Is indoor or outdoor grown cannabis better quality?

A reader asks: Is indoor or outdoor-grown cannabis better quality?

Dr. Lenny: Indoor grown cannabis is the current best-practice for growing medical-grade cannabis. It has higher quality and consistency.

Indoor cultivation gives you complete control over all aspects of the plants, including light, temperature, water quality, and nutrients. This means you can optimise everything about the plant growing. You can get them to do exactly what you want.

In the case of cannabis, this leads to more consistency in the cannabinoid makeup of the flowers.

However, indoor cultivation is expensive because it is energy, water, and nutrient intensive. You are basically replicating things like the sun and the air that you get outside for free.

So obviously outdoor grown cannabis is much cheaper. But because cannabis is wind-pollinated and open to cross-fertilization, even when outdoor cannabis plants are propagated from a single seed, they have plant-to-plant variation.

When done poorly, outdoor cultivation can also cause serious environmental problems.

Cannabis is an unusually resource intensive plant. It needs a lot of fertiliser and water. Over double the amount of other water-intensive crops like cotton and rice! This can lead to damage from water diversion, cause soil acidification, and water eutrophication.

Indoor grown cannabis has advantages over outdoor grown cannabis when it comes to quality and consistency, but it will be more expensive and produce more greenhouse gases.

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