Cannacribs Podcast Episode #2 With Nathaniel Pennington
Cannacribs Podcast interview with Nat Pennington
Join Nat Pennington Founder and CEO of Humboldt Seed Company for this in depth interview with cannacribs podcast – Episode #2. Learn More
TRANSCRIPT
hey i’m nick creator of canna cribs and growers network where we have educated millions of
people on how to elevate their craft i have toured some of the largest school operations befriended the best growers
and built a network of the top cannabis companies join me on this next adventure where i document history with the
pioneer shaping the global cannabis industry in real time welcome to the canada’s podcast
hey welcome back to the canna cribs podcast i’m your host nick mourin and today’s guest is nat pennington and
about 20 years ago nat started humboldt seed company you might have heard of it
and in this interview nat teaches us how he started that company a lot of advice for new breeders and new
growers entering the cannabis industry and about his most recent 10 000 plan
mega hunt for the best phenotypes in the industry stay tuned for this interview i hope you
enjoy it you’re about to hear how nat skilled humboldt seed company over the past
20 years while providing strong genetics to tens of thousands of growers
all around the world this was all made possible by having healthy plants at his own grow operation like any
healthy plant the food they consume is vital to their success this episode was brought to you by
house and garden nutrients i’m not sure if you knew this but they’re actually headquartered in arcata
california right behind humboldt seed company located in the heart
of the emerald triangle and just like nat house and garden has helped thousands of
growers succeed in cultivation with the use of their nutrients and amendments you can check them out
at house hyphen garden.us that’s
www.househyphengarden.us now on with the episode hey nat welcome to the canon cribs podcast thanks for
joining us all right glad to be here yeah so tell me a little bit about yourself how did you end up in
the cannabis space well uh you know i i didn’t
go to school specifically for cannabis obviously um i i had
you know studied done art and a little bit of glassblowing but uh
didn’t get too far with that and ended up you know making my way out here to humboldt county at a really
pretty young age i was 18 years old and uh of course you know humboldt is is a
mecca for cannabis and uh you know i i loved cannabis and
as a a young adult let’s just say as well and um so of course you know
getting here it just everything fell together and and uh yeah but
you know it it was a journey uh to get here a little bit as well yeah
tell me about that journey i i heard that you took a road trip from philly ended up in humble and then never went
back yeah well you know i certainly have gone to visit with with family and friends
but um i was you know spent my childhood in upstate new york
and in in the philadelphia area and uh like i said i went to school briefly for
glassblowing and and pottery actually and then you know a high school sweetie
called and said hey let’s take a road trip across the country and and uh you know i was certainly a sucker
for that and and just jumped on that one and and before i knew
it i was uh heading across the country and and we were you know seeing the
sights and just having a blast and and we actually ended up for a while in in the
little town prescott arizona and there’s kind of i’m in tucson yeah right and there’s kind of like an
alternative school there and uh some friends of ours mutual friends my
girlfriend at the time and i were were in college and so we kind of
had some places to stay and it was kind of a whole scene and and being from the east coast you know the
west coast you just kind of wow this is wild out here and
it was the wild west uh for sure but you know we actually ended up parting
ways and and uh you know she went off with this
i gotta admit this gorgeous female folk singer lady i don’t blame her but
it was definitely a surprise i was like wow okay and uh i kind of had this choice of like
you know go back to sort of with my tail between my legs and and you know face the music with family
and such or uh continue on this journey yeah and and of course i i definitely
made a good choice i think and and ended up you know touring california
uh i wouldn’t exactly call it touring more like you know the classic volkswagen bus
and um and then you know san francisco and santa cruz
and uh san diego even you really didn’t support it all yeah but then just got to humble and it
was just like wow this is it and this is the the spot to be like you know beautiful redwood trees
and i mean i can’t say i came here just because i was on this like cannabis pilgrimage or anything like
that right but i don’t know i had it i was like nature was calling
i think more and humboldt is full of some of the most beautiful the
wild yeah exactly the redwoods the ocean the mountains the rivers and
so uh i got here and just kind of i was like oh if i could
i didn’t actually believe it but i was like if i could stay here it would just be amazing and you know lo and behold it
all kind of worked out so yeah i remember i went out to honeydew farms and humble uh to film a
can of cribs episode and it felt like the time paused like we went up the hill
and it’s just you’re going through this you know warp zone and everything pauses and you’re just in this
beautiful bubble of nature and you’re surrounded by cannabis plants and it i am looking for
reasons to take us back so you want us to go out there to film let me know oh any time any time so you started
humboldt seed company in 2001 um did you like work in the cannabis
industry before then up and humble or right when you got there you’re like let’s do this this is what i know i
i want to do well you know i think i i started working
with cannabis growers and and of course back then it wasn’t a job so to speak it was like you know
we were doing kind of the you know the really the old school style and it was
like a lot of it was yeah hiking and uh definitely we were
out in the open about it at all and you know i’m not sure how much i should
get into it but you know that i think everybody knows um how humble
is and and was and um so yeah but i i definitely started i had
some mentors i’ll say um a person that
uh you know was a wonderful musician a incredible grower and a
uh also an environmental kind of a mentor for a lot of
environmental work that i eventually got into fisheries biology and things like that and he
uh you know i wanted to emulate a lot of things about you know the amazing things that
he was doing in his life so that was really helpful to be honest and
the power of mentorship can really change the path of your life forever exactly and uh
you know so i definitely can’t say that i decided oh you know i want to be a a
seed company right out the gate but but there was a need that was really
evident in humboldt and you know because the cannabis industry still was
relatively you know had to be tucked away and hidden there was not
that there wasn’t as much of a continuity when it came to holding on to cannabis genetics so
because people were hiding things and you know you you didn’t you weren’t able
to just keep the same strain and and so on and so forth but i i wanted to and i wanted to not only
keep genetics around that i liked a lot but sometimes improve on them
and have them ready for you know myself as much as anybody and and certainly just the the community of
of eastern humble that that i was in and so before i knew it i had kind of become
one of the primary people that you know was the person that had seeds and so you know
every year i’d end up having you know especially obviously like december
january march and february march and april there were a lot of folks that would come
and get seeds and and my whole thing was well bring me a few beers you know we’ll
have a beer around the kitchen table yeah and and they would always say though you
know i feel like you know i should pay you for this and it took it took a
i think a girlfriend at the time being like dude you really should say yes and take
compensation because well i think a she was like sick of me having people
out person after person show up with beer and then b it was just you know she kind
of saw that that there was something to it and and i was putting a bunch of effort into it i’d always just felt like
well if i’m doing it for myself it’s not hard for me to make enough for other people too yeah and so then you
know it it became a real conscious shift into you know this is actually
something that i really do enjoy and i want to you know continue to do it
and and why not have a company and so i made my way down to the the
local courthouse and got a business license and that i mean that was so long ago
that 20 years yeah it’s it’s actually like really rare that
i don’t think any companies with that were even cannabis minded and of course like humboldt seed company
i didn’t walk in and say hey i’m you know i sell all these cannabis seeds
or you know i walked in and just said i want to have a seed company and they’re okay great
so it wasn’t exactly like that but you know since then of course we’ve had every
humble farm humble you know all the different names that could even be
related are taken or whatever you want to call it and uh so i think it was kind of
i definitely had a little bit i mean i i don’t want to come off braggy but i
had some foresight there in in definitely all right this is going to be a thing i wanted
you know this is something i really like doing yeah you had the vision and i’m sure there’s a lot of things
that have changed over the past 20 years as well yeah oh my gosh it’s it’s wild
and uh you know one of the things that i kind of lament
a little bit about the new paradigm of of legalization or recreational use
whatever you want to call it um is that we you know sometimes we did end up
some of the old humble you know the original the people that kind of made humble so
well known for great cannabis have not
been the best at transitioning into all the regulation and red tape that’s
associated with like having a licensed farm so i think we lost some
some skills and some you know really great uh contributors to what makes
humboldt cannabis what it is but the good news is is that a lot of them um
you know are are now parents grandparents of you know you see a lot
of second and third generation humble farmers that are carrying the the torch and
obviously that’s a connection between uh some of that original
cannabis community so so how does one go about starting a seed company i know it’s not
as simple as just walking down to the courthouse getting your business licensing i mean nowadays you might start a
website you might get some social media set up but where do you go next i mean there are so many different kinds of of
cannabis seed companies i’d say you know first figure out what
you’re in where your interests lie do you want to you know kind of make seeds that are
good for uh pheno hunting or do you want to make seeds that are a known outcome and
you know all of the you know if you say it’s a cherry strain it’s going to come out
like cherry every time or do you want to be a regular or autoflower or a feminized or cbd so i
think that that’s the first thing and then obviously just get your feet wet you know like
actually make some cannabis seeds because it’s not as easy as i uh you you know people might
assume and um then
you know it depends too there there are a heck of a lot of seed companies out there that are
just kind of making seeds that are that kind of fall under the personal use
let’s just say uh you know either they’re in a medical state or they’re
you know doing this in a basement or garage or even a closet and it’s kind of you know and and we
love that i mean while that isn’t so much what
humble and what you would probably do here because you know ironically
a place that was so that that kind of a grow those growths were so prevalent uh 10 15
20 30 years ago it’s become almost harder now that we
have all of this legalization and all of the licensure and stuff it’s
you know just as an example i had neighbors in in my neck of the woods of
humboldt just last year that had been growing for you know quite some time out of the
blue they just got busted and it really it it is because of
you know the new laws and the fact that you know now we’ve got uh
you’ve got to pay your dues or whatever it is and and if people aren’t paying their dues
then they’re going to end up having enforcement action which i don’t
like that or agree with it but that just is the way it is so yeah and in your opinion do most seed
vendors in the world right now do their own in-house breeding
what’s developed in the cannabis space without a doubt is that and this isn’t
it’s not uncommon in like conventional ag seeds too but you have a seed
bank which is essentially like a reseller slash distributor and then you have the
actual seed breeder or the seed company that’s creating
the the seed and you know testing the genetic and all the work they’re supposed to be doing and so
to be a seed bank you certainly don’t you you don’t need to have a ton of uh
hands-on experience with cannabis i mean you should know that you know the the breeders that
you’re working with are good right but you know vertically integrated now so you have both
you have the in-house breeding and research and development but then you have the uh seed bank side
to distribute those genetics yeah so and and we just assumed that
that would be the way to to do it and i don’t think we ever really
you know thought about one way or another but yeah we make the seeds and
we have a packaging facility which actually that’s where i’m sitting right now and then we have all different kinds of
distribution but we certainly do our own distribution sometimes and we have you know farmers
come in here regularly and you know we’re having meetings with them and and uh we call it genetic
consultations and so we’ll have those pretty pretty regularly in here with uh people
that have licenses in california yeah and in my research you know running the
growers network forum we have a little over ten thousand growers at the time of this recording we are kind of an affiliate for a lot of
different seed banks around the world and a lot of different types of genetics so
in my research and in running those partnerships and relationships a lot of those partners are overseas you
know like in spain for example so how is humboldt seed company able to operate successful in the united
states but maybe those companies can’t right well that’s a good question so you
know we’ve now set up uh satellites and
we have production in different parts of the world oh wow more and more coming on all the
time and so we kind of you know take sops and we take
uh methodology and and sort of what you know because i’ll tell you one thing
it definitely uh it’s not you asked earlier just like how do you start a seed company
yeah the years and years of experience that we’ve got like just as an example
here in humboldt uh or in the emerald triangle or you know over in amsterdam that really does make a
huge difference you can identify problems that you’ve
maybe seen in the past and kind of head them off before they become
issues for your customers and and things like that really does make a huge difference so
i guess back to what your question was is how do we uh we look at it kind of like
you know our base is here in humboldt we actually have licenses a couple more licenses in california and
nevada county and uh ben lin down there runs those
he’s uh the cio for the company and then we’ve got operations in oregon
and oklahoma and in all of those different places we do actually produce seeds in maine as well
and we were we’ve got an operation happening in spain but you know just to wrap it back around
a lot all of the ip and the methodology and a lot of the
breeding really originates here but at the same time you know i
have to admit that there are great things that we find you know
like we’ve got we’re doing some work in south africa and jamaica and you know those are places
that are hot beds for cannabis genetics as well so i think as the plant gets
you know is a little bit d destigmatized and and as laws change you know it’s just
gonna even more open up pathways to you know both
share and improve the genetics and then you know we always our heart is in
uh not only improving but making sure that we preserve some of the
different special attributes of cannabis that could you know potentially could be
lost if we shift too far towards you know monoculture or
you know having just a couple strains that become popular and and lo and behold we’ll probably
find out you know a few years down the road after some more studies happen and so on and so forth
that that maybe you know there are more molecules than
just thc and on all the different turpins that are out there so excited for that research nat
yeah and i i think we a lot of us uh you know sort of seasoned cannabis
smokers we know that because or consumers i guess i should say we know that inherently
because of all the different experiences we’ve had with the plant over over our lives
we know that there’s more to it than just oh we’re scratching the surface yeah and but i do
see that the consumer base you know if you look at like the california market we
we always breed for turpins and the effects of cannabis and we have
you know a pretty significant catalog but just to be completely honest
when it comes to us doing those genetic consultations for big farms in california
we do have to guide them more towards you know especially if they want to
produce a great you know top shelf flower that goes into a jar
people are making their purchasing choices based on thc
numbers more than they are yeah you know the smells and and the things that they really should
be maybe um making choices based on but you know so
it’s a big it’s a tough job and i think we’re doing a pretty decent job of
balancing you know those consumer the the market drivers like thc
and what we you know what our hearts tell us is important like you know turpin
profiles and and uh different cannabinoids and some things that are we yet to even
unlock as far as research and understanding well let’s dive into seeds versus clones
so i read an article where you actually mentioned seeds potentially being better than clones for
commercial growers can you explain why for our audience sure well it’s always i it’s a little bit of
a of course of like a needle that we thread with that because we do a ton of breeding with clones and and
you know we have amazing business partnerships with california’s largest
clone nurseries as well where we’re you know providing them with with clone genetics but we definitely
you know one thing that’s become really evident uh is
i’m sure folks that are listening have heard about pesticides in cannabis and you know
chemicals and all the testing that’s needed to happen to clean it up and
and make the industry uh safer safer and and we’re you know of course
100 behind that i think it obviously folks that we’re growing
cannabis never had any intention to put harmful chemicals on it but
sometimes the the way that we were sharing genetics with clones from you know
basement to garage to closet to you know there was there’s this amazing network that and i
wouldn’t change it if i had the chance i think it’s great the way that that works
but it led to a lot of of insects and pathogens ending up getting
passed from one you know basement one garage to another and uh
so you know we basically had to start you know trying to get rid of the sword i mean
yeah the spread of genetics uh through that network that organic network that spread was great but it
also carried negative side effects kind of one of the cons of seeds
which i have to touch on because i don’t want to be one-sided here is the you know we have
with with a seed it’s a it’s a new life form and so you’re gonna have it’s clean but you
can have a lot of variation in genetics and it just really depends on how you do
your breeding um it’s i like to do a comparison with like dog breeding a
lot and you know some some seeds are essentially mutts and and the ironic thing is that
you know mutts sometimes make the best dogs and and that
kind of holds true with seeds as well if you take if you take a you know a recent
popular strain and cross it with a classic one that you love you’re
probably gonna find something in there that is amazing but that doesn’t necessarily
work very well if you are trying to plant 10 000 seeds and and have an acre or two
of cannabis or whatever it is you’re more likely to want to have
a whole bunch of uh more clone-like plants where you can you know mix the
whole harvest together and batch it all up and that was honestly like one of the things as a
evolving seed company here in humboldt county you can probably imagine that you know
it was not it really an easy place or a forgiving place to
to build out a seed company because we have some of the best cannabis growers in the world
in the world yeah and they expect you know to have performance from their genetics and
uh as the cannabis market grew and grew one thing that we started
noticing as the seed company was you know people needed to have bigger batches of cannabis
to sell and they had to come from plants that looked and smelled
and you know tested fairly identical and so that was something that we
set out to do quite some time ago and i think that’s probably one of the
things that we’re best known for and uh just as an example you know we created a
strain called blueberry muffin and it was like 2010 and
uh if you look at all the reviews that there are about it and if you
you know hear from people their experience i i think like leafly let’s just say
they can be quoted saying like it’s the most aptly aptly named strain
around because it really truly does smell like blueberry muffins and and the thing
that that i think we’re really proud about is the fact that we can guarantee that
every seed that you grow from our blueberry muffin seed line actually will have that smell
and it’ll come out you know true true to form um
and so that’s basically all in the breeding and you know true
true breeding seed is not an easy accomplishment it’s not something that you can just do
in one year so you know when it comes to having the pros and cons of
of clones versus seeds it depends where you’re getting your seeds
for sure and it depends how much work that breeder has put into making a seed
vine that is one you know very stable and and produces uh you know consistency consistency
yeah and uh you know i’m not even getting into the whole like there’s you probably if you’ve ever
done any gardening you might have bought like hybrid corn and
there’s a little bit of a misnomer in cannabis that well it’s just in conventional breeding
uh a hybrid varietal is one that has two incredibly inbred
lineages that that are brought together in the final stage of of the seed
creation so it’s basically a highly inbred
mother and a highly inbred father and that sounds bad but already yeah
from the start that does not sound like a healthy baby right but it plant breeding and animal
breeding are different and uh but it i mean it is it’s basically like if you look at
labradoodles for example you’ve got you know purebred poodles and purebred labradors
and all of a sudden they come together and you’ve got this like these litters of really like cool dogs and it’s
very similar almost every uh major agricultural crop the work has been put into making seed
so that you can have hybrid because it’s kind of a phenomena where you when you bring those highly
inbred lines and in and of themselves they’re they’re actually not appealing because
they’re so inbred and they’re they’re almost uh they have inbred depression so they don’t have
hybrid vigor what but the the phenomena of breeding in general is when you bring
those two together you get all of a sudden the the genetics are reinvigorated and
and you’ve got what we call hybrid vigor and you but but at the same time you end
up with uniformity and consistency and so it’s kind of this holy grail
of of seeds and that’s something that we we actually kind of released our first
uh effort at that last year with our early girl og hybrid scheme and it’s just basically
the product of about many many years of creating inbred lines and and it seems to
be have worked really well so we’re excited about that yeah and over the past 20 years nat
i am sure over your you know breeding experience you’ve come across a fair bit
of fraud and other companies or growers or breeders around the world
perhaps taking some of your genetics and putting it under their own brand their own company can
you talk to me about that yeah it’s a touchy subject for sure um
you know there’s like there’s ethics and then there’s the legality of things
and and especially in cannabis the legality question is
is you know really hard to unravel because you don’t have
any enforcement anyways right if you were to you know trademark or patents and things
like that are trickier because you know we don’t have the federal government looking into any
of that stuff in the u.s and then it’s a global thing cannabis is a plant that’s enjoyed and consumed i
would venture to say in just about every nation on the planet and so you know
it’s not a uh it’s not an easily controllable uh
plant and which i love about it i mean you know if i were to have a choice
whether you know to have all cannabis completely just open source and
versus having it totally locked up by a whole bunch of patents
and i would definitely choose the open source and what i think we’re
going to end up with is more like a uh you know there
there will be some battles that happen between companies and and
over patent infringement and yep and is that inevitable now is that
that’s going to happen regardless no matter what we do now that patent war on cannabis genetics
will be in our future yeah and we’ll see if it really becomes
a war because you know there there was this rush to get a bunch of patents
on cannabis that were probably kind of undue or they
they were over broad and overreaching patents for for things that weren’t
necessarily 100 the creation of the patent applicant so okay you know for to get a patent really
it’s you should have put a lot of work into creating something that is
they use the word novel yeah and so novelty factor right and so you have to have created
you know either a method or and you can you can patent plants and
you can have different kinds of patents on plants some of them are more broad and some of them are you
know only specifically for one like a clone or one iteration of the plant and so yes i do
believe that there will be litigation and and that that is inevitable but i don’t
necessarily think that it’s going to be as powerful as people tend to think
because you know fortunately cannabis is an incredibly diverse plant
like we were discussing before yeah and so you know as as important as it might be
to find you know wonderful strains and wonderful genetics i also
tend to think that people will continually want to
try the next version and so it’s going to be hard to find you
know the i mean if you look at apples and you know like i one thing i found really
interesting and kind of akin to cannabis is this cotton candy grape thing that just came
out have you ever tried those i haven’t no what is that it’s it’s literally they’re grapes and they
truly truly taste just like cotton candy you can just go to the store and buy these grapes
yeah yeah they’re really popular and and whoever came up with that i’m sure that they you
know did they’ve done their best at kind of being compensated for that discovery and
it probably took a good amount of work to get there to you know create a grape that actually
tastes like cotton candy but i really do feel like you know we just you know years ago we
created uh you know a strain that smells like blueberry muffin and so you know it there’s a lot of
similarities between conventional agricultural breeding and and cannabis so
so last year philo’s bioscience caused a little bit of a stir when uh it was
kind of discovered that they had an internal breeding program going on and i didn’t really dive
too deep into that whole uh controversy but what happened in your opinion can you
teach me um what went on and what is philo’s doing today yeah
you know we were we did a decent amount of work with the folks from philos and we don’t
have uh particularly like hard feelings we know that you know groups have
shareholders and things like that that they need to look out for and
sometimes you know that’s unfortunately i think sometimes sort of the crux of
of our you know the us system that we’ve created is that you know these corporate entities and
and they don’t always act in the best interest of the whole because there’s our shareholders that
are involved and and so you know i kind of think that
there was a lot of of that kind of motivation involved with the whole philos thing
and that they you know had had to make some decisions that maybe weren’t
what they were originally supposed to be doing and so i know a lot
of people that had given them genetic material
from their own cannabis right breeding programs things like that who were in
the understanding that they were not a company that was ever
intending to use information or genetic material
to then you know profit and make money in the in the breeding
space and then just to have them kind of you know turn on a dime and all of a sudden you
know they were and it was a little misleading i mean the the public uh program and then
what was said internally which was an elite it was a leaked investor meeting right yeah there was a
fella who you know knew his way around social media and had recorded
a public meeting um so they didn’t really he didn’t do anything specifically wrong
and put it online and it kind of really just showed a lot it sort of showed a lot of their
hand of what they were trying to do and and there were things that were said
in that video recording to this room full of potential investors that were
just outright like you know they were misleading the
investors and and many of us knew that you know like oh my gosh not only are you saying
things that are uh insulting to anybody anyone else in the candidate’s
face but you’re also actually not you’re you’re misleading
this poor you know i mean if they’re if they’re potential investors they’re not poor but let’s just say you’re
misleading these people who you know might
put their hard-earned money um you know into this company and and
knowing that it was sort of definitely hard to watch because you know they had collected all this
information and all of a sudden they were saying now
we’re the best we’re in the best position of anyone to be able to to breed
cannabis genetics and wow i that was
not even remotely true because all the information that they had collected was
at best anecdotal and didn’t have like real hard and fast data
connected to it and and also you can’t use like breeding cannabis there are
advantages to having let’s just say like a molecular
breeding program or marker assisted breeding or you know the the gmo and
gene editing um which you know they weren’t necessarily saying that they were doing that but
it sort of begs the question but i i’m very familiar with all of those
different methods and we actually have a molecular breeding program we’re not modifying we’re not
gene editing we’re not doing any of those things but the the irony
is that you can’t like a computer can’t tell you what cannabis consumers are going to like
and a computer can’t tell you what turpins are
you know going to be popular in the next year and and you know a computer
there are certain things maybe that you know like even thc the thc synthase
gene occurs at so many different
loci in the genome that you the functionality of that is is not
something that’s very easily controlled via gene editing or even a molec you know a marker
assisted breeding program and so these things that
that maybe the the advantages that they might have had had they had this huge
data set that had truly hard and fast data attached to it
um you can’t just you know turn on a computer and
switch the artificial intelligence switch to on and and it tells you you know oh wiz khalifa
is going to rap about that one next so you better read for that
so there’s more to it more to it than that and the you know they they also said
that they had a uh exclusive agreement with um illumina which is a genetic uh
sequencing machine essentially it it’s you can sequence the dna and
they’re top of the line sequencing equipment and that wasn’t true because you know we had sequenced cannabis with
illumina equipment as well so there was just a lot of things that were like
you know boy that’s a stretch and uh and it ended up being a huge
social um debacle and a major controversy in the cannabis
space and the ripples and waves that it created
are still you know having an effect and i feel like oh really because i feel like i haven’t
heard about them really since that debacle i guess about a year ago i mean are they they’re still
around they’re still a business yeah philos is still a business as far as i yeah
um i know that they’re looking more at the hemp space because you know one of the things is
if you want to invest a ton of money into marker-assisted breeding programs or
different kinds of of doing you know reading that is
really technical you you need to be protecting that intellectual property
that you’re creating via patents via so on and so forth and so
in hamp which i believe that they’re doing some more work that it’s a little bit more
straightforward because it’s not you know a schedule one drug anymore or whatever you know
yeah but you know the scientists at philos are all a bunch of really
nice people and and smart people and uh i’m you know some of their outreach and
staff and uh we don’t hold anything against them and we wish them the best it was
definitely a precipitous falling from grace that kind
of occurred at at that time and i don’t know whether they deserved all of it but there were some things
that seemed a little disingenuous that happened and it was um
you know just goes to show that you know the cannabis space doesn’t seem
to reward uh folks that are not
authentic yeah or you know and so it which is amazing because i don’t
think any of us really expected that but if you look at like what’s happening with a lot of the you know super funded
companies that are traded on canadian stock exchange and things like that
and of course like the med men’s of the world and and those kinds of groups there seems to be a
trend where they’re not having a lot of successes and it’s kind of it’s
hard to ignore i mean i don’t think that i’m saying anything that everybody doesn’t know
so i’m not worried about saying that but it seems like the the authentic
companies that have been in the space for quite some time and have this understanding
of how to navigate uh both ethically and and kind of keep
the the teamwork and be collaborative they’re they seem to be somehow being successful
against you know it’s sort of like that what is it david and goliath or i don’t even know
the saying but you know kind of like the the small to mid-sized operations here
in california are crushing it and in humble you know who would have thought that a
whole bunch of kind of uh you know
that these weed smokers and cali would be
you know actually making it through this wild upturn with with the
probably what is you know one of the most financially uh
exciting industries since yeah it really is and um i appreciate
your explanation of what happened with philos and kind of that breakdown and where
we’re at as an industry right now of authenticity really uh shining and and
being rewarded um i appreciate you breaking that down for me so we’re going to take a quick
break um for everyone listening and don’t go away right after the break we’re going to talk about your 10
000 plan phenotype mega hunt so we’ll be right back hey hope you’re enjoying the
episode so far i wanna shine a light on another incredible humboldt company royal gold they have grown their company
alongside nat in northern california providing one of the original cocoa soils nationally distributed to
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goldcoco.com now back to the episode alright so we are back from the break
and i noticed uh on your website you guys produced a video on your 10 000
plant phenotype mega hunt do you want to tell me a little bit more about that
sure um so you know everybody told me that that was
a crazy idea and you know it would be just
way too much and and to be honest it was a heck of a lot of work but you know what we saw with
california and the expansion of the weed world and with
a lot more acreage and in humble i thought you know how can we take
advantage of that or in california in general and because it’s you know it was while
it was maybe not good for really small mom and pops there was still i think a way for and what i came
up with was making this collaborative phenotype mega hunt which is something
that we’ve continued doing but what it was in 2018 and 19 we kind of
developed this idea and got a group of farmers together
that has you know significant grows and and we’re willing to look at
our seed populations and so we kind of split it up we had
different crosses that we knew would produce you know amazing offspring
and uh allocated you know some farms did up to like 3 000 happy dreams farm
i think handled like 3 000 of them that’s pretty cool you split it up that way yeah we had other farms that were you
know more like 2 000 and i think the smaller farm was 800 or
something like that and and we did uh close to a thousand ourselves
but the idea what what we’ve done for many many years is we go and and
take vegetative cuttings or clones off of the plants
right before they go into flower and that way and we catalog everything so the ones in the
fields are labeled to the cuttings that we’ve taken off of them so we know that
it’s a you know genetic clone of the one in the field and then once we’ve got them all
preserved like that in in our clone room then you know the fun part happens
and yeah we the video i think that you’re referencing which is uh on our website it’s a bunch of
different places but um we actually invited media and we
invited a whole slew of different collaborators from dispensary owners to the general public to
you know newspapers tv and and i missed the invite
i would have loved to film that for canada cribs yeah that would have been perfect but we’ll
have you guys next time obviously we’re not doing a you know giant get-together like that
this year for obvious reasons but um you know we’ll we’ll certainly do it again and and what
we were able to do over the course of that weekend uh well long weekend we did three days and we
actually looked at a subset but a significant subset of the plants so we went around and i think we
were able to look at around 3000 of the the living plants and
the different participants had notebooks or you know that we had uh
ipads and and data sheets and and we developed many years ago a
phenotype rating data sheet super cool has you know all the different
attributes that we consider uh critical to breeding
what were some of those attributes for example well i’ll tell you this it’s actually we
published our phenotype data sheet on the cannabis horticultural association
website so folks actually want to look at it that’s something that i think we published five or six years ago but
um it has you know like the different turpins the trichome content
it’s got it just everything that you can imagine that
you might appreciate about cannabis and of course like farmer friendly things too like you know
how much vigor does the plant have does it you know require trellising or
is it kind of hold itself up really well all those different things that are both
you know something the consumer might be interested in and also something for the the farmer too
yes that’s important as well and uh yeah at the end of the day what the idea
was to find you know ten or so just exemplary cuttings and
just hope and pray that they were actually catalogued and and made it through that whole process
and unfortunately it it worked out really well and somehow one percent that that’s what you guys
were looking for yeah we did we ended up gosh yeah
and and so you know we do that to some degree every year and in 2019 we
set that target of 10 000 plants and boy did was it a lot of work
to go and take yeah and a lot of them we tend to try to take two cuttings off
of each plant because if you’ve ever you know taken clones
before you know that you know if you have 95
success rate you’re doing pretty good there’s always going to be a couple of them that don’t make it so if you
have redundancy take two cuttings then you’re in pretty good shape so we
probably really ended up doing around 15 16 000 cuttings
in the field and keeping them alive but this happened over the course of of
one growing season so we had like light deprivation and and it was spread out
as far as the timing of it but it all did kind of come together in in our big
event where we actually had all of those different people out there
raiding the the clones and we went to i think four farms to look at the
000 plants and that entire 10 000 plant fino hun what was the most
exciting find that you took back to humble seed company
that’s everybody definitely always asks that question i i like the plant the
vanilla frosting plant which is something that we had created with uh happy dreams
genetics well they weren’t really a genetics company at the time but we made a cross of something that you
know we had really special that we had been working on and something that they had and came together and and looked at
three 000 plants and so that was a particular find that i thought was exemplary
and has really had a lot of sort of like a lasting effect on the market
because it tests really high and i think as i mentioned before that’s really
important to people so you’re able to bring that back into production and then people can
start buying it maybe six months after three months after like walk me through that timeline
so yeah then we’ll we’ll bring that to the public in clone form and
we do that with like our nursery partnerships that we’ve got here in california like dark dark heart for example yep
those guys and and hendricks farms and the list kind of goes on but the process
to do that actually has gotten longer and longer
the more that we’ve kind of learned that you know because just because something
does really well in a field or a light depth doesn’t mean that it’s
gonna do well indoor it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to do well in you know light depth or a field all
the different growing conditions need to kind of be truthed out and tested so
these days it takes longer than six months but back then we actually did come forward with some
of them in you know about six months so you kind of nailed it there and fortunately we didn’t run into a lot
of problems and you know that’s that’s looking at trying to pick one plant out
of 10 000 or excuse me 10 plants out of 10 000. yeah that is a lot of r d
i would say just you know compared to some folks but we’ve held ourselves
definitely to a little bit more of a standard and now we you know collaboratively test
it with all the different environments you know make sure that it doesn’t all of a sudden you know it doesn’t hate
the indoor growing environment and it wants to hermaphrodite or something like that or the other one
that’s new that we do before we release something is we look for the
uh any pathogens so test it for the hop latent diploid virus or
any other you know diseases and things that that might be in it that could be passed
through so when you find a new phenotype that you really like you know you’re gonna bring it to market
how closely do you work with those breeders if it’s not under your company yeah so
you know just for example um we have a new strain out called we
it’s called the freak show and that one is something and folks may have seen it it’s kind of
all over the cannabis media these days because it’s so
entirely different from any other cannabis plant i would definitely venture to say that it’s
probably the most unique cannabis plant just about ever
that’s come out so what why is that not what makes it so unique well it’s got these leaves that don’t
resemble cannabis at all it looks something like a fern crossed with
a marigold crust with maybe a cannabis plant at one point but it you know it’s it’s almost
unrecognizable as cannabis especially before it’s budding and then when it buds you know if you
know if you know your stuff you might be like that’s those are buds that’s weed but everything else about it it has
these lacy leaves that don’t have like the traditional five finger seven finger
eleven finger kind of cannabis leaf that you that we’re all accustomed to that’s got these
uh it’s like a pin 8 uh leaf form that it’s very lacy and it
looks like a fern i mean it does not look at all like a cannabis plant and so fascinating yeah you’ve got to check it
out it’s on the picture it’s on the cover of grow magazine actually the the last issue that came
out but um it’s also all over our website
we’ll definitely link it yeah we’ll link it in the show notes and for everyone watching this interview
on youtube uh we have a bunch of videos and pictures that we’ll put in
to the interview while we’re talking yeah so the freak show plant we didn’t
uh we we made all the seeds at our facilities but we we didn’t
create the strain it was uh a fellow who goes by the breeder name
shapeshifter for i guess obviously show by shape shifter i like shape
shifter yeah and i mean the cool thing is is it produces really good canvas so as much
as it doesn’t look like cannabis it is cannabis it’s not cannabis sativa or
cannabis indica or root or alice it’s i would you know almost say it deserves
like it’s an entire new sub species but um
it it makes really nice bud and it tests reasonably high
for thc it’s like you know 18 and is about average it seems like
and it has uh really amazing turbines too it’s got kind of like
i don’t know it’s really hard to describe it’s they’re unique and a lot of people say you know hints
of cherry and kind of like maybe a little bit of train wreck smell then i have
some that i feel like have kind of a just a gassy paint thinner almost smell but
it’s a very unique turpin profile on the freak show strain
and so you know even if it didn’t have the crazy amazing leaf structure that it
does i think it’s something that we would be interested in in working with so yeah and i’m i’m fascinated with your
business model matt so let’s say you come across genetics like the freak show do you reach out to
shapeshifter those types of breeders or they reach out to you and then you just have like a licensing agreement
to resell their genetics on their behalf yeah exactly so
you know it’s tricky these days because i think we talked about before there’s
not a lot of things that you can do to you know protect your
your work and and so you know we like to think of it as like hey you know we’re doing this because we
love the plant we love what we do and you know so every day is vacation if you love your
occupation or whatever right um i love that quote but
the shapeshifter deserves credit you know because he found this amazing thing and one thing that
you know always resonated for me that that he said was he had been working and breeding
with cannabis for many many years i don’t want to say exactly how long but a long freaking time and
that experience to find something like this genetic and to
not just throw it away because i know especially like in my early days of
breeding and when we were cutting our teeth as a seed company in late 90s early
2000s you know if you found mutations and if you found
things that don’t look right in your breeding population you were like ah get this out of here
i’m scared of it and he i think had the level of comfort in what he was
doing to that wisdom yeah to recognize that it was special and that it
you know rather than get it get it out of its population and hide it then maybe he wanted to work with it and so he
did and preserved that leaf shape and was able to get it to the
point where it was basically uh ready for us to to take it and then kind of produce it
at scale and and he 100 deserves to be compensated for that
because otherwise you know like what there should be compensation for
the development of unique and special cannabis genetics and so but once upon a
time beer was just as good of a barter right yeah yeah and
and so you know we definitely seek to have
transparent relationships with other breeding companies because
you can’t cannabis doesn’t just spontaneously you know there’s no
immaculate conception everything has to start from
genetics and it’s the work that you put in that makes it uh
sort of your own creation and and that work should be rewarded
and so a hundred percent you know we say it’s it’s not cool to just
take someone’s work and recreate it and uh then try to profit off of that
but you know when it comes down to like you know on the other hand we don’t love
like the monsanto model where you know it they have
certain aspects of their seed so locked up that if if a farmer
is growing next to a farmer that’s not growing and then the pollen from their seed blows onto
you know and then all of a sudden with you just all you wanted to do is grow your own corn and keeps the seed
like you’ve been doing for you know since time immemorial and and all of a sudden you can’t do that
because you know this patented corn is right is it happening in a in a
different way though is it happening with the rise of hemp genetics and hemp farms in this country
outdoor you know kind of wind blowing over to a canvas farm and
messing up their crop is that is that happening um in your opinion right now
yeah for sure and you know i we hear a lot about that from folks up in oregon in particular
and uh the oregon recreational people that
might have either just you know greenhouse or outdoor cannabis that that they do
not want to have you know seeds in it and then this new emergence of a significant hemp
market and the fact that hemp is grown at such scale that it’s pretty hard
to be 100 sure that you’re never gonna have a a male plant that releases pollen and
all of a sudden you know there’s seeds everywhere in in both the hemp which is bad for
most people don’t want even their hemp to be seeded but then you know it gets your neighbors
and and all of a sudden their whole cannabis crop that you know it’s expensive and
it’s a major issue it’s a huge loss for a small cannabis business to have
everything get full of seeds is there any way it can be avoided when you’re growing outdoors in your opinion
well you know one of the things we’re looking into here in humboldt county because there are people locally and humbled that would
like to set up some you know big hemp production here
and there’s been a contingent that is really opposed because they’ve
heard about sort of the horror stories of oregon and the paul and getting out and things like
that but i think there are some sensible solutions but unfortunately they kind of involve
you know regulation of course and so a hemp grower
basically if you want to be a good neighbor you shouldn’t be doing something that really really adversely affects
the neighborhood and if in humble you know let’s just say a you know there’s a decent portion of
the neighborhood that you know has an economics surrounding seedless cannabis
and and the recreational cannabis market so
i do think that you know as hemp growers if they do
eventually take kind of have a foothold in humboldt there will be some strong regulation it
may just be yeah you know feminized seed only clone only
and are you going to be supplying that growth now are you trying to diversify into uh
hemp genetics well yeah we do have a hemp line already and we we did a project with
the uroc agricultural corporation so okay there there’s the
local humble native american community is actually quite robust and it’s pretty awesome
that we’ve got that you know here because those cultures
were obviously you know really
sort of hurt in other parts of the country and they’re intact more here which is which is great
and so we worked with uh one of the local tribes and did produce
some hemp seed it seems like the hemp market is not doing
super hot right now and what why is that in your opinion you know it’s
it’s funny because for better for i mean cannabis is what do they say it’s the most widely
consumed recreational drug in the world i think and i i’m not sure if that includes
alcohol or not but you know that has for many many years that’s developed
into this robust industry whether it was black market or now white market and
cbd as awesome as it is and as great as hemp is there haven’t been
people you know there hasn’t been this black market network of people buying and selling
hemp rope or you know hemp herd or you know buying cbd uh tincture
from that guy on the down the road who you know you so iceberg under the water
that has been there building up this cannabis industry this trade network whether it was black
market or not that’s what you’re saying is it’s been there for cannabis but not for him right so with hemp
you know we had the farm bill which basically made it
legal and and really made it crystal clear that the feds were
not gonna go after a hemp farmer so people
planted thousands hundreds of thousands of acres and now there’s not as much of an
established market to handle all that product and i mean i heard
just last week that there was someone’s trying to just give away uh hundreds and thousands
hundreds of thousands of pounds of hemp biomass in california right now because
it’s just not selling and so that’s going to even itself out like
that there’s gonna be the marketing balance yeah it will and there’s always gonna be
i think from now on i hope that there is a
robust hemp uh market for all the different by-products
and products that come from the cannabis plant and i definitely you know even if occasionally
it puts some pollen that’s maybe not wanted i think that that’s going to work itself out and
there’ll be a place where that’s okay and and maybe some places where
you know we don’t want that so much and so you know hopefully we don’t have too
many financial casualties in that process of of you know it working
itself out as far as the economics go right hopefully hopefully the businesses can sustain themselves
can you share some advice for maybe some smaller breeders or growers out there of how they can really use their
genetics to stand out from other growers in the market sure
yeah i think that that’s really important to think about as a as a grower and
as you know obviously as a breeder and one of the things that has been really
successful for us is finding a couple
you know as a small breeder let’s just say we can start with that finding partners that are
cultivators who can give you immediate and honest feedback
about the genetics that you’re providing and so those kinds of relationships with
uh you know be they small growers or or even big growers but
you know oftentimes it’s nice to have someone who is willing to you know throw
a few of your new genetic into the corner of their grow and try it out and
uh from the grower perspective having different and new exciting
genetics is i think you know incredibly
important to differentiate yourself if you’re a small business if
you’re even a medium-sized cultivator you know that one of the harder things
about getting dispensary shelf space for example can be just the fact that you you know
walk in there and you’ve got the same genetic as everyone else and so
everybody that day came in with their product and they all had og kush or whatever and
just having something different can really get you sort of past that
first filter that a lot of dispensaries have to have for like well i’m sorry but we
are all stocked up on og kush we can’t can’t take any more and so
having something unique having something different like maybe a different cannabinoid profile or okay
just you know are there trends in those cannabinoid profiles or phenotypic traits
that you see are gaining popularity that growers and breeders can kind of cultivate towards yeah and
you know we have there’s certainly like the sativa indica thing and you could you know come in with sativa strains
tend to be a little less common right now so those are desirable for dispensaries and they
may be a little trickier to to grow or or just trickier to even find as a
grower or but you know if you’re a breeder and you kind of diversify your offerings
and work with the grower who then gets those into the market and gets
some kind of recognition then all of a sudden you you know you might be surprised i mean you mentioned
cannabinoid profiles and there’s uh new cannabinoids that we’re discovering
all the time that you know may have effects like you know like thcv they say might be an
appetite suppressor and you know someone like like me i that sounds good
because you know i over the years have put on some pounds from maybe
is that the one maybe from the munchies yeah right is that the one that i heard dubbed as like skinny weed
like with that uh cannabinoid yeah thcv and and there’s a few
um there’s actually a breeder in in mendocino that has
you know really really taken an interest in breeding specifically for that cannabinoid and
really that’s so interesting and then of course the the cbd the there’s cbg
i mean you know we’re discovering new types all the time and and also on
on an annual basis you’re coming up with or discovering new cannabinoids and bringing those to
market yeah well you know and it’s us or the laboratories or
researchers in specific and and so but teasing out
what the effects of those different you know peaks in in different
cannabinoids might be is kind of in a way up to the consumer it can be a little
subjective so and as i’m sure you know all the
cannabis smokers out there know you know a different strain can
you can actually like build up a tolerance to a certain type of cannabis and it
doesn’t you know have the effect maybe that you’re looking for any more if you’re you know
just smoke a joint or whatever it doesn’t do the same thing and so then
that’s uh often you know people would try something new and i think that’s kind of one of the
beauties of cannabis and it sort of circles back to that whole
discussion we were having about gene editing and you know breeding from uh sort of
molecular breeding but that and i’m not saying that that isn’t those aren’t going to be useful
tools and those aren’t tools that we’re using but i think also you know it just really there’s so
much human uh it’s it’s so
dependent on what people actually like and that is uh subjective
at its core so you know and so easily by culture as you
put it you know a musician rapper you know wiz khalifa could mention you know a certain
cultivar in a song and then boom people want to go try that you know
yeah exactly and and i actually i love that because you know it
keeps it fresh and it keeps it moving and i think what we want
as a community in cannabis is for you know not to have
everything be consolidated so that you can really only buy
your your cannabis from like let’s say the big three producers or something like that
kind of like you have you know just a few choices of [ __ ] that yeah no so i don’t think that
that’s the nature of cannabis and so i think that it will have uh
a built-in resistance to that kind of economic phenomena but
i still think that it’s important for us in the cannabis space to try to you know
buck that whenever it comes our way but i like i said i think that nature will
do that because it’s evolving and we’re evolving as
consumers and the plant is evolving through breeding and
evolving just in the fact that you know we’ve like we’ve just barely seen the tip of the
iceberg yeah as far as what can come out of this plant and and the different benefits that we’re
gonna see that it has for humanity and for the planet in general yeah
and i was uh perusing your website and i came across your auto flower
section um what type of growers are buying autoflower genetics from you like what
are they looking to do in comparison to maybe some other stuff that you are currently selling yeah that’s a good
question so autos are you know we’ve been breeding cannabis
for over 20 years and only probably breeding
autos for like five years so they are relatively new and i think
they’re largely new in in california um it seems like they’ve you know
they’ve been more popular in europe for a little bit longer so
they’re focused there yeah it is and the culture over there
maybe they’re growing indoors they want shorter cycles you think that kind of
brought on the auto flowering genetics a little bit sooner than us out here that might be growing outdoors and
in our genetics that way yeah i mean i think that that was a factor i also it’s my understanding that
that siberia was the original you know where nature created an
autoflower and so wow i’ve never heard of that yeah
i’m pretty sure that that’s the case and that you know then in holland
and some of the sort of cannabis centers spain and places like that that uh
folks started quickly cross breeding like the original root
oralis low rider types and what we found in the last which i think
is something that was surprising because i didn’t necessarily expect that that it would be some
sort of malleable but what we what we found is that that autoflower characteristic can essentially be just
kind of copied and pasted into the genetic makeup
of you know any of our photo period type so when i say photo period i mean of
course the canvas that most of us are used to that that begins to flower when the
either the naturally the light starts to days get shorter in the fall or if
if you uh are in an indoor or light deprivation so photo period versus autoflower or
day neutral cannabis that just essentially flowers like no matter what you do uh
a few months after you start the seed and then it’s done on average maybe you
know two and a half three months later so that trait though it’s crazy how
useful it can be because with the light depth as a
growing technique that has become very popular in california for example we
end up using inadvertently kind of a lot of plastic and that’s not something i think that
any of us cannabis growers are very proud about and we’d love to see those kinds of
impacts go away and and autoflower is really
you know not you’re not losing anything what i think i originally assumed was
that we would lose a bunch of quality in the flour or a bunch of terpenes or
just that you couldn’t kind of have your cake and eat it too but it turns out in in our experience
with auto breeding that we’re able to essentially just take that one
trait that you know let’s flower you know
just not when the light tells us to but just when our internal clock tells us to you can take that trait and literally
paste it into any kind of cannabis and and have incredible yeah faster yields yeah and more control
right more control uh although you know adversely like
you you could also say that the photo period flowering gives you a little bit more
control too because you can just like one problem that some people have ran into with autos is
if you don’t they’re not like magical beans you know you don’t have a plant that just grows you know so
people will start them uh when it’s still really cold for example like you’re in humble that
if you start a seed and plant it outdoors in february or march like just try to
put it right in the ground it’s not gonna do very well and it’s gonna struggle and
it won’t get big and then if it’s only you know six seven inches tall and it’s
an autoflower it’s gonna flower whether you like it or not whereas one that is a photo period type
you can say to yourself well you know i want this plant to be at least two feet tall before it starts
to bud so yeah so there’s there’s pros and cons but really the the pros i think in a lot of
respects outweigh the cons and i think people will gravitate more and more towards the autoflower
genetic and one thing i really like about it is the fact that
you know it’s it’s nice for the home grower the backyard grower to be
able to just go and and you know treat the plant more like they would treat
uh a tomato plant and and have you know a nice little harvest of a bud
just a few months later so smaller yield but quicker time and a little bit easier
to easier to grow and maintain for that new grower yeah yep i think those are some of the
qualities there’s other drawbacks are the fact that i can’t stress enough how important it
is to never let an autoflower plant get root bound and i i didn’t believe it until i had
done enough experimentation myself but we normally uh treat the
the photoperiod seedlings that we do we you know wait until they’re kind of
you know holding together the soil that’s in the pot and then we’ll transplant and move them
into a larger pot size but with autoflower if you’ve waited until the roots are
you know kind of encircling the soil you’ve waited too long and they’ll
actually start to flower before they’ve gotten big enough to be
of substance so that’s something that that’s a good tip for everyone out there
getting into autoflower anyone who’s listening just it’s hard to believe
and and i didn’t believe it myself but i came to learn very quickly that
it is actually true that you do not want to let the autoflower any autoflower cannabis
become too root bound because it will just flower out on you and that could be it can be kind of a cool thing because
if you only want a plant that you know gets like two feet tall
you could put it in a a one gallon or a two gallon and it’s really only ever going to get
you know a foot and a half to two feet tall and but then it’ll flower it’ll be done
quicker so it’s kind of you do have a lot more control interesting
in a lot of ways so nat what’s on the horizon for humboldt seed company and uh
let’s say the next 10 years what are you guys working on maybe some projects that you can share with us
yeah um well i think i talked a little bit earlier about how we’re we’re growing and
expanding a little bit into these sort of other uh places and and markets
and that’s exciting for us because you know we we always intended like the whole goal
was to provide something that was a service to people that wanted
to grow cannabis be it commercially or uh you know one of the things i get a
lot of um it makes me feel good to see
people having success like in their backyard or in their little closet grow and and people that
are new to it um so i know that we’re going to continue that and i know that we’re
you know we’re nice people and we just like to help people and that’s kind
of our company culture and so authentic right you genuinely
want to produce a really good product for your customers and i feel like that service and that
story shines through like we were talking about earlier with certain companies that might have a
different story behind closed doors to what they share with their you know their fans their followers their
customers so i commend you for that for 20 years you have built that reputation and stuck to
it yeah well it was never um never about the money
that’s for sure and you know for the longest time i mean
here in humble my colleagues or friends or just our community i think kind of didn’t get it
they were just like oh you know he is he must really enjoy doing that playing with pollen and
breeding and all that because it wasn’t so much like it it certainly we could have made a lot more
money i could have done a lot more you know winter vacations in thailand or whatever
it was like sounds pretty nice yeah i know but it just i guess it wasn’t like so much
our style and and yeah i didn’t talk about this very much but for many years uh many of us who have
been involved with the company were also biologists or
scientists that worked to like i my focus was fisheries biology and i did
a whole bunch of stuff with the removing
the klamath river dams which is people who said you know the world’s largest river restoration project
and so science and that was
you know this this was never about money for us we learned a lot about doing you’re
following your heart and your passion and yeah you know that was a work that was passionate
we were all passionate about helping protect you know locally helping protect
humboldt’s environment and helping you know northern california in general
and and even global issues and so yeah um i think
it just so happens that you know we i have a great business model but it’s
probably pretty clear to people that um we don’t do it for the money so yeah you’re in it for all the right
reasons so we have reached our our time with this interview thank you so much for
joining me today and i’d love to extend you the the platform
of canada cribs to share directly with our listeners anything that we didn’t mention maybe something that
we missed in this interview um the floor is yours my friend
excellent yeah well we will be definitely promoting because
this has been a great opportunity for us to kind of get the word out about what
we do and we love what you guys do as well with cannon cribs so
i know you’ve been to you know a lot of mutual friends and
it’s a small small world actually with the whole cannabis community so
uh and i look forward to a day when we can actually have you up on our our different
farms and count me and show you i know we’re sending some video and stuff but yeah we’ll have
to get you out there and back to humboldt yes
back to humble i love that and we will make it a candy crib special where we film your next mega
pheno type hunt yeah you had ten thousand plants maybe we can increase that maybe we can
do some new things uh we have a bunch of drones that we can fly and um it’ll be a lot of fun
oh yeah that sounds awesome well thank you again matt i really appreciate you everything that you’re doing for this industry um
keep keep up with the great work and i’ll talk to you soon
hey thanks for listening the can of cribs podcast i hope you learned something new and if you like this episode you’re
probably going to like our other series by growers network like hannah cribs and deep roots you can check it out on our
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About the Author: Humboldt Seed Company
