feature
22
RE U T L U E C TISSU FUTURE & T H E A G AT I O N OP OF PR
WE ED SC IEN C E
leafmagazines.com
WALKING INTO CONCEPTION NURSERIES feels a bit like boarding the U.S.S. Enterprise. It’s astoundingly clean. And shiny. But instead of redshirts milling about pushing glowing buttons, the rooms at Conception’s Sacramento, Calif. facility are packed with bustling PhDs in lab coats and blue nitrile gloves, handling tiny little baby pot plants with the utmost care. Conception is a different type of Cannabis nursery. In its facilities in Oregon and California, it focuses on a science-based practice common in modern agriculture, but relatively new to the world of weed: Tissue culture. P R O PA G AT I N G A P L A N to pivot and scale quickly was critical for CEO Kevin Brooks chose to spearour business. We started looking at how head Conception after his time working other industries handled this and what the with the Connected and Cookies crews norm was in traditional agriculture, and it in the early lead-up to rec legalization really pointed to tissue culture for consistent in California. In those nascent days, the product and being able to give that predictcompanies had trouble finding ability that growers wanted.” regular supply of viable, A form of both disease disease-free plants for their remediation and massively cultivation operations. scalable plant propagation, “What we found was almost tissue culture offered a path every challenge we had traced forward. Through the tissue back to the mother room,” culture process, Brooks and his Brooks said. “First off, it’s team of science-minded plant very expensive real estate … biologists are able to clean and it was our main source out any diseases that genetic of pathogens. As bugs, pests lines have picked up along the and disease came through, it CEO KEVIN BROOKS way – restoring cultivars to their was almost always through the original glory. mother room. And it was a very difficult “These mother plants, over time, environment to scale up and down. For become tired,” he said. “They lose some companies that were consistently dropof their health and some of their vigor. ping new, cool, hype stuff – being able So part of what tissue culture does, is it
MAy 2022