PESTICIDE 101

Growing beautiful cannabis flower is our passion and why we started Avitas. So keeping our herb healthy is of utmost importance. However, we’re also committed to creating a product that we can be proud of and that we can enjoy ourselves. That’s why one of our founding principles is our commitment to all-natural, organic growing practices and why we never use any harmful chemical pesticides, insecticides, or herbicides on our flower even though they might make our lives easier.

So What?

But, why does that matter? It’s true that chemicals are everywhere. Everything made of matter is a chemical. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and even our own bodies are composed of or actively engaged in chemical reactions. However, some chemicals, particularly those used in certain pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides are particularly dangerous when smoked, combusted, or vaped. This danger to our Avitas family is unacceptable. That’s why we use only natural oils, beneficial fungus, and living beneficial, predatory insects to fight damage from things that might harm our crop.

Our Soil

Keeping up with our rigorous standards all starts in the soil. We use over seven all-natural soil additions to build a living ecosystem that’s both excellent for the health of our plants and defends against any and all bad-intentioned interlopers. Employing an all-natural integrated pest management strategy with cannabis plants is not easy, mostly because there are very few established protocols or research data to help growers in this area. However, we’ve been seeing great success and continue to hone the science behind our soil with every strain we produce.

Going Above & Beyond

We’re so passionate about being pesticide-free that we go above and beyond those measures, because not only do we care about our own flower, we’re fanatical about testing buds we get from other farms for pesticides as these products come into our facility. Many growers claim to have 100% organic herb, but analytical labs report finding banned pesticides in many products on the shelf. That’s why we’ve not only forged close relationships with a small group of farms that share our values, but we also implement testing that’s more rigorous than state-mandated requirements. We test both the flower we buy and each lot of flowers that go into our extractors to ensure a clean process from start to finish. These tests come at considerable cost, but we think it’s well worth the investment both for the sake of plants and our customers.