How do you get repeatable chemistry in a biological system? Fancy words for simply asking: how do I get this plant to react the same way every cycle? Flashy equipment, automation promising Star Trek levels of efficiency – these are all the little tools growers rely on to get their plants to perform consistently. Things, however, get a bit more complicated when the growing purpose is very narrow and specific, such as growing for rosin. How do you get a plant to flower in a specific way to produce the desired high quality end product?
© TSRgrow
At Bountiful Farms in Massachusetts, GM of cultivation Zachary Taylor has spent years studying how different light spectra influence terpene and cannabinoid expression. His partner in this work is TSRgrow, a Rhode Island-based lighting company led by CEO and cofounder Mikhail Sagal, who has been engineering LED systems since the early days of blue diodes. Together, they've been fine-tuning a spectrum designed not just for biomass, but for quality.
"We've been working together for six years," says Zachary. "One of the hard things about cannabis is consistency. It's a plant, and every cultivar reacts differently."
© TSRgrow Mikhail Sagal and Zachary Taylor
Let the light cook
TSRgrow entered horticultural lighting around 2016 after years of working with universities on greenhouse systems. Their focus was always on data and control. "We removed the driver from the fixture," Mikhail explains, "so all power and dimming are centralized. That gives you efficiency, clean maintenance, and more importantly, full data capture."
Their control system, the GrowHub, allows growers to assign a lighting "recipe" to a specific cultivar. "You can load a strain, click a button, and the lights dim or change spectrum accordingly," says Zachary. Bountiful Farms operates over a thousand lights across roughly 20,000 square feet of canopy. Every room runs on strain-specific parameters. "From a cultivation standpoint, that's a game changer. You can analyze the data, see how many kilowatts went into a specific cultivar, and plan financially as well as agriculturally."
© TSRgrow
Far-red
When talking about spectrum, Mikhail and Zachary focus on ratios, such as red to far red, blue to green. In most commercial grows, far red is ignored because it's costly and doesn't count toward efficiency ratings under the DesignLights Consortium (DLC) rules. TSRgrow, however, has used far red since day one.
"It's more expensive, but it works," Mikhail says. "Far red at the right ratio with red helps flower development and yield."
Zachary confirms the results. "For rosin-focused production, we're seeing up to one percent more rosin yield just from the far-red tuning. That's huge when your top cultivars max out around six percent yield for rosin. We've also seen three to five percent higher terpene content under the pink spectrum, that's the one with heavier far red and reduced white."
For him, this bridges the gap between anecdote and science. "Back in the caregiver days, we'd mix light spectra without really knowing why it worked. Now we understand what's happening at the nanometer level."
© TSRgrow
Light, chemistry, and expression
In Bountiful Farms' experience, spectrum doesn't just change how plants grow, it changes what they produce. "We're seeing upticks in micro-terpenes, not just the majors like limonene," says Zachary. "Minor terpenes and flavonoids also respond to light quality. You can think of it as a kind of BRIX for cannabis, a measure of how the plant expresses itself."
From TSRgrow's perspective, light ratio drives morphology as much as chemistry. "We've seen better vegetative structure, tighter internodes, and improved stem quality when balancing blue and green," Mikhail says. "But the point isn't one perfect spectrum, it's the ability to match light to the cultivar's behavior."
Data, not dogma
Both agree that modern cannabis cultivation has to move beyond bro science. "Follow the scientific method," says Zachary. "Test one variable at a time. Growers tend to change ten things and then wonder which one worked." Mikhail adds, "Quality is consistency. Our job is to give cultivators tools that make quality measurable and repeatable, to collect data, analyze it, and improve continuously. That's where our GrowHub comes into play."
© TSRgrow
Still, both acknowledge the temptation of chasing trends. "You'll hear a lot about spectral tuning," Zachary says. "But one should not focus too much on a single wavelength. To make a comparison, the market is constantly chasing ever-higher THC numbers. By doing that, however, you are doing a disservice to the cannabis plant as a whole. Similarly, if you focus too much on one color of the light spectrum, you leave behind all the other wavelengths which, combined together, can have a great impact on plant performance. I am a firm believer in the KISS method, coupled with actionable data, like the kind you get from tools such as the GrowHub. This is especially important in the current ever-changing climate of the cannabis space."
For more information:
TSRgrow
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www.tsrgrow.com
