The C Word Episode 2 - Exploring the World of Cannabis with Breeder Steve

In this engaging conversation, Breeder Steve shares his insights on the evolving cannabis industry, discussing  global breeding projects to the impact of legalization on tourism and business. He emphasizes the importance of quality genetics, the future of cannabis seed production, and the role of technology in cultivation. Steve highlights the potential of automated growing systems and introduces the concept of cannabis median heat units as a new metric for evaluating plant growth.  The discussion also touches on the cultural significance of cannabis and the need for reform in cannabis banking and legislation to support the industry’s growth.

#CannabisIndustry #GrowYourOwn #CannabisCommunity #CannabisIndustryandBusiness #CultivationandScience #plantscience #Cannabisgenetics #cannabis #Breeder Steve #cannabis culture #cannabisbreeding #cannabis tourism #cannabislegislation #cannabistechnology #cannabis seed production, #cannabis market dynamics, #cannabis innovations, #automated growing systems

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Produced by www.inktheory.com

Transcript

Transcript:

The C Word (00:05)
Hello and welcome. You are listening to The C-Word, where we explore current affairs and culture. My name is Hina and please give a warm welcome to our guest, Breeder Steve in our continuing podcast series of cannabis. Hi, Steve!

Breeder Steve (00:21)
Hey, thanks for having me. Good afternoon to you.

The C Word (00:24)
good afternoon. How, how are you?

Breeder Steve (00:26)
That's right.

Yeah, things are good. Just pottering in along and sort of at mission control. Just monitor my projects, which are all abroad. So at home, I don't go to work every day. I go downstairs and have a Zoom call with the grower in a different continent, you know, and you get to keep up with various projects all from home. And then when the weather gets really cold, I like to go visit these warmer places.

from the winter (inaudible) crops. I used to be totally hands-on. If I had a project, I was there doing it, right? And then about eight years ago, I started to set places up that I would...

The C Word (00:57)
Was it mainly triggered by COVID?

Breeder Steve (01:17)
be there more at the beginning and then less later on and typically I would be maybe there for a month, home for two months, then away for a month and home for two months. And now I've picked up a couple of new places starting up and I had had a good year of really minimal traveling at this point because everything that had started up to then was pretty much self-sustaining at that point.

So the new ones that are coming up are in Africa and really keen to get over there and do a one, two degrees north of the equator in Ghana and another one in Morocco, which is quite a different climate than Ghana.

So those will be really interesting complimentary breeding stations, you know. So the one in Thailand's at 17 degrees north. So that's a different climate there as well. And you can really develop, well, there's different plant types that are happier in different climates, of course. And to focus on those in situ is really ideal. You know, of course.

The C Word (02:13)
Let's see.

Hmm.

Breeder Steve (02:28)
some people think cannabis is, you know, stronger now than it ever was.

It's not true, you know? There may be more availability of it, but it really hasn't changed that drastically at all. I 20, 30 years ago, there were still people smoking as good as anybody is today, you know? They haven't changed that much, and probably longer, you know?

The C Word (02:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you find that when you partner up with people in different parts of the world they, what they ask of you is different or so for example, the, your grow in Ghana. Is that for, for the local market?....

Breeder Steve (03:05)
Well, it's a brand new market there and they're still establishing all the guidelines, but predominantly we're expecting license number one any day, like virtually any day. And it may not be number one, but it should be in the first wave of them any day now.

They don't have a local market per se, like the finds. They smoke lots of weed there. It's highly illegal and people get like seven years for smoking a joint and stuff. So they've got a lot of room to improve on the, you know, human rights and cannabis culture, let's say. But the, the focus for them is medical export, presumably, you know? But in addition, people that had invited me to join the company setting up there. That's what their focus was, as they wanted to make, know, pharma grade export product like APIs and whatnot. And that's fine. But I said, at the same time, you do yourself a great service to have in-house breeding program to, you know, climatize the best of the best and isolate chemotypes and things like this. And at the same time, that can be a...

A great ROI is investing into your breeding program and doing genetics business as well, whether that's licensing out improved clones or new seeds, you know, or custom production for other breeders because we have lots of space there to work. So if people, you know, if other breeders say, hey, you know, I've bred this, selling seeds like crazy, but I can't make a hundred kilos of seed in my little place.

they can subcontract that to us and we'll give them, you know, world beating rates to do mass production of seed because I'm happy that you've got to realize that in the seed market is it's kind of like the wine market almost how vast it is. You're your two buck chuck to your, you know, century old petraeus or something that's over the top, right? I mean, but the price of

kilo of hemp seeds to the farmer might be two dollars. So that's like 50-60 thousand seeds if they're medium-sized seeds. So that's two dollars. Wholesale, feminized seeds, they're about two dollars a seed. Right? Whereas retail, they might be ten or twenty dollars a seed. So the difference

Breeder Steve (05:38)
You know, there's seeds even more than that. There's people selling $500 packs, $1500 packs. They're not selling very many. But there's a lot in the $100 or $200 range is pretty common for a pack of 10. So at $10, $20 a seed, that kilo of seed that was $2 as hemp is suddenly a lot more valuable. They were $2 a seed. It's a huge difference, right? It's like six figures.

Breeder Steve (06:06)
.. if you're allowed to produce it openly and you don't have to hide it in a basement with lights and all that if you can do open tunnels and stuff in or field seed even if you're doing one one pollination at a time you could have multiple females receiving is always one type of pollen in the air for field seed but but if you're doing them in tunnels too you can have a little more surety that you're filtering the incoming air in your neighbour's pollen from 10 miles away and slipping into yours, you know? So in a field you can't control that. But doing seeds at scale, an agricultural scale, makes them much more affordable when most of the competition's at a horticultural scale, you know? So if you can do large scale seed production of high quality seeds, you can really work to bring the price of seeds down. And I think, you know, lots of people have a seed buying problem growers that we buy more seeds than we can grow, you know, lots of growers have got a refrigerator full of seeds that they'll never get to because they've only got a little closet at home, but they're, they're totally collectors and they just like order, that looks awesome. Sometime I'll have to make some space and grow that.

The same model that seeds do in any nursery, you if you go to, or you go to the big box store, they've got their outdoor stuff, they've got spinning rocks of seeds from big mainstream seed companies, right? And most of that business is on consignment. So it's kind of like the greetings business where the people service, they go change out the Mother's Day one and put the Father's Day cards in.

Breeder Steve (07:55)
And then they just charge the store for what they've sold. They don't charge them for all the cards up front. They just keep replacing them every year, every season, or every month, or whatever. And the seed business, the mainstream seed business, when it's legal, mark my words, those people will be into it and there'll be racks of cannabis seeds on those things. So the trick is to start scaling up to that and getting the certifications and the accreditations for the seeds. So if you want to take these seeds mainstream, there's a new paradigm coming for the seed business as it opens up. So I think not everybody's going to have the wherewithal to do that.

Breeder Steve (08:43)
You know, but there are going to be people that do and there's going to be existing companies that say, we already do 200 kinds of seed. We can add cannabis pretty easily and do 10 of those, you know. So, or they might just say, hey, you're USDA approved. We'd like to buy those in bulk and package them. You know, so I want to be that bulk centre that can provide seed to the wider part of the seed world, let's say. So if they're looking to add cannabis seeds of various types, they see you as a producer that they can white label the packs with their own brand and sell it. So that's the hope with that. Just to make them more approachable. you know, somebody, they want to see everybody grow in their own and they're not the person that's starting out

Breeder Steve (09:35)
isn't going to drop 200 bucks on a pack of seeds for their windowsill. But I still want the people that are going to pop seeds on their windowsill to have the same crack at a good plant if the genetics are there. So as long as you're giving that great value, then you get more people doing it. There's no reason that it has to be lesser quality. And this has ruffled a lot of feathers when I've announced I'm doing this. A lot of guys selling $100 packs or $200 packs or like Home Depot or Walmart coming into some town and killing all the family farms and you know, it's like well you know what the seed business isn't really like that in the greater world, you know? It's not, you can have a boutique seed company, there are little seed companies around, but there's also gigantic seed companies, you know? And...once they're, the only reason they're not in cannabis now is they're not allowed right so those little guys are like well we're allowed because we got the state approval but they're not a big you know multinational firm so they you know they don't want to have any risks you know so if they're not federally permitted to do you know seeds are tricky in the states because the D.A has ruled that they're federally legal

Breeder Steve (10:55)
Under the (illegible), any part of the cannabis plant under 0.3 % THC is legally considered hemp. So seeds don't contain THC. So they, you know, it takes months of care to turn those into something, you know? They're just seeds. It's crazy how much...
effort they put into trying to suppress them and they just made them more valuable and more people worked on them and they wrote I swear the prohibition pushed the industry to you know because it had to be efficient and it had to be the best it could be to operate under the threat of major problems right? So in a way prohibition kind of sharpened the stick you know helped everybody sharpen the sticks I think but as it's coming around and going mainstream,

Breeder Steve (11:47)
more and more in more places, you know, we're going to see it start to resemble, you know, typical businesses in those spheres, right? So in as far as the seed business, look to the legal seed business of sunflowers and tomatoes and corn and everything else. That's what you're going to be looking at. Whether it's from some boutique heirloom seed company down the road or from the big ones doing everything under the sun to it, then you can't, you can't imagine it's just gonna stay the same. It's not just gonna be boutique people making seeds in their little grow rooms, you know? It will move. I mean, that's, I'm not knocking on it, I'm just saying it's not realistic to think that the big ones aren't gonna get involved, you know? They will, they absolutely will. They're just held back by in a federal legality in the states at least and in other places like Canada where it's just not even viable to be a cannabis seed company because they get a dollar of seed excise tax. Not counting the sales tax and everything else But I think in the states they're gonna turn a corner hopefully on the banking.
Because just for the safety of the people in the shops that are getting held up, like, a lot of people pay with cards, know, they're paying cards. It's just crazy that they have to be subjected to the cash business, you know, legalization is supposed to make it safer. And if it was a black market, it would just be a cash business. But then you get the Al Capone type of violence because it's a big cash business and there's big sums of money laying around.

You don't have that once it's normalized, you know, just like any other product. Just let people come in and pay, like, well, it'll make the banks have a conniption over opening cannabis accounts. Obviously some do, but it's tricky down there for them. And I think even in Canada, where it's federally legal, it's still very hard to get bank accounts here, according to cannabis businesses here I've talked to. And they charge them extra fees and all this so they really just you know feel a little garraged I think.

The C Word (14:12)
Do you find that cannabis tourism has also changed?

Breeder Steve (14:17)
Absolutely, absolutely, you know. The culture is such that the people that really like to smoke, they take it into consideration when they're choosing their next destination. It's a draw for so many people to go somewhere where there's relaxed attitudes and a strong cannabis culture, you know? So I think it's absolutely a draw and some of the places they say we don't want to attract that kind of.. It's like You realize who you're shutting out like there's all kinds of intelligent successful people that enjoy cannabis, know plenty of and it's or many places an overlooked demographic, I think. Like I think Thailand definitely got a bounce in tourism from that, but they were also just coming off the COVID, which was a big problem, right? They're a very tourism dependent country and they have massive like, 20 million visitors and

Breeder Steve (15:16)
the openness they've had for cannabis the last few years has really helped it. And even when they start talking down about it, people are like, we will change our plans. Well, we're here now. We're here as long as it's good. We're going to keep coming back. But yeah, once they start giving out fines for using it again, we're out of here, you know? So the more open it is, the more attractive it is. And the more controlled it is, the less attractive it is. So I don't think It's driven a huge amount of tourism to Canada, but also Canada's very restrictive about it and cold half the year. But there's no social clubs where you can go and smoke it. You can't smoke it at a bar, you know? So it's still like you can go to a store and buy it. You can go and, you know, puff it in private somewhere or eat your edibles. You know, it's anywhere in Canada. It's absolutely ubiquitous.

So that's nice, but it's still, people wanna be able to sit down in a room full of other people rolling joints and smoking them. And they've added lounge licenses in California and that, but I don't think they've got them. It may have happened by now. I know there's been talk about it. I'm just not sure if if anybody ever got one.

I think that will add to the feeling. Like when you go to Amsterdam, they've got coffee shops. They've had far-right Christian government for a long time that's really tried to crack down on it, make it more, and they have made it more difficult. even just driving, even just to grow equipment's illegal, you know? So they've made it, they've really pushed it underground harder.

The C Word (16:53)
Right.

They restricted it.

Breeder Steve (17:02)
But they've still got the coffee shop models, but they've started introducing a legal coffee shop model rather than a tolerated one. Like the original ones were tolerated and they got sort of a grandfathered permit that they would die with them kind of thing so that they couldn't pass on the license easily or sell the business and that. there was, that was years ago. I haven't been to Holland in quite a while and kept up with it, but.

But I do know that they've opened up, I don't know, a dozen or half a dozen legal coffee shops, or they're just starting to open anyway. And there are a limited number of licensed growers there now. So they do have a model in place for legal production and legal sales. But most of it is still just the old shops, right? And they're...
going by the old ways of doing things, which was they couldn't have more than 500 grams in the shop. So they had offices nearby packed to the gills and then somebody running the grams back into the shop as fast as they sell them.

The C Word (18:13)
.(inaudible) .can only buy from local suppliers, right? I mean, you can't buy from...

Breeder Steve (18:17)
Yeah, theoretically, but of course they have Indian hash and Moroccan hash and Nepalese hash and Pakistani hash, Lebanese hash, it's all imported, you know. They have local flower, but they usually have some imported flower too, so they might have Jamaican or Ghana flower, even there's African flower shows up there. Wherever you have the diaspora, their weed usually follows, you know.

It's an interesting thing. So Amsterdam's a very cosmopolitan, multicultural city, you know, much in the way of London is, know, not on the scale that London is, but it's also, you know, the Dutch have been around the world the same as the English and colonized places. And then they've got the people coming back from the former colonies and it becomes a big mixing pot, you know, and

And that is nice to see, you know, that I think the world has to come together, you know, a little more and more, just without being able to dictate to each other, you know. If that's just collaborate with the people you get along with, good enough. Doesn't matter where they're from, you know.

But there's ways to coexist and then there's the invader mentality. It's all a disaster in some ways. I don't know what to think. Some days I just lose it. Because the world is divisive, you know? And I just think that is such a cause of big problems. Cannabis has always been cultural.

The C Word (19:58)
How do you how do you select your tribe i mean what what are you how do you know is it now because you've met so many people it's like a knowledge you just know or is it.

Breeder Steve (20:06)
I'm no expert in it. I hook up with bad people all the time. I am the wrong guy to ask. I think, you know, I like to think I have good judgment of character, but I've been proven wrong over and over. So I've stopped thinking I'm a good judge of character. 

The C Word (20:21)

The science doesn't lie, that's what I mean, a lot of the time in the culture of cannabis, one would have thought intuition comes into it quite a lot or (inaudible)

Breeder Steve (20:31)
Lots. in the old days, you really had to trust your gut because it was very risky. If you were in the cannabis business, you were taking big risks and there was no contracts and writing. know, everything was done on a handshake and preferably in person and not on the phone. So, I mean, you had a real one-on-one trust relationship with people you'd work with because...you know, things go sideways, there's big problems for everybody. So you don't, everything has to be, if it's a win-win, then everybody's happy. But if somebody loses, then pretty soon nobody's gonna be happy. So I think it really mattered. You know, it still matters a lot because now there's a lot more people in the industry that definitely wouldn't have been when...

Breeder Steve (21:36)
there was some risk associated with it, you know? So it's become the domain of pump and dump stock people and just, it's just kind of, you know, was predictable that it was gonna happen,


Breeder Steve (21:43)
And even like I was talking about with yesterday, all these new products of like they've got weed with glitter on it and all kinds of weird shit like it just made like in all these artificial flavours or sprayed with oil. I mean, if you tried to sell somebody that and when I was in high school, they'd punch you in the face. know, like, what is this crap? You know, you can sell that shit like in the legal market. They can get away with it. Like there's the

Breeder Steve (22:10)
is really abysmally low standards for what they can sell, you know, so anyway, it's totally a brave new world.

The C Word (22:18)
What are your thoughts on people wanting to propose automated grow systems for cannabis? So, you know, where everything's done through technology. Do you think that's a good idea? 

Breeder Steve (22:25)
Yeah, I love it. Those are cool. Those are cool. Yeah, absolutely.

Nowadays, of course, there's apps for everything, you know, so you can have garden control things on your app. And absolutely, would, especially if I had an indoor place. But I've had really nice weather stations set up in the fields, sometimes even in different parts of the same field, those weather stations monitor all the variables that you have no control over. So I mean, at least you know the high and low temperature, the high and low humidity, the wind speed, the UV, and you you've got, you've got data logs for your crop. So you can, you know, isolate times when things go right or wrong and see, you know, what's working best and what's working, what's not working. So the data log is for field farms are important and

Breeder Steve (23:18)
Once you get into horticultural paradigm in the greenhouse or indoor like that, now you can control really a lot of variables and even like the new generations of lights, which I haven't used. I haven't used lights in really a long time, but I was using like high pressure sodiums. And nowadays a lot of people are onto these really high end LEDs I've seen some of these in tours we've been on where they've had a light sensor that reads the light reflected off the leaf surface and it tells you from the plant like the plant can pretty much control its own if they just on the day i'm between the controls and the reader the plant itself could say i want more light.  I kid you not I've seen these already you know so they've

The C Word (24:26)
wow.

Breeder Steve (24:11)
Now the plant tells you it can use more light and you turn up the light. But there's no way you can't just connect the two, know, and cut out the middleman. you can have plants literally request, a little more blue spectrum, like a little more red today, you know. You can totally have technology that we haven't even dreamt of is what's coming out, basically, you know, it's amazing.

Breeder Steve (24:38)
Obviously, it's no big deal to control the temperature of the air or the water or to raise or lower the pH if you have a hydroponics system, you know, for aeroponics or aquaponics. But you can really have a lot of monitoring, you know, and you want to see a lot of variables and you want them logged and tracked and graphed. One of the things that I identified and...

Breeder Steve (25:03) Understanding Cannabis Median Heat Units
I announced to the world at large in the last year or two was I call the cannabis median heat units. So there's such a thing called CHUs which are corn heat units. And then for grapes for wine they talk about degree ripening days. So from the time of bud break till the time they finish, you know, how many degree ripening days is it? And that's

You just add up the highs every day to get that. you might need, I can't remember the numbers, but you might need 1,600 hours or 2,600 degree ripening days for 'Cab Sauv' but 19 for Pinot Gris, you know? So you can select your sites based on the degree ripening day data from those sites.

So you really want to match your site to the grape cultivar, you know? So all those cuttings, you know, you can get different cuttings of Pinot Noir, different cuttings of Merlot. It's not just one cutting. There's a few selections of them. So you might get five different Pinot Noir cuttings and they all might like a little different conditions better than others.

But overall, you you don't necessarily plant a 'Syrah' and a 'Gewertz' in the same vineyard. The 'Gewertz' loses acidity faster than anything. They ripen quite quickly, whereas the 'Syrah's' is going to be really stiff tannins unless it reaches phenolic ripeness, and that might be 3,200 degree ripening days. So anyway, it is really standard practice in viticulture to know the degree ripening days. By the site and to match the variety to the size, you know? In corn, we have corn heat units, roughly the same idea as degree ripening days, So, I realized how much this applied to corn, how much this applies to grapes, it's a parallel universe, right? So all plants need a certain amount of heat units to ripen. So with cannabis, I've used to have an idea of how long it cutting took indoors. And I kept my indoors pretty much trying to aim cool nights, you know, whatever in the day. I work to keep it cool, which gets more colour in the plants usually too. And...

Breeder Steve (27:25)
It delays the ripening, but I didn't know that because I really thought that was the ripening time. So say I have my sweet pink grapefruit cutting and I expect this cutting takes 60 days in flower, you know, to get to where I'm happy with it. 60 days way I normally do it. I would find in the greenhouse, which is about 10 degrees warmer day and night than outside temperatures even, that plant would finish a week faster than I expected. And every plant was like this. And when I took them to the greenhouse, they were finishing a week faster. So I was really like, wow. But we were also manipulating the photo period. So instead of indoors, I had them on 12-12 for flowering neutral. I did 11 light, 13 dark in the greenhouse because I was doing light deprivation to force them to flower in the middle of the summer.

But it was very warm and it would hold the heat in at night. And still I didn't realize it. I thought it was from the difference in the light, both the light intensity, but also the different daylight length and like, the longer nights are helping it along. Anyways, that's what I thought. But later I started growing on the equator and I would see those same cuts finish in 45 days. So now I'm like,
I don't know, it shaves two weeks off of that. That's basically turning an eight-weeker into a six-weeker. And I mean, done, done, done. There was no more room for that plant to fill in. The buds were, it wasn't just that tight. This applied to a hundred types. So then I realized, and then I'm looking at the weather, because the days weren't really any hotter, but the nights were. The nights were 24 was my lows.

Breeder Steve (29:15)
You know, so was getting a low of 24 at that, in that season, there was a low of 24 for that crop. And I was like, it's the median, the easiest way to look at this is the median temperature. So I formulated cannabis, median heat units as a wave. So I think every seed catalog in the next couple of years, every seed company in the world is going to start listing the cannabis media and heat units. Because it'll take time to finish and people put eight, nine weeks indoors, mid-October outdoors, even that. Mid-October in California is different than mid-October in BC. The plants harvest much earlier in California, then Oregon, then Washington, then BC. The harvest moves up the coast for grapes, for strawberries, for peaches, cherries, you name it.

They start harvesting much earlier, further south, and the harvest moves north. know, acorns in Spain, where they move those special pigs, they start eating acorns in the south of Spain, they follow the harvest north. It's the time is shorter to ripen it because they have warmer nights and more heat in the day too. But overall, it's the median heat unit, it's the easiest way to calculate that. So we'll see it first on the Stars and Stripes site where I'm posting the seeds. We'll put medium heat units, cannabis medium heat units in the tester forum because we have official testers on that site. So people that want to grow out samples for us in test fields or in their garage or wherever they grow, we want to see different plants grown in different conditions and get the feedback and data from them.

Breeder Steve (31:00)
One of the things I'm asking them to calculate is their high and low every day so we can track their heat units. And that's a new way of evaluating the ripening times of cultivars for cannabis, you know?

The C Word (31:15)
We'll have to put the link at the bottom.

Breeder Steve (31:19)
I wrote a thing about it on the forums at Stars and Stripes. I wrote about cannabis media and heat units there. So we can follow up some more on that.  it was, like I think I figured it out probably seven, eight years ago. It's for everybody to use and know. it's just a more accurate way for people to evaluate the plants they're looking at. How long does this take?

Breeder Steve (31:43)
It makes a big difference where you are when it finishes, you know. So I would rather say it takes this many median heat units. So average out your highs and lows.
If you want to accelerate the ripening, keep warmer nights, you know, and and people will see that this will imagine shaving a quarter off their flowering times. That's extra crops in a year, you know.
That's a free tip for anybody. Extra crops in a year. If you've got a hundred million dollar greenhouse facility, and there's ones that are worth five times that, I mean, if you can suddenly get 25% more crop in every year just because you know to raise the night temps, that's a big deal, you know

The C Word (32:31)
if somebody wants to get more tips is it on your website at all?

Breeder Steve (32:34)
If they go on the forums, that's where I'll answer questions. We have, there's a Spice of Life section on the Stars and Stripes forum. So in the Spice of Life section, that's where I'll, I'm trying to keep an eye on the rest of it too, because, you know, my forums too. anywhere on the forums, you can ask the question, just tag me to make sure I know about it. Or just go in the Spice of Life forum so I'm sure you get a notification.

The C Word (33:07)
With the upcoming festive season, what gift ideas does Breeder Steve recommend for growers?

Breeder Steve (33:13)
That's a good question. I think growers always like to get seeds and they're really nice and small easy stocking stuffer. But also, you know, if they're puffers, do they do they like dabbing or do they like rolling joints more? You know, because if some people like dabbing, some people don't like dabbing. But if they like dabbing, if they don't have a cold start banger, I would get them a cold start banger.

And if they're getting into extracts and maybe using a, you know, a dab straw or something, they might want a dab straw if they don't have it. also I would say get a little rig with the cold start bangers. A lot of people sort of move from those to what are called the turp slurpers. But I like, prefer my cold start banger to the turp slurp. Not to say I'd turn down a turp slurp, but yeah,

Breeder Steve (34:05)
That's just sort of for custom use stuff, Or if they haven't got into making hash, but they want to get into making hash, you can look at some good dry sift equipment or some water hash equipment. There's two ways to go as far as that's concerned. Or if they already make hash, but they don't make rosin, maybe you should get them a little rosin press you know, for the grower on your list and that'll see more rosin in your life. And really, almost everybody likes rosin. You never get a total consensus in many communities on anything probably, but in cannabis it's quite divided over extracts in that there's people that absolutely love rosin and especially live rosin and they won't smoke flower, they won't smoke hash and they won't dab extracts made with solvents, but really if you make the extracts with solvents really really well I think they're just as good. There's nothing wrong with them But I only know like one or two people in the world that don't really like rosin. Most people try really excellent rosin and they're that's delicious you know? I know a couple guys that are kind of snobby about rosin because they don't they think that the pressing screen gives off something or you know, they'll have some issues with it that, you know, personal preference. don't There's no right or wrong. If you don't like it, you don't like it, you know? But I think most people are absolutely thrilled to have some nice, fresh live rosin. And for making live resin or live rosin, it's really nice, you know, almost essential, pretty much essential to have a

Breeder Steve (35:46)
freeze dryer. So you can get small freeze dryer units for a home grower or of course, know, commercially they're available in all shapes and sizes. I was, I've been repping one manufacturer actually from China for a while that we, you know, they have units that are up to 2 million, 3 million bucks, but they're pharmaceutical grade with the clean in place and the whole thing. And they also have food grade ones. So the food grade ones are

Breeder Steve (36:13)
fair bit cheaper and they sell them to people processing mango strips and stuff like that. But the pharmaceutical ones, like they were so busy though, like the lead time became huge because they're all in use for vaccines, manufacturing vaccines and they have huge plants of these things. There's a hundred of these units that are two million bucks a unit, you know, like huge plants.

And all the trays of vaccines would be hanging from like an I-beam on the roof and they would have these trays that go into the unit. Then the doors close, freeze dry them for 45 minutes and then they travel out of it on these overhead things. Like the freeze drying you can you can get a little desktop one or you can get ones the size of tractor trailers, know, and stack them. the there's The freeze drying is a big part of how the best extracts are made today. So that's for sure.

Anyway, I'm happy to take a commission on anybody that wants those!


Breeder Steve (37:25)
Banking reform is needed to allow the banks to service these companies. But I can't tell you anything about the status of it. Overdue. That's what the status is. Overdue.

The C Word (37:39)
Do you think we'll see more of an anti-cannabis stance Because we were reading that at a federal level, I think the marijuana policy wasn't really moving forward?

Breeder Steve (37:50)
Well, it was stagnating for sure. The Democrats always said they want to do something about it, but they never really did. And if they did, they were just looking at doing schedule three, which just hands it off to big pharma basically. And nobody in the cannabis community is asking for schedule three. It's not ideal. Now there's...

There's a good chance the Republicans will do the same thing and just hand it off as Schedule 3 as a gift to pharma companies. But, there's also voices in the Republican Party that are speaking out for complete descheduling. But the Republican Party itself is not totally united on the issues, let's say. I think there's basically the three camps there where you've got the: the pro-crim, you know, keep it illegal, keeps our private jails full, we got the highest incarceration rate in the world, go America, you know? And the, and then there's the other crowd in the middle going, let's sell it off to our cronies and as a schedule three gift, you know? Which nobody in the consumer side really wants to see. And then you've got the third camp, which is still probably outnumbered.

Breeder Steve (39:11)
But they're going, just de-schedule it to like the day before it was prohibited. was it then? It was nothing. You know? Just de-schedule it. And that's it. That's all they have to do, you know? It's not rocket science. They really want to make it more complicated than it needs to be. But there's a good reason for that. They're mostly, you know, the government's always seeking benefit for itself and its cronies, you know?

So England's a prime example of that, right?

The C Word (39:44)
Well, you mentioned that, in Canada that only four plants are allowed. And I remember thinking to myself, that's four more than the UK.

Breeder Steve (39:53)
Yeah, but that's not even in every province. Some provinces still like Quebec and Manitobus, and I don't know which other ones, but they prohibit homegrown. So federally, four plants is allowed, but the province by province, they have the say, you know? So it's backwards. But yeah, of course there are people lobbying against that and fighting it in court and they're pushing back.

Breeder Steve (40:19)
But yeah, four is better than none. And if you're allowed four and you've got six or eight, nobody probably cares, you know? It's just if your neighbours in BC, if your neighbours complain, then the police can come and ask you to cut them down. If they're in your neighbour's sight line, if your neighbour can see your plants and complains, the cops can come and ask you to cut them down. So that's still unacceptable, you know?

Breeder Steve (40:47)
It's just overbearing. But on the other hand, you got to look at it like the cops don't care. It's a nuisance to them to get cannabis calls. think they're just kind of like, aren't we over this? Aren't we done this already?

The C Word (41:01)
I think even financially, we were talking about this yesterday, that, you know, post COVID when business was so many different sectors were losing money, it was an environment where even public retail, made a lot.

Breeder Steve (41:14)
I knew people working in the industry in Canada that were in cannabis sales, and they, you know, promote certain brands and go shop to shop and deliver samples and whatnot.
You had an exemption to travel for work in certain industries and cannabis sales was one of those. So the people that worked in cannabis were considered essential workers. So they were able to fly around and, you know, rent cars and go visit the shops and all the towns and do their routes because they were considered essential workers.

Breeder Steve (41:48)
And the sales were through the roof because they were allowed to be open. Like liquor stores could be open, cannabis stores could be open. They were considering essential services. So there's a long way from being prohibited a couple of years ago to being considered an essential service, you know?

The C Word (42:46)
Yeah.

Breeder Steve (42:06)
That's a nice change. That was beautiful to see that they say, hey, cannabis is an essential service. Okay. I get behind that, you know?

The C Word (42:15)
It's all, everything is pointing to that direction culturally, economically, that cannabis is an essential service,

Breeder Steve (42:22)
Yes, bit by bit. You know, the dominoes are falling. They're falling slowly, but they're falling. And I think Czech Republic's coming up with a more open approach soon, I hope. I don't know what the deal's going to be exactly. I've tried and followed the international news a bit, and the same with the national in Canada, but in Canada I haven't really been inspired to participate in the industry because I've seen it as over-regulated and over-taxed. I know it's good for some people that have always dreamt of doing it and they get a chance to do it, but

I know also most of them have had their behinds handed to them by the realities of the market and the realities of the over taxation is literally they're just working to pay taxes. They're not really getting the take home. They're not paying off their investment. They're just selling weed to pay the taxes. That's about it. And to me, I saw that in

Bill C-45 when it came out. I always read the Canadian bills when they came out. There was MMA, MM, PR, ACMP, and then the Cannabis Act, which was C-45. And C-45, I didn't even read the whole thing. I got about halfway, two-thirds of the way. said, is broke by design. You know, this is just gonna suck for anybody that goes, 'we're gonna get'... they don't I won't say they don't have a chance. I think there's a couple of small ones that are doing really high grade and they're doing it themselves. they've, know, three buddies that are doing well. You know, you hear three guys, but they don't have an office full of lawyers and marketing people and all this. They're just putting out killer quality and people are snapping it up. But if you've got, mid-range product and you're relying on marketing, which is heavily restricted as well, you know, to, you know, move a consumer packaged goods, you know, you pretty much have to be absolute top shelf to compete. If you, if you're at the bottom end of the market, then you're competing on volume and you're hoping, you know, if you make a dollar an ounce, that's okay if you're selling a million ounces a week or something, right? But they're not, you know? So they're really struggling, you know? And most of them are just losing, losing, losing. Even if they have big sales, their overheads just swallow it up. And then anything, you know, if you include the taxes especially, then there's just nothing left, right? So I...

I do have some sympathy for the people that are in that position, because it's not that the government changed the regs and added more taxes. That's what they were going to be from the time you signed up. Your math just wasn't on. You know, you thought you could make that work. I knew even I didn't want to bother trying to make that work because I just saw it as, you know,

They're going, we can make this work. Our business plan shows that the price of weed is $10 a gram. Whereas my experience showed me like when I went to Switzerland, it was legal and everybody started growing it because it hadn't been made illegal, right? So there wasn't like special cannabis taxes or licenses. It was just like doing tomatoes. was absolutely normalized activity. But as you know, efficient skilled foreigners showed up and went to town there, we crashed the price, you know? So even the absolute top end was a buck fifty a gram by the time I left. know, fifteen hundred a kilo in French, fifteen hundred a kilo, which at the time was like Canadian, French are higher now. But if you're getting fifteen hundred a kilo and two years before...


Breeder Steve (46:40)
That same kilo was six or seven thousand, right? So suddenly there was so much of that top quality stuff, the low quality stuff that most of the locals had been growing in their fields and stuff that wasn't great genetics and they were taking it a bit early because it starts to rain a bit early there. There weed wasn't worth the price of trimming it, because it cost you 400 francs to trim a kilo at the time. And the price, yeah, and the price of that weed was dropping to like 400 or 500 a kilo. It basically, was just a price of trimming it. So there was no point in them growing anymore because there was a couple of people with greenhouses there, me, myself, and other people that were growing really top-end genetics and growing them at scale.

Breeder Steve (47:37)
and with nice, you know, nice soil, nice fur, really proper looking pot. And I was the first one doing light deprivation in that area, at least in the, that I knew of in the Italian side. So with light deprivation, you force them to flower earlier. And in the middle of the summer, the sun's a lot better to flower, you know, because normally they don't flower until the fall. So for me,

In the middle of summer is when the prices of cannabis are traditionally the highest because a lot of indoor places shut down because it's too expensive to run the air conditioning to cool the lights while it's hot out. You know, in the winter it's no problem, but in the summer people go, just shut down for the summer. So all of a sudden that, you know, top shelf indoor disappears from the market. The last batches are sold in the spring, early summer. In the middle of summer,

Prices of cannabis are really high because all the indoor is gone. And if I do a light deprivation, I might start pulling tarps on those greenhouses on the 1st of June. And by the middle of July, I'm starting to pull out crops. And they look like frosty green indoor pot, you know? Because it's never been rained on. It's been totally pampered.

people don't know that's fantastic but it's so exciting and they're so happy to get it so I was able to move you know greenhouse crops at the indoor prices and then people were totally happy to buy it but nobody ever asked me because I never said hey this is from my greenhouse and nobody ever asked they just went wow that's amazing but how much is it like six thousand which is a good price for it to be like okay they'd buy ten you know and then a week later they call it

Breeder Steve (49:24)
Did you grow that in your greenhouse? I said, yeah. They said, well, 'greenhouse was only 1500. It's not supposed to be that much. It's because it's from a greenhouse'. And you didn't ask me. You just love the pot. You know, it doesn't matter where I grew it. How good is the quality? You know, you bought the quality. You didn't buy a story. I didn't tell you a story. I just showed you the pot. But they didn't think about greenhouse being ready until October or something, right? Because other people are just putting it in there.

They were letting it grow into the roof of the greenhouse. There's no airflow. All the greenhouse would be mouldy. So I just saw some absolutely poor practices when I got there. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do was three crops a summer out of that greenhouse and keeping them really flower them 15 centimeters tall and then flip them over and then they maybe grow to a meter, not even a meter, you know, they would be finished.

That you have lots of airflow in a greenhouse environment or indoor, you've got to have the air turning over a lot. And you can't have more than 25 % of the cubic space full of plants. Three quarters of the cubic space has to be empty air. You know, if you grow weed right into the roof, it's all going to mould, you know? So you've got to just have

Breeder Steve (50:49)
really good airflow, short, quick crops. You'll only get a canopy where the light penetrates about this much. So if you grow really big plants all summer, you're growing all of that timber for nothing. You don't get anything for that, you know? You're still only going to have, you know, 45 centimetres of solid canopy, really good quality flower. So you, there's...way more sensible to grow more short crop. You know, and get them in and out. Have the next ones ready to plant the day you're cutting those ones. Just efficiency. So once you start doing it right, you can pull off absolute premium herb that everybody's really happy to have in the middle of the summer. Obviously in the U.S. and in Canada, places where people have been pushing the envelope longer, light depth is better known. You know, the light depth situation is a great technique, know, whereas in the tropics, we don't have those long days to contend with. Everything wants to flower too fast because it's always 12-12 at the equator. So we have light sup, know, light supplemental light. So instead of light depth, we do up north, we do light sup down at the equator.

That lights sup might just be a light coming on for half an hour at midnight. It just, and they don't have to be grow lights, they just have to be bright enough that the plants register their presence and it keeps them from flowering. So it looks like a Christmas tree farm with all the light bulbs strung up in it. And we've even done some that were like soccer field style where we had the big lights on posts around the field putting into it.

Breeder Steve (52:42)
And then we have the lights come on and that way the plants will stay in a vegetative state and keep getting taller. And then to flower, we just turn the lights off. You know, so we give them some supplemental light just to keep them from flowering and to remain in vegetative state. And that's the. That's a trick to growing hybrids on the equator that aren't acclimatized. Once you've acclimatized plants and preferably crossed them into some native types. The native types don't need that, of course, you know. And then, because they've evolved on 12-12, their thing isn't that they're waiting for 12-12 to flower, it's just that they take a really long time to flower, right? So you can have your modern hybrids, they typically grow three months cycle, like four weeks veg, eight weeks flower. That's kind of a, you know, rough, rough idea.

the typical indoor hybrids that are the modern genetics standard, let's say. Whereas the tropical stuff, it can take six months, eight months, ten months, and some even some here, some going even over a year. But basically, I would consider everything that takes like six to ten months in that other category. And those, those don't need light. They'll still grow two or three meters tall with no extra lights, but it just takes them that long to flower. Different plant.

The C Word (54:18)
Have you written a book, Steve?

Breeder Steve (54:20)
No, I used to do, I used to do some articles. I can, and I should. I've been told I should a hundred times, and ought to do it. There are definitely people that like listening to me and that's why I keep saying yes to doing these things because people listen to it say hey I learned something from that or I like to listen to you. That keeps me doing more, you know, There'll always be your haters, know, as soon as you've got people that love you, got people that hate you instantly it goes without saying...You do it to spite them that I'm still here, drawing breath, and then the people that enjoy listening to me, hopefully they enjoy this. Thanks for coming out.

The C Word (55:04)
Yes, absolutely. And thank you so much, for taking time out and speaking to us.

Breeder Steve (55:08)
Always a pleasure, always a pleasure, Hina anytime.

The C Word (55:11)
There's always more to learn, we'll include some of the links that you mentioned today below if that's everybody stay tuned for updates on the C-word for upcoming episodes with Breeder Steve, Please don't forget to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. And as always Steve, your support helps us grow this community.

Thank you so much.

Breeder Steve (55:32)
My pleasure. Have a great day.

The C Word (55:34)
Sending lots of love. Until next time! Thank you, Steve. Bye.

Breeder Steve (56:19)
Okay, take care.


LINKS:

Median Heat Units Forum:
https://starsandstripesseed.com/forum/f1e8779b-39d1-4c96-b897-903130f0bc50?ref=New%20Replies

Breeder Steve's website and contact:
www.breedersteve.com

Stars and stripes forum: 
https://starsandstripesseed.com/forum

Spice of life forum:
https://starsandstripesseed.com/supplier/ad00a53c-4302-4724-b05d-0b172040ff77

Website and Blog:
www.the-cword.com