I still doubt the utility of patenting hemp on the basis of simply differing ratios of THC to CBD. It’s stupid. It is ALL proportionately high CBD low THC.
I still attribute it to marketing.
Good reasons to patent/obtain plant breeders rights include things like exceptionally fat seeds, like Jayce Callaway’s famous Finola that most food companies use if they are at the right latitudes. Or exceptionally fast/slow flowering times or superior fibre yields per hectare etc.
Among Ecofibre’s PBR’s is a variety we called CHG (stands for nothing, was the trial ID it was given while developing it). It had good fibre yield at Queensland latitudes, as I recall. There may be others by now.
Do keep in mind that developing new strains from 400 different sets of genetics by breeding is a long winded process without going all GMO and upsetting the hippies.
We only did breeding. And it’s 3 months and 3 months and 3 months with a permutation of 400 different strains where the number of possible combinations (C) is [ N x (N-1) / 2 ]
So, C=[400 x 399 /2]
The number of possible combinations of 400 different strains Ecofibre has is, 79,800.
Now, what’s in those 400 strains genetically? And what are their attributes?
We have no idea.
The best we were able to do with the germ plasm, given our resources back in the day, was KEEP THEM ALIVE. This required about $300,000 of pure no return on equity expenses each year growing out the seeds we had in isolated Perspex chambers we built ourselves (to isolate the pollen) every 3 years (so 130 strains per year spread over 4 growing periods per year of 3 months each because this was done indoors). So each quarter, about 40 Perspex chambers were growing out a strain, forcing them to seed, then we’d put the fresh seeds back in the fridge.
If we didn’t the old seeds would die.
What we COULD NOT DO is get any of it genetically catalogued.
Here is the BIGGEST THING I DON’T KNOW RIGHT NOW and will ask, by proxy at the shareholder’s meeting in November:
Are we still doing this? At least spending the money to keep the germ plasm alive?
Are we spending more, to catalogue what we have for the future?
So, to sum up, yes, you can patent plants. But there’s stupid marketing reasons to do that, and there are good commercial reasons to do that. High CBD production is a given in all hemp. High yield of fibre or oil is not a given, and if you find something special, it’s worth protecting.
