Although retrofitting an existing building or greenhouse can help enable a cannabis firm be first to market, there are difficult challenges to overcome that require designeers and builders with experience in plant cultivation facilities. Cultivators who plan on simply scaling up their current equipment and practices for one or two rooms often fail to anticipate critical factors for an entire building. For example, greenhouses that formerly grew flowering crops or vegetables were buit in anticipation of pesticides being used, so are not properly sealed or air-filtered. Warehouses and industrial buildings were not built for the high humidity environments that cultivation creates, as well as the need for washdown and sanitation to control disease. Learn from experts in addressing these problems and more. Understand the key performance indicators and targets to guide producers and project teams during the retrofitting phases, reduce energy use and operating costs for resilient facilities, and maximize incentives from your local utilities and efficiency programs.
Topical areas include:
Understanding the energy and water requirements of a cannabis cultivation facility
Retrofitting existing buildings and greenhouses to cannabis cultivation
Building envelopes and MEP considerations
Considerations for DIY vs outside contracting
Assembling CEA Project Teams
The Value of Commissioning Tiered Model
Navigating Codes and Permits
Retrofit Best Practices for Indoor Farms and Greenhouses
Operations & Maintenance Planning
Maximizing Technical Assistance for CEA Projects
Brian is a founding partner of Anderson Porter Design, Inc., an international practice focused on design and architecture for the cannabis industry. Anderson Porter Design provides strategy, technology, design and thought leadership built on 20 years as a general practice in Architecture. Since 2014 they have focused on buildings for plants: Controlled-Environmental Horticulture (CEH), Extraction / Manufacturing and Retail Dispensaries.
Brian merges a RISD education in the craft tradition of making and designing objects with an analytic data driven process to drive value along the cannabis supply chain. He has a Masters degree from Harvard and has been in practice since 1992. Anderson provides professional leadership in strategic planning and design. He speaks nationally on energy sustainability in the Cannabis Industry, Facility Design, and on interior design for retail.
Anderson Porter Design were the architects for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 1999 – 2006. The events of 9/11 necessitated site and building security upgrades both physical and electronic. Anderson's specialty in building design for security includes a new vehicle inspection and site security measures for the FRB. The program included site upgrades and a new building for the inspection of all vehicles entering the underground garage capable of protecting the bank from a car or truck bomb. Anderson has further specialization in buildings with complex programs as architect with a team from Mumbai India for MIT’s Neuroscience Laboratory and architect for commercial medical device manufacturing facilities in Massachusetts. Anderson has extensive experience with public agencies and non-profit organizations. He brings over a decade of work with small business retail and interior design with both private and public clients.
Brian began working with cannabis clients in 2014. He is working with clients in various stages of state approvals process in MA, NJ, CO, OR, AR, OH, OK, MO, MI, VA, WVA, PA and FL.
Rob has over 30 years of experience in plant growth facility management, plant research and commercial production. At Purdue University, he brought online and managed a computer- controlled 40,000 ft 2 research facility, made up of 25 greenhouses and over 60 growth chambers and grow rooms. He was responsible for hundreds of CEA studies involving flowering, food and medicinal species. He served on design teams for greenhouse projects and one of the first automated machine-vision phenotyping centers in the country. In his consulting role, he supported major hydroponic produce growers AeroFarms and Bright Farms; Big Ag companies Dow AgroSciences, Novozymes and Indigo Ag; and several cannabis operations including Clade9. He wrote cultivation plans for cannabis licenses awarded in Missouri and West Virginia.
Rob’s protocols for optimizing greenhouse production have been downloaded over 70,000 times in 104 countries. He participated in the publication, A Practical Guide to Containment: Plant Biosafety in Research Greenhouses, recognized throughout the world as a primary resource for safe production of genetically modified crops. In 2016, he was a member of the International Committee for Controlled Environment Guidelines that published Guidelines for Measuring and Reporting Environmental Parameters for Experiments in Greenhouse Facilities, the seminal document of quality assurance protocols for plant science research.
In his free time, Rob enjoys gardening, growing microgreens under LEDs, baking and winning croquet matches against his three grown children.