Industrial Hemp in Oregon

PDX Dopesmoker said:

Does that thing really say 42.3% cannabinoids? How in hell is that even possible, did you figure out how to clone a chunk of hash? That strain name is suspicious, are you using some sorta biomedical science flimflammery to push cannabinoid content to astonishing new levels?

Click to expand...

The posted test result was from a rough ethanol extract. Flowers average 8-10% CBG by weight, 0.1% THC, 0.1% CBD. This is the product of traditional breeding.

socioecologist said:

The posted test result was from a rough ethanol extract. Flowers average 8-10% CBG by weight, 0.1% THC, 0.1% CBD. This is the product of traditional breeding.

Click to expand...

Seems like you're pulling some exciting, crazy results. It was only a matter of time before someone started accusing you of witchcraft.
How many generations did you have to work on the CBG line to get it to start giving such amazing results? Do you think you'll be able to push CBG into the 20%-25% range?

PDX Dopesmoker said:

Seems like you're pulling some exciting, crazy results. It was only a matter of time before someone started accusing you of witchcraft.
How many generations did you have to work on the CBG line to get it to start giving such amazing results? Do you think you'll be able to push CBG into the 20%-25% range?

Click to expand...

I would question claims like that too, no worries! I don't know a lot of other seed or cannabis production companies who are operating like us.

Two generations of inbreeding on the initial CBG-rich variety, which led to 3 different pure CBG plants out of a small batch of seed (remember: inbreeding becomes very difficult very quickly due to sterility). I outcrossed the best (last March) to start the improvement process (earlier flowering, day neutral, more oil, more terps, etc.).

We have autoflowering CBG plants growing right now in preparation for a large seed production run for 2018 field trials. We are testing out some cool tools for identifying those plants in large populations (youPCR from Medicinal Genomics), as they only pop up 6% of the time in F2s. We are very curious to know if it is 100% accurate at this point or if SNP variation can lead to false results, so must compare the gene screen to leaf analysis on this first run ($$$). Our auto CBG lines will be the default for large scale oil production and will dominate our acreage next year.

On the boutique side (trimmed flowers destined for domestic and international markets), we are in the selection stages for new plant lines derived from outcrosses to high content lines with recognizable terpene profiles (The White, GG4, GG12, Ghost OG, Death Star, Thin Mint GSC, Plat. GSC, White OG, etc.). We plan to run about 15 acres of clones from these selections next season--which will not be enough to meet demand, but is about all my tired brain can handle logistically.

Wanted to share this shot of our crew. Can't thank them enough for making this all possible. Our first large shipment of trimmed flowers is ready for delivery. Growing acres of plants is (relatively) easy; getting material broken down, trimmed, and packaged back up is a true logistical challenge and we couldn't do it without our team. We were able to produce some epic product this season, could not be happier with the outcome.

Rain is creeping into the forecast and this year's harvest looks to be winding down for us over the next two weeks.

socioecologist, I was just reading back through this thread to refresh my stoned memory & look at the dates on a few things. You posted your harvest photo last year in early November & this year its in early October. In January you posted about your experiments with finding the early flowering varieties indoors.
Assuming that the socioecologist annual harvest photo is an accurate metric for progress in the outdoor cannabis growing season, how much of the full month earlier is attributable to a more favorable growing season this year and how much is attributable to your sophisticated indoor pheno hunting technique? Did the ones that performed early indoors also do the same outside?
Kinda makes the head spin a little if so, too much to think about at once.
I know a number of people who are trying to develop their own tasty early flowering high THC varieties & they get good results, but mostly its done on trial & error. Using your method could really advance the ball for them (also for me cause they keep on giving me free seeds to test out). Also got me wondering about finding some plants that flip at 15/9 & leaving the timer there and if that would speed up the indoor flowering cycle.

I can tell you PDX that they do flower early. And the buds are fat and aromatic. They have been prone to some bud rot this year since we had a very wet August here on the east coast. Flowers in August, harvest in mid September.

oldchuck said:

I can tell you PDX that they do flower early. And the buds are fat and aromatic. They have been prone to some bud rot this year since we had a very wet August here on the east coast. Flowers in August, harvest in mid September.

Click to expand...

Sounds like the system works as intended, thats really big news. Congrats on the dank harvest & thanks for filling me in.

PDX Dopesmoker said:

socioecologist, I was just reading back through this thread to refresh my stoned memory & look at the dates on a few things. You posted your harvest photo last year in early November & this year its in early October. In January you posted about your experiments with finding the early flowering varieties indoors.
Assuming that the socioecologist annual harvest photo is an accurate metric for progress in the outdoor cannabis growing season, how much of the full month earlier is attributable to a more favorable growing season this year and how much is attributable to your sophisticated indoor pheno hunting technique? Did the ones that performed early indoors also do the same outside?
Kinda makes the head spin a little if so, too much to think about at once.
I know a number of people who are trying to develop their own tasty early flowering high THC varieties & they get good results, but mostly its done on trial & error. Using your method could really advance the ball for them (also for me cause they keep on giving me free seeds to test out). Also got me wondering about finding some plants that flip at 15/9 & leaving the timer there and if that would speed up the indoor flowering cycle.

Click to expand...

Good recall and thanks: I think this is one of the more important insights / developments in cannabis production in a while. You are right about last year, it was a mid-to-late October harvest that stretched into the first week of November with our 2016 varieties. We were testing our first "early" varieties in the summer of 2016 on a small scale at our greenhouses. The indoor grow in my garage last winter was more of a "proof of concept" on our "early" varieties released for the 2017 production season, just to make sure that they would respond to the light cycle the way I had hoped (they did). No pheno hunting required on this one, since our crosses are as close as we can get to true F1s without using double haploids. We self our selected moms until they become infertile as pollen donors (line breeding), then outcross to another highly inbred line that is as distant genetically as possible. The resulting plants express true for particularly traits: (1) early flowering, (2) massive flowers, (3) loads of resin and terps, and (4) robust stalks that do not require staking. I don't want to sound like an arrogant ass, but this outcome is all purposeful and by design. It seems like magic, but is just basic plant breeding in many respects (though also years of hard work and meticulous devotion to a particular goal).

As you and several others mentioned last winter, there are SO many variables that can affect flower timing, even with the early flowering genes nailed down. Our R&D field was full of 2018 varieties getting tested before release to farmers; our experience in real conditions is that each variety has a harvest window lasting about 1 month. When that window arrives is dependent on your location (i.e. day length) and, critically, your fertilization regimen (excessive N can delay onset over a month). In our field, flower initiation began in early July for some plants and early August for others, with about 25% beginning the process each week over the course of a month. We harvested from late August to late September as the blocks of plants reached maturity. If your row spacing is appropriate, "early" varieties stretch the usefulness of drying space by allowing for a long, staggered harvest under good weather conditions.

This is definitely a "golden age" of cannabis production for my brother and I. Farmers are arriving from all over the world to see these lines in action; it's really cool to have solutions, in seed form, ready for deployment regardless of where a farm is located. Looking to grow thousands of acres in Columbia at high elevations? Got a line developed for that. Want to grow in the high desert where frost can strike in mid-August? We have plants (autos) that will get you a bountiful harvest before then. These breeding tools also help our own flower production program as well: when we ID new cannabinoids, we have a breeding program in place that allows us to scale up production within a year. Even that is getting a boost right now, as we just ran our first PCR gene screen yesterday; now we can screen out unselected chemotypes the same week they emerge from soil. This was my goal 10 years ago and we finally achieved it yesterday afternoon--pretty stoked. The future is so bright that I'm trying to revel in the moment a bit.

Just got a sample of some cbd tincture made using your (Socioecologist) varieties grown and extracted here in eugene. The producer is very pleased with the seeds.

Nice! Hope it helps you. We've had nothing but positive feedback from growers. Our goal is to make varieties better every year and help push large scale cannabis cultivation forward.

Following.

socioecologist said:

Nice! Hope it helps you. We've had nothing but positive feedback from growers. Our goal is to make varieties better every year and help push large scale cannabis cultivation forward.

Click to expand...

I'm going to be stocking the tincture in the shop I manage and am giving some to my ex (mother of my child) later today for her elderly dog. Hoping it gives the old girl some relief. Will keep you posted

Oregon Dept. of Agriculture THC compliance test results below for our Stem Cell CBG variety (0.028%, 10x less than the legal limit for hemp). We waited until 5 days before harvest for the official test to prove a point--this is the lowest THC content variety available through traditional breeding practices and can be safely grown in any country with a hemp program. It is the first publicly available pure cannabigerol (CBG) variety. We are very excited to get this to people around the world!

I posted some of these photos over in Robrites' awesome "Oregon grow" thread already, which most folks who read this are also a part of--sorry for some duplication. Torrential rains hit early Thursday morning; we put in an 18 hour day harvesting Wednesday to get all of our finished CBG clones in from the 3 farms where they spent their days. It took about 12k sq. ft. of warehouse space to hang whole plant / tops, but will be worth the effort in the end.


With that, we can almost wrap up the 2017 harvest season. We still have thousands of plants in the field that we couldn't get to, so there will be one more gross harvest of all the moldy material (yup, there's a very good market for that stuff too), which will get piled up in "mold mountain" sometime next week and slow dried until the new year. At $50 a pound and 500k pound demand, it's still worth salvaging! What a weird world we live in....so cool that extraction technology has figured out how to make use of what used to be compost.

Our trim team is still working around the clock to fulfill international flower orders on our R&D crop, pallets of trim / leftover material are headed out to oil extractors, and the farm team is getting ready for a large increase in scale next year. I got to spend the day in our temporarily cleared out greenhouses, getting the parents to our 2018 crop settled into their new pots and PCR screened for the presence / absence of particular genes of interest. Two days after bringing in all our CBG clone mothers for harvest, a small percentage of her grandchildren are stretching their legs and beginning to flower under 24 hours of light...these are the special ladies we've been looking for--high oil content, pure autoflowering CBG plants. We've progressed so much in 3 years and know that year #4 will continue that trend in a positive way. So thankful to contribute a bit to the legacy of this plant.

Got the oil in yesterday. Each bottle is a half ounce and contains 347mg cbd and 7.5mg thc. He grows your strains, does a co2 extraction, then mixes with pure coconut oil. By far the best CBD oil I carry now. By far. He was going to breed his own cbd varieties then got hip to what you're doing Socioecologist, and decided fem seeds were the way to go. He just harvested 10k plants!

socioecologist said:

Oregon Dept. of Agriculture THC compliance test results below for our Stem Cell CBG variety (0.028%, 10x less than the legal limit for hemp). We waited until 5 days before harvest for the official test to prove a point--this is the lowest THC content variety available through traditional breeding practices and can be safely grown in any country with a hemp program. It is the first publicly available pure cannabigerol (CBG) variety. We are very excited to get this to people around the world!

View Image

Click to expand...

so these are available in seedform?

Moppel said:

so these are available in seedform?

Click to expand...

The pictures are of our original mother plant, one of three phenotypes that emerged from our 2016 breeding projects. We outcrossed this variety in early 2017 to improve it; it takes 2 generations (minimum) to lock the CBG chemotype back in, and we have done that now with several different outcrossing projects. We are selecting our best to use as field production clones in 2018 and those will become the backbone of our "Early" CBG lines, which will then be released to the public for production in 2019.

a friend just came back from Colorado , and told us that the <0.3% thc endproduct is sold for 50-250 $. Are prices that low?

Moppel said:

a friend just came back from Colorado , and told us that the <0.3% thc endproduct is sold for 50-250 $. Are prices that low?

Click to expand...

That's the range for stripped material or ground whole plant destined for extraction / isolate, yes (CBD). Our trimmed flowers are going for a bit more than that (not much though, we are the low price leader in that regard) and the resulting high quality trim is on the upper bound of what you mentioned. But yes, that's an accurate price everywhere in the US for CBD. CBG, due to it's novelty and usefulness, is going for quite a bit more (i.e. more than THC).

CBG, due to it's novelty and usefulness, is going for quite a bit more (i.e. more than THC)

Click to expand...

It was a while ago that you told us that the less common cannabinoids were going to be a major moneymaker for hemp growers, now its turning out to be the case. Is it safe to assume you have projects targeting other cannabinoids?