News Joint launches Scientific Grow Journal series
Editor’s note: We at Illinois News Joint believe combining academia and cannabis is one of the best ways to normalize cannabis and its community. As such, Illinois News Joint has been partnering with colleges and universities to incorporating an educational Scientific Grow Journal series that showcases scientific studies pertaining to the practices of growing better cannabis. This is the first entry in a series.
Dr. Dokyoung (D.K.) Lee, who is the crop sciences professor and director of online masters programs at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, created this inaugural Scientific Grow Journal as part of his academic studies comparing two different light duration settings.
The purpose of this experiment, as the following slide shows, is to better understand if turning off light for a certain period during the afternoon, when energy cost and chances of power outages are greater, would affect the yield of the cannabis plants.
The experiment setup included two Lighthouse 2.0 4’x4’ tents installed with NextLight 420h LED Grow Light (sponsored by GroUp Gardening). The conditions for each grow tent were same, except in one tent the light was turned on for 18 hours continuously (6-12 a.m.) and in the other tent the light was turned off two hours from 2-4 p.m.
For consistency, Lee measured the lighting distribution, distance, and spectrum in the tents. Lee is growing hemp strains from his F-Line, G-Line, and S-Line that he propagated at the University of Illinois. Lee collected the seeds from the wild and has been hunting phenotypes for more than a year.
Last year, the University of Illinois’ crop consisted of about 7,000 individual plants. Some of the plants were transplanted from inside to outside and other trial-plants were started from seed. Lee and the university are trying to improve the plants’ genetics for plant architecture (for best spacing and row placement), flowering initiation, protein and oil concentration, fiber production, and seed production.
“We like for a plant have good architecture for fiber production and/or for seed production,” said Lee. “I would like to have large seeds and lots of seeds for the plants, and those would be idea plants for our program. But at the same time the industry is looking for dual purpose plant, which can produce fiber and grain at the same time, and that would be another benefit so the farmer can plant a large acre.”
Other setups included 9 plants per tent and 3 plants per the 3 genotypes with a targeted temperature of 75-80F and targeted light intensity at 600 umol per square meter per second. The grow medium included Berger BM7 soil / Classic 600 (2-gallon) pot.
Check back soon for the second Scientific Grow Journal entry. Visit our YouTube page for Scientific Grow Journal videos. Follow all of our Grow Journals here.
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