Cannabis, Food Security, and Aeroponics

This is a story of how advances in cannabis cultivation just might save the World from famine by making truly sustainable agriculture a reality. 

World population is expected to grow by a billion people over the next 25 years,  according to USAID (USAID.gov). They estimate that the world will have to somehow double its food production in order to feed all these people. 

Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO.org) estimates that each year the world loses 10 million hectares of land through soil erosion and depletion, plus an additional 10 million hectares of land through the inability to irrigate partly due to drought conditions.

Food Security is at Stake

The prospect of world famine grows each year because of urbanization, poor water management, and poor soil conditions. Sub-Saharan Africa is most often associated with food cultivation conditions that lead to famine, but the United States, Australia, and Asia are rapidly approaching similar conditions. 

Climate change is considered a major culprit and world organizations are targeting ways to potentially control the effects of climate on food production. Because of this, AGtech is currently a major area of innovation. Cities are building vertical farms where fruits and vegetables are grown hydroponically. Farming regions are also moving to hydroponics and greenhouse cultivation. However, these advances have also produced their own problems of increased power demand and toxic water runoff. 

A leading innovator in aeroponic cultivation, AeroBloom, may have the answer. The company was founded in 2018 by Dale Devore and Darren Walz, both vitally interested in the sustainable cultivation of food crops without pesticides and other harmful chemicals found in modern farming. Of course, they were also interested in how much premium cannabis they could grow. The money they made in their successful cannabis business went into the commercialization of Devore’s aeroponic cultivation process and equipment. 

That Devore’s invention reliably produces five beautiful harvests of premium cannabis annually, at over 4 pounds of dry trimmed bud per light (4’x4’) per harvest, at least double the production of top cultivation facilities, isn’t the important part of the story. What is important is that it’s actually the road to truly sustainable agriculture because it finances what Devore and Walz see as their ultimate goal: sustainable-cultivation systems that can feed the world with fresh, clean, and chemical-free food while causing very little impact on the health of our planet. 

Every advance in sustainable agriculture seeks to deal with urbanization, poor water management, and poor soil conditions:

Water

Lack of rainfall and drained aquifers are already affecting the major food production regions of the world such as the United States, Australia, Mexico, and areas of South America, Asia, and India. States that are seriously running out of water are California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Those states that don’t already have restrictions on water use in agriculture expect them soon, while other states like California, Arizona, and Texas expect increased restrictions.

Soil Depletion and Degradation

Centuries of farming have resulted in the depletion of soil nutrients necessary to grow food crops in as many regions as are affected by drought and aquifer over-use. This is only part of the problem. Arable land is also lost to flooding, desertification, wind erosion, saltwater intrusion, and chemical contamination. It can take ten years for topsoil to renew itself through the natural process of decaying vegetation and the absence of farming activities. Currently, more soil is being lost each year than is being renewed. This is now a developing problem in the Midwestern United States.

Urbanization

As the population of the world increases, great numbers of people will need places to live. Each year more arable land is converted into housing developments, commercial zones, and infrastructure such as roads and power delivery facilities. Combine this with water and soil problems, and a food-production disaster can easily be foreseen.

Hydroponics

One obvious solution is hydroponics, which is a system of growing plants without soil in water that is fortified by the addition of the nutrients that plants need to grow. Hydroponics uses only 60% of the water required in field agriculture, so it seems like a good solution to declining water resources. Further, it avoids soil depletion by dissolving nutrients in the water to feed the plants so they don’t require soil to grow.

On the other hand, hydroponics has some significant disadvantages. While it uses less water than field irrigation, it still uses a lot of water. Further, the water isn’t used in the most optimal way and, in many hydroponic facilities, the water becomes toxic runoff that harms aquatic life in streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Aeroponics - The Better Option

The MIR Space Station began operating in 1986. Among many scientific studies to be conducted on MIR, NASA wanted to grow plants aboard the station to learn how they reacted to zero-gravity conditions. In 1997 NASA brought in Richard Stoner II, a noted agri-biology expert who had developed a system of growing plants without soil, in sterile conditions, using only a small amount of nutrient-fortified water. Stoner had spent the previous decade developing the system in his own company, Aeroponics International. He began work with NASA-sponsored BioServe Space Technologies to develop an aeroponic system for use in space to perform experiments for the study of plant biology in a pristine environment free of pests and pesticides.

Aeroponics is a cultivation technology that grows plants without soil, using a root chamber that contains a nutrient-infused fine mist that surrounds and permeates plant root balls. 

To understand how aeroponics differs from hydroponics, imagine yourself as a seedling planted in the dirt. You are trying to grow and to do that, you reach your roots out into the dirt to find water and nutrients. This is hard work that saps your energy most of the time yet your success depends on whether your roots can wiggle their way through tiny cracks in the hard dirt. Your leaves also use energy to bring in oxygen because little or no oxygen is available in the soil. This takes energy away from photosynthesis.

If you, as a seedling, had been planted in a hydroponic system instead, you would find your roots bathed by nutrient-infused water. They either spend their time immersed in water or bathed by intermittently flowing water. Either way, it takes much less energy to grow lots of roots in the water as opposed to trying to find space and pockets of water and nutrients in the soil. However, spending all of your time in the water limits the availability of oxygen to your roots, which means your leaves have to work overtime to collect the oxygen you need.

If you had been planted in an aeroponic system, your roots are suspended in a nutrient-rich fine mist of water. This is their optimal growing condition. It allows your roots to flourish in volume and to form extensive quantities of root hairs that capture nutrients and oxygen out of the mist. This promotes the growth of microbiomes in the root ball. Microbiomes are what give the plant its characteristics. 

Aeroponic cultivation systems result in greater root growth with greater root hair development because it is easier for the root system to thrive in a fog-like mist that provides everything they need: water, nutrients, and oxygen. Roots produce fruits.

Enter Cannabis

In the late 1980s, a former music prodigy discovered he had a physical condition that would make touring with bands impossible, so he set out to cure himself by eliminating toxins in his food and finding ways to support himself through his efforts toward that goal. In 1988 he created his first aeroponic grow system and in 1999 he impressed Richard Stoner, leader of NASA’s aeroponics research team, with his proprietary aeroponics technology developments. 

During the next four years, AeroBloom co-founder and Chief Scientist Dale Devore compared ideas and notes with Stoner. Devore applied their discussions, and the genius that made him into a young concert pianist and composer, to the growing of various edible plants and cannabis. The cannabis more than paid Devore’s medical and living expenses, and he became the recognized authority on aeroponic cannabis cultivation in the industry.

Devore relentlessly refined his original aeroponic system during the next quarter-century into at least 50 variations with continuously increasing yields until he came up with an aeroponic cannabis cultivation system that reliably produces at least 4 pounds of dry trimmed premium bud per light (4’x4’). This compares to what the industry considers to be outstanding production of 1.5 pounds to 2 pounds of bud per light.

Needless to say, this allowed Devore to produce cannabis at more than double the profit margins of his competitors -- which he did.

Using Cannabis to Fund Sustainable Agriculture 

Devore and Walz started Aeroponic Integrated Systems, Inc. d.b.a. AeroBloom in 2018 to commercialize their growing system for cannabis cultivation. Their company is essentially a startup with 30 years of successful operation in the shadow world of the cannabis industry in California. They began working with startup professionals to craft a business plan and convert their OG ways of doing business into a tight corporate format.

AeroBloom is strictly AGtech, meaning they aren’t using their system to grow cannabis for themselves. The AeroBloom business model is to sell the system to growers of cannabis and other crops who want to increase yield but without the extra cost of additional growing space and operational costs. The initial focus on cannabis growers is a simple strategy of going where the money and excitement is currently flourishing. It wasn’t long before Dr. Robb Farms, the company behind the cannabis-focused Coachillin industrial park in Desert Hot Springs, California, began negotiations for a side-by-side comparison of their hydroponic system against AeroBloom’s aeroponic system.

AeroBloom is also currently in negotiations outside the world of cannabis with one project that could save the Northern Mexico food cultivation region from its rapidly advancing water problems. The aeroponic system will be tweaked and tested for use in the greenhouse cultivation of four types of tomatoes, chili peppers, strawberries, grapes, and potatoes. As each system reaches readiness for the climate and specific crop, it will be installed in giant greenhouses on the property. 

There is also a similar potential project in the United Kingdom. The reason for that isn’t lack of water but the impact of Brexit on the importation of foodstuffs from the better growing climates in the Eurozone. The goal of this project is to supply farming enterprises with high-volume rapid-growth cultivation systems to meet British demand for fruits and vegetables.

There is investment money to fund specific AeroBloom projects, but to fully prepare the company to go global with its technology, funds are needed for legal work, marketing, personnel, and manufacturing. Devore and Walz have found that potential investors are more interested in funding the growing and selling of cannabis than they are in developing an aeroponic system to grow tomatoes. For that reason, they decided to open the first of what will be a series of cultivation facilities and dispensaries under a separate company, AeroSynergy. Their fully-licensed Long Beach, California cannabis cultivation facility is set to launch in the Autumn of 2021 and will double as an R&D facility as well as a showroom for the system. It is expected to throw off at least $3 million in EBITDA in its first full year of operations in the 3000 square foot facility. They expect as much as $6 million in EBITDA after the build-out and power upgrades are complete.

They are also taking investment for additional grow rooms and dispensaries throughout Southern California. The dispensaries are expected to produce even greater returns than their Long Beach cultivation facility because their previous successful top-rated medical dispensary, Cafe Canna Cabana near Palm Springs, California, produced more than $800,000 in monthly revenue back in 2016 shortly after cannabis became legal in California.

AeroSynergy has been structured to provide licensing fees to AeroBloom for the use of the technology as well as to market the system to growers through its showroom. This will aid in funding the expansion of AeroBloom’s sustainable food cultivation projects throughout the US and globally. AeroBloom will also launch a WeFunder crowdfunding campaign in late April 2021 to provide funds to begin the expansion.