Nutrients
Finding vegan cannabis nutrients that aren’t full of animal products is harder than it should be. Most of what gets sold as “natural” or “organic” has animal products in it. Blood meal, bone meal, feather meal, fish emulsion, worm castings, bat guano. OMRI certification doesn’t help with any of that. It’s a process label from a private organization, and a lot of OMRI-listed products are built primarily from the same industrial animal byproduct streams we’re trying to avoid.
Product websites are often incomplete about what’s actually in something. The General Hydroponics BioThrive line is labeled “VGANIC™ contains no animal derived ingredients” right on the physical bottle. That’s easy to miss if you’re only looking at their site. If you’re at a hydro shop trying to sort something out, flip the bottle and read the ingredient panel. That’s the binding claim.
This is a short list of what I’ve actually run or researched. Not exhaustive, and things do change – check the bottles in person if you can, check websites, and reach out to companies if needed to be positive that something is vegan.
GH BioThrive / BioGrow
https://generalhydroponics.com/collections/general-organics
Confirmed on the label: “VGANIC™ contains no animal derived ingredients.” BioThrive Grow (4-3-3) in veg, BioThrive Bloom (2-4-4) in flower. Full ingredient panel on BioThrive Grow: alfalfa meal, cane sugar, copper sulphate, glacial rock powder, iron sulphate, kieserite, manganese sulphate, molasses, plant extracts, potassium sulphate, rock phosphate, sodium borate, sodium molybdenate, soybean meal, zinc phosphate. All plant or mineral.
This is what I run. CaMg+ (cal-mag) and Diamond Black (0-0-1, humic acids from leonardite) are both VGANIC from the same line. BioRoot in early veg, dropped at flip.
One product in the same lineup that isn’t vegan: BioMarine, marine-derived. It sits right next to the vean stuff in shops and on GH’s own feed charts. BioBud and BioWeed aren’t confirmed either way, so check the label before using either.
BIOCANNA
CANNA’s own product page says “BIOCANNA fertilizers are 100% vegan.” Bio Vega for veg, Bio Flores for flower, both plant-derived. They also make a point of noting that no animal pathogens can get in, which is a strange thing to advertise until you think about what most “organic” nutrients are made from. Long track record in veganic growing, been the starting point for a lot of people when they first tried to figure this out.
BioBizz
Bio·Grow, Bio·Bloom, Top·Max, Root·Juice are all plant-derived.
Fish·Mix is fish emulsion from the North Sea. Their own site says so. Skip it.
Greenleaf Nutrients Mega Crop
greenleafnutrients.com/product/mega-crop
ICMag thread
Different situation from everything else here. Mega Crop is a synthetic mineral salt formula, not plant-derived, not organic, and confirmed vegan. GrowDiaries has it listed as vegan and amino-acid chelated rather than EDTA. Greenleaf told 420Magazine directly: “MEGA CROP and our fertilizer products are Vegan fertilizers… but do not officially have Organic (OMRI) certification.”
It also holds stable in a reservoir for days, which matters a lot if you’re trying to automate anything. Bud Explosion (0-21-40 from the same line) is the same: monopotassium phosphate, potassium sulfate, magnesium sulfate. Mineral salts.
BioNova veganic line
bionovanutrients.com/products/nutrients
Dutch company, markets the line as veganic. Less community documentation than the brands above, but a real company with a real track record. They call it veganic.
Mykos (Xtreme Gardening)
xtreme-gardening.com/mykos-mycorrhizae
Single-species mycorrhizal inoculant: Rhizophagus intraradices. That’s it. A fungus, no animal inputs. Mix it into your medium at transplant for root contact, then forget about it. Expands the root system’s effective surface area, which means better water and nutrient uptake without doing anything extra.
Nothing on the label says “vegan” because it’s a fungus and that question doesn’t usually come up. If you’re thinking about it: fungal spores in an inert carrier. Nothing animal.
Mr. Fulvic
Humic and fulvic acid concentrate mined from a 30-million-year-old humic shale deposit, water-extracted (no hydroxides, no fermentation). Confirmed vegan per label. I run it at 1ml/gal every watering as a chelator. In a hand-fed setup without a living soil buffer doing that work, humic and fulvic acids help nutrients cross into the plant more readily — the chelation-and-uptake mechanism, especially for iron, is well documented (Zanin et al., Frontiers in Plant Science 2019). Low cost, been in rotation almost every grow.
Sounds vegan, isn’t
These show up constantly because they’re sold right next to the vegan stuff, usually with “natural” or “organic” on the label. This list used to have Diamond Black on it. Check bottles, not forums.
- GH BioMarine (marine-derived)
- BioBizz Fish·Mix (fish emulsion from the North Sea)
- FoxFarm (castings and guano throughout the whole line)
- Roots Organics (same)
- Most “premium organic” bloom boosters (fish or bone meal turns up constantly, check every one individually)
If you’ve got a good local hydro shop, use it. Someone who actually grows can usually pull a bottle and tell you what’s in it, or just hand it to you to read. Worth more than trying to piece it together from a website, including this one.
The soil side of this is its own rabbit hole — covered separately.