If you walk by Indigenous Farms in the evening you’ll likely hear Sean Dyament’s cannabis plants being serenaded with some funky jazz or new-age vibes. It’s just part of the special attention and care Dyament pays to grow a good crop of craft cannabis that will give folks a good vibe and help heal the mind, body, and soul.
Dyament’s grow facility consists of
a repurposed building and large greenhouse located on a remote island near Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The name of his business reflects Dyament’s native American heritage and was chosen by his mother, Jennifer, a tribal elder. Both are members of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, a prominent tribe with casinos and other holdings in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Indigenous Farms is owned and operated by Dyament and his mother and her husband, Denny. Each has a part to play in the business, which consists of two 13’ x 30’ indoor grow rooms where Dyament grows medical marijuana and a 30’ x 100’ greenhouse where he grows some monster recreational plants, despite a growing season that is considerably shorter than most of the rest of the country.
Besides providing funky vibes to his plants Dyament gives special attention to the lighting he uses in his grow facility. He understands how the quality of light is not only essential to producing big buds and well developed trichomes and terpenes, but how the heat they generate affects all other aspects of his grow–especially the amount of AC, water, and nutrients that will be required during the veg and flowering periods.
Setting Up The Grow Room
Dyament originally equipped his indoor grow rooms with high pressure sodium (HPS) fixtures. Although he liked the quality of light they provided his plants, he couldn’t take the through-the-roof light bills and the heat that they generated. So he started scouring the internet with trusted friend and veteran grower, Ben Martin. They were looking for light fixtures that have all the qualities they were looking for, including light across the spectrum and diodes that didn’t give off the heat as did the HPS lights.
“Me and my buddy Ben were researching LED lights and trying to find something that looks like it is well engineered, covers the full light spectrum, and will give us the savings without sacrificing terpenes and yields,” says Dyament. “We came across SpecGrade and that’s when we got into them.”
SpecGrade LED, out of Columbus Ohio, isn’t new to the lighting game. They’ve been providing commercial lighting for street lights and other commercial applications for years. They’ve hit the ground running in the commercial agriculture space and now offer several options for the serious cannabis grower, including the Verta line of A1 spectrum LED grow lights, which provide light for both the vegetative and flowering stages of growth without having to change settings.
Dyament invested his savings from bartending and other odd jobs to go into the craft cannabis business. Once he and Denny got the grow facility ready he ordered SpecGrade’s Verta-8, Linea, and Flora-5 lights, all engineered and built here in the USA. The Verta-8s feature a modular design which allows growers to change out components if one should go bad or they need to be upgraded to the latest technology. The A1 spectrum is a full spectrum, providing everything from blue to green and yellow to red.The proprietary thermal management system, which throws off less heat while maximizing light levels and plant uniformity, was perhaps what impressed Dyament the most.
“They’re A1 spectrum,” says Dyament of the Verta-8, “but I think for me it’s the thermal management without stressing my plants out, their leaf temperatures are right, they’re not sizzling up. I think with the temperature control it’s a lot easier for my plants to veg out and grow out, they love them.” He loves that you can dial down the light levels during the early stages of growth. “A lot of people don’t have 12-foot ceilings, you have to work with the space that you got,” says Dyament, whose ceilings are 8-feet tall.
Dyament compared his SpecGrade LED’s Verta-8s with Gavita’s 1700 Gen2 LED grow lights. He says he didn’t like the heat the Gavitas produced and the fact that you could only dial them down to 40%, unlike the SpecGrades, which can be dialed down as low as 6%. He also ran a test where he compared his Gavita 1700 Gen2s with the Verta-8s. With both fixtures set at 80% he recorded a temperature of 147 degrees fahrenheit off the bottom of the dividers for the Gavitas and only 89.6 degrees fahrenheit with the SpecGrades.
“That was a lot of intense feeding right off the rip,” says Dyament. “But with the SpecGrades I did my teas but I didn’t have to feed as much, I could tailor it specific to their growth. I liked the fact I could control the light intensity vs. having to feed them like crazy and pump AC, which is just a lot more money.”
Dyament also likes that you can switch out units if one needs repaired or upgraded. He said that when his Gavita Gen2s went down he had to send the entire unit back, had to wait 30 days just to get the repair approved, and in total lost 90 days of growing time, 16 square feet of growing space, and nearly an entire run!
For his seedlings and clones, Dyament depends on the Flora-5s and his T5 fluorescent light as a way to get the plants used to the light before they’re set under the Verta-8s to complete the rest of the growing cycle. He says when going into the flowering stage he likes to be at 800-1000 PPFD, which he says will produce well developed trichomes and buds that are nice and dense.
The Linea LEDs are utilized in Dyament’s greenhouse, where he can supply supplemental lighting to grow some very tall plants in a relatively small space. He said once he added the Linea LEDs for his greenhouse plants his yield went from 3 ½-5 lbs. dry weight per plant to 8-9 lbs. per plant. That includes using SpecGrade’s Extra inter-canopy tube lights under the lower branches of the plants to provide additional full spectrum light to maximize the buds in the lower canopy.
Customer Support a Plus
The indigenous grower says he’s happy with his new lights and the customer support he has received so far from SpecGrade LED. He said a lot of companies just sell you lights and then you’re on your own to configure them in your grow room. With SpecGrade he gave the tech support staff the layout of his room and received a blueprint back on how to configure the electrical and build the daisy-chain lines.
“Their warranty (seven years on the diodes and five years on the drivers) is great and their customer service is unreal,” says Dyament. “When I called to talk to them I just called to get one test light to do a test run in a tent and they treated me like I had a thousand light grow–and the engineering, the way the lights are, they don’t push all the heat down on your plants, it picks the heat off the back of the driver and keeps it away from the diodes.” He added that when he’s running the lights at 90% he uses a thermal camera and laser thermometer to check leaf temperatures.
“I’ve been using the SpecGrade LEDs for about three and a half years now,” says Dyament. “I started out with the Verta-8s and that’s all I’ve had for my lights all the way from veg through flower. It’s a one stop light.” He said with the Gavitas he was averaging around 1.5 to 1.6 lbs. of product per light in his grow room compared to 2.4 to 2.6 lbs. with the Verta-8s.
Growing Success Pays Off
Dyament has been sharing his growing experiences and expertise on Instagram and says he is constantly trying to up his game when it comes to growing cannabis with a good terpene profile and heavy buds. His growing success hasn’t gone unnoticed. He was recently hired to be the cultivation manager at Northern Lights Cannabis Company, the first dispensary in Michigan that is owned and operated by an indigenous tribe.
The Bay Mills Indian Community, located about 30 miles from Sault Ste. Marie operates the facility on sovereign land and just recently made the decision to become a vertical cannabis business, growing their own product on the same land where their dispensary is located. Dyament will oversee the development of the grow facility and train employees in the finer aspects of growing.
“They like to support local growers and caregivers as long as everything passes state labs” says Dyament. “They’re really focused on helping the little guy. It’s a unique situation over there because they can pretty much do things the way they want.”
Dyament says he’s looking forward to the new challenge and to passing on his knowledge so others can grow a quality crop of cannabis, knowledge he plans to share to Instagram and a YouTube channel.
“I always try to bring the right energy, the right vibes, and yeah, just make sure I get along with everyone and try to push my love for the plant onto other people and make them just as excited about growing as I am.”
