Breeding At Scale For Scale
Cannabis seeds have never been more accessible, but their variability and availability remain a challenge for mass-scale commercial cultivation, resulting in an expensive reliance on clones.
To date, the cannabis industry has been forced to make a choice: grow from seed and gamble with unpredictability, or dedicate a significant amount of labor, investment, and space to propagation (mothers, clones, & culture) to ensure crops proceed as planned.
ETHOS and Happy Valley—a licensed Massachusetts—are partnering to bring stable, organic seed to the commercial market, eliminating the costs of propagation.
This partnership will be mutually beneficial, allowing ETHOS to boost its production and phenohunt capabilities while offering Happy Valley access to exclusive varieties selected in these hunts for in-house use and breeding.
An Organic Alternative for Mass-Scale Cultivation
At some point, the agricultural giants will enter this space, and with them will come true GMO and BioTech seeds.
Our goal is to be able to provide a product organically that is competitive in a future where biotech cannabis is a reality.
In the United States, more than 90% of seeds grown—from corn to soybeans—are biotech seeds, and 90% of biotech farmers are resource poor.
We have to accept the reality that we may not be as good as these GMOs as far as pathogen resistance—They have a billion dollar R&D and we don't—But I think we can get really close using selective breeding rather than foreign DNA from other plants and organisms.
ETHOS' partnership with Massachusetts operator Happy Valley helps accomplish this, exponentially expanding production and phenohunt capabilities.
We will be phenohunting 6,000 square feet of canopy, or roughly 3000 plants consistently, upon completion of a new state-of-the-art facility. This allows us to hunt up to 30 varieties at a time while still running 100 of each variety. Then, we may rehunt certain selections in larger runs of 300-500 plants.
Our goal is to hunt for special cultivars for commercial production as well as selections for in-house breeding projects.
The Pitch Is In The Proof
In addition to producing seed at scale, ETHOS' partnership with Happy Valley serves as a proof of concept, quantifying the value of growing crops from seed by documenting the entire process from initial buildout to ready-for-market.
Because it's not just about whether you can grow from seed, it’s about how best to do it successfully at scale.
We want to make sure that our clients who are growing from seed are succeeding, which is why we are developing as many resources as possible, including testing results and high resolution photos and videos of the process.
That's the beauty of working with Happy Valley is that we get their place to prove it; We get to grow everything from seed and test every aspect before pitching to other growers and operators.
What Does Breeding at Scale For Scale Mean?
The biggest difference breeding at scale is the phenohunt; Making seeds at scale is about hunting at scale.
This involves a variety of tactics and strategies—from the reversals to the selection criteria—to achieve the seedstock we are looking for. It is equally about how we pick which plants will be used as much as it is the physical aspect of doing the work.
And, gradually, you have to continue to scale up your own hunts and production in correlation with demand.
We will be starting with one room for the first project, but eventually scale to 10 individual breeding rooms by the end of next year, all dedicated to different varieties and end games.
From there, we will be working to get our seeds certified in international markets, allowing international operators to confidently buy and grow our seeds regardless of where they are located.
In the next year and a half, ETHOS, through its partnership with Happy Valley, will be hunting for the most genetically stable varieties in our catalog to produce True F1 and S1 lines, with the goal of releasing our first commercial batches by the end of 2023.
What we are doing with Happy Valley is audacious—We are trying to create a market that doesn’t exist—but I just can’t see how this market won’t exist, regardless of whether ETHOS does this or not.
And the more folks I talk to in this space, the more seem to agree: the market is inevitable.
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This article is featured in Vol. 6 of The ETHOS Magazine.
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