Having previously worked in cannabis cultivation in both Spain and Germany, Gutsch moved to Switzerland in August 2022 to put his experience to good use at Grow Motion’s new facility. He was personally involved in the final preparations, and today he and his team of six people take care of the day-to-day operations at the facility. That currently comprises a mother room and a growing room, each measuring 145m². “Quality is very important to us, especially because we are selling to the pharmaceutical industry. And Switzerland is a good country in which to make good quality,” he comments.

Clean and time-saving solution

“When I became involved in this project, I said we should definitely work with Grodan. I’d been working with NFT systems for many years, including with Grodan blocks, and I’d always been very happy with their performance,” comments Gutsch. “Besides being known for product quality, Grodan also offers good support, so we saw it as the best fit for us as a company. And the excellent service we’ve received so far confirms that we made the right decision.”

“As an inert medium, Grodan’s stone wool enables us to work much more cleanly than with coco peat, for example, so that we can comply with the strict standards and SOPs required for medicinal crops. Additionally, unlike soil, stone wool doesn’t contaminate the drippers in the irrigation system and make them harder to clean, so it saves us time,” he continues.

Tailored approach to irrigation

Grow Motion sources all its growing media from Grodan, specifically two different sizes of plugs and one size of blocks. “We use the bigger plugs for our mother plants and the smaller plugs for the clones, which we subsequently place directly on top of the blocks,” says Gutsch. “We were keen to use blocks rather than slabs, partly because blocks are more visually appealing when visitors come and look inside our facility through our showroom window,” he explains. “But blocks make it harder to get a uniform water content when using a dripper, like we do. So the Grodan experts helped us to set up the irrigation cycles at the beginning and developed an adapted plan for us.”

Overcoming challenges

To maximize the production surface, Grow Motion has a three-layer setup in the growing room. “However, this presents its own challenges. For example, the microclimate this creates inside the room can be pretty difficult to manage, posing a greater risk of fungus. The Grodan blocks help us to minimize that risk,” he comments.

“Additionally, to ensure the plants don’t grow too close to the lamps and block the radiation, we need them to stay wide and bushy rather than tall. To achieve this, we work with a very short vegetative phase followed by 60 days of flowering in the cultivation phase,” says the head grower. “Based on Grodan’s advice, we soak the blocks completely based on weight and then let them dry back for 8 to 10 days. This approach is working really well for us now, and even allows us to use a slightly higher EC.”

Steering the crop with more precision

Gutsch monitors the crop closely using Grodan’s sensors and he is clearly a big fan. “The sensors are amazing and I would advise everyone to use them if they’re working with blocks because it makes a grower’s life so much easier. And the system connects easily to our Priva computer, so all the information from both the climate computer and the sensors is at our fingertips in GroSens for analysis,” he comments.