Editors’ Note: This is the transcript version of the podcast. Please note that due to time and audio constraints, transcription may not be perfect. We encourage you to listen to the podcast, embedded below if you need any clarification. We hope you enjoy!
Breeder Steve is incredibly well known for, exactly as the name says, breeding. Steve has been growing his own since 1989. He shared incredible stories and shared insights into
– Backstory on how he got into breeding
– Living Library of Cannabis Genetics
– His most famous seed
– His run-in with the Pope
– Wine and Cannabis similarities
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”
Guests Links:
Follow Breeder Steve
#BreedingCannabis #Cannabis #CannabisSeeds
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[00:00:00]Bryan Fields: What’s up guys? Welcome back to an episode of The Dime. I’m Brian Fields and with me as always, this Kellen Finney. This week we’ve got a very special guest breeder. Steve. Steve, thanks for taking the time. How you doing
[00:00:12]Breeder Steve: today? Great, man. Thanks a lot for having me, guys.
[00:00:15]Bryan Fields: Excited to dive in. Kellen, how are you doing?
[00:00:18]Kellan Finney: I’m doing really well, Brian. I’m been very excited to talk to Steve and I learned about some, uh, plant science. How are you Brian? I’m doing really well. And Steve, we have an east coast, west coast battle, so I understand your location and your allegiance, please. Hm.
[00:00:34]Breeder Steve: I’m on the west coast by choice. I’m originally from, well not the coast of it, four hours from the coast, but I’m originally from Ontario and southwestern Ontario for Canadian zones.
[00:00:45] That’s easily the best place to grow. Outdoors is pretty close to Detroit cuz Canada kinda dips down there. Most of the borders of 49th parallel. But down there it’s the 42nd. So that’s the same latitude as you know, Northern Cattle in southern Oregon. It’s the [00:01:00] 42nd parallel, so you get the same photo period and similar, not the exact same season, but the uh, the length of the season is fairly similar, I would say.
[00:01:09] Awesome. Yeah. So
[00:01:11]Bryan Fields: for our listeners that are u unfamiliar about you, can you give it a little background about.
[00:01:16]Breeder Steve: Yeah. Well, as far as pot goes, I mean, I started growing my own as a hobby when I was like 18 and never looked back, you know, just, uh, really was so in love with homegrown that I just made it my mission to share that with people and encouraged them and helped them get started.
[00:01:34] And back then, like late eighties there, or early nineties, there was really, uh, not a lot of options. If you were looking to order seeds or something, there wasn’t a lot happening. The grow stores weren’t selling clones or anything . So if you found genetics you liked, you had to preserve them. And as a young guy that didn’t have his own place, I was doing little gorilla patches here and there, and the summer.
[00:01:56] Couldn’t keep mothers all year. Sometimes I would out at a [00:02:00] friend’s place, I might, you know, pass a cutting there to keep for next year. But usually we started making our own seeds, even just a single branch of a plant so that you had that film canister of seeds to look through the next year. You know, it was really a, you know, totally a hobby that got carried away.
[00:02:18]Bryan Fields: So when did we take it from hobby to profession? How did that transition happen?
[00:02:23]Breeder Steve: Well, I, when I moved to Vancouver in the fall of 94, I had brought a, my harvest from that year, but also my seeds. And the next year, another guy I knew from Ontario that was an activist, I didn’t know him well at the time, uh, mark Emory, he was selling seeds at hemp BC in Vancouver.
[00:02:43] He got busted and I went down and, and told the guy I said, I don’t know if you’re gonna keep going or not, but if you’re gonna keep selling seeds, I want to donate a jar to you. So I donated them a jar of seeds and then I came back a few months later to get papers or high times or something, and he [00:03:00] was like, oh, everybody loved those seeds.
[00:03:01] Bring, keep, keep bringing ’em, keep bringing them. So he said, I’ll give you two bucks of seed for all the seeds you can make. And I was like, Hmm, I better start making some seeds, . And then that’s what, that’s when I had to come up with a name for the seed bank, as it were. So I had like a list of names and when I thought a spice of life, I was like, oh, that’s the perfect name.
[00:03:21] So I called it Spice of Life Seeds. And then, uh, that was 94 was the first release of those. That’s incredible. Yeah. It’s a wild now , right? Yeah. That’s very serious. What was the, what was the first, uh, strain? What was that seed? The first one I released, we, I was calling it originally Medway Madness in, in honor of the creek where I grew it back home.
[00:03:45] But it, it, that means nothing to people outside of that county. Right. So I said, I, I called it Jolly Rancher cause it was tangy, it was sweet but tangy, you know, it had the kinda sweet and sour vibe going on. So it was like, [00:04:00] it’s like those Jolly Rancher candies. So I called it that. It was funny. It is those Jolly Rancher candies at all, but disappeared at that time.
[00:04:06] And then it sort of, they came back like a year later. The candies are like relaunched again. It was so funny.
[00:04:14]Bryan Fields: So you sold a co, you sold a couple of those seeds. When did you realize people were starting to get a big appetite for, for breeder Steve’s products?
[00:04:22]Breeder Steve: Well, the, the second release was when I called Sweet Paint Grapefruit, but Sweet Paint Grapefruit was really a name I gave to a clone only That was, uh, clone.
[00:04:31] I was collecting clones, anybody selling clones in Vancouver. I was buying ’em so that I could see everything that was around and, uh, There was this one person, I had new selling pot, and it was always a bit immature, but it was sweet, and you thought, oh, this has potential, whatever it is, give me a clone of that.
[00:04:48] And when I grew it out on my balcony that summer of 95 in Kitsilano I would have people come over and smell it, and I would say, what does that smell like to you And 20 out of 20 [00:05:00] people would say Sweet pink grapefruits. Like the Ruby Reds. You know it like it was unmistakably, like the sweet pink grapefruit.
[00:05:05] So it was a clone only, and then the most stable male I’d worked was from my Jolly Rancher line. So I’d crossed the Jolly Rancher male on that sweet paint grapefruit and called that first seed release of those sweet pink grapefruit. Then it was the next release off of that grapefruit, which was really a.
[00:05:24] You know, a matriarch in my lines which uh, thus became known as Sweet Skunk. And I had originally sold that as Big Fruit with the understanding. Somebody had sold me, uh, a tray of clones that had two. Two things in it. And one was supposed they were freshly purchased from Sensi seeds and they’d made their selections or were in the process of making their selections.
[00:05:48] And they said, okay, this half of the tray is uh, or this tray in black was Northern light haze and this tray with orange mark on it, like orange spray paint. He said, and I [00:06:00] think this one was the big skunk, and I think this one was the NL Hayes. It became apparent later that he had them back, you know, mixed up.
[00:06:07] But originally I thought it was a big, it turned out one of the trays was all male. And I was like, oh now. But it was a beautiful, really robust plant and it was a stick sticky branches and smelled good. And I was like, I’m gonna use this male and hit my favorite females. So that be, I was calling it Big Fruit when I released it for Big Skunk Grapefruit.
[00:06:26] That was a big fruit. But Mark was out of uh, skunk Seeds, so he said, oh, I’m gonna change it to Sweet sku. Cuz we thought it was a big SKU male at the time. And then as we grew them out, it was like, oh, there’s no big skunk in that. That was all N ML Hayes. And the, there was out the 500 F one s I grew out, there would be two recessive narrow leaf plants that were absolutely hazed like, and the rest of them were all far more squat NL looking plants.
[00:06:54] Right. So of the two recessives, I was like, well I can’t keep both of them. I’ll keep one of them cuz [00:07:00] I absolutely love the smell. It would take 12 weeks, the other ones would take eight weeks. And I, and that was. That was the sweet skunk cutting. So the uh, the original sweet skunk, we could call it the oss.
[00:07:12] And then downstream from that later you see the is s the island sweet skunk. And a lot of times I think the clone was passed around was the original sweet skunk, but the seeds they were making from it was this island sweet skunk. It gets confusing and I have no idea at the end where the day, what the real story ends up being.
[00:07:29] Right. But the, uh, that plant is still one of my very favorites and it’s still like, I would say, you know, a lot of people indoors don’t grow the narrow leaf plants, what we used to call sativa’s. Right. But that one has stood the test of time because that came out in either late 95 or early 96 that was around when I was making it.
[00:07:52] And that was, uh, to this day it’s still like sort of the top skinny girl in, in BC and abroad. You know, I see [00:08:00] people growing it in Spain and other places and it just gives me such joy. It’s just such a high note. The aromas of it are really, there’s nothing dirty about them. Whereas everything that’s kind of Afghani dominant, there’s a real earthy undertone or a bit of a stinky.
[00:08:17] And yeah, it can be loud, but if the loud is stinky, how good is the loud ? You know, I want one that’s perfume. And if it really is like, oh, that just gets me excited, you know? That’s more important to me, you know, and the, uh, like, we’re gonna puff whatever we, you know, need to, to stay lifted all day. You might as well get the flavors in you that, that make you most excited.
[00:08:42] Right. And it’s more of a social lift to those kind of buzz. It doesn’t put the herd on people. It gets ’em chatty and having fun. That’s usually why I end up talking for two or three hours on podcasts cuz I’m dabbing some sweets, , twisting one up. Yeah.
[00:08:58]Kellan Finney: Yeah. I mean, I’d like the high from, uh, [00:09:00] uh, cannabis with a much sweeter note.
[00:09:02] I mean, it’s not only the flavor, but like for some reason the high is a lot more
[00:09:05]Breeder Steve: enjoyable. Yeah, yeah. It’s a pleasant, it’s more pleasant. It’s not so, yeah. And it’s,
[00:09:08]Kellan Finney: it’s a little more high. I just feel more creative and like more of a head-high kinda
[00:09:12]Breeder Steve: situation. Yeah. It’s, know what I mean? It’s stimulating as opposed to numbing.
[00:09:15] Yes.
[00:09:16]Kellan Finney: You know? Yes, exactly. Yeah. That’s a great way. Describe it. I had one quick question, Steve, so Sure. When we’re, when, uh, breeders go through and they’re, they’re crossing plants, right? Of course you have a male and a female. Do you physically, are you physically removing the pollen and like brushing it on the female?
[00:09:30] Or is it like you kind of just set ’em next to each other? Have a fan and just shut the mood. Like can you kind of talk our listeners through that whole
[00:09:37]Breeder Steve: process? You know what I mean? Absolutely. No, it’s a great question and it’s, uh, it really depends on the situation. So if you’re doing a small test batch, like I’d never want to make a whole greenhouse of one seed before I’ve made a small batch and grown out a few hundred, you know, and see how they behave.
[00:09:54] So once, if I’ve done the small test batch, that might just be one branch. That, and for collecting [00:10:00] Poland for small batches, what I tend to do is I’d take a shoebox and on the bottom of the shoebox inside I’d put parchment paper and then some cheesecloth or a screen over that. And then I cut some male buds right before they’re opening, just when they’re about to open.
[00:10:17] But havent I’d cut them and then I tape them in the lid of the shoebox. So they open in the shoebox. The pollen drops through the screen. Any little green bits or flower bits stay on top of the screen. And you can even poke a few holes in there so it’s not too humid. The, um, humidity will kill it. The pollen pollen’s got to stay dry to stay viable.
[00:10:39] As soon as it gets wet, it sprouts. And if you look under a microscope at pollen, it’s like really tiny seeds and they, they sprout a long tail, you know, the, um, If I’m going to do a production run, I typically put live males at, you know, by a fan in a room or in the air intake [00:11:00] end of the greenhouse. Like when I was doing big batches in Switzerland, in my greenhouse, I would hang four males There were cuttings of the same male, but I would hang four males at the air intake end of the greenhouse, and that just cloud of pollen would go down and hit everything in the greenhouse. So I’d get, you know, 20 kilos of seed or something from, yeah, okay. That those greenhouses are about 12 kilos of clean seed per time.
[00:11:26] And I might have four different females in there, or five different females, you know, taking the same pollen. So that was, uh, a good way to go. You excuse me for 20 seconds here or less. I gotta let my dog in. I.
[00:11:44]Kellan Finney: I’ve always wondered about that, that process. You know what mean? I think that’s a great question. That’s a great question. Like everyone always talks about it, right? And I mean, I’ve even just spent so much time with growers and it’s always like, oh, we just crossed these two plants. I’m like, do you want what I mean, save that or no?
[00:11:58] What do you mean? I think we could keep that [00:12:00] right? Like I’m canceling you canceling
[00:12:07]Breeder Steve: So Steve, yeah, no, I miss
[00:12:08]Kellan Finney: No, no, I was just teasing Kellen. So Steve, those techniques that you learned, was that trial and error over time or was that something that someone taught you? This is, this is the way to do it? You
[00:12:20] know
[00:12:20]Breeder Steve: what, I think I got that out of marijuana. Bought me from Robert Connell clerk, but, and that was really one of the first books that really inspired me.
[00:12:30] You know, the first grow book I had was Mel. The Mel Franken Rosenthal Grower’s Guide and the second book I had, I might have even ordered them at the same time. I had the Marijuana Botany by Robert Connell Clark. And uh, yeah, when I, I was reading that like, oh, this is the world’s greatest hobby if you’re a pot lover.
[00:12:50] You know, collecting genetics and trying them out from all over and trying to craft something new and distinctive, you know, having fun with it. So it’s just a [00:13:00] great hobby, you know, if you love pot, you know, you, it’s really taken it to the extreme to start breeding your own. And you know, you, if you start out a necessity, it didn’t seem like, you know, if you start out a necessity, it just seemed like a normal course of action.
[00:13:17] Whereas today, you kind of have to make a conscious choice to start breeding because it’s so easy to just go pick up some cuttings at your local grocery store, you know, whereas that just wasn’t an option back then. Yeah. You know?
[00:13:29]Kellan Finney: So take us back in time. You were in Canada. How did we get to Switzerland?
[00:13:34]Breeder Steve: Well, I’d had, I’d moved to PC in 94, and then maybe 97, 98 I opened a grow store that made Aquaponic systems and my super soil, which is all bio of course. And then, uh, uh, American consultant slash experts that, uh, is up from California visiting PC regularly Rosenthal. He lined up a consulting gig and [00:14:00] invited me to go in on it with him as a partner.
[00:14:03] And that was for three brothers that had probably the biggest operation in Switzerland. So that was, that was, uh, early May of. Of, uh, 99. So I went over with him on this two week consulting gig and said, you know, was, and I said, man, I’d always said if I could just breed wide openly and pay the taxes and treat it like a normal business, I’m there.
[00:14:27] You know? Yeah. So when I saw that that was the case, and it wasn’t just get a license and start working, you didn’t need one. It was never illegal. So there was no license. It was just legal like tomatoes, which was perfect. It was absolutely boring. Nobody give a shit about it. You could go to the mainstream supermarkets, like really mainstream supermarkets in the in May and where they had all the flowers and vegetables and fruits for sale and trays out [00:15:00] front.
[00:15:00] All the little starter plants. They had a hemp section and they had a cannabis section and they had a great white shark with plant tags. It’s a picture of the bud or a picture of the plant. And they had ulti, hemp, you know, with a picture of it beside a Shelly, like 30 feet tall and all this, you know, and it’s a plant in full sun, good drainage, heavy feeder harvest mid-October, like it was just normal, you know?
[00:15:24] It was just like any other plant in the garden center. So this was so refreshing coming from where we didn’t, nobody even had met at that time, you know, like it was in Canada at least. So it was, uh, It was like, oh, well hopefully in 10 years the whole world will be like this. It’s just normal dreaming, right?
[00:15:42] Yeah. So the instead the Swiss went backwards, the, but at the time it was great because Swiss botanicals and plant research in that is really big in Switzerland for pharmaceuticals and cosmetics and you name it. So they said, you know, when the neighbors say, why isn’t cannabis growing illegal there?
[00:15:59] They say, oh, [00:16:00] we’re not going to start making plants illegal. The uses can be illegal. There’s no hash bars. This is not Amsterdam. You know, it’s illegal to sell hash. It’s not illegal to sell a kilo of flour because you like the way it makes your sweaters smell in your closet. You know? So that’s how they did it.
[00:16:14] It is just he really. Because look at Italy, Austria, Germany, all their neighbors, it was highly illegal. France is highly illegal and expensive, but they let all their kids go plant 10 hectares every summer. And they knew their friends from Italy or their friends from France, or their friends from Germany would come to Switzerland and buy it.
[00:16:36] The, the Swiss aren’t risking anything, you know, they, they know just let it, let it happen and the money will come. The Swiss are, they’re open to business. They always have been. They, they have no qualms about where the money’s coming from. You know, not that there’s anything wrong with cannabis business, it’s just, uh, they just, they’re equal opportunity that way.
[00:16:55] Wherever the money’s coming from doesn’t matter as long as the money’s coming.[00:17:00]
[00:17:01]Kellan Finney: So how, how long were you doing that? And I know you have an interesting story of, of what ended, what ended that ?
[00:17:07]Breeder Steve: Yeah. I was, I was there about three and a half years and. I left for Spain at the end of it because it started to get weird. And what happened was it had grown, the industry had sort of grown so much with all these informal, the shops that were set up selling it on the border of Como and Kiso, which is where Italy and Switzerland meet me.
[00:17:31] Italian side are one of the areas they meet the um, if. Borders in the middle of what appears to be one town like Quiso. If you look from space, it’d look like one town, right? But in the middle of Main Street there’s a border. Mm-hmm. . So people would finish school or work walk over to the Swiss side. As soon as they walked across on both sides of the street, the sidewalks had sandwich boards of pot leafs and pot stores like the both sides of the street for the next block.[00:18:00]
[00:18:00] So it was right within sight of the Italian border guards. And the Italians actually had to change their law cuz they had to charge anybody caught with anything. They had to drop it to five grams or less. They can take it without doing paperwork. Because so many people, and they just started, you know, they give up because everybody come and buy five grams.
[00:18:17] Five grams was the smallest package in the shops. But what they had, uh, the thing that really threw a wrench into the local industry for us was one of the shop owners. Whose name I’ll leave out of it. But he had, uh, investigative journalist showed up in his shop from Rome with a hidden camera and a microphone, and he’s looking at this shop, there’s hundreds of kilos of pod around the shop, and he’s going, man, the sh this read is so good and frosty and so cheap, like back then wholesale by that last summer, frosty, you know, white rhino or whatever was going around at the time, [00:19:00] that would be 1500 a kilo Franks, which was like Canadian at the time.
[00:19:05] So that would be almost a doll, a little over a dollar a gram US buck 20 year gram us if you were buying a kilo, right? Which is thousand grams, of course. So they, the, the journalist says, oh, it’s so sad. This stuff’s worth of fortune in Rome. It’s so sad we can’t get this in Italy. And the shop owner says, Hey, don’t worry, we do 24 hours free delivery anywhere in Italy.
[00:19:26] So that went on the Roman News the next night and the Pope was on the phone. or the Pope’s people got on the phone to the Catholic prosecutor for the area and said, if you’re a good
[00:19:38] Catholic,
[00:19:38]Breeder Steve: you’re gonna shut this down. So even though they had, uh, there was no reason for them to shut us down, but they wanted put you in investigation.
[00:19:46] And we said, well, you can have a look Buck. If you’re gonna make this a pain in the ass, we’ll just close up anyway, you know? So they like, they came in, it was the end of the summer and we had, uh, just cleaned up. We were [00:20:00] taken down. We had different locations. So at the Warehouse, which was the head office and warehouse, where I did most of the seed work in the winter and had all the veg area and whatnot, that would also be a trimming area.
[00:20:11] Light depth for the summer or the, or the field crops and that. And we had literally just finished sweeping up from cleaning out one greenhouse. And I was in the rental truck about to take another greenhouse over there, and they’re, don’t bring it, don’t bring it. So they called ahead and said, we wanna come and visit your place.
[00:20:29] And they, they came with a video camera and everything, and they’re like, well, if all you do is make seeds, where’s all, you know, what happens to all the weed? And truthfully, you know, we said, Compost it, you know, and they’re like, let’s see this. And sure enough, we went out, we had like a 10 pod, like we were dropping it from our upstairs window, all the T seeded weed, and there was like a 10 foot mound of bud with seeds sprouting out of it.
[00:20:54] It was like, you know, Moss, cuz there was still so many leftover seeds in the, the bud, right? [00:21:00] So they, they were like, oh you really are throwing out CD weed. Yeah. It was like, yeah, after we, you know, skim most of the seeds, we compost it all the weed. And they’re like, okay. So they really, they never had anything to charge us with.
[00:21:11] We just said, if you’re gonna make it a hassle and we just stockpiled a whack of seeds that summer. So we said, let’s shut down and, you know, go to the beach . So I went to the south of Spain and I sold my facility to uh, shanty Baba, who was a friend, other expat breeder in town at the time. Was interesting is we used to, we didn’t get together a lot, but a couple times we didn’t.
[00:21:37] Uh, he’s a super nice guy and I felt bad for him because he’d jumped through all the hoops to do the paperwork to be there legally and whatnot. And I was like, company, apartment, company car. I’m a tourist, you know? And he’s like, oh, they’re just gonna scare off you cowboys. He says, I got paperwork, I’m gonna stay here.
[00:21:56] And he want, he was, uh, having problems with his [00:22:00] partner and he loved, you know, I had a, a better seed place really. So he said, I’d love to buy your place if you’re, if you’re scared off. I said, it’s like you buy it then. So I sold at my place and I went south and then like a month or two later, he was the only guy that got locked up in this whole situation.
[00:22:16] And they put him in a Amnesty International condemned Dungeon, who was like 400 years old or something in Mendrisio And, uh, He that none of the Swiss people, they, they did a roundup in an investigation of like the hundred local companies and they hadn’t even heard of my company because we didn’t have a shop and we weren’t doing any retail or anything.
[00:22:40] Right. So the only reason they heard of us was because I’d caught this guy breaking in a few times and my lawyer said, oh, let me call the prosecutor and I’ll get the guy locked up because you caught this thief. And I’m like, caught him red-handed. I even beat him down a couple times. I’m like, I dunno what I’m gonna do with him this time.
[00:22:56] Like I, this is like the third time I’ve caught the guy red handed. [00:23:00] And he is like, he’s like, oh, I’ll get him, I’ll, I’ll talk to the prosecutor. And she’s like, oh, thanks for telling me I’ve ever heard of this company and I’m about to do a big investigation of all the cannabis companies. It was like, oh great.
[00:23:11] So we literally just shot ourselves in the foot with, so that was. We could have stayed on and, you know, pushed it. But at that point we were kind of just getting fed up with the scene and just said, you know what, whatever, we just stockpiled the seeds. We’ll close up shop for now. And, you know, sold the facility.
[00:23:30] So it wasn’t a loss to walk away from it or anything. So it was, uh, Just good timing, but I felt really bad for Scotty there. His what a drag. He was the only guy even in that damn prison, but he was also the only person arrested. And it was only because he was a foreigner. None of the Swiss people, like they got hauled in for interviews or whatever, but, and they, they didn’t come in like throw cuffs on anybody they you up and say, come in for an interview.
[00:23:56] So it wasn’t like they rated places. They ju they’re very, it was [00:24:00] very civilized, way they went about it. But I just said, well, you know, I don’t need the, the headache. I, I was here because we’re able to do it wide open and legal. We were getting refunds on our employee taxes because we were, uh, classified as a export manufacturer, which it means if you ac manufacture something and export over 70%, they give you big tax refunds there.
[00:24:22] And we had like 97% of our sales were export. Very few people actually bought them in the Switzerland. So, Went to. Go ahead Brian. No, you go. I was gonna say,
[00:24:33]Kellan Finney: so I have two questions. How long did, uh, the individual have to, to spend in that, uh, medieval dungeon?
[00:24:39]Breeder Steve: Got he still there? I think he’s, no, he’s not . Oh.
[00:24:43] I think he, but I think he did about eight months, I think. Oh yeah. I, I remember sending him a letter from Spain because I felt, you know, just so bad for him because, you know, he hadn’t hurt anybody. He hadn’t done anything wrong. We’re, none of us are in favor of these, [00:25:00] you know, prohibition tactics. It’s just a nightmare.
[00:25:03] But I felt so bad for him and, um, I just felt like I’d gone away with something. Cause I was sitting on the beach in the south of Spain and he’s sitting in a dungeon getting bread and water and, and I just felt so bad for him cuz we were doing the same thing and what we were doing was legal. But because you’re a foreigner, you don’t get treated the same there.
[00:25:21] So you, you know, , I, I was glad I. Picked up steaks when I did for sure. So you dodged the, the bullet
[00:25:30]Kellan Finney: and then you’re hanging out in the south of Spain. What made you think be like, okay, you know, I’m gonna give this, I’m jumping back in.
[00:25:37]Breeder Steve: What, what was that thought process like? , I, I didn’t jump back in. What I did actually was, uh, my, I had my first child born in Switzerland and my second one conceived in Spain.
[00:25:47] But the Spanish moms were, or the British moms were scaring my wife about the Spanish hospitals since he’s like, I don’t wanna give birth in Spain, I wanna go back to Canada. And we really loved bc We had most of our friends out [00:26:00] in BC and uh, she said, well, you got to pick The last time we moved, she, I’d really like to move back to BC.
[00:26:05] And I said, well, I’m fed up with cannabis for now anyway, so, and we got into drinking wine when we were in Europe. So he said, let’s go back to bc I’ll take the course on winemaking. If I try some local wines that I liked, then we’ll stay and make a winery. So for 15 years I made wine and, and just was a hobbyist again, you know?
[00:26:25] That’s awesome. So, so then, but it’s a parallel universe and part of it was, you know, it’s a, I always thought I said it’s a parallel universe of growing and crafting flavorful intoxicants with some health benefits, . So, so I thought, yeah, this is so fun and I love being outside. I love drinking good wine.
[00:26:47] And I was, went over to. Europe, more of a beer and whiskey guy, or beer and rum guy. But I got into drinking wine over there cause there were so many good lunches and dinners where my European friends or [00:27:00] partners or customers were really into good wine and they take me wine touring at Burgundy and stuff like that.
[00:27:05] So I got really juiced in it and I was like, oh, this is fun. And I said, I could do this until cannabis lightens up again elsewhere. And then I can come back to cannabis and it’ll be a good little sabbatical because you’re still growing something for the flavor, you know? So there’s just a world of parallels and it’s really.
[00:27:26] An eyeopener. I felt like I gained, like, I felt like my cannabis experience gave me a huge leg up in wine, but my wine experience coming back also gave me a big leg up in cannabis. And even studying sensory evaluation classes and things like that, like, you know, the wine industry’s a little more evolved that way than cannabis had been because you couldn’t have, you know, fu Maiers or Ganjiers Right. You had sommeliers but you didn’t have these other ones. Right. So I think, um, you know, cannabis is playing catch-up in that [00:28:00] regard and it’s a good, uh, so much of it’s applicable either way, you know, to as far as tasting goes and blind tasting and all that. So, and obviously with cannabis there’s a lot more.
[00:28:14] To the buzz how, how the buzz is affected because of the entourage effect. And I think to a lesser degree, there’s that in alcoholic beverages. Like some people go crazy when they drink tequila, you know what I mean? Some people are like, I can drink anything except tequila, but that just makes me go fighting or whatever.
[00:28:30] So I think there’s a lesser degree of that in, in the alcohol world, but in cannabis it’s really integral to the experience. And I really thought, um, It can’t hurt, you know, and do something non-controversial while the kids were young. By the time my kids are teenagers and they’re puffing their own in high school and they’re like, dad used, you know, they, then they realized Dad used to grow a fields of weed.
[00:28:58] And I says, well, why [00:29:00] don’t you go back to, so the kids were very supportive by the time they were teens. They’re like, why don’t you keep doing that? And I was like, well, because it was a hassle, but now that it’s starting to open up, I’m going to keep my eyes open at the opportunities. And there was various incarnations of that in Canada and none of the.
[00:29:17] Programs really appealed to me. There was a M M A R, then there was the mm p r, then there’s the AC M P R, and then there was the Cannabis Act, and MMA R was about personal medical growth or designated grower. Then the mm p r was about commercializing medical cannabis, and they were even trying to get rid of the M M A AR growers, but that, you know, they ended up staying.
[00:29:45] And then the A C M P R kind of reflected that there was gonna be both. And then the Cannabis Act came out when it was about, uh, adult use, you know, so, The evolution of it’s been, you know, interesting to watch over the last 20 years. But at, [00:30:00] you know, even with the M M A R, it was kind of like the best case scenario.
[00:30:03] You’re gonna, they might give you a 300 plant license or something great, you know, and people were taking advantage of that, of course. And, and I don’t blame them for it, but it still was like, I wasn’t gonna contract it. I was just gonna plant 300 plants because as a breeder, you know, I’d wanna plant 10,000 of each line and I want to plant 20 lines.
[00:30:22] So if I, I might not finish 300 plants out of those, you know, cuz I call them constantly, you know, each transplanting, I probably kill 75, 80%. So if I start with 10,000. After I’ve done three transplanting to go put ’em in the field and look at ’em, I’ve already reduced the numbers drastically, you know?
[00:30:41] Yeah. So with breed breeding’s, a numbers game, and if you can’t use high populations, it’s just not as much fun and not as efficient, you know? And you can do good work on a small scale. And I always think of, you know, there’s exceptions to every rule, right? So you have, you know, Sam, the scout man, he would do 10,000 [00:31:00] seeds of each line and do a bigger scale, whereas DJ short making blueberry and that he’s working most of the years, he was doing it in a closet, you know, with one light.
[00:31:13] He had like a thousand watta flour in a 400 for veg, and it was just highly illegal. So I don’t, you can’t blame people that don’t want to get busted for having a bunch of weed and getting life in prison, right? Yeah. So, but he still was able to come up with distinctive work. on a small scale. So it can be done, you know, anybody can do it on as a hobby on any scale, but, but if you want to, you know, make the most of your time, you wanna do the, the biggest scale you can because you’re gonna have a better chance of finding the most impressive individuals.
[00:31:46] Right.
[00:31:47]Kellan Finney: So for our listeners at home that are interested in kind of learning like the very basics of breeding, can you kind of walk us through like the, the, the first step and like a, a small macro level of the steps that people would take, just as an example, so they can be familiar with, [00:32:00] with how it would.
[00:32:01]Breeder Steve: Sure. So you, you start all starts with seeds. You may collect cuttings as well, but you know, cuttings alone isn’t really a breeding program, let’s say, but you know, with feminizing you can do it, but it’s, let’s say DiUS plants, male and female, that’s what you need to use to breed real plants, you know, real females, if you just want hermis on hers after a while, just do feminized.
[00:32:26] You know, I’m not opposed to feminized, although I never released any at this point, you know, I still will probably, but I never released any feminized because I was al, I’ve just always been so against hermaphrodite. So anyways, the point, its, let’s say you have 10 packs of seeds and there’s 10 seeds in each pack, and you say, I’m gonna plant these out and pick my favorites, and maybe.
[00:32:52] Maybe there’s only two packs that you think, oh, these ones I really like, but the other ones, they weren’t my favorite. So don’t use them. You know, you really just have to [00:33:00] be exclusive, you know, and, and narrow it down to what excites you the most and, and what you’re going for in the plant. So if you’re looking for a certain flavor, then you wanna find that in both parents, you know, in the male and the female.
[00:33:14] And if you say you’re looking for a lemony plant, if you rub the stalks of that male, you’re gonna get a scent even before they’re flowering. And you might be able to say, okay, this male is easily the most lemony of the line. You know? So that’s probably your best pick. If, if lemon pot is what you’re after, if you want one with more color, take the one with more color.
[00:33:37] You know, it’s totally what you’re after. So, but an essential point is you’re gonna take a male and a female minimum. And the best thing is if you can take more than one female. or more than one male because if you just have, say, one brother and sister, that’s gonna start getting inbred. So with line [00:34:00] breeding, so you’d have the first filial generation is your f1.
[00:34:04] So you’d have a male plant and a female plant, and that F1 could be an F1 hybrid. If they came from different genotypes, you know, the um, F two, you’re gonna see lots of different recombination. But by the F three, assuming the parents were anywhere close to stable to begin with, which is a big stretch these days, you can start to see some, uh, stability in the F three.
[00:34:29] Now, if you’ve been keeping two lines, say you had two sisters and one male, then you’ve kept them two lines going like this. Every third generation, you cross those back and that is how the basis of line breeding, you know, so if you’re. Maintaining some vigor in it because if you just keep doing that 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, you know they’re gonna start getting inbred.
[00:34:55] You’re gonna lose vigor. Um, [00:35:00] You know, some plants that might take you more generations than three to stabilize ’em because they’re poly hybrids of poly hybrids. And it, it takes a while to sort that out. Another strategy, which I believe I was the first using in cannabis, I don’t recall seeing it on anybody else’s catalog, was back crossing.
[00:35:17] So I would do, for example, with that, uh, grapefruit because it was a clone only, I wanted to make a stable version of seed of it. So I wanted to cross it with something that was very different as a backboard. So I used the blueberry mail, that was a fantastic mail I founded in 90, summer of 96. And that mail was, so, the stock was solid purple.
[00:35:41] Right? It was absolutely solid purple on the stock in, in branches. Whereas the grapefruit is more green and striated, you know, you get the red lines on it. Yeah, the candy canes. Those are striations. So, . Um, when I’m growing them out, if I find a male that’s purple, it’s not the one to use for the back [00:36:00] cross.
[00:36:00] If I find a male with the striations and it smells like grapefruit, that’s the male I want to use for the back cross. So that’s taking the sun back to the mother and you do that once. It’s a back cross. You do that twice, you’ve squared it. The third time you’ve done that, you’ve cubed it. That was a sweet two, three was a cubed grapefruit.
[00:36:20] So it’s the third back cross to grapefruit. Now those seeds, they were amongst, if not the most homozygous cannabis seeds out there. Cuz before that skunk number one was the only one that was noted as being homozygous and. There was even some debate about that, but I think it, I, I mean, I felt skunk was, you know, if you had the real thing, it was a very recognizable thing.
[00:36:46] Anything can fall apart a few generations in somebody else’s hands. It may not be the same, but I think when skunk number one came out, it was very distinct and recognizable and. And there was not like you were pheno hunting through it, they were pretty damn stable. Right. [00:37:00] And the Suite two three was like that.
[00:37:01] They were, I saw lots of times people walk into a room from seed or a greenhouse from seed and say, oh, which cutting is this? I say, it’s all from seed, man. What? No, they’re, there’s, they’re cutting. I know that they’re all from seed. You know, they just couldn’t believe it. Right? But it takes time to do that.
[00:37:17] And most people are just about crossing this and that as fast as they can and getting out that new, new, nobody takes any time to stabilize something. And people say, well, why would you do that? It’s so easy to, to make knockoffs and rip you off. I say, yeah, but everybody is making poly hybrids or poly hybrids.
[00:37:33] Somebody’s gotta put out a stable mail that people can use cuz they’ve all got a nice clone. Only that they would like to do the same process and stabilize seed it for their home use and whatnot. Give, you know, we gotta have some stable genetics in the world. So I just felt it was crucial to put out something knowing, yeah, I can get ripped off for it, whatever.
[00:37:55] You know, and you couldn’t protect your genetics back then. You had no plant breeder’s rights or anything. [00:38:00] Right. But in the other hand, we all want better grass in the world, and to help the home breeders by giving ’em something stable, they can, they don’t have to, you know, keep whatever they’re breeding, 50 50 sweet two, three, they can breed the sweet two, three out of it.
[00:38:14] It’s just having a stable backboard to use. Right. So anyway, that process was, uh, a lot of fun. And then later I see, you know, now there’s a lot more seed companies doing back crossing, which at the time there was, it was the only back cross stuff out there, you know? Yeah.
[00:38:33]Kellan Finney: For, for commercial operations, what is your opinion on like balancing, uh, like growing from seed versus
[00:38:40]Breeder Steve: tissue culture?
[00:38:43] Well, it depends on your, uh, technique. You know, what paradigm you’re growing in. If you’re in a horticultural paradigm for a lot of people, I think the tissue culture and, you know, asexual propagation is the current standard, right? That is the way to go. [00:39:00] But that is because the seed is not stable. So you can’t expect somebody to go plant a green, go back, that stability’s not stable, right?
[00:39:07] If you had stable fam seeds, then you might have, uh, you know, a possibility of doing your commercial production without mothers in cuttings because, and just like with seeds, and you have to remember, or planting hemp, the real hemp farming to me isn’t transplanting clones into a field, you know, it’s taken a seed drill and laying down a blanket of hemp, you know, and.
[00:39:35] And that’s how, you know corn is produced. And a lot of these commercial crops like cannabis is a grain crop. You know, when you think about it, you, you can grow it just like a grain crop. And people think, oh, but cannabis is too branchy. And that’s simply the spacing. You know, if you do high density planting, it doesn’t have any branches, it just grows single coals, right?
[00:39:56] Because you’ve got a hundred seeds in a square meter, so there’s no [00:40:00] room to grow branches. And I do love that high density planting style that is common in use for hemp. And because it’s, but obviously if people are paying $2 a femme seed, they can’t afford to blanket, you know, a field with a ton of seeds.
[00:40:16] You need to have silos of seeds. If you wanna plant it like corn and harvest it like corn and make it for the price of corn oil, you have to be in the. Agricultural paradigm where it’s mechanized agriculture. And you think about it, you could, you know, maybe you wanna modify the combines, not to trash the herb too much, but if you’re making extracts you can
[00:40:40] As long as it is more a factor of time than careful handling. If you can get soil to oil in under an hour, you know you’re ahead of the game. That’s, you know, for live resin or live rosin, it’s really a question of how fast can you get that stuff outta the plant, you know? [00:41:00] So I think there’s a lot to be said, and I think we’re gonna see more mechanized agriculture because hemp is cannabis.
[00:41:08] You know, cannabis is hemp, and if you want to knock out, you know, vats of diamonds and sauce, or vats of rosin, the chances are you’re not gonna need everybody out there cutting it by hand. And, you know, hanging them up and putting them in. I don’t know. It’s just, uh, thinking about it more at industrial scale, cuz industrial cannabis could be a thing.
[00:41:33] Like if there wasn’t the THC phobia in the regs right? Then you could get hash from a hempfield, you could still, you know what I mean? There’s. There’s so much potential for the plant to be, you know, tri cropped even. You could use it for three different things in the same crop. So you could have, even if I’m making a seed crop, let’s say I’ve got a successful cross that I’ve tested out.
[00:41:55] I like it for my local area, and I think, okay, I wanna start producing a [00:42:00] thousand hectares a month of this seed. I need to start making 10 hectares a month, or one hector a month of fem seed to be able to plant that many, right, right. So you’ve got, first you’ve gotta acclimatize to where you’re growing and have the chemo type you want.
[00:42:16] Maybe I want a high th hcv, which is really common to tropical equatorial types. You know, you don’t get t h CV in the auto so much, right? Because they’re high latitude. They’re just a different plant type. So, If, um, you want to go to town and really produce, even with G M P meds, and this is something my company in Columbia lobbied for, uh, against control union or two control union.
[00:42:45] They’re the ones that control whether something’s GMP or not. Right? So, I mean, it took us three years to get G A C P, which is good agricultural collection practices, and your crop needs that before it can go into a [00:43:00] GMP or E U G MP processing facility. So the first stage is that the crop passed that well in the cannabis medicinal cannabis regs in G M P they originally said, No outdoor, it has to come from a facility because you can’t have bird fly over and poop on the flowers or something.
[00:43:18] Right. Okay. I get that for flower, but I wouldn’t accept that for extracts. And I told the lawyers to repeat three words. Poppies, poppies, poppies, you know, and they had the cave because there’s E U G M P, poppy production, right? That they make all these, all the pharmaceutical opioids come from fields of poppies, not greenhouses, not warehouses, fields.
[00:43:46] They say, yeah, if you can do fields of. Poppies that are EU GMP meds, then we can do fields of cannabis extracts that are EU G MP meds. So I’m trying, you know, I’ve worked really hard. I don’t know if we’ll be the first, [00:44:00] but I’m trying to be the first one, crossing that paradigm into industrial cannabis with the certifications and be able to crash the price of meds.
[00:44:09] Cuz right now, if you look at live rosin or live resin, these are treats for rich people. You know, if I give a cart with some diamonds and sauce in a cart to a street person, you should see the smile on their face. You know, and , I’ve done this in, you know, developing worlds and you and you, and they’re like, yes, Hollywood weed, Hollywood weed.
[00:44:30] Like, they can’t believe it. They’ve never seen it. And they, and you think the, it’s good meds for everybody. You know, it shouldn’t be a hundred bucks a gram if, if you can make it cheap and have this stuff going out for the price of peanut butter. that’s doing a service. You know, like, yes. I feel like the meds for the masses have kind of been my theme with that.
[00:44:49] That I wanna make affordable meds that are meds for the masses, and I want to give them that high grade experience for the price of aspirin so that, you know, anybody can experience it. [00:45:00] And not to say that people won’t keep making great stuff on port, a cultural scale, that’s absolutely fine. You know, not every, not the best winery is necessarily the biggest winery.
[00:45:10] Right? Great. So that’s fine. But you can still do quality at scale and it’s just a constant striving, right, where you’re trying to keep raising the bart. It’s very easy. For me, it’s, it’s too easy to say, oh, I can make, you know, six star, you know, ice wax from my indoor, okay, yeah, I can do that. Anybody can do that.
[00:45:32] It’s easy, especially if you can sell at a first world pricing, you know? But let’s see how, how close to that you can get and s and get it made for the poorest people in the world, you know? Because 99% of the people are never gonna get that ice wax from your indoor, you know? That’s great. It’s a treat for rich people.
[00:45:50] That’s beautiful. But let’s see how good we can get it for the poor people,
[00:45:54]Kellan Finney: you know? Yeah. I think that’s really well said. So I want to kind of take it back to the genetics. Obviously you’ve seen your hand, your, your [00:46:00] handful of genetics. Is that what inspired the living library of genetics?
[00:46:04]Breeder Steve: Well, the living library is, uh, uh, uh, a long-term project at this point where I started with a million seed search and I invited, you know, supporters to contribute seeds in the, in my.
[00:46:19] Thing was you want to contribute seeds for me getting back, going again. Let’s look at everything together. So anybody that contributes welcome to come and join in. Also have, uh, other academics or journalists or aficionados are welcome to join. So I’m doing them in different locations. The next one happening is January.
[00:46:43] In the Plains of Columbia, Los Janos, and that’s with a company I co-founded down there called Medcan. And we started that a little over six years ago. So in the next round in Medcan, there’s 375 different sessions [00:47:00] and some of those will be aligned. That’s just a clone, but most of them have been planted from thousands of seeds.
[00:47:06] So you can do some pheno hunting within each of those 375 sessions. So you’re really looking at plants from very high populations. I have 60 acres fenced for seed wear down there, right, with two armed guards, 24 7. So I think it’s a great opportunity for people that are really into it to come and see.
[00:47:31] And select themselves any plants they want because we do formal registration of the genetics and then we export them with phytosanitary certificates to legal countries. So we license genetics to Spain and Canada right now, and that’ll expand the, and then those are for royalties, typically. But the, uh, the, think of the beauty of walking into a field that’s on the equator.
[00:47:55] So you can have equatorial stuff, but it’s in the height of the dry season [00:48:00] when everything finishes in the rainy season, most of the Afghani stuff won’t finish right. But in the dry season, everything finishes rock hard to its potential. It’s super fun to see. And you can go through the blocks and say, okay, I’m gonna spend the morning walking up and down African lines.
[00:48:18] Then I’m gonna spend the afternoon walking up and down Asian lines. Then I’m gonna go to the Indian section. So we’ve got. Land, race and heirloom stuff from all over the world. We’ve got all the new, new stuff that you can think of, and then we’ve got hybrids between them, you know, so you’ve got Santa Marta gold crossed with slime cookies and you know, all these fun things.
[00:48:42] So, you know, it’s just a real, to me that’s the absolute joy of it, is to walk in the fields and make the selections. And as far as having the assistance of Mother Nature in external pressures, like you said, the natural selection’s a pitch, right? So , I like, I like, I [00:49:00] like doing these, um, selection runs, not just in the dry season.
[00:49:03] I do them in, in ending in the rainy season as well because under a research license that I’m doing, the selection runs under, I can’t use any of that for medical production. It’s all gotta be destroyed. So I might have, you know, 10 acres of selections and then, you know, promising plants. We’ll get tagged.
[00:49:25] They’ll get sampled for the lab cuz we have onsite, we have really nice lab and um, so we’ll go through and study all our favorites, but at the end of the day it just comes down to cutting them, weighing them and wet drying them. And we don’t even dry them. Like with cold we just, you can hang ’em in the sun cuz it’s only about the weight for the government to show them that we’ve taken all the weed that we grew, that we’ve taken this much off for a few for samples and then they come out and watch us burn it all in a big, beautiful bonfire.[00:50:00]
[00:50:00] So you think you’re crying out loud, you know there’s just such a waste to have to burn all that cannabis. But cuz you sometimes it’s this really like, incredible stuff, , but you gotta just pile it all up. It’s, it’s a bit painful. Cause originally we had hoped to donate it to the university and then we could do some, you know, extraction.
[00:50:22] Run trials and partly to train the people, the technicians working on the extractions. Cuz I want to train them in the different types of extractions, right? Yep. So I wanna use that stuff and then say, at the end of the day, even if it’s just reduced to a basic distillate for the university to set up, you know, uh, trials with, they do clinical trials and preclinical trials and that they just need the raw material.
[00:50:45] You know, if they’re making a topical and they just want some THC distillate to work on their arthritis topical or whatever, why can’t we just give it to them, you know? But no, the way it is, it’s very strict, the regs, there’s not an adult use scenario at the [00:51:00] moment in Columbia, and there hadn’t been a huge push for a long time because since I think the nineties, maybe even the eighties they had, uh, in their constitution, everybody’s allowed 20.
[00:51:12] So that’s pretty sweet. You know, not too many countries are letting everybody have 20 plants for the last several decades, you know? So I, that was something that made me feel good. Cause I never wanted to go and operate somewhere. It was a captive market situation where the people aren’t allowed to grow their own.
[00:51:26] They have to buy it from the big company, you know? And me, I want them to buy it because they want it, not because they have to, you know? You know, I want to compete with themselves. You know, you could grow your own, but you’d rather buy mine. So, you know. Right. That’s either way I’m happy, you know, I’m happy if they grow their own.
[00:51:43] I’m happy if they wanna buy ours. But, uh, there’s a very complicated system in Columbia of quotas called Copos in Spanish Los Matos cups. So you have to apply for quota to plant anything that’s gonna have over 1% T H C [00:52:00] C B N combined. So they, you know, you don’t need a cooper for growing hemp, but most hemp isn’t acclimatized to the equator.
[00:52:07] So it’s kind of . You gotta hybridize it with native stuff so that it works in those conditions. But you need a quota every generation, and sometimes they, you have to wait a few months up to six months between generations. I mean, as a breeder, that’s just, you know, I’ve beaten my head against the wall.
[00:52:28] Like I can’t wait six months to plant the next generation because some bureaucrat hasn’t signed some, you know, gimme a break, you know? So, and this brings me to where I’m happiest working right now is a project I have in Thailand, which is unrelated to med can, but it’s, uh, Thailand has come a long way.
[00:52:45] And I’ve started there with a hemp license about two and a half years ago. And then this June, they basically descheduled. So they didn’t, it wasn’t like they imposed a bunch of eggs on it, they just descheduled basically for the flower. So [00:53:00] extracts, you’d still have to be a license processor and the extracts could only be sold with a prescription through a pharmacy.
[00:53:08] Whereas if you’re breeding, you don’t need a quota. You don’t even need to destroy the flowers because you. because there’s no law against selling flowers, you know, so it’s just, they might as well be tomatoes. It’s just great. It’s so, it’s so workable and we’re not even selling flowers. I don’t care. It’s just that I don’t need the quota to keep planting more seeds every generation.
[00:53:31] Cause if you’re losing half your time to waiting for permission, you know, it’s too expensive, you know, to, to deal like that. So I’m really, really a lot happier working in Thailand than Columbia at the moment. But to be fair, um, they’ve passed, I think four readings now, and I think they have to do eight, but they’re, they’re overwhelmingly passing for an adult use regime in Columbia.
[00:53:54] So there will be wide open dispensaries where any adult can walk in and [00:54:00] buy any form of cannabis they want. Theoretically, you know, that’s not officially yet, but it’s by March, that should be in play. And Columbia is a fantastic place to visit and tour as a tourist. It’s got, uh, It’s reputation as an unsafe place is really outdated.
[00:54:18] It’s not the safest place in the world, but there’s really different regions within Columbia and the safest parts of Columbia. If you look on like the, I think US Department of , foreign Affairs, or I don’t know what the hell they call it, but I was looking on some website and they give like Santa Marta in certain tourist areas like that.
[00:54:41] The same rating is Belgium for safety. Yeah. So if you’re not afraid to go to Belgium, don’t be afraid to go to Santa Marta. You know, it’s, it’s really fine. There’s other parts of the country that you are an idiot to go. If you’re a tourist, you’re just asking for trouble, you know, and there’s places in between.
[00:54:59] So [00:55:00] you’ve basically got Red Zones, yellow zones, and green zones. And if you stay in those green zones, You’re probably not gonna have any trouble, you know, if you’re stumbling around really drunk at night, flashing some wads or something, you’re gonna get jacked. You know, like, but that could happen to you in LA or anywhere else.
[00:55:19] Right? You know, you just, if you’re asking for trouble, you’ll find it . If you, if you just there to have fun and, you know, go out and see the beaches or go fishing or go for a hike, you’re gonna have a great time. And it’s really fantastic. The people are overall super friendly and, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell anybody to go there for an amazing holiday.
[00:55:41] And for me, the natural world is the, the nicest thing traveling and, and Columbia’s got so much packed into such a small area coming from Canada, you know, you’re like, there’s 11 climactic zones in this one little country and they drastically vary from mountaintop [00:56:00] glaciers to ocean front deserts. And they’ve got the Amazon and they’ve got the cloud for us.
[00:56:05] So, you know, they’ve got the planes where, you know, they’ve got all these different zones where you see different plants, different animals, different birds. There’s amazing amount of birds and orchids and fruit. Even I’ve been going six and a half years, I still find fruit on every trip that I haven’t tried before.
[00:56:21] Wow, that’s incredible. It’s amazing. It is amazing just to go around these old farms and see. Like Indi, there’s a lot of indigenous fruits, you know, that don’t grow anywhere else. You know, it’s amazing to go try these things because they’re flavors you don’t know. And for me, it’s all about loading up the organoleptic memory so that you have that recall.
[00:56:44] So if. If somebody says, oh, that bud smells like grape, what does it smell like? Concord grapes? Or does it smell like Thompson seedless? Like if you don’t know grapes, what is the grape smelling? You just say, okay, it smells like grape. But if you could differentiate, same with cherries. Does it, [00:57:00] is it have a bit of sourness, like a morelo cherry, or is it a bean cherry?
[00:57:03] You know, you know, cherries are different. Apples are different. You could say, oh, this smells like red apples. This smells like yellow apples. This smells like green apples. That’s a start. But you know, there’s levels to this shit, right? So the, your organoleptic memory is where you store this information and everybody has one, but not everybody has it developed to the same level.
[00:57:23] And it’s really about recall. Like you might say, I know exactly what a raspberry smells like and tastes like, but you don’t notice it in things always. Whereas some of us, you know, you take, oh, that’s totally raspberry. You know, you notice it right away. But other people are like, oh, that, you know, I see it lots of times and.
[00:57:42] It’s a blessing and a curse to have a good sense of smell and a good palate because stuff that doesn’t smell good or tastes good, , it’s very aggravating. You know, , if you’ve got a heightened sense of smell, it’s, you know, when you’re smelling great stuff, it’s glorious. And when you’re smelling bad stuff, it’s wretched, you [00:58:00] know?
[00:58:00] So I find myself occasionally cursing the good nose. I was born with , but it’s, I have a lot of fun with it overall and you know, it’s been not just a, a pleasure in my life, but I always said my life would’ve been so much simpler if I was happy drinking box wine and smoking brick weed, you know? Yeah. But if I liked drinking fine wine and eating fine food and smoking proper, you know, good cannabis, you know, that’s drives you to try harder to.
[00:58:30] Either acquire these things or produce them, you know? Yeah. And at some level, when you’re saying, Hey, this $500 wine’s delicious, but can I make one for 10 or 20 ? You know, surely these don’t have to be 500 bucks. You know? So there’s people that aren’t happy. If they’re not spending 500 bucks on a bottle of screaming Eagle Cabernet from Napa or something, that’s fine.
[00:58:54] I would rather pursue the art of crafting it than, [00:59:00] you know, just have fun tickets to keep buying it. It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with having money to buy these treats, , but it’s, to me, there’s a greater satisfaction in producing them yourself, you know? Yeah,
[00:59:11]Kellan Finney: absolutely. Steve, I wanna take you on a quick rapid fire.
[00:59:15] All right. The seed you are most
[00:59:17]Breeder Steve: known for. Ooh, I would have to say ishka. I think
[00:59:23]Kellan Finney: your all time personal favorite seed.
[00:59:28]Breeder Steve: Hmm.
[00:59:31] Honestly, it was probably the parent of my tropical treat, which later became Tropicana, and that is pure Santa Margold. I think Pure Santa Margold is really my favorite. If I had to pick one to take to the desert island, hands down the, the best version I had of Santa Marta Gold was in the nineties. And I’ve strive to restore it from the Degradated versions I find of it now.
[00:59:58] But to me the, [01:00:00] that’s kind of my holy grail strain is the, that’s strain. We can’t say strain anymore, guys. That’s only for viruses, right? Only virus. There’s only strains of viruses. There’s not strains of cannabis. There’s cultivars and the sessions and hybrids, but there’s no strains of cannabis. And I think, uh, Cannabis is a funny plant.
[01:00:19] This way. We’ve had the, it developed our own lingo and often it’s not always that accurate and sometimes it’s very understandable. If you think of when you see the pollinator machine, right? Was the pollinator machine was to make hash, right? But hash is illegal. So it’s for collecting Poland. You can collect Poland in these things, right?
[01:00:42] And then in the coffee shops, they would call it pollen or P O L M in, in Dutch, but that’s Poland. It’s because of the equipment was sold for pollen making, not because hashes pollen, you know, but it just became known as that it is just we this, and then everybody’s [01:01:00] calling drye keefe. Whereas you know, if you’re in Morocco, Keith is um, a pouch that’s got a mixture of hash tobacco and weed chopped up in a pouch and they dipped their little pipe in.
[01:01:14] It’s called a subsea. And that’s a kef pipe is the subsea. And they smoke their kef through that. It’s not, it’s not straight hash, you know, that’s, but anyways, the, the world thinks of keif as streif and I, I always like, okay, whatever. Sorry I interrupted your rapid fire though.
[01:01:31]Kellan Finney: It’s alright. What’s your most knocked off
[01:01:33]Breeder Steve: seed?
[01:01:35] I would easily sweet tooth or shuka berry easily.
[01:01:41]Kellan Finney: Has there been a, a seed or a cross breeding of two seeds that have evaded you throughout your lifetime? ?
[01:01:49]Breeder Steve: Well, there’s lots I haven’t done, but there’s, uh, there are definitely ones that got away that I regret not, uh, either not seeding or not passing around, cutting stuff.
[01:01:59][01:02:00] I’ve had, you know, the things that I didn’t share, I lost the things that I shared. I can always get back. And I learned that a long time ago where I said, oh, like the first time I found sterile females, these are plants with no pistols, so you can cover them in pollen and they won’t make seed. You can grow, you know, 10 acres of sensimilla in the middle of a thousand acres of ham, and there won’t be a seed in it, you know?
[01:02:22] But I didn’t share those cuttings and I lost them. I’ve learned to recreate them, and now I’m applying that to other lines. But for the cross that I haven’t done, I don’t know what that would be. There’s, you know, there’s certainly endless permutations of what that could be, but I could, I can’t answer that.
[01:02:40] I’m sorry. . That’s fine.
[01:02:42]Kellan Finney: Uh, what is one fact you have learned about breeding that would shock or surprise others?
[01:02:54] I wish I
[01:02:55]Breeder Steve: had a clever, clever response, but I cannot think of one. What’s the first
[01:02:59]Kellan Finney: thing that came to [01:03:00] mind? .
[01:03:02]Breeder Steve: I was still stoked. , nothing gave me, I thought the
[01:03:04]Kellan Finney: shoebox thing was pretty clever. I thought That’s awesome. Oh, okay. If I wanted to start growing at home, what is the number one mistake you think people make?
[01:03:15]Breeder Steve: Overwater. I think that, I think that’s the first mistake I’ve seen most people make is overwatering.
[01:03:22]Kellan Finney: That’s the first mistake I made when I bought a house plant in college. I was like, call my mom. I was like, she’s just drowned. Yeah, she’s just dying. And she’s like, how much are you water? I was like, every day
[01:03:30] She was like,
[01:03:32]Breeder Steve: I helped a lot of people grow their first plants and even where I live now, most of my neighbors are retired and uh, I’ve got quite a few of them growing up and down my street and it’s their first plants, but they’ve done really good cuz it’s mostly ladies that are really into gardening, you know?
[01:03:48] Yeah. So they haven’t had any issues, but I’ve seen it a lot of times where I tell people, they say what’s wrong with my plant? They send me pictures and it’s just drowning. You know? They say Stop watering it. . That’s usually [01:04:00] the first mistake.
[01:04:01]Kellan Finney: I’m gonna take a step, I’m gonna take a stab at it this summer off to reach out.
[01:04:05] Yeah,
[01:04:05]Breeder Steve: go for it man. Happy to help you along. I’m gonna
[01:04:08]Kellan Finney: get Peter, Steve to get my back. I think I’ll be successful.
[01:04:10]Breeder Steve: You’ll, you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. I, I mean, I’ve been so stoked to see first timers around my neighborhood that are retired ladies that are just killing it, I’m sure. And they’re growing like their first plants on grandpa’s breath or some, you know, modern genetics and they’re like, ever, it probably is the best weed you ever had.
[01:04:29] But yeah, you can’t go back once you, once you, you know, get a taste for growing your own, it’s pretty hard to stop because you don’t really have the same level of satisfaction outta something that just came from a store as something that came off your back porch or something, you know? Yeah, that’s a good point.
[01:04:45]Kellan Finney: That’s perfect. When you started your journey in the cannabis space, what did you get? Right, and most importantly, what did you get wrong?
[01:04:53]Breeder Steve: Well, I, it’s a good question. I think the thing I got right was, [01:05:00] Just, just doing it, you know, where it didn’t have any shame about it. I knew I could get in trouble for it, but I felt like I just had the conviction that I was willing to stand up and do what was right. I mean, I had C N N come to my garden where I had 1500 plants in my backyard in Vancouver before medical or anything, right?
[01:05:23] So I mean, I was going out on a limb with no shame, and part of that was, What really stood me in good stead was I had no shame about doing it. I just had the conviction that I felt, you know, indignant about being prevented from doing it. So it was really the mindset that you could do it, you know? So that was what I got right, was the mindset to just go ahead and do it.
[01:05:47] What I got wrong was probably being too trusting and often I, you know, in, in any kind of business that can be a setback for you if you’re, you know, you have faith in people to [01:06:00] treat you the way you wanna treat them. You know that you wanna be treated the same way you’d like to treat others, and that world’s just not like that.
[01:06:06] So, , it’s not specific to cannabis, but I always say my biggest mistake if you ask my wife, is that I’m too trusty . I know that one.
[01:06:14]Kellan Finney: Yeah, they’re always right. I hope she’s listening and she heard that so, so Steve, for our listeners, they wanna get in touch and they wanna buy some of your seeds. Can they still do that?
[01:06:25]Breeder Steve: At the moment, no, but they, well, they can, uh, get in touch and when I have seeds ready for my new release, I’ve been working on stuff the last few years. I expect over the next year I’ll be doing my first releases in close to 20 years. So that’ll be, that’ll be exciting. But go breeder steve.com and if you’re signed up for the newsletter there, you’ll be sure to hear about it.
[01:06:49] I’ve, I’ve had that site up now for maybe four years or something and I’ve never sent out a newsletter. So , you’re not gonna get spa I promise. But if you do wanna know what happens [01:07:00] with new releases or any new projects, that’s where I’ll be putting it out there.
[01:07:04]Kellan Finney: Awesome. We’ll link those up in the show notes.
[01:07:06] Thanks for taking the time.
[01:07:07]Breeder Steve: Hey, thanks for having me guys. You have a beautiful weekend. You as.
