How to Run a Commercial Cultivation Product Trial

The safest way to adopt a new cultivation product is to prove it under representative conditions before converting the whole operation. A useful trial isolates the change and defines success in advance.

Write the hypothesis

State what the product is expected to improve and why. Examples include more consistent dryback, lower labour, higher accepted output or reduced electrical demand.

Choose a meaningful control

Compare against the facility's current standard. Use comparable genetics, plant age, environment and staff procedures.

Change as little else as possible

If substrate, feed, lighting and irrigation are all changed at once, it becomes difficult to know which variable caused the result.

Measure operational outcomes

Include labour, downtime, consumable cost and maintenance—not only plant metrics. The commercial winner is the system that improves total production economics and repeatability.

Document the setup

Record product lot, rate, equipment settings, room, dates and deviations. A trial that cannot be reproduced is difficult to scale.

Decide the scale-up rule in advance

Define what result justifies a larger trial or full conversion before seeing the data. This reduces the chance of changing the standard based on one impressive anecdote.

Use the Pure Technical Library to collect current specifications before designing a trial.