Synthetic or Oragnic? Synthetic is Minerals pulled straight out of the ground. The only thing synthesised are the chelating agents. Mineral Based Nutes is a better term. Its just Minerals broken down to its raw form. simplicity of nutritional needs, tends to work the best. when you start complicating things with multiple additives, and BS snake oils that only play with the uptake of readily available foods and fuck w PH. when you use all these things, it's hard to distinguish what product might be giving you issues. I try to keep it short & sweet. I dont believe that "Organic" Meds are better or worse than Mineral Based Meds. Its about the grower and how he uses his products. Less is More!
This^^^^^^^^^
And Pauly touched upon a good point , a lot is in how you cure and dry your product. Don't get in a hurry.
As for prices , it's cyclical supply and demand , same as any other ag commodity. So of course it's dirt cheap up here in far northern Cal , so are clones for that matter.
It will cycle back and stabilise , face it what with 19 and everything a whole slew of starry-eyed profit greedy folks jumped in , prices plummeted and those same folks got out when their " million dollars" didn't magically appear and they realised that this can be WORK. Doesn't bother me too much though since of course those types are responsible for a good portion of the lightly used equipment around for DIRT cheap at the moment.
And then of course we have whatever the flavor/strain fad of the year is at a given time , right now it looks like Girl Scout Cookies , Cherry Pie and Sonoma Coma will be the fad for a minute or two , at least 'round the Bay area and Sac , not so much in the Far north end of the state.
And folks up here are still waiting with bated breath to find out exactly how far the federal crackdown is going to go , a lot of us feel that there is another shoe poised to drop. There were certainly enough of 'em around this last summer and fall , every freaking third Suburban and Crown Vic in Trinity county had a G plate it seemed like for a while there.
All in all it's nothing that hasn't occured before when you really look at it , every decade or so they come in and beat their chests and wave the federal pecker around and shake it threateningly for a season or so and then everything goes back to normal for a while.
The caveat is that this time there may be more at stake , I haven't tracked 'em down but there are enoug rumors of Big Pharma money and Big Tobacco money purchasing large tracts within the Emerald Triangle to make one wonder if it's not all about to get hijacked by big Corporate interests and leave all of us out in the cold as the equivalent of moonshiners , take a look at what you get for growing unlicensed tobacco in certain states for an example of where we may end up.
Big Pharma wants to put it in a capsule and profit , Big Tobacco wants to sell " MarlBoro Purple 100 Filters" or some such crap like it ( you just watch) and profit , the politicians are looking towards the tax revenue and.............
..........profit.
Bleak picture 'eh? But *maybe* not , the big majors can't do what we do just as they cannot do what the *really* good Wine Makers do , and that's going to be our niche , high-end *quality* to give folks an alternative to the flood of factory CRAP that's gonna flood us twenty years down the road. Boutique Growers if you want to call it that , folks willing to put the time and care into to get quality.
Who knows but what there may come a day when we can actually set up a stand at the local farmers market just like other folks with produce.