Cannabis Terroir

How do you know if your Runtz was grown in Massachusetts? Or your Tropicana Cookies in Colorado or Blue Dream in California?

Historically agricultural products have benefited from their association with a place. The climate, the land, the culture… the terroir. Tomatoes from San Marzano, peaches from Georgia, Florida oranges or grapes from California. These crops are all grown in other places in the world but have a deep association with these specific locales.

Cannabis grown today is, well, pretty damn good. Indoor cultivation has allowed folks to maximize the genetic potential of the plant by providing a consistent, repeatable set of conditions. There is a downfall here though. Ironically, the very thing that has made cannabis so popular has inadvertently made it bland and undifferentiated.

This has led to a market that is primarily driven by two factors -

Genetics and potency.

It’s no surprise that there is a new “hot” strain every month. When each cultivar is an exact genetic copy growing in identical conditions and cured the same way you’re probably going to have the same result. This is where growers get schizophrenic. They want consumers to get excited about their cut of Cereal Milk, which actually might be special, but then they put it into a factory system devoid of any uniqueness. A couple of months down the line everyone else gets the genetics and the arms race starts all over again.

Then the benchmark becomes how potent can you make it, which we all know is a ridiculous game.

So what can producers do to differentiate themselves when everyone is using the same lights, the same nutrients and growing in essentially the same climatic conditions year after year?

This will be considered blasphemy but growing outdoors may very well be the saving grace of cannabis.

Right now cannabis is suffering from the inability to brand itself like its most commonly used analogy, wine. The indoor cultivation model does not allow us to differentiate cultivars based on time or place.

Vintages of wine from France in 1959 and 1982 or Napa Valley in 2014. The famed Chaunsa mango of Pakistan. Japanese Wagyu beef.  This is the stuff dreams are made of and all are based on conditions, environment and culture.

Future cannabis will undoubtedly be commercialized and industrialized. It’s already happening. It will take people to think outside of the box in order to create something special to survive. It will take people who recognize that a deeper partnership with the natural environment and the wisdom of this 4.6 billion year old lab, Earth, may very well be the key to unlocking the next great leap in cannabis cultivation.

OTHER NEWS

The Sea of Green podcast returns this Sunday! Episode 11 features Ryan Power of Atlas Seed. Ryan and his team are hell bent on revolutionizing how people think about cannabis genetics. His outlook is simultaneously old and new and something I think is sorely missing in today’s cannabis conversation. Stay tuned.

Design the difference, not the object

Thanks for reading,

d