A New Approach to Solving Cultivation Challenges Through Collaboration

Commercial cultivation has never been more complex. Facilities are expected to produce a consistent harvest within budget, improve operational efficiency, prevent contamination from pests and disease, and stay competitive, often all at once.

To meet these demands, most commercial cultivation operations rely on a mix of vendors, consultants, and specialists, each offering expertise in a specific area. The problem is that these specialists often work in isolation from one another, with little visibility into what the others are doing. That can lead to conflicting advice, duplicated costs, and slower problem-solving exactly when operators need the opposite.

To address this, DRM has entered into a strategic collaboration with six other leading companies in the horticulture and cannabis industry. Informally, the group calls itself “The Core 7.”

Meet the Alliance Members

• DRM provides commercial cultivation design services focused on creating efficient, buildable, high-performing facilities.
• Grow Pros supplies commercial cultivation equipment and operational solutions for indoor grow spaces.
• Calyx Containers provides cannabis packaging solutions that balance compliance requirements, product protection, and brand presentation.
• UPI Panels designs infrastructure systems for controlled environment agriculture, including durable, antimicrobial building materials.
• ProGuard specializes in pest and disease prevention, along with mitigation strategies and plant health programs that minimize losses for cannabis growers.
• Advanced Nutrients develops cultivation nutrition products designed to improve plant performance and increase yields.
• Kaya Coir supplies high-quality cultivation media, with a focus on sustainable agricultural practices and direct partnerships with farming communities worldwide.

The alliance is supported by the Grow World platform, a resource hub built specifically for commercial cultivators to access these combined areas of expertise in one place.

Why This Alliance Was Created

Most cultivation facilities eventually run into problems that span multiple areas of expertise at once. A few examples:

• A pest issue may have environmental root causes.
• An operational bottleneck may trace back to facility layout.
• Yield problems are often the result of irrigation, plant nutrition, infrastructure, and workflow design interacting with each other, not any single factor in isolation.

Despite this, most facilities are run by a single operator coordinating multiple specialists who rarely communicate with each other directly. 

In practice, most operators are coordinating a stack of vendors who never talk to each other: the electrician doesn’t know what the HVAC contractor specified, the nutrient supplier doesn’t know the room layout. Someone has to catch that before it turns into a change order. Usually, nobody does.

The Core 7 Alliance was formed to change that dynamic. Because these interrelated problems (pest and disease issues tied to environmental conditions, environmental conditions tied to facility design, nutritional issues tied to irrigation and workflow) rarely have single-discipline solutions, cultivators need more than a list of recommendations from disconnected sources. They need coordinated solutions built by people who already understand how these pieces fit together, especially given the pressure operators face from rising costs, a more complex compliance environment, and the need to increase production without sacrificing margin.

What This Means for Cultivators

Whether you’re planning a new facility, expanding an existing one, or optimizing current performance, the alliance gives cultivators access to a broader range of specialist expertise within a single, coordinated framework.

Integrated Strategic Guidance

Facility performance is rarely the result of one factor working in isolation. Design decisions affect workflow. Infrastructure choices impact environmental control. Plant health programs influence production outcomes, and packaging requirements affect downstream operations. Alliance members bring these considerations into the same conversation as early as possible, whether that’s for a new build, an expansion, or an improvement to an existing operation.

Faster Problem Solving

Operators often spend significant time coordinating between vendors just to get answers to cross-disciplinary problems. When specialists from different fields are already working together, that coordination friction drops substantially, and solutions can be identified and implemented faster.

Better Project Execution

Construction and cultivation projects run into costly problems when specialist recommendations conflict, or when important issues surface too late in the process to address cheaply. Bringing multiple disciplines into the planning process early reduces the risk of these conflicts and the expensive changes that follow.

Operational Optimization

Whether the goal is a better facility design, stronger day-to-day operations, improved biosecurity, or solving an active production challenge, alliance members offer practical guidance grounded in real, day-to-day experience solving these exact problems for other operators.

Education Is a Core Part of the Mission

The Core 7 Alliance isn’t only a group of service providers. Education is a stated part of its purpose, with plans to produce educational videos, expert interviews, facility tours, and strategic insights aimed at helping commercial growers improve their operations.

Planned topics include cultivation facility design, integrated pest management, contamination prevention, packaging strategy, infrastructure planning, and operational efficiency, with a consistent focus on real-world challenges rather than general theory. The goal is straightforward: give operators useful, practical information from people who solve these problems professionally, every day.

A Smarter Model for Industry Growth

The cannabis industry continues to evolve quickly, and while individual parts of running a cultivation operation can be handled separately, the services supporting that operation typically can’t be, at least not effectively. No single vendor can answer every question a cultivation business faces day to day.

The Core 7 Alliance represents a different model: combining cultivation design expertise, real-world growing experience, quality products, and practical education into a single, coordinated resource for commercial cannabis growers. That coordination is the foundation of the Grow World platform and the collaboration behind it.

Want to learn more about the Core 7 Alliance? Read the official press release: DRM Leads Strategic “Core 7” Collaboration to Deliver More Integrated Solutions for Commercial Cultivation Operators.

DRM Leads Strategic ‘Core 7’ Collaboration to Deliver More Integrated Solutions for Commercial Cultivation Operators

If you’d like to talk through how this collaborative approach could apply to your facility, get in touch with our team, or browse our portfolio of cultivation projects to see the kind of work this alliance supports. You can also learn more about our team at DRM.