The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Delay and Indecision Are Sinking Cultivation Businesses | How to buy Skittles Moonrock online

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Scaling this up:​

• To achieve an optimal supplemental light intensity of 500 µmol/m²/s across your entire 50,000 square feet of flowering canopy, you would need approximately 668 fixtures.​
• At a cost of $900 per fixture, your total capital outlay is $601,200.​

Now Let’s Talk About Returns
With the production metrics outlined above, these 668 fixtures could enable you to generate up to $9.3 million in additional revenue annually (assuming consistent fixed-area perpetual harvests). That’s a return of 15x on your initial investment—a payback period of less than one year, even with conservative yield efficiency assumptions at 0.2g/mole which could be as high as 0.3g/mole. (Most growers have 0.12 – 0.15g/mole as current state yield performance. Easy low-hanging fruit here to improve to 0.2 with zero capital.)

​The Cost of Waiting: Missed Yield and Revenue
Every day a grower delays investing in this infrastructure, they are losing yield and revenue capacity.

Consider this:​

• Daily Yield Potential per Fixture: 30 grams = 0.0661 lbs.​
• Daily Revenue Potential per Fixture: $38​
• Entire Greenhouse (668 Fixtures):​

• Daily Yield: 668 x 0.0661 lbs. = 44.2 lbs./day​
• Daily Revenue: 44.2 lbs. x $575 = $25,415/day​

Now factor in lead times:​

• Manufacturing & Delivery: 12 weeks (84 days)​
• Installation & Commissioning: 3–6 weeks (21–42 days)​
• Total Lead Time: 15–18 weeks (105–126 days)​

The missed revenue in just the lead time to get the lights after purchase:​

• Best Case (15 weeks / 105 days): 105 x $25,415 = $2,668,575 lost revenue​
• Worst Case (18 weeks / 126 days): 126 x $25,415 = $3,202,290 lost revenue​

For every week you delay on making this decision, on top of the lead time of shipping and installation, you are actively giving up $178K in top line sales revenue weekly you would otherwise be guaranteed to realize continuously in no less than 6 months. ​

This is a quantifiable, avoidable loss. Delaying action is not “playing it safe”—it is absorbing guaranteed, compounding losses that cripple operational cash flow and investor returns.​

Travis Higginbotham is the founder of Due Diligence Horticulture (DDH) and an authority in commercial horticulture and cannabis production. He holds a B.S. in Horticulture from Clemson University and an M.S. in Horticulture from Virginia Tech. Most recently, he served as vice president of cultivation at California’s Statehouse Holdings managing a Cultivation Business Unit responsible for over 223,000 square feet of canopy, postharvest, processing, distribution and bulk sales. Prior to Statehouse, Higginbotham was director of research and development at Battlefield Farms, managing global partnerships with major retailers and plant breeders focused on production research and product development for a 1.8-million-square-foot greenhouse operation. After Battlefield, he was global director of Horticulture Services at Fluence Bioengineering, where he co-invented two smart farming patents and led a global technical support team. He also served as vice president of sales and business development at The Hemp Mine, establishing a robust supply chain for cannabis genetics in the hemp sector. Currently, he leads DDH, taking on fractional CEO roles in multiple states, spinning up operations of distressed assets, and serves in advisory and board positions for several companies, driving advancements in horticultural practices and cannabis production.