The life cycle of the cannabis industry’s products begins at cultivation/processing facilities. It’s at these sites that the cannabis plants go all the way from seeds to the oils, pills, edibles and vapes that you find in your local dispensary. Most state regulations require the tracking of these plants with RFID technology all the way from seed to sale. That tracking begins here, using barcodes as soon as the seeds are put in the soil.
Each state requires 24/7 video surveillance and access control within these sites. Most of these facilities are large-scale indoor agricultural operations covering upwards of 100,000 square feet. The number of endpoints required to secure a space that size under normal circumstances can be massive. However, these facilities offer unique conditions that increase those requirements even further.
Many of the grow rooms now utilize vertical vegetation racking systems to maximize the yields they can produce inside the footprint of the facility. Typically, these racks extend from floor to ceiling allowing three to four different levels of shelving for plant cultivation. They are fixed on a track system that allows entire rows to be shifted from side to side to provide cultivators with access to each plant.
While this system offers tremendous flexibility and efficiency on the cultivation side, it creates an equally difficult challenge on the surveillance end. In an industry that requires every square inch of the facility to be monitored by surveillance cameras, moving shelves that extend from floor to ceiling makes meeting that regulatory requirement very challenging.
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