Crop steering is a plant growth management practice that manipulates the environment (light, climate, irrigation) to encourage plants to grow a certain way. Next to light intensity, it’s the most important tactic you can use to achieve a high-quality finished product with the highest possible yield

Crop steering utilizes vegetative and generative cues through three main pillars: Light, Climate and Irrigation. Through all these cues in combination, you can encourage plants to produce bigger flowers and higher quality.

Generative is just targeted intentional stress, and the resulting behavior of plants is to focus on reproductive parts so that they can finish getting their DNA out into the world before they die, basics of evolutionary selection. The vegetative, on the other hand, is removing all that stress, and just treating that plant to the absolute maximum that you can so that it can grow at the fastest speed.

Cannabis plants have hormonal systems that regulate their growth in response to external stresses. The concept of crop steering is essentially the exploitation of these hormonal responses, by manipulating a controlled environment to achieve a desired outcome (i.e.) bigger yields and higher quality.

When a plant puts most of its energy into producing leaves the plant is in vegetative growth phase. When a plant is focused on the development of flowers, it is in generative growth phase.

Maintaining proper plant balance is a defining concept in crop steering. At any point in the life cycle, the plant is either focusing on leaf and stem growth or on flower production. If the plant spends too much time in either, the plant balance will be skewed. And if the plant isn’t in balance, then it’s likely that production and quality will ultimately suffer.

Our goal in commercial cannabis production is to maximize yields by optimizing plant growth in each stage. With crop steering, plants are given the opportunity to produce only enough foliage and stems in vegetative growth to support vigorous flower production and quality.