Information is incredibly valuable in a young industry like medical cannabis cultivation, especially when it comes to growing practices. Sadly, a lot of good growing information is hidden behind NDA’s or secrecy, and so it can be quite difficult to find out how to properly handle your crop. This is also something that Paul Herment, a student at Agrocampus Ouest Angers in France, noticed. Thus, he decided to conduct a survey in order to get a better idea of best practices for the medical cannabis sector.
At first, Paul tried to do his own research into the best practices of medical cannabis production, but it soon became clear to him that there was not a lot of useful information out there. “The industry is not mature yet, so it is really difficult to find good information,” he says. “We realized that there are no standards, even though the industry is full of growers who seem to have expertise when it comes to growing cannabis.”
But the techniques of these larger, more expert growers are protected by NDA. Those that are willing to share and compare their techniques are often heavily influenced by the underground activity of before. “It was complicated for me to find the best information,” says Paul. “One type of information is not scientific, and the other is protected by NDA. That’s why I decided to make a survey to get as much information as possible, so to get an overview of the current most common growing techniques, and to potentially come to a first draft of a standard.”
Paul created an anonymous survey to get information from cannabis growers on their practices, in order to get a better idea of best practices. “My main mission was to conduct a big bibliographical and technical research in order to get to know the production processes of medical cannabis a bit better,” he says. “As well as to better understand what we can improve concerning the equipment in the greenhouse to make the production better.”
Paul's work is to define the best solution for the market respecting GMP’s guidelines. The information that he hopes to get from this survey will be an immense help when it comes to this project.
If you are a medical cannabis grower and are interested in helping out with the survey, you can find the survey here.