Green Home Solutions Visionary Russ Weldon Develops Revolutionary New Products and Services Geared Toward Cannabis Industry
“Unplanned” was the word Russ Weldon used when describing the creation of his newest venture geared toward the cannabis industry. Green Home Solutions’ Chief Cultural Officer and visionary established Trusted Green, a revolutionary new lineup of products and services serving the growing industry that is cannabusiness, after helping a Massachusetts grow house with their mold problem in 2018. Known for its ability to eliminate plant-based molds of all kinds in many different settings, Green Home Solutions was well-equipped for the job.
“A grower reached out to us in need of assistance, but we had no experience treating mold in a grow house before,” Weldon said. “We went out to investigate their problem regardless and found that we had a few products and ideas that might be useful in solving their problem. That’s where the project started.”
Mold needs three basic things to thrive, Weldon explained: a nutrient source, humidity and relative temperature. In a grow house where there are multiple food sources and the humidity is kept high, all of the ingredients are present for mold to become a pervasive issue. At this grow house, in particular, technicians discovered the mold in the ventilation system, which posed a particular challenge for the growers to eradicate. Mold on cannabis could destroy their entire crop.
“We strategically took on the mold in the ventilation system with our EPA-certified products, which allowed us to solve the issue before it negatively impacted another crop cycle,” Weldon said, noting that the grow house was treated for mold in between crop cycles prophylactically. “That was my introduction,” he said.
As the grow house was repeatedly treated for mold, Weldon and David Bloom, now Trusted Green’s chief science officer, started hypothesizing. If they could subside mold growth in the marijuana plants at a cellular level, they might be able to prevent the mold issue from occurring altogether. Bloom got to work developing a product, and sure enough, tests revealed his suspicions to be correct — plants could grow bigger, stronger and healthier, making them more resistant to mold and powdery mildew.
“As humans, we’re less susceptible to disease when we maintain a healthy diet and exercise,” Weldon said. “The same is true for plants. When we began live testing our product with actual growers, plants were not only growing more resistant to mold, but their THC levels increased. They grew bigger and in less time. A normal crop cycle was shortened by 10 days.”
With a shortened grow time, increased plant size, higher THC levels and greater yield, PlantBoost 420 was born. The new product specifically designed for cannabis growers gives Trusted Green the opportunity to not only treat a contaminated space, but reclaim it in a way that maximizes its output.
“When I got into the wireless business in 1983, it was touted to be the next billion-dollar industry,” Weldon said. “It turned out to be much bigger than that. When the mold business came along several years ago, we were at the forefront of it. Now, states are passing laws requiring homes to be checked for mold before they can be sold, making our services industry-standard. The cannabis business has come along and provided us with another awesome opportunity to be an industry leader, so we responded. We’re excited for what’s to come with this next business.”
What’s to come is extreme enthusiasm from the cannabis-growing marketplace, if the response from growers who partook in product testing is any indication. Weldon said that one grower wrote hima letter in which he provided four years’ worth of data that showed steady year-over-year improvement.
“After noting that they’ve learned, adapted and improved every year, the grower wrote, ‘We’ve had many companies come to us along the way and make us a promise that their product would do all kinds of great things for us. Every time, we were disappointed,’” Weldon recounted. “The letter concluded with, ‘However, this Trusted Green product is crazy.’ He included their data so we could see its impact on their crop.”
Inspired by the results growers were seeing and the incredible potential of its new products and services, Weldon unveiled Trusted Green to much fanfare at the Cannabis Conference in Las Vegas in April. Trusted Green is currently at work developing a product similar to PlantBoost 420 for hemp that would be suitable for outdoor growth and build a better, stronger seedling, or clone.
“At our core, we are a solutions company—we were presented with a problem, and we created a solution for it,” Weldon said. “We’re problem solvers and we have the right talent in place to seize the opportunities that present themselves to us through innovation. We were in the right place at the right time and we’ve proved we can adapt."