Just had a nice long and involved conversation/consultation with my friend,
@homebrew420 . He's been the head breeder at fourteeners for years and it's all he does. There's an entirely separate crew that runs the grow houses... using his strains and crosses, of course. That alone gives him serious status- but the work he's done is quite simply world class. Just for starters, the Hillbilly Hobby in the pic above is his strain... and the list is endless.
Impressions from today's meeting:
1. The Super Silo system kicks serious ass- he's impressed with how we're doing things here. That kind of validation is worth its weight in dank buds. Yield per watt is on par with the best of the best.. and yield per ft² of floorspace is waaaay beyond what commercial warehouse operations are pulling. Our unit labor costs are a fraction of theirs.
2. He's planning to breed autoflowers soon- he thinks that modern autos finally now have potential when crossed with today's popular strains like Chem Sour Diesel, Strawberry Cough, etc. I can't wait to see what comes from this project. Other projects include growing red buds- I mean bloody red, and crossing to get color and potency into new varieties.
3. Buying brand name water bottle nutrients is no better than commercially available dry nutrient salts, you're just spending more cash for the same chems. For the money, you get a tested nutrient schedule and buffers to stabilize pH. Truly, it's not hard to add pH down when the girls want it...
4. He was very happy indeed to get a baby Hillbilly Hobby back- and will be sending us more clones to run soon! This is how our symbiotic relationship works; we get genetics that simply aren't available anywhere else at any price, CUSTOMIZED FOR THIS VERTICAL SILO APPROACH. He gets growth and potency validation and actual real world test results on his strains, without having to pay the overhead for the extra space- or labor. Simply amazing.
Straight up, I don't know of any other bootstrap/self funded research project that's doing anything like what we do.
The future is being built right here, kids- stay tuned!