How to Select Quality Genetics: Do’s and Don’ts From Cannabis Industry Veterans

While securing a license, building out a facility, establishing a team and outlining a business plan are all major milestones on the journey to launching a cannabis business, selecting quality genetics is also an important—and perhaps daunting—step that all cultivators must take.

At Cannabis Conference 2022, Dave Holmes, founder of California-based Clade⁹, and Ashley Hubbard, director of cultivation for Michigan-based Rair Cannabis, shared their top tips for choosing what to grow.

“You’re never going to have a preset menu,” Hubbard said. “These skills that you can learn on how to select genetics … are going to be helpful because you can and you will have to bring new strains into your company. So, if you can find some metrics that work for you, it’s helpful because you’re going to want to grow new things to stay relevant in the industry.”

Genetic selection has become increasingly critical for business success as competition continues to heat up in the industry, Holmes said.

“It’s become a lot more important as the market’s become more competitive, so make sure you do your homework,” he said. “If you’re launching a new operation from the ground up, whatever market you’re in, do your homework [and] do your research because you want to make sure you get off on the right foot. You’re going to make mistakes, there’s no doubt about it, but try to do as much research and talk to as many other cultivators as possible before you launch.”

Here, Holmes and Hubbard share some do’s and don’ts for selecting quality genetics.

DO: Find what works for your facility and SOPs.

Genetics should fit into a grower’s existing cultivation facility, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and other systems, the speakers said—not the other way around.

“It really goes back to, you have your facility, you have what you have when you build it, and so [with] your genetic selection, you have to find what works in your system,” Hubbard said. “You have to find also what works for your process. Our processor, she needs a certain strain from us to produce certain SKUs.”

Genetic selection will also depend on whether a cultivator grows indoors, in a greenhouse or outdoors.

“It’s very dynamic and it depends on what you’re doing,” Holmes said. “If you’re an indoor grower, you might select a certain set of genetics. … If you’re doing two-tier indoor versus HPS [lighting] with a 12-foot ceiling, you’ll probably select a little bit different.”

Outdoor growers may be more focused on growing flower that will be extracted, he added, in which case distillate yield may be more important than genetic variety, for example.

“If you’re growing [in a] greenhouse and you’re doing a mixed batch, you’re going to need a more diverse strain menu in your repertoire,” Holmes said.

DO: Give consumers what they want.

It may sound obvious, but Holmes and Hubbard both stressed the importance of growing cultivars that consumers actually want to buy, especially in an increasingly competitive market.

“It’s so competitive,” Holmes said. “We grow in California, and … it has to have the right color, it has to test high potency, … it can’t have too many nugs in the jar. Every single one of those things has to be on point because you’re fighting against 5,000 other brands for shelf space.”

Customers in California’s market are currently interested in high-THC flower with visual appeal that Holmes described as “super pretty-looking, super-trichomed-out purple bud,” and so that is what Clade⁹ has focused on growing.

“You’ve got to combine yield with marketability or salability,” he said. “You could grow something that yields 100 grams a square foot, but it might not sell at all. There’s stuff in California that I’ve seen that looks pretty decent, but it doesn’t sell.”

DO: Pay attention to regional differences.

Genetic selection is also regionally dependent, the speakers said, especially in outdoor operations.

“If you’re in a very damp environment, you might need to select a particular strain that is able to handle a little bit higher humidity,” Hubbard said, as an example.

DO: Make it a team effort.

Genetic selection should align with an operation’s overall business goals, Hubbard said, whether that’s producing CBD, or growing for fiber or oil extraction.

In addition, genetic selection should involve input from an operation’s whole team, as well as third-party vendors.

“As far as the retailers’ input and their voices, luckily for us, being vertically integrated, we have constant meetings every week [where we talk] about what’s moving, what’s not, how do we move these things, or this is what’s coming down the pipeline for three months from now,” Hubbard said. “It’s definitely a dance.”

At Clade⁹, Holmes and his team have a clone allocation meeting every two weeks.

“When we’re going to take clones for our flower rooms, we have the sales team on,” he said. “It’s a combination of the cultivation and sales and marketing [teams, asking them] … what’s hot right now? What are you hearing on this new [cultivar]? It has to be a group effort.”

DO: Focus on consumer education.

While consumers, overall, are becoming more experienced and nuanced in selecting cannabis products, most still make decisions based on cannabinoid—particularly THC—content, the speakers said.

“If there’s one thing I wish we could educate consumers on, it’s that cannabinoid and THC content do not denote quality,” Hubbard said. “When we’re thinking of how genetic selection in a state changes, as you bring new markets on and new customers and they get a little bit of experience trying these new things, you’ll see product lines change.”

A rapidly changing market means that cultivators must continually adapt based on consumers’ evolving preferences—while also considering the life cycle of a cannabis crop.

“One of the most challenging things is we’re working with a living organism, and it takes anywhere from four to 12 months to release a new strain,” Hubbard said. “So, [when you are] trying to make predictive guesses on, ‘Hey, I think this is going to be the next, newest strain,’ you might be eight months late.”

DO: Collect data.

Holmes and Hubbard both stressed the importance of collecting data on all things related to growing a particular cultivar.

“Find whatever works well for you, whether that’s writing it on a sheet of paper and scanning it in or building yourself a database,” Hubbard said. “As you’re going through and you’re introducing a new strain, there are a handful of different avenues or different departments that are going to have to deal with that strain along its lifecycle. For your propagator, how does it root? … How many moms do we need to keep? Does this require a specific nutrient regimen?”

She said the Rair team, for example, has analyzed cloning success based on which round of cuts the clones are from the mother plants. This has resulted in key insight that the second round of cuts off a new mother plant has the best rooting success.

Rair’s cultivation staff also uploads photos of a cultivar’s growth each week to document what the plant looks like at each stage of its life cycle.

“The amount of data you’re going to capture is going to be endless and you’re just setting yourself up for success and to make business decisions if you have data points,” Hubbard said.

Beyond using a robust system of data to determine which genetics perform best, data can also help growers understand where the genetics perform best.

“I have eight identical rooms, all with their own unique personalities,” Hubbard said. “They’ve all got their own microclimates and all of that. If I can take that and say, I’ve ran this strain in five different rooms and this one seems to correlate well to this room, then maybe my strategy is, I’m going to save that strain for this room.”

DON’T: Base decisions on cultivar names alone.

While certain cultivar names have become well-known and engrained in cannabis culture, Holmes and Hubbard said there are also very specific taste and flavor profiles that have become popular among consumers over the years.

“There are very specific flavor profiles that people gravitate toward, and if you can figure out what those are and grow those and grow them well, you’re going to sell product,” Holmes said.

This strategy has proved well for Clade⁹ since its launch, he added.

“What we did when we launched our brand [is] … instead of looking at all the different strain names out there, we started to look at, what are the flavor profiles of all these exotics that are really popular?” Holmes said. “If you look at sticking in a family of terpenes and effects as opposed to chasing strain names, it helps you dial in your selection a little bit.”

DON’T: Overextend your business.

In the four years since Hubbard entered Michigan’s market, Rair has narrowed its genetics down to only a few cultivars to both simplify its approach and optimize its crops.

“You want to get really good at growing fewer things,” she said. “You really want to dial in things you know you can manipulate and that work for your systems.”

DON’T: Rely on the indica/sativa/hybrid nomenclature.

Holmes and Hubbard said that while the industry as a whole is moving toward terpene-driven classifications rather than relying on the indica/sativa/hybrid classifications of the past, consumers are taking more time to catch up to the new nomenclature and way of thinking.

“I wanted to, when we were building Rair, think about, how do we market this a little bit differently?” Hubbard said. “How do we find the new indica and sativa classification? What we decided on was dominant terpene profiles. I think that’s a movement that you see the industry moving toward. For us, we wanted to educate our customers … on something that we feel is a little bit more predictive of your experience, which is terpene profiles.”

Holmes echoed this sentiment.

“Indica, sativa, hybrid was probably more useful 30 years ago when it was more regional, but everything is a hybrid that we consume at the retail store,” he said. “It’s not helpful anymore.”

That being said, Hubbard added that the indica/sativa/hybrid classifications are still useful for cultivators to help them know what a particular cultivar might look like morphologically as it grows.

DON’T: Consider only one factor.

When selecting genetics, Holmes and Hubbard said the decision must hinge on a variety of considerations, not just one factor.

Cultivators should evaluate a cultivar’s yield, potency, color, how it fits into packaging—and much more.

“You start to look into structural things you never had to think about,” Holmes said. “How many eighths does it pack? Can you put it into enough products to make it valuable? It could be 70 grams per square foot, but if only a certain percentage is packageable, then it doesn’t make as much sense as a strain that yields 60 grams per square foot but is really chunky and you can pack a lot more. So, there are a lot more hidden variables than there were before.”

Hubbard takes the same approach in her role with Rair, and also pays particular attention to how much flower is packageable and saleable.

“One of the metrics that we do is actual yielded biomass but also what we call saleable flower, so large, medium and small buds,” she said. “What are those ratios when we’re making some of those decisions?”

Of all the considerations, one of the most important is how well the cultivar ultimately sells, Holmes said.

“Sometimes you have to grow it and then try to package it to really learn, so to predict beforehand is really tough,” he said. “You’ll run a small section of phenotypes—they might be from seed [or] they might be from clone—and then, … I think you learn in production what the value of the strain is. But I think it’s the THC, the yield, the packageability, the aesthetic of it, and then the sell through at retail. It did all those things great but then it went to the store, and it sold slow. You don’t know until it’s at the store, so that’s when you’re like, OK, we’re really going to have to scale back on that one. We thought it had everything, but it didn’t move.”

DON’T: Compromise biosecurity.

When deciding between growing from seeds or clones, Holmes and Hubbard said there are benefits to both methods but that cultivators must be very careful with clones to ensure that they are free from pests and diseases that could spread to the rest of the facility’s plants.

“Seeds are more fun if you’re a breeder and like variation,” Holmes said. “But that’s the thing—you’re going to get tons of variations with seeds at this point and unless you’re selecting phenotypes, [you probably want] to start with clones that have been vetted, and vetted not just for performance but for diseases and pests and everything else under the sun.”

Hubbard said that Rair has tried growing from both seeds and clones over the years, but added that growers should start from seed when possible to protect biosecurity, ensure the genetics are compatible with the region and differentiate themselves from other cultivators.

“One of the challenges with clones is they’re going to be selective to your region,” she said. “Cannabis being federally illegal, it’s created 50 different islands of genetics. We can’t transmit things across state lines. For us, in the state of Michigan, we’re able to get clones through caregivers or from other licensed facilities. Well, there are only a handful of nurseries in the state of Michigan, and I’m sure every state is set up very much like that. So, you might be selecting strains that other cultivators are selecting because that’s what that nursery had at that time.”

If using clones from another operation, Hubbard said cultivators should quarantine them for at least two weeks to ensure they are free from pests and diseases.

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