Hydrolife Magazine August/September 2016 (USA Edition)

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An Essential Part of
Cannabinoid Production
It’s official. Research has proven
that the quality and potency of
cannabinoids depends on the
minerals in the soil where the
cannabis is being grown.
by Augustus Dunning
Soil-borne mineral depletion has caused a crisis in the food
supply. Mineral-deficient food-borne soil is causing disease
rates to increase dramatically. Food is nearly empty of the
genetic triggers—minerals—that help make the compounds to
keep us healthy. This food-quality reduction is from the yearly
depletion of soils due to harvesting without restoring mineral
content to cropland.
The cropland destruction has created both an explosion
of illnesses and an explosion of vitamin companies and
pharmaceutical products. Minerals are critical for the plant
compounds we need for nutrition and soil minerals are
taken up into plants to create the compounds we use as
nutrients when we eat.
Similarly, deficiency in mineral content can produce deficiencies
in cannabis plants as well. In soilless hydroponic
growing media, minerals have to be introduced every time
you grow a crop. The quality and potency in cannabinoids is
directly dependent on the minerals in soil where cannabis is
grown. In the 2014 paper “Metals and Organic compounds in
the Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids: A Chemometric Approach
to the Analysis of Cannabis Sativa Samples” the relationship
of minerals in soil were mapped to the synthesis of the various
cannabinoid compound content in C. Sativa. In their abstract
the authors state: “This work is an attempt to recognize correlations
between the metal content in the different parts of cannabis
sativa L. and the cannabinoids content, as a potential
indicator.” Their results? “Correlations between metal content
in plants and soil, analyzed by chemometrics unsupervised
methods, highlighted partly their role in the biosynthesis of
cannabinoids. It was recognized that the CBN and the psychoactive
THC contents are manganese-dependent while the CBD
content is iron-dependent.”
The authors concluded that the contents of metals in the
rhizosphere could be an indication of the cannabinoid content.
This can be seen in the test results of numerous examples of
the same strain. There is a wide variety of potency as seen in
the Blue Dream samples, and it can be concluded that it is a
nutrient deficiency in ionic minerals during growth that causes
these dramatic differences. According to the same study quoted
above, the high-THC sample had adequate amounts of manganese
and the high-CBD sample had adequate amounts iron.
In growth rate, the testing minerals have shown to accelerate
growth and yields, beginning with rapid and thick root growth
in identical untreated and treated clones at six weeks. Foliar
ionic mineral spray applications in the late phase increased
trichome numbers dramatically.
Other benefits occur from healthier, strong, ionic mineraltreated
plants: lack of pathogenic and pest attacks. If you want
better medicine, you need to supplement it with ionic minerals.
Most N-P-K fertilizer systems contain up to eight minerals,
but plants need more than 50 minerals to function for optimal
genetic expression. Water-soluble, ocean water-derived liquid
ionic minerals work best because they contain some 60 different
elements and are taken up into the plant fast because they are
bio-available. As individual ions (atoms) they can pass directly
through leaf and root cells. Mineral ions are critical. It is, after
all, the iron in hemoglobin in the blood platelets that carries
oxygen to our cells, and iron is critical for making CBD in cannabis.
In other words, you’ve got to mineralize to energize!
Want more? Check out the Wide World of Weed on Youtube.
Augustus Dunning is the CEO of Eco Organics and is a physicist,
chemist and an inventor. He is the former systems ops designer
for the International Space Station and a former regional
manager of liquid, solid and electric propulsion systems for
Pratt and Whitney space propulsion.
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