Tips to make sure your indoor cannabis facility design is optimized for cultivation and work flow!

1. Build sustainably. One of the biggest mistakes operators make is trying to go "big" to fast. There's no need to bite off more than you can chew. It's much easier to add additional square footage when things are going well. This approach allows you to refine and optimize your cultivation SOPs, read your customers, the market, and scale accordingly.

2. Optimize your production schedule and floor plan to maximize harvests per year and grams/sq ft.  This will be dependent on your budget and facility layout.  I prefer to have veg rooms.  If you go with this design it’s imperative you have enough veg space and dry space in relation to flower canopy. Too often we see designs with huge flower rooms but very little veg or dry space. A good rule of thumb is to designate 1/4 of your total flower canopy to veg space and 1/3 of your total flower canopy to dry space. There are lots of solutions with vertical dry racks to reduce the required dry space when necessary.

3. When building a dry space always have multiple rooms available. You never want to bring freshly harvested product into the same room with plants that are further along in the drying process.

4. Make sure the building has enough power. At lest 1,000 AMPS for every 10,000 sq ft is a good rule of thumb.

5. Don't forget to include space in the design for processing, storage, tested/untested product, fertigation, electrical, office, and entry/exit.  Keeping clean product that’s about to be tested in a separate place to avoid cross contamination is super important.

6. And finally, be patient and budget accordingly. The timeline for building permits, and licenses always takes longer than anticipated. It's never a good idea to run out of money before you get started.

Happy Growing!