By Kathleen McLean
FB @kathleenmclean
Joshua Haupt FB @threealight
“Growing, Where Science Meets Art.”
Josh Haupt, the author of Three A Light, is passionate about helping people utilize his methods to triple their yields. If there’s a reader thinking about starting a grow whether it’s large or small this is the book to read. It can be purchased on Amazon.com. It has an 4 out of 5 stars, respectively. The common thread throughout the reviews is that the price of $500.00 was completely worth it, not because it’s 250 pages of great content but, the consumer has access to master growers throughout the process to answer questions and give feedback, priceless.
KM: How were you first introduced to the cannabis plant?
Josh: The way most people get introduced to the plant, in school a buddy brings some weed out. Next thing you know I grabbed some seeds from the baggie and decided to grow my own. I’ve always been fond of gardening in general. I have a good amount of Dutch in me, and my grandfather was full Dutch. He had the most amazing gardens!
KM: What made you decide to turn your cannabis cultivation into a career?
Josh: I’m passionate about it due to my epilepsy. The way we grow plants is unique and different than other people. What we do is far superior, to be honest with you. I made it an obligation to serve this knowledge, and that’s where the book came from. We want other people to be able to do well for themselves.
KM: Can you please tell me a little bit about your defoliation technique called Shwazze?
Josh: We take all of the fan leaves off the plant so it almost looks like a cactus plant. This is to provide the optimum light penetration so the light can penetrate through the whole plant. It transfers the energy where it needs it the most which are at the tips and the bud sites. It’s essentially just taking all the fan leaves off the plant. Many people hesitate to do that thinking it will stress the plant because the plants hold micronutrients in these leaves. We know that, and that’s why we replace the micronutrients in the fan leaves into the feed line. So when we’re feeding them, it goes in there and allows the plant to repair quickly.
KM: Without sounding like an idiot, did you make the Shwazze technique up, as in it’s your technique?
Josh: It was taught to me by my mentor over a decade ago. He showed me this is a very old school method that’s been kept behind lock and key doors. It involved scissors, and we had to call it something, so it’s Shwazzing. Also, people think it’s defoliation but, defoliation is taking a few leaves from the plant and Shwazzing is taking leaves from the entire plant. There’s a difference between snowing and a blizzard.
KM: Is this the secret sauce? You didn’t tell anyone about the secret sauce?
Josh: That’s how it was for a long time. We released that intellectual property in the book that way people could understand it. What we do and how we achieve our end goals. People see our flower and say “gosh it’s only buds in here how do you do this?” and Shwazzing is a huge part of that puzzle.
KM: Your book Three a Light, what does the title mean?
Josh: Great question, the industry averages about 1 pound per light, so if you have a flower room with 20 lights in it, typically you’re going to pull about 20 pounds out of it, and we pull anywhere to three to four pounds of light. Lately, we’ve been hitting just under five pounds per light.
KM: You’re advanced, is the Shwazze technique ok for a new grower to learn or is this more for experts?
Josh: No, not at all. For sure new growers can do this. Very much so. New growers can be some of my favorite people that purchase the book. I work with a lot of gentlemen with PTSD, and they are struggling, they want to grow their cannabis themselves. They’ll get the book, and then I will work with them personally because I’m very passionate about it. These guys just have to follow the book. If they do exactly what the book says they will do extremely well for themselves. They’ll hit a very fruitful harvest. The people that are tough to work with are the genius growers.
KM: I get that for sure; It’s tough to teach an old dog new tricks.
Josh: Yeah well, they only read a very small portion of the book about Shwazzing, but don’t want to change anything else they are going to do. Then I’ll get a call asking why they didn’t hit three a light and I’ll let them know they didn’t follow the whole book, they didn’t follow the methods. It’s like the people that do the 90-day diet plan but, cheat 15 of the days. They wonder why they didn’t hit their goals but, they didn’t follow the whole plan to the T.
KM: What are other topics you cover in the book?
Josh: There’s basically two sections to the book. The first 100 pages are the how to. How to clone, how to transplant your clones when they’re ready, how to transplant your four-inch cubes to go into seven gallons, how to properly manicure. It’s a complete how-to from the seed all the way to the finished flower.
The second half of the book is all about the environmental components. It’s about what we are doing to yield at least three pounds a light, what we are doing differently. You’ll see our temperatures throughout the day and the night, the exact humidity we use, what we keep our CO2 at. We go into how far the lights are from the flowers. There’s a lot of environmental components we address in the second half of the book.
KM: I honestly didn’t know how much went into a successful grow. I feel like people think they are going to get a few lights, some pots and seeds and the rest is history. What are your thoughts?
Josh: That’s a misconception that a lot of people have. They think they can just throw a bunch of money into it and it will be successful. It’s quite the contrary with cannabis. The operations run into problems. There’s a grow right now out of Nevada that has a metric ton of product they produced last year that they can’t sell at all because it didn’t pass testing. It had too many problems with it. It’s one of those things where science meets art. The success is in the details.
KM: You are the chief cultivation officer at Medicine Man Technologies, are you exclusive with them or can people find you?
Josh: People can find me through Medicine Man Technologies. I’m pretty accessible. We treat everyone with a lot of respect and are here to help, of course, I do have some gatekeepers.
KM: You’re a busy guy and wear a lot of hats, what are you working on for the future?
Josh: Technology. We are building an application on the Iphone, Ipad software. The application has the book in it but, you’re also able to take photos upload them as easy as Instagram and it goes to our customer service. Our master growers can interact with people following the book and make sure we have more successful growers, producing better product out there. We have huge projects going on right now in Canada, Puerto Rico, all over. We are helping write the policies in different states.
KM: I’m finding in my research that policy’s don’t just differ from state to state but, from county to county. How to do you feel about everyone trying to rewrite policies where it will vary from state to state, county to county?
Josh: It’s funny to me because if you engineer a wheel, you wouldn’t go and rebuild the wheel, you would just use the same one that was very effective and worked well. Every state wants to rebuild the wheel. I try and stress that Colorado has a very approved and very effective successful model for cannabis. Just adopt ours.
