Crop registration, especially within the context of crop steering in cannabis, revolves around the detailed collection and analysis of plant metrics in order to monitor and optimize plant growth. Although many growers take rough measurements throughout the grow cycle, crop registration takes plant data to the extreme.
In other agricultural sectors, crop registration is a cornerstone practice for enhancing yields, increasing harvest quality, and ensuring the precise management of growth conditions. But beyond what growers share, little information is available about crop registration as it applies to cannabis cultivation.
Considering the growing prevalence of crop steering in cannabis, this is a glaring omission in the online conversation. Below, we tackle the crop steering information gap head-on. If you have questions about crop registration in cannabis, we cover them below.
What Is Crop Registration?
Crop registration has a few definitions, depending on the sector and point in the supply chain in which it occurs. However, when it comes to cultivation, specifically under the crop steering umbrella, crop registration is the practice of meticulous, detailed plant measurements and data point collection. It's fundamentally a measure of plant productivity.
Crop registration is crucial for tracking plants' development as they respond to vegetative and generative cues. This detailed collection of plant-level data enables growers to monitor plant attributes and make informed decisions to optimize yields and quality.
By recording specific metrics (aka, key performance indicators or KPIs), like plant height, root development, stem diameter, leaf color, bud circumference, node spacing, and other relevant details, cultivators can make informed decisions about the indoor environment to better steer growth patterns.
Crop Registration in Cannabis
Crop steering and, subsequently, crop registration are relatively new terms in the cannabis industry. Yes, growers have been manipulating the indoor environment and tracking plant growth for decades, but crop steering takes this to entirely new management levels.
Let's start with crop steering. This is an advanced approach to managing plant growth by adjusting factors like irrigation, nutrient delivery, lighting, and climate conditions. This technique aims to trigger specific metabolic and hormonal responses in plants, guiding development toward either vegetative growth or generative growth phases by controlling the environment and conditions at the root zone.
Under this mandate, growers obsessively measure dry backs, electrical conductivity, shot sizes, and volumetric water content, but they also regularly measure plant growth.
Specifics vary slightly between different agricultural sectors, but in cannabis cultivation, crop registration revolves around measuring these KPIs:
- Plant height
- Root development
- Stem diameter
- Internodal spacing
- Leaf and stem color
- Flower circumference
- Trichome attributes
- Plant vigor
Of course, all this plant-centric data is only helpful if paired with the rest of the steering data:
- Moisture content
- Electrical conductivity
- pH levels
- CO2 levels
- Humidity
- Temperature
- Photoperiod
- Light intensity
- and others
Collect, Track, and Analyze: Crop Registration Best Practices
Before cannabis went legal, growers relied on notepads and whiteboards to track rough metrics on their plants. While these scribbled crop notes evolved into Excel spreadsheets, even this progression has become bogged down with the sheer number of data points.
Even without the added layers required for crop steering and crop registration, the future of cannabis is moving into regulation as an active pharmaceutical ingredient under strict Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMP).
Managing this level of growth data on a whiteboard is simply no longer possible. The truth is that cannabis cultivation in today's hyper-competitive environment requires an unprecedented level of grow room data.
This means the only way to accurately collect, track, and analyze the millions of data points collected in a grow room for larger, more profitable harvests is with an intelligent growth management platform.
TSRgrow GROWHub for Crop Steering
GROWHub offers complete monitoring over your grow room environment, from lights to irrigation to climate. As you move between vegetative and generative cues, GROWHub allows for precise adjustments to meet the specific lighting needs of different strains and specific stages of growth and models the intensity based on environment real-time measurements as compared to historical data.
Not only can it handle the sheer amount of data pulled from a facility filled with sensors, but it's also customizable to track the data you need to assess for every grow.
The GROWhub Software is an advanced crop management platform designed specifically to meet the needs of cannabis cultivators. Features include:
- Cloud-based system for monitoring anytime, anywhere
- Data logging and analysis
- Real-time monitoring and notifications with recipes for each strain
- Customizable dashboards
- Calendar-based scheduling
- Status overviews and alerts for all your zones in one place
- Historical data storage of past and present grow cycles
How Frequently Should You Collect Plant Data?
Routine crop registration might take place once a week among greenhouse tomato producers. But among cannabis producers, you'll find that growers tend to take much more frequent measurements, sometimes as often as every two days.
Of course, not all plant measurements apply to every part of the crop cycle. Flower circumference and trichome attributes are only measurable during flowering. Root development and plant height are most critical during the vegetative stage.
Also, the more aggressively you steer your plants in vegetative or generative phases, the more aggressively you'll want to measure their development. This is especially true for new strains under production and R&D projects.
Even for growers with 100 harvests of the same strain in the same facility, regular crop registration can help improve problem areas in the growing environment and ensure yields are on track with historical records.
The Future of Cannabis Is Here: Crop Steering and Crop Registration
If you are competing in today's market, crop registration is one pivotal practice that helps you hit each strain's full genetic potential. With TSRgrow's GROWHub onboard, you can revolutionize your approach to crop data management thanks to an advanced level of control and dashboard customization.
Our advanced solution helps you harness the power of data-driven growth management and helps your facility reach the yields and quality to lock in profitability. If you are ready to upgrade your cultivation strategy to prepare for the future of cGMP cannabis production, speak with the TSRgrow team today.
