How Summit’s Cultivation Director Tackles Efficiency, Talent & Lighting 🌱⚡
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD5a7E32Cx0

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Hello everyone. We're at Summit. I'm here with Matt. >> My name is Matt Roe. I'm the director of cultivation here at Summit. I've been the industry about 11 years. Been with Summit for four of those. >> How do you approach energy and resource efficiency in your grow operations, especially with the rising pressure to optimize your cost system? >> We are constantly tracking all of our cost factors, whether that be energy usage, materials, nutrients, and of course labor.

>> What are some things that you noticed that was immediately, "Okay, we need to change this." >> A lot of those things come down to allocating labor, making sure that the time that we're putting into certain tasks is really worth the payoff, and figuring out how to approach some of those tasks differently. On the energy side, if we have a room that's down and it's just being cleaned, I'll try to turn the lights off, make sure that we're not wasting energy on lighting and HVAC if the room doesn't have plants in it.

>> In your opinion, what's the most in-demand skill set in cannabis cultivation business right now? >> Defoliation, or defanning as we call it. It does take some skill to be able to efficiently remove the leaves without doing damage to the plants. It's something that does require quite a bit of practice. That's where roughly 50% of the labor that we spend in this facility is spent on defoliation alone. >> So, if you want to work in cannabis tech, defoliation is what you should be working on.

So, lighting is obviously very important. When you're evaluating a lighting system, what do you look for? What is your criteria? >> First and foremost, we're looking for reliability. There's nothing worse than having a whole slew of lighting failures that you have to deal with on a daily basis. Efficiency is huge. Having lights that you can easily maintenance is really important, and ease of installation. Usually, when we are doing those installations, we're on a pretty tight timeline.

So, being able to get the lights up quickly and and get them running as quickly as possible is a really big factor.