The Soil That Gets Better Every Cycle

In 2019, living soil asked investors for patience they didn't have. In a mature, compressed market, the operators still standing plan to stay, and an asset that gets better every cycle finally matters.

In 2019, I spent a lot of time making the case for living soil to the people who wrote the checks. The case was simple, and I still think it was right: build a soil once, feed it, and it gets better every cycle. Media you throw out and fertility you buy in a bottle have to be bought again every harvest. Over enough harvests, the soil wins on cost.

Mostly, the pitch didn't land. Not because the math was wrong, but because of who was listening and how long they planned to stay.

The pitch that didn't land

Early cannabis money was quiet money. Investors were wary of the legal status, careful about being seen, and, reasonably, not planning on forever. Many of them wanted to reach their return, take some house money off the table, and see what came next. I don't say that as criticism. When the federal picture is unsettled and state rules change every legislative session, a short horizon is a rational horizon.

Living soil asks for the opposite. It front-loads the cost: bigger beds, more material, more labor to build, and a few cycles before the system hits its stride. Its advantage shows up in year two and year three, in the bills you stop paying. To an investor planning to be out by then, higher upfront overhead and a slower payback don't read as a smart long-term play. They read as risk.

Conventional growing offered a cleaner story. Bagged media, bottled nutrients, a feed chart, a predictable build. It was easier to get into and faster to pay back, and the market rewarded speed. Colorado's average market rate for retail bud, the state's median wholesale price, was set at $999 a pound for the last quarter of 2019, after four straight quarterly increases.¹² When prices are climbing, the fastest path to harvest wins the room. Most leadership teams wanted numbers, and the numbers favored getting product out the door.

So I took living soil where it was valued: the craft end of the market, where growers cared about the plant and the culture as much as the spreadsheet. That niche has been my bread and butter for the last seven years, and it taught me exactly what this method does well and where it's hard.

The market changed the math

The industry I work in today isn't the one I was pitching in 2019. It has matured and consolidated, and multistate operators now hold major share in many markets. Margins are thin. That same Colorado wholesale benchmark is set at $601 a pound for the final quarter of 2026, roughly 40 percent below where it stood seven years ago, before you even account for inflation.³

The operators still standing are not planning a quick exit. They've built facilities, trained teams, and committed to the long haul, because the fast flip is gone. That changes the question. When you plan to run a room for the next ten years, the number that matters is not what it costs to start. It's what it costs to run the hundredth cycle.

That is the question living soil was always built to answer.

What throwaway media actually costs

Single-use media is easy to underestimate because its cost arrives in pieces: a pallet here, a dumpster haul there, the labor to break down and refill containers between every turn. The clearest picture I've found of what those pieces add up to comes from a 2021 report prepared for Metro Vancouver, the regional government around Vancouver, British Columbia, which set out to estimate the waste coming out of the region's licensed indoor and greenhouse cannabis facilities.⁴

The report's working assumption, drawn from an agricultural consultancy, was about 15 liters (about 4 gallons) of growing media per plant per cycle, at roughly four cycles a year indoors. Run that across the region's canopy and the estimate comes to between 12,366 and 16,489 tonnes (about 13,600 to 18,200 tons) of growing media discarded every year, with an average of 14,430 tonnes (about 15,900 tons). Add plant waste and the total is about 14,600 tonnes (about 16,100 tons) a year. The authors projected that growing-media waste alone could climb to about 59,045 tonnes (about 65,100 tons) as more facilities were licensed. Most of the waste stream, they wrote, is growing media "typically used and disposed multiple times in a year." Rockwool can't be composted in the region and goes to the landfill after every use.

Those are regional estimates built on stated assumptions, not audited invoices, and Vancouver isn't Denver. But the shape of the problem travels. Every one of those tons was bought, shipped, handled, filled, hauled away, and then bought again. Every cycle starts from zero.

Living soil starts where the last cycle left off. A well-managed bed carries its structure, its biology, and much of its fertility from one harvest into the next. You amend it, top-dress it, keep it covered and alive. You don't buy it back. The soil moves from a consumable on the expense line to an asset on the balance sheet, and unlike nearly everything else in a grow, it appreciates with use. In a flat, compressed market, a line item that shrinks every cycle is worth more than it was when prices were climbing.

The water claim I stopped making

There's a line that shows up in nearly every regenerative pitch, and I've used it too: every 1 percent increase in soil organic matter lets an acre hold 20,000 more gallons of water. It's a good line. It's also overstated, and if we want operators to trust us on soil, we should be the ones who say so.

The figure comes from back-of-the-envelope math. Take the top six inches of an acre, assume a typical bulk density, assume organic matter holds ten times its weight in water, and you land near 21,700 gallons.⁵ The assumptions are generous. They count all the water the organic matter could hold, whether or not roots can reach it, and they ignore the water the mineral soil was already holding.

When soil scientists Budiman Minasny and Alex McBratney pooled 60 published studies and more than 50,000 measurements for a 2018 meta-analysis, they found that a 1 percent increase in soil organic carbon raises plant-available water by about 1.16 millimeters per 100 millimeters of soil (roughly 0.05 inch per 4 inches), on average.⁶ Their conclusion was that the effect is real but small. University of Minnesota Extension translated that into about 3,400 extra gallons per acre for each 1 percent of organic matter in the top foot of a medium-textured soil, or about one-ninth of an inch of rain.⁷ Worth having. Not 20,000 gallons.

I still care about water in living soil, but the reason has more to do with management than with a headline number. In a living bed, water is held by structure and biology, not just by the sponge of the media. Aggregates, fungal networks, old root channels, and a mulch layer slow evaporation and let water move evenly through the profile. In practice, that shows up as gentler, more forgiving drybacks. The bed dries down gradually instead of swinging from saturated to stressed between irrigations, and the margin for a late or missed watering is wider. That doesn't fit neatly on a slide, but any head grower will tell you that steadier plants and fewer emergencies are worth more than a gallons-per-acre figure.

I'd rather make that claim, which I can stand behind in any grow room, than repeat a number that falls apart the first time someone checks the math.

Start where operators already are

If I could go back to 2019, I wouldn't change the case for living soil. I'd change where I started the conversation.

Most operators don't wake up thinking about soil biology. They wake up thinking about the things that can stop a sale or shut a room down: a lab result that comes back wrong, a traceability record that won't reconcile, an inspection on the calendar, a batch that won't move at today's price. Every operator has those problems, from a single craft room to a multistate company, and they're the honest place to start.

These days, that's where I start: working with leadership teams of every size on compliance, testing, traceability, and operations, and earning the right to talk about the grow itself.

What I've found is that the regenerative case tends to make itself once you're inside those problems. A short, documented input list is easier to trace and easier to defend in an audit. A soil you keep instead of media you buy back changes the cost curve the finance team is already worried about. A root zone that buffers water and fertility is one less variable when you're trying to make every batch consistent. None of that requires anyone to adopt a philosophy. It only requires them to look at the numbers over the length of time they actually plan to be in business.

Sustainability, quality, and access are the things I care about most in this industry. I've learned they make their strongest argument not as a lecture, but as lower costs, cleaner audits, and a better product.

In 2019, a soil that gets better every cycle was a hard sell to people who didn't plan to be around for many cycles. The people still in this industry plan to be around. That's the audience it was always built for.

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Sources

1. Colorado Department of Revenue, Taxation Division. "Current & Prior Retail Marijuana Average Market Rates (Median Market Prices)," published 09/2024 (retail bud AMR effective 10/01/2019: $999/lb). https://tax.colorado.gov/sites/tax/files/AMR_PriorRates_Oct2024.pdf
2. CBS Colorado. "State: Average Market Rate For Retail Marijuana Bud Goes Up," 09/17/2019 (bud rate up for the past four quarters, $850 to $999). https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/retail-marijuana-bud-average-market-rate/
3. Colorado Department of Revenue, Taxation Division. "Average Market Rate for Unprocessed Retail Marijuana," period 10/01/2026 through 12/31/2026 (retail bud: $601/lb). https://tax.colorado.gov/average-market-rate
4. Alba, Cody. "Cannabis Waste Management in Metro Vancouver," prepared for Metro Vancouver Solid Waste Services, 10/13/2020, updated 03/14/2021. https://metrovancouver.org/services/solid-waste/Documents/cannabis-waste-management-metro-vancouver-report-2021.pdf
5. Bryant, Lara. "Organic Matter Can Improve Your Soil's Water Holding Capacity," NRDC, 05/27/2015. https://www.nrdc.org/bio/lara-bryant/organic-matter-can-improve-your-soils-water-holding-capacity
6. Minasny, B., and A. B. McBratney. "Limited effect of organic matter on soil available water capacity." European Journal of Soil Science 69, no. 1 (2018): 39-47. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejss.12475
7. Cates, Anna. "The connection between soil organic matter and soil water," University of Minnesota Extension Crop News, posted 03/2020 (page currently dated 01/01/2024). https://blog-crop-news.extension.umn.edu/2020/03/the-connection-between-soil-organic.html