Trinity County, California. 2019–2022.
I ran a 13,000 square foot flowering canopy on whiteboards, a countdown app, and notes in my phone.
From 2019 to 2022 I ran Wildcreek Farms in Trinity County, California. The real tool stack looked like this:
A whiteboard on each greenhouse door tracking day count and target harvest date. A map on the wall with the strain layout. A color-coded spreadsheet I built for the full cycle schedule—clone, transplant, defoliation, harvest, buck, reset, sterilize. A countdown app on my phone where I tracked room flips with emojis because nothing else did it. Two whiteboards in my office: one with BH1, BH2, BH3 columns tracking day counts, strains, harvest dates, transport dates, flip dates, and clone inventory. The other was the full-season schedule grid. Employee schedule at the bottom.
That was five different systems to answer four questions.
Inside one of the flower rooms at Wildcreek. This is the room Flip was built for.
Six rooms. Day count, strain, harvest date, transport date. This is Flip's entire dashboard written in dry-erase marker.
A laminated card I made to hang on each greenhouse door. "Flower Day" and "Flip Date" with blank lines for a marker. January 2022. I was building the tracking system that Flip replaced—with scissors, tape, and a laminator.
The morning walkthrough. A clipboard with a printed tracking grid, bed by bed. Pest status, dry pots, canopy level, plants pulled. Everything I observed went on this sheet. When the sheet was full, it went in a drawer.
Running Trym from my van at the beach. Four hours from the grow. The compliance software worked fine from here—plant counts, harvest manifests, state reporting. But it couldn't tell me what happened in BH2 that morning. That was still on a whiteboard back at the facility.
My phone, May 2022. Nine room and batch timers in a consumer countdown app. Plant B3: 32 days left. BH3: 60 days ago. Gelato 41 Moms: 59 days ago. The compliance app is on the same home screen. It handled compliance. The room stuff still lived in my phone.
This is what the walkthrough sounded like.
These are from my actual grow log at Wildcreek. Not adapted. Not cleaned up. Typed standing in the room, usually before 7 AM, during a bed-by-bed walk of BH2. May 5, 2022.
Bed 1a: first square is completely planted but other than that it's only the southside that's planted. This was the most wet bed with no dry pots. Plants are booming. I only see thrips. No signs of russets, aphids or anything else. Humidity is good in here. Pretty level canopy now that I topped everything. These things are in full veg mode. Look for serious growth after the topping.
Bed 1b: definitely quite a few dry pots in this bed. I manually fed all beds while ripping and tried to unclog the lines but nothing seems to get them going again. Definitely a clean time! There are a few smaller plants but they are all growing and catching up. They look like they love being topped. I did remove 3 plants from this bed while topping. I'm really liking the growth in here. No weirdness as far as bugs or anything like that. Definitely a thrip presence. Nothing to be concerned about. There is a bit of reveg going on.
Bed 4b: alot of dry pots once again. Some of these are about to die. This should not happen. Even with the dry pots this is the most full bed in the house. It's my favorite one in the entire house.
Bed 5b: once again unfortunately there are alot of dry pots. Very dry. I'd say half the bed is dry. I had to kill three just in this bed from being dry.
“There is WAY to many dry pots in this house and in my opinion that shouldn't be a thing. With these being so small and not bushy if you do a walkthrough it's very obvious to see the dry pots. We can't just look at dry pots and not hand water them at the very least. We lost over 10 plants total because of this and stunted a lot more than that. It took me 15 mins to water everything. That's a part of the walkthrough and cannot be happening on small, obvious plants. It breaks my heart to see so many plants not tall because of leaving them dry. Other than that there is alot of good going on in here. Plants are growing super fast and thriving.”
That note has everything a grower actually needs. Pest status. Irrigation failures. Plants pulled. Canopy level. Growth rate. What changed. What didn't.
No compliance system captures any of it. Nothing is built around it. So it lived in my phone, in a notes app, and when I left that facility it would have left with me.
Open the demo and check the journal. Those same kinds of notes live in Flip now.
Real walkthrough entries from Wildcreek Farms, BH2. May 5, 2022. This is what grower tracking actually looks like.
I asked what they were going to use for tracking.
I was at a friend's facility recently. Brand new build-out. License just turned on. Plants going in the building. We were outside and I asked what they were going to use for tracking. I expected them to name one of the existing tools. I figured someone had finally built the thing.
They said: notebook. Going to set up a spreadsheet.
Same answer I would have given three years ago. Same answer every grower I know would give. Nothing had changed.
That's when it clicked. I can make this. So I did.
The cultivation software gap.
“This app is not built around or for compliance. This app is built around and for growers. We're tracking it the way we have always tracked it, but more intelligently.”
I keep asking. I've had conversations at trade shows with new apps—I ask about operational tracking, room-level walkthrough stuff, day counts, bed notes—and they look at me like I'm crazy. "Nah man, we're just here for the compliance." And I walk away shaking my head. Every time. The grower stuff doesn't get built because growers don't have time or money to demand it. You're putting out fires all day. You don't have a spare afternoon to go shopping for software that might be slightly less bad than the spreadsheet you already built.
That's the gap. Not missing features—a missing category. The compliance tools are fine at compliance. But nobody built the layer underneath: the part where you walk into BH2 at 6 AM and need to know what day you're on, what changed since Friday, and whether those dry pots got handled.
“What do we have? What's coming? What's it look like? What's good?”
That's it. Four questions. Every morning. Flip answers them before the lights come on.
See it running with real data from a real facility.
Run the room.
Most teams are set up in a single sitting. The whiteboard comes down the same week.