Agrify and Confident Cannabis: Uniting Chemistry with Cultivation

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  Agrify Team

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April 20, 2021

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Max 4 minutes read

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    Uniting chemistry and cultivation

    A cannabis plant’s growing environment greatly influences its chemical profile, which is responsible for shaping a consumer’s desired experience. Inconsistencies in these phytocannabinoid and terpene profiles, even among cultivars of the same lineage, are bound to occur from harvest to harvest.

    Even though these changes are natural and expected, they can be noticeable enough for a consumer anticipating the same experience with each purchase of Tangie or Blue Dream. For that reason, dispensary buyers will want to verify that each harvest is consistent in phytocannabinoid and terpene content.

    To help cultivators and buyers reliably assess flower before purchasing, Agrify joined forces with Confident Cannabis, a software and lab testing platform used by around 60 percent of the cannabis industry, in early 2021. This partnership delivers next-level insights into each cultivar on the granular level. By uniting the Confident Cannabis platform with data collected by Agrify Insights, buyers can tell with certainty that a cultivator’s product contains the phytocannabinoids and terpenes listed on the label.

    On the Trust, Transparency, and Confident Cannabis episode of Agrify’s The Future of Growth podcast, Chief Science Officer David Kessler sits down with Confident Cannabis Co-founder and CEO Steve Albarran to discuss how the two software platforms offer unprecedented transparency to buyers in cannabis markets across the U.S. In this blog, we highlight some of the biggest benefits of the Agrify – Confident Cannabis partnership explored in this interview.

    Turn scientific data into digestible bites

    Certificates of analysis aren’t precisely page-turners, but they are important. Albarran observed that lab report readability is typically not prioritized, as lab reports are often issued to fulfill a requirement, not to make a sale. In the cannabis industry, though, lab reports are essential to closing the deal.

    “Tomato farmers don’t sell more tomatoes with lab results, but cannabis farmers do,” Albarran said on the podcast.

    However, no person is expected to go through all that information, let alone understand how each piece connects back to the product under consideration. The Confident Cannabis interface creates easy to read reports with key data points up top and additional information toward the bottom. These reports can be shared with prospective buyers with just a click.

    “Someone can email it out to all their customers saying, ‘We just harvested this, let us know if you’re interested in buying,’” Albarran said. “Buyers can see key information, like THC content, without having to scroll through a .pdf.”

    Albarran also said that Confident Cannabis offers a free feature that maps several reports of a particular cultivar by phytocannabinoid and terpene profile. Buyers can see a cultivator’s consistency right away, which further underscores the importance of producing similar results with each harvest through Agrify’s tools.

    “Every dot is the average of all of the strains grown by one producer in one state,” Albarran said. “If the dots are all close together, that means they’re very consistent. Sometimes, [the bell curve] is very, very wide, which could mean that the cultivator has THC dialed in, but maybe the terpenes are all over the place, or vice versa.”

    Integrate cultivation and chemistry datasets

    Lab test results are crucial for cultivators working to optimize yields and standardize results across harvests. With so many environmental factors involved — cultivators need to analyze light, humidity, vapor pressure deficit (VPD), temperature, and more – it’s impossible to know which areas to adjust without data to evaluate. The lab reports produced by Confident Cannabis can be applied back into a harvest by comparing the results with the environmental data tracked by Agrify Insights. This helps inform a cultivator which settings are the winning combination for that cultivar.

    “A lot of factors go into the quality of the final product, but a large portion of that is the actual chemistry of the product,” Albarran said. “Both chemistry and cultivation [contribute to] the outcome, and the outcome is in part determined by the lab results.”

    Kessler noted that a chart data feature in Agrify Insights can run a comparison of the entire life cycle. This information, when compared with the data pulled from Confident Cannabis, helps pinpoint the anomalies that may have caused a change in phytocannabinoid or terpene content. This provides the cultivator with the information necessary to prevent that fluctuation in future harvests.

    “In the past, people would cultivate and they would have either good results or bad results,” Kessler said. “They’d try and correlate their notes to good or bad and replicate a practice… without that chemistry and without that chemical composite at the end, you’re really only playing with a third of the picture at best.”

    Minimizes data errors

    Even the most diligent of professionals are susceptible to human error. Integrating Confident Cannabis with Agrify minimizes the chance that information is entered into either system incorrectly, as even the slightest mistake can throw off results.

    “When you’re double and triple entering data, especially chemical data that’s very precise to the hundredth or thousandth of a decimal point, it’s an area that’s rife for mistakes,” Kessler said. “Mix-ups can have a profound result.”

    “Larger operators test maybe 50 samples every day, and the minute the test results are done from the lab, we send that over to Agrify with the identifying information to allow Agrify to automatically map that to the batches that were harvested and tested,” Albarran added. “So there’s no more manual entry, there’s no error. You get all the data immediately, right at your fingertips.”

    To learn more about Confident Cannabis, its integration with Agrify, and insights into the future of cannabis flower, listen to the full episode here. To find out if the Confident Cannabis-Agrify Insights integration is currently available in your state, contact us today.

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