Signify together with long-term research collaboration partner CannNext, is going to optimize crop yield and quality by expanding its joint research program. During the research, the two will determine the optimal harvest momentum and lighting regime. In August, Signify and CannNext announced the first phase of their research collaboration to develop growth recipes for high grade medicinal cannabis crops with CannNext.
“We see the cannabis industry evolving at light speed due to the investments involved and increase in legal use in a short time. What may have taken tens of years to get to standards for other crops, this industry clearly has a pace to evolve 10 times faster. Operating our high-tech indoor facility enables us to accelerate research to enhance quality and crop yield,” says Eric Uleman, managing director of CannNext. “We’re used to optimize growth recipes with detailed steering and measuring of irrigation, light, temperature and humidity in the greatest detail necessary to meet standards of GMP production. In this research we focus on finding standards in trichome development to predict content over time and we’ll also leverage technologies from other industries for analysis of trichomes and developing algorithms.”
“We’ve accumulated a wealth of knowledge on how light recipes can
advance crops and we’re applying this knowledge to the cultivation of medicinal cannabis. We strongly believe there’s a way we can optimize the harvest moment for a consistent production. In all circumstances this may lead to a significant higher yield of active compounds and secondly improve operational efficiencies,” said Udo van Slooten, Business Leader Horticulture at Signify.
For any medicinal cannabis crop, it is important to understand the right moment for harvesting as this may influence the quality of the flower and therefore its compounds composition. In many cases, the harvesting moment is determined by “touch” and “smell”. There is a lot of craftsmanship to it, but CannNext and Signify will apply a more technological and systematic approach to help the grower and operations manager in decision making.
Like many other crops, quality attributes are strongly influenced by harvest timing and pre-harvest conditions. Shelf life, dry matter percentage and secondary metabolic contents are rapidly changing when the plant matures and flowers ripens. In our research, we’re monitoring quality aspects of trichomes development on the flower buds during and briefly before harvest in order to draw the right conclusions of the research. Two identical growth containers have been built to conduct the experiments with varying parameters and study the effect of light, irrigation, climate and plant architecture at all phases of the growth process.
For more information:
Signify Global Marcom Horticulture
Daniela Damoiseaux
Tel: +31 6 31 65 29 69
daniela.damoiseaux@signify.com
philips.com/horti
CannNext
Eric Uleman, Managing director
+31 (0) 20 767 1950
eric.uleman@cannNext.com