Tuesday July 11th at 11am MDT - Ask Me Anything with Todd from CAN! Research

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We’re hosting an Ask Me Anything event on Tuesday July 11th, 2017 at 11am MDT with @Todd Dalotto from CAN! Research to answer your questions about cannabis research, breeding and education.

Click here to add the event to your Google Calendar or download and open this attachment to add to Outlook and other calendar programs. CAN_Research_Ask_Me_Anything.ics (1.3 KB)

CAN! Research provides consulting services and education on the horticultural science and public policy of cannabis. CAN!'s owner and lead consultant, Todd Dalotto is the most experienced cannabis consultant in Oregon, having been, until recently, the state’s only cannabis consultant for seventeen years, conducting cannabis horticultural research for nearly two decades, and earning a Horticultural Science degree from Oregon State University. CAN! serves clients in our home state of Oregon, as well as those nationally and abroad.

CONSULTING:
Horticultural Science – design & operation of licensed cannabis production facilities, specializing in Hoophouse Production Systems, cultural practices, employee training, and Crop Management Oversight Services.

Business Operation – technical input/review for business plans and other documents, authoring Standard Operating Procedures for producers & regulatory compliance

EDUCATION:
Cannabis Horticultural Science Course – 10-week certificate course, three terms per year, in Tigard, Oregon. Summer term begins July 13, 2017

Cannabis Hoophouse Production Course – 9-month course to educate, train, and guide licensed producers through and entire season of hoophouse production, from planning & construction, through to post-harvest processing

Numerous classes, workshops, presentations, and trainings. See website for offerings: www.CanResearch.net/education

RESEARCH:
Traditional breeding of inbred lines of high-THC and high-CBD cultivars

Growth, development, morphology, cultural practices, and mutualistic relationships of cannabis

CAN! Research, Education and Consulting - 541-752-9053 - www.CanResearch.net

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What are some of the more frequent questions you receive as a consultant?

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Good morning! I’m Todd Dalotto and I’ll be here for the next hour to answer your questions about cannabis horticultural science!

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Are there any common misconceptions that you see from people who take your education classes?

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Good question. My expertise in in both horticultural science and public policy, so I get a lot of questions related to business feasibility in regulatory systems and obtaining a license. The most common horticultural science questions are: “What is the most energy-efficient, high-yielding production system?” and “What cultivars should I be growing” and “Could you help us develop a breeding program to create our own special cultivars.”[quote=“Hunter, post:2, topic:4773, full:true”]
What are some of the more frequent questions you receive as a consultant?
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Do you help growers install in-house laboratories to test product for potency, microbial contamination, pests, etc.? If so, what do you recommend?

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There are many. For many years popular grow books and experts have encouraged people to apply mega-doses of nutrients, particularly Nitrogen and Phosphorous. This megadosing is problematic in numerous ways including preventing plants from utilizing other important nutrients, killing or bypassing the mutualiostic microbes that live to make nutrients available to plants, eutrification and nitrification (pollution) of water with excess nutrients, and unsustainable use of phosphorous, which is a limited mined niutrient that we will run out of in the next 70 years.

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As a follow up to this, what do you recommend as more sustainable solutions to plant nutrition?

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I encourage in-house labs for internal QA/QC and R&D. I have a great deal of experience with analytical testing so I can recommend appropriate in-house testing, but I leave the installation and operation to the PhD chemists that are more specialized than I in analytical chemistry.

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Can you tell us about some of the breeding programs you’ve worked on and what outcomes you’ve gotten from them?

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When developing new strains, do you ever use genetic sequencing technology? If so, what information from those tests do you use to inform your breeding decisions?

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Firstly, organic cultivation practices in true soil that enhances a dynamic mutualistic microbial biome. Mutualistic microbes, including mycorrhizae benefit the plant by breaking down organic nutrients into soluble form and convert gaseous nutrients (N2) to mineral form, thus very efficiently utilizing nutrients. True soil (sand + silt + clay + organic matter) is far superior to potting & hydroponic media in terms of providing a diverse and sustainable habitat for mutualistic microbes, buffering nutrients & pH, and making nutrients available to plants.

Secondly, I encourage testing for both soil nutrients (and other chemical properties such as pH and CEC) and leaf nutrients. The soil test will tell you the capacity for your soil to hold nutrients, make them available to plants, and the current concentrations of each nutrient. A leaf nutrient test will tell you how well your plant is uptaking, utilizingm, and translocating nutrients. If there is a large discrepency between soil nutrient concentrations and leaf nutrient concentrations, then something may be wrong with your microbes, nutrient application, pH, or plant physioology.

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Molecular genetic technology is just beginning to be available to the cannabis industry. Genetic sex testing is most commonly used today and is an early example of how molecular markers can be utilized to determine whether a genetic trait is present in the plant’s genome. In order for that technology to advance, we need further research into genome mapping, which means identifying the loci on the chromosome that controls each particular trait. This take a great deal of work, but is progressing slowly and will be an incredibly useful tool for breeders in the future. For example instead of waiting until the plant has flowered to determine whether or not it has a “purple pistil” trait, you can use a molecular marker to run a PCR and gel electrophoresis from a seedling’s leaf sample to determine whether the gene was transferred from it’s parent.

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Have you identified a virus in cannabis? If not, do you believe they may be present but yet to be positively identified?

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@todd Could you please share some of your public research with us? You are welcome to reply with links or upload the actual files.

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What are your thoughts about the differences (perceived and analytical) in the product comparing soil grown and hydro?

Have you looked into effects of recirculating hydro systems which can allow development of mutualistic microbes?

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While almost all cannabis breeders produce polyhybrid, which are single crosses of unlike parents that are crosses of crosses of crosses… my breeding focus is development of inbred lines, which is developed by in-crossing a line after initial hybrid cross to maintain a set of desirable traits, resulting in a stabilized cultivar. While polyhybrids can be developed in under a year, inbred lines take at least 6 generations. My breeding lines are for outdoor & hoophouse production, so I can only advance the truest lines one generation per year (to maintain natural/seasonal environmental conditions and light cycles). So, although I’ve leaked out many of my breeding lines (particularly ‘Oregon Sun’ lines) to other growers and breeders, I have not yet released my main inbred lines that I have been working on for 15 years (some apple breeders take a lifetime to produce a single cultivar). Nevertheless, within the next couple years, I will have completed two truly amazing strains, one is high-CBD and anothe high THC called ‘Oregon SunSet’.

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Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) is fairly common in cannabis, especially due to the ease of transmitting the virus by the hands of tobacco users. In the past couple years Broadmites and Russett Mites have made their way into Oregon from California and they show early symptoms that look like TMV, so there has been a lot of mis-identification there.

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What are the consequences of misidentification?

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How may I test for TMV in cannabis?

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