Is tissue culture the future of growing cannabis? – Leafly

Cannabis cultivators need a clean, reproducible growing process that can cater to high demand and create consistent product.

Enter large-scale, plant tissue culture propagation. Using practices adopted from orchid farming, plant cells are taken from a mother plant and grown using a specific regimen of nutrients, hormones, and light under sterile conditions on a nutrient culture medium.

The tissue culture process involves test tubes, sterile labs, and technicians wearing clean suits, so its a far cry from the country farm atmosphere. But if any crop is accustomed to artificial conditions its cannabis, and tissue culture holds a lot of promise for growers who want consistency and vigorous, disease-free plants.

However, its not a simple or easy process and definitely not cheap. Here well cover the process, its advantages, and disadvantages.

There are four basic steps to the tissue culture process.

Why would this method replace conventional methods of cloning cannabis? There are numerous advantages:

Theres less environmental waste with this process. According to Fred Green, a horticultural consultant in Princeton, Massachusetts, Eliminating the mother room reduces the need for a significant amount of water because you dont have to keep those plants alive. And in terms of energy, the number of watts per square foot required for tissue culture is just a fraction of what it is to keep a mother plant growing and healthy.

Additionally, the space required is far less than growing seeds, mother plants, or clones. In an average facility, 15-17% of space is used for mother plants and vegging clones. If you use tissue culture, almost all of that can be converted into flower production, said Green.

The tissue culture process is not quick or easy. Plants grown in a lab cant just immediately go into a greenhouse or field; its a delicate process.

It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a tissue culture operation. It requires highly skilled technicians, and in the current market, producers are largely untrained. Clean rooms are expensive to build and run, and they need special equipment to filter air to reduce the risk of contamination.

About that contaminationin the beginning of their lives, plantlets grown from tissue culture are much more vulnerable to disease than plants grown from seed or clone. Spores, bugs, and viruses can quickly wipe out a crop. According to Green, All tools have to be sterilized between each use. If you get disease spore on a tweezer and then you handle 20 plants, all 20 of those plants will certainly have disease.

While plantlets grow fast, putting a new crop into a clean stock program can take years. For example, it takes a minimum of six to nine months to get a new strain clean and stable enough to go into production. It can then take years to get it into large-scale production with thousands of plants.

Marketing for tissue culture often claims that growers will have consistent outcomes because plants start out disease- and pest-free. According to Jeremy Plumb, Director of Production Science at Pruf Cultivar in Oregon, thats only the beginning of the journey. You still need good growers and a stable growing environment to control temperature, lighting, humidity, nutrients, and more. Unless you can execute those variables, its very unlikely tissue culture is going to make any difference, said Plumb.

Today, very few companies in the US are jumping into tissue culture. This is partly because the legal market is still young and businesses are still figuring things out.

Because markets are limited at the state level, the consumer base is small, making this practice unviablebut California may be an exception. Green estimates that only a small amount of cannabis growers in the US use the process, but in Canada, where the legal market is the entire country, its much more. Canada is much further ahead than the US because you can ship it anywhere in the country.

So until the market expands, you may want to keep your aspirations for this high-tech process on hold.

Christine Giraud, a freelance writer in Boston, has been writing about cannabis for publications like The Boston Globe, Overture Global Magazine, Dig Boston, Civilized, Her(b) Life, and Foottraffik.

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Is tissue culture the future of growing cannabis? - Leafly