R06 Ledger in Plain English — How Cannabis Is Fed

Companion to Claim Ledger v1.0 (signed off 2026-09-07). Each entry restates the claim for a general reader, says how solid it is in plain words, and points at the evidence. Full citations, grading, boundary lines, and evidence-type tags live in ledger.md and SOURCE_LIBRARY (S-198–S-218, plus reused entries).

How to read “how solid”: Solid = verified full text or regulatory record, or a finding that several independent groups share. Promising = real evidence, but one study, one genotype, one lab, or an abstract we could not read in full. Honestly unknown = nobody has defensibly measured it, and saying so is the finding. Practitioner = what Danny actually did; true as history, never proof of anything general.

One warning that applies to most of the dose-response entries (C009–C013): they come from one laboratory, in one or two plant varieties. They are several experiments, not several research groups.

What “organic” and “synthetic” actually mean (C001–C005)

C001 — THE HEADLINE: the science measures feeding systems, not labels. Solid. Every study we found measured specific things: which chemical form the nitrogen came in, how much, when, in what growing medium, in what water, into which variety, with what else in the bottle. None of them tested “organic” versus “synthetic” as such. The one head-to-head trial compared two specific products, not two philosophies.
C002 — The labels overlap chemically. Solid. “Organic” liquid fertilizers deliver soluble ions and are often formulated with chelators or added salts; in the one controlled trial, the organic product line included Epsom salt. Mineral programs can carry kelp, sugars and microbes. Rock phosphate is organic-approved and is a mined mineral.
C003 — “Equal feed” means four different things. Solid. Equal total nitrogen, equal EC, equal label dose, and equal plant-available nitrogen are not the same, and matching one does not give you the others. The one controlled trial matched on solution concentration and the plants still took up nitrogen at different rates under the two programs.
C004 — There is no USDA-organic cannabis. Solid, as of September 2026. Cannabis is ineligible. California’s OCal is a state “comparable-to-organic” program with its own rules.
C005 — Canada’s organic logo does not cover cannabis cultivation. Solid. Any “organic cannabis” claim in Canada rests on a provincial or private scheme.

The one comparison, and the dose-response studies (C006–C017)

C006 — THE KEY EXPERIMENT: in one indoor trial, mineral feeding grew 21% more flower, organic feeding made flower with 12% higher CBD, and the mineral plants still produced 10% more total CBD. Promising (one study, one variety, two specific products). This is the single most important thing in the report, not because it picks a winner but because it shows three outcomes moving three ways: how strong the flower is, how much flower there is, and how much cannabinoid you actually harvest.
C007 — In the same trial, the medium nitrogen dose gave 95% of the CBD harvest of the high dose with a third less fertilizer. Promising. An efficiency finding, not an environmental one.
C008 — Organic liquid fertilizer has a dose curve too. Promising. Yield peaks at a certain rate and cannabinoid percentage dilutes above it. You can overdo organics.
C009 — Mineral nitrogen: yield goes up to a point, then potency goes down. Promising (one lab). Vegetative plants were best around 160 mg/L; in flower, more nitrogen meant bigger plants and lower THCA, CBDA and terpene percentages.
C010 — Same total nitrogen, different form, half the crop. Promising (one controlled study) and the sharpest result in the report. With total nitrogen held constant, feeding half of it as ammonium instead of nitrate cut flower yield 46%. All-ammonium killed the plants.
C011 — Extra phosphorus past sufficiency does nothing useful. Solid direction (three labs, four experiments), with a real disagreement about exactly where “enough” is (30 vs 59 mg/L). In one experiment, tripling phosphorus tripled nothing but the amount leaching out the bottom, twelvefold.
C012 — Potassium: too little hurts, moderate is fine, more lowers cannabinoid and terpene percentages. Promising (one lab, two varieties).
C013 — Magnesium: a middle range is best; high magnesium cost about 12% of reproductive biomass. Promising (one lab). “More magnesium is better” is not supported. Calcium was not tested, so this is only half of “Cal-Mag.”
C014 — Missing any one major nutrient cut flower yield by a third to two-thirds; missing iron or manganese did not. Promising (one study; only those two micronutrients tested).
C015 — Adding extra phosphorus, potassium and iron on top of a normal feed did nothing significant; recirculating the nutrient solution instead of draining it to waste raised total THC harvested. Promising (one study).
C016 — In hemp, variety mattered as much as dose. Promising, adjacent (essential-oil hemp, not drug-type flower).
C017 — In field hemp, some compost-plus-half-mineral hybrids matched full mineral feeding. Promising, adjacent (field hemp).

How nutrients actually become available (C018–C021)

C018 — Why the organic program fell behind in the key trial: its nutrients probably weren’t available fast enough when the flowers needed them. Promising (proposed by the authors, consistent with their data, one experiment). It matches what R01 found across organic farming generally.
C019 — Nobody has measured how fast meals, manures, guanos or composts release nutrients in a cannabis pot or bed. Honestly unknown.
C020 — Nobody has shown cannabis taking up meaningful nitrogen as intact amino acids from the products sold for that purpose. Honestly unknown. Plants have the transporters; the cannabis-specific evidence does not exist.
C021 — EC (PPM) tells you how salty the water is, not whether two feeds are equivalent. Solid. Doubling EC at the same phosphorus bought nothing; EC says nothing about nitrogen form or timing.

Taste, smoothness, and flushing (C022–C028)

C022 — No blinded taste test of organic versus mineral cannabis exists. Honestly unknown.
C023 — Feeding changes flower chemistry; nobody has shown it changes what people taste. Promising on the chemistry, unknown on the palate.
C024 — A short 7–14-day water flush has not been shown to do anything. Promising. The one industry trial found no difference in yield, potency, terpenes, most minerals, taste, smoothness or ash color (iron and zinc actually rose); the unflushed flower trended smoother, not significantly. A Guelph thesis abstract says the same.
C025 — A much longer leaching regime did change tissue chemistry, and cost yield. Promising, from an abstract we could not read in full. Two to four weeks of flushing to near-zero EC lowered nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the flower and lowered flower weight. This is a different treatment from a short flush, not a longer version of it.
C026 — White ash proves nothing we can find. Honestly unknown. No cannabis evidence links ash color to fertilizer residue; the one trial that looked found no flush effect.
C028 — Nobody has connected feeding to nitrate in the flower to harsh smoke. Honestly unknown. The old “you’d be smoking nitrogen” line has no evidence either way.

A practitioner-record passage is withheld from the public copy.

Safety (C029–C032)

C029 — Canada’s regulator says fertilizers and supplements can carry heavy metals, pathogens, pesticide residues, dioxins and furans into cannabis, organic or not. Solid (regulatory guidance).
C030 — Illegal Canadian cannabis had more arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury; legal cannabis had three times the chromium. The authors suspect fertilizer additives for the chromium but did not test it. Solid on the pattern, unknown on the cause.
C031 — Rock phosphate and sewage sludge generally carry more trace metals than manufactured fertilizer or organic amendments, in one general survey; no cannabis study traces an input’s metals into the flower. Promising on the general point, unknown for cannabis.
C032 — Whether a batch passes a microbial test depends on which test; no study shows organic feeding causes failures. Promising / unknown.

Environment and economics (C033–C036)

C033 — The only measured nutrient-loss study is the phosphorus leaching one. Honestly unknown for nitrogen, potassium and flush discharge.
C034 — Nobody has done a matched life-cycle comparison of organic, mineral and hybrid feeding. Honestly unknown. A yield gap alone is not a footprint; Gemini’s “+26.5% per kilo” was retired because its anchor paper does not exist and its arithmetic was wrong.
C035 — No cost, labor or failure-rate data compare feeding programs. Honestly unknown.
C036 — In every schedule Danny taught and every system he ran, the “nutrient” was really a program: nutrients plus microbes, sugars, vitamins, kelp. Solid as history of that archive; not claimed for the industry. No trial isolates the extras from the nutrients.

What Danny did (C037–C038) — practitioner, not evidence

Practitioner-record section withheld from the public copy.

Source file in the research repository: research/reports/R06-organic-vs-mineral-fertility/ledger-plain-language.md. Private links, some names and practitioner-record passages are removed from the public copy, and broken character encoding from file conversion is repaired; nothing else is changed.