Low-Voltage Infrastructure for Georgia Cannabis and Hemp Operations
Georgia is not an open cannabis market, and that changes the infrastructure job before a single cable is pulled. The state’s low-THC oil program is administered by the Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission under a small number of production licenses, with product reaching patients through licensed pharmacies. Hemp is a separate track, with growers and processors licensed by the Georgia Department of Agriculture. Either way you are working on a site the state can inspect, in a building that is either a controlled production environment or a retail counter, and the cable plant has to hold up under both.
The rule book sets the camera plan before the budget does
On a licensed production site, video is not a security nicety. It is a record. Coverage is expected wherever product is received, weighed, packaged, stored or destroyed, and at every entrance and exit, with footage retained for a period set by rule rather than by preference.
That retention period, multiplied by camera count and resolution, is what actually sizes the recorder. It matters far more than picture quality, and it is the number to settle first. The common and expensive version of this mistake is a full camera count installed against storage sized by habit, where the fix is new hardware rather than a setting change.
- Fixed views on scales, packaging tables and the destruction area, with no obstruction from racking or plastic curtain
- Recording equipment inside a locked room with its own access control and its own camera, not sitting in an open office
- Reliable time sync, so footage lines up with the seed-to-sale entries it is supposed to corroborate
A flower room will destroy ordinary copper
Cultivation rooms run warm and wet by design, and Georgia’s outdoor air sits close to saturated for much of the summer, so any room pulling makeup air is importing that humidity. Add foliar sprays, carbon dioxide enrichment and periodic washdown, and standard commercial practice does not survive a growing season.
- Sealed, gasketed enclosures instead of open wall-mount racks, with stainless or coated hardware at every mounting point
- Cable in conduit or sealed raceway through grow and processing space, not exposed J-hooks above the canopy
- Camera housings with a genuine ingress rating and internal heaters, or the dome fogs and the picture becomes useless
- Data pathway routed clear of lighting circuits, ballasts and LED drivers, which put noise on the ground that costs a week to chase
Keep the compliance systems off the office network
One flat network across a cultivation site is a bad day waiting to happen. Cameras, access control, the tracking terminal and the environmental controls each carry a different risk profile and a different owner.
Environmental gear such as chillers, dehumidifiers, irrigation and carbon dioxide control often speaks BACnet or Modbus and often shares the same cable plant. Separate patch fields and a labeling scheme that identifies which system a jack belongs to are worth more a year from now than any document written after the fact.
Rural sites, long runs, Georgia storms
Hemp processing and greenhouse operations tend to sit on rural parcels where the headhouse, the office and the dry room are farther apart than 100 meters of copper will reach. Between structures it is fiber, every time. Separate buildings sit on separate ground references, and a nearby strike will find that difference through a copper pair. Anything leaving a building gets surge protection, and the recorder gets a UPS sized to ride through the short outages that come with an August afternoon.
What you hold at the end
As-built drawings, a port-to-port schedule labeled at both ends, certification results for every link, rack elevations, and a camera field-of-view map keyed to the floor plan. That last document is the one someone will eventually ask for, and it is usually the one nobody has.
KSEDCO works Georgia sites from 2700 Cumberland Pkwy SE, Suite 410, Atlanta GA 30339. Call (888) 360-0035 to walk a facility.