Hacker News Reader

Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading something years back that applying modern large scale ag technology to cannabis was never a technical hurdle, merely a legal one, and how much cheaper it would be once the well-capitalized giants got ahold of it and came to pretty much the same conclusion. It did make for a neat trip through Colorado in 2017 when it was still pretty novel though.

View on HN

It actually is a technical hurdle because not a lot of academic research is being done on it for commercial growers to use. You see some papers out there that cover things like yield per light spectrum or what soil ammendments do for terpene content, but they all come out of Canada and specifically McGill. It's like U.S. researchers are blackballed by their institutions or maybe their grant funding agencies. As such, techniques like plant tissue culture that are commonly done with other crops and expensive ornamentals in the U.S. are rarely done with cannabis because growers that do these techniques are often tight lipped about things such as the most ideal media composition or really anything else related to methodology.

Meanwhile with crops such as corn, you have entire land grant universities planting test crops as we speak and biology departments dedicated to maize genetics, and thats true for almost every other large commercial crop. Billions are spent on research by the federal and state governments. Agriculture takes advantage of all of this research and development when producing commercial crops, but none of this investment is being made for cannabis and when it is done by these private companies they are not proliferating their findings.

"As such, techniques like plant tissue culture that are commonly done with other crops and expensive ornamentals in the U.S. are rarely done with cannabis because growers that do these techniques are often tight lipped about things such as the most ideal media composition or really anything else related to methodology."

There are so many cannabis forums on the internet (I used to be on the top 5 waaaaay back in the day) that you can find tons of research and tips on various culture methods. Right down to micro-sample cloning techniques.

From what I understand, the current classification in the US is what stops a lot of the research. Also, if you can get past that, you have to use crappy weed from the federal government that isn't representative of what people are consuming. I don't have any references available, though.

Corn feeds millions of people and animals. Pot? It doesn’t feed anyone. So I can understand the funding disparity.

It's not so much as a disparity as the funding is simply nonexistent. Pot doesn't feed anyone of course, but its legitimate medicine.

The value to society of pot vs corn is where you should look to see why government funding doesn’t match your expectations.

There's plenty of value for pot in society, for some people it means they no longer are dependent on opioids for example. That being said, the Canadian government thinks this is worthy to fund, grant support for cannabis research can come from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and because of this the bulk of the literature in recent years is published by researchers in Canadian universities.

But finding and better understanding its value to society is precisely what the funding is needed for.

Despite the name 'weed'... it is actually a very complex plant to grow well and with the highest output. I propagated the best cuttings, from the same strain and the plant morphed over the years. Far stronger at the end than when I started. But it also became oddly harder to grow, the same techniques that I was using, didn't work over time despite a relatively controlled growing environment.

It is a fascinating plant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com