Minerals: An Essential Part of Cannabinoid Production

Soil-borne mineral depletion has caused a crisis in the food supply. Mineral-deficient food-borne minerals is causing mineral-deficiency disease rates to increase dramatically. Food is nearly empty of the genetic triggers—minerals—that help make the compounds to keep us healthy. This food-quality reduction is from the yearly depletion of soils due to harvesting without restoring mineral content to cropland.

The cropland destruction has created both an explosion of illnesses and an explosion of vitamin companies and pharmaceutical products. Minerals are critical for the plant compounds we need for nutrition and soil minerals are taken up into plants to create the compounds we use as nutrients when we eat.

Similarly, deficiency in mineral content can produce deficiencies in cannabis plants as well. In soilless hydroponic growing media, minerals have to be introduced every time you grow a crop. The quality and potency in cannabinoids is directly dependent on the minerals in soil where cannabis is grown.

In the 2014 paper “Metals and Organic compounds in the Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids: A Chemometric Approach to the Analysis of Cannabis Sativa Samples” the relationship of minerals in soil were mapped to the synthesis of the various cannabinoid compound content in C. Sativa. In their abstract the authors state: “This work is an attempt to recognize correlations between the metal content in the different parts of cannabis sativa L. and the cannabinoids content, as a potential indicator.”

Their results? “Correlations between metal content in plants and soil, analyzed by chemometrics unsupervised methods, highlighted partly their role in the biosynthesis of cannabinoids. It was recognized that the CBN and the psychoactive THC contents are manganese-dependent while the CBD content is iron-dependent.”

The authors concluded that the contents of metals in the rhizosphere could be an indication of the cannabinoid content. This can be seen in the test results of numerous examples of the same strain. There is a wide variety of potency as seen in the Blue Dream samples chart, and it can be concluded that it is a nutrient deficiency in ionic minerals during growth that causes these dramatic differences.

According to the same study quoted above, the high-THC sample had adequate amounts of manganese and the high-CBD sample had adequate amounts iron. In growth rate, the testing minerals have shown to accelerate growth and yields, beginning with rapid and thick root growth as seen in Fig. 3 in identical untreated and treated clones at six weeks. Foliar ionic mineral spray applications in the late phase increased trichome numbers dramatically (Fig. 4).

Other benefits occur from healthier, strong, ionic mineral-treated plants: lack of pathogenic and pest attacks. If you want better medicine, you need to supplement it with ionic minerals. Most N-P-K fertilizer systems contain up to eight minerals, but plants need more than 50 minerals to function for optimal genetic expression.

Water-soluble, ocean water-derived liquid ionic minerals work best because they contain some 60 different elements and are taken up into the plant fast because they are bio-available. As individual ions (atoms) they can pass directly through leaf and root cells. Mineral ions are critical. It is, after all, the iron in hemoglobin in the blood platelets that carries oxygen to our cells, and iron is critical for making CBD in cannabis. In other words, you’ve got to mineralize to energize!