The Cannabis Breeder's Bible (20 page)

This kind of knowledge when applied in practice will help you to produce strains that have the edge on others’. It is more than possible to produce several highly desired lines. There are no perfect cannabis breeders because there are no perfect cannabis plants. You don’t have to be the best—you just have to do your best. The market is growing and is in need of good breeders and strains to meet its demands.

Medical markets will be the new wave of cannabis breeding operations. Even though the end results may be synthesized in another format someone still has to find it first. Locate your nearest medical marijuana center and ask them how you can help. Most countries and states are becoming tolerant of cannabis medical research. Make sure you check your country’s laws before exploring such avenues though.

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HOW TO PROTECT YOUR WORK

AS WITH ANY OTHER AREA OF CREATIVE ENDEAVOR in life, if you create something original, then other people should ask your permission if they want to reproduce it. Ownership of strains is important but so is the fact that the herb is free.

If people are not making money out of your strains then let them pass on their offspring to other people. This is a great way to get your name into the public domain.

However you may find that a breeder has decided to recreate and sell your strain or brand name without your permission. This can be a problem because in most countries cannabis is still illegal. How do you take an illegal produce and copyright it? The answer is to find a country where cannabis is a legal product and that has copyright laws on plant produce. Countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Switzerland are gaining more and more legal ground on the subject of copyrighting a cannabis strain (you can copyright strains right now in The Netherlands). That is the first step you could take, although it would be very hard to enforce the copyright across the seas.

The next thing you should do is to understand fully what the concept of IBLs, F1 and F2 seeds are and you should use this to inform your clients about the stability of knock-off strains. Let’s recap for a moment what IBL, F1 and F2 offspring really are.

IBL, F1 and F2

If we release an IBL onto the market then we are going to be giving our clients a real treat. If we take an example trait such as purple bud color, and let us say that the trait is recessive (mm) and that the dominant side to that trait is white bud color (MM). What will the offspring produce if both parents are homozygous recessive for that trait?

Look at that—all purple bud colors. That is very interesting because no matter what seeds you produce using these two parents (mm and mm) the grower will always get purple bud and will be happy with the results (no variations in bud color), but this trait is then very easy to knock off because the offspring when crossed with themselves or backcrossed to a parent plant will always produce purple bud. Now let’s see what happens if only one of the parents is homozygous for that same trait. Here is the F1 produce.

Fifty percent will have white buds and fifty percent will have purple buds. You can’t really release that on the market can you? You will have some unhappy customers if they don’t get the purple bud as advertised. What if we used the offspring for an F2 cross? What would we get? Well, this depends on the parent plants. Let’s take the mm parent and an Mm parent and do both sets. The mm parent first crossed with the mm offspring.

Good. That trait breeds true. Our clients will love it but it will be very easy to knock off.

Fifty percent/fifty percent. We are still in the same boat if we use the mm parent. Client will be unhappy. Let’s try the Mm parent instead.

Same problem again. Let’s try the heterozygous offspring next.

Totally out of the question. We have a serious problem here. Only 1/4 of the offspring will show the purple bud trait. Client will be unhappy. If you sell ten seeds then chances are two to three will have purple buds. Remember also that the male/female ratios are not set so what are the chances that those two to three will be female? Client will be very unhappy and may not get any purple bud at all. So the only way we can please the client is to release the true breeding trait for the purple phenotype......but all is not lost yet! We can still protect our plant from knock-offs.

When breeders release a strain onto the market they release the F1 produce. However they make sure that any homozygous recessive traits breed true in that F1 produce. This is the key if you have a strain that depends on a homozygous recessive trait. Our problem above was with the recessive trait that was dominant. Let’s pretend for a moment that our strain is very potent and this trait plays a big part of our plant’s mega-marketing plan. Potency is PP. If we release the true breeding trait for potency onto the market then we will only end up with all PP offspring and people will be able to knock off the potency trait very easily. But if we have a heterozygous trait in one of the parents then watch what happens in the offspring.

Client is very happy. They will have all their offspring potent because the P is dominant. However 50% are heterozygous and 50% are homozygous. If people want to knock off your strain then they will have to do a test cross to discover the homozygous trait. That requires work on their part so you have made your strain harder to knock off. Let’s see what happens when we use two heterozygous parents.

Happy customer again. Three quarters will show the potency trait, only one quarter will show the recessive trait, plus ONLY one quarter is actually dominant homozygous for that trait. This makes it harder for the knock-off artist. However they can notice the pp because it will be different from the rest, so they can eliminate this from their breeding efforts.

So, both of these methods will help to prevent your strain from being stolen.

THE MORE HETEROZYGOUS TRAITS THAT CONTAIN THE DOMINANT ALLELE FOR THE TRAIT THAT YOU WHERE BREEDING FOR - THE BETTER THE CHANCES OF PROTECTING YOUR STRAIN AND KEEPING THE CLIENT HAPPY.

By keeping a heterozygous parent that shows the characteristics of your selected strain you can breed offspring that will meet your clients’ demands and keep the knock-off artists at bay. The knock-off artist will have a tough time trying to reproduce your strain entirely.

Now you are in a position to warn your clients of the fake F2 produce on the market. By explaining what F2 produce is, you can help educate them. If the knock-off artist tries to copy your seeds from any of these F1 results…

… he’s only going to produce some very non-uniform plants for that trait. The client will be buying an inferior product. This is what ratios are all about. In real life all the major breeders release F1 seeds onto the market. F1s are not IBL so there will be variations in the pack. Maybe you are asking, what degree of variations will I find in the pack? This depends on how many traits the breeder has tried to lock down or make true breeding.

The less true breeding traits that are in the strain the more non-uniform in growth the F1 results will be. If the breeder is a good breeder and has released a good F1 product line then you should find only minor variations in the pack.

There are some Sativa plants like Haze that are very unstable but have true breeding traits for flowering times, taste and potency. The plants may develop at different heights and have different leaf shapes but the breeder has created this plant for potency and taste. Unstable Sativa genetics are very common. Many breeders do not have the time to IBL a Sativa so they release a strain onto the market that is stable for only a few traits. Here is a list of what should be stable in a species before it can compete in the market.

As we have previously noted, true breeding traits takes time. Since a Sativa has almost twice the flowering times of an Indica plant then it will take twice as long to develop the strain. Because of this, growers do not mind if they don’t get a consistent bud color, leaf shape, height, resinous look, internodes or branching numbers with Sativa strains. They generally don’t mind how the plant looks either. What a Sativa grower wants to see consistent is the potency, taste, flower times, smell and yields on the plant.

So which strain is easier to protect? Probably the Indica strain because it has eleven true breeding traits to knock off compared to the five of the Sativa.

In reality, protecting your work has to take both the customer and the knock-off artist into consideration. The customer should come first in terms of what you produce because he’s the one who will critique your work and want to get his money’s worth. If you release a strain with too many variations then you will not get good feedback from the consumer.

The only true way to protect your work is to make it known to people that you are the original creator of the strain and that they should only buy seeds from you or your authorized seed bank resellers. This goes a long way, because there are many growers out there who do not like knock-off artists and they will help pass along the message that you are the creator of a strain and buyers should accept no substitute. The one thing you should never do is tell anybody what traits you are selecting for. You can tell them about your plant’s history, i.e., your parent plants and where they came from, but you should not tell people what traits you where selecting for. If you tell people that you were selecting a number of specific traits and describe those traits, then the knock-off artist may be able to reproduce a very similar strain by selecting for those same traits using similar parents. Also, make sure that you do not give your strain a name that could infringe on any trademarked names such as “Coca-Cola”, or “Pepsi.” That could land you in hot water very quickly.

A very interesting case is that of the Matanuska Valley Thunderfuck strain. To understand more about this strain, we should first have a look at its origins.

MATANUSKA VALLEY THUNDERFUCK

The Matanuska Valley in Alaska is a wonderful place to visit. Alaska became a very popular settlement for hippies who had left the cities in America and Canada to travel the world. Most of them wanted to grow pot when they got home from their tour of the globe and so Alaska seemed like an interesting place to settle down in. Today you will find that Alaska is home to a large cannabis community. It is very common to find whole villages and towns that like nothing better than to sit down and have a spliff.There are many people who live the hippie life in communes there or deep in the woods with their families in log cabins they have made. These people are not poor or neglected parts of the community. They are people who have chosen a more relaxing, natural and healthy way of life.

In the ’70s, work began on a strain that could withstand the extreme climatic conditions of Alaskan cold weather. Since Sativa and Indica plants are rarely found growing naturally in the wild in countries that have a cold climate another species would have to be used. Ruderalis is a very popular species of cannabis found in cold climates. Ruderalis was used in the development of MTF because of its thick leaves and weather-proof sturdiness. The Alaskan people started to cross Ruderalis strains with high-yielding Indica plants. The result was a new strain of the Indica/Ruderalis species called MTF.

MTF is very popular in Canada and America because of its high-yielding produce and heavy stone effect. However the plant has auto-flowering values which do not make it very popular among all or most growers.