We should probably address the elephant in the room first. When a grower or dispensary builds an in-house laboratory, they shouldn’t focus on doing third-party laboratory work. For conflict-of-interest reasons, third party testing labs will always exist, and growers and dispensaries will always need to use their services for legal reasons. Remember that third-party labs only test the finished products. They don’t test seedlings or clones for potential problems, and they generally don’t analyze information that breeders find relevant early on in a plant’s life cycle. Instead, we should focus on the multiple additional benefits an in-house laboratory can provide:

1. Currently, many growers feel like they’re playing Russian roulette when they submit samples to testing laboratories. With an in-house laboratory, growers can reduce or eliminate that fear altogether.
2. If your company is focused on building a high-end brand, in-house laboratories can set a quality assurance (QA) bar for the entire company, making it stand out from its competitors.
3. In-house testing can save money by performing tests before products go into packaging. Normally, if a test from a third party comes back with bad results, the entire batch may need to be unpackaged and tested more thoroughly. Having an in-house laboratory test products before they enter the package can save a lot in packaging costs.
4. Third-party testing laboratories aren’t obligated to test for certain things that might be relevant to a grower. Third-party labs mainly test for things that are of concern to the end consumer, not the grower. For example:
5. Uncertain if your seeds are feminized? Why not test them early on and save yourself the headache of growing males all the way to flowering?
6. Want to look for potential pathogens before they become a problem? You can detect things like Mosaic viruses, which aren’t harmful to consumers at all, but could endanger a grow.

As you’re probably aware, testing equipment can be really expensive. If you were to try and build a complete lab that could test everything, you would probably spend around $1.5 million, which isn’t feasible or necessary for most operations. Instead, you should focus on the tests that what will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Below are different kinds of tests in order of usefulness per dollar spent:

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Genetic Testing

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Genetic testing is actually much cheaper and simpler than many people think it is. Not only are services for humans like 23andme becoming increasingly common and cheap, but similar services are also appearing for horticultural companies. Genetic tests will probably give you the biggest ROI. The information you can learn from them is incredible, and the cost is relatively miniscule compared to what you could lose from not knowing. You can test for pests, help out your breeding program, and look for potential problems that might appear in third party tests. Soil sampling and leaf sampling is relatively cheap and easy. For example, Medicinal Genomics has developed a USB-powered PCR device that only costs about $500. It can run about 8 wells at any given time, which isn’t a huge amount, but sufficient for a small grow. This little device can test for different microbes in soil, on leaves, and elsewhere. This information can be extremely helpful to a grower looking to eliminate pests and increase beneficials. These tests can also help prevent crop loss, which has a very heavy cost for grows.

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Cannabinoids Testing

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Testing for cannabinoids is relatively cheap. However, cannabinoid testing is significantly more expensive than many genetics tests. Knowing your cannabinoid content can really help boost sales and product prices or improve your breeding programs, thus it has a good ROI. Generally speaking, you’ll need a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) machine to test for cannabinoids. These can run around anywhere $10,000 for your basic models, up to $100,000 for very advanced models. You’ll also need a technician trained in using this equipment to run your tests.

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Heavy Metals

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If you want to test for heavy metals, you’re looking at a relatively low ROI. The main reason you’d want to perform heavy metal testing is that you’re a sufficiently large company that wants to streamline their QA and testing with third-party labs. In order to set up a lab to test for heavy metals, you’ll likely need an ICP-MS machine or GC-MS machine, which will run you around $30-50 thousands. You will also need a technician to operate these machines.

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Pesticides

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Testing for pesticides is extremely expensive and probably has a very low ROI for growers. If you’re a good grower, you should already know what’s gone into your plant, and this test shouldn’t be necessary for an in-house laboratory. Third party labs usually test for pesticides anyway. An Agilent Triple Quadrupole LC/MS system. However, if you are still interested in testing for pesticides in-house, you’re looking at buying a Triple Quad, abbreviated as TQ-MS, which often costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’ll also likely need a Ph.D or an experienced Masters degree to operate the machine.

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You can test a mother for any pathogens before cloning. If you clone a mother that’s hiding spores or holding a pathogen, you can end up with a nightmare scenario and a lot of wasted time and effort. You can test your mothers before cloning to ensure you don’t waste time or energy.

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You can test whether seeds are male or female. This will save you a significant amount of time and effort that might have been wasted raising a male plant all the way to flowering. Save yourself some time and money in your breeding program!

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You can test for pathogens before entering flowering. Powdery mildew takes a month and a half to incubate in a host plant before it begins expressing itself. Because it grows within the host plant, it is a systemic pest. Typically powdery mildew expresses itself when a cannabis plant transitions into the flowering stage. By testing plants before they enter flowering, you can catch powdery mildew while it’s in its dormant stage and quarantine affected plants, potentially saving many crops as well as reducing your sanitation needs.

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You can speed up your breeding programs. You can look for desirable genes in your breeding programs and select for those traits. This can lead to an accelerated breeding program that you may be able to file patents for in the future.

One thing worth consideration is that cannabis is still a relatively young industry. As rules and regulations change, an in-house laboratory may act as a buffer to keep your operation compliant. For example, recent papers have highlighted a number of dangerous compounds that plants can produce. With a lab, you could relatively easily detect if a strain could produce these compounds and avoid a legal headache, should these compounds get banned. Saving you headaches. In the long run, a genetics laboratory can help you identify genes for resistance to certain pathogens. By incorporating these genes into your breeding programs, you can make stronger, hardier strains that make your operation more secure.