6 GERMINATION.CA JULY 2019 meeting rooms, and also house all the mechanical and electrical systems that support the greenhouse. Most agricultural crops have had decades (if not centuries) of breeding to develop beneficial traits. Cannabis hasn’t received the same attention by plant biologists and plant breeders because of the historical difficulties in obtaining the appropriate licences. Aurora will be using traditional plant breeding techniques to develop new cultivars that have desirable chemistry, disease resistance, and/or traits that improve industrial cultivation practices. As far as cannabis seed goes, that last point is key. As Canada will allow the sale of edible cannabis products starting in December 2019, Baute says varieties that lend themselves to the produc- tion of edibles and other products which use cannabis extracts (as opposed to varieties grown for the flowers themselves) represent a major untapped market that researchers like him are just beginning to select for. “If you’re making an edible, for example, it’s still the flower you’re after, but you don’t care what it looks or smells like. That relieves some of the selection pressure as a breeder. You only need to talk to a few pro- ducers to know where most of the costs in breeding go, and right now that’s for cloning. It’s labour inten- sive,” Baute says. “There are lots of annual crops that can be propagated clonally, but no one does that because seed works so much better. Annual plants have evolved to grow from seed. Everyone is thinking the same thing — the question is how fast we get there. How fast can we make seed that has good enough quality and the desired uniformity that we can use those seeds for large-scale production?” Trading Scissors for Combines Right now, cannabis harvesting in North America looks very different from other crop kinds, Baute notes. In U.S. states where cannabis is legal, he says you can already see cannabis production from seed at some scale and producers — especially those harvesting cannabis varieties for their CBD as opposed to THC — are strug- gling to stay cost competitive. “They’re harvesting plants with a chainsaw and throwing them through a wood chipper and dragging them to a corn silo to dry. In Canada, for high-end flower, you’re trimming with a pair of scissors and inspecting each one by hand and hand packag- ing it. For a combine-scale operation, you need seed.” One of the pioneers of high-CBD cannabis varieties in the United States is John McKay of New West Genetics (NWG), which has created the first certified American hemp seed. McKay is director of genet- ics for New West and a professor in the Bioagricultural Sciences and Pest Management department at Colorado State University. The company was founded five years ago when the U.S. first legal- ized hemp research, and is focused on creating high-yielding, combine harvestable hemp varieties that are adapted to U.S. and newly legal production environments. NWG announced in March of this year that its proprietary hemp varieties, NWG- ELITE and NWG-RELY, placed in the top of dual-purpose (fibre and grain) trials conducted last summer at the University of Kentucky. McKay and the NWG team made pilgrimages to Europe and Canada to see what other countries were doing to breed new varieties of hemp, but he says New West’s products are uniquely American. “It was useful to understand the agronomy angle and see how to breed to maximize yield under those production systems, but there simply hasn’t been enough dollars put into hemp breeding in Canada or Europe for us to gain a great deal of breeding knowledge from them,” McKay says. “In the U.S., big seed companies spend billions a year on cutting-edge breeding approaches but only invest heavily in crops that are planted on at least 30 million acres. In Europe, it’s largely federal legacy breeding programs that aren’t well-funded that have developed and maintained open Greg Baute, Cannabis Innovation Centre director. Hemp breeder Jan Slaski of InnoTech Alberta. John McKay, director of genetics for New West Genetics.