HLVd destroying cannabis crops
- Thread starter hotrodharley
- Start date
Drop That Sound
Well-Known Member
Laugh it up (I would too, I am crazy, lol 
), while I figure out how to in vitro micro-graft 10 strains of choice.. all "viroid" free.. onto one rootstock TC clone. I'll have super mother plants in the palm of my hand, that can sit around in the modified fridge for months, in hydroponic bio couplers that flood and drain the media instead of tumbling them, not using up much electricity. Then be able to pull them out when needed.
), while I figure out how to in vitro micro-graft 10 strains of choice.. all "viroid" free.. onto one rootstock TC clone. I'll have super mother plants in the palm of my hand, that can sit around in the modified fridge for months, in hydroponic bio couplers that flood and drain the media instead of tumbling them, not using up much electricity. Then be able to pull them out when needed.
Drop That Sound
Well-Known Member
Southerner
Well-Known Member
I used to post here a long time ago and since then I’ve had many years in the rec grow world both as the lowest worker on the totem pole and now as a manager of a reasonably well known nursery for my area. This conversation is really interesting to me and instead of replying to individual posts I’m just going to post my observations and my general 2 cents about the situation. Now, I’m just a grower and not a scientist. That being said, I have grown thousands of cannabis plants by this time in my life.
First off, the viroid is very much a real thing. I have seen it more or less destroy grows, along with other pathogens and pests that seem to move in when plant health gets low enough. It true that it can also be sort of “out healthed” with many varieties. It will begin to express itself again when stressed and is certainly not any sort of cure. I think for these large grows it has become about containment and minimizing the effects rather than being able to run a 100% clean operation. Nurseries of course are under a higher standard now that the viroid has become well known. No one’s SOPs or guarantees are ever 100% in this situation, no matter what fancy language is on their website. A lot of places with a large spread of the viroid are chasing phantom deficiencies(insert cal mag meme) or it’s hiding behind pest pressure. Success is now considered a 5%-7% detection rate, not completely clean.
There are huge limitations to testing right now. PCR is the standard, but the latent nature makes it very complicated to detect. You can also send the same sample to two different labs and get opposite results. Everyone experienced the inconsistency of PCR during covid. It is also very cost prohibitive for most facilities to test rigorously but it’s the best option we have. It has also been found that the virus stays mostly in the roots during veg and reaches the upper around week 4 flower. A good looking plant going in can still be a dud.
Of course there is also meristem tissue culture. This is also cost intensive and also more difficult than some in this thread would have you think. It’s also no guarantee that the plants you end up with will in fact be virus free when grown out. You have to also think of it this way: farm brings in a cut of Hypestrain to bring into the commercial market. They do meristem to ensure the best possibility of a clean plant. This costs them 6 months if it goes right. You then have to establish enough mother stock to get a true generation of clones to run in your facility, starting from at best a couple of plantlets that are nowhere yet near as established as the average propagated clone. This adds 3 more months if you have the space to grow a bunch of small moms. Then you have 3 more months to actually grow the weed and I won’t count any time for processing, curing, and moving it into the market. That puts you, at best, 1 year behind since you first got the cut of Hypestrain and now Hypestrain 2.0 is the only thing customers want. This is the trap many facilities have fallen into. You need to have a stable of clean genetics from the start and then hunt your own flavors but it’s too late for many.
With all this being said, I do believe there is a large effort to create an environment of fear around the situation for financial gain. You can find scientists who will convince you that you should run 3 e/c everyday in veg to buy more nutrients and so on. Now any plant that has any mutation, deficiency, etc is considered infected. Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely is a massive issue for commercial grows that just can not survive a hard reset of the entire grow. Now with the market in the dumpster it has become even less feasible to fully utilize the tools we do have. Meristem makes sense to preserve varieties that are central to your company, but not yet for every cutting.
My tips would be: Most facilities have moved completely away from isopropyl alchohol, it actually pools the virus and does not kill it. Don’t keep mother stock for longer than 2 months. Keep small, healthy moms that you only take top cuttings from. Kill shitty plants. Don’t keep unhealthy plants around sucking up resources under the guise that you can fix it later unless you absolutely need it. Virkon seems to be the standard for tool cleaning, 20% bleach for tables and surfaces. You can use bleach for tools but it is a bit more corrosive to scissors in my experience. Recent information has suggested all these cleaning agents are worthless, but I’ll keep going until I know more. Best thing would be a disposable razer blade per strain or even per plant if you have a small garden. Don’t reuse cutting boards or surfaces without disinfecting and always wear gloves that you change at least every strain. Dont bring in clones from untrusted sources. Hell, don’t bring in clones from anyone if you don’t absolutely need them. It’s hard to resist the hype and do the hard work of selecting your own phenos, but the more closed your loop is — the better. Even quarantine isn’t sufficient because so many strains are asymptomatic or don’t show till mid flower. If you want the wasteful but honest version, Don’t bother reusing nursery plastic. You can buy a box of 100 10x20 trays for under a hundred bucks and so on. Use the panda film disposable pots or just use cheap fabric pots one time. It’s not worth the trouble of hoping they were cleaned properly to save a few bucks, especially for a homegrow that could make a box of trays last years. This is environmentally troubling, but effective.
The demands of the market have far exceeded the level of research and solutions that would normally be appropriate for any other crop that has been open to research. We are just now able to really study cannabis specific issues because of legality. Something like hops has the benefit of hundreds of years of scientific study, where this just hasn’t been possible with cannabis until recently with modern scientific means. Clones have now traveled the world in recent years. They are being mailed all over the place as we speak. Clones are now the standard, whereas seeds have been up till this point. This is the answer to “why now”. You can tell the seed markets have gone cold in recent years and many of the banks have mostly old stock and less and less breeders are willing to do the work in such a public sphere. You are seeing, and will continue to see, more of the reputable breeeders move towards licensing agreements with clones and less public releases of their best work. It’s just too much work and money to develop these strains and generate the appropriate amount of hype to make it worth giving potential breeding stock to everyone, including your competitors.
The scariest data put forth to me is that 8% of seeds from an infected parent will also contain the virus. With so much genetic bottlenecking in the industry, we are surely perpetuating the issue and once an infected plant is pushed forward, who knows how many others it will then infect and so on. I had always considered seeds to be the last safe place and it sucks to find that they are no longer a guarantee. Who even knows how long this has been floating around.
Anyway, I’ve gone on too long.
First off, the viroid is very much a real thing. I have seen it more or less destroy grows, along with other pathogens and pests that seem to move in when plant health gets low enough. It true that it can also be sort of “out healthed” with many varieties. It will begin to express itself again when stressed and is certainly not any sort of cure. I think for these large grows it has become about containment and minimizing the effects rather than being able to run a 100% clean operation. Nurseries of course are under a higher standard now that the viroid has become well known. No one’s SOPs or guarantees are ever 100% in this situation, no matter what fancy language is on their website. A lot of places with a large spread of the viroid are chasing phantom deficiencies(insert cal mag meme) or it’s hiding behind pest pressure. Success is now considered a 5%-7% detection rate, not completely clean.
There are huge limitations to testing right now. PCR is the standard, but the latent nature makes it very complicated to detect. You can also send the same sample to two different labs and get opposite results. Everyone experienced the inconsistency of PCR during covid. It is also very cost prohibitive for most facilities to test rigorously but it’s the best option we have. It has also been found that the virus stays mostly in the roots during veg and reaches the upper around week 4 flower. A good looking plant going in can still be a dud.
Of course there is also meristem tissue culture. This is also cost intensive and also more difficult than some in this thread would have you think. It’s also no guarantee that the plants you end up with will in fact be virus free when grown out. You have to also think of it this way: farm brings in a cut of Hypestrain to bring into the commercial market. They do meristem to ensure the best possibility of a clean plant. This costs them 6 months if it goes right. You then have to establish enough mother stock to get a true generation of clones to run in your facility, starting from at best a couple of plantlets that are nowhere yet near as established as the average propagated clone. This adds 3 more months if you have the space to grow a bunch of small moms. Then you have 3 more months to actually grow the weed and I won’t count any time for processing, curing, and moving it into the market. That puts you, at best, 1 year behind since you first got the cut of Hypestrain and now Hypestrain 2.0 is the only thing customers want. This is the trap many facilities have fallen into. You need to have a stable of clean genetics from the start and then hunt your own flavors but it’s too late for many.
With all this being said, I do believe there is a large effort to create an environment of fear around the situation for financial gain. You can find scientists who will convince you that you should run 3 e/c everyday in veg to buy more nutrients and so on. Now any plant that has any mutation, deficiency, etc is considered infected. Don’t get me wrong, this is definitely is a massive issue for commercial grows that just can not survive a hard reset of the entire grow. Now with the market in the dumpster it has become even less feasible to fully utilize the tools we do have. Meristem makes sense to preserve varieties that are central to your company, but not yet for every cutting.
My tips would be: Most facilities have moved completely away from isopropyl alchohol, it actually pools the virus and does not kill it. Don’t keep mother stock for longer than 2 months. Keep small, healthy moms that you only take top cuttings from. Kill shitty plants. Don’t keep unhealthy plants around sucking up resources under the guise that you can fix it later unless you absolutely need it. Virkon seems to be the standard for tool cleaning, 20% bleach for tables and surfaces. You can use bleach for tools but it is a bit more corrosive to scissors in my experience. Recent information has suggested all these cleaning agents are worthless, but I’ll keep going until I know more. Best thing would be a disposable razer blade per strain or even per plant if you have a small garden. Don’t reuse cutting boards or surfaces without disinfecting and always wear gloves that you change at least every strain. Dont bring in clones from untrusted sources. Hell, don’t bring in clones from anyone if you don’t absolutely need them. It’s hard to resist the hype and do the hard work of selecting your own phenos, but the more closed your loop is — the better. Even quarantine isn’t sufficient because so many strains are asymptomatic or don’t show till mid flower. If you want the wasteful but honest version, Don’t bother reusing nursery plastic. You can buy a box of 100 10x20 trays for under a hundred bucks and so on. Use the panda film disposable pots or just use cheap fabric pots one time. It’s not worth the trouble of hoping they were cleaned properly to save a few bucks, especially for a homegrow that could make a box of trays last years. This is environmentally troubling, but effective.
The demands of the market have far exceeded the level of research and solutions that would normally be appropriate for any other crop that has been open to research. We are just now able to really study cannabis specific issues because of legality. Something like hops has the benefit of hundreds of years of scientific study, where this just hasn’t been possible with cannabis until recently with modern scientific means. Clones have now traveled the world in recent years. They are being mailed all over the place as we speak. Clones are now the standard, whereas seeds have been up till this point. This is the answer to “why now”. You can tell the seed markets have gone cold in recent years and many of the banks have mostly old stock and less and less breeders are willing to do the work in such a public sphere. You are seeing, and will continue to see, more of the reputable breeeders move towards licensing agreements with clones and less public releases of their best work. It’s just too much work and money to develop these strains and generate the appropriate amount of hype to make it worth giving potential breeding stock to everyone, including your competitors.
The scariest data put forth to me is that 8% of seeds from an infected parent will also contain the virus. With so much genetic bottlenecking in the industry, we are surely perpetuating the issue and once an infected plant is pushed forward, who knows how many others it will then infect and so on. I had always considered seeds to be the last safe place and it sucks to find that they are no longer a guarantee. Who even knows how long this has been floating around.
Anyway, I’ve gone on too long.
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