Breeding At Scale For Scale
ETHOS Partners with Happy Valley For Mass-Scale Production of Seed Grown For Harvest
By Colin Gordon & Ben Owens
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.