PHOENIX — Inside a 66,000-square-foot facility nestled in an industrial neighborhood in Phoenix, thousands of cannabis plants grow with their roots hanging freely in the air, receiving only a mist of water. This is Aeriz’s approach to cultivation. The company is a growing operation, and according to Aeriz’s website, it uses 95% less water than traditional soil farming, in a state that desperately needs it.

Aeriz has embraced aeroponics, a soil-free growing method that suspends plant roots in an enclosed irrigation system, where they are misted with purified water. This system is a departure from traditional cannabis growth, where plants are typically grown in soil.

“That’s the nice thing about aeroponics, your best plant is going to grow five times faster,” Jason Gemrose, vegetation manager at Aeriz, explained during a tour. “It’s cleaner, too.”

The process begins not with seeds, but with carefully selected “mother plants” kept for three to six months. Workers take cuttings from these plants to produce clones, which then move through developmental stages that Gemrose likens to “the nursery and then the toddler stage.” From cutting to a fully mature plant, the journey takes approximately four to six months.

What makes Aeriz’s growth process distinct is what happens beneath the plants. Rather than burying roots in soil or submerging them in water, the facility allows roots to hang freely within specialized tables. “Those reservoirs on the other side are what feed into the tables,” Gemrose said. “When they go in, they give the nutrients to those reservoirs, they balance them out, and that creates the plants.”  

The irrigation system operates on precise timing. Pumps kick on periodically throughout the day, delivering nutrients directly to exposed roots, and then “everything will drain out,” said Michelle Bailey, general manager at Aeriz. The facility uses reverse osmosis water drawn from “coral tanks throughout the vicinity,” ensuring complete control over what the plants consume.

Cleanliness is critically important in this setup.”It’s a tough system, because there’s really no room for error,” Bailey acknowledged. Between plant cycles, workers clean around the clock. “Every time the plants are out of the table, they’ll completely clean the entire system,” Gemrose said. “We’ll run a flush that comes after we scrub everything down and clean it up. We never put plants on our dirty table.” 

This method saves a lot of water, which Arizona certainly needs. With conventional agriculture consuming over 72% of Arizona’s water supply, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, alternative growing methods are emerging. Aeroponics uses a fraction of the water required for soil-based cultivation while producing faster-growing, healthier plants, Gemrose said.

Inside the flower rooms, where plants reach full maturity, environmental controls are precise. Lights are adjusted three times weekly, starting at 3% intensity when young plants first arrive, eventually reaching 75%-80% before harvest. “You want the buds to grow strong,” said Chuck Krammer, flower manager at Aeriz. He also described how lighting changes like seasons. “Different lights and different spectrums. We want to mimic the sun as much as we can.”

Each production room contains approximately 1,600 plants, with 90 plants per table. Before harvest, which occurs around eight weeks into the flowering stage, the plants undergo something of a detox. “For the last two weeks of the cycle, we perform a water flush to remove all the water,” Krammer explained. “That gets rid of all the residuals, all the nutrients that we added to the plant, making for a cleaner finished bud from the plant.”

However, not all plants make the cut to survive. “For certain strands that don’t work well in our aeroponic environment, we tend to get rid of them rather than trying to baby them along,” Gemrose said. “It doesn’t work super well for our system. We want the healthiest plant out.” 

As water scarcity intensifies across the Southwest, Gemrose says this model offers a potential blueprint for water-efficient agriculture not just for cannabis, but for other crops. Bailey noted that similar aeroponic systems are increasingly being adopted for vegetable production, suggesting the technology could have applications far beyond the cannabis industry.

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