6 Tips and 4 Steps for Creating a Structured Cannabis Breeding Program

This article originally appeared in the December 2017 print edition of Cannabis Business Times. To subscribe, click here.

Breeding programs for almost any plant can be as simple or as complex as you choose to make them. Fortunately, you can quickly and effectively develop your own breeding program, even if you are a beginner. All it takes is a sharp eye for positive traits that you’re interested in developing and an accurate record-keeping system to track the usable crosses you’ve made, as well as the parental lines (male and female) that you’ve used.

Cannabis is dioecious (meaning the species includes separate female and male plants) as opposed to monecious (which means that an individual plant can have both male and female flowers). You need both male and female plants to begin a breeding program. TIP: It is imperative that you separate males and females from the beginning, and keep them separated throughout the program to ensure that you don’t get unwanted contamination by pollen from male plants that you have not selected to cross.

So how do you select breeding parents or parental lines to begin with? While it is relatively easy to select the female line, it can be difficult to select male lines for the following reasons:

• All the traits of interest on the female selection can be seen or documented, including: growth and development rates; flower characteristics such as size, quantity, smell and color; as well as potential for accumulating THC or CBD, and terpenes. This cannot be said of male plants.

• Male plants can only express growth and development traits visually. All other bud traits are hidden in their genetic makeup and are not expressed for selection. You can select for pollen sac size and density, but the data so far is inconclusive on how these traits translate to female flower size and density.

You can easily begin by selecting known female strains that have most or all the desired traits that you want expressed in any cross, and by selecting males that are derived from strains having other or stronger vegetative traits that you want incorporated into your new strain.

To read the full article in Cannabis Business Times' December issue, click here.

Top photo by Mel Frank