a sudden that
doesn't become the limiting factor.
Now instead of phosphorus, your limiting factor may be magnesium
and so you have to look at adding magnesium.
And so all of these things have to be very tightly coordinated
together and then delivered to the plants progressively so that
they don't experience bottlenecks that are, you know,
reasonable. I think if the bottleneck itself
can be the intensity of the sunlight or the ability of the
dehumidifiers to pull moisture out of the air, that puts the
stress on the external factors that are not in.
The environment, yeah, no longer the plant and that.
And that's, that's what I initially learned through all of
that study was like, oh shit, this guy who's growing is not
doing anything of this. There is nothing that's being
tracked. And I was like, what are we
doing this? What are we doing with this?
What are we doing with this?
And the guy's like, crickets, so.
Yeah. And I I think about that cause
like when you're talking about decreasing the time for full
yield, but on top of that I'm just thinking about like you're
taking a lot of the complexities and you're being able to utilize
all of the nutrients in the waters that are going in there.
So a big problem with a lot of growers is the usage of water
like when I got involved he made the investment and he's like
hey, I don't think these guys really understand business talk.
Can you talk to him and when I just.
Started business at. All, yeah, business at all.
It's. Him on as like the CEO and that
would be a good idea. Well, 'cause I came from the
supply chain and manufacturing world at that time.
And so I was like, OK, well, cool.
I need to know your water usage, your power usage.
You know what? What's your nutrients you're
putting in the ground? What's the cost on your
nutrients? And and where are you getting it
from? Is it a trusted source that at
the time there was a a grower out there that they had to
recall a bunch of their cannabis products because everybody
started getting hepatitis? Yeah, it did some horrible thing
out there. Yeah.
And I was like, what the? Crap.
I mean, who? Who knows what they were using
for fertilizer at that time? And that's I think that's a big
misunderstanding for many growers, especially when they're
getting into it and even some of the larger grows, they kind of
treat it like it's just tomatoes and you can just do is whatever
you get over at Walmart and saying, hey, yeah, that's going
to give me the best shield. But when you were talking about
the color of the leaves, I remember one of those times
where we got pictures back from this grower they invested into
like the yellowing of the leaf and they're like, oh, it's
probably just too close to the lat.
And it's like that's that that it just like when you talked
about that, it's it's literally like foundation medicine within
us humans. Like if we are deficient in one
thing or another and we run a lab report on it, it'll tell us
like hey you're low in testosterone, you're low in in
vitamin D you have low sodium. I mean and those things matter
and adjusting them accordingly helps to level things out.
And it sounds like it this is like a super dense nutrient food
that plants are able to just get the most out of and you said you
have a line of products, is that right for different types of
plants with that? Yeah, we have a full product
line. There are 9 distinct
formulations, but there's eight products.
So one of them is a two-part base nutrients and they're all
incredibly fine-tuned specifically for cannabis, but
they work phenomenally well on other crops as well.
It's just the use rates may change and the timing of
application may change, but the form factor of those products
represents the most biologically relevant form of those elements
that are inside of the bottle. Like I mentioned with the
calcium for example, fermenting the orange peels in particular
lets us really deliver basically like a 99% complete cell wall
for the plant. It doesn't have to do any work
anymore. All that has to do is take it
and it actually releases energy within the plant because once
the production power is opened up in the plant that powers the
plants processes. So in a in a strange way, the
electrons that flow through the electron transport chain during
photosynthesis are actually identical to the ones that are
captured in our products. And So what we've seen is also
that there's a decreased need for highlight intensity as well
because the electron energy which is captured in the form of
reduction power is stored in the chelates that we make.
It's physically present in those molecular bonds as potential
energy. And then plants have these
enzymes, they've got these tools and the ability to go and maybe
cut up some of those compounds, break them down into simpler
compounds. And it's during the breakdown
process that the potential energy becomes released as
kinetic energy and that drives metabolic processes that
typically the plants would have to absorb energy from the sun in
order to power. But now we have this advantage
of them being able to actually take it up directly from the
feed water and access the power of the sun as it's stored
through the fermentation chemistry and delivered through
the actual feed water. I think it's worth questioning
too, like you were just talking about, you know, plants and car
engines are actually remarkably similar in their underlying
mechanistic principles. In order for a car engine to
produce horsepower and torque, you need spark, you need air and
you need fuel. Those are kind of like the basic
components and you start to build out a system around that
with the intake and the exhaust. You start looking more
specifically at like the strength of the spark carried
through the plugs themselves, the amount of air and fuel, and
really the ratio between the two of them to prevent the engine
from running rich or running lean or dry.
I should say plants are actually exactly the same way.
Their spark is the sunlight. Their air, quote UN quote, is
the carbon that comes in from the air.
And then their fuel is water, because as we all know, plants
take up water. They split water molecules
apart, they convert them into electrons and protons which each
get funneled down to their respective metabolic pathways,
and then molecular oxygen, which we learned in kindergarten.
Plants breathe out, humans breathe in and we released the
CO2 back to the plants. So this is the kind of
underlying principles and obviously car engines producing
horsepower and torque, plant engines actually produce primary
and secondary metabolites. It's a really good way of
thinking about horsepower and torque and what is the
measurement of the flow of power in a car engine?
Will it's horsepower and torque and the same measurement applied
to plants as primary and secondary metabolites and for?
Cannabis come out with cannabis is like terpenes and
cannabinoids. Yes, yes.
The terpenes and cannabinoids represent the flow of power
through the plants. These are very high energy
molecules. They require a lot of energy,
which is exactly why you need to highlight intensity and direct
light intensity. No one ever won any cups or got
any awards as a result of shade growing a plant under very low
light and only watering once a week.
You know the the the intensity associated with these molecules
is captured in their the rates at which they are accumulated
and the more intense your grow environment.
In other words, the more intense your air, spark and fuel are,
the higher the performance that you're going to achieve.
In other words, more cannabinoids and terpenes your
plants will be able to cause. As long as your ratio matches
and it fits, you can increase that.
You know spark gas and feel like you can increase all of those as
long as the the ratio is perfect and it matches what that plant
needs. And it sounds incredible because
what it sounds like to me is this, this fertilizer basically
allows the plant to not work as hard in some aspects and put
more of its energy into growing bigger and probably healthier,
meaning that it's going to fight off more things.
I would, I would imagine naturally, just because it's no
longer putting so much energy wasted in trying to convert or
do these things that are not necessarily necessary processes
when they have the fertilizer and the nutrients, you know, at
the correct ratio. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you're 100% right about that.
Just like a car engine operates, plants are very similar.
So imagine you crank up the light intensity in your guru,
but you don't increase the strength of the fertilizer.
The plants will quickly become deficient.
Let's say you increase the light intensity and the fertilizer
load, but you don't increase the CO2 concentration.
Same thing. Now.
There was a bottleneck there. Now let's back up one step.
Suppose you did not increase the light intensity.
What if you just fed them a lot heavier and you cranked up the
CO2? Your results would also be
limited because there's not enough spark that's there to
combust this combination of stronger feed with.
You're going to burn rich or yeah, you'll run rich or you'll
run lean. So exactly.
Someone way or the other, your end product won't be ideal
because it won't, it won't ever be that perfect level if those
ratios don't match. So that's yeah, that's
incredible, I think. Yeah, and we know it was talking
about with the fermented orange peels and and what that it's
ultimately doing by being able to give it more calcium rich,
strengthening the plant. Like in my mind it went all like
marvel, like how the cells are like the biting and everything
like that. When he was describing that and
then thinking about the calcium is creating this like stronger
exoskeleton to really protect the plant from a lot of, I mean
and that's kind of a question I have there is this through this
nutrient, through your, through your product, is this able to
help the plants be stronger and being able to fight off against
like pests? Yeah, absolutely.
And there's two halves of that approach.
One is just treating carbon like a macronutrient because as it
turns out, when plants have additional substrate pools, they
can afford the production of certain molecules.
I actually created the analogy of a bank account, a Chemical
Bank account. You know, imagine you go to the
store and you have a $10 to spend.
You're trying to get a variety of ingredients to make your
sandwiches. So you have to buy your bread.
You have to buy your meats, cheeses, sauces, little
accoutrements here and there. Plants are the exact same way.
They too have reduction in power that they build up and put
inside of a Chemical Bank account.
And they use that reduction power much like we use dollars,
except instead of buying, you know, sandwiches and ingredients
for sandwiches, they're trying to effectively access minerals
and nutrients out of the soil. They want to convert the
nitrogen, so they have to spend a certain amount of energy on
that. They need to fight off the
disease pressure. So there's a huge tax that's
placed on their bank accounts, if you will.
It's very expensive for the plants to deal with certain
types of disease pressures. And if you increase the
substrate pool available for them to spend, they can start to
have all these expressions that they typically wouldn't because
they don't have enough money. They're being taxed by having to
process too many nitrates or too many sulfates or too many
synthetic fertilizers. All this stuff robs the plants
of their energy pools that they progressively build up
throughout the day, which is why when you deliver our products,
because there's no, because the reduction power is captured in
those bonds, the plants can automatically utilize that to
ward off disease pressures by producing secondary metabolites
with almost no tax. I mean it's it's like you work,
you know, through the day and you put a certain amount of
money in your bank account, let's say every week or every
month. Imagine if someone came in and
just gave you an extra $1000 a week and said spend this on
whatever you want, but it has to improve the quality of your
life. It has to give you a stronger
structure. It has to give you a better
foundation. It has to smooth out the rough
bumps for you in your life. This is exactly what happens
with the plants. You give them the additional
reduction power and they are capable and they certainly do
generate more compounds. But on a on a more microscopic
level, the basis of this sort of effects all plant expression
down to the DNA. So we actually see the gene
expression increase significantly, not only the
overall concentration of terpenes and cannabinoids being
higher, but also the breath and the death.
And we see these terpenes come out and test results that are
typically very rare and very conserved in cannabis.
So now there's this additional layer of complexity because the
plant has this extra energy. So it says, well, let me turn on
this pathway. And now there's this synthase
enzyme that's responsible for producing A terpene that
typically is just kind of in the background hanging out, doesn't
get much attention, doesn't get much activity.
But in an environment where the plants have access to a surplus
of energy, now you have all these other ancillary enzymes
coming in and they start participating in the process of
taking the substrate and creating a compound out of it.
And that's where we start to see the increase in the breadth and
the depth of the terpenes. I mean huge difference in the
overall flavours and aromas that are captured in the plants and
really their ability not only to resist disease but also to hold
a really long cure and a really long shelf life with no
degradation to the terpenes or cannabinoids whatsoever.
That's when. Yeah.
I was curious with that because as you were talking about that,
it really just sounds like you said a wider expression of
terpenes and cannabinoids. And for everyone who understands
the entourage effect, that truly just means like a better
experience. So do you living in Washington,
do you grow your own at home or do you grow your own, maybe even
commercially like? Not anymore.
I like to live vicariously through other people's gardens.
I mean, I have a small garden in my backyard every year.
I'll grow like fruits and vegetables and I have a chance
to see how our products work there.
But it's been a couple of years since I've grown cannabis and.
Do you have? Friends who are utilizing your
soil that you I'd just be very curious like the experience of a
side by side comparison because I would wager that products
grown in rooted leaf would have a much better experience.
Even from like if I were to pop 2 seeds one pot next to each
other and have one standard like soil or whatever, I'm using UN1
rooted leaf. I think that entourage like I
think it would be a much more complete experience with that
rooted leaf one. I'm just curious, how often like
do you get to sample that? Yeah, we're fortunate enough to
have friends that are local to us here in Washington state that
we do a lot of really good work with.
A couple of these guys have been working with for a few years and
they've definitely provided very valuable feedback and
information that initially is a little bit theoretical.
I'm just thinking to myself, like, hey, I wonder if I
fermented orange peels, if we could see a better translation
of calcium being fed to the plants versus calcium that it
actually becomes deposited into the cell walls, right?
Because it's one thing to just have it in the soil or to have
it dissolved in your feed water, but it's another thing entirely
when the plant starts taking it up and starts acting on the
calcium in a way that makes it relevant for its both primary
and secondary metabolic purposes.
And and some of the things that we've theorized and hypothesized
in the past, we're now through the good work that we're doing
with our close friends, not only here in Washington but certainly
across the US We have a number of people that are testing in a
variety of different climates. And it's nice to start to see
very consistent pieces of feedback come in not only
anecdotally in terms of what the growers are seeing.
Some of these differences are like, hey, my plants are
drinking 20 to 50% more water even though I'm in peated drinks
faster than the comparable set up in rock cool.
I mean plants literally go through wet, dry cycles that
fast as a result of the way that our products work.
But also on the test results themselves, we see fractions of
terpenes and particularly furnishing is 1 to one example
of a terpene that typically we don't see very high
concentrations of until people start using our products.
And then all of a sudden, it just becomes almost a dominant
terpene, in some cases, harnessing.
Yeah, yeah. It's a cespraterpine that's
produced kind of gives like Jasmine flowers, their floral
aroma. It's also involved in the
aromatic profile of apples. So a lot of times, it's kind of
like this sweet, fruity, floral kind of thing.
And there's a very good reason why that occurs.
That has to do with the way that our products work.
But you know, to kind of answer your question more directly,
there's there's effectively 2 halves of what we're doing.
One is this advanced approach to looking at carbon like a
macronutrient. This is where the advanced
chemistry comes in. We're starting to actually look
at individual elements, individual atoms of carbon, and
figure out how to fit them within the dynamics of these
plant engines, both primary and secondary metabolism.
And then on the flip side, totally opposite but still
dovetailing imperfect. It's this like leopard skin
loincloth wearing jungle shaman that's using four dozen species
of plants and their extracts to create this holistic nutrient
profile. So we do work with four dozen
species roughly of plants. There's, you know, 3/4 of them
are terrestrial plants, 1/4 of them are aquatic plants.
We've got red kelp, green kelp, brown kelp, single celled algae,
all of which we're extracting in house.
We have very specific portions of plants, like we're using a
organic Matcha that's produced in the Uji region of Japan, very
high quality Matcha, but it's just the powdered green tea
leaf. In some cases we're using just
the orange peel for example, or when we're making silica skin,
we use just the pistols of the safflower plant.
And so they look like little strands of saffron.
But you know, the point I'm making here is that we're not
using the whole plants. We're using very specific and
isolated portions of the plants because those portions contain
very valuable compounds for us. An idea basically here is that
these plants have been used for thousands of years already for a
variety of different reasons, everything from pharmaceutical
and therapeutic all the way to industrial and textile
applications. In some cases these plants have
been used for over 6000 years and so we understand that they
have this long standing history with humans for a very long time
and what we're trying to do is repurpose the compounds that
they produce into the context of agriculture.
We're asking this question of hey, we know this is a plant
based medicine. It's been used as medicine for
thousands of years to heal the human nervous system.
I wonder if there's some analogy, some metaphorical
equivalent that we can make. Maybe instead of just healing
the human body and the human nervous system, I wonder if we
can heal damaged and degraded soils.
Where I wonder if we can improve the quality of life for all of
the soil microorganisms, macro organisms such as worms leading
all the way up to the food chain, to the human that
consumes the flower at the very end of the of the cycle.
So there's this, there's definitely this like plant based
approach that we're taking and the use of all these plant
extracts I feel allows us to create a chemical environment
that is significantly richer than any living soil that's ever
been present anywhere on earth. I mean most of the living soil
blends out there, they'll have maybe 12 to 15 ingredients.
Most of them are animal byproducts.
We don't use any animal byproducts at all.
You can give us a clean slate of just peat and perlite maybe with
a little bit of cocoa mixed and and after one full round of
using our products that is now a living soil with dozens of
species of microbes with a perfect physical and chemical
properties and it has this very rich orchestra of plant
extracts. You have all of these different
compounds produced by so many different species of plants that
would never be found in nature but they yet here they are
inside of the soil. So of course the plants will
respond to it as they grew through the soil.
They find the ginkgo leaf. They find the Jasmine.
They find stevia extract. They find hibiscus green, they
find all these compound licorice fruit extract that is in our
root anchor. It's.
A very diverse, like genome of plants.
Yeah, that's wild. Some of these plants have
different purposes, like the licorice root that we extract.
We're bringing in whole and we're extracting it.
Licorice roots, as it turns out, produce saponins.
And for those of you who are familiar with surfactants or
saponins you may be familiar with, like Yucca and Kilaha,
these are some of the more common saponins that they're
used. But even some of the synthetic
surfactants, they effectively just modify the way that, you
know, oxygen behaves and also water specifically, they have a
tendency to make water wetter, quote UN quote as it's
described. But what we figured out was
licorice roots also have saponins.
These saponins, due to their molecular structure, can
actually capture huge amounts of oxygen inside of their molecular
framework. So when we water in this
licorice root extract, it delivers dissolved oxygen to
root hairs, which is fantastic for the operation of the roots
because they behave just like human lungs.
They need oxygen in order to breathe and to run their
metabolic activities. What we also found about this
licorice root, which I find very interesting, is that it's an
incredibly powerful stimulant for beneficial fungi.
So we used to put fungi, mycorrhizal fungi, inside of
root anchor. But we eventually cut it out
entirely because we noticed that licorice root is such a powerful
biostimulant for fungi that whatever fungi you naturally
have present either in your soil or in your air, in the
surrounding environment, those fungi become so stimulated that
easily. Within 24 to 48 hours, you'll
see the mycelial networks literally explode in the soil.
You'll see these white fuzzy hairs growing all through the
medium, and then the fruiting bodies pop up.
Within 48 to 72 hours, we've seen the fruiting bodies of
these mushrooms just explode out of the soil, which is fantastic
sign of balanced living soil chemistry.
It's very healthy. Holy cow, that's insanely fast.
That's. So cool.
I you know when when I'm hearing you talk about this and and you
talked about your background like you didn't come from a
chemistry background you were just passionate about this.
Am I right or are you did you go to college or all these other
things or or kind of take us through that because it sounds
like based on your history and and what led up to to rooted
that it's almost like it it was always meant to be because it
just everything fit into place. I could imagine your R&D time to
develop your products you have now was not as long as many
other ones 'cause you already have this background with
fermentation in in industrial chemistry like yeah, how did you
how did you get into this? Yeah, it's a personal passion of
mine. I did go to college, but I
didn't graduate, so I dropped out.
You know, in hindsight's always 2020.
I probably would go back and and finish, you know, an advanced
degree nowadays if I could. But back then I was just really
excited about the opportunity to start a business.
And I specifically dropped out of college to pursue the
Kombucha brewery itself. You know, never really got too
big. At most I was making probably,
you know, 55 gallons a week of Kombucha, which for most people
it's, you know, quite a lot. But in the grand scale of, you
know, where kombucha is at right now, 55 gallons a week isn't
really that much. But it still gave me an
opportunity to, you know, be my own business owner, be an
entrepreneur. I learned from my mistakes.
I learned a lot from that one experience.
And then certainly as I move forward through the industrial,
you know, chemistry, I kind of took what I learned from
Kombucha, applied it to that business, learned a lot more.
And now I'm applying everything to this business.
And you know, we're doing really well.
The formulations themselves are based on a kind of chemistry
that not a lot of people even know exists or even understand
its relevancy in agriculture. So we we have to come up with
these manufacturing processes from scratch.
We don't have any toll blenders. We didn't pay anyone to come in
and formulate these products for us.
This is entirely from scratch. This is kind of like my
intellectual brainchild if you will.
And over the years we've been refining the way that these
products are made. And along the way, we've hired
some chemical engineers to come in and just to review the
processes and give us their input as far as, like which
equipment, you know, pieces would be best with what hardware
would be best for us to continue scaling this process up.
And every single time we bring somebody in, they always scratch
their head and they're like, there's no way this is going to
work. Like there's no way you guys are
actually making this. It's impossible.
And I just, you know, kind of look at them and I say, well,
buckle up, What you know to be true about standard chemistry,
industrial chemistry is perhaps just one perspective, one way of
looking at things. And if you change your
perspective and look at things from a slightly different way,
you can start to build out a process by which the creation of
these types of products is in fact possible to achieve.
And that's kind of where we're at right now.
So with that, can you go back? And when you really saw this
take shape and saw the difference, like where you've
got these chemists just classically trained, and I'll
call them classically trained chemists because they've been
given these walls? Like, here's this is the bounds
that you can travel in. And you can't really go outside
of it because this is what academia has said and this is
the practices we use throughout any other type of company.
When you change that up and just start going, I'm gonna use my
background in fermentation. Like, what if we did this?
It wasn't like this is the way you're like, Nah, the
entrepreneurial side said. But can we do it differently?
One of your first experiences of seeing, you know, let's take a
cannabis plant. Like when you saw that, I mean,
what was what was that like for you to be able to just absolute
excitement for you and for somebody who's growing it and
they're looking at it going, holy shit, this is nuts.
Yeah, yeah. And that kind of aha moment came
with a very early version of solar rain, which is our foliar
spray. It's magnesium based foliar
spray and initially at the time, what I was trying to do was
create a form of magnesium that could fit directly into
chlorophyll biosynthesis. So there's seven or eight steps
involved in chlorophyll biosynthesis, and one of those
steps involves the insertion of the magnesium ion into the
porphyrin ring that sits at the dead center of chlorophyll.
So this is the actual part of the chlorophyll molecule that
absorbs photon energy and becomes excited, thus initiating
the electron transport chain. It's magnesium that's tethered
in the dead center of this. The photons hit the magnesium
ion, and then that's where all the beauty and magic happens.
So I was just trying to rack my brain because I was looking at
all the ingredients and I, you know, I saw magnesium sulfate
and magnesium phosphate and magnesium nitrate.
And that's not at all how plants work.
There's just so many steps in between those forms which burned
the conventional fertilizers and the final form factor that
plants utilize magnesium in that to me it indicated the gap or
the distance between the two needed to be closed a little bit
so that we could create a product that was more digestible
for the plants, more biologically relevant for them.
And the aha moment came when we did foliar sprays of a very
early version of solar rain and noticed that the plants respond
within a matter of minutes. I mean, the response we know
nowadays happens instantly because the chelates are so
small that they can freely pass through cell walls.
All of the chelates that we make their less than 10 carbon atoms
long. These are like high octane race
fuel that gets injected directly into the sites of primary
metabolism. The moment that plants get them,
they begin using them. The gene expression starts to
become upregulated, more chlorophyll can be made and
within a matter of minutes you'll see a noticeable change.
I always tell people, I always challenge people to pick a plant
that doesn't look so healthy, find the one that's off from the
corner little bit yellow, not drinking too fast.
Give it a spray of solar rain and I can't tell you how many
times people have come back that following day and looked at that
plant and thought for themselves, there's no way this
is the same plant. There's just no way that this
that's. Insane.
Well, I have a quick question then 'cause you might have an
idea. I get I I have plants around my
house and I get every once in a while when I buy a plant from
the store that has gnats and then they will spread and fuck
all my other plants. Is there a product of yours that
works really well for that? Yeah, you know, most of the
products, they're designed in such a way to deliver carbon
that strengthens the immune system.
So we're not trying to impart a Part 2.
We're not trying to override what the plant naturally wants
to do. So if you give your plants,
depending on the species of plant, whether it's the house
plant or a cannabis plant or anything like that, yeah.
So these various house plants, they've all got different
molecular strategies, if you will, for how to defend and ward
off certain disease pressures. Fungus gnats may be a little bit
more benign than something like aphids or mites, but there's
still a little bit of a nuisance for the plants.
And so when you give our products to those plants,
they're going to take that excess carbon and find an
outlook for it in the form of that secondary metabolite.
So they'll effectively end up creating their own mechanism or
their own pathway to better resist the fungus gnats and in
most cases what we find when you can't get rid of the actual
fungus gnats. The plants end up establishing
an equilibrium where they're not affected by the presence of the
fungus gnats at all. There's no loss in the rate at
which they grow. There's no loss in the compounds
that they accumulate. They just literally are capable
of dealing with them with no tax or draining of the energy.
Yeah. Because it's not.
They have enough added energy from the extra compounds that
are in that carbon that they're not being really hurt.
Like you said, that energy tax isn't being used for fighting
off that. Yeah, and we have seen certain
cases. This is true of some of the
terpene test results that we get back from customers.
Cannabis plants naturally produce a terpene called nerola
doll, and it's specifically for thrips.
So when your garden is full of thrips, you know, thrips, if I
had to pick one bug to have in my garden, it probably be
thrips. They're very benign.
They kind of just mess with the leaves, You know, they're
they're kind of there without really damaging the plants in a,
you know, very significant way. But what I've seen over the
years is that the concentration of nerolidol produced by plants
is sort of proportionate to the concentration of thrips and
white flies that exist on the leaf surface.
And you know, that's an example of where you give your plants
more carbon. They'll naturally produce more
neuralidol because they understand through their plant
receptor systems that they have thrips that they need to deal
with. Whereas if you had a fungal
infection like downy mildew or powdery mildew, instead of
nerolidol being produced, you might find the plants produce
more limonene because limonene is a compound that exhibits
phase toxicity to the exoskeletons of bugs and also to
the cell walls of fungi. So when they understand that
they're being attacked by that specifically try to up regulate
the biosynthesis of this terpene versus that terpene that does
that kind of make sense? Yeah, that's incredible because
yeah, the plants really just utilizing those nutrients to go,
hey, I need to fight this or I need this because this is what
is dependent on like my environment is having this.
So it sounds like the plant, if it has the ability and the
energy is incredibly smart on its own and can almost self
fight these if it has the initial health and you know
energy, nutrients and fertilizer that it needs to kind of combat
that. It's exactly what you said.
I mean, if it has the right the way that I I mean, I'm hearing
this is the same as our body. Yeah, exactly.
Because if we have the right nutrients, we have the right.
If our homeostasis is where it needs to be, it's able to fight
off bugs. Like, you don't think about
that. Look, a typical layperson's not
thinking about that with their plants, right?
Going, Oh yeah, if it had better nutrients, if it had more
carbon, then it's able to produce these terpenes.
And the terpenes are like these defensive, the being able to
help strengthen it and being able to repel certain things or
bring in more things. Like that's just it's amazing
how that works. The blown away just spraying it
on and noticing within a couple of.
Yeah, where he's like, oh, you can notice.
He had that change in. Coloration or like.
Crazy though, it it's just like a person, right?
You give him, if you give them something really, really
healthy, you can see it in their almost their pigment of their
skin, like, I feel better, they look better.
So that just goes to say with with growers within the
cannabis, I mean you you're you're on, you're on pretty good
scale. You're all over the US right
now. Is that right?
Yep all. Right.
Are you outside of the US or is it just AUS product currently?
We have customers in Mexico and in Canada and we're looking at
doing some more international. We are a global show.
We are heard all over the world. Yeah, we're maybe.
Six different countries in the top 10 so.
We were just curious. Yeah, because it just sounds
like such AI mean literally. Like Brandon says, it's like a
miracle, this miracle nutrient that it.
Makes so much more sense 'cause even when I studied that
handbook for growers, it was it went more into like like the
balance, the ratio and that. But understanding the process of
where so much of its purpose is to convert most of that back to
carbon. Well, if you can provide it with
those nutrients and things in the 1st place, it's not going to
go through all these extra steps and try and fight this stuff or
do this like it's going to just have some basically food or feel
to grow into the best possible plant.
Like this Seems like such a more direct method then even the
approach that I read and studied in that entire handbook.
When you get more out of your yield, I mean you think about
all of these growers out there and and and I'm sure you know
this too, not all growers are equal.
You've got some ones that have the staff the knowledge to be
able to understand some elements of what you've discussed.
But from being able to have it where it's all a product that's
all in one, it's it's designed specifically for this and things
that weren't even thought of before this is gonna be able to
help a lot of those growers producing.
Or even home grow. You think about if you're
growing your own medicine at home and you're wanting to have
the best yield, the highest quality product, the best
entourage effect because you've got the widest terpenes,
cannabinoids like, and it's taking out so much of that work
you're not worrying about crap. I need to worry about all these.
OK, well, if your plant, like you said, has all of this, like,
ideal stuff, all of this energy in this bank, well, it's not
having to go. Hey, I don't have energy for
this. I don't have energy for this.
I don't have energy for this.
It's going to that bank going, hey, I've got energy for this.
I've got energy for this. Oh, sweet.
Let's build this new addition. Oh, let's do this like, I've got
energy for days. And I imagine this plant just
being so much like, a million times better.
It's like the crap if you're putting fast food in your body
every day versus honestly, yeah, it might suck and it might be a
pain in the ass to figure out, but like the whole food diet,
like, I'm sure your body feels a million times better.
Well, and I really, really like is you know, on their website
when you're thinking about that, if it is a home grow, you can
get a court. If you're doing commercial,
you're going up to 5 gallons. The prices are extremely
reasonable. Or even reach out to him if you
need larger than that. I'm sure they have larger than
that options that they can work with.
That's great. You think about all of those
types of growers that I'm am so glad that you hit on that
Brandon. It's if you know that your home
growers, you know, who knows what they do, if you're being
able to produce and and you're able to follow great process.
It's it's every grower. It was when we invested in that
and realizing it wasn't just the grower.
Like that founder wasn't the grower.
He had a separate grower. So we had two guys who were
there who were supposed to be experts in it.
And yet when I went and read one book, one book past my knowledge
at that moment, none of the things that I asked, they
understood. None of the things I asked they
knew. And yet they could take
something as simple as your fertilizer and you can take the
average Tom, Dick, Harry and turn it into an amazing grow.
You're no longer having this Charlie Brown Christmas tree
looking fuck in the corner. Grow and you're like, man, I
hope this gets me high. I hope this does what I want it
to. So you're over there.
Like I'm not sure I would smoke that.
Like you probably shouldn't consume.
That well I think about it I I get I'm actually really jealous
and and I'm just like I wish I knew more growers you know or
even locally here are those that we we frequent are using this
product yeah I mean I it's I know I am I am seriously blown
away here and. There.
So tell us, Nick. How can everyone find rooted
leaf? How can they get in touch with
you? How can audience get in contact
to check you out? Check us out on Instagram, the
rooted leaf, and if you send us a message, I'm usually the
person that responds, so I always encourage people.
If you have questions or if you want to learn a little bit more,
don't hesitate to ask. You know we're all on this
together and better you can understand something, the better
we all do as a community and kind of push things forward.
I do want to mention real quick too.
The benefit for home growers primarily is that there's no
longer a need to supplement CO2. If you're in a home grow
environment, you can crank up the light intensity by returning
a dial and you can give extra fuel to your plants by simply
watering them a little bit more. The hard part for home growers
has always been how do I increase the concentration of
carbon available to the plants because that requires A sealed
room. Now you have very expensive
build out. You've got air conditioners and
dehumidifiers. It becomes a little bit too much
for a home grower, but if you couldn't fit the equivalent of
5000 PPMS of CEO 2 into the feed water, your home grower will go
from small 12 to 24 inch plants to 5 foot 6 foot tall plants.
You'll shave the veg time in half, you'll save two weeks on
bloom and you'll get twice as much yield with an increase in
the overall quality. A lot of the home growers, they
really like the fact that you do not have to adjust the pH of our
products. It does come out acidic.
I'm not saying it's APH perfect, like it's always going to be
5.8. We have growers using RO water.
The feed water mixture comes out to APH of four point O, which is
incredibly low. It's very, very acidic, but
that's 100% safe to apply to the plants.
You do not have to adjust the pH whatsoever.
In fact, we encourage people to not adjust the pH specifically
because of the way that our carbon based chelates work.
They operate very, very efficiently at extremely low PHS
and the nutrients themselves remain soluble from aph range as
low as it goes, maybe 3.54 point O on the low end all the way up
to about 8.5. We never see the feed water
mixture come out that high. But you know, over time as we've
run bench tests and stability tests, we've noticed that all
the chelates, they're capable of maintaining those elements in a
true solution, meaning there's no adverse chemistries in that
full pH range, 4 point O all the way up to about 8 point O 8.5.
Everything is 100% available to the plants.
You just mix it up, don't aerate it, don't adjust the pH, just
mix it up and water it to the plants and they're good to go.
So, yeah, you know, we'll have questions.
Definitely reach out on Instagram.
And check out our web. We'll have his website and the
Instagram below too. Yeah.
And I I am man, I am. So I am blown away.
Like I'm literally so blown away because what you've ultimately
done, if you have made it easier for anybody to be able to grow
high, yield anything. And better quality.
Better quality. I I'm just you know when you're
describing these little tiny little plants that they'll grow
like I remember your little hemp plant that you get in the
backyard and that thing was tiny and the.
Problem was, if I had used his, it wouldn't have been discreet,
it would have been over the wall and everyone would have seen it.
So it's super. It's super fuel, dude.
It's it's seriously, it like makes it a mutant in the best
way possible. It's so I am just, I mean and
and I know, I know enough about it.
But just to hear from you and especially really appreciating
that it came from a passion like not only on the business side
but you're passionate about it through Kombucha that got you to
this point. And it's it's not saying like
well that can't be done going what else could we do from what
I already know what else can I apply to it.
And you have such a wide range of different products that are
specific for different types of what whatever you're trying to
be able to accomplish with your grow.
I I I would just be, yeah I I could see a massive 1 when I'm
thinking on the commercial grow side, I'm thinking amount of of
extra cost that's being able to be reduced just by utilizing
this. Oh, massive.
Like even the talk of carbon alone.
Like what is the cost of going and buying all of these carbon?
Like buying all of that carbon well and maintaining all that
and everything else. How many outdoor grows can
become almost as good as some of these indoor grows even just
because it's so hard like that is a really tough thing to do
outside is to increase that carbon amount or like the the
plants need to get cause like in a sealed indoor environment you
can increase the light, you can increase the, you know you can
increase all of that. You don't have any way to
manipulate the sun, you don't have any way to manipulate that.
So it's way harder to introduce like that carbon based thing but
in their fertilizer that becomes this incredible source to just
like get almost indoor quality grows from even outdoor grows or
at home grows. Like you said most people at
home aren't having a totally sealed environment that they're
hey, I've got this enclosed area I've got and they know here's my
CO2 levels, here's my like they're not measuring those.
They have no clue. Most of them have no idea.
Yeah, this is the reason why we wanted to bring you on 'cause we
just. Oh, and I didn't even understand
it to this level. So this has been incredible
because it it just, it really opens the door for every
cannabis grower or those who are even on the fence about man.
You know, I've really been nervous to try growing because I
don't want to screw it up. I don't want to waste and have
all this time that in it, it doesn't turn out OK.
Well, if you can start from scratch with a fertilizer to
give that plant like the best suited option to grow the best
plant, like that's going to be your best thing.
You can grow that at home. You could grow that commercial
grade. You could do whatever scale that
you're doing with that and take it to the better like you're
growing such better quality. How many dispensers have we gone
to that it's like, yeah. Well, you can tell a difference
with the bud. I mean you can tell if they've
been, if it's really been well cared for it like we've been
able to receive some from up around your area to Oregon and
Norcal and and just like you, you really are able to
appreciate when a cultivar is really taking that time.
But that's a lot of time and understanding and there's a lot
of screw ups that go in there. You know the one thing I would
think the gateway drug of using this for, those that are are
watching or listening get that solar range just thinking about
that. What if you have a plant right
now that you're working with whether you got like 5 or 6 or
way more than that, getting just starting out with solar rain and
say, look, I just want to see this like I'm really want to
test that. I I guarantee right from that
point that trigger will go off. Oh yeah, you'll be right back on
that side by anymore because it's yeah, it.
Takes one time and you're sold. Yeah.
Particularly on the outdoor side like you were talking about,
carbon is always a limiting factor for plants growing out
there. So a lot of times when we do our
side by sides, it's not an incremental difference.
It's not like a 10% gain or a 15% gain.
You know, on the one hand with the salt based fertilizers, you
have plants that end up being about four to six feet tall and
then directly next to them, you know, same environment basically
with our products, those same strains taken off the same mom
at the same time, they're 12 to 14 feet tall.
And I always try to distress the people that it's impossible
unless you have a trained understanding, a really deep and
thorough understanding of how to identify a carbon deficiency in
a plant. Because if you give your plants
more carbon and they end up producing more terpenes and more
cannabinoids, it's a sign that the plant was deficient in
carbon. Just like if your plants are
yellow and you give them more nitrogen in the green backup,
you know the plants were deficient in nitrogen.
That visual feedback loop is not possible to achieve with carbon
because you can't look at those plants.
You can't look at a test result and say, God, you know, I only
tested at 4% terpenes, It's a sign of a carbon deficiency.
I could have tested at 5% terpenes.
Most growers don't know enough about the inner workings of
carbon metabolism to actually see that.
So the benefit with our products is we can hard wire, you know
just like an axle connects 2 wheels through the use of our
products with hard, hard wire the air and the fuel together so
that when you increase the fuel rate you can also increase the
air, the concentration of carbon available for those plants.
This creates an equilibrium between the two of them.
And the only thing you really have to do is just change up the
light intensity and make it more intense And if the plants are a
little bit thirstier, give them a little bit more water.
Everything else underneath that within the the system is
hardwired and linked to the delivery of both the carbon the
plants are ultimately ineffably obsessed with.
They're even more obsessed than we are with carbon, somehow.
And. They.
Also utilize all of these elements specifically for that
purpose. It's a little bit, you know,
it's interesting because I feel like through this discussion
we've actually just kind of scratched the surface, if you
will. You haven't even actually looked
with the list to be an analogy of how nitrogen relates to an
engine mount, or how phosphorus is like the battery in a
superconductor or maybe a magnesium is like a specialized
spark plug in all these engines. Those are kind of the more inner
layers of this analogy that we've been refining over time.
And really as we've learned about how the products work,
we're capable of creating these analogies and having people
better understand what exactly is going on so that they too,
even if they're just the average home grower, that they can hit 3
to 4 lbs per 1000 watts, which we see quite often at this point
above 6% terpenes on dry flour. No problem for a home grower.
It's the type of stuff that, you know, any commercial grower
would have to spend millions of dollars to actually properly
build out. And you know, like we were
talking about earlier, Solar Rain was kind of that first aha
moment. And there was this underlying
theory that we had about how Solar Rain operated and what the
specific mechanism was, which then ended up flowing out into
the rest of the product line to be developed and designed.
And now all the products that we make, it's like 1 holistic
system that represents a carbon centric approach to plant
fertilizer and maybe more specifically from the individual
perspective of how those elements get metabolized and how
they're processed by plants, all in an attempt to capture carbon,
to store it or to move it around and utilize it somehow.
So there's yeah, there's definitely something and I do
want to mention too, we we, we created a coupon code for the
listeners. If they're if they use the
coupon code CANNABIS School all one word, it'll get him 20% off.
Dude. Oh.
Nick, thank you man. Awesome.
Thank you, man. Oh.
Yeah, that is you're. Welcome.
Oh man, this is so cool. OK, so go to rootedleaf.com.
You know, for anybody. Honestly, after listening to
this, this is probably by far the most exciting conversation
that we've ever had about nutrients in the soil.
Like we we had a guy we knew he's an ethnobotanist and.
He has his own living soil that he's created here.
He sells it around and that. But it's nowhere.
It's nowhere. It doesn't level, not even
close. And I've known this guy since I
was in elementary school and I've never had this level.
And he's the smartest guy in the world.
Just ask him. But you know, But seriously, I
we we love this. It just you have made this such
a complex idea of what plants actually do when they use the
water, the sunlight and the nutrients and the soil to such a
magical place. Like, honestly, I say that
wholeheartedly. This is magical if you are a
home grower. I mean, you got to get solar
rain, just give it a shot, put it on your plant and see that.
And then that's just going to get you addicted to the rest of
the line. If you're a commercial grower,
you need to be looking at this. I think about the reduction in
cost as far as everything else that goes in there and then the
margins that you have. And.
Quality and thinking down to the dollar price like the yield as
far as what you get the margins, I know you guys are operating in
a thinner margin. How would you like to expand
that one? By being able to reduce your
cost with your actual production this.
Is if you increase yield and decrease cost, that is also
increasing your margins. That's like a no brainer.
Simple. Yeah, but just to be able to
watch anyone hearing that, right, solar rain is just like
that. That's cool.
That's that conversion moment, right?
That's the baptism. Like it's.
Awesome. And there's there's layers to
the experience of cannabis flower that I feel like are
being removed in the pursuit of this very, very large
recreational industry that's nationwide.
You know people are getting used to mediocre quality of cannabis
and they forget there's entire layers of the experience.
One of them which is most profound with our products is
the after taste. There's a very distinct and it
it's not like a specific after taste that is present in every
single strain. But it's certainly flour that's
grown with our product line has a very depending on the strain
it'll have a different after taste.
But it's very distinct and unique thing.
And as soon as people identify that they can start to compare
that in some of the other examples of flour that they get
and they come back and they're like, you know what that tastes
like Salt. I can actually taste the salts I
have used in the environment. I've actually heard really
negative things about salt grown flowers.
There's a one of the content creators on social that we
follow and I had a discussion with her about it because she's
out in I think she's in Washington actually.
And she was talking about like salt based fertilizers and just
even the experience in like a salt based fertilizer flour
versus like even an organic grown one without the salt based
fertilizers. I was like that's interesting
but it was actually more of like a negative experience even from
the salt based fertilizer. And so I'm just very, very blown
away just, I mean with the wide range of products that have come
out even for cannabis across the years and even in the last 1020
years, how drastically it has changed, you know, I see I
haven't heard of any negatives from what he's told us is in
there, you know, and there's nothing in there that it's
looking at and going it's magic. Sauce.
Yeah, that's. Literally what it's like.
I'm like, oh shit, it's like, you know, Space Jam, you got
Magic Mike's special sauce or whatever.
And I. Don't know where you were going
there, but I mean, yeah. Space Jam it's just.
Dude, I honestly, I know, I I seriously agree with you.
But like, it's just it it's that crazy to hear this from you
because I've we've heard a lot of different things about soil
and soil composition, especially when it comes to growing
cannabis. This is the easiest and the most
that you're just going to have a better experience from.
Yeah. And what it sounds like, yeah.
And particularly for people that are very used to certain
strains, if you're familiar with a particular genetic, you've
grown that cultivar for maybe a decade, 15 years, every single
time. We've worked with people that
have very old genetics, they're very comfortable with, very
familiar with. They come back and they tell us
not only are the growth characteristics like visibly
different, it almost looks like an entirely different plant, but
the quality of the smoke and the flower is dramatically
different. You know the the smoke is so
soft and smooth that you can barely even feel it going into
your lungs. And in some cases, like with a
Cushman strain that we grew just a few months ago, it had the
distinct and overt cooling property.
This cooling effect because the there was menthol there, which
typically is not expressed in very high concentrations in
cannabis. For this particular pheno of
Cushman's, it was very minty. And it had this combo of, like,
citrus fruit, lime, lemon, coupled with this minty kind of
Wintergreen kind of flavor sensation.
So you would inhale a joint or, you know, bong or even a blunt,
You couldn't even feel the smoke entering your lungs.
And then when you exhale, this icy kind of sensation, it's very
soft and relaxing. It almost makes the lungs feel
more expansive, like you can breathe more deeply as a direct
result of this. Nobody's coughing.
Nobody's like, oh, that's harsh. It's exactly the opposite.
They take a hit, they exhale, and while the smoke was still
billowing out of their mouth, they say, whoa, what is this?
Yeah, Nick, this needs to be sold to anyone who grows
cannabis because if that's the experience of the end product,
like sold, I don't know why any It's like this bong.
This is the smoothest bong that we have ever tried.
And I don't know why I would tell anyone else to buy any
other bong or smoke out of any other bong ever.
Because until I find something that is better, that is the best
thing I have ever found. And it makes exactly the same
sense because you look at that and you go, OK, cool, you could
get like half a subpar product or you could grow like the best
quality product. Which one are you going to pick?
Dude, this magic magic. Because it makes me think about
like we the reason why we love this bong is the the smoothest,
most flavorful hits we've ever been able to receive from a
bong. But to have flour that's been
grown with your products? And then smoked out of that.
I could just imagine because this is one that like, it's
really hard to cough. Yeah, it would be just the most
amazing experience. Oh, there's so, so much out of
this. OK, again, so we've got
rootedleaf.com, You go promo code Cannabis school 20%.
All one word. Go check them out.
This is amazing. Nick, thank you for being on the
show. It's for everyone at home.
Yeah. And tuning in, I I think this is
going to be an episode a lot of people are going to be listening
to over and over and over because this is absolutely a
game changer for cannabis. I can't wait to be going to a
local dyspo and being able to try some of that.
So thank you again, brother. Thank you so much and thank you.
Guys, I appreciate the opportunity and for everybody
listening, thanks for taking the time.
If you guys have questions, like I said, please follow us on
Instagram, send us a message, and I'm usually the person that
responds and I like to nerd out and talk in great level of
detail. Here.
I feel like we've barely scratched the surface, you know,
it's the Pandora's box of possibilities.
This is an infinite world for us to keep exploring.
So definitely over time if you guys have questions, even if
it's not right now, but in the future, feel free to reach out
and I'll I'll help out as best I can.
All right. We love you guys at home.
Love all of our Patreon supporters.
Thank you so much for helping us reach just another person like
you. All right?
Hey, take care.