Light, Yield, and Quality: The Science Behind Cannabis Cultivation with Travis Higginbotham

Light, Yield, and Quality: The Science Behind Cannabis Cultivation with Travis Higginbotham

Travis Higginbotham: Your flower timing — the date at which you harvest — is vastly different in an extract system versus a flower system. There's a certain point throughout the flowering cycle where yield will outpace potency, and this has been proven. So it's in your best interest to harvest early in some cases to optimize your potency per pound so that your extraction efficiency is optimized at that point. Whereas if I were to harvest at that same date for finished flower, the flower wouldn't even visually look finished in some cases. Bryan Fields: What's up, guys, welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellan Finney. This week we've got a very special guest, Travis Higginbotham, CEO of Diligence Horticulture. Travis, thanks for taking the time — how are you doing today? Travis Higginbotham: Hey Bryan, I'm doing good. I've been a long-time listener of this podcast, so I appreciate y'all reaching out to me, and I'm eager to dive into it. Bryan Fields: Excited to dive in. Kellan, how are you doing? Kellan Finney: I'm doing really well, really excited to talk to Travis, really excited to dig into cultivation and some of the efficiencies that can be gained there. It's also nice to be able to chat with someone who's currently on the West Coast and really loves being out there, you know what I mean, Bryan? How are you doing? Bryan Fields: Absolutely — listen, I think it's totally fair to love the West Coast, sunshine is a beautiful thing. But I think when you talk about loyalty, you talk about family and roots and where you went to school, and that's the important part. So Travis, where is your family located, and where do your heart and your roots lie — East Coast or West Coast? Travis Higginbotham: Strong question there. No, the majority of my family is in South Carolina. I went to school at Clemson and Virginia Tech, so I am a Southern boy at heart, you better believe it. Kellan Finney: That's not East, Bryan — I just want the record to show he said Southern boy, not East Coast. And one would say Colorado isn't West, but here we are, right? Bryan Fields: So Travis, before we dive in, for our listeners who don't know you, can you give a little background about yourself and how you found your way into the cannabis space? Travis Higginbotham: Sure. I grew up in South Carolina — my father was military, so we grew up in a conservative, military, Southern Baptist family, and cannabis or weed was never part of the discussion. Originally I wasn't on track to go into plant science or crop production at all — I was actually on track to become a classical pianist. I took piano for about 13 years; there's a rich musical history in my family. I'll share the first time I came into contact with cannabis: I smoked a joint one day on the way to a friend's party while I was at Lander University, majoring in classical piano performance. Music was my life. That first time was one of the most magical times of my life — I remember sitting in the back of the car, it was dark, the stars were out, 'Sweet Disposition' by The Temper Trap was playing, and I was in bliss. The next day, even though I'd gotten pretty stoned the night before, I went to practice piano, and it was as if something had unlocked in my brain. That was my first introduction to this crop and what it could possibly do — enhancing wellbeing and life in general. That's been my personal interest, but the long story short: I got out of music, got my bachelor's in horticulture at Clemson University working under Dr. Jim Faust in his lab for about three years, and then got into the industry as Director of Research for one of the top 100 growers in the US, Battlefield Farms, helping build their R&D department. While there I had great opportunities across all facets of horticulture — rearing microorganisms for biocontrols, working directly with Lowe's, working with lobby groups on pesticide issues and environmental certifications, soil, source, photoperiodic and supplemental lighting in greenhouse and indoor settings, irrigation booms, acclimating tissue culture, you name it — plus working with about 50 different global breeding companies on product development and variety selection, not just for our business but for Lowe's nationwide. I ended up being one of four research council members for Lowe's on product development, trialing as many as 200 different species and 3,000 varieties a year. I learned a lot quickly. My mentor there, Mark Ferndale, head grower of Battlefield Farms, taught me my foundational crop science background — I have to give him credit. After that, I was recruited by Fluence to help build a global technical support team, which was my introduction to the cannabis industry. We built a technical support service that complemented sales of their most strategic accounts across North America, Europe, and Australia, and I also worked in tomatoes, vine crops, cucumbers, and leafy greens at the time. It was a wild ride — consulting on the Gold Coast in Australia one week, then in an underground bunker in Germany, then visiting Cronos Group's facility in Canada, the size of a Costco. During that time I also got my master's in horticulture from Virginia Tech, focused on plant pathology — the interactions of Trichoderma and other microbials in relation to crop performance and disease prevention, plus some work with UV. Most recently before that, I worked with Alice at The Hemp Mine in South Carolina — an opportunity to go back home; she was spearheading exciting things in the state, being a leader in cannabis and, at the time, hemp. I focused on go-to-market strategy for hemp genetics with field farmers throughout the US, working with multiple universities on regional trials to validate genetic performance, then took it to market. We all know where the hemp market went, so we had to make some hard decisions. Most recently I was VP of Cultivation for StateHouse Holdings, a large single-state operator in California. I was originally hired as VP of Production at Harborside, which then went through a full merger with StateHouse, and I became VP of Cultivation. They had close to a quarter million square feet of greenhouse across two locations, and I'm incredibly proud of what we built there. Since then, I've left StateHouse and started Diligence Horticulture, which has been in business for about eight months now, and we're having a lot of fun. Bryan Fields: So let's dive into cannabis cultivation. In your opinion, are current businesses structured successfully, or do they need to change their approach going forward? Travis Higginbotham: Each cannabis business, and specifically each cultivation system, is vastly different from one another. There's no standardization, no systematic design, no real horticultural production foundation in most cannabis cultivation businesses — and that's a big opportunity for Diligence Horticulture. It's fascinating stepping into these businesses; they have exceptional individuals, exciting ideas around product development and go-to-market strategy, and robust sales and finance experts. But then I look at their yield forecasts over a year in a greenhouse, and they're not even accounting for seasonality or its impact on cost and yield in their financial model. At the same time, there's still a lot of 'bro science' out there influencing parts of the business, which is really starting to hurt companies. Bryan Fields: What's 'bro science' — just so we're on the same page? Travis Higginbotham: I want to be sensitive about how I describe this, because there's a lot that legacy growers have thought about that we still don't formally understand. But bro science means approaching the crop in a way that isn't formally horticulturally educated — in fertilizer decisions, flowering duration, harvest timing, and how quality is determined, which is this whole subjective can of worms. Bryan Fields: It's all over the board. I think that's important to highlight, because we've heard cannabis described as more art than science, and I think one of the things you bring is pulling from other horticultural disciplines and best practices. Can you elaborate on what a baseline operation has versus what's often missing? Travis Higginbotham: When I walk into a facility, indoor or greenhouse, one of the first things I look for is the foundational production schedule — how are you scheduling people, plant count, and area on a weekly timestamp? We don't yet have access to automation because we lack scale and stable seed, so in many cases everything has to be touched, moved, or pinched by hand. Some systems are still doing nine to ten weeks of flowering, harvesting every other week, with total cycle times as long as 18 to 20 weeks. The longer the cycle, the longer cash is tied up, and in many cases this isn't even properly validated — why are you flowering for ten weeks? I never get a clear answer. So I look first at the foundation production schedule, then I evaluate whether the infrastructure has the capacity to create the environment needed to hit the business's goals — remember, humans don't grow plants, the environment does; humans manage and control the environment. Then we evaluate the team's true horticultural expertise. In traditional horticulture there's a title called 'head grower' — someone who's grown at scale, has a decade-plus of experience across multiple crops, is often horticulturally educated, and can balance time, area, and business goals. In cannabis you rarely find that level of expertise running a facility. You usually find a legacy grower doing their best to run a business, manage a P&L, manage a team, and hit company KPIs around cost, revenue, and yield — but missing that key horticultural leadership. So we look at infrastructure, location, team, and overall production schedule, and from there we figure out how to improve the business. Bryan Fields: When you analyze all of this, is there typically one area you start with, or is it case-by-case? Travis Higginbotham: The two key things that help me understand a system's capability are the infrastructure available to grow plants, and how they're scheduling their area within a year to optimize yield and crop development. We usually focus on the production schedule first, because it drives materials management, labor management, and how you handle photoperiods and energy usage. But systems in general also vary — a greenhouse is very different from an indoor environment. Sometimes a facility looks clean and modern, but we find they've chosen the wrong LEDs, paid too much for them, have benches that aren't sized properly for the room, a strange irrigation and fertigation design, insufficient airflow, and no real understanding of their homogenized environment because sensors aren't deployed properly. That's what Diligence Horticulture audits when we first get involved. We have four main service offerings, and one is an audit of the cultivation unit — myself and our VP of Projects spend a few days collecting essentially every document a receiver would review in a bankruptcy: financials, production plans, prior yields down to the cultivar level. Then we systematically redesign the business model around unit time, unit area, unit energy, and unit yield. Bryan Fields: I want to go back to the ten weeks of flowering comment. Is there a right answer, or is it just legacy habit? How would you determine the ideal flowering time for a given strain, and what's the typical response you get from growers? Travis Higginbotham: Cannabis is a light accumulator — the more light it accumulates, the more yield it converts, and research from Dr. Bruce Bugbee at Utah State University and others shows that higher light accumulation correlates with higher yield. One way to apply more light is to grow the plant longer. But there's a point in the flowering cycle where the photosynthetic efficiency gained no longer justifies continuing that cycle versus starting a new one. At the same time, growers will say a strain 'doesn't finish' until ten weeks — but what does 'finished' mean? Not tolerating amber trichomes isn't a quantifiable answer. As a grower you're given a fixed, limited production area you must optimize across a year — I like to look at a full year because a greenhouse goes through low season, peak season, rainy season, and back to day one. If I have 100,000 square feet, how many times can I turn that footprint to accumulate the most grams per square foot per year while maintaining a fixed weekly cost? A 7.5-week flower cycle versus a 10-week cycle means significantly more turns per year and much more accumulated biomass converting into revenue. There's a lot of research into the right flowering duration — different genetics finish differently — and we're learning that harvesting a bit earlier may actually increase potency, because yield isn't diluting it, per the dilution effect seen in other crops. Bryan Fields: Are there specific KPIs you use to help operators identify that optimal turn time? Travis Higginbotham: Diligence Horticulture has a validated playbook at this point. I'm a big proponent of two weeks of propagation, two weeks of veg, and 7.5 weeks of flower, turning the facility as aggressively as possible — there are cultural techniques with nutrition, photoperiod, and temperature that can speed up flowering, similar to what's done with orchids and other crops. We track two key metrics: grams per square foot per cycle as our weekly yield tracker within a perpetual schedule, and then Photon Conversion Efficiency — grams per mole of light per meter squared per cycle and per year. Research shows the best-of-the-best systems achieve around 0.4 grams per mole per meter squared per cycle; most operations are around 0.18 to 0.2. That gap is where the grower comes in — how they choose crop density, train the crop to optimize light capture, and manage turn rate so the square footage is never sitting idle. That single metric lets a business break out energy-use efficiency, water-use efficiency, and more, since everything ties back to how the plant uses light as its energy source. I usually grade a grower from A to D based on where they stand and build a plan to get them to at least a B+ by year end. Bryan Fields: I'd imagine that's not always an easy conversation — growers are juggling staffing issues and doing their best. How do these engagements typically start, and how do you approach that relationship? Travis Higginbotham: Diligence Horticulture is a cultivation operations service provider. Over the past eight months we've worked with family offices, venture capital groups, debt lenders, and court receivers who come to us for turnaround services or distressed-asset revitalization. Our services include distressed asset revitalization, usually starting with a receiver or investor from a business that's gone under; fractional C-level services, where we step in as Chief Cultivation Officer or Chief Operations Officer, and we also partner with a financial firm to offer CFO services; and risk mitigation and innovation consulting, which is our third offering — we have seven clients across the US and Europe focused purely on what's next. Most of our business has come from the original investors in these companies. Bryan Fields: Does it create a sensitive dynamic when an investor brings you in and the existing lead grower now has to follow a new protocol? Travis Higginbotham: It definitely can be sensitive. In many cases these individuals already know it's coming — investors give businesses the chances they deserve to try to turn things around, but at the end of the day no one can do it alone. Cultivation, especially horticultural production, is a specific expertise. Sometimes a great partnership blooms between our company and the existing leadership, and we learn together through new trials and innovations. Other times, the whole team has to be replaced and we start from the ground up. It really depends on the grower — are you open to a partner for your success? I try to be sensitive because people put their heart and soul into these businesses. Bryan Fields: Random question — has there ever been a case where a location just doesn't have a strong cannabis market, and you've calculated that it might make more business sense to grow a different crop there instead? Travis Higginbotham: Yes. We've worked with capital groups interested in controlled environment agriculture broadly, supporting vertical farming and leafy greens as well, and we can show the pros and cons of a location's capacity for either business model. In some cases we've told a group, 'I would not recommend production here — sell this asset.' I try to help people make the most of what they've invested, but sometimes you just can't hit the benchmarks and need to cut your losses. Bryan Fields: Do you need a team of scientists on staff, or just an understanding of the principles? We've heard some of these tools and metrics can be complicated for teams to execute. Travis Higginbotham: It depends on the scale and vision of the business. A real plant scientist on staff should be tied into product development and brand strategy, since the science fuels everything — so at scale, a business should have a director of research. Diligence Horticulture already comes to the table with two PhDs on staff: a director of technical support and a director of research, covering innovation, product development, fertilizer programs, IPM schedules, and substrate selection and cost. But for other businesses, if you have an efficient, weekly perpetual production schedule with solid SOPs in place, the foundation doesn't necessarily require a PhD or in-house cultivation expert — it can run on autopilot, freeing the business to focus on distribution, sales, and manufacturing margin. Most companies don't have a churning, autopilot cultivation business, and that's where having an outside partner on call to handle technical issues is more efficient than carrying a high-cost individual on staff in a capital-intensive space like agriculture. Bryan Fields: Does your team bring monitoring tools or sensors to give visibility into a grow's performance in real time? Travis Higginbotham: Yes — one of the key values we offer clients is a clear dashboard and system tracking. We work with specific partners to present an overall business performance dashboard, and depending on the business's cash flow and available capex, we refine data capture and collection with our vendor partners, designing systems to give confidence in what's actually happening and tracking performance back to cultivar level to inform future production forecasts. In addition to our internal team, we have 13 best-in-class vendor partners across water infrastructure, lighting, controls, and consumables who join us on-site during a takeover to review purchasing, costs, and control system algorithms. We're also tied into three universities — for example, we were the exclusive sponsor of a private university event in Colorado this week with at least four universities represented, so we know who to call when we don't have an answer. Bryan Fields: Are there specific technologies for monitoring plant health in real time that have been game changers? Travis Higginbotham: Honestly, we rely on the basics. Many of the businesses we step into don't have a lot of capital at the outset — we need to turn the business around and generate cash flow before further enhancing the system. It comes down to horticultural and crop science fundamentals: light intensity, DLI (Daily Light Integral), VPD (vapor pressure deficit), average relative humidity, parts-per-million CO2, and confidence that the environment is homogenized. Bryan Fields: Are there certain metrics your team uses to determine cultivation performance? Travis Higginbotham: The one I mentioned — what I call the golden metric — is Photon Conversion Efficiency. Photosynthesis has three inputs: water, light, and CO2. Many growers underestimate the impact of light and CO2 designed appropriately together to optimize yield, along with how you manipulate photoperiod or night length across production stages. A metric used for decades in traditional horticulture is DLI — Daily Light Integral, moles per meter squared per day — calculated from light intensity (micromoles per meter squared per second) accumulated over a photoperiod. In flower, a photoperiod is 12 hours — are we accumulating 30 moles, 50 moles? Dr. Bruce Bugbee's research shows the crop can be productive up to 70 moles. You track total moles accumulated from veg through flower against total grams per square meter, giving you grams per mole per meter squared per cycle — this ties in how you optimize inside a greenhouse relative to the ambient outside environment, and how the grower manages density and cultural practices to capture and convert that light every day. Kellan Finney: Does this differ based on strain? Some strains have broad leaves, some have thin leaves, so surface area for light capture would differ — is that factored into the calculation, or am I off base? Travis Higginbotham: Cannabis growers don't really have the luxury of being that specific right now — sales teams always want new varieties, so optimizing a system for one or two cultivars isn't practical currently. As long as a crop — meaning a single cycle with multiple varieties — is trained consistently within a robust production system and environment, you can be confident in average yield and performance across that population. There will always be differences in cannabinoid profile and total yield per cultivar, but deploying cultural practices like topping and pinching consistently, and training all plants the same way, optimizes performance regardless of variety. Bryan Fields: Have you found that premium genetics need different nutrients or resources compared to lower-end plants? Travis Higginbotham: Certain varieties have different quality attributes — some have fabulous flower but are hard rooters or less aggressive growers, so irrigation regimes might need to differ. My approach is to select genetics with good average performance so you can manage an efficient production system while using science to optimize quality. You can achieve good quality across a wide array of genetics. Bryan Fields: What is quality? Let's define it. Travis Higginbotham: I knew you'd ask that. Based on how universities conduct studies to control for quality, it's defined by measurable, quantifiable quality attributes — percent terpenes per pound, percent cannabinoids per pound, moisture content, water activity. That's quality, because that's what a grower can control. When we talk about frostiness, the squeeze test, or terpenes that volatilize once you open a bag — that's not representative of what's actually on the product. The way quality is defined by consumers and bulk buyers isn't yet aligned with how we quantify it scientifically, which makes it incredibly difficult to improve. In some cases legacy growers are most valuable because they intuitively know when a product is 'quality,' even when it goes against what I see on a COA. We still have a long way to go — if the industry aligns quality definitions properly, it could significantly and positively influence buyer value and open new market space. Bryan Fields: Do clients ever come to you knowing a strain is destined for extraction and ask you to push specific traits — high terpenes, high potency — accordingly? Travis Higginbotham: Certainly. If a facility wants to produce a certain amount of extract from internal channels alongside a certain amount of flower — say a 50/50 split — you'd treat those two production systems very differently: cropping density, flower time, and harvest date all differ between an extract-focused system and a flower-focused system. There's a point in the flowering cycle where yield outpaces potency, so it can be in your best interest to harvest early to optimize potency per pound and extraction efficiency, even though the flower wouldn't visually look finished for a flower-sale product at that same date. Strategy depends entirely on your business goals, target margins, and market pricing. Bryan Fields: That requires an organization to be really dialed in with those numbers — some companies seem to just push for max yield without that segmentation. What percentage of organizations do you think are actually that dialed in? Travis Higginbotham: I haven't seen many, if any, operate that precisely. The market changes so quickly that by the time you pivot, something else has already changed — and lead times in cultivation are long. If I change something today, you won't see the result for at least 18 weeks; changing genetics or stock takes six months or more. In the ornamental world, everything trickles down from sales — which varieties, when they're needed, which store, what volume — and you schedule production accordingly. In cannabis, it's often the opposite: the grower says 'I've got a cool variety, how do we take it to market?' There's a lot of room for improvement there. Bryan Fields: It's like companies extract flower they couldn't sell, the extract does well, then they need more extract, and they end up chasing their own tail just to survive. Travis Higginbotham: Exactly — and by the time a resulting change comes to fruition, priorities have shifted again. That's also why businesses are hesitant to allocate capital to cultivation improvements — the payback takes so long to materialize. A company can turn a dollar into a dollar-twenty-five at retail within a month and a half, but that same dollar put into cultivation might return four dollars a year later. That mismatch is, in my opinion, why many businesses fail. Bryan Fields: And layering onto that complexity — you can't grow in California and ship nationally with a consistent consumer experience; you've got siloed state operations growing supposedly the same strain. Is consistency across states realistically achievable? Travis Higginbotham: Even most MSOs have vastly different systems by state, and depending on the state, they may not even be able to grow the same variety. We also don't yet have plant or utility patents on most genetics — people rename strains constantly for convenience, claiming something 'new' when it isn't. Different systems produce different plant performance and quality attributes, so user experience will vary, and the science of user experience is vast. For extracted products, there's no reason you can't formulate a very similar or identical product across markets, but for cultivation-derived flower, that consistency is genuinely hard. Kellan Finney: It's wild, though — people don't expect that same consistency from something like broccoli. Bryan Fields: Have you ever had broccoli that didn't taste like broccoli? Kellan Finney: I guess that's a bad agricultural example — they call that cauliflower. Kellan Finney: Travis, what's the most common misconception about cannabis cultivation? Travis Higginbotham: That it can be as standardized as people think. Many leaders expect to track performance and hit exact numbers every single week, but plants don't work that way — we're growing a living organism subject to natural environmental variation, we can't use pesticides or plant growth regulators the way other markets can to stabilize performance, and in some cases we don't even have stable, clean genetics — I'm not guaranteed any facility is free of hop latent viroid, which throws curveballs constantly. This isn't a manufacturing facility, and people need to understand the complexity of plant science — it's a fundamentally different model. Bryan Fields: What question do you wish more people asked you? Travis Higginbotham: You ask good questions, Bryan — I want to give good answers. Honestly, it would be, 'How much better could we do?' A lot of people are satisfied, or take so much pride in what they do, that they don't see significant room for improvement, so I'm rarely asked that, but I'd love to share thoughts on it. Bryan Fields: Do you think that's because operators are just trying to survive amid so many challenges, so they default to 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' without realizing the yield upside available to them? Travis Higginbotham: If I hadn't gone through my schooling, worked in the ornamental industry, and learned from experienced growers and researchers, I probably would have thought we were already doing the best we could. But there's always more to learn — we still don't know everything even about petunias and tomatoes. That's where working with a group like Diligence Horticulture, or others bringing that continuous-improvement mindset, adds value. You can't put blinders on your own production; you have to learn from others and stay open. Bryan Fields: Prediction time — how do you see the role of technology evolving in cannabis cultivation over the next five years? Travis Higginbotham: I think we'll see a lot of exciting technology for determining quality without human intervention, plus automation specific to the crop and system. You're already seeing robotics like strawberry-harvesting on vertical indoor racks, drones manipulating photoperiods on perennials outdoors, and companies like Spec AI doing spectral imaging on chlorophyll concentrations to detect hop latent viroid infection. There's a lot coming — and things like COVID, where 14 people suddenly have to go home for 20 days, show how much of a role automation has to play in horticulture. Bryan Fields: Kellan, you want to take a swing at that? Kellan Finney: I do — but first, apples, that's the agricultural example I should've used instead of broccoli — Washington apples and so on. Anyway, back to it: I completely agree with Travis, I think automation is going to be the future — more robotics integrated into agricultural processes across every industry. It'll help yields, help costs, and help lower the cost of food and agricultural commodities for everyone, so I think these technologies will be driven into cannabis and agriculture broadly. What do you think, Bryan? Bryan Fields: I think it's a balance. Technology can make a massive difference, and we can apply everything learned in agriculture and horticulture for other crops to cannabis. But it starts with having a clear plan, a focus on the metrics of success, and building an organization aligned around that North Star, the way Travis broke down today — understanding your goal, then bringing the whole organization together step by step to get there. I hope more organizations reach out to Travis and adopt those principles, because ultimately the consumer benefits the most. Travis Higginbotham: Definitely, couldn't agree more. Another point on technology — new facilities should be built with automation and spectral imaging in mind from the start; retrofitting existing systems is always going to be more challenging. The future is in new facilities that adopt this technology from day one. Bryan Fields: 100 percent. Travis, for our listeners who want to get in touch and get help with their grow facility, where can they find you? Travis Higginbotham: Sure — reach out to info@diligencehort.com. We'll soon have an Instagram and a website, but we haven't needed one yet. Otherwise, reach out to us on LinkedIn. Bryan Fields: Awesome, we'll link it up in the show notes. Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Travis Higginbotham: Yeah, thank you.