With a background in film advertising, customer service and sales, the past 9 years have been primarily focused on the cannabis industry. As an epileptic, I was inspired to start Cannabis Clean, a company dedicated to providing mold, mildew, and bacteria protection for growers in the medical cannabis industry. After 4+ successful years, the company was acquired and I moved towards providing efficient lighting and energy solutions for the growing industry. My goal is to contribute to the development of a sustainable cannabis industry and provide solutions in any way possible.

Steven McMorrow

Co-founder & Principal Consultant at Grownetics | 20+ years growing experience

Building CEA tools for the top 1% of growers.

Most cultivation facilities are flying blind. They track seed-to-sale compliance but can't explain why Room 3 yields 15% less than Room 1. Grownetics exists to fix that.

For 10 years, we've built open sensor platforms, 3D microclimate mapping, and crop analytics systems that tie canopy, substrate, and facility data directly to yield outcomes. Grownetics has been deployed across facilities from 5,000 to 300,000+ square feet. Our facility design work spans precision large scale living soil cultivation, automated greenhouse operations, and cutting-edge R&D facilities. For enterprise clients, we develop next-gen diagnostics tools that automate scouting and scale crop analytics. Grownetics customers lead in their markets and typically operate with 30-50% less staff than their competition.

I lead our consulting practice and hold advisory positions with the USDA-funded Resource Innovation Institute, OptimIA, and ADVANCEA initiatives—collaborating with Ohio State, Cornell, University of Arizona, and other leading institutions and researchers on efficiency standards and data-driven decision-making in CEA.

Currently co-authoring "Grow Perfect 10" with J.R. Loza—introducing The Rule of 10s, a benchmarking framework for objectively evaluating cultivation performance.

I write about CEA, operational excellence, open innovation, and sustainable development. Follow for the ideas. Reach out if you want to talk shop.

Vincent Harkiewicz

If they were playing for keeps it wouldn’t be open source. They understand things from a fundamentally different paradigm than we do in the west. They have the concept of competing together, rather than competing against one another. Yes, there are plenty of problems with Chinese governance but the benefits of open innovation is thankfully something they understand.

Building precision CEA tools for the top 1% of growers.

China has launched its first open-source, *agriculture-specific* large language model.

#Sinong is a vertical foundation model trained on thousands of agricultural books, hundreds of thousands of academic papers, policy documents, standards, and web-scale agronomic knowledge. It is fully open-sourced and positioned as national infrastructure for agriculture.

This signals intent. China is treating agricultural AI as a strategic capability, alongside energy, manufacturing, and defense.

The question for the rest of us is straightforward: how does our agricultural technology system respond?

Open models alone do not deliver impact in the field. What matters is whether these systems are validated with growers, integrated into operational workflows, and tied to real economic outcomes at the farm level. The next phase of competition will be decided by deployment, trust, and adoption.

In the U.S. and allied markets, our advantage has historically come from tight coupling between growers, startups, research institutions, and incumbents. Preserving that edge will require faster field validation, stronger feedback loops, and clearer paths from research to revenue.

Agriculture is becoming a proving ground for applied AI. The countries that win will be those that pair models with real farms, real labor constraints, and real balance sheets.

China is clearly playing for keeps. The rest of the ecosystem should be clear-eyed about what that means.

h/t Andy Sinton

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